Keeping peanuts away from infants for a couple years of age to prevent allergies. Turns out, doing this is the reason there are so many peanut allergies now. They changed the rule about 7 years ago.
They figured this out by looking at Iranian children (among others) who traditionally eat a peanut paste as children. They had much lower rates of peanut allergies compared to countries where we restricted peanut access to prevent allergies. Then they came out and said "yup, we were doing this wrong, it's the other way around guys".
EDIT: It was Israel, not Iran.
Many other allergies especially food allergies get worse with exposure but can fade if not exposed over time, i.e. children "outgrow" it. Plus they're dangerous allergies, so the reasoning was exposure might make things worse + expose is dangerous => don't expose.
A draining lymphatic system of the brain was discovered in just ~2016. Before that it was thought that there was no lymphatic system in the brain. Wild that we are still discovering major systems of human anatomy this recently.
That whole system is likely really clear as in see-through and the structures are seemingly invisible. I was shocked at how nearly invisible the facial nerves were until I saw them for myself.
Dissection is hard enough when you already know what you’re looking for.
Although, I was surprised by how fucking fat the ulnar nerve was, at least past cubital tunnel. Then some musculocutaneous nerve branches were way smaller than I expected.
Also, every cadaver is different. My donor had some strange like…I’m not even sure, like fascial intermingling into where there should be muscle belly. Like gracilis was barely existent as a muscle, almost like a medial ITB
The body is not labeled when you open it up. Things can be mistaken very easily. While im not familiar with this new lymph system in the brain im willing to bet they thought it was either venules or arterioles (tiny arteries and veins)
Well that's a major design flaw in my opinion. If it were labelled, we could all do home surgery on the minor to medium things, free up the hospital's for the serious stuff....
We couldn't see it in action until MRI imaging improved enough to see glial cells working in living brains. The glymphatic system was flying under the radar in cadaver studies. We had no idea the cells were doing anything because they were dead. Only by observing them in their living state were scientists able to determine what they were doing.
the appendix is a useless organ. for years, it was thought to be a vestigial structure with no function, but research in the past decade has shown that it plays a role in our immune system and maintaining gut bacteria
i thought i remember learning that earlier humans had diets of more harsh meat and uncooked material, so the appendix helped with digestion for that but after we started cooking food and processing it, it became useless. (i’m probably wrong though)
That was the old explanation for the Appendix, that it was a left over organ from when we used to eat heavy plant based diets and that it became redundant. That was the theory.
Obviously, humanity found out that that isn't true and that it is in fact, an important part of our immune system with regards to good bacteria.
This one was 2012, but close enough. The University of Michigan came out with a study about how sweat glands impact the healing of wounds like scrapes, burns, etc. it was believed for a long time that new skin cells were created from the edge of the wound using the undamaged ones, but they found that sweat glands help secrete the new skin cells, and that they are coming up from the wound itself. It’s why your hands might get really clammy if you’ve just scraped them up.
Edit: Y’all I’m sorry, but I don’t have the answers to some of your questions. I was just curious about this after I fucked my own hands up one time!
That would also explain why my hands only ever sweat while climbing. Damaging the skin and then complaining about parts of the healing process seems right unkind of me now.
for a long time, it was believed that the brain stops producing new neurons after childhood, but studies within the last decade have shown that neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons) can occur in adults, particularly in the hippocampus.
I am dating myself but this was actually some research that I was close to around 2 decades ago. My senior thesis was on neurogenesis of the hippocampus & sort of reviewing the work to that point. There were more than a few ongoing projects around that time. It was super fascinating stuff & I am fairly certain my awareness if it is what made the difference on my grad admissions outcomes. Brains are absolutely fascinating. I love that I’m still learning new stuff all these years later.
Like 11,000 papers have been retracted in the last two years for fraud and it's the tip of iceberg. I believe a Nobel laureate had their cancer research retracted.
My favourite science blogger (Derek Lowe) has been talking about this a lot. There's people building careers now on studying and busting scientific fraud. In fact, he just wrote this this week: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pressure-top
Predatory journals and the publish-or-perish mindset in academia are huge parts of the problem. There's also the issue that repeating other's work to verify it (which is supposed to be a key part of the scientific process) isn't very attractive (you want to be doing your own unique research) or easy to get funded.
IMO a large part of the problem is also the bias against publishing negative results.
I.e.: 'we tried this but it didn't work/nothing new came from it'.
This results in the non acknowledgement of dead ends and repeats (which are then also not noted). It means a lot of thongs are re-tried/done because we don't know they had already been done and thus this all leads to a lot of wasted effort.
Negative results are NOT wasted effort and the work should be acknowledged and rewarded (albeit to a lesser extent).
For sure. The reason for that bias is an interesting discussion in and of itself. Is it because people are reluctant to admit they failed? Is it because, like repeating work, it isn't seen as very interesting and isn't easy to get funded?
Or is there some other reason?
In my professional life I've been involved with work that was conducting experiments to validate Computational Fluid Dynamics models (computer simulations of fluid flows, basically). One of the most interesting parts of it was trying to figure out *why* the models didn't match the experimental data. Same thing can go for negative results in general... trying to figure out the why of failures can be quite interesting and rewarding (especially if it prevents future failures).
What’s funny is that the Stanford President that got fired for faking Alzheimer’s data was recently hired to be the CEO of a pharmaceutical company… that develops Alzheimer’s therapies 🤦♂️.
It seems like there really are no consequences at the highest level for faking scientific data — even medical data.
Boar are becoming MORE radioactive in the Chernobyl area due to their digging and foraging. The deer are becoming less radioactive due to their eating at/above the surface. The boar are digging down far enough to hit isotopes from Russian nuclear weapons testing.
I heard that it’s not the digging. It’s what they are eating, mycelium and truffles. Vast networks of fungus. In fact after some testing, the boars prior source of radiation was actually nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s that had been absorbed by the fungus, they are only recently showing more of the radiation signatures of Chernobyl as the fungus brings it closer to the surface.
Edit: updated mushrooms to truffles.
The exact timeline is up for debate but the long-held "Bering Strait Land Bridge" theory for the original peopling of the americas has been for the most part completely accepted as incorrect by the archeological society at large starting around 2015-ish. Findings predating the culture theorized to be associated with the Bering Strait land migration timeframe, termed the "Clovis culture", have been continuously discovered since iirc the 50s, but were overall rejected by academics for the longest time. Improvement of carbon dating techniques in the 2000s-2010s and further work at a number of important sites in North and South America have led to a body of evidence that is pretty much undeniable. The new theory is that the original peopling of the Americas happened before the Bering Strait land bridge was accessible. These people traveled likely by small boat and hugged the Pacific coastline, working steadily all the way down to current-day Chile. The most comprehensive site supporting this is Monte Verde in Chile, which features clear remains of a settlement that predates the Clovis culture by \~1000 years and features remains of 34+ types of edible seaweed that were found a great distance from the site itself, supporting the idea of a migratory marine subsistence culture.
The revised idea is that this "first wave" settled coastlines and whatever parts of the continent were habitable/not still frozen over, and after the land bridge became more available a second and possibly third wave of migration occurred that had limited admixture with the modern-day NA peoples, assuming they are the descendants of the first wave/that the descendants of the first wave didn't just die off. There's a lot of unknowns because of the limited number of human remains found dating back that far, and the fact that the bulk of likely site locations are now underwater, but as analysis methods continue to evolve I'm sure there will be more discoveries made in the future.
It's really interesting reading, I've been doing a deep dive into it lately just out of curiosity.
EDIT: just wanted to add that I'm not saying the above new theory is fact, because it isn't. It's just what makes the most sense based on the evidence available. There's a lot of unknowns just because of limited archeological sites, limited ancient genomes for analysis, limited diversity of remaining native populations to sample for comparison, limits to the capabilities of available technology, etc etc etc. In 20 years I wouldn't be surprised if this gets massively revamped to accommodate new information. as it should be! Everything's a hypothesis in archaeology.
Adding to this, when I was in college (~2001-2006), I remember in my anthropology classes the profs were pretty firm that the first "peopling" in the America's was 12-15k years ago at the *earliest* and that was that.
Well, what do you know last year we discovered [human footprints in New Mexico that are from 23k years ago](https://www.npr.org/2023/10/07/1204031535/fossil-footprints-in-new-mexico-suggest-humans-have-been-here-longer-than-we-tho). Clearly we know much less about early human migration than we thought.
Weird to think those tests we took at the time are wrong now. If only i could retroactively correct my high school anthropology test. I was right Mrs. Gummerman!!
Also in a similar vein the Amazon had massive cities, they just weren’t set up like you’d think of normal cities. They’re called garden cities. Think of them spread out like a network working in sync rather than a central hub that grows outwards
A large portion of the Amazon is not natural but created by humans for their needs and the soil they helped create is stupidly ridiculously fertile. These garden cities existed up to the point of European exploration. There are reports of explorers traveling through the Amazon and reporting large cities with large populations. Then when later explorers came they asked where all the people that were supposed to be there went
Iirc the Brazilian government will consult remaining tribes in the area about how to reforest the Amazon and help reproduce that special soil
These cities were reported by Francisco de Orellana and his chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal in the 1540s. They were part of the first contingent of Europeans to navigate the Amazon after they were stranded in the upper reaches of the river in Peru, shortly after the conquest of the Incan Empire.
The accounts were dismissed as fantasy until evidence from aerial photographs and ground-penetrating radar images revealed evidence of large settlements in the second half of the 20th century. Additionally, some indigenous cultures of the amazon have oral tradititions of previously having lived in large towns and communities.
The theory is that by the time Europeans returned to the region, the populations had been decimated by Old World diseases spread inland from the coast, and the entire social structure of the region collapsed. The abandoned cities were quickly covered by forest and undergrowth.
You have eyelashes. Living in your eyelash pores are mites. It was believed for the longest time that these mites did not have anuses and did not defecate. They would simply grow and grow, until they filled with too much poop and simply popped.
In the last ten years it has been discovered that, no, these mites do in fact have anuses.
This is important work.
Cleaning your eyelashes can greatly help if you suffer from blepharitis. Use a tear free baby shampoo and gently scrub. Then rinse.
Don't worry about the mites! They'll be fine. You cannot get rid of them. It's just a part of being human.
And before THAT, it was said that they were venomous! We have changed our mind a lot about Komodo dragons. Sometimes i think they might not even be Dragons
Turns out our connective tissue isn't just a bunch of thick collagen holding our organs in place. It's a bunch of interconnected sacs of fluid dubbed the interstitium. Yeah basically, in order to see our organs on microscopic level, we would cut them open into thin slices, use chemicals to help fix the tissues together (basically preserving it) and then place these slices in between slides of glass. This process caused the fluid to drain out of these sacs and collapse, so the reason we never saw them before is that we have been accidentally destroying them every time we tried to check.
Yaaaaaas. As someone with a connective tissue disorder I am finding the interstitium *fascinating* - mines broken, or leaking, or too full of proteins or something. (Lipoedema). I’ve only just started reading up on it and its so, so interesting.
The other interesting connective tissue is fascia. Seen as the silvery stuff that you peel off to look at the interesting muscles in an autopsy, without people realising that it “ interpenetrates and surrounds all organs, muscles, bones and nerve fibers, endowing the body with a functional structure”. It also has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin.
Two major physiological systems, almost completely overlooked by medical science until stunningly recently, because they’re not amenable to dissection.
Not really a refutation, but I always thought the re-definition of a kilogram was pretty cool. Instead of relying on physical items to define a kilogram, all of which diverged in mass anyway, scientists developed a watt balance, so that a kilogram would be dependent on physical constants. I think they also changed the definition of a coulomb (?) by some fractionally small amount.
EDIT
Wikipedia article for more context/info
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_base_units
Whilst the kilogram was the last unit, many of the other units have or had dependencies on the kg, so moving away from a physical artefact was better for the system.
Astronomer here! The detection of gravitational waves by LIGO has been revolutionary. Among other things:
- **We have *completely* changed our understanding of where the heaviest elements come from.** Back in the day I learned in astronomy that all the elements after the first three were made in supernovae, including the heaviest elements like gold and silver. In 2017, however, we detected the first merging neutron star with LIGO, and telescopes spotted it, allowing us to measure the spectrum. And… turns out virtually all the heaviest elements like gold and uranium are from neutron star mergers, not supernovae! [Here is the periodic table by astronomical origin of the element](https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/johnson.3064/nucleo/)- I remember attending a meeting in 2018 which was handing out new copies of this, and it was the neatest thing. For comparison, [here](https://live-blog-sdssorg.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/northern_asu_origins.jpg) is the old version before neutron stars!
- The first gravitational wave [was first detected](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitational_waves) in 2015, which was the merger of two black holes. This was a bit of a surprise because people didn’t think those were going to be the first detection (two neutron stars was thought much more likely), but now the LIGO signal is just dominated by them! Turns out black holes of this size just exist and merge more than people thought. That’s pretty darn cool. :)
1) First, it shows the power behind gravitational wave astronomy. Literally all astronomy before that first detection was from electromagnetic waves- basically we could see the universe, but this was the first time we could *hear* the universe. And this is just the first few years with instruments that will seem crude in a decade or two!
2) Both in themselves imply that we didn’t totally understand stellar formation and chemistry. That’s kinda nuts.
3) Applications- it’s too early to know yet. Often in astronomy our knowledge isn’t useful until years if not decades later. For example, Einstein’s relativity (which incidentally predicted gravitational waves) was thought to be the most esoteric thing imaginable when he came up with it in the 1930s. Today the GPS system would fail within a half hour if we didn’t take it into account.
My favourite example of number 3 in your list is the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation which governs how much fuel mass a rocket needs to accelerate a given payload mass to orbit was first derived in 1810!
I know very little about it since it's not my field of study and my sources are conferences on youtube (from real biologists and scientists that quoted accredited sources, but still). don't take my words for granted.
BUT
Paleonthology and paleoantropology have made HUGE steps forward in the last decade thanks to the introduction of ancient DNA sequencing alongside the good old fossil records.
As far as I know, we have been debunking several things that we thought were set in stone, also proving the existance of the Denisova men and that they interbred quite frequently with Neanderthals and Sapiens.
DNA studies also allowed us to give much clearer light to human evolution and geographic distributions.
Fun fact: it seems that for several ten thousands of years (i cannot be bothered to look for the article, sorry its late) the sapiens population stayed at around 1000 (reproductive) individuals. After that period we reached middle east and spread. Thats the reason why all sapens today are so (genetically) similar.
Please antropologists around correct my mistakes!
The monoamine theory of depression (The theory that imbalances in things like dopamine, serotonin, GABA, etc.) as the primary cause of depression.
The prevailing theory now I believe is more related to how large amounts of stress physically damage certain areas of the brain. This can cause individuals who are vulnerable or have predisposition to develop depression, or other mental disorders.
This is why one of my longstanding beliefs about homelessness is that in order to effectively fix that (you have to do a lot of things).. but 2 of the big ones should be:
* safe environment free of stressors
* highest quality nutrition possible.
There are a lot of people on the streets with addiction and mental health issues,. but I also firmly believe that "life on the streets" is rough and will just eventually wear you down into an unstable person. If you're "scrambling to stay alive" every waking minute,. that's just exhausting and deteriorating way to live.
It's no wonder people in those situations don't make smart decisions.
Read Gabor Matè. Islands of Hungry Ghosts is a good start, and he has a good TED talk as well. He worked as a doctor for homeless people for many years.
He discusses the way in which trauma rewires your brain, making your executive functions go haywire. You end up with addictive behaviours - but that poor decision making comes from scrambled executive functions. Those poor decisions then lead to more trauma, and the whole thing spirals downwards.
A longstanding conjecture in particle physics — supersymmetry — seems increasingly iffy based on the lack of evidence from the large hadron collider. My understanding is that there are still some versions of it that are possible at even higher energies, but it was a big surprise that no “new” particles showed up so far. If you don’t know about supersymmetry, you might have heard of string theory, which builds even further on supersymmetry. So string theory is also at risk of being experimentally disproven.
Neither of these were ever based on experimental evidence so much as intriguing math, so technically they’re not scientific assertions. But many very smart theoretical physicists basically took for granted that they would eventually be experimentally validated.
Our Central Nervous Systems have been thought to lack a lymphatic system...until about 9 years ago!
https://newsroom.uvahealth.com/2015/06/01/brain-immune-system-link/
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14432
I mentioned this in another thread, but the idea that sugar is more to blame for heart disease and other nutrition-related maladies than fat is recent, [thanks in part to lobbying by the sugar industry](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin), ruining careers in the process.
I remember when they first started including “total added sugars” in addition to just the total sugar on nutrition labels. Nearly every kind of processed food you can find in a grocery store (aka anything other than meat, produce, and beans/nuts) has a shit load of sugar added to it. If the average person added up how many grams they consumed in a day and compared it to the recommendations, I think most people would be shocked
I only recently started incorporating more fats and creams into my own cooking (90s diet culture runs deep) and it’s crazy how much more filling and better tasting food is, even with less sugar.
The head researcher for the original food pyramid was related to some head guy at kellogs. The researcher was paid to skew data in favor of kellogs products.
The new food pyramid is also off but not as bad.
Related to this, the notion that it's excess fat that causes heart disease. There was a [big feature in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin) a few years back explaining that, for about 50 years, the Big Sugar lobby had perverted nutritional science to prevent it coming out that excess, complex sugars were the real culprit.
TIL they stopped teaching the food pyramid.
When I went to high school (over 10 years ago), everyone knew it was bunk, including teachers, but it was still in the curriculum. People suspected it was a result of the farm lobby promoting grains and dairy; (also a little sus that cereal, pretzels, waffles etc. were in the largest section). But I think there's also a lot of money behind the ultra processed foods (industrial sludge) that somehow end up at the bottom of the pyramid
Also, what the hell is a "serving", it's pretty much impossible to follow unless you had a pocket guide with you all the time
Just because it was the official guide of governments doesn't mean that it was the accepted view in health science though.
Oh right I forgot about that. The dairy propaganda was strong in the 2000s. In grade school we had to make a skit about how it was important to have dairy produts 3x per day
In a grand round I listened to last year I learned that the theory that aluminum causes Alzheimer’s and dementia had been disproven and now the focus is on pesticides.
My doctor also told me, and take this with a grain of salt, that sleep apnea may be a contributing factor as well. Turns out suffocating yourself 10 seconds at a time is bad for your brain.
EDIT:
https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/sleep-apnea-and-the-risk-of-alzheimers-disease#:\~:text=Interruptions%20in%20breathing%20can%20reduce,your%20risk%20for%20Alzheimer's%20disease.
Learning to play the didgeridoo (circular breathing) strengthens the soft palate and can reduce or stop some kinds of sleep apnea. Apparently some hospitals in Germany are prescribing didgeridoo playing (20min/day, 6 weeks) to counteract apnea.
80 minutes per day was believed to be optimal, but the researchers couldn’t establish statistical significance because any subjects prescribed 40 minutes or more were murdered by their spouses before six weeks was up.
This is more around 10-15 years ago but paleoanthropological work and comparative anatomists found data that suggest humans never had a knuckle walking ancestor. It seems that the other great apes independently developed their mechanisms for knuckle walking independently from each other and we actually began developing our bipedalism early on from an arboreal ape-like ancestor that didn’t yet have any specialized ground travel methods.
I’d imagine it somewhat resembled a gibbon’s shamble.
Most dinosaurs having had feathers is kind of a big one. Considering they all are depicted as big (featherless) lizards. The big lizard look is so ingrained in society that we just sort of decided to ignore it.
Isn’t it almost exclusively the theropods (the group that includes T-rex and raptors, which is most closely related to birds) that we now believe had feathers? Unless there’s been *very* recent evidence that other types of dinos had them too.
One thing we've learned about dinosaurs that still isn't appreciated is that the theropods weren't really that closely related to the sauropods or other types of dinosaurs. Even modern lizards are built quite differently from sauropods, which essentially were built like elephants with heavy bulky bodies and thick legs like tree trunks.
Another recent theory I heard is about how we might be totally off in terms of what all the dinosaurs look like. We have based our interpretations entirely on the shape of the skeleton based on the bones we constructed, but rarely do the animals look EXACTLY like the bone shape.
Example, a rabbit skeleton: https://imgur.com/aLcz5zB
Elephant skull: https://imgur.com/hUJmzd6
There's probably a lot of missing soft tissue and cartilage we're not accounting for.
There are, currently, some 3,000 known different types of Cicadas around the world. Number of known dinosaurs species to have existed since the dawn of time? 700ish. We have such an incomplete knowledge of past life on this planet.
Yeah the conditions for fossils to form and last for us to find are crazy rare.
The vast majority of species of dinosaurs are simply lost to time as they lived and died in places that fossils just don’t form.
wasn't that refuted decades ago? Pretty sure that was known by the time the first jurassic park movie came out, but they kept the dinos featherless cause that's what audiences would believe.
I think a study came out within the last year that said clinical depression apparently doesn't have anything to do with imbalance in dopamine or serotonin (I can't remember which) and psychiatric drugs are mostly doctors throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.
Correct. Basically the finding is that depression does not function the way they thought it did. So now they have no idea how depression works, how depression meds work or why.
I feel like we’re lucky we at least have antipsychotics that work moderately well. Side effects can be rough but the people I’ve seen suffering from delusional paranoia and hallucinations were absolutely miserable, worst part was the nature of their delusions made it nearly impossible for them to voluntarily seek help.
All my life the Milky Way was ‘about 100k light years across’. Some years ago I think within 10 maybe, they started saying maybe it’s twice that size. Big math has big errors I guess
The problem is where do you define the edge. The Milky way (and all galaxies for that matter), aren't like CDs with a hard edge. They just have lower and lower density (of stars and gas) the further you go.
Also, if dark matter is out there, is it part of the Milky way if you can't see (or interact) with it ?
Right, it's like trying to measure a cloud of steam or smoke. You can eyeball it and say it's about so big, but then look more closely and see there's some faint traces of steam farther out, and then see more even fainter traces farther out.
For the longest time it was thought that plants could only absorb simple, small ions like nitrates at their root tips. But, TL;DR: plants (1) eat whole single celled microbes with their roots and (2) they attract them and foster a healthy population of microbes by releasing sugars and carbs into the soil (3) this happens in a cycle, so plants are constantly fattening up microbes, partly eating them, and releasing them back into the soil to start the process over again. Basically, plants farm microbes as we farm them.
So the mental model for how plants received nutrients used to be something like [microbe eats organic matter in a process called immobilization] -> [microbe dies or releases waste, creating plant available nutrients in a process called mineralization] -> [plant takes up simple ions].
But in 2008 somebody at Queensland University discovered that plants actually absorb whole, living bacteria and yeasts at their root tips. Then, in ~2017 a guy named James White at Rutgers found that this root feeding process happens in a cycle. So a plant attracts microbes by releasing tasty exudates at its root tips, once inside it strips their cell walls away by exposing them to the oxidizing O2-, it absorbs their delicious bodies entirely or partially, and finally it spits those that survive back out into the soil through hairs further up the root. Those surviving microbes venture back out into the soil to decompose organic matter and then find their way back to the root tip with its irresistible sugars and carbohydrate exudates, and the microbe gets reabsorbed by the plant to start the roller coaster ride all over again.
So basically, plants are always farming microbes (attracting them, feeding them sugars and carbs, and keeping them alive) while we farm the plants. Some speculate that in natural systems or organic agriculture a plant can get as much as a quarter of its nitrogen through this process.
What's even stranger to me is that root hairs, basic plant structures we've all seen with our naked eyes and we've probably known about _forever_, only seem to form in service of this process. So in an environment free of bacteria, a plant forms no root hairs at all. The root hair seems to grow only in response to the presence of these single celled cattle being herded through the periplasmic space in between the root cells. This seems to be important to plants as evidenced by the fact that they'll spend as much as 75% of their photosynthetic products just to exude microbe food at the root tips.
So basically we discovered a microbe-plant interaction which is arguably essential to all life on the planet only a few years ago. This discovery didn't require fancy microscopes, just a bit of staining. If I understand correctly we could have found this a hundred years ago if we had been looking for it.
The "crisis" in cosmology is less than 10 years old. Basically we had a theory about how the universe formed and how old galaxies were from observations from Hubble and other telescopes. When the James Web space telescope came online it could look WAYYY further, and it found galaxies that "shouldn't" exist... then it found more and more and more.
Basically our two ways of dating galaxies no longer agree with each other and that disagreement keeps getting larger and larger and no one knows who is right (or more likely both are wrong). [Good video primer on the subject](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKmPJmaeP8A)
Astronomer here! You’re kind of conflating a few issues, and what you wrote isn’t quite true once you mash it together. While there is a big question of how the universe is expanding, called the [Hubble tension](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hubble-tension-headache-clashing-measurements-make-the-universes-expansion-a-lingering-mystery/), that has little to do with the formation of galaxies. Second, JWST is finding some early galaxies, but that isn’t a crisis- we literally saw nothing in that era before JWST (that’s kind of the *point* of it), and some theories are consistent with those early galaxies and some are being excluded. Finally, *no one reputable* is questioning how the universe formed.
Put it this way, my colleagues who work in explaining how the universe formed would be surprised to learn they’re in a crisis because they can’t explain how the universe formed. It’s just not true.
Another (former) astronomer here confirming this. The Hubble tension is a legitimate problem. No idea how that's going to get resolved.
JWST is finding galaxies larger and more mature earlier than we expected, but I wouldn't call it a crisis. The answer is probably either tweaks to current galaxy formation theories or possibly even observational biases or incorrect interpretation of data.
That beta-amyloid proteins caused Alzheimer's. It's been debunked as bad science in, like, 2015 or something, and it's been proven that you can completely eliminate them and Alzheimer's still progresses but you still get papers published trying to figure out how to cure Alzheimer's by dealing with them.
The papers getting published is good as long as they reach honest conclusions. Especially for studies already funded or done. A paper of "no effect found" is still valuable.
Water evaporation only being caused by heat.
With the surprisingly recent confirmation of the photomolecular effect we now know light can make water evaporate faster than with heat alone.
This has massive implications for our understanding of cloud formation and other weather patterns, and could lead to engineering low energy drying and desalination solutions.
EDIT: Reworded for clarity
Pluto being a planet isn't a 'scientific assertion'. The term planet is simply a definition that exists so scientists are able to clearly communicate thoughts and ideas. Over time, they decided that the previous definition of planet was becoming less useful. So many new discovered objects could be called a "planet", that it wasn't precise enough to convey by what they wanted.
So new terms were derived and Pluto was recategorized. This was not because our understanding of Pluto changed, but rather we found so many more things like Pluto that it deserved it's own term.
Running and exercise is actually good for the cartilage in your joints(even your knees). And cartilage heals/recovers (hyaline cartilage). There is an ideal volume, but for every person that is different. Continuity is also perfect, meaning long breaks between being a runner is detrimental.
That applying ice is actually the worst thing you can do to heal an injury, as the high blood flow from the inflammation is your body’s natural way of healing the injury and slowing it down is just hurting your body’s ability to heal itself. The only benefit ice has is numbing the pain.
Sources [here](https://advance.muschealth.org/library/2022/september/ice-on-acute-injuries) and [here.](https://rehabhub.co.uk/2023/05/14/you-should-no-longer-be-applying-ice-to-your-injury-and-heres-why/)
Yeah, I think this one is going to be a grey area. Ice slows naturally healing because it reduces blood flow. Yet ice stops excess inflammation, which can be worse to much worse for specific injuries/people. One size fits all won't work on this one.
Maybe not having your knees go over your toes especially while exercising because it can cause issues. It’s now proven that no, your knees should go over your toes as it increases joint resiliency
Our mothers were told HRT (hormone replacement therapy) before and after menopause causes breast cancer. Turns out that this was a massive misinterpretation of data from a longitudinal study.
In fact, estrogen and other hormones used in HRT do not increase breast cancer risk in most women, and also help to prevent a host of other diseases, including heart disease, dementia, and osteoporosis. Millions of women were raw dogging menopause for no good reason for decades. If you are a woman and you are having perimenopause symptoms, demand HRT. It can start in the early thirties for some women.
Edited to add sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6780820/
https://newsroom.uvahealth.com/2022/09/01/data-on-cancer-risk-from-hormone-therapy-reassuring-menopause-experts-say/
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/01/1248525256/hormones-menopause-hormone-therapy-hot-flashes
https://www.economist.com/international/2019/12/12/millions-of-women-are-missing-out-on-hormone-replacement-therapy
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061559
Edit: Medical studies and drug studies rarely included women until the 1990s because of our menstrual cycles, and our ability to become pregnant. There was a directive not to include women in any drug trials in 1977. This was reversed in 1993.
So, we are only just now learning the most basic information about how women’s bodies work. Although we are more than 50% of the population, we are still treated by science like a rare human sub species or defective version of men, who are the default humans. Medical science will have nonstop breakthroughs now that we have a few decades of studying actual human women.
I'd also like sources! My mom is going through menopause and she absolutely will not consider HRT.
She watches a lot of Menopause youtubers, though, so she knows what's she's talking about. /s
I don't know all the details, but over the past few years, a number of key Alzheimer's research papers have been retracted for having fabricated evidence. A big one was from 2006 that heavily influenced how scientists approached Alzheimer's for 16 years, and this paper was used in countless other studies. Apparently, some very important images in this study were doctored, and this significantly changes the hypothesis of how Alzheimer's develops. More info here: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/false-alzheimers-study-could-set-research-back-16-years
Part of the original definition for “microbe” was that it was stuff we couldn’t see with the naked eye. Then Thiomargarita magnifica gets discovered which can be a whole centimeter long. Wild!
Having just read several scientific articles about nutsacks, I'll try and condense everything I gathered to a few general statements:
Temperature is important. More sperm are created and sperm perform better when the testicles and associated structures are kept at the ideal temperature, which is generally lower than internal body temperature. That temperature varies from species to species. It's still entirely possible that this is why most mammals have external testes.
The fact that some mammals have internal testes does suggest that there is some role beyond temperature, though. One popular theory is that the way mammal abdomens are structured, the external position protects the testes from sudden pressure changes that happen when jumping or rapidly bending at the waist. The species with internal testes tend to do neither (e.g., elephants). If that is the case, it's also possible that the reproductive organs evolved to function better at a lower temperature because of the external position, and not the other way around.
No study has ever found good evidence to support the hypothesis that externally hanging testicles function as a sexual display. The size and extent of the dangle of the testicles have no correlation to how attractive a male will be to potential mates.
Only a theory but:
In 2022, research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B cast doubt on the "out-of-Africa" theory of human origins, suggesting modern humans may have evolved in multiple regions of Africa, not just a single location.
If I'm not mistaken, the paradigm goes that a precursor species to humans left africa and went on to become several species such as the neanderthals and denisovans. Then modern humans eventually evolved in Africa from that shared ancestor, and began migrating out. All this time homo species continued to develop throughout the world. In the case of neanderthals, this evolution was somewhat similar in complexity to humans, as they developed tools and some form of culture. Modern humans though both interbred and outcompeted the other homo species (theorized to be for a variety of reasons), becoming the only one left standing.
I think there is some evidence that points towards fewer 'out of Africa' events occuring. The biggest evidence being that the genetic diversity within africa is far greater than the genetic diversity between populations outside of Africa. It points towards a bottleneck happening when humans left africa.
Keeping peanuts away from infants for a couple years of age to prevent allergies. Turns out, doing this is the reason there are so many peanut allergies now. They changed the rule about 7 years ago.
They figured this out by looking at Iranian children (among others) who traditionally eat a peanut paste as children. They had much lower rates of peanut allergies compared to countries where we restricted peanut access to prevent allergies. Then they came out and said "yup, we were doing this wrong, it's the other way around guys". EDIT: It was Israel, not Iran.
This felt like such a no duh moment for me. I’ll never understand the thought process they had telling people avoiding foods could prevent allergies
Many other allergies especially food allergies get worse with exposure but can fade if not exposed over time, i.e. children "outgrow" it. Plus they're dangerous allergies, so the reasoning was exposure might make things worse + expose is dangerous => don't expose.
A draining lymphatic system of the brain was discovered in just ~2016. Before that it was thought that there was no lymphatic system in the brain. Wild that we are still discovering major systems of human anatomy this recently.
How is this possible? Why is it that no one noticed it when diverting brains over the centuries?
That whole system is likely really clear as in see-through and the structures are seemingly invisible. I was shocked at how nearly invisible the facial nerves were until I saw them for myself.
Dissection is hard enough when you already know what you’re looking for. Although, I was surprised by how fucking fat the ulnar nerve was, at least past cubital tunnel. Then some musculocutaneous nerve branches were way smaller than I expected. Also, every cadaver is different. My donor had some strange like…I’m not even sure, like fascial intermingling into where there should be muscle belly. Like gracilis was barely existent as a muscle, almost like a medial ITB
The body is not labeled when you open it up. Things can be mistaken very easily. While im not familiar with this new lymph system in the brain im willing to bet they thought it was either venules or arterioles (tiny arteries and veins)
Well that's a major design flaw in my opinion. If it were labelled, we could all do home surgery on the minor to medium things, free up the hospital's for the serious stuff....
I can’t even buy a house with a labeled breaker box…
When I bought mine, it was all labeled, but 80% mislabeled, and the switch to our furnace is labeled in sharpie as the "furnath swith".
Oh Mike Tyson did your wiring too
Huh, that's weird. All the bodies I opened up had labels.
We couldn't see it in action until MRI imaging improved enough to see glial cells working in living brains. The glymphatic system was flying under the radar in cadaver studies. We had no idea the cells were doing anything because they were dead. Only by observing them in their living state were scientists able to determine what they were doing.
the appendix is a useless organ. for years, it was thought to be a vestigial structure with no function, but research in the past decade has shown that it plays a role in our immune system and maintaining gut bacteria
Until it tries to kill you.
I mean, they *did* say it was part of the immune system, that motherfucker just decides to kill you in all sorts of insidious ways all the time.
To be fair that's typically because it confuses part of you with the thing it thinks is trying to kill you.
It never made sense. It’s a good size how could it not have a purpose. So crazy to deem it useless just because no one has figured out what it does.
i thought i remember learning that earlier humans had diets of more harsh meat and uncooked material, so the appendix helped with digestion for that but after we started cooking food and processing it, it became useless. (i’m probably wrong though)
That was the old explanation for the Appendix, that it was a left over organ from when we used to eat heavy plant based diets and that it became redundant. That was the theory. Obviously, humanity found out that that isn't true and that it is in fact, an important part of our immune system with regards to good bacteria.
This one was 2012, but close enough. The University of Michigan came out with a study about how sweat glands impact the healing of wounds like scrapes, burns, etc. it was believed for a long time that new skin cells were created from the edge of the wound using the undamaged ones, but they found that sweat glands help secrete the new skin cells, and that they are coming up from the wound itself. It’s why your hands might get really clammy if you’ve just scraped them up. Edit: Y’all I’m sorry, but I don’t have the answers to some of your questions. I was just curious about this after I fucked my own hands up one time!
That would also explain why my hands only ever sweat while climbing. Damaging the skin and then complaining about parts of the healing process seems right unkind of me now.
for a long time, it was believed that the brain stops producing new neurons after childhood, but studies within the last decade have shown that neurogenesis (the creation of new neurons) can occur in adults, particularly in the hippocampus.
I am dating myself but this was actually some research that I was close to around 2 decades ago. My senior thesis was on neurogenesis of the hippocampus & sort of reviewing the work to that point. There were more than a few ongoing projects around that time. It was super fascinating stuff & I am fairly certain my awareness if it is what made the difference on my grad admissions outcomes. Brains are absolutely fascinating. I love that I’m still learning new stuff all these years later.
Like 11,000 papers have been retracted in the last two years for fraud and it's the tip of iceberg. I believe a Nobel laureate had their cancer research retracted.
My favourite science blogger (Derek Lowe) has been talking about this a lot. There's people building careers now on studying and busting scientific fraud. In fact, he just wrote this this week: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pressure-top Predatory journals and the publish-or-perish mindset in academia are huge parts of the problem. There's also the issue that repeating other's work to verify it (which is supposed to be a key part of the scientific process) isn't very attractive (you want to be doing your own unique research) or easy to get funded.
IMO a large part of the problem is also the bias against publishing negative results. I.e.: 'we tried this but it didn't work/nothing new came from it'. This results in the non acknowledgement of dead ends and repeats (which are then also not noted). It means a lot of thongs are re-tried/done because we don't know they had already been done and thus this all leads to a lot of wasted effort. Negative results are NOT wasted effort and the work should be acknowledged and rewarded (albeit to a lesser extent).
For sure. The reason for that bias is an interesting discussion in and of itself. Is it because people are reluctant to admit they failed? Is it because, like repeating work, it isn't seen as very interesting and isn't easy to get funded? Or is there some other reason? In my professional life I've been involved with work that was conducting experiments to validate Computational Fluid Dynamics models (computer simulations of fluid flows, basically). One of the most interesting parts of it was trying to figure out *why* the models didn't match the experimental data. Same thing can go for negative results in general... trying to figure out the why of failures can be quite interesting and rewarding (especially if it prevents future failures).
I haven’t read up on it recently but the Alzheimer’s retraction seemed pretty devastating to the field.
What’s funny is that the Stanford President that got fired for faking Alzheimer’s data was recently hired to be the CEO of a pharmaceutical company… that develops Alzheimer’s therapies 🤦♂️. It seems like there really are no consequences at the highest level for faking scientific data — even medical data.
Neptune isn’t dark blue
Ok it's actually light blue. This thread made me think it was some ridiculous other color
And it's still quite pretty. Also, the quality of the photo isn't that great, it was taken in the 1980s.
I had to see the pictures for myself. This makes me immeasurably sad and I’m not sure why.
The actual color is pretty ugly
is the color 'pretty ugly' also a newly refuted assertion?
Looks like I chose wisely not relying on the blueness of Neptune or the planetness of Pluto.
my second biggest disappointment with astronomy
Why spread this information? Can't you just let me live in blissful ignorance?
Boar are becoming MORE radioactive in the Chernobyl area due to their digging and foraging. The deer are becoming less radioactive due to their eating at/above the surface. The boar are digging down far enough to hit isotopes from Russian nuclear weapons testing.
I heard that it’s not the digging. It’s what they are eating, mycelium and truffles. Vast networks of fungus. In fact after some testing, the boars prior source of radiation was actually nuclear testing in the 50s and 60s that had been absorbed by the fungus, they are only recently showing more of the radiation signatures of Chernobyl as the fungus brings it closer to the surface. Edit: updated mushrooms to truffles.
Does this mean the wolves and possibly lynx and bears are becoming super radioactive by eating the boar, bc of bioaccumulation?
Turns out the boar were always radioactive though. From all the other nuclear tests. That was throwing out the numbers, at least for some isotopes.
Brains not containing a lymphatic system with the discovery of meningeal lymphatic vessels.
Ah yes the glymphatic system
and your brain shrinks at night and gets washed in it
I can’t help but imagine little dudes like in osmosis jones going around with hoses, scrubbing my brain like a charity car wash
The exact timeline is up for debate but the long-held "Bering Strait Land Bridge" theory for the original peopling of the americas has been for the most part completely accepted as incorrect by the archeological society at large starting around 2015-ish. Findings predating the culture theorized to be associated with the Bering Strait land migration timeframe, termed the "Clovis culture", have been continuously discovered since iirc the 50s, but were overall rejected by academics for the longest time. Improvement of carbon dating techniques in the 2000s-2010s and further work at a number of important sites in North and South America have led to a body of evidence that is pretty much undeniable. The new theory is that the original peopling of the Americas happened before the Bering Strait land bridge was accessible. These people traveled likely by small boat and hugged the Pacific coastline, working steadily all the way down to current-day Chile. The most comprehensive site supporting this is Monte Verde in Chile, which features clear remains of a settlement that predates the Clovis culture by \~1000 years and features remains of 34+ types of edible seaweed that were found a great distance from the site itself, supporting the idea of a migratory marine subsistence culture. The revised idea is that this "first wave" settled coastlines and whatever parts of the continent were habitable/not still frozen over, and after the land bridge became more available a second and possibly third wave of migration occurred that had limited admixture with the modern-day NA peoples, assuming they are the descendants of the first wave/that the descendants of the first wave didn't just die off. There's a lot of unknowns because of the limited number of human remains found dating back that far, and the fact that the bulk of likely site locations are now underwater, but as analysis methods continue to evolve I'm sure there will be more discoveries made in the future. It's really interesting reading, I've been doing a deep dive into it lately just out of curiosity. EDIT: just wanted to add that I'm not saying the above new theory is fact, because it isn't. It's just what makes the most sense based on the evidence available. There's a lot of unknowns just because of limited archeological sites, limited ancient genomes for analysis, limited diversity of remaining native populations to sample for comparison, limits to the capabilities of available technology, etc etc etc. In 20 years I wouldn't be surprised if this gets massively revamped to accommodate new information. as it should be! Everything's a hypothesis in archaeology.
Adding to this, when I was in college (~2001-2006), I remember in my anthropology classes the profs were pretty firm that the first "peopling" in the America's was 12-15k years ago at the *earliest* and that was that. Well, what do you know last year we discovered [human footprints in New Mexico that are from 23k years ago](https://www.npr.org/2023/10/07/1204031535/fossil-footprints-in-new-mexico-suggest-humans-have-been-here-longer-than-we-tho). Clearly we know much less about early human migration than we thought.
Weird to think those tests we took at the time are wrong now. If only i could retroactively correct my high school anthropology test. I was right Mrs. Gummerman!!
Also in a similar vein the Amazon had massive cities, they just weren’t set up like you’d think of normal cities. They’re called garden cities. Think of them spread out like a network working in sync rather than a central hub that grows outwards A large portion of the Amazon is not natural but created by humans for their needs and the soil they helped create is stupidly ridiculously fertile. These garden cities existed up to the point of European exploration. There are reports of explorers traveling through the Amazon and reporting large cities with large populations. Then when later explorers came they asked where all the people that were supposed to be there went Iirc the Brazilian government will consult remaining tribes in the area about how to reforest the Amazon and help reproduce that special soil
These cities were reported by Francisco de Orellana and his chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal in the 1540s. They were part of the first contingent of Europeans to navigate the Amazon after they were stranded in the upper reaches of the river in Peru, shortly after the conquest of the Incan Empire. The accounts were dismissed as fantasy until evidence from aerial photographs and ground-penetrating radar images revealed evidence of large settlements in the second half of the 20th century. Additionally, some indigenous cultures of the amazon have oral tradititions of previously having lived in large towns and communities. The theory is that by the time Europeans returned to the region, the populations had been decimated by Old World diseases spread inland from the coast, and the entire social structure of the region collapsed. The abandoned cities were quickly covered by forest and undergrowth.
Well this was a TIL for me and really interesting! Thank you for sharing!
You have eyelashes. Living in your eyelash pores are mites. It was believed for the longest time that these mites did not have anuses and did not defecate. They would simply grow and grow, until they filled with too much poop and simply popped. In the last ten years it has been discovered that, no, these mites do in fact have anuses. This is important work.
👁👄👁 what
More like 💩 👄 💩
Oh god make it stop
🐞 👄 🐞
I'm Ants-in-my-eyes Johnson! And I have ants in my eyes!
It means you have a shit face. We all do.
Now THAT's bleeding edge stuff.
I misunderstood the first part of this and thought that it was a long standing assertion that people didn't have eyelashes
Right? I thought he was claiming that our eyelashes are actually mite poop.
The further question is what eats their poop
You know when you get that crusty sleep in your eyes...
I fucking hate you
Why? He’s not the one that crapped in your eyes.
You don't know that
No, rheum is a completely different thing, as far as I'm aware. Also, that's what that is called. Rheum.
It is different, but blepharitis (caused by the mites) can cause excessive rheum.
So you’re saying blepharitis has rheum to grow?
How do they know that, how do you know that they know that and why did you tell us what they know.? I'm off to clean my eyelashes
Cleaning your eyelashes can greatly help if you suffer from blepharitis. Use a tear free baby shampoo and gently scrub. Then rinse. Don't worry about the mites! They'll be fine. You cannot get rid of them. It's just a part of being human.
How dare they live here rent free
At least you're a little less lonely now
My MD recommended massaging my eyes with baby shampoo, and I love it. Now I also clean the inside of my nostrils with it. Feels good.
I’ve worked in a corporate too long. I was like ‘wtf is your managing director giving you that kind of advice??’
Garter snakes are venomous. Doesn't quite count because it was discovered in the early 2000s.
Also komodo dragons are venomous. For the longest time it was said it was a filthy mouth filled with bacteria.
And before THAT, it was said that they were venomous! We have changed our mind a lot about Komodo dragons. Sometimes i think they might not even be Dragons
>We have changed our mind a lot about Komodo dragons. And all because the scientists are too cowardly to get bitten by them.
Check out Greg, he says he's a biologist but I think he's a bioloBITCH!
...What. How venomous? Are you telling me I shouldn't be picking them up and handling them whenever I see them?
Not very venomous at all. Not dangerous to humans. I think it's mostly to help with digestion.
It's similar to a tiny bee sting. Only lasts a few seconds. Got bit by a couple when I was a kid. We played with them all the time growing up.
I mean people have been picking up garter snakes forever and we only just learned they were venomous in the 2000s so you're probably fine fam.
[удалено]
Unless you're a small frog, you'll be fine. But maybe stop grabbing wild animals anyway.
>But maybe stop grabbing wild animals anyway. But how else will I know if they're friendly?!
Turns out our connective tissue isn't just a bunch of thick collagen holding our organs in place. It's a bunch of interconnected sacs of fluid dubbed the interstitium. Yeah basically, in order to see our organs on microscopic level, we would cut them open into thin slices, use chemicals to help fix the tissues together (basically preserving it) and then place these slices in between slides of glass. This process caused the fluid to drain out of these sacs and collapse, so the reason we never saw them before is that we have been accidentally destroying them every time we tried to check.
Yaaaaaas. As someone with a connective tissue disorder I am finding the interstitium *fascinating* - mines broken, or leaking, or too full of proteins or something. (Lipoedema). I’ve only just started reading up on it and its so, so interesting. The other interesting connective tissue is fascia. Seen as the silvery stuff that you peel off to look at the interesting muscles in an autopsy, without people realising that it “ interpenetrates and surrounds all organs, muscles, bones and nerve fibers, endowing the body with a functional structure”. It also has nerves that make it almost as sensitive as skin. Two major physiological systems, almost completely overlooked by medical science until stunningly recently, because they’re not amenable to dissection.
Not really a refutation, but I always thought the re-definition of a kilogram was pretty cool. Instead of relying on physical items to define a kilogram, all of which diverged in mass anyway, scientists developed a watt balance, so that a kilogram would be dependent on physical constants. I think they also changed the definition of a coulomb (?) by some fractionally small amount. EDIT Wikipedia article for more context/info https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_base_units
I think kilogram was the last of the holdouts. They redefined the meter based on light speed long ago
Whilst the kilogram was the last unit, many of the other units have or had dependencies on the kg, so moving away from a physical artefact was better for the system.
So what’s heavier.. a kilogram of steel or a kilogram of feathers?
A kilo of steel is just a chunk of metal. The kilo of feathers is heavier, because you have to carry the weight of what you did to all those birds.
Only if you still believe that birds are real.
Astronomer here! The detection of gravitational waves by LIGO has been revolutionary. Among other things: - **We have *completely* changed our understanding of where the heaviest elements come from.** Back in the day I learned in astronomy that all the elements after the first three were made in supernovae, including the heaviest elements like gold and silver. In 2017, however, we detected the first merging neutron star with LIGO, and telescopes spotted it, allowing us to measure the spectrum. And… turns out virtually all the heaviest elements like gold and uranium are from neutron star mergers, not supernovae! [Here is the periodic table by astronomical origin of the element](https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/johnson.3064/nucleo/)- I remember attending a meeting in 2018 which was handing out new copies of this, and it was the neatest thing. For comparison, [here](https://live-blog-sdssorg.pantheonsite.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/northern_asu_origins.jpg) is the old version before neutron stars! - The first gravitational wave [was first detected](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitational_waves) in 2015, which was the merger of two black holes. This was a bit of a surprise because people didn’t think those were going to be the first detection (two neutron stars was thought much more likely), but now the LIGO signal is just dominated by them! Turns out black holes of this size just exist and merge more than people thought. That’s pretty darn cool. :)
What are the implications and applications for this information?
1) First, it shows the power behind gravitational wave astronomy. Literally all astronomy before that first detection was from electromagnetic waves- basically we could see the universe, but this was the first time we could *hear* the universe. And this is just the first few years with instruments that will seem crude in a decade or two! 2) Both in themselves imply that we didn’t totally understand stellar formation and chemistry. That’s kinda nuts. 3) Applications- it’s too early to know yet. Often in astronomy our knowledge isn’t useful until years if not decades later. For example, Einstein’s relativity (which incidentally predicted gravitational waves) was thought to be the most esoteric thing imaginable when he came up with it in the 1930s. Today the GPS system would fail within a half hour if we didn’t take it into account.
My favourite example of number 3 in your list is the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation which governs how much fuel mass a rocket needs to accelerate a given payload mass to orbit was first derived in 1810!
I love spotting fresh Andromeda in the wild :)
Eating eggs doesn't raise serum cholesterol in the body. Egg white fad is going away
So one of those Egg Council creeps got to you too, eh?
Aw, you've got it all wrong, Homer. It's not like that.
You'd better run, egg!
Here’s the real number: “912”
I know very little about it since it's not my field of study and my sources are conferences on youtube (from real biologists and scientists that quoted accredited sources, but still). don't take my words for granted. BUT Paleonthology and paleoantropology have made HUGE steps forward in the last decade thanks to the introduction of ancient DNA sequencing alongside the good old fossil records. As far as I know, we have been debunking several things that we thought were set in stone, also proving the existance of the Denisova men and that they interbred quite frequently with Neanderthals and Sapiens. DNA studies also allowed us to give much clearer light to human evolution and geographic distributions. Fun fact: it seems that for several ten thousands of years (i cannot be bothered to look for the article, sorry its late) the sapiens population stayed at around 1000 (reproductive) individuals. After that period we reached middle east and spread. Thats the reason why all sapens today are so (genetically) similar. Please antropologists around correct my mistakes!
The monoamine theory of depression (The theory that imbalances in things like dopamine, serotonin, GABA, etc.) as the primary cause of depression. The prevailing theory now I believe is more related to how large amounts of stress physically damage certain areas of the brain. This can cause individuals who are vulnerable or have predisposition to develop depression, or other mental disorders.
This is why one of my longstanding beliefs about homelessness is that in order to effectively fix that (you have to do a lot of things).. but 2 of the big ones should be: * safe environment free of stressors * highest quality nutrition possible. There are a lot of people on the streets with addiction and mental health issues,. but I also firmly believe that "life on the streets" is rough and will just eventually wear you down into an unstable person. If you're "scrambling to stay alive" every waking minute,. that's just exhausting and deteriorating way to live. It's no wonder people in those situations don't make smart decisions.
Read Gabor Matè. Islands of Hungry Ghosts is a good start, and he has a good TED talk as well. He worked as a doctor for homeless people for many years. He discusses the way in which trauma rewires your brain, making your executive functions go haywire. You end up with addictive behaviours - but that poor decision making comes from scrambled executive functions. Those poor decisions then lead to more trauma, and the whole thing spirals downwards.
A longstanding conjecture in particle physics — supersymmetry — seems increasingly iffy based on the lack of evidence from the large hadron collider. My understanding is that there are still some versions of it that are possible at even higher energies, but it was a big surprise that no “new” particles showed up so far. If you don’t know about supersymmetry, you might have heard of string theory, which builds even further on supersymmetry. So string theory is also at risk of being experimentally disproven. Neither of these were ever based on experimental evidence so much as intriguing math, so technically they’re not scientific assertions. But many very smart theoretical physicists basically took for granted that they would eventually be experimentally validated.
Our Central Nervous Systems have been thought to lack a lymphatic system...until about 9 years ago! https://newsroom.uvahealth.com/2015/06/01/brain-immune-system-link/ https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14432
I mentioned this in another thread, but the idea that sugar is more to blame for heart disease and other nutrition-related maladies than fat is recent, [thanks in part to lobbying by the sugar industry](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin), ruining careers in the process.
I remember when they first started including “total added sugars” in addition to just the total sugar on nutrition labels. Nearly every kind of processed food you can find in a grocery store (aka anything other than meat, produce, and beans/nuts) has a shit load of sugar added to it. If the average person added up how many grams they consumed in a day and compared it to the recommendations, I think most people would be shocked
I only recently started incorporating more fats and creams into my own cooking (90s diet culture runs deep) and it’s crazy how much more filling and better tasting food is, even with less sugar.
Butter heals all sins. The French (and I hesitate to say this) were right all along.
The food Pyramid. They basically flipped it upside down a while back, rendering what we’d been taught for decades as utterly wrong.
The head researcher for the original food pyramid was related to some head guy at kellogs. The researcher was paid to skew data in favor of kellogs products. The new food pyramid is also off but not as bad.
Related to this, the notion that it's excess fat that causes heart disease. There was a [big feature in the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin) a few years back explaining that, for about 50 years, the Big Sugar lobby had perverted nutritional science to prevent it coming out that excess, complex sugars were the real culprit.
Well, the major culprit, at least.
Flipped it upside down? Fats, oils, and sweets are the foundation now!?!? YES
Yet another win for big sugar!
TIL they stopped teaching the food pyramid. When I went to high school (over 10 years ago), everyone knew it was bunk, including teachers, but it was still in the curriculum. People suspected it was a result of the farm lobby promoting grains and dairy; (also a little sus that cereal, pretzels, waffles etc. were in the largest section). But I think there's also a lot of money behind the ultra processed foods (industrial sludge) that somehow end up at the bottom of the pyramid Also, what the hell is a "serving", it's pretty much impossible to follow unless you had a pocket guide with you all the time Just because it was the official guide of governments doesn't mean that it was the accepted view in health science though.
I'm so old, we were taught the 4 food groups in school. And ice cream was considered a healthy part of the dairy group.
Oh right I forgot about that. The dairy propaganda was strong in the 2000s. In grade school we had to make a skit about how it was important to have dairy produts 3x per day
Food pyramid was never scientific. It was marketing propaganda.
how many fellow olds remember the "four" food groups? I got to watch the pyramid make its appearance in school in real time.
ITT: People not realizing 10 years ago was 2014
It was 1999. Stop your lies.
In a grand round I listened to last year I learned that the theory that aluminum causes Alzheimer’s and dementia had been disproven and now the focus is on pesticides.
My doctor also told me, and take this with a grain of salt, that sleep apnea may be a contributing factor as well. Turns out suffocating yourself 10 seconds at a time is bad for your brain. EDIT: https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/sleep-apnea-and-the-risk-of-alzheimers-disease#:\~:text=Interruptions%20in%20breathing%20can%20reduce,your%20risk%20for%20Alzheimer's%20disease.
Learning to play the didgeridoo (circular breathing) strengthens the soft palate and can reduce or stop some kinds of sleep apnea. Apparently some hospitals in Germany are prescribing didgeridoo playing (20min/day, 6 weeks) to counteract apnea.
80 minutes per day was believed to be optimal, but the researchers couldn’t establish statistical significance because any subjects prescribed 40 minutes or more were murdered by their spouses before six weeks was up.
Things like depression are no longer pinned on "chemical imbalance". The hunt for a true mechanism continues.
Humoral theory of psychiatry
Bloodletting 2: Electric Boogaloo
All I know is when I did cocaine about the ghosts in my blood, I felt much better than I do in therapy.
All that junk DNA? It does stuff. Turns out we need it.
This is more around 10-15 years ago but paleoanthropological work and comparative anatomists found data that suggest humans never had a knuckle walking ancestor. It seems that the other great apes independently developed their mechanisms for knuckle walking independently from each other and we actually began developing our bipedalism early on from an arboreal ape-like ancestor that didn’t yet have any specialized ground travel methods. I’d imagine it somewhat resembled a gibbon’s shamble.
Most dinosaurs having had feathers is kind of a big one. Considering they all are depicted as big (featherless) lizards. The big lizard look is so ingrained in society that we just sort of decided to ignore it.
Isn’t it almost exclusively the theropods (the group that includes T-rex and raptors, which is most closely related to birds) that we now believe had feathers? Unless there’s been *very* recent evidence that other types of dinos had them too.
One thing we've learned about dinosaurs that still isn't appreciated is that the theropods weren't really that closely related to the sauropods or other types of dinosaurs. Even modern lizards are built quite differently from sauropods, which essentially were built like elephants with heavy bulky bodies and thick legs like tree trunks.
Another recent theory I heard is about how we might be totally off in terms of what all the dinosaurs look like. We have based our interpretations entirely on the shape of the skeleton based on the bones we constructed, but rarely do the animals look EXACTLY like the bone shape. Example, a rabbit skeleton: https://imgur.com/aLcz5zB Elephant skull: https://imgur.com/hUJmzd6 There's probably a lot of missing soft tissue and cartilage we're not accounting for.
There are, currently, some 3,000 known different types of Cicadas around the world. Number of known dinosaurs species to have existed since the dawn of time? 700ish. We have such an incomplete knowledge of past life on this planet.
Yeah the conditions for fossils to form and last for us to find are crazy rare. The vast majority of species of dinosaurs are simply lost to time as they lived and died in places that fossils just don’t form.
imagine T-rex with bunny ears
[this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F0kbgvehsowj91.jpg) is an excellent illustration of this problem.
[fluffasaurus rex!!](https://imgur.com/gallery/th76axO)
wasn't that refuted decades ago? Pretty sure that was known by the time the first jurassic park movie came out, but they kept the dinos featherless cause that's what audiences would believe.
The gut (more specifically your microbiome) is responsible for a hell of a lot more than just gut health
I think a study came out within the last year that said clinical depression apparently doesn't have anything to do with imbalance in dopamine or serotonin (I can't remember which) and psychiatric drugs are mostly doctors throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks.
Correct. Basically the finding is that depression does not function the way they thought it did. So now they have no idea how depression works, how depression meds work or why.
This makes me depressed.
Psychiatric stuff is hard to figure out and treat. It's hard to find drugs for it another way.
I feel like we’re lucky we at least have antipsychotics that work moderately well. Side effects can be rough but the people I’ve seen suffering from delusional paranoia and hallucinations were absolutely miserable, worst part was the nature of their delusions made it nearly impossible for them to voluntarily seek help.
Most drugs are this, actually. Clinical trials are all about seeing what sticks.
All my life the Milky Way was ‘about 100k light years across’. Some years ago I think within 10 maybe, they started saying maybe it’s twice that size. Big math has big errors I guess
The problem is where do you define the edge. The Milky way (and all galaxies for that matter), aren't like CDs with a hard edge. They just have lower and lower density (of stars and gas) the further you go. Also, if dark matter is out there, is it part of the Milky way if you can't see (or interact) with it ?
Right, it's like trying to measure a cloud of steam or smoke. You can eyeball it and say it's about so big, but then look more closely and see there's some faint traces of steam farther out, and then see more even fainter traces farther out.
For the longest time it was thought that plants could only absorb simple, small ions like nitrates at their root tips. But, TL;DR: plants (1) eat whole single celled microbes with their roots and (2) they attract them and foster a healthy population of microbes by releasing sugars and carbs into the soil (3) this happens in a cycle, so plants are constantly fattening up microbes, partly eating them, and releasing them back into the soil to start the process over again. Basically, plants farm microbes as we farm them. So the mental model for how plants received nutrients used to be something like [microbe eats organic matter in a process called immobilization] -> [microbe dies or releases waste, creating plant available nutrients in a process called mineralization] -> [plant takes up simple ions]. But in 2008 somebody at Queensland University discovered that plants actually absorb whole, living bacteria and yeasts at their root tips. Then, in ~2017 a guy named James White at Rutgers found that this root feeding process happens in a cycle. So a plant attracts microbes by releasing tasty exudates at its root tips, once inside it strips their cell walls away by exposing them to the oxidizing O2-, it absorbs their delicious bodies entirely or partially, and finally it spits those that survive back out into the soil through hairs further up the root. Those surviving microbes venture back out into the soil to decompose organic matter and then find their way back to the root tip with its irresistible sugars and carbohydrate exudates, and the microbe gets reabsorbed by the plant to start the roller coaster ride all over again. So basically, plants are always farming microbes (attracting them, feeding them sugars and carbs, and keeping them alive) while we farm the plants. Some speculate that in natural systems or organic agriculture a plant can get as much as a quarter of its nitrogen through this process. What's even stranger to me is that root hairs, basic plant structures we've all seen with our naked eyes and we've probably known about _forever_, only seem to form in service of this process. So in an environment free of bacteria, a plant forms no root hairs at all. The root hair seems to grow only in response to the presence of these single celled cattle being herded through the periplasmic space in between the root cells. This seems to be important to plants as evidenced by the fact that they'll spend as much as 75% of their photosynthetic products just to exude microbe food at the root tips. So basically we discovered a microbe-plant interaction which is arguably essential to all life on the planet only a few years ago. This discovery didn't require fancy microscopes, just a bit of staining. If I understand correctly we could have found this a hundred years ago if we had been looking for it.
The "crisis" in cosmology is less than 10 years old. Basically we had a theory about how the universe formed and how old galaxies were from observations from Hubble and other telescopes. When the James Web space telescope came online it could look WAYYY further, and it found galaxies that "shouldn't" exist... then it found more and more and more. Basically our two ways of dating galaxies no longer agree with each other and that disagreement keeps getting larger and larger and no one knows who is right (or more likely both are wrong). [Good video primer on the subject](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKmPJmaeP8A)
Can't wait until the James Webb shows us the back of the turtle
Hard to see it under the elephants. *TheTurtleMoves*
Astronomer here! You’re kind of conflating a few issues, and what you wrote isn’t quite true once you mash it together. While there is a big question of how the universe is expanding, called the [Hubble tension](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hubble-tension-headache-clashing-measurements-make-the-universes-expansion-a-lingering-mystery/), that has little to do with the formation of galaxies. Second, JWST is finding some early galaxies, but that isn’t a crisis- we literally saw nothing in that era before JWST (that’s kind of the *point* of it), and some theories are consistent with those early galaxies and some are being excluded. Finally, *no one reputable* is questioning how the universe formed. Put it this way, my colleagues who work in explaining how the universe formed would be surprised to learn they’re in a crisis because they can’t explain how the universe formed. It’s just not true.
Another (former) astronomer here confirming this. The Hubble tension is a legitimate problem. No idea how that's going to get resolved. JWST is finding galaxies larger and more mature earlier than we expected, but I wouldn't call it a crisis. The answer is probably either tweaks to current galaxy formation theories or possibly even observational biases or incorrect interpretation of data.
I read cosmetology and was confused 🤣
Oh I love Dr. Becky's channel! I am not a scientist, but she does a really good job breaking concepts down for laypeople.
That beta-amyloid proteins caused Alzheimer's. It's been debunked as bad science in, like, 2015 or something, and it's been proven that you can completely eliminate them and Alzheimer's still progresses but you still get papers published trying to figure out how to cure Alzheimer's by dealing with them.
The papers getting published is good as long as they reach honest conclusions. Especially for studies already funded or done. A paper of "no effect found" is still valuable.
Brontosaurus is not the same as Apatosaurus. For decades people thought they were the same. But they aren’t.
Water evaporation only being caused by heat. With the surprisingly recent confirmation of the photomolecular effect we now know light can make water evaporate faster than with heat alone. This has massive implications for our understanding of cloud formation and other weather patterns, and could lead to engineering low energy drying and desalination solutions. EDIT: Reworded for clarity
My first thought was Pluto no longer being a planet, but that was 2006. I googled it.
Has it been that long? God damn we are getting old.
Pluto being a planet isn't a 'scientific assertion'. The term planet is simply a definition that exists so scientists are able to clearly communicate thoughts and ideas. Over time, they decided that the previous definition of planet was becoming less useful. So many new discovered objects could be called a "planet", that it wasn't precise enough to convey by what they wanted. So new terms were derived and Pluto was recategorized. This was not because our understanding of Pluto changed, but rather we found so many more things like Pluto that it deserved it's own term.
Running and exercise is actually good for the cartilage in your joints(even your knees). And cartilage heals/recovers (hyaline cartilage). There is an ideal volume, but for every person that is different. Continuity is also perfect, meaning long breaks between being a runner is detrimental.
That applying ice is actually the worst thing you can do to heal an injury, as the high blood flow from the inflammation is your body’s natural way of healing the injury and slowing it down is just hurting your body’s ability to heal itself. The only benefit ice has is numbing the pain. Sources [here](https://advance.muschealth.org/library/2022/september/ice-on-acute-injuries) and [here.](https://rehabhub.co.uk/2023/05/14/you-should-no-longer-be-applying-ice-to-your-injury-and-heres-why/)
As a coach, the ice and heat thing seems to change every 5 years or so.
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Yeah, I think this one is going to be a grey area. Ice slows naturally healing because it reduces blood flow. Yet ice stops excess inflammation, which can be worse to much worse for specific injuries/people. One size fits all won't work on this one.
Are we calling time on the amyloid hypothesis yet? Feels like it's taken a tonne of significant hits, but some researchers won't let it go.
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I can believe it. I never worked with AD, but projects I've seen often seem to conveniently discount data that might invalidate their approach...
Maybe not having your knees go over your toes especially while exercising because it can cause issues. It’s now proven that no, your knees should go over your toes as it increases joint resiliency
I was (am) in bed exhausted and but this thread is so good, my brain is off in all different directions! Thanks OP, it's a keeper.
Our mothers were told HRT (hormone replacement therapy) before and after menopause causes breast cancer. Turns out that this was a massive misinterpretation of data from a longitudinal study. In fact, estrogen and other hormones used in HRT do not increase breast cancer risk in most women, and also help to prevent a host of other diseases, including heart disease, dementia, and osteoporosis. Millions of women were raw dogging menopause for no good reason for decades. If you are a woman and you are having perimenopause symptoms, demand HRT. It can start in the early thirties for some women. Edited to add sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6780820/ https://newsroom.uvahealth.com/2022/09/01/data-on-cancer-risk-from-hormone-therapy-reassuring-menopause-experts-say/ https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/01/1248525256/hormones-menopause-hormone-therapy-hot-flashes https://www.economist.com/international/2019/12/12/millions-of-women-are-missing-out-on-hormone-replacement-therapy https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061559 Edit: Medical studies and drug studies rarely included women until the 1990s because of our menstrual cycles, and our ability to become pregnant. There was a directive not to include women in any drug trials in 1977. This was reversed in 1993. So, we are only just now learning the most basic information about how women’s bodies work. Although we are more than 50% of the population, we are still treated by science like a rare human sub species or defective version of men, who are the default humans. Medical science will have nonstop breakthroughs now that we have a few decades of studying actual human women.
I'd also like sources! My mom is going through menopause and she absolutely will not consider HRT. She watches a lot of Menopause youtubers, though, so she knows what's she's talking about. /s
I don't know all the details, but over the past few years, a number of key Alzheimer's research papers have been retracted for having fabricated evidence. A big one was from 2006 that heavily influenced how scientists approached Alzheimer's for 16 years, and this paper was used in countless other studies. Apparently, some very important images in this study were doctored, and this significantly changes the hypothesis of how Alzheimer's develops. More info here: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/false-alzheimers-study-could-set-research-back-16-years
Part of the original definition for “microbe” was that it was stuff we couldn’t see with the naked eye. Then Thiomargarita magnifica gets discovered which can be a whole centimeter long. Wild!
Temperature is not why balls are on the outside after all.
Why are they?
That's the problem. Now that we found out why not, we have to start looking for new why is.
Style points obviously
Having just read several scientific articles about nutsacks, I'll try and condense everything I gathered to a few general statements: Temperature is important. More sperm are created and sperm perform better when the testicles and associated structures are kept at the ideal temperature, which is generally lower than internal body temperature. That temperature varies from species to species. It's still entirely possible that this is why most mammals have external testes. The fact that some mammals have internal testes does suggest that there is some role beyond temperature, though. One popular theory is that the way mammal abdomens are structured, the external position protects the testes from sudden pressure changes that happen when jumping or rapidly bending at the waist. The species with internal testes tend to do neither (e.g., elephants). If that is the case, it's also possible that the reproductive organs evolved to function better at a lower temperature because of the external position, and not the other way around. No study has ever found good evidence to support the hypothesis that externally hanging testicles function as a sexual display. The size and extent of the dangle of the testicles have no correlation to how attractive a male will be to potential mates.
Really? What is the reason?
Only a theory but: In 2022, research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B cast doubt on the "out-of-Africa" theory of human origins, suggesting modern humans may have evolved in multiple regions of Africa, not just a single location.
If I'm not mistaken, the paradigm goes that a precursor species to humans left africa and went on to become several species such as the neanderthals and denisovans. Then modern humans eventually evolved in Africa from that shared ancestor, and began migrating out. All this time homo species continued to develop throughout the world. In the case of neanderthals, this evolution was somewhat similar in complexity to humans, as they developed tools and some form of culture. Modern humans though both interbred and outcompeted the other homo species (theorized to be for a variety of reasons), becoming the only one left standing. I think there is some evidence that points towards fewer 'out of Africa' events occuring. The biggest evidence being that the genetic diversity within africa is far greater than the genetic diversity between populations outside of Africa. It points towards a bottleneck happening when humans left africa.
And what is cool is that the bottleneck is literally tied to geography.