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Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

nature.com

141–150 of 258 posts

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought some live lobsters to kill (humanely, with a knife to the brain) and steam. I only had him in my custody for a couple hours, but I got attached. I had a bad experience thinking about taking a life, and it kinda fucked me up. I don't think I'll be doing it again. If I had to kill everything I ate, I'd be vegetarian. But I have no problem buying it at the store.

Is that intellectually honest, to hide from the truth you know about your food?

I struggled with this. I suppose it's not intellectually honest, but I learned intellectual honesty is not my highest priority.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#142
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the experiences which led to me becoming a vegetarian was ordering a whole lobster and being forced to pick it apart bit by bit. It's easy to forget/dismiss that the "stuff" inside your lobster roll was ever a living, breathing, thinking being. However, when you're handed the whole animal, told to crack it open and stuff it into your mouth, it's a very different story.

Lobsters have about 100,000 neurons in their whole bodies. Less than half as many as an ant or fruit fly.

Perhaps you forgot about the significance of life?

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#143
post #3

Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...

I did read the article. I didn't see that it was peer reviewed nor a repeated study, scientifically speaking. The last few paragraphs also give some (typical) scientific distance on the rhetoric that it will revolutionise ALL past rat experiments. It's still worth a read though.

What I found:

* It is a science story about findings presented at a meeting. The story is published in Nature, which does do very prestigious peer reviewed papers, but the findings and the story itself are not peer reviewed.

* Within the same institution, the head of the lab repeated the experiment.

* Some other actually peer reviewed papers with female researchers, rats and ketamine show positive influences.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#145
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever the Holy Wikipedia says about the distinction, isn't it funny, not to say something else, that we use the same words for two/three concepts that are, supposedly, completely different and vary independently? I'm a male identifying as female expressing as male, aka sex:gender:gender-expression. Because, you know, people were so dumb until social-constructivism landed on Earth like the Messiah no-one expected.…

Please let's not. It's off topic and we all know that it won't lead to constructive discussion.

I think it will lead to a constructive discussion, much like the various threads on the google memo, but it depends what you care to construct.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens when you have more variables than you can control? It's naive to think all of them can be controlled, even in simple animals as mice

Then it's outright fraud to present your results as reliable when there's radically uncontrolled variables that dominate the results.

It would only be fraud if done with deliberate intent to deceive.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#147
post #20

This reminds me of Feynman's story of the researcher who eliminated possible variables in rat experiments one by one, to find a surprising result (EDIT: To find that rats didn't need smell, spatial relationships, taste, or vision to find the cheese - the sound of the floor was enough) https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/02/the_rat_experi...

I suppose humans tend to underuse, or undertrain, their senses, so we fail to consider the possibility that other animals might be taking advantage of their senses in different ways. In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like…

Modern society has a nasty side effect to forbid us to experiment with sophisticated yet intuitive notions.

Simply learning drumming made my sense of touch, balance, and a ton of other parts of my brain extremely more acute and potent. Not dissimilar to when you grok induction on trees, all of a sudden a lot of things become clearer. Well similarly with a lot of focused attention to your senses you'll start to notice patterns and relationships that are invisible otherwise.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#148
post #3

Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher, don't in a fume hood, do always in a fume hood with a human male's t-shirt. It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...

Are there links to this being repeated?

Else, it sounds like someone beat up their data until they found something worth publishing. It certainly wouldn't be the first time such an effort passed a "peer review."

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens when you have more variables than you can control? It's naive to think all of them can be controlled, even in simple animals as mice

Then it's outright fraud to present your results as reliable when there's radically uncontrolled variables that dominate the results.

Just make sure to note the variables if you can list them. The main problem is media outlets taking the results as fact.

Re: Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose humans tend to underuse, or undertrain, their senses, so we fail to consider the possibility that other animals might be taking advantage of their senses in different ways. In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like…

I agree with you. I can often hazard a reasonable guess at what people are typing or writing based on the sound, and of course, hearing the touch tone sounds of a phone makes it relatively easy. Similarly, I will often turn off all the lights and navigate around my house/room by pure touch and sound, which is surprisingly easy given how much credence we give to sight as the paramount sense.

Many sniffing attacks tapped into this. The sound of keys map to their shape and location quite often.
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