LetThereBeLight

Burlap and Barrel I believe has a good reputation with their spice sourcing.

https://www.burlapandbarrel.com/products/turmeric

Your story reminds me of this segment from Mr. Wizard that I saw as a child. This kid eats an apple while doing a hand stand, and I remember being amazed by it.

https://youtu.be/bC6jJnVe1LI?t=1072 (starting at 17:52)

A large issue is that PIs have no training on how to manage people nor is there much protection for grad students (and practically none for postdocs). It is surprisingly common to hear stories of sexual harassment, or international researchers essentially being held captive by their advisors. The universities are motivated to maintain their public appearance, and so cases of harassment and mistreatment are either entirely ignored or dealt with quietly. This, in addition to pay issues, is also playing a significant role in the unionization efforts that are taking place across US universities.

By "robots" they mean algae cells coated with a drug.

Double-blind is not all that feasible unless preprints, conference posters, and talks were also all done anonymously.

Anyone interesting in learning more about Gorbachev's life, I recommend watching Werner Herzog's Meeting Gorbachev.

Funny to see this pop up, it's from 2008. I worked with Martin for quite a few years and we spoke about this article at one point. If I recall, the intended audience of this article is primarily incoming graduate students.The point being that the experience of doing research is very different from taking classes. It is not uncommon to see those who excelled in their undergraduate studies go on to graduate school and be dismayed to find that a PhD program uses a different skill set from getting good grades.

I agree, there are a variety of plotting library options in Julia but they aren't nearly as developed/robust as matlab (e.g. quiver plots). There are a number of plotting functions that have completely changed how they work across versions and generally lack descriptive documentation. There have been several occasions where I had to give up and export my data into matlab to generate a plot. I also think the image analysis libraries are underdeveloped.

It is striking to me that this article doesn't discuss the negative impact such a technology will have on actors and translators. In fact, the author makes the surprising claim that there is a shortage of translators and voice actors, which is very hard to believe.

Should add 2020 to the title. This is the relevant paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/117/4/1853

I am curious to hear what HN thinks of calling these things robots. These are frog embryos that have been surgically reshaped and had muscle cells implanted in them.

Sorry, I should have been more clear in my post. I meant to say that, if I no longer want to support Apple (or Google) because of their behavior, are there any reasonable smartphone options available? It seems to me that this is the only way I can protest against what Apple is doing.

My question after reading this article is, what can I do as a current iPhone user? Is there a reasonable alternative phone out there that can run the same apps but that isn't effectively controlled by Apple or Google?

More specifically, this paper is focused on the social sciences. That's not to say that this isn't present in the basic sciences either.

But one other thing to note here is that these headlines about a "replication crisis" seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Let's not forget the history of the electron charge. As Feynman said:

"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.2...

It is $10 because the money from individual kits is being used to subsidize the foldscopes for classroom kits.

See "Why the difference in price between Deluxe Individual Kits and Classroom Kits?" in the FAQ: https://www.foldscope.com/faq

For those interested in understanding more detailed discussions there is an article by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

Perhaps the most interesting point is the discussion of the furin cleavage site.

I think the main complaints about VAR in football have been the amount of time these decisions take and the inconsistency of the rulings. Instead of the constant play we used to have, now we see players stand around as the screen shows lines drawn in seemingly arbitrary locations to decide whether or not an attacking player was onside before a goal.

In contrast, fans have been fine with the goal-line technology, which gives decisive (usually) and quick results.

The use of AI in this paper seems more relevant for setting team strategies and picking players rather than enforcing rulings.

I know that this site mentions MIT's Introduction to Computational Thinking course, but the hyperlink doesn't send me there.

For those interested in seeing Pluto in action I highly recommend checking out the course notebooks here: https://computationalthinking.mit.edu/Spring21/

In the event people are interested in a higher budget microscope, the openFrame is a very nice modular system [1].

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/photonics/research/biophotonics/i...

This is correct [1].

Why the difference in price between Deluxe Individual Kits and Classroom Kits?

Our mission is to bring bring affordable scientific tools to everyone (not just communities who have the resources - but everyone). For any of this to be possible, our business model balances our cost of operations with offering extremely low-cost (low-profit) products.

We find this balance through a pricing structure that operates on a 2-tier system: high price point kits for individual Foldscopes (Deluxe Individual Kits), and low price point kits for bulk Foldscopes (Classroom Kits).

We arrived at this pricing structure for many reasons, but primarily because the reality of fulfillment and shipping means we cannot ship a single Foldscope that costs roughly $1 in parts to produce at a $1 dollar price while being sustainable. Overall, we make a profit only from our high price point kits, this profit allows for us to exist and produce any microscopes at all, and this profit also subsidizes our low price point kits (which we do not profit off of), in which offer Foldscopes for as inexpensive as $1.75 each!

[1] https://www.foldscope.com/faq

This is a cool company that started out of QB3. One of the co-founders was a postdoc at UCSF working in regenerative medicine before starting wildtype. I think these wetlab incubator spaces near universities is really key to getting more biotech startups.

I think it is a shame that the 50+1 rule (which states that at least 50% of the team's voting rights must be held by club members) is only instituted in the German League. I don't think any fans actually want this super league to happen.

The current publication system is very odd. Mostly government money is being used to fund research, then professors are asked to review a manuscript (who may just hand it off to a grad student or postdoc) without any compensation for their time, and the final result then locked behind a paywall of some private journal.

It seems that the incentive of a journal is to maintain an appearance of legitimacy, rather than actually enforcing it. This is why, as the article mentions, journals tend to be fairly quiet about retractions and issues of misconduct.

There is a better incentive by those that are funding the research (the taxpayers/government) that their investments are resulting in legitimate works. This also goes in line with the idea that these final manuscripts should be freely available to the public. Now with that said, I also acknowledge that the idea of having the NIH, NSF. etc. operate the editorial and review process would be nightmarish.

Let's not forget that all the grain those cattle are eating were grown in nitrogen fixed soil produced via fossil fuels. Nor that roughly 40% of the world's crops are used to feed cattle. Or the other detrimental environmental effects to the land such as feedlot runoff that pollute streams and rivers. The environmental impact of raising cattle is by no means something we should ignore.

This is still subject to Landauer's principle, at best it will cost kT ln2 energy per bit erased.

That is interesting, I have had the exact opposite experience. People saying that genes and their regulatory circuits are all that matter and that proteins are boring byproducts of that. I guess it is a matter of what sub-community you find yourself in.

To anyone interested in early space flight and the Apollo missions, I strongly recommend reading Michael Collins's memoir Carrying the Fire. It is quite amazing all the training that the astronauts had to go through so they could manually perform various tasks and measurements, since the computing capacity was extremely limited.

Indeed, if you look at startup fellowships for scientists that currently exist, fellows don't have to give up IP or equity. Calling this program a fellowship in this context is highly misleading.

I use Libro.fm and am happy that at least some of my money ( 15%) is going to my local book store.

If physicists adopt this humble mindset, and resist their craving for certitude, they are more likely to seek and hence to find more even more effective theories, perhaps ones that work even better than quantum mechanics.

I don't believe that most modern physicists dispute that the equations we use are anything more than models. For example, you won't go to a seminar on microrheology and have a physicists point out in disgust that the presented derivation is "wrong" because it used Newton's second law without the relativistic component. While this is perhaps an extreme example, it is the case that we often have to ignore certain effects/make certain assumptions to make equations solvable and interpretable. If we believed that our physics equations represented some "absolute truth," then we would never allow ourselves to make these sort of assumptions in the formulas we derive.

The technology for synthesizing large quantities of specific RNA sequences has only been available recently. Same goes for forming the lipid nanoparticles that are used for encapsulating and delivering the mRNA. In fact if anyone has more detailed information on how these two processes are done I would love to learn more.