My kids have a Metaquest and it is kinda fun as a toy, but not really going to replace a desk setup for work. It'd be cool if there was a sculpting program for designing 3d models to print and so on, but I don't think that sort of stuff exists in an easy to use way yet.

With them classed the way they have been it is very difficult to legally do much research at all, even while approving safety and efficacy would be the same as any other drug. Legally buying/transferring enough to legally give to volunteers who will need paperwork should they get drunk and screened by the police and set off a christmas tree of testing results all creates a lot of overhead. Upthread they were complaining it was synthetic for the study but it may be easier to legally produce the compounds synthetically than to grow them depending on the laws and enforcement mechanisms.

Why do people keep saying this? The home owners are losing their jobs, there's an excess of office space, and the wheels are going to come off the data center bus any moment now. No one will be paying contractors do play glorified legos with modern plumbing and HVAC fixtures. You can even get plug and play electrical connectors now. 1 million more construction workers just means that the value of skilled trade work drops even further.

Agreed, its just reputationally laundering downsizing because the economy is tanking by pretending to be due to increased effeciency.

Right, even if we were immortal until killed like vampires or Tolkien elves there'd still be selective pressure based on who had more children to increase their signal in the population.

Unless typing and mousing affect your reproductive success then you're describing lamarkism rather than darwinism. But increased fine motor control would affect reproductive success over a longer period of time and be increasingly useful in a more technological society regardless of occupation.

I didn't read the paper yet but if 'the smoking gene' is a predisposition to addiction more generally than it'd make sense it be selected against before tobacco use became prevalent.

Microsoft tried that with the Duo, it didn't sell very well, although the software was rather poor compared to Samsung's software for their Fold.

Battery replacement for a laptop is going to be the main thing for getting it to last more than 5 years in an as-new state of usefulness.

Hey man they validated this tool by comparing it with a dowsing rod, it's totally legit and worth the project budget

I wasn't disagreeing with what he said I was correcting the interpretation of how strongly worded what he said was. Like if a Briton makes a joke the direct reading and the correct reading may not be obvious to all audiences. What the body can clear is dependent on its solubility in water and peroxide, generally. Your body will build granulomas around other buildups it can recognize but not dispose of. It's why, say, asbestos or graphite tend to stay put once they get inside you, water soluble vitamins shoot on through, fat soluble things can poison you but will diffuse back out eventually. This is also why the article points out differential concentration of microplastics in different types of tissues, and why concentrations in brain tissue are of particular concern because things don't diffuse back out of it easily. Particle size also matters, e.g. dust exposure of microparticulates of something as otherwise mundane as wood can end up directly dissolved in your blood. In those cases, though, the worst likely outcome is immunogenicity because your body can 'see' such natural proteins readily. If it is hypoallergenic then it is comparatively invisible and you're depending on diffusion and solution buffering to save you.

The research I work with doesn't touch this sort of microplastics, but you seem to be confused regarding your preferred interpretation of what isn't a particularly hard to understand research paper, how couched in tentative language it is written, why a researcher would write it that way, and how they'd intend for it to be understood.

Yes that's what I was referring to as speculation.

I'm talking about what they said in their summary and the body of their paper rather than the linked news article.

This is essentially creative botany for producing known biological chemicals in bulk via plants instead of transgenic yeast like would normally be used. These aren't the same scientists working on de novo drugs for the conditions you're talking about.