Episode #1043

Episode #1043

News Items

• AI Research Collaborators
• AI Carbon Footprint
• Curing Deafness
• Food Myths
• AI Enzyme Engineering

Question #1: Why Do Scientists Fall For Woo

• I have a friend who is a retired Geophysicist, he is an intelligent individual. He has always been a supplements person, but pretty mundane with it. Just the normal digestive and joints and vitamins things. But lately, he has really fallen off the deep end. He recently had a MRSA infection develop in his foot after stepping on something. He tried to treat it himself for a while, until it got so bad that the infection had eaten from one side through to the other. Finally, he went to the hospital, and spent several weeks there! Then this week he sent me a thing about taking meythl blue for brain fog! I normally ignore what he sends, but this one grabbed my attention because I know it was a die. And of course, it is all woo, and because I am on SSRIs could be fatal! So I was contemplating it all, and what strikes me, is this is an individual who is a hard scientist. He is trained and understands evidence, examination, experimentation, statistics, etc. And yet, here we are full on woo to the point of almost losing his foot. How does this happen? I get people who have none of that training, but I just cant get how someone steeped in science can fall for all this. Brian L. New Orleans

Science or Fiction [ Show Answers ]

• Item #1 Fiction

  The smallest animal genome, but number of coding genes, is the Trichoplax adhaerens, at just 3,500 genes, while the largest belongs to the axolotl, with about 90,000 genes. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017176118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017176118

• Item #2 Science

  Bdelloid rotifers are small aquatic animals with a high rate of horizontal gene transfer, with genes from other kingdoms of life responsible for about 10% of their genome. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2421910122

• Item #3 Science

  The Japanese pufferfish, Fugu rubripes, has the animal genome with the highest coding density, at 17% compared to 3% in humans. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014579300016598

Skeptical Quote of the Week.

“There is a kind of a spatial association between music and math … the intersection of science and art. Medicine is an art and research is an art. You have to be creative in the way you design experiments.” Dexter Holland, PhD (molecular biology), lead singer of the punk rock band The Offspring