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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • They try to get you to submit articles to them (usually for a fee too). But they’re kind of sham journals with no peer review or standards who no one actually reads. They’ll publish pretty much anything without even looking. They have bots that just mass email every corresponding author in every paper published just begging for submissions to their journal. Whenever an article is published in a reputable journal, one author has to have contact information publicly listed so they can answer any questions about the paper, and these predatory journals just scrape that info. It’s bad, so many emails every day.


  • I get the impression there is not model for why sometimes thousands of base pairs can fuck off with no impact, and sometimes it changes the organism unrecognizably.

    No there’s many known reasons that can happen. Here’s just some of them, but in the end it all comes down to understanding that genes code for proteins, little molecular machines. Sometimes there are multiple copies of genes that code for similar proteins or even the same protein, so losing one or even more doesn’t really do anything as there’s more where that came from. Sometimes there are genes that used to be important but no longer have a role or were made redundant, and are free to sedit. If a gene codes for a protein called an enzyme, sometimes a change in the active site that binds the chemicals for the reaction it assists might be catastrophic, but a change elsewhere doesn’t do much because it’s not as necessary to the function of the protein. Sometimes changes even result in the a similar amino acid or the exact same amino acid getting put at thag spot (since the genetic code has some redundancies, a different combo might still end up being the same).

    Many genes code for proteins called transcription factors. Transcription factors help control expression of many other genes, some of which might also be transcription factors that in turn affect other genes, etc. This can create huge cascades. For instance there are things called hox genes that are very important for creating a cascade that leads to the formation of different body segments, and differentiating the different body segments. Mutations in these genes can be devastating, in some animals leading to the dissappearance or redundant addition of whole body segments.

    There is tons more to learn of course on specifics in terms of evolution, genetics, and molecular biology of course. I don’t think it’s comparable to gravity though, which we seem to have a fundamental gap and irreconcilable theories.

    At least coming from a background of life sciences personally, it seems to me evolution is probably better understood than gravity. I think a better comparison to gravity in the life sciences might be abiogenesis (how pre life conditions give rise to life to begin with). Once life is going, evolution, that we have a ton on. Not that we know nothing about abiogenesis, but that it’s a difficult outstanding problem.





  • Ranvier@sopuli.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzreviewer 1
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    4 months ago

    Have you considered answering this other question that would take three years and six figures of funding to complete? Maybe just add that to the paper quick with the next revision.

    Or

    Have you considered mentioning this barely relevant subject in the discussion, in particular this aspect, which has a recent paper you can cite? Totally not mine by the way, I am very anonymous. But this should definitely be mentioned.





  • There’s a lot of problems with this. Just some include that it’s a blog and doesn’t link to the actual study so it’s impossible to see what’s going on with the this report. They also never explain what this “reliability score” even means or what’s included in that. Then they start doing things like using a percent to compare the scores saying this is percent more reliable. But we still don’t even know what this score is, and comparing as a percent may not make any sense to say depending on what the scores are and how they’re calculated. Unfortunately you can’t really draw any conclusions from what’s in this article.


  • Ranvier@sopuli.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyzHe did though.
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    7 months ago

    It depends on the journal. I’ve only published in medical related journals, but some journals don’t charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.


  • It’s a tough call. Many forums have a rule against changing the title at all. People posting are often used to this and post the title as is from the article. The idea being to help prevent editorializing and clickbait on the part of the poster. Every headline these days though seems to be some variation of blatant clickbait or so and so “slams” this or “destroys” that. At this point I probably trust randos on the internet to make headlines more than publishers.





  • Those auto tldr summaries can be super random and misleading too regardless. The auto tldr summary doesn’t imply anything like this either. It’s just a section of the article with an expert making fun of whatever expert the DA hired who missed that it was a forgery and thought it was authentic. So it’s embarrassing because they told this country, he we recovered your priceless artifact and threw the guy in jail who smuggled it. And the country is like, oh well that’s nice but the artifact was never missing in the first place. If you want to comment on something at least read the article first, or you’ll just be spreading misleading clickbait headlines even more.


  • It was a loaded headline meant to trick people into clicking. If you just read the headline you’d think the United States government was stealing artifacts, forging them, and sending the forgeries back or something. Which has like nothing in common with the actual story in the article. Always pretty easy in the comments to tell who actually read the article and who made up an imaginary article in their head based on the headline.


  • I think you’ve misunderstood the article. What happened was a district attorney in the united states caught someone smuggling antiquities into the country. So the district attorney who caught them had everything sent back to the country of origin, exactly what they should do with smuggled antiquities. It turned out the guy was trafficking in mostly forgeries of pieces that are in other known locations and were never brought to the united states. The experts the district attorney used thought they were authentic. What on earth do you think the new york DA did wrong here? I guess they could hire better experts. But if they have what they think to be authentic artifacts that were smuggled out of countries, they did the right thing and sent them back to the country of origin. They’re saying this is just embarrassing for the DA because they billed this guy as a smuggler in their court case, but actually he’s a forger. I don’t see any reason for anyone to be outraged though, except maybe at the forger.


  • I know. I was pointing out one of the nice things that this person can do, since they’re referring specifically to the default android sms handling app, is that android allows you to switch the default to whatever sms app you’d prefer to use. So if you don’t like the direction Google is taking theirs, you can find a different one that better fits with what you prefer.

    If you have an iPhone and don’t like the direction apple takes one of their default apps, like sms or phone calling apps, you can’t change the defaults that handle those and other phone functions.