To be fair, grants seem to be awarded more to conservative, safe, boring studies. A grant application that either will totally break new ground or fail completely will not be funded. A grant which is sure to advance the field but incrementally has a much better chance.

Moreover, at least within biology, "translational research" is all the rage and is getting more and more money, while basic research loses money. Translational research seems to be "take things we already know and move them towards medical treatment." Which is traditionally the providence of private industry, while government grants should be dedicated to research that won't come up with a product that can be sold. I worry that translational research is taking money away from cutting edge research and putting it indirectly into private industry's pockets. That's an oversimplification and I admit I don't really feel confident that I know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, I think that OP is more accurate: grant committees, like all committees, are generally biased in favor of safety rather than taking a gamble.

Wait wait wait wait... stupidity is on the rise? Citation needed. That's simple elitism.

I'd believe that stupidity is highlighted due to the internet and such, but stupidity in medical issues seems to be at about a constant rate to me. Fears over vaccinations are nothing new. The vaccine court was setup in the 80's specifically because fears over vaccines leading to silly lawsuits were threatening vaccine makers. Vaccines since their invention have been viewed with fear. Illogical, but it's easy to see why: the benefits aren't as tangible as many medical procedures. It's not like a broken arm or antibiotics where the treatment makes people get healthier, you just STAY healthy.

With the autism link, there was one (fraudulent) study which supported the whole mess, and a charlatan WHO IS STILL FUCKING OUT THERE PROMOTING HIS NONSENSE. Moreover, autism's first signs happen to occur at about the age when the kids get vaccinated, so to frightened parents there appears to be a correlation (obviously not causation). There's no cure for autism, and no clear cut answers as to what DOES cause autism.

You're suggesting it's stupidity that makes people fear vaccines? Well, if you want to look down your nose at people, fine, go ahead, but where does that get us? You feel better about yourself, but we don't get rid of the antivax movement.

Oh, hey, a tu quoque argument! Neat!

Jasper is not the US, Jasper presumably does not control the US's corruption, the US doing something does not justify China doing something, and your post was off topic, not insightful.

People forget that the constitution is not really self-enforcing. Any document, no matter how high we claim to value it, is just words on paper if we ignore the meaning. We've done that with the constitution since it's inception. There's plenty of wiggle room in the constitution (which is good, given how old it is, it should be flexible) and that allows us to ignore it. The NSA's activities violate the spirit of the constitution pretty squarely, to a point that no one in their right mind would have honestly thought it didn't.

With cruel and unusual, people have argued "Well, it can be cruel OR unusual, just not both." People will and probably have argued about this that it's not cruel compared to the crimes they're being punished for, or that it's not cruel given that it will be a deterrent against crime. And someone will come out with a study claiming that if we start using this as punishment, crime is going to go down. Others will come out with studies that no it won't, and no one making the decisions about it will bother understanding which is more convincing, they'll just go with what they feel like. I mean, look at the felony murder rule, you can be executed for... driving a car. That politicians can argue for it without anyone nearby punching them squarely in the idiotic face is beyond me. It's pretty clear-cut cruel and unusual punishment.

Consider that we torture people and justify it by saying it's not punishment and we don't do it to citizens of the US (that we know of.) Insane interpretations of the constitution in the US government are commonplace. "Cruel and unusual" doesn't have a chance of stopping this if the people rationalize it, which they very well could.

I said the first two chapters WERE peer reviewed. One was a review, the other was a normal article. Both were rigorously edited by my thesis adviser. They were both published before the thesis was put together, which might explain why the thesis was such a non-issue.

I'm really not sure what your point is here.

Yeah, not the media storm that went on with this though. That's a bit like tossing a kid from swim class into the middle of the English channel. "You know how to doggy paddle! SWIM TO SHORE!"

Because "chicanery" is not an absolute for one. I had to look up the definition "the use of trickery to achieve a political, financial, or legal purpose." You could argue that plagarizing text is trickery to get a thesis out and finished, sure. However, if Waseda is anything like my graduate school, background text on things like stem cells were of nearly zero importance. It doesn't sound like she faked any results in her thesis, which is the only part anyone cares about.

Here was my recipie for my thesis, approved by my thesis adviser and committee: Take two papers you've already published, staple them together. Write up a third part in case I hire someone to finish the stuff you didn't. Get signatures, the end.

Theses are treated with great esteem in other graduate programs. In science, or at least biology, no one gives a shit about them. My thesis adviser heavily scrutinized the two papers making up the main part of my thesis, they got peer reviewed, but the third part probably got skimmed only by my thesis adviser. Everyone else likely didn't even open the document aside from signing it.

This is not to say "plagiarism doesn't matter," or that it shouldn't be punished, just that labeling the STAP cells as bogus because of that is an overreaction. It should and IS factoring into skepticism about the results, and it should be and is a black mark on Obokata.

As far as reproducible, it's still early. It's only a few months old. The Knopfler blog is keeping track of some efforts that have failed, but if I recall, it took a year for induced pluripotent stem cells to be reproduced. The detailed protocol was released only two weeks ago.

At this point, you can conclude that Obokata should face consequences for plagiarism in her thesis, and that the "easy pluripotent stem cells" headlines were misleading. You can also conclude that more skepticism and scrutiny is merited, though skepticism should be and already was high given how important it is. It's far too early to conclude that it's outright fraud or not science. I've been somewhat following the controversy, there's no smoking gun on the actual science yet.

Lastly, remember that these are scientists, not PR experts, politicians, or celebrities. Obokata went into hiding after this blew up, I think people smelled blood in the water from that and assumed something fishy was up and not, say, that she was overwhelmed.

Words can't describe how much I hate the people who are fine with spending our grandchildren's money on wars rather than science, but how much funding is "proper?" And what's a reasonable time to be able to start a mission given a reasonable funding? A decade doesn't seem that long. Wiki tells me it took Cassini seven years just to get from here to there.

Oversight already exists everywhere: peer review is the minimum requirement for publishing, funding is awarded based on what your fellow scientists think of your research. If they, for some reason, decide to have it not be scientists, then sure, that will probably be reviled and rightly so.

It will also depend on how they conduct themselves. It's unlikely to be a heavy handed approach "We did what was suggested in the methods verbatim and it didn't work, so we demand their paper be retracted!!!" isn't going to fly. If it's "We'll reproduce your results for free and you can then say it's been officially validated independently" then I suspect it will be wildly popular with scientists.

I think the "wear" in the title highlights the main feature: you can wear it. While that sounds stupid, ask yourself what your smartphone can do that you can't already do with your computer.

Lab notebook too. It's similar to evernote.

Good point. Unrelated note: I have selected you, AC to make a special once in a lifetime offer to buy the Brooklyn Bridge which I won through a complicated backstory involving a game of chance...

1 is sort of a tu quoque argument. Additionally, Russia would argue they are fixing problems back home. They have a direct interest in access to the black sea. I'd hope most rational people would disagree with Russia's definition of home or fixing problems is, but our interest in the conflict is less direct than theirs is.

On 3: the national debt. If the military industrial complex decides our punch card is full and we've earned a free war, okay. A debt disaster is much scarier to me personally than Russia being allowed to continue having Ukraine basically in their pocket. If we have some extra money or want to raise taxes to pay for it... still no I'd much rather the money go to something useful like research.

You're probably not the only one wondering if there's a connection. The answer is basically no.

From skimming google, it looks like women with a Brca1 mutation have one functional copy, that mutations in both would cause death in embryonic stages. Mice lacking both copies of Brca1 are dead before birth. The mice here had the gene only lost in neural tissue.

The current finding doesn't seem like a surprise. It seems to only be news because of marketing. Brca1 is probably the closest thing to a gene with a household name due to the breast cancer tie in and the patent insanity. Neural stem cells seem to have higher requirements for a lot of "housekeeping" genes. And Brca1 regulates DNA repair. As I said, we already knew that the gene was important for cell survival. This paper isn't even the first to knock it out in specific tissues.

You take away a gene critical for cell survival and neural stem cells die? Wow, what a shock. Hey, I have evidence that FIRE kills neural stem cells! I should write that up and send it to PNAS too!

(Joking aside, I haven't fully read the paper. It looks like good science, I don't object to it being published in PNAS, just saying this isn't all that surprising.)