There are always going to be people whose reason is “because we can”. Going to Mars has, on the scale of a human lifetime, only recently become vaguely feasible. As someone who works in STEM, I’m generally on the side of new technologies unlocking things, though I don’t doubt that population and environmental shifts in the home territory can tip things over from a few crazy dreamers to a more coordinated expansion.
More data sounds better, but especially in a medical context, you have to be careful, because false positives have consequences. The PSA test is no longer broadly recommended for prostate cancer screening [1]. What harm could it do, you know more about your body, even if it's a noisy predictor? Most prostate cancer is slow growing, and something that men "die with" rather than "die of", so treatment can make for worse outcomes, without clear benefit.
It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body. How often do anomalies show up and then go away? How often are anomalies purely a scanning/data processing artifact? Who reads the scans and makes recommendations about follow-ups, if any? I think this is the kind of thing that sounds exciting and with low direct risk, but with all kinds of questions that are not only unanswered, but apparently unconsidered.
> It's not clear that we have the health infrastructure in place to know what to do with frequent, low resolution, whole body scans of the human body.
This is exactly my thinking. There are decades of longitudinal studies behind the recommendations physicians make based on given levels of e.g. cholesterol in a standard blood test. And critically, those depend on standard protocols around administering and testing samples.
This would be brand new and would not have any of that infrastructure. Which all tech starts at, good. But I would expect Midjourney to need to dig in for a few decades to get and analyze clinical results and outcomes.
For body scans, I think about how few people would know if they have e.g. three kidneys (or other distortion), and how that impacts/doesn't impact their health.
Most people do not undergo autopsy after death, so it's possible there are correlates between good/bad health outcomes that frequent scanning would eventually reveal. But it would take significant time for this to be apparent.
Yes. I spent a bunch of money on many of the optional extra imagining scans on my last health check up only to realize this afterwards. Humans have survived this far without this data. It would be better to spend resources on preventative things or lifestyle things known to promote health, than to obsess over seeing whats going on inside.
Stearates aren’t microplastic plastics, though, they’re just similar enough under a microscope and in some chemical analyses. Without knowing which stearates glove manufacturers use (or what exactly it is about microplastics that is harmful), it’s difficult to to say whether the stearates will have the same harmful effects.
I’m curious how you came to that conclusion. While he’s certainly not in the pantheon of best presidents, he ends up around the 75th percentile in rankings by historians. Even subtracting a few spots, he’s nowhere near close to “one of the all-time worst“. Or are you faulting him for not resigning when incapacitated by a stroke?
I don’t see a straightforward way this would actually help with the cleanup. A hypothetical microbe that “eats” oil would be useful in an oil spill as would chemically break down the oil and harvest its carbon.
A radiotropic fungus that’s in TFA can’t meaningfully affect the rate at which nuclear decay is happening. What it can do, supposedly, is to harvest the energy that the nuclear decay is releasing; normally there’s too much energy for an organism to safely handle.
At the risk of vastly oversimplifying, you can’t plug your phone into high voltage transmission lines. These fungi are using melanin to moderate the extra energy, stepping it down into a range that’s useful (or at least minimally harmful).
To tag on, the economy gives us more than just physical "stuff" (though that's one of the easiest things to measure). Do you enjoy travel? How about clean water, yoga classes, or therapy? What about the ability to post a message to complete strangers over the internet? As much as we could, in theory, do all of those things without having an economy to support it, money is a shockingly good way to give you whatever it is that you value.
Yes, some people have more money than they know what to do with (and, I would argue, than is good for them or us), but I've seen no reasonable suggestions that as many of us can have what we want without a reasonably open market economy. I don't think we're at a local optimum in the fine details of the rules for that economy, but I don't think moving to a whole different part of the possibility space is likely to be better than where we are now.
There’s very often a comparison to the somatic (i.e. non-cancer) genome of the same patient. It’s a great way to quality control that there wasn’t some sample mixup in the lab.
Transmission of cancer is rare in humans—if it were not, it would make someone’s career to find many cases of it. While we can’t say that all sheep are white, we’ve looked at enough of them to say that black sheep are not common. Furthermore, it’s very clear how the Tasmanian devil cancer is spread—it’s around the mouth while they are biting each others faces; it’s not as obvious how one would spread most human cancers.
That assumes that what causes the false positive is some kind of analytical noise in the test. The bigger concern is biological noise that would persist if you tested the patient again.
It might still be useful to know you have weird protease activity that isn’t cancer derived, but the more of these tests we do, the more likely it is that for every person, there’ll be at least one non-cancer oddity that looks like cancer signal for at least some test.
Just to be clear, most drug trials for anything where we have an effective treatment are not “new drug vs placebo”, but instead “new drug vs standard of care”. Thus the goal being to prove it’s better than what already exists.
Sure - it rather depends on how good the 'standard of care' is or how much consensus there is on what that should actually be.
If the standard of care is already good and you don't need a placebo - then you have another problem - you probably are going to have to do quite a big trial to get the stats to show a significant difference, and you are going to find it harder to persuade people to participate with an experimental treatment if there already is a fairly good treatment.
The whole point about the challenges with clinical trials is that it's not an intellectual exercise in designing the perfect experiment and 'just doing it'.
It's about persuading yourself, the regulators, the doctors and ultimately the patients that it's something you should try - and before you've done your first trial you don't have any human data to show it's safe and effective - all a bit chicken and egg - the solution is often to move slowly in stages.
I always hesitate to ascribe motives to non-human animals, but the butterfly shouldn’t particularly “care” whether the pollen gets from its body back to a plant. If the butterfly is eating the pollen, then maybe there’s an advantage to hoovering up more just by getting close, but that doesn’t mean it wants to give any pollen back to other plants.
On the other hand, if the butterfly is eating the nectar and the pollination is an ancillary effect, then you have to start invoking more complicated mechanisms. Maybe successful pollination of the plants increases the food supply later? Maybe the flowers are not neutrally charged, but instead become oppositely charged when the pollen is ready to bias pollinators to come close at appropriate times? You can always construct some just-so story that fits the observed evidence, but where it becomes science is when you make predictions and test them.
The butterflies are adults that do not need to grow, they just need energy, so they normally eat only nectar. They have a mouth adapted for sucking liquids, which could not be used to eat solid food, like pollen.
On the other hand, the bees collect both nectar and pollen. Nectar to provide energy for themselves (which they dehydrate into honey, which can be stored for a long time, unlike fresh nectar), and pollen, which is rich in proteins, to feed their larvae, which need to grow into adults.
I’m reading “The Light Eaters” which takes a broad look at plant behavior. It would not surprise me if the premise is inverted, that plants selected for electrostatically charged butterflies by selectively changing nectar availability.
