CharonY

Non sequitur. Contamination of food has little to do with overall calories or calorie intake. The only argument I can see is describing sugar as a contaminant. Even then, I would choose sugar over lead (as the former is easier to control at a given caloric intake).

Excellent point. Heavy metal poisoning is also a big one.

It is difficult to rank infrastructure, but most indices put the US higher than, say, Japan. And this is not necessarily a high endorsement, but just demonstrates that infrastructure is a grand challenge for everyone. Much of Japan's infrastructure (as elsewhere in the world) were built during big expansions, which would be around the 60s and 70s. Perhaps weirdly, Germany tends to rank up very high but even there are many challenges. Some parts of Asia show very well simply because they are new and this is probably the crux of the matter. Building infrastructure is one thing, but continuously maintaining and modernizing it is yet an entirely different challenge.

There are also other factors and especially around the 19th century, industrialization and urbanization placed a high toll on public health. I do not recall the paper off the top of my head, but not only smoking, but air quality in general was horrible (might be as bad as smoking, if one ran the numbers), before legislation was introduced to improve it. On separately, there is a large body of literature out there that links harmful exposures to effects such as high oxidative stress and tissue damage, which will also affect outward appearances (e.g. skin).

Eh, I think we are talking about different scopes here. Lipid contents of cell membranes are quite minuscule. When we talk about dietary fats, we really mean large-ish fat deposits relative to the residual mass. A complete dissolution on the cellular level would likely take more time than the residence time in your gut. Remember, food is moved through your gut and gets showered by e.g. bile salts and enzymes, but you only extract a portion out of it before it moves further and ultimately excrete it.

Another aspect of pattern recognition is body language, and with the help of spatial cues and known behavioural pattern there are a lot of things that spouses can tell what is going on. But just paying attention can make you look like a mind reader, too.

I am not sure how well that works, though. If you consider all media streams suspect (assuming that the government controls everything), how would people gain information in the first place? There is a fundamental challenge regarding trust in information. A tightly vetted system has the challenge that one would need to trust those that are doing the vetting doing a good job and do so for a good purpose. This might not be the case and can (and sometimes should) lead to an erosion of trust. On the other hand, a free-for-all will allow misinformation to have the same impact as facts, or even outmatch facts. The ramification for that can be dire, especially in emergencies where facts really matter (as, say, during a major pandemic...).

This is utter nonsense and in no way comparable. Folks with chronic pain do get reminded of their predicament by the very nature of well, being in pain. But most of the time they cope with it in order to function. Not everyone is successful of course and it depends on how debilitating the pain is. Also chronic pain sufferers don't sit around and wait for a cure, usually because there is none. They learn to deal wit it. You saying that not getting what you want and to your standards to boot is akin to saying that non-billionaires suffer because not being insufferably rich is going to be constantly at the back of their mind. Nope, the term you are looking for is "learn". We change our preconceptions regularly by learning new things. Or should be, in any case. Dwelling and elevating the past over new experiences is a choice, though. I can state for a fact that this not the case and you should not assume your limited worldview to be universally transferable. There are all types of women, of course. But from personal experience I can tell you that for example having a great and compatible sense of humour is often way more important. Again, this points to your attitude way more than your looks. Wayyyyy more. It may surprise you, but meeting someone who judges them from them get go is not very endearing. As highlighted throughout your posts, you feel judged by certain folks and complain about it. Now turn that around and try to view your behavior and attitude from their perspective.

That does not really sound like regular interactions to me. While I am far more comfortable in direct, clear interactions, I am sufficiently aware that humans don't work like that. A lot, if not most of communication is contextual and one has to learn to provide context. I see a lot of retroactive rationalisation and some attempts to disguise it as science, though most is just justification not to do things. Most people who are in long-term relationship did not meet with the intent of dating. They became friends because of common interest and at some point fell in love. If you go in with your weird system on how you things should be, folks will pick up on the context and I can tell you, it is difficult to become friend with someone who doesn't seem to see you as the person you are. What seems to happen is that your preconceptions crash with reality. If you were scientifically minded, you would try to address the preconceptions, rather than to reconstruct reality.

I am not sure regarding the claim that folks do not understand it. I think it is very much well-established that authoritarian regimes use all available tools to shape public perception in order to fortify their power. I think the only thing that has changed over the years is the available technology to do so. In my mind, the part that we still do not fully understand is how the modern information landscape (even in non-authoritarian regimes) shapes our brain. After all, even in non-authoritarian countries, misinformation has led to the creation of perceptions that are utterly disconnected from reality. In a fully controlled environment the potential for manipulation is enormous. But again, I do not think that folks are oblivious to that issue. It is more that there are not good solutions.

I think OP's premise never made much sense. It is fairly obvious (I think) that at least structurally, the pro-life movement cares little for children. There have been zero commitment in their cause to improve children's life and the entire focus has been on the use of women's bodies. The hypocrisy is quite apparent when conservative pro-life movement cut prenatal funding (not to mention support for children after birth), but apparently are happy to fund fake pregnancy help centers, which do not provide medical are. All that being said, even if an artificial womb existed- it would be expensive. As such, the very same pro-lifers are very unlikely to support it.

Oh yes, I believe that by some estimates we are only a decade or so out for a prototype that could work as a an artificial womb. Though often the issues are in the details. That being said, i do not really see any reasonable relation to abortion, as outlined by OP.

In the future, perhaps. I know that there are attempts at that with some encouraging results, but I think most successes were time limited and involved early stages or extreme premature extractions. Development from fertilized egg to full gestation has not been demonstrated yet. And extracting a fetus intact is rather disruptive (involves opening the uterus, hooking up ECMO and so on). I.e. even if the technology matures, it would be major surgery requiring a rather large set of circumstances to make it necessary. E.g. extreme danger/complication of pregnancy to the mother but strong desire to keep the child.

That is not how things work. Fertilization occurs outside a womb and then is introduced into an uterus. It would be madness to even try to extract a fertilized egg from an uterus. At 11 weeks the fetus is about 3-4 cm in size. So even if implantation was possible (which it isn't), precisely extracting them (without damage) would be extremely difficult. But again, you cannot just plop a fetus into another body. The placenta is crucial in mediating the immune system, otherwise a foreign body would simply get rejected. Since sanity apparently is not requirement anymore, this might be considered a good argument. After all, some folks consider women to be little more than wombs with sandwich-making capabilities. Usually the same folks are also surprised why women do not throw themselves at them.

Assuming that is iron and it is insoluble, it is going to be some kind of iron oxide or hydroxide. Most methods to quantify them (which I know) are not really suitable for DIY testing. You could open up your (used) filter and/or get a sample before to the filter (if you have a bypass valve) to check whether you have got visible turbidity (use a clear glass and white background to check for discoloration). Typically, municipalities also provide water testing (for a fee). A way to deal with that (other than replacing lines) is to use a backwash filter, I believe.

Yet the article seems to address entirely different issues that you have brought forth so far. For starters, you have argued against bias in science, yet this article suggest subjectivity, i.e. a major source of bias, needs to be included. The reasoning is that it is an integral part that allows It is mostly a philosophical treatise and there is unfortunately not a lot on the practicalities in how it can or should be implemented. Also, it deals with a high-level idea on information and from what I see tries to include thoughts that are closer to social science methodologies. Unfortunately, it does not seem that this approach has been demonstrated to provide good applications in natural sciences (perhaps aside from more abstract areas such as information theory?).

There is an infinite amount of nonsense and a finite amount of sense. If you give both the same amount of time, you are elevating nonsense. It only makes sense if nonsense has already been elevated in public consciousness so that it has to be addressed. For example, if you wanted to teach history, you would focus on things that happened rather spending time explaining that cowboys did not, in fact fight aliens. Cancel culture did not need encouraging, it was always there. It only appeared more broadly due to social media. In the past, the groups shaping what was cancelled were just smaller. Carlin had a famous routine regarding the seven dirty words. As such, I think complaints regarding cancel culture (from Dawkins and others) often miss the mark and I really wished that it would be replaced by a more meaningful discussion.

Not to mention that at best all the examples can be put into the psychology section, which is not really part of natural sciences (there are overlaps, but for a big chunk their methodologies align more with social sciences). It surely sounds like an extreme form of selective reading and wild extrapolation here. A geographer got the bend of a local river wrong. I am sure that also applies to quantum mechanics.

Not true. Authors pay the fees. Usually they secure grants for the purpose.

Food in Europe is tested which provides safety (and luckily EU levels are on the stricter side) , but there is increasing concern that also in Europe grain and maize can be increasingly contaminated ( beyond what is already the case). Does not affect PB as long as food testing is done. But in recent years recalls due to exceeding mycotoxins limits have increased. But you are right if it wasn't there already due to contamination, you probably will notice mold before dealing with the toxins (there is arguably a transition period where some mold may be invisible to the naked eye while toxins might be able to do low level harm). I think my overall off topic (and preachy) point is that dangers to the food chain are often way closer than we intuitively think.

I think prevalence of the fungus in Europe, incl. UK. However, all things considered, it is more likely found in a damp and forgotten corner in your home than in you peanut butter jar. If we talk specifically about aspergillosis rather than general fungal infections, the highest in Europe are in Greece and Ireland, UK is a bit lower. Mexico is a bit lower than UK, and the lowest surveyed are Canada, Russia, Sri Lanka and Portugal. It is likely not only weather but also how homes are built.

You have it backwards. In science, if things have merit, they go somewhere (eventually). If they are going nowhere for a long period of time it fundamentally means that either a) folks worked on it and found nothing and abandoned that line of thought or b) the evidence that it might be something is so weak, that folks ultimately see no merit in spending time and effort studying something that goes nowhere. Ideas are cheap, but actually working on it is where a random thought becomes science. Conversely, if something doesn't move much, it means that the foundation has been rock solid. Also, if you think there has been no rethinking in evolution, you really have not even scratched the surface of literature. However, the high level basics still hold true, because that it is how things happen. So for example Darwin was not wrong, he just had a lot of gaps and some have been closed during modern synthesis and folks are ever pushing evolutionary questions that have not been solved yet. Your examples are individual articles, not a review on field. You have been mostly talking about observations, not research directions. As mentioned above, it has to lead to something specific to be investigated. I can write a paper and postulate that mitochondria are the source of souls and if I get the right articles and/or reviewers I might even get published. It does not mean that it leads itself to a research program, especially if it does not make it clear how to study it. Again, postulating things or throwing out idea is cheap. There are expected to be fewer the more we figure out. If there are constant paradigm shifts, it would suggest we know too little to develop paradigms in the first place. But even so, smaller shifts happen all the time, but they apply to areas in a field and rarely to whole fields. On big shift for example is the issue of low reproducibility in certain types of research (e.g. psych) and how to address this issue. Edit: I think an underlying issue in this discussion is that your view how science should work is at odds with the methodology. In order to get as close to reality as we can, we whittle down ideas and prune away things that do not match data. In other words, the whole scientific process is to reduce all possible hypotheses to the most likely ones. If we go and throw away everything every time has a minute idea, there simply would be no progress.

Generally speaking, I would advise to confer with supervisor regarding basic lab tasks. The reason for that is that you and your lab have to be in sync when it comes to basic procedures as miscommunication will jeopardize any analyses you want to do. Based on your question you might be a bit confused how molarities are calculated (i.e. your question regarding 1L water and changing it to 800 mL does not make much sense to me, especially if you want to make 7.5 mL of the buffer). The other issue is that tris-base has a pKa of around 8. It is unclear how you want to reach a pH of 10.5, especially with HCl.

Do you understand the concept of likelihood? Uh, I suggest you take a look at how proteins are formed... Uh, nope.

I disagree with this premise. I think what you do not quite appreciate is that there are things that are well-established and things that are still under investigation. Among the former, the key elements have been investigated so thoroughly that most reasonable folks with knowledge simply have no objections to the assumption. To a lay person it might seem like homogeneity, but it is really just because hundreds or thousands of scientists worked on that view and that it all the alternative explanations have been effective discarded because of the accumulated evidence. The laws of thermodynamics are such an example, in hundred of years no one really managed to challenge them meaningfully, so it makes a lot of sense to start with them as a given. Similarly, you probably would not want to consider flat Earth as a reasonable starting point. no This does not make sense. If you have a model it has to allow for predictions under the situation covered by your model. Data measured under those conditions either fall in line with the prediction or they don't. In the latter case you have to revise your model. This does not make sense. Either the field is fringe, which basically just means that not a lot of folks are interested in it (could be for a lot reason, personal interest, difficulty or insufficiently developed to do proper science). Or it is a field in which case by definition it is not fringe. I don't know either. But there are quite a few papers on near death experiences. Probably just not discussing it in a way that you find attractive. Natural science deals with the material world. It would be weird to criticize something, which is the basis for your work. It is likely trying build a religion but decide that humans have no place in it and only squirrels are allowed to follow it. I have worked with hundreds of scientists who are not famous (and I am certainly not myself). You should define mainstream here. If you mean with areas that are obscure, you are likely wrong. I know specialists in very weird and specific fields that do not make much sense to me, but they still follow scientific approaches. If you mean that they are doing non-mainstream approaches then I refer you to my above comment regarding rigor. If you cannot show that your approach is scientifically sound, folks will not consider it much more than unscientific guessing. When I develop a new method, I have to compare it with existing best practices. I cannot just make something up. This seems like a random statement without context. There are many scientists working on various aspects of consciousness. Probably someone should tell them that it is somehow bas for their careers. You are missing the point that some things are well established and some other parts (which are usually the key elements of the paper) are novel. But to understand the novelty you have to understand the field. If you have only a cursory understanding (if at all) it may not look like a difference to you. What I am sensing is that you have an assumption regarding science that confuses you, and it is clear that you would need more understanding of a given field (rather than superficial in multiple) to get a sense what is really going on.