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Cool science stuff

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LalaithUrwen
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Tue 08 Mar , 2016 3:48 am
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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Tue 08 Mar , 2016 7:25 am
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Yeah, that's the story, although I read a different article.

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Tue 08 Mar , 2016 1:56 pm
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The PLOS journals are legitimate. And I often see naive English mistakes in some papers from non-native speakers, from unexpected slang to words I don't think they meant to use (though I can't tell if that's the case, in this paper). No idea what the copyeditors are doing, not to catch and ask about these things. Or the reviewers, for that matter. If I saw someone mentioning God or "the Creator" in a scientific article, I'd definitely point that out in my review.


Actually, even the predatory journals may contain some legitimate, decent research that would have been accepted by a good reviewer. People do get caught by them.


I like the teleport research from that site.http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/03 ... or=4&sn=sn

It would be wonderful to teleport - as long as you didn't end up like Douglas Adams' song from the Hitchhiker's Guide....
(I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg)

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 08 Apr , 2016 1:59 pm
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I thought this was rather cool. The treatment consisted of garlic, leek or onion, and ox gall steeped in wine for 9 days, and was originally supposed to be for infected eyelashes. You can read the full article at the link.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26265721

MBio. 2015 Aug 11;6(4):e01129. doi: 10.1128/mBio.01129-15.
A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity.
Harrison F1, Roberts AE2, Gabrilska R3, Rumbaugh KP3, Lee C4, Diggle SP1.
Author information
Abstract

Plant-derived compounds and other natural substances are a rich potential source of compounds that kill or attenuate pathogens that are resistant to current antibiotics. Medieval societies used a range of these natural substances to treat conditions clearly recognizable to the modern eye as microbial infections, and there has been much debate over the likely efficacy of these treatments. Our interdisciplinary team, comprising researchers from both sciences and humanities, identified and reconstructed a potential remedy for Staphylococcus aureus infection from a 10th century Anglo-Saxon leechbook. The remedy repeatedly killed established S. aureus biofilms in an in vitro model of soft tissue infection and killed methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) in a mouse chronic wound model. While the remedy contained several ingredients that are individually known to have some antibacterial activity, full efficacy required the combined action of several ingredients, highlighting the scholarship of premodern doctors and the potential of ancient texts as a source of new antimicrobial agents.
IMPORTANCE:

While the antibiotic potential of some materials used in historical medicine has been demonstrated, empirical tests of entire remedies are scarce. This is an important omission, because the efficacy of "ancientbiotics" could rely on the combined activity of their various ingredients. This would lead us to underestimate their efficacy and, by extension, the scholarship of premodern doctors. It could also help us to understand why some natural compounds that show antibacterial promise in the laboratory fail to yield positive results in clinical trials. We have reconstructed a 1,000-year-old remedy which kills the bacteria it was designed to treat and have shown that this activity relies on the combined activity of several antimicrobial ingredients. Our results highlight (i) the scholarship and rational methodology of premodern medical professionals and (ii) the untapped potential of premodern remedies for yielding novel therapeutics at a time when new antibiotics are desperately

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MariaHobbit
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 08 Apr , 2016 3:50 pm
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Oh, that is interesting! :) It is nice to know that formulation is important.


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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 08 Apr , 2016 5:30 pm
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I heard about it on the Radiolab podcast. The scientists who came up with the recipe speculated that because the compound has not been used in so long, the staph bacteria has lost resistance to it.

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Mon 11 Apr , 2016 1:05 pm
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How odd. As far as I know, there's no way to tell if bacteria a thousand years ago ever had resistance to something. You can sometimes look at resistance genes if you have DNA, but in this case, they don't even know what the active components are, much less what genes might provide resistance to them. It was all trial and error. For instance, the name of the Allium was ambiguous, so they tried both onion and leek. Then they tried to break down the ingredients to see what was essential. They found they needed the ox bile for full potency if they used onion with the garlic, but leek + garlic + wine worked as well without it.

And I imagine this preparation would have had to be pretty commonly used for bacteria to develop resistance to it. There's no selective advantage, otherwise.

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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Mon 11 Apr , 2016 4:30 pm
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Well, no, they don't know for sure that the bacteria had resistance, they just speculate that it was likely that staph would develop resistance to something that was used commonly, which would cause the remedy to fall into disuse, which in turn would lead to the bacteria losing the resistance.

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LalaithUrwen
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Sun 17 Apr , 2016 1:13 pm
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I've read this article awhile ago. And I think I discussed it here. But I am jetlagged, so I don't even quite know what day it is. :P

Maybe the details will come to me later.

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Sat 23 Jul , 2016 7:24 pm
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There was an article about a Bronze Age site with some amazingly preserved artifacts in a recent issue of Science. There are even linens with a surprisingly high thread count. It seems that everything fell into the mud of a river after the houses caught fire, and was somehow preserved.

The Science article requires a log in, but this story seems to be written up in a lot of places, including this one.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science ... -old-fire/
Quote:
Rare Bronze Age Artifacts Found Exceptionally Preserved at Site of Ancient Fire
Archeologists are calling the site "Britain's Pompeii."
The website for the project: http://www.mustfarm.com/

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LalaithUrwen
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Sat 23 Jul , 2016 9:39 pm
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Oooh, that is really cool! :)

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Jude
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Thu 11 Aug , 2016 7:30 pm
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Greenland sharks may live 400 years, scientists say
Quote:
The study published in the journal Science examined 28 females caught as bycatch and determined that Greenland sharks have an average lifespan of 272 to 512 years, with their most likely lifespan being 390 years.
:Q

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MariaHobbit
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 12 Aug , 2016 2:24 pm
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Wow! I had no idea any vertebrates lived even close to that long. :Q


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 12 Aug , 2016 6:49 pm
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I didn't either. I originally heard this story on NPR and they mentioned two other animals that live for hundreds of years. The only one I remember is a bivalve (oyster, I think).

Apparently, the researchers first started wondering about the age of these sharks because 1) they grow very, very slowly, and 2) they found some surprisingly large specimens.

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LalaithUrwen
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 12 Aug , 2016 10:33 pm
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That is very interesting. Wow!

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Jude
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Fri 12 Aug , 2016 10:41 pm
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So theoretically, one of them could have swam to the waters north of Scotland, rammed one of the ships of the Spanish Armada, causing it to sink, and then swam back to Greenland, and still be alive today.

Highly unlikely, I know, but still possible.

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MariaHobbit
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Tue 16 Aug , 2016 6:21 pm
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One of them could have eaten a sailor who fell overboard from the Spanish Armada, maybe. Or one that was buried at sea.


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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Tue 16 Aug , 2016 7:33 pm
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I never really thought about this before, but I suppose "burial at sea" is really just a pretty way to say your body was fed to the fishes.

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aninkling
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Thu 18 Aug , 2016 8:12 pm
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After yet another day of an inbox full of invitations to scam conferences and journals, I was feeling a bit punchy and googled "submit joke abstract to fake conference" ... and accidentally came up with something entertaining.

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
Quote:
SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator

SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to conferences that you suspect might have very low submission standards.

And an unfortunate consequence of the joke:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... g-academia
Quote:
Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.

... The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it as an academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted.

... This week, Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer.

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Frelga
Post subject: Re: Cool science stuff
Posted: Wed 19 Oct , 2016 1:54 pm
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Here's a paper about the new method of converting CO2 to ethanol, lauded by a Russian science twitter as the solution to the global warming.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 01169/full

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