science

This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

LilB0kChoy, in Scientists Identify The Optimal Number of Daily Steps For Longevity, And It's Not 10,000

Saved you a click: Per the article it’s closer To 6,000

lemonflavoured,
@lemonflavoured@kbin.social avatar

Which is what the app on my phone is based on already. I manage it most days easily by walking from the bus station to work and back, which is ~1 mile. And that doesn't include the time I'm actually at work, because I can't wear my smart watch actually in the office.

Pons_Aelius, in Scientists Identify The Optimal Number of Daily Steps For Longevity, And It's Not 10,000

Not surprising. The 10K steps idea was first set by a Japanese maker of pedometers as a marketing exercise with zero research to back it up.

GigglyBobble,

The pedometers are all so imprecise though that it showing 10k may well be 6k real steps.

bedrooms,

6k would be too easy to motivate buying pedometers, I guess.

outer_spec, in Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will
@outer_spec@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Sapolsky, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will…

Theirs is very much a minority viewpoint. Sapolsky is “a wonderful explainer of complex phenomena,” said Peter U. Tse, a Dartmouth neuroscientist and author of the 2013 book “The Neural Basis of Free Will.” “However, a person can be both brilliant and utterly wrong.”

FaceDeer, in Academic journal forced to retract peer-reviewed AI-generated paper after "rat penis" pics go viral
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

It's the "peer-reviewed" part that should be raising eyebrows, not the AI-generated part. How the gibberish images were generated is secondary to the fact that the peer reviewers just waved the obvious nonsense through without even the most cursory inspection.

Nawor3565,

In another article, it said that one of the reviewers did being up the nonsense images, but he was just completely ignored. Which is an equally big problem.

YMS,
@YMS@kbin.social avatar

It's in this article.

bedrooms,

It's how this publisher works. They make it insanely difficult for reviewers to reject a submission.

MotoAsh,

Some of the reviewers have explained it as the software they use doesn’t even load up the images. So unless the picture is a cited figure, it might not get reviewed directly.

I can kindof understand how something like this could happen. It’s like doing code reviews at work. Even if the logical bug is obvious once the code is running, it might still be very difficult to spot when simply reviewing the changed code.

We have definitely found some funny business that made it past two reviewers and the original worker, and nobody’s even using machine models to shortcut it! (even things far more visible than logical bugs)

Still, that only offers an explanation. It’s still an unacceptable thing.

bedrooms,

Actually, figures should be checked during the reviewing process. It's not an excuse.

MotoAsh,

Yea, “should be”, but as said, if it’s not literally directly relevant even while being in the paper, it might get skipped. Lazy? Sure. Still understandable.

A more apt coding analogy might be code reviewing unit tests. Why dig in to the unit tests if they’re passing and it seems to work already? Lazy? Yes. Though it happens far more than most non-anonymous devs would care to admit!

bedrooms,

No, "should be" as in, it must be reviewed but can be skipped if there's a concern like revealing the author identity in a double-blind process.

oyfrog,

I’ve heard some of my more senior colleagues call frontiers a scam even before this regarding editorial practices there.

It’s actually furstratingly common for some reviewer comments to be completely ignored, so it’s possible someone raised a flag and no one did anything about it.

Jesusaurus,

Frontiers has something like a 90%+ publish rate, which for any “per reviewed” journal is ridiculously high. They have also been in previous scandals where a large portion of their editorial staff were sacked (no pun intended).

bedrooms, (edited )

The biggest problem with Frontiers for me is that there are some handy survey articles that are cited like 500 times. It seems that Interdisciplinary surveys are hard to publish in a traditional journal, and as a result 500 articles cited this handy overview article for readers who would need an overview.

The article I checked was in a reasonable quality, and it's a shame I can't cite it just because it's in Frontiers.

doctorn, in ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis
@doctorn@r.nf avatar

*The world 3 months ago:*AI is growing exponentially and might take over the world soon. It can do everything you can, but better, and some even seem almost centient.

*The world today:*Turns out the large language model made to fool us tried to fool us by ‘unexpectedly’ exhibiting behavior it was made for.

😅

palordrolap, in Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will

Whether or not we have free will and whether this whole existence is pre-calculated, I'm going to go all meta-Pascal's wager on it and suggest that we try to act like we do have free will and try not to think about it.

Maybe I was always going to come to that conclusion. Doesn't matter.

Maybe this makes about as much sense as Wile E. Coyote staying in the air until he actually realises he has run off a cliff. Doesn't matter.

Be the Road-Runner able to run into a painting of a tunnel as if it is real and remain as happy as possible about it.

meep-meep

EmptyRadar,

Yep. On the grand scale it doesn't matter if this comment was pre-determined or if I genuinely made the free choice to write it. What matters is that, to me, the illusion of free will is complete. There is nothing other than my belief that I am free to affect my own existence.

As Rush once said, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

billothekid2,
@billothekid2@kbin.social avatar

Thanks for referencing Rush so I didn't have to. Lol

HubertManne, in Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will
@HubertManne@kbin.social avatar

Assuming his hypothesis is true I find this rediculous from the article:

"The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over," Sapolsky said. "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."

How is it made more so. We have no free will over how we reward or punish people. If the world is screwed up and his hypothesis correct then its exactly as screwed up as its supposed to be and our lack of decision neither make it worse or better. It just is.

sheepishly,
@sheepishly@kbin.social avatar

That is a very good point. It seems like his argument is that, since we have no free will, we should stop trying to do anything to control others' actions... which in itself is suggesting to control others' actions. Furthermore regardless of whether we have free will or not, however you want to define it- punishing bad behavior discourages it and provides better outcomes for the world at large. It's like he's saying people just blindly act according to some non-free-will principle without taking in any environmental input, which just seems ridiculous. And implying that specifically applies only to bad behavior, which just seems like he's being smugly pessimistic as a gotcha. "Ha ha, the world is bad, if you disagree with me you're just a hopeless optimist" sort of thing.

ScarletIndy, (edited ) in Unnatural evolutionary processes of SARS-CoV-2 variants and possibility of deliberate natural selection

This is missing the biggest piece: phylogenetic analysis. They aligned a selected group of mutations and then eyeballed the alignments and then speculated.

Here’s what the methods section for this paper should look like in order to make the theoretical leap.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8969601/

A reasonable phylogenetic tree is here: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global/6m

Drusas, in Ozempic linked to stomach paralysis, other gastrointestinal issues: UBC study

Words can barely describe how awful gastroparesis is. I'd much rather be fat and diabetic than go through that again.

admiralteal,

The study is very clearly talking about non-diabetic patients, too..

These are almost certainly people who want the weight loss primarily for aesthetic reasons rather than health ones, and may face these terrible health complications as a result. Makes it even worse, I think.

You're almost certainly better off somewhat "fat" than skinny by way of a drug like this. Especially given that "fat" is an entirely subjective measure and the "objective" measures like BMI overweight/obese are not based on points of any kind of phase change in health outcomes but are just somewhat arbitrary statistical variations. Dramatic interventions like these should be reserved for people that have dramatic need, at least until we have such an intervention safe enough and with few enough side-effects for over-the-counter sale.

Drusas,

Yes, I understood that. Sorry I wasn't clear. I have experienced gastroparesis a couple of times, and I'm saying that it is worse than a chronic illness in my experience (I also have a couple of chronic illnesses). It's extremely unpleasant. Sure can lose weight since you can't eat anything, though.

sonori, in Scientist shocks peers by 'tailoring' climate study
@sonori@beehaw.org avatar

I think the best part is how the journal told him he was focusing too much on climate change over other factors in peer review, he spends most of it trying to defend only accounting for climate change, then after publication comes out and goes on a media tour about how he was forced, forced i say to only include climate change by the journal, seemingly forgetting that the journals peer review comments are published alongside the paper.

Itty53,
@Itty53@kbin.social avatar

This has big "I voted the general election in three states and then complained about voting security on Fox News" energy.

Ubermeisters, in Is there anyone moderating this community?

I don’t think this Lemmy thing is gonna make it tbh. Too many small communities all hoping to be the main hub for types of content, not enough moderation for the amount of fucking around that can happen, not to mention the constant armies of poorly informed morons trying to misinformation the general public.

Dead internet theory was right.

sunbeam60,

It can happen. With the protocol as it is, I agree Lemmy is going to remain too fragmented and might wither.

If we changed the protocol so multiple communities could become siblings (post to one, post to all), it might improve.

glittalogik,

It's still early days, I don't think we're quite doomed just yet. Right now we're witnessing the Fediverse's initial wild west Cambrian explosion sort of era. I reckon eventually the landscape will settle as people flock to where there are already other people, and tools develop and mature to navigate and manage servers/communities.

Obviously we need human mods to weed out morons and maintain quality, but automoderation and other mod tools for spam/astroturfing/etc. will also make a huge difference. A quick google turned up this Lemmy automod which appears to be in active development, and I'm sure there are plenty of others in the works.

Affidavit, in Here's What NASA Pays to Be Locked in a Mars Simulator for a Year

I suppose it's not too bad. People typically use their wage as they get it, paying for rent/food/utilities. Many of these costs would be covered by the programme, which means they can potentially come out of it a year later with the full 60k.

HeartyBeast, in Scientists discover breakthrough in carbon dioxide absorbers replacing trees
@HeartyBeast@kbin.social avatar

Slightly more informative article with link to original paper: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-scientists-porous-material-greenhouse-gases.html

Luci, in Scientists solve the mystery of a hole in the Antarctic Sea
@Luci@lemmy.ca avatar

But in the center of a frigid ocean roughly twice the size of the United States, or Switzerland

What? Switzerland is tiny compared to the US?

palordrolap, in For first time in a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into one

How sure are they that his hasn't happened in the last billion years?

Maybe it happens once every 1,000 years but they've all died out before humans were able to observe it. It's not like things like this tend to leave much of a fossil.

And if you don't like 1,000, there's a few orders of magnitude to reconsider between there and 10^9.

Lightborne,

Some real fucking pedantic bitches on this site.

palordrolap,

The scientific method is pedantry made manifest.

HeartyBeast,
@HeartyBeast@kbin.social avatar

It’s certainly possible that it is happening constantly, and we’ve only started looking for it recently. I’ve had a tinker with writing a better headline and it’s not easy. What would your short, pithy, accurate and unambiguous headline be - suitable for a non-technical audience?

palordrolap,

"New bacteria/plant cell symbiosis discovered"

And if "symbiosis" is too much, "combination". I also like "meld(ing)", but that might be somewhere in the middle.

I wouldn't use "hybrid" because that word has definitely made it into common vernacular and implies they've bred which isn't strictly accurate, and "chimera", while more accurate, is probably the more terrifying-sounding, if not still technical alternative.

Ferk, (edited )
@Ferk@kbin.social avatar

"First evidence in a billion years of two lifeforms merging into one"

It's slightly shorter and more accurate.. it does not state absolutely that it happened for the first time, but rather that it's the first evidence we've found from the last billion years.

HeartyBeast,
@HeartyBeast@kbin.social avatar

Spot on

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • science@kbin.social
  • random
  • meta
  • Macbeth
  • All magazines