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For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

quantamagazine.org

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Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#261

Post by twothreeone »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #220
twothreeone wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is this: as an academic you tend to know the reviewer landscape within your field. You have seen this happen to a colleague before, they submitted a paper, it had interesting results - it was forcefully rejected by 1 or 2 extremely negative reviewers. The publication gets delayed, you need to wait another 6 months to get the next set of reviews. Meanwhile, some "colleague" from another lab publishes nearl…

The extremely obvious solution to this is just to preprint your own work before submitting it to a journal? This has become the norm in science, and all of the best labs do it now, except for a few toxic holdouts who incorrectly believe preprinting their work will adversely impact its peer review.

Because it does, the review process is now no longer double blind. And I disagree, I think there is no obvious solution - though I would venture to guess that publishing the reviewer's names alongside their reviews upon rejection would be a better step towards a healthy discourse.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#262

Post by cookingmyserver »

paulddraper wrote: post #253
cookingmyserver wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone else that might be curios, the definition of a planet you will often see quoted online applies to bodies in our Solar System. It comes from the International Astronomical Union in 2006. This is the famous definition that dropped Pluto as a planet. While the criteria are widely quoted, that actual resolution isn't. The resolution: The IAU...resolves that planets and other bodies, except satellites, in the S…

Eh, that doesn't make sense. What's a meteor?

The streak of light generated by a small astronomical body as it moves through the atmosphere of earth (or another astronomical body).

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#263

Post by cannonpr »

noosphr wrote: post #238
hallway_monitor wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an outside observer, it does seem that the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt. No wonder academia is crumbling - it deserves to, and it needs to be replaced with a new, better system.

[flagged]

We must live in different worlds, I’ve been literally blown away by the advances I’ve seen and the new research coming out in the past 40 years. In some ways it feels like we are just getting started, especially in bio. We finally have the tools to discover the wonderful nano machines that make up life and people are using them in wonderful ways.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#264

Post by root_axis »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #223
noosphr wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an over reaction if you have a decade to argue with morons. I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected, then when they are finally published the other editors of the journal that rejected them came crawling in asking for the next paper in the series and promising the front page. Worse they ran a news story about our paper _in the journal that rejected it_ saying how groundbreaking it was. The…

As an outside observer, it does seem that the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt. No wonder academia is crumbling - it deserves to, and it needs to be replaced with a new, better system.

> the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt

Is there any human institution under the sun that doesn't labor under a litany of such criticisms?

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#265

Post by stale2002 »

bouchard wrote: post #126
vintagedave wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, it's a workaround against something that likely should not have happened. Problems require creative (aka unusual) solutions.

Rejections from journals are not uncommon and sometimes it's for somewhat questionable reasons. Uploading the manuscript to a preprint server and/or submitting to another journal, which Adamala is doing/planning to do, is the normal response. Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.

Journalists are meant to report on the news. This sounds like an interesting piece of science/news to me.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#266

Post by stale2002 »

Lerc wrote: post #196
im3w1l wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"

Nobody knows how another person will see something with their eyes. What appears to be obvious and revolutionary to one person may not be so to all. Review is precisely to protect against the importance and accuracy of a work being decided by the person who is most invested in it being so.

Seeing as we are talking about it now, it seems like they were right that it is interesting to the public.

I am not sure why you think social media attention needs to be gate kept.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#267

Post by thaumasiotes »

Retric wrote: post #255
thaumasiotes wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not qualified to make a judgement here, the point is following the process is better than jumping the gun on principle . Why? The process is quite obviously net negative; we'd get better results with no process at all.

> we'd get better results with no process at all. I’m going to give some advice that you probably won’t understand for years, but when you don’t find value in a process you’re missing something about what it’s doing. A common shortcut is to look past who is making money to who is paying for that process and why they would want to pay for it.

In this case, the process is paid for by the government, and the reason they do it is that they wish to outsource the decision of which scientists on their payroll should be promoted.

If you're willing to stipulate their goals, it's easy to understand why they appreciate this system. But there is no benefit to other parties. As far as society is concerned, this is a big loss and an unforced error.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#268

Post by rmunn »

tete wrote: post #203
FloorEgg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I had ever heard the phrase "x is doing a lot of work here" until about a year ago, from Claude, which seems to say it's lot. Out of curiosity, do you use Claude a lot and did you pick up the saying from it? Are you Claude? Or just a coincidence?

"doing a lot of work" and "doing a lot of the heavy-lifting" are and have been somewhat common on reddit, etc. I guess it's a great source for LLMs for weighting, because the weighting is largely done for you via upvotes. Something search engines love as well.

The weighting-by-upvotes is why there was a short period when Google's AI search results (I'm not 100% clear on whether that was Gemini, or a different model) would tell you to use white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. Because that was shortly after they had bought Reddit's data set, and they hadn't yet gone in and filtered out "upvoted because it's useful info" from "upvoted because it's hilarious". And the Reddit post recommending white glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza had gotten thousands of "man, that's hilarious, I love it" upvotes.

Re: For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides

#269

Post by aiisjustanif »

bouchard wrote: post #246
noosphr wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an over reaction if you have a decade to argue with morons. I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected, then when they are finally published the other editors of the journal that rejected them came crawling in asking for the next paper in the series and promising the front page. Worse they ran a news story about our paper _in the journal that rejected it_ saying how groundbreaking it was. The…

What field are you in that you'd actually wait two years, rather than retract your submission and go somewhere else?

Not in academia, but aware of the process, I was wondering just the same.
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