Ketamine lifts rodents' mood only if administered by male researchers
nature.com
nature.com
It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents ...
I'm not sure if anybody suspected that rats reacted differently to how men and women smell, but only women were allowed to work as rodent caretakers or be in the rodent room at my school. Our professor showed the guys the room once, but we weren't allowed to talk, since she thought it was men's voices that set the rodents on edge.
In case anybody is wondering what our experiment was, we were measuring whether caffeine affected the VO2 of mice. Their oxygen consumption pegged anytime any of the guys handled them.
Don't be evil.
Does that help? ;)
Or do they just publish, "X caused effect Y"?
Frankly, identifying why it requires a female, or female non-cat owner sounds like it may be more interesting than whatever other result they are working on...
I've had a similar thought about these little insights. There are literally thousands of times more biology undergrads than there are people doing biology research. Biological experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. There are so many confounding variables, data is hard to collect, etc, that experiments bomb as often as they succeed.
A lot of these experiments are extremely well supported, so you might actually be able to discover something novel if you were able to track the failures.
Anyways, I don't do anything with biology anymore, but I strongly believe that biology is a field where citizen scientists could make a meaningful impact.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24677-fear-of-a-smell...
Couldn't it also be possible that rodents reacting like that is the result of established practices? I.e.: Rodents get only handled by females, rodents adapt to that female smell while reacting differently to the male smell due to its unfamiliarity?
This is a fascinating issue.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2616610
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3696469
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18463628
SSC wrote an article about it:
Now some of those students may have published work as part of their senior capstone, however it's pretty unlikely. You need a lot of knowledge to get to the point where you can publish something meaningful in biology. If you were to publish a work as an undergrad, you are probably working on a professor's project or with a less complicated topic.
If it was a strict trade-off, I would agree that the answer was somewhere on the middle. But it isn't. Most of the things that give you precision will also give you accuracy. The few things that let you exchange one for the other look too much like cheating, and seem to always have much greater impacts on accuracy than on precision.
This is absolutely false - digital clocks are a common example. Precise to the second (or millisecond, or more!) but only as accurate as their setting.
Calculations also give precision without accuracy, like my package of tortilla chips - 13oz (368.5g) They took a measurement or specification precise to the ounce, multiplied by 28.3495, and got 368.5.
Accuracy and precision are independent variables, and the utility of either is usually limited to the order of magnitude of the other. With either "accurate to the second with a precision of milliseconds", or "accurate to the millisecond with precision to the second", you should only report a measurement to the second (or possibly a more precise measurement with an error range).
Do they have different meaning to you? They are the same thing unless there is some scientific meaning that makes them different of which I'm not aware. i.e. Theory in Science means a different thing than what it means to a layman person.
If you're target shooting, and all of your shots go through the same hole: that's precision.
If that hole is several inches away from the bullseye, it's precise but not accurate.
In common usage, these words mean the same thing, but scientists often give words specific meanings in order to make their research and ideas less ambiguous.
Definitions are even more important in non-scientific fields such as philosophy or math where meaningful reasoning of abstract structures and ideas would be next to impossible without giving them concrete definitions and stating your assumptions.
Remember that definitions are arbitrary, so to understand an author's argument or idea, you must seek out the author's definitions.
Hopefully that clarifies some of the discussion going on in the comments here.
[1] pre·ci·sion: noun the quality, condition, or fact of being exact and accurate.
[2]ac·cu·rate (of information, measurements, statistics, etc.) correct in all details; exact. "accurate information about the illness is essential" synonyms: correct, precise, exact, right, error-free, perfect; More
But it's inaccurate by many hours because you haven't set it yet.
It's naive to think all of them can be controlled, even in simple animals as mice
That said, you do learn not to act 100% confident. You need to say "This suggests that" instead of "This proves that", etc.
Anyway, the solution to reliable data is simple: Have multiple competing groups try to repeat the work as closely as possible.
Now that you have something to hang your hat on, you come up with some theory/model to explain the phenomenon. Even better, come up with multiple competing such models. From these you deduce some precise prediction that is checked against future data.
All of this was well known a few generations ago...
Charlatan fortunetellers aren't owed careers as scientists -- if they can't produce reliable, predictive models because they utterly fail to control experiments,then they should have their careers destroyed.
We've seen enough damage from corporate leaders and politicians relying on guides to reading chicken entrails masquerading as science.
It's time to stop the fraud.
Let's call it 'science' and 'hunches'. (I'm sure marketing people would think of a better name.) There's nothing stopping you from publishing hunches; there's nothing stopping the same journals from publishing science and hunches. It would just be the case that we'd treat publishing a hunch as science as fraud, because you're outright lying about how sure you are.
It is the case that several fields would get (almost entirely) moved from science to hunches, but that would be good! The label will match what's inside.
If we have this split in the product lines, if we have these two tiers (models where we're really sure and complex systems where we only have a working hunch), then we should just own it and put that on the tin.
All I'm asking is people stop labeling composite wood as lumber -- and understandably, a lot of people selling composites act like that would make the sky fall.
Hardly, there's a real demand for both products and both serve a real need. Let's just be honest in our marketing and stop conflating the two.
Worse: isn't this always true? Specific breed of mice, humans working with them, temperate, trace differences in food, light patterns, sounds (including sounds beyond human range)...
There’s a reason psych has a bigger reproducibility problem than any other field.
>If you’ve ever taken antibiotics, had a vaccine, a blood transfusion, dialysis, an organ transplant, chemotherapy, bypass surgery or joint replacement, you have benefited from animal testing and research. In fact, practically every drug, treatment, medical device, diagnostic tool or cure we have today was developed with the help of lab animals.
>Many diseases that once killed millions of people every year are now either preventable, treatable or have been eradicated altogether. Immunizations against polio, diphtheria, mumps, rubella and hepatitis save countless lives and the survival rates for many major diseases are at an all-time high thanks to the discovery of new drugs and the design of sophisticated medical devices and surgical procedures.
For example, say that we have genuinely useful medical information as a result of Unit 731 experiments and similar crimes (which may or may not be the case; I have no idea). There's no contradiction if one person supports using those existing results to save lives while simultaneously opposing further collection of such results.
Another example: I personally eat a lot of meat (keto/LCHF), but even so I might support legislation to ban killing animals for food or sport, because the personal sacrifice would only be worth it to me if it came attached to a systemic change.
This is the reason why. You may prefer the world to be a certain way, but you aren't willing to make any sacrifice to make it be a particular way, so it appears that you don't actually care about an opinion that you are espousing.
People who don't eat meat have a net effect on a reduced demand for meat, reducing the amount of cattle. Becoming a vegetarian doesn't stop everyone eating meat, but it helps.
[I'm not a vegetarian but I have some respect for people who are willing to stand by their beliefs]
Says who? OP is willing to make a sacrifice that results in desired effect - just not "any" sacrifice, which in this case does nothing.
If I think taxes should be lower, should I start paying less tax then I am asked to?
For me, I see the greatest impact I can personally make as continuing to work to become successful and then investing a ton of money into lab-grown meat.
Anyway, it's something I'd like to help do something about, but it's not my life's focus. If I had a magic "make everyone stop eating meat" button, I'd be tempted to press it and figure out a way to personally adapt, but ultimately I think that would cause more harm than good without a market-ready drop-in replacement that fits the same macros. That's not the same as not caring or being unwilling to make a sacrifice; it's just caring about multiple things to varying degrees and being realistic.
But the linked video isn't about that at all. It's about the pitfalls of using rodents for testing and trying to extrapolate meaningful conclusions from the results. In other words, an argument that is squarely on topic with regard to the original article. Or in other words further, that using rodents is "a horrible testing method"―to repeat what the original commenter wrote before you derailed the thread.
Your commenting as if this discussion is about the ethics of animal testing and the comments of you and those who've responded (including the one I'm writing now!) have been—and are contributing further—to a massive waste of effort and attention.
What I found:
* It is a science story about findings presented at a meeting. The story is published in Nature, which does do very prestigious peer reviewed papers, but the findings and the story itself are not peer reviewed.
* Within the same institution, the head of the lab repeated the experiment.
* Some other actually peer reviewed papers with female researchers, rats and ketamine show positive influences.
Who says? I get your over all point, but I disagree that only "professionals" can install copper pipes. It really isn't that difficult.
Else, it sounds like someone beat up their data until they found something worth publishing. It certainly wouldn't be the first time such an effort passed a "peer review."
Before anyone who didn't actually read the link goes off at it - this is a peer reviewed, repeated study - mice react to drugs differently depending on the sex of the researcher
Absolutely. The statistics are text-book standard, and the research is peer-reviewed and published in a major journal, so as Kahneman said about the now discredited priming studies, "You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true."[1]
It potentially plays havoc with ALL past experiments with rodents
And possibly not just rodent experiments! We may even want to re-evaluate the weight we put on statistical claims across a broad range of fields. I think Gelman covers it well in his article "I disagree with Alan Turing and Daniel Kahneman regarding the strength of statistical evidence": http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/03/disagree-alan-turing-dani...
[1] To Kahneman's credit, in perhaps the most genuine mea culpa I've ever read, he later confessed that he had "placed too much faith in underpowered studies": https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...
Another similar problem was mice in maze experiments, which also could not be repeated. The experimenters were using mazes with sand on the floor rather than hard bases, and it turned out that the earlier experiments were not measuring the memories of mice; instead their ability to sense vibrations from their footsteps and helped with location senses.
And of course there are similar issues with mice. You have all the different strains which are genetically different, but they'll also be genetically changing over time through drift & selection & mutations, so your Wistar-XXX may not be the Wistar-XXX from 50 years ago. Or mice chow - sure, the label may say it's the same but when was the last time you checked? (Think about that paper about how all sorts of lab animals, supposedly fed constant diets and under constant controlled environments, keep getting fatter over the past century. Something is changing; what? Genetics? Food composition? Micronutrients? Lab infections? Microbiomes? Measurement tools themselves?)
"This kind of mouse we raised under these conditions, and we changed nothing, but they varied in these ways over time"
I often wonder whether the variables we check against are actually as independent and subject to the central limit theorem as we assume.
Unsurprisingly, there's a ton of heterogeneity which means it's easy to violate your statistical assumptions (i.i.d. being more important than normality here, I think) and so you get a lot of false positives. It's similar to the brain imaging issue: the assumption of spatial locality and Gaussianness is not really true and drives a lot of false-positive _p_-value inflation. There are really quite a lot of problems with animal studies, so it's not a surprise that they wipe out spectacularly when transferring to human.
I keep a list of systematic reviews & meta-analyses I run across at https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ#fn95 One of the most impressive ones, I think, are sepsis treatments: ~150 sepsis treatment experiments in humans based on mouse/rat experiments, and all of them failed: "Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory diseases", Seok et al 2013 http://www.pnas.org/content/110/9/3507.full.html
Also for the mice getting fatter over time? That's fascinating!
Well worth reading through the archives, IMO, even if you're not a chemist or biologist (I'm not). Quite aside from the methodological issues and the realities of working in the pharmacorp industry, Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" series about dangerous chemical compounds is... a blast.
In elementary school, I used to listen to the sounds of people’s pencils scratching on the desk, and could accurately determine what they were writing, especially if my head was near the desk and I knew what their handwriting looked like. Curves and lines, and strokes of different lengths and directions against the grain of the paper, have different frequency profiles; lifting and setting the pencil back down generates a tapping sound…that sort of thing.
People often don’t believe me when I tell them this, because they figure that human hearing just isn’t that sensitive, or that the sound of handwriting doesn’t convey that much information—but it does! You’ve simply never noticed or paid attention to it because you had no desire or reason to. Another animal might, for various reasons.
Once, my dad picked up my Magna-Doodle board as we stood outside my room, and started writing a message to me. I listened closely and said “…Clean your room?”—he had written “Cʟᴇᴀɴ Yᴏᴜʀ Rᴏᴏᴍ”—and I’ll never forget his perplexed look, first at me, then turning the board around to see if any light could be shining through. He still didn’t quite believe that I could do what I had just done in front of him!
I should add though, that "clean your room" would be a pretty safe bet in most parent/child relationships.
Similarly, I will often turn off all the lights and navigate around my house/room by pure touch and sound, which is surprisingly easy given how much credence we give to sight as the paramount sense.
When I learned to play guitar I was perplexed that my playing sounded bad, even when playing right. Later I started to listen better and heared stuff that wasn't encoded in the tabs, but still mattered.
Also, I could smell different foods like cereals. When I was a floor above in my room I smelled people eating even uncooked stuff, and I knew exactl what. Couldn't do this anymore today
I share your strong sense of smell too. I could tell you if someone was cutting cucumbers two rooms away. Dunno how long that’ll last, although my mom still has quite a nose in her early 60s, so there’s hope.
Simply learning drumming made my sense of touch, balance, and a ton of other parts of my brain extremely more acute and potent. Not dissimilar to when you grok induction on trees, all of a sudden a lot of things become clearer. Well similarly with a lot of focused attention to your senses you'll start to notice patterns and relationships that are invisible otherwise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kish
https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...
One weird memory is that I remember detecting objects in silent and dark room at home if they were like 10cm from my head. Even with eyes closed. I'm not sure if it's real or kids magical thinking. But it could have been very high pitched/ambient noise echoing from surfaces.
I think that's something that is common, but I have no idea what it's called.
If you hold something (especially if it's sharp) up to someone's forehead but not close enough for it to make contact with them, they will get this weird sensation building up in their forehead. Or at least I and a lot of the people I've tried it with have. It wasn't in a completely dark room so I bet you could see the shadow through your eyelids but it's still pretty weird.
But what Young discovered, according to Feynman was infinitely more vital.
"In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats."
Wow, this is a really fascinating study, and goes to show how evaluating psychoactive drugs can be so difficult. There are so many confounding variables that it's very difficult to know what is causing an effect.
On the scary side imagine being able to use this for evil. Spray something like this on your product to manipulate people's hormonal system to respond to it, maybe trigger affection towards it. Even worse, spray it to induce rage or hate for example.
no need for provocteurs at pro^H^H^H riots anymore!
Is that a question? Isn't this well known?
I didn't mean only that we feel happy when we smell lavender or something like that, but more drastic things. Others mentioned toxoplasmosis, something like that basically. Now imagine being able to control and tailor that. Or something like rabies where it induces rage for example.
(Ignore the person interviewing him)
Heh, the question about the better soccer teams from countries that have higher toxoplasmosis infestation rates. Pretty silly correlation.
Also interesting the idea that males infected with toxo are more attractive to females and since it can spread through sperm it is now a symbiotic relationship. I knew about risky behavior and on, but this was a new thing I haven't heard about before.
Then oxytocin being "exploited" by dogs and pets is strange. Just waiting till the latest phones and cars are sprayed with something that also triggers that.
This is fairly generally true in science. Deconstructionism was a fever dream.
This is because it increases the danger of drug use and could cause death. But no one has ever said not to mix uppers and downers because it wasn't fun.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_t...
Some larger animals might be somewhat closer but a.) much more expensive b.) more ethically challenging to kill/drug something more intelligent at the scale at which we do mice
An acquaintance of mine did work in medical studies with mice and he quit after a few years because he said one handled the mice so much that he grew attached to them and could not bear to kill them at the end of the trials anymore.
On the other hand we eat pigs and octopus and those are pretty smart creatures.
That said, I'll put a lobster in a pot without hesitation. I like to put a cigarette in their claws beforehand like a last smoke before a firing squad. I appreciate their sacrifice for my butter drenched enjoyment.
Good on you for sticking to your morals though. I don't mind vegetarians or vegans or whatever, but the one group that really annoys me is people who eat meat, but get upset seeing animals get butchered.
He's good at attacking the food bowl, and that's about it.
Then he kinda ignored the corpse for about week because he didn't know what to do with it and then we removed it from the garden (since we found it by then)
The bird was probably sick anyway since my dog is one of the worst hunting dogs I've seen.
I'm pretty sure it's due to the domestic upbringing, if he had grown up on a farm and actually had to hunt small rodents then he'd probably know how to eat them.
Any efficiency gleaned in food production is simply eaten up with billions of new mouths to feed within decades.
I'd prefer an "inefficiently" managed planet with 6B people, versus a "very efficiently" managed planet with 20B vegetarians.
The manure is also applied before seeding, months before harvest. Together with rinsing, and sometimes peeling or boiling, there's really no need for the scaremongering.
If you want to be afraid of faeces, manure is the least of your problems. Foxes and other wild animals shit on every field, and they often carry parasites.
I've wondered about this. Fox tapeworm is very common (30% of all foxes in many areas in North-West Europe carry it last time I checked) and (the scary part) for humans, it can cause lethal liver failure 10 years after infection. Not 'lethal' is in 'flu lethal' - like 'might cause you to die in specific circumstances, when untreated, and when you were unhealthy already anyway' - but rather 'will certainly kill you in a painful way, very difficult to diagnose, no known effective treatment'.
So the advise is 'don't eat berries or mushrooms that grow in the wild below waist height'.
However, many/most fruit farms have fruit growing at that height, and the standard cleaning procedures don't remove worms (e.g. vaccinium isn't washed at all, too fragile). I know for a fact foxes (sometimes) enter these farms, I've seen some with my own eyes. How does this work from an epidemiological point of view? When devising health warnings, are there separate measurements for incidents caused by fruit picked in the wild, and from farms? Or is this just one of those things where everybody shrugs and says 'we don't have a better solution' and hope for the best?
On the off chance anyone doing epidemiology research is reading this, this sort of situation must be common; how is that dealt with?
I used the scare quotes because "organic" food is basically just a giant scam. Plants don't actually care if their nitrogen comes from manure or from anhydrous ammonia. Really.
Truth is, 99% of any difficulties have been social rather than related to my own appetite.
Giving up meat in itself was much easier than I expected, but I still haven't become comfortable with people quizzing me about my reasons.
Even when people are well-meaning and genuinely curious, they always end up asking these questions just when you're having a meal together. It's hard not to come off as preachy when you're talking about farming practices at the exact moment when steaming plates of meat arrive at the table!
Then there's the thing of going to someone's home and having them make different food for you. Even if they're super nice about it, I still feel like a bit of a burden.
It's reinforced my respect for vegans. Being a vegan while having an active social life takes a strength of character and bloody-mindedness that I don't think I have.
Compare that to store meat and you're looking at things that lived in cramped uncomfortable quarters and spent their lives being pumped full of antibiotic agents just to try to prevent them from becoming too sick before they're sent off a slaughter line where all their senses are going to inform them well ahead of time what's coming. And then enter in things like the growth hormones we use (that have been banned in much of the rest of the developed world) that often result in ongoing pain and other issues for the animals again before they're lined up for slaughter. Then there are straight up sadistic things like foie gras. That involves force feeding animals, generally ducks, to increase their liver to ~10x its normal size by shoving a pipe down their throat and jamming in "food" over a period of many weeks.
Cooking that lobster (or hunting deer or whatever else) is vastly more humane than supporting our meat industry. Like many things that happen on scale, ethics are quickly replaced with an insatiable lust for profit. I enjoy traveling and something I like more than anything else is to go into a chicken and rice shop and see some chickens freely pecking about around the shop. We should understand where our food comes from, and give it the respect it deserves. That doesn't mean not killing it, but it does mean giving it as reasonable a life as possible in the interim.
The saddest part of the desensitization to killing is the waste. You wouldn't waste much if you had to kill it too. You'd know the value.