#bad science

[existennialmemes]

Photosynthesis is one of those things that you usually learn about in a simplified way when you're little, that we grow up kinda taking for granted that we "know how that works."

But the process is actually so spine tinglingly bizarre, that if you heard about it for the first time as an adult, you wouldn't even believe it.

Plants are just transmuting light beams into highly complex molecules of sugar. By using the light as a fuckin' battering ram to shatter molecules of water apart. And we're just like "oh yeah, they do that, no big deal" as if that's not a seven layer bizarro dip of what the fuck.

[octisticsopinions]

Why on earth is anyone taking this shoddy cass review seriously?

I'm sorry but it's baffling how an actual government is uncritically taking this review at face value. It literally only comes to the conclusion it does because it ignore literally all other evidence. They excluded a shit ton of studies because they didn't have enough controls, which sounds reasonable but in order to have those controls they'd have to unknowingly give patients placebos instead of the hormonal therapy and puberty blockers they asked for.

That would be an extremely unethical thing to do, and would achieve nothing because the effects of hormonal therapy and puberty blockers are extremely obvious.

Just let that sit with you for a moment. All that clinical evidence completely thrown out the window because they didn't do a horrific and unethical test on their patients. All that clinical evidence ignored because the study was ethical. This is an extreme oversight at BEST and deliberate misinformation at worst. Either way, it makes the review extremely unreliable.

That's just one issue. But the fact that the vast, VAST majority of research was completely ignored due to a ridiculous and unethical requirement should be enough for you to oppose anyone using this as evidence for anything other than why queer people need to be included in scientific discussions about our communities. Because this review is being used to roll back LGBT rights.

[bigrobotbee]

How to see dinosaurs:

1.) Travel 66 million light years away from Earth.

2.) Look at Earth through a telescope.

3.) Dinosaurs.

[fox-bright]

OKAY SO I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THE WHOLE SENDING CREMAINS TO THE MOON THING If you haven't heard about it, a bunch'a dead people (cremated) (just a teaspoon or less of each) are going to the Moon, where they will stay forever. They left this morning, riding up on a United Launch Alliance rocket for Peregine Mission One, technically out of Pittsburgh, PA but launched as usual from Florida. There are five NASA payloads on the mission, so Science is Happening. That’s cool, I’m all for it. But I, and it turns out the Navajo Nation, are not very cool with the Elysium and Celestis parts of the deal, which is sending a hundred something dead people’s remains up there. I’m against it because while I’m all for scattering cremains in nature—returning your carbon to the cycle—and I’m all for cemeteries and tombs, this won’t be either; there’s not any breaking down, there’s not any cycle, and there’s no hallowed ground. The Navajo Nation, in the letter they wrote to NASA in December, is against it because to them the Moon is sacred. You don’t just drop corpses on sacred things, basically. They weren’t asking to stop the mission, just to be consulted about how to handle it with grace; their request was denied. NASA couldn’t have done anything for them, anyway, because this isn’t a NASA mission even if they’re sending payloads up. So the Magical Flying Husband and I good-naturedly Got Into It on the topic, on Saturday, and we still don’t quite agree. To my mind, it’s gross and tacky to throw a Space Rubbermaid full’a cremains up there. There were already the remains of one single person on the moon, as Eugene Shoemaker’s ashes went up with the Lunar Prospector thirty-something years ago. He was a scientist who trained Apollo astronauts about what to expect when they reached the Moon; a geologist with his eyes on the stars. Having him up there doesn’t oog me out. Having a bunch of randos who only get to go there because their families have the money for it, that oogs me out. And then there’s just the pure metaphysical aspect; we put gates around our cemeteries for a reason. We make specific places out to be the resting places of the dead, so that we can say here are the dead and here the dead are not. Most of the religions or belief systems which have the dead remain in the home, on altars or in special (holy!) rooms within the building, also have requirements for attendance on those lost relatives. Incense, prayer, attention. You can’t do that if you lawn-dart Grandma onto the Moon. So throwing a bunch of bodies into a place where they will never degrade, without marking out land as “this specific place is where our dead go,” is either a hugely expensive method of littering, or it makes the whole Moon into a cemetery.

So the MFH and I have this discussion, back and forth, and then we realize we don’t really have any data. How many people are going up? Who are they? What’s the deal? So I looked it up. There are two companies sending cremains on this trip, Celestis and Elysium. Both of them have (frankly, tacky) websites selling you the ability to send Grandma to the Moon.

Celestis starts you at about three thousand US dollars to put some ashes onto a payload that goes up, and then comes down again; the equivalent of tying her to an Estes rocket that you launch from the park, only this is a proper spacegoing rocket that gets up there. She just doesn't get to take the whole ride.

Further Celestis packages allow you to put Grandma into orbit, send Grandma to the Moon, or send Grandma out into Deep Space.

(Reading that aloud is the point where the MFH's ears really quirked. It is very difficult and very expensive to get something properly into Deep Space. That offering is bullshit, and can't not be bullshit, and this is where the MFH decided probably this whole thing was more than a little scammy.)

The Orbit Grandma package is particularly romantic; the orbit she'll be put into is a degrading one, so that after some time spinning around our gorgeous blue marble, she'll reenter the atmosphere and become a visible shooting star.

(The MFH said "Is there going to be a big enough payload to be visible with the naked eye? What amount of matter is required for that?" and then we had to do Math about it. Of course, it's not just Grandma who would be on that bus, it's another hundred people or whatever; the image appears to show a hundred or more thimbles of cremains stored separately in basically a large cube container. So maybe the size of a soccer ball? I think it would be visible. It is, however, impossible to say "look there, and you'll see Grandma!" so while it would be visible to someone, it's not going to be something you can make sure to see.)

Elysium offers all the same packages, with slightly different names. But unlike Celestis, Elysium has a little row at the bottom of the page with photographs of previous launches. They've done this before, they're saying, and Grandma is safe with them.

So I looked up the launches, and found a Wikipedia page on them. And oh my god. That's where my ears quirked, and then I started cackling, and the whole slightly-fractious discussion with the MFH absolutely dissolved into macabre jokes.

Because, yeah, there have been two previous launches. One of them failed to reach orbit. A payload of Grandmas was put onto the next one, to make up for the failure.

The second launch, which was to be a Shooting Star trip for the god knows how many people that the first launch failed? That one made it to orbit! All good, right? Now Grandma can orbit for a while, and then immolate for a second time, this one much more spectacular and high-velocity than the first?

ABSOLUTELY not.

Because of licensing issues.

(image: two columns of text describing Elysium launches: ORS-4 Elysium Star I, launched on a Super Strypi, was destined for reentry failed to reach orbit.

SSO-A Elysium STar II, launched on a Falcon 9, was destined for reentry and made orbit successfully. "Orbit was to decay in 2 years, but satellite was locked into the Lower Free-Flyer dispenser due to license timing issues." )

Grandma is stuck in the dispenser. Grandma's in a gacha-gacha that just spins around and around and around and around, never releasing its prize to her glorious conflagration.

Because of licensing issues.

I'm siding with the Navajo Nation with this one, either way, but I have to wonder if those folks are actually getting to the Moon as planned.

[marzipanandminutiae]

The newest video from lab muffin beauty science seems like exactly up the alley of someone with your crusade for fact-checking. It was a wild ride of enlightenment, highly recommend.

Oh this is REALLY interesting. Thanks for the recommendation!

I first noticed the benzoyl peroxide scare when someone mentioned it in a post I made about the Radium Girls story inducing "what are they hiding from us now?!" anxiety, and I looked it up. I don't use any products with that ingredient at the moment, but it seemed worth checking into. And despite me not being a scientist, the fact that the benzene levels they cited showed up at VERY high temperatures seemed...off. Like how frequently are the products ever at those temperatures? "Maybe in a hot car?" I thought, but still wondered how often acne cream is left in a car in Australian high summer for that long.

And hey- the history professional with little chemistry knowledge was right! Seems like even ordinary laypeople can see the issue here if they just read the study even a little bit.

But because humans respond more to dramatic headlines- and, not going to lie, because we've been primed to believe in this by companies CONSTANTLY doing it for real throughout history with heavy metal dyes, radium, tobacco products, asbestos, fossil fuels, PFAs, etc. -you get "we're all rubbing cancer on our faces!!!!" reactions.

Really highlights the need for a balance between watching companies like hawks because they've proven that they will kill us if it pads their bottom line, and not falling for junk science.

[downthegenderriver]

@a-dinosaur-a-day @quark-nova

So I was looking through my textbook (assigned by my university) and got to the bit on dinosaurs and...

The textbook is Evolution 5th Edition, it's not about dinosaurs specifically but this shit makes me question everything else in the book.

My first thought was they want on shutterstock, looked up triceratops and clicked on the first thing but i up triceratops and this image was not there so idk what happened.

I'm not even sure what dinosaur this is actually meant to be because the frill shape does like triceratopsy but the spikes on it and the lack of brow horns makes me think Styaracosaurus, but the frill shape is wrong for that.

Triceratops is one of the most well known dinosaurs how do you make a mistake this basic in a fucking textbook, this wouldn't be ok in a random cartoon.

Is this some kind of weird trick to make sure my critical thinking is turned on.

Can someone help.

[sporksaber]

The gravity thing in humans are space orcs.

I always think about it but I've never posted about it. Humans are very poorly developed as bipeds, so our muscles and skeletal systems are kind of delicate. When people are in space currently they're always weightless (comparatively. I googled are astronaughts always in zero gravity to double check and kept getting annoying "well actually-" answers. They're technically in suspended freefall or smthn, it doesn't really matter tho.). They grow taller because of the lack of pressure on their spinal disks.

Space fiction always has artificial gravity, but what would that be set to? Other species may need different gravity levels, so would it be constantly changing? What kind of strain would that put on the skeletal muscular system.

Speaking of muscles, a person's muscle mass would fluctuate during extended time in different gravity. Astronaughts have to relearn to walk after extended time in space. Imagine that over and over again. And if they're under gravity higher than earth would they not have trouble remaining up right with increased pressure on their spine?

Also think about calluses. Another reason astronauts have to relearn to walk is because their calluses, built up from childhood, completely peel off. You need those to walk.

Some species may need their specific gravity level to survive at all. Others might be almost completely unaffected by different levels.

Obviously this could be hand waved off by personal gravitation devices, but then you could go into specifics of how they interact with eachother. Does the ship have a set gravity? If someone is holding somthing is that item at their gravity or the ships? What happens when two crewmates interact? Fun misstep shenanigans of people being thrown off balance while passing a crewmate. Space pirate "ship shifting and throwing people stound" plot device replaced by gravity malfunctioning or two people of very different gravity colliding. The comedy of crewmates not being able to properly toss things to eachother because the item goes through three gravity changes and that's really difficult to figure out.

It also ties into two other concepts very well.

1. The idea that other species have never seen anything but fully grown humans because space travel would thoroughly mess up a growing human's body. (And there are so many ideas you can pull from that, from rumors that humans are born fully formed to the idea that they have super secret coming of age rituals, possibly involving body modification.)

2. That post about the pig/boar based species going feral and seeing a human post earth camping trip and thinking humans undergo the same process. The human is now more compact and muscular, their skin is rougher, their face seems more harsh. I really like that post.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

My phone likes showing me clickbait I Might Like and today I thought of your frequent posting about mammal bias/human bias when I saw this:

My second thought was, well it'd be real awkward if humans had no ancestors that survived the asteroid, considering that as far as we know, we do exist.

(it also mentions using statistics and "molecular data" to determine how long placental mammals have been around, which iirc you've also posted about being inaccurate? this article is a train wreck)

There’s a whole lot to unpack here o-o

[crossdreamers]

New study shows that women have been, and are, hunters too.

Science have been used actively to uphold gender stereotypes and gender roles. One narrative that has served this purpose is that in hunter-gatherer societies men hunt and women gather. This division of labor has been seen as inborn and natural, and has therefore been used to defend a society where men work outside the home and women take care of the kids.

NPR writes:

Until now, the general sense among scientists has been that  [the accounts of hunter gatherer societies] overwhelmingly pointed to men mainly hunting and women mainly gathering, with only occasional exceptions, says Robert Kelly, professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming and the author of influential books and articles on hunter-gatherer societies.

But Kelly says that the views he and others held of the typical gender divisions around hunting were based on anecdotal impressions of the reports they'd been reading, combined with the field work many had engaged in personally. "No one," says Kelly, had done a systematic "tally" of what the observational reports said about women hunting.

Enter the researchers behind the new study: a team from University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University. "We decided to see what was actually out there" on hunting, says the lead researcher Cara Wall-Scheffler, a biological anthropologist.

Wall-Scheffler notes "our goal was to go back to the original ethnographic reports of those populations and see what had actually been written about the hunting strategies."

Their findings — published in the journal PLOS One this week — is that in 79% of the societies for which there is data, women were hunting.

An Awá woman holds hunting bows and arrows in Brazil’s Caru Indigenous Territory in 2017. Photo: Scott Wallace.

The researchers write:

Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility.

To be fair, a lot of researchers have questioned these stereotypes before. The main culprits have been researchers from a field called “evolutionary psychology”, a discipline notorious for its development of pseudo-scientific theories aimed at reinforcing gender roles.

However, the narrative has spread to text books and popularized versions in the media. It fits the prejudices of many and is therefore considered good content by many editors.

"I think that next to the myth that God made a woman from man's rib to be his helper, the myth that man is the hunter and woman is the gatherer is probably the second most enduring myth that naturalizes the inferiority of women," says Kimberly Hamlin, a professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

It has fueled the idea, she says, that "men are supposed to be violent, they're supposed to be aggressive – one of the core elements in the soup of toxic masculinity."

Read the whole article here.

See also:

The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts

Shattering the myth of men as hunters and women as gatherers

Do animals have genders? Are there transgender animals? A scientist find some clues among chimpanzees.

Top illustration: Artists depiction of female hunter 9,000 years ago in ancient Peru. Source: Matthew Verdolivo / UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services

[phoenixyfriend]

I have a socio-biological in-universe stereotype for omegaverse:

Okay so one of the big questions when trying to play out omegaverse with Logic is "what is the point of Alpha Females and Omega Males, how do they differ from each other, and what evolutionary situation happened to make them an option?"

Anyway, in reading a fic that wasn't a/b/o (it was a Stewjoni Bio thing), I got to thinking about how and why lactation has evolved to be a trait that is found mostly in childbearing individuals, rather than a shared trait between both parents.

And one of my big recurring questions with the AF/OM thing is "if pregnancy hormones involve a rise in female-associated traits, like breasts and hips, and the simply process of ovulation and menstruation relates primarily to those 'gendered' hormones, then why do AF individuals generally end up with breasts and femme-aligned figures, while OM individuals are flat-chested and capable of facial hair etc. (until pregnancy)?"

Which... has a lot of options, but I think that for an omegaverse setting, you could argue that AF/OM sets came from a one-time genetic bottleneck in a high-stress, high danger environment, and it was necessary for greater portions of the population to be capable of both carrying and feeding newborns, and AF/OM sets developed into their unintuitive biological formats in response to that situation.

However

Since nursing was originally gender-limited, in a way that suggested the siring parent would be able to ditch the carrying parent for whatever reason (death, the pregnancy was unplanned, even leaving for extended periods to hunt), there is an expectation that AF/OM are more likely to be monogamous.

Does this logic? Not entirely.

But stereotypes rarely do logic

And in this case that stereotype involves a few things, like Alpha Females being more aggressively protective of their mates (whether OM or not, so long as the mate isn't a fellow Alpha), more possessive, and significantly more likely to 'trap' a pregnant or nursing partner at home 'for their own safety.'

This is not a biological response at all, but a sociological one (you see it in all the movies, you see it in the people around you, and so you learn to act that way), and not nearly as exaggerated or strong as people would have you believe (for the most part, it's actually heightened anxiety and, if the partner is pregnant, nervous hovering/doting ad nauseum).

However, the in-universe biological essentialism folks love to insist that AF possessiveness/controlling manners are a Natural Thing.

[existennialmemes]

Extremely Scientific™ Diagram of the Neurophysiology of Executive Dysfunction

[punisheddonjuan]

That big NIH study on ME/CFS that's been in the works since 2017 was published today in Nature Communications.

...and it is a giant piece of shit that was done in bad faith which reaches the conclusion that Post-Exertional Malaise is a result of "an alteration in exertion preference" and deconditioning. Like this study really fucking sucks, it should be immediately retracted. Poorly interpreted data that is poorly reported, a tiny sample size of cherry-picked subjects, improperly followed protocols, everything that would mark a study as of poor quality is here and it's all in service of perpetuating negative stereotypes. The authors even ignore and discount their own data which serves to contradict their (predetermined) conclusions. This is bad faith science. Call me a cynic and a pessimist, but this is so egregiously poor that it's enough for me to believe this is a deliberate attempt to bury and dismiss ME once again.

Anyway, here it is:

And here's a Twitter thread detailing everything wrong with it from someone with relevant credentials and research experience because I'm too out of it to type anything further up.

This was a waste of resources, a waste of time, and a betrayal of patient faith and trust. The authors should be ashamed.

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

ok @ratstuckinamarble u see it goes like this-

i aim to skew the statistics at the local frog pond each spring >:D

[leo-fie]

List of stuff that's not only bad science in the sense that someone did some bad science, but in the sense that some asshole just made shit up:

Vaccines cause autism

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria

Everything Sigmund Freud ever did

Neoliberalism

Autogynophilia

[deviantplum]

You are my Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

I coo, at the Experimental Plasma Orb the Review Board urged me not to build in my basement. I'll show them. It's my time to Shine.

[connormurphysreanimatedcorpse]

I’ve cracked the code, why we’re… like this. The non-science version is that you can remove a full hemisphere of someone’s brain if they’re under 2 years old and the other hemisphere will compensate. Normally, the empty part of the brain will fill with the fluid that normally surrounds the brain, but it’s pretty much free real estate. One hemisphere of the brain is the size of two fists, or… wait for it… one rat. Half my brain is a rat, half of your brain is a rat, it’s all rats. The rat brain strikes again.