Viewing profile — rflrob

There are always going to be people whose reason is “because we can”. Going to Mars has, on the scale of a human lifetime, only recently become vaguely feasible. As someone who wor…

More data sounds better, but especially in a medical context, you have to be careful, because false positives have consequences. The PSA test is no longer broadly recommended for p…

Stearates aren’t microplastic plastics, though, they’re just similar enough under a microscope and in some chemical analyses. Without knowing which stearates glove manufacturers us…

I’m curious how you came to that conclusion. While he’s certainly not in the pantheon of best presidents, he ends up around the 75th percentile in rankings by historians. Even subt…

I don’t see a straightforward way this would actually help with the cleanup. A hypothetical microbe that “eats” oil would be useful in an oil spill as would chemically break down t…

To tag on, the economy gives us more than just physical "stuff" (though that's one of the easiest things to measure). Do you enjoy travel? How about clean water, yoga classes, or t…

There’s very often a comparison to the somatic (i.e. non-cancer) genome of the same patient. It’s a great way to quality control that there wasn’t some sample mixup in the lab. Tra…

That assumes that what causes the false positive is some kind of analytical noise in the test. The bigger concern is biological noise that would persist if you tested the patient a…

> or worse placebo Just to be clear, most drug trials for anything where we have an effective treatment are not “new drug vs placebo”, but instead “new drug vs standard of care”. T…

I always hesitate to ascribe motives to non-human animals, but the butterfly shouldn’t particularly “care” whether the pollen gets from its body back to a plant. If the butterfly i…

I’m not OP, but the startup ethos of the last few decades has been to move fast and break things, fake it til you make it, and generally operate on the bleeding edge to deliver inc…

Also the Guatemalan coup that was heavily lobbied for by the United Fruit Company. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%2527%...

The claim, as I understand it, is that commerce within a megaregion is more tightly integrated than commerce between megaregions. If this is the case, there should be more trade be…

While I agree that you want to be wary of any particular claims, and more study is warranted to establish the effectiveness of any particular intervention based on data, there’s a …

In addition to the comments proposing some other kind of exercise as a control group, I’d want to see whether “being prescribed something but then being waitlisted“ prolongs depres…

In addition to the sister comment (that I 100% agree with) that publicly funded research ought to be in the public domain, if the technique is broadly useful I’m sure that companie…

23andMe works by checking ~1M sites along the genome, and using known correlations with pathogenic variants. This Invitae test actually sequences the (coding portion plus a bit of)…

While the Linear, No Threshold model is relatively widely used by regulatory and safety bodies, evidence for it (or any other competing mode of low dose exposure) is quite weak. ht…

chr6:41,515,652G>C, GRCh38, rs9367106 Is the lead variant in the association study, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the causal variant. Genome Wide Association Studies line the one…

The article is from a .au TLD, and the conversion to Australian dollars is roughly correct.

You may be pleased to know that “essay” literally means “attempt”. The idea being that you aren’t sure exactly what you believe, so you’re going to attempt to write it down and see…

The introduction (but nowhere in the rest of the article) makes a distinction between Dollar Cost Averaging (where you spread out a windfall over some period of time) and systemati…

One thing that’s confusing is that Nature has two purposes: first as a scientific journal, and second as a science news magazine. They’re bundled in the same physical issue (though…

I think the biomedical academic job market is tight enough that you could fairly easily attract a strong class of researchers to nearly any second tier city. Maybe not the best of …

Bonobos are exactly as close to us as chimpanzees (by descent). Maybe the “default“ human behavior, independent of the last x thousand years of culture, is closer to one or the oth…