Arete

Having submitted a few EUAs for phage therapy applications - CharonY is on the money. The FDA will REVIEW your EUA within 30 days (significantly faster if time is of the essence, I've experienced a 48 hour turnaround for a critical sepsis patient) but there's no guarantee that the review will result in a final decision. If the review results in a request for additional data, then it's on the applicant to get the data and resubmit, which can take a long time dependent on the type of data requested. Then your 30 days potentially resets. I would say in my experience that the likely impact, number of patients, etc plays heavily into the review process e.g. if it's one patient who will definitely die without experimental therapy vs a vaccine for millions of otherwise healthy children, vastly different levels of scrutiny and expected justifying data will be applied.

In addition, consider the snow leopard. Lives the remote, high altitude areas of the Himalayas - considerably more remote than the West Virginia woods. Stealthy AF, near perfect camouflage, super low abundance, solitary. Formally described in 1930. Lots of crystal clear photos. Tens of physical museum specimens. A sequenced genome. Over 160 you can go see, live, with your own eyes in a zoo. Bigfoot is supposedly bigger, lives in a much more fragmented and densely populated locality, and yet none of the above evidence exists.

I love how "We understand X" is immediately followed by a spectacular demonstration of not understanding X.

I only know of one report of human parthenogenesis, but I don't believe Jesus was ever genetically confirmed to be a tetragametic chimera, so I'd say the report remains disputed. So no, as mammals with a diploid mating system, the continued existence of humans necessitates the existence of both male and female individuals.

"Participants were randomly assigned to positions with unequal opportunities for success. Results showed that both winners and losers were less likely to view the outcomes as fair or attributable to skill as the level of redistribution increased, but this effect of redistribution was stronger for winners. Moreover, winners were generally more likely to believe that the game was fair, even when the playing field was most heavily tilted in their favor." https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau1156 Now imagine a player losing, even though they were dealt a stacked hand. Now imagine the dealer, halfway through the game gives all the other players the wild card the advantaged player had in their hand at the start. Experimental data shows that the player will perceive this as unfair even though the objective data unequivocally demonstrates the playing field is simply becoming probabilistically flat. The societal impact is the same. If one is white and male, and has low socioeconomic status, one is less likely to perceive the inherent advantages they have over others, as those advantages have not manifested in tangible benefit. When the playing field is evened out, it is perceived as bias against the individual not receiving benefit, because it places them at a relative disadvantage to their previous position - despite all objective evidence to the contrary.

The "chromosome conspiracy" is biologically nonsensical. Meiosis is a stochastic process, so the formation of gametes is probabilistic. The "conspiracy" therefore assumes selection on an inherently random biological process, and is therefore trivially dismissible. Second, patriarchal societies are not a "natural" state for humans or other organisms. Evolutionary selection for societal structure is dependent on environmental factors such as population density, resource allocation, infant survival rates, kin structured cooperative interactions, etc. Matriarchal structures predominate in environments with male biased dispersal and female philopatry, high offspring investment and reliance on cooperative resource acquisition. Patriarchal societies dominate in environments with lower resource allocation, higher rates of mate competition, higher fecundity and infant mortality. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31303158/ That is to say that the "natural" structure of a society with respect to the role of the sexes is both environmentally dependent and labile.

Give that you loved Adam and Eve absolutely, and being omniscient you knew the snake would trick Eve - who had no concept of good or evil - into eating the apple precipitating the fall of man, why didn't you like, flick the serpent into the sun and put the tree of knowledge on top of an un-climable mountain or something?

Professor Richard Lenski has a series of blog posts that do a much more thorough breakdown of the flaws in Behe's argument in his most recent of three books "debunking" evolution than I have the time or patience to undertake. Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Book Review in Science. Why does this matter? One of the centerpieces of Behe's attempted deconstruction of evolutionary theory is his interpretations of the LTEE experiment, which Professor Lenski has conducted for the last 34 years in his lab at Michigan State. Which means that the blog posts above represent a detailed, exhaustive deconstruction of Behe's arguments against evolution, as presented by the distinguished scientist that actually conducted the experiments himself. Or, in other words, Richard Lenski himself has invested a bunch of time and effort to explain why Richard Lenski's own experiment doesn't prove what Michael Behe says it does, so Michael Behe's books are probably not worth reading.

Observation without data is worthless.

While magnetic forces are not my "field" (see what I did there) of expertise, as a friendly suggestion, it might benefit discussion to frame your question like: "Scientists assume that force A and force B are equal [citation]. This data demonstrates that they are not [citation]. What does that mean for the assumptions that they made? Also couldn't one just use a magnetic force meter to measure the strength of the magnetic field at each end of a magnet for a quick and convenient answer?

You got me. In the context that approximately 54,500 people were murdered by their intimate partners in 2020, I don't think the financial losses Johnny Depp suffered because of the mean things his ex wife said about him to the Washington Post are terribly important, nor do I really care what Amber Heard said to the Washington Post in the first place.

I mean, the introduction of this, and several other papers discusses the hypothesis that women are more likely to suffer physical forms of spousal abuse, and men are more likely to suffer psychological forms of spousal abuse, and investigates one part of that hypothesis of the asymmetry in the type of abuse likely to be suffered by men and women. While it is well established that women are more likely than men to be the victims of physical violence, this paper discusses the fact that the research is biased towards investigation of physical violence toward women, and that both psychological abuse and spousal abuses of males are understudied, before presenting a dataset showing men and women are equally likely to report psychological spousal abuse. But I guess that kind of nuance wouldn't fit the narrative you're trying to paint.

I think the fundamental issue is that the court case sought to examine the issue of defamation, not domestic violence/abuse. While Depp's quote clearly indicates he believes he was a victim of abuse (as does Heard), the trial itself was never intended to prove if Depp or Heard were the perpetrators/victims of abuse, but defamation. There is certainly an ongoing discussion about gender issues in domestic violence/abuse in the sociology literature - the gender based asymmetry of physical/psychological forms of abuse, gender bias in the likelihood of reporting abuse, etc. But the Depp/Heard case is tangential to that issue at best, simply because its focus was not abuse. To apply a scientific analogy, if I do a Kirby Bauer disc diffusion assay on a stain of bacteria using an amoxicillin disc, it will tell me whether or not the bacteria is resistant to penicillin beta lactam antibiotics. It won't, however tell me anything about the resistance of that bacteria to carbapenem. The bacteria might or might not be resistant to carbapenem - but making an objective, evidence based determination about its carbapenem resistance would not be possible based on my test - I'd need use a carbapenem KB disc.

As I alluded to earlier, it's unlikely to yield a positive result. There is a global shortage of expert taxonomists, and an ever growing backlog of putative new species waiting to be formally classified. For example, even individual genetic barcoding studies can reveal hundreds of undescribed taxa. Unless the species you have found is of particular scientific or cultural importance, the novel taxa you have putatively identified simply join the queue. Further, wanting someone else to describe the taxon while you dictate the name is akin to asking someone to ghost write a book for you, while they likely have a backlog of books they can write themselves. An exception to this I've seen is that the museum I worked for auctioned off the right to name some charismatic species to raise money for the museum. Without knowing what the taxa are, how you define them to be novel and whether or not you have viable specimens in hand - it's difficult to really say how much help an expert taxonomist might provide.

It really depends; 1) Without knowing anything about the morphology/ecology/genetics of the organism in question, I don't really see how OP can determine they have discovered a novel taxon. 2) Depends on the taxon - new beetle? Cool. Go put it in the jar with all the other new beetles and maybe we'll get to it one day. New bear? Forget what else I had on today, let's go.

I've formally named several species of lizard, as part of my PhD was a systematic review of a genus. Generally, the person/people who publish the formal description also are the individual/s who nominate the species name. There are several nomenclatural codes that describe the process of naming species e.g. the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), Botanical (ICBN), Bacterial/Archaeal (ICNB) etc. These have in the past been largely gentlemen's agreements, but more formal regulations have been recently applied thanks to a few bad actors. Anyone can publish a formal description - which is essentially a description of the phenotypic/genetic/ecological traits which distinguish the novel species from existing species.

"World's biggest clown buys worlds biggest circus" Also, the same thing happened with MySpace: News Corp. bought Myspace 2009 for $580 million and sold it to Viant for $35 million in 2011. Also, in terms of active users, Twitter is actually kind of small with 436 million, compared to Facebook's 2.9 billion, Youtube's 2.5 billion, WhatsApp's 2 billion, Instagram's 1.4 billion, TikTok's 1 billion, Snapchat's 557 million and Pinterest's 444 million. I'm just a layperson with no fondness for either Twitter or Elon Musk, but I imagine, given the increasing competition in social media platforms, poor management could kill twitter pretty rapidly. I also can't really imagine the Musk is capable of the kind of nuanced and insidious approach to data management, manipulation and collection that Mark Zuckerberg orchestrates with Facebook.

Verizon bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013, only to sell it for $3 million to Wordpress in 2019. Hopefully we can collectively do something similar with the cesspool that is twitter for Elon.

I have significant experience working in research that is adjacent to clinical trials. I think the big thing preventing many folk/herbal/alternative therapies from being prescriptible medical products is that one of the first steps in evaluating a potential therapeutic agent is determining HOW and WHY it works. So if you have Grandma's bubbleberry bush tea that helps with her asthma, we can use that as a starting point. But we're going to stick it through a GCMS to determine exactly what molecules are in it. We are then going to determine which components of the tea are those that are active, and isolate them. We then test in vitro to see how they alleviate asthma. We may then bring in the biochemistry people, and they may determine that by adding an acetyl group to the enzyme we isolated from the tea makes it 5 times more effective. Then you synthesize it, and take it to clinical trial. By the time it's in a pharmacy, it's called Dilexapropha, its side effects include diarrhea and gastrointestinal upset (which you'd get if you drank 7 pots of bubbleberry bush tea as well), and shouldn't be taken by breastfeeding mothers. And the same people who only take herbal remedies who wanted bubbleberry tea to be a legit medicine won't touch it.

Unpopular opinion: It doesn't matter. The same lobbyists and corporate interests own both major parties. The health insurance industry isn't going away, the banks aren't being meaningfully regulated, the military isn't being defunded, the oil industry isn't getting curtailed... While the January 6 riots were eye opening, does anyone really think it could have changed the election outcome - like if the crowd successfully held the capitol and prevented the certification of the election would it have had any long term effect? Personally I have trouble imagining a successful coup without the full support and cooperation of the military, which Trump certainly didn't have. There is trillions of dollars a year dependent on the political status quo of the US and I don't think that Trump had any realistic possibility of disrupting that. One of the "benefits" of Trump is that he's largely bluster and chest thumping, without the political clout or intelligence to effect meaningful change. His political ideology and agenda is incoherent, and has no ability to actually staff and effectively manage a government. So, while he is a disturbing symptom of a broader, problematic worldview that is prevalent in the US - which CharonY described in detail, he has very little ability or even motivation it would seem to do much more than performative symbolism. Hillary isn't in jail, there's no border wall, the affordable care act is still law, etc. So rather than a malignant growth, Trump is ultimately more like pustulent discharge - unpleasant and concerning, but a symptom rather than the cause of the infection.

You are all wrong. I thought it was common knowledge that the answer is 42 and am disappointed in you all.

You're right in that it's a topic of considerable debate, and I'm very much a layperson on the topic, so am happy to be wrong - I've read a few articles on the origin of the fourth Gospel and I am struggling to find the article, or I'm misremembering I may well be confusing the letters of John with the gospel. Either way, modern scholars seem to agree that John the disciple himself didn't write it.

All liquids conform to the shape of their container, but I doubt many people would agree that it means that mercury and water are basically the same.

Also for the record, it is illegal to own just one guinea pig in Switzerland, due to them being social animals.