Really jumping to conclusions there, lmao. Dogs have been human hunting partners for thousands of years. Do you know what they are trained to do? Find the thing and bring it to a human. Of course they’re going to find the thing and bring it to a human. To extrapolate that cats won’t help you because they are uninterested in finding the thing unless there’s something in it for them? huge leap of logic.

An interesting read. It never struck me as something that needed researching - the obvious bias baked into any and all tests which utilize language and probe at abstract ideas like feelings. It seems obvious to me that the idea of “sadness” is both inherently as well as culturally determined. For anyone who’s dealt with individuals with varying amounts of alexithymia its glaringly obvious that some of the standard questions such as “feeling down, depressed, or hopeless” (PHQ9) would be interpreted differently, let alone questions in which context is crucially important such as “poor appetite or overeating” (PHQ9) or “being so restless that it is hard to sit still” (GAD7 - a test about anxiety) that are common on these kinds of questionnaires. Perhaps its because my interaction and discussions with clinicians tends to be folks who are focused more on the total mental wellness of someone than they are about the specific answers to a question and are using the context of the patient’s other conditions and affect to assess, but this hardly seems groundbreaking… except that perhaps the literature on this itself is minimal. Perhaps this kind of clinical awareness has been handed down, rather than studied, and the corpus of literature needs to be enhanced so that more can learn and absorb it.

It’s not just neuroplasticity, it’s one of very, very few things in the world that actually promotes neurogenesis. Your brain may be changing structure and connections constantly, but it’s entirely disingenuous to suggest that psychedelics aren’t causing changes that just aren’t observed from normal day-to-day life. It’s a massive dose of neurogenesis and neuroplasticity (which comes with both it’s pros an cons) and we shouldn’t minimize that just because the brain is normally a changing environment.

Of note, many psychedelics upregulate BDNF too which has neuroprotective effects (I haven’t seen anything linking lifetime psychedelic use to things like alzheimers and general neural decline) but we know that exercise, which also upregulates BDNF, is shown to have neuroprotective effects and slow cognitive decline.

Hey fam, starting with this reply its pretty clear you’re not engaging in good faith - this statement is fundamentally accusatory. It’s unsurprising that other folks viewed this as an attack. Please chill out, treat users with good faith, and do your best to avoid escalating things - you should gut check your own comments and ask yourself “how will others view this? Is this helpful?” and if the answer is no, rewrite your comment or don’t reply.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a way to solve everything. But an authoritative body can build credibility and hold onto it. People should still be skeptical and still review, but that’s a normal part of the scientific process. Knowing what’s more and less credible is a normal process of research, and learning to assess credibility is important too. Peer review doesn’t need to be torn down as a concept, it just needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt, like all processes. This is part of why I mentioned how some journals are more reputable than others - it’s a reflection of how often their peer review misses important things, not a reflection of how bullet-proof their science is. Everyone makes mistakes, the goal should always be to make less.

Also, to be clear, I’m talking about the post-research and pre-publish step, not the pre-research proposal step - that form of peer review can fuck right off.

Also of great importance which I should have probably highlighted in my initial post - this is really dependent on the field itself. In medicine people put in effort for that kind of review. I’ve peer reviewed quite a few papers and I’ve received really good advice from peer reviewers on some of the papers I’m on. Certainly this can happen in environments where this kind of review isn’t necessary, but the institutions that exist do make it a lot easier. An open source self-hosted model would make it really hard to get an idea of how many eyes were on a particular paper, and would make keeping up with continuing education difficult… of course unless groups of people made their career reviewing everything that emerges and putting together summaries or otherwise helping to sift through the noise.

In certain fields, at least, there are important steps these papers provide such as screening and review that are simply not feasible through as self-hosted. People who understand what the paper is about and can sniff out bullshit - be it cooked numbers, incorrect figures, improper citations, etc. are an important part of the process. Heck, even among academic papers out there, some are much lower ‘quality’ than others in that they are frequently bought off or have poor review processes allowing fluff and bad science to get through.

With all that being said, scihub is a thing and even paid journals are often easily pirated.

Framing it as what ‘sparked complex life’ is what makes it slightly clickbait-y. The circumstances which involved the creation of RNA/DNA is arguably more important when we talk about what ‘sparked complex life’, but it’s really borderline and this is an important discovery and previous gap in knowledge so I think it’s excusable here.

Slightly clickbait-y title, but super cool and important discovery!

I found the following particularly interesting:

They also learned that in pairings that work, both partners adapt to each other — a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked. It wasn’t just the bacteria adapting to a new environment; the host changed too, even in the early stages. “That is a fundamentally important question that people have ignored,” Richards said. “This opens the doors for real advances.”

I’m removing this because Sabine has repeatedly been lambasted by the media for junk science, and because she’s a known transphobe.

It’s a big step up from literally drowning lab rats as an experiment, but we’ve got a long way to go before we get even reasonably ethical with lab animals 😔

To be fair if anyone was gonna not kill them when they’re done, this lab seems like they might be the ones.

Yes, but if a review board were to sign off on them and then someone managed to significantly hurt or damage themselves, one could theoretically apply some of the blame to the review board for not doing their job to ensure that a study was safe. The whole idea of having ethics as a part of the review board was born of some of the studies they used to sign off on that were ultimately problematic and resulted in seriously damaging some individuals, such as minorities and kids.

Sorry by experimental what I meant here is something which is not ready to be tested in humans - this scientist was skipping a bunch of the necessary steps to show this is a safe thing to do (in lab grown cells first, for example) to proceed to human experimentation.

Ethically speaking, we should not be experimenting on humans, even with their explicit consent. It’s not allowed by any credible review board (such as the IRB) and in many countries you can be held legally liable for doing experiments on humans.

With that being said, there have been exceptions to this, in that in some countries we allow unproven treatments to be given to terminal patients (patients who are going to die from a condition). We also generally don’t have repercussions for folks who experiment on themselves because they are perhaps the only people capable of truly weighing the pros and cons, of not being mislead by figures of authority (although I do think there is merit of discussing this with regards to being influenced by peers), and they are the only ones for which consent cannot be misconstrued.

This isn’t related to science, feel free to repost in news

My understanding of the word comes from how I’ve seen it used in American culture. I’m not enough of an etymologist or a sociologist to accurately claim where the term itself was first created or how prevalent its various uses are and will gladly defer to others with more expertise. Thank you for sharing the wiki article for those who are unaware of genders outside the binary in different cultures 💜

are both older derogative terms for trans women

Absolutely a possibility. Depends on how often people are using VPNs, whether there’s a distinct difference between political ideology and VPN usage, and the average distance to a VPN exit point. I think it’s fairly safe to assume a similar distribution of VPN usage across political bounds and generally speaking geographically distributed fairly evenly, with perhaps major cities and higher educated areas using VPNs slightly more often but with the exit point also being closer to the true point of access.

To be fair, they also do the same with… well everyone. They like a strict hierarchy with straight white married christian cis men at the top.

Just want to acknowledge the the writing and title choice in the article itself are annoyingly smug, but the data analysis itself I found interesting.

I appreciate your warning, and would like to echo it, from a safety perspective.

I would also like to point out that we should be approaching this, as every risk, from a harm reduction standpoint. A drug with impurities that could save your life or prevent serious harm is better than no drug and death. People need to be empowered to make the best decisions they can, given the available resources and education.