[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

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'none of these possibilities will undo the fact that the first island universes are not what we expected. Even accounting for some weird new phenomena, “everything’s too big, and it’s too big, too soon,” [...]

[...] these new discoveries have injected drama, even anxiety, into a field that was quite stable. “It’s incredible how the universe is just so much weirder than we thought it was,” [...] When I asked [...] whether she feels stressed about the uncertainty [...] she cackled with glee. “It’s the beginning of the universe!”

As I’ve talked with astronomers about what Webb has found so far, one word keeps coming up: shouldn’t. Galaxies shouldn’t be this way; the cosmic dawn shouldn’t be that way. I find these shouldn’ts delightful. They hint at the well-intentioned hubris of humans, especially the most curious ones, those who wish to determine exactly how something works and why. But of course the universe says, speaking to us by way of a giant telescope floating a million miles from Earth, This is how it is. This is, apparently, how it has always been. We’re just discovering the wonder of it now.'

Astronomers Were Not Expecting This - The Webb telescope is scrambling the story of the universe

[Tsundoku]

What a dude! This guy is the very definition of "think global, act local".

https://www.goodnews...-bills-by-half/

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

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'Men tend to die earlier in life in countries where the belief that manhood is "hard won and easily lost" is more widespread, according to new research [...]

[...] precarious manhood beliefs, which refer to the idea that manhood is something that must be earned and maintained through demonstrations of toughness, control, and dominance. According to this belief, manhood is vulnerable to being lost and men must constantly prove their masculinity to avoid losing their status as "a man."

[...] "[...] manhood is seen as a precarious social status [...] We've looked at lots of behaviors, like aggression, risk-taking, derogation of women and LGBTQ populations. The current study is looking at men's health behaviors."

[...] 33,417 college students from 62 nations [...] Precarious manhood beliefs were assessed by asking participants the extent to which they agreed with statements such as "It is fairly easy for a man to lose his status as a man" and "Some boys do not become men, no matter how old they get."

[...] "[...] such a simple measure — a 4-item measure of precarious manhood beliefs — was such a consistent predictor of these real-world health behaviors and outcomes,"'

Not clear whether any respondents were considering trans or nonbinary people or genderfluidity? I suspect the correlations would go in the opposite directions for progressives... IDK if the other two questions addressed that adequately.

Quote

'[... belief in 'precarious masculinity' was] associated with men's health behaviors (e.g., smoking, high volume drinking, contact with venomous animals) and health outcomes associated with risk (e.g., drowning, death from accidents, liver cirrhosis deaths)."

[...] men living an average of 6.69 fewer years and 6.17 fewer healthy years in countries with high precarious manhood beliefs compared to countries with low precarious manhood beliefs [after trying to control for confounding factors].

[...] previous research has found that men who endorse precarious manhood beliefs tend to exhibit heightened physiological stress responses when their masculinity is threatened.' Men across the globe may be profoundly affected by a core belief about manhood, according to study of 62 nations

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 08 March 2023 - 08:54 PM

[worry]

https://www.nytimes....h-dna-hair.html
DNA From Beethoven’s Hair Unlocks Medical and Family Secrets

By analyzing seven samples of hair said to have come from Ludwig van Beethoven, researchers debunked myths about the revered composer while raising new questions about his life and death.


^^^^^If you wanna know why Beethoven had so much diarrhea, among other things, this is the article for you.

[Tsundoku]

"Would you like to know more?"

EDIT: Goddamn paywalls.

Attached File(s)

•  Starship Troopers Neil Patrick Harris.jpg (272.42K)
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This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 28 March 2023 - 09:07 AM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Tsundoku, on 28 March 2023 - 09:01 AM, said:

"Would you like to know more?"

EDIT: Goddamn paywalls.

The paper isn't paywalled:

Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven: Current Biology (cell.com)

... though obviously the New York Times didn't deem that 'fit to print'....

From the Times article:

Quote

Beethoven was dying. As he lay in bed, wracked with abdominal pain and jaundiced, grieving friends and acquaintances came to visit. And some asked a favor: Could they clip a lock of his hair for remembrance?

[...] Within three days of Beethoven’s death, not a single strand of hair was left on his head. [...]

DNA variants that made him genetically predisposed to liver disease. In addition, his hair contained traces of hepatitis B DNA, indicating an infection with this virus, which can destroy a person’s liver.

[...] indicates there must have been an out-of-wedlock affair in Beethoven’s direct paternal line.

[...] terrible digestive problems, with abdominal pain and prolonged bouts of diarrhea. The DNA analysis did not point to a cause, although it pretty much ruled out two proposed reasons[...]

Hepatitis B could have been the culprit[...]

The DNA analysis also offered no explanation for Beethoven’s hearing loss, which started in his mid-20s

[Tsundoku]

New Sensor Can Tell Whether You Have Covid-19 or The Flu – And Do it Within 10 Seconds

https://www.goodnews...hin-10-seconds/

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

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Your Brain Can Create a False Memory Quicker Than You Think

[...] Half a second after viewing [...] almost 20 percent of people had formed an illusory memory [...] this increased to 30 percent after 3 seconds.

The human brain alters memories according to what it expects to see. Because people included in the study were so familiar with the Western alphabet, their brains expected to see the letters in their actual orientation.

When letters appeared mirrored (Ɔ instead of C), people were more likely to remember the pseudo-letter as a real letter, even after only milliseconds had passed.

"It seems that short-term memory is not always an accurate representation of what was just perceived," [...] "Instead, memory is shaped by what we expected to see, right from the formation of the first memory trace."

[...] "Participants consistently report, with high confidence, that they have seen the real counterpart of a pseudo-letter target," [...]


The researchers differentiated these false memories from errors in initial perception by taking measurements at two time points. [...]

[...] When the error rate increased over time, this suggested that false memories were forming.

[...] We know from experiments [...] that false long-term memories can be easily generated.

For instance, adults can be persuaded to recall a vivid but fake memory of getting lost in a shopping center and crying as a child. In another study, people generated false, rich memories of committing crimes such as theft or assault.

Your Brain Can Create a False Memory Quicker Than You Think : ScienceAlert

[Tsundoku]

For those of you with small kids:

Entrepreneur Designs Shoes That Expand As Children Grow, Building Great Business

https://www.goodnews...business-watch/

Could have used this 10 years ago grumblegrumblemuttermutter

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 11 April 2023 - 11:09 PM

[Tsundoku]

Some more sciency good news (maybe):

Rooms Filled with Plants Could Protect Us from Colds and Flu by Disinfecting Air, Study Finds

https://www.goodnews...ir-study-finds/

As they say "At the moment the authors are calling it a proof of concept, and shouldn’t be taken as a confirmation of causation, but their findings are pretty compelling."

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

The Science of Ruining Birthday Parties

[...] I've got a Ph.D. in experimental psychology, but I didn't really understand my own field until I started showing up at strangers' birthday parties because science told me to. And now that I've inadvertently wrecked multiple get-togethers, I finally know the true meaning of psychology.

[...] meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The place was buzzing with a new idea: Talking to strangers, research showed, could be surprisingly delightful. A few years earlier, two researchers had persuaded a bunch of Chicago commuters to talk to one another during their train ride in exchange for a free banana[...]

So [... w]hy not listen to all these studies and go meet some strangers?

[...] Many escape-room websites allow you to see how many people have already signed up for a certain time slot and, as if predicting my pro-stranger epiphany, they even allow you to join those preexisting groups without consent. I was so excited that I signed up for two nearly full rooms. Unforeseen pleasures, I thought, here I come!

[...] Psychologists sometimes act like we're compiling a how-to book for life. [...]

We are not compiling a how-to book for life. Many of our studies fail to replicate, but even if every paper were 100 percent true, you could not staple them together into an instruction manual, for two reasons.

First, people are just too diverse. [...] We also study just a small slice of the Earth's population, and there's no guarantee that what we discover about undergrads doing studies for extra credit, or Americans taking online surveys for pennies, or Chicago commuters striking up conversations for fruit, will generalize to the rest of humanity.

Second, social situations vary too much. People did have a surprisingly nice time talking on a train in Chicago, but the same might not be true at a grocery store in Tallahassee, or in a New York elevator. The outcome might depend on whom you're talking with, or what you're talking about, or whether you'll end up getting a banana.

[...] We use statistics to show that our stories are credible, but a little bit of math doesn't change what's underneath.

I ended up ruining two perfectly good birthday parties because I didn't use my story sense. The science at the conference in Atlanta suggested that meeting strangers can be unexpectedly wonderful, but I didn't consider the context[...]

A story sense can sometimes be misleading, though, as psychologists have shown in many different ways. For instance, people tend to assume that easily imagined events (such as dying in a terrorist attack) are more common than events that are hard to picture (such as dying from falling out of bed). Learning how to apply the findings of psychology research is not like learning long division [...] You pick it up slowly, painfully, through trial and error, when you see the crestfallen faces of the people whose birthdays you've ruined.

I Ruined Two Birthday Parties and Learned the Limits of Psychology - The Atlantic

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 25 April 2023 - 07:23 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In our new @Nature paper, [...] used the position of genes on chromosomes to show that ctenophores (comb jellies) not sponges are the sister-group to all other animals.

(2) Steven Haddock on Twitter: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In our new @Nature paper, Darrin Schultz @conchoecia used the position of genes on chromosomes to show that ctenophores (comb jellies) not sponges are the sister-group to all other animals. https://t.co/LCSHC1AbRu https://t.co/wTtVMgZhOe" / Twitter

Evolutionary tree: FwV_MjwaMAA16DF (2872×1796) (twimg.com)

Quote

Gelatinous, carnivorous
Free-swimming
Nerves Muscles

We had so much potential....

[worry]

We should have a family reunion.

[Tsundoku]

Yes but as always Uncle Jeff will get drunk and accuse everyone else of being spineless ...

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

The next time you whisper sweet-nothings into someone's ear, you might want to target their left side.

Neuroscientists [...] in Switzerland have discovered a strange bias in our perception of pleasing voices.

According to the brain scans of 13 adults, positive human sounds, like laughter, trigger stronger neural activity in the brain's auditory system when they are heard from the left-hand side, suggesting the human auditory cortex is specially tuned to the direction of sounds that make us happy.

[...] previous studies have shown the left ear can more easily identify the emotional tone in someone's voice [...]

[...] "We also show that vocalizations with neutral or negative emotional valence, for example meaningless vowels or frightened screams, and sounds other than human vocalizations do not have this association with the left side."

[...] evidence suggests a person is more easily aroused when a sound comes from behind.

The Human Brain Shows a Weird Preference For Sounds From The Left : ScienceAlert

Tiny sample size and IDK if Swiss culture could be influencing it... interesting though.

If it were true I'd expect advertisers and music producers (among others) to make extensive use of it---at least unless it doesn't work for signals from the left that are in front of you. Should work with headphones though.

[Edit: of course you can try testing it on people yourself---don't tell them ahead of time which side is supposed to be preferred. Even better, have someone else test it on someone else with neither of them knowing which side is supposedly preferred---not truly double-blind since you know, but you can try to avoid letting emotion or word order convey which is expected to be preferred. Maybe provide instructions as text to make that easier.]

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 22 May 2023 - 02:09 PM

[Tsundoku]

Hey AVD, here you go - something good about AI:

Antibiotic That Destroys One of World’s Deadliest Superbugs Discovered by AI Supercomputer

https://www.goodnews...bug-mcmaster-u/

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Plants perform quantum mechanics feats that scientists can only do at ultra-cold temperatures

Plants at room temperature show properties we had only seen near absolute zero.

During photosynthesis, plants utilize quantum mechanical processes. [...] plants act like a strange, fifth state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. [...]

In a Bose-Einstein condensate, the bosons within a material have such low energy that they all occupy the same state, acting as a single particle. This allows quantum properties to be seen on a macroscopic scale.

[...] “Chromophores … can pass energy between them in the form of excitons to a reaction center where energy can be used, kind of like a group of people passing a ball to a goal,” [...]

[...] forms a superfluid — a fluid with zero viscosity and zero friction — allowing energy to flow freely between chromophores.

[...] room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensates may have practical applications

How plants can perform feats of quantum mechanics

[worry]

This isn't a breakthrough or particularly new, I just really like this phenomenon:

[Tsundoku]

So they're trying reverse theory and digging through to the rest of the world? Reds digging up under our beds!

China has mysteriously started digging a 10,000 metre hole
China has mysteriously begun digging a 10,000m-deep hole as it searches for ways to become the world’s biggest economy.

https://www.news.com...016f6159a816d15

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

Zapping a rodent's brain can put it into suspended animation. Scientists want to one day use the same technique for humans traveling to Mars.

[...]published in [...] Nature Metabolism, [...]

Mice and rats were fitted with tiny helmets to send ultrasonic waves to the brain.

[...] these rodents "do not naturally enter torpor, suggesting the possibility that similar effects could be induced in humans,"

[...] [astronauts' food] consumption could drop by 75% in suspended animation, [...]

[...] Studies suggest astronauts would be at lesser risk of substantial muscle and bone density loss and protected from the worst effects of exposure to cosmic radiation. It could also protect the astronauts' mental health, as nobody knows what happens to human minds after being away from Earth for that long.

[...]

"As far as we know, there is nothing unique about homo sapiens that would prevent our species from hibernating, and I believe the capacity is there but it needs to be unlocked,"

Mice Put in Suspended Animation, May Be Used on Humans for Space Travel (businessinsider.com)

#HumanPotential


It's like the great haiku poet Basho famously wrote:

Autumn flooding swells---
pizza rat also desires
a tiny helmet

- from the collection Pizza Rat's Tiny Helmet:

Sarumino - Wikipedia

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 04 June 2023 - 01:52 PM