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mmmrtl

318 karma · joined February 14, 2016

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mmmrtl··on LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash
RWSL were red in the video. https://viewfromthewing.com/__trashed-13/ So maybe we'll be looking at training and fatigue for the firefighters too
mmmrtl··on All Look Same?
Obviously, random chance... It's a bit ignorant/racist to expect people from different countries to look distinctly different (fashion notwithstanding), when genetics are so overlapping
mmmrtl··on Sora 2
I think that's the point... Then world coin comes to the rescue
mmmrtl··on Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah
second suspect also released...
mmmrtl··on The Dire Wolf Is Back
It seems their deeper sequencing of dire wolf samples clarified the phylogeny - they claim the dire wolf's closest living relative is the gray wolf, at 99.5% identity. The 2021 study was only able to sequence the dire wolf genome at 0.23x coverage and put a 0.56 probability on their species tree (Fig 2A). https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/255832/1/NatureDireWol...
mmmrtl··on [dead]
Why do you think this is reputable research? MDPI does not inspire confidence, and it's written by a UFOlogist-chemist. And what is "radar ultrasound"?!
mmmrtl··on Oldest human genomes reveal how a small group burst out of Africa
I think it is a fair generalization at this point. Mbuti also have a ~6% West Eurasian admixture signal using an ancient (4.5kya) Ethiopian individual as reference, though Pickrell 2014 did not see it. Decimal dust, perhaps? https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad2879

The ghost admixture story(s) will turn out to be much more localized, I imagine.

mmmrtl··on Oldest human genomes reveal how a small group burst out of Africa
Hasn't backmigration/Eurasian admixture post-introgression made that true? iirc reference bias artefactually made African genomes look like they had no Neanderthal segments.

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30059-3 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1313787111

mmmrtl··on Google says AI weather model masters 15-day forecast
Yeah the preprint was last year https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15796
mmmrtl··on Fish have a brain microbiome – could humans have one too?
Probably the vast majority of studies are correct and a few misinterpret artefacts, and then a journalist uses an evocative word like "teeming" without knowing that what they're saying doesn't pass the sniff test. Same reason these papers languish for years and don't pass peer review in rigorous journals
mmmrtl··on Fish have a brain microbiome – could humans have one too?
Why hasn't it passed peer review yet? Maybe because they only used techniques prone to artefacts. IMO if a brain microbiome exists in healthy people it would have been seen already, with all the microscopy and sequencing done
mmmrtl··on Making Pop Rocks from scratch (is complicated) [video]
see also: Applied Science's attempt 12 years ago (no fancy pressurized mixing machine so the result is weaker than the real thing). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsSwvmNEr0Q

IMO his is the best random project channel on youtube

mmmrtl··on Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?
Explain to us how water "tension", density, and viscosity are variables that would change? It's just water, and temperature is set at ~25 C. The shape of the pool and gutter setup are the only major factors at play, assuming the filtration system isn't causing major currents.
mmmrtl··on How Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Is Treated
Slightly related: pro cyclists inhale small amounts of CO to measure their physiological adaptation to altitude training (and maybe dope with it too) https://escapecollective.com/exclusive-tour-riders-are-inhal...
mmmrtl··on UV-K5 is the most hackable handheld ham radio yet
This project's trying to add 53-bit *scrambling* with an ESP32. Maybe not technically encryption, but the lines are blurry https://github.com/kamilsss655/ESPRI?tab=readme-ov-file
mmmrtl··on [dead]
Discussion 9 mo ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35462378
mmmrtl··on Early dispersal of domestic horses into the Great Plains and northern Rockies
You can see author contributions at the end. It took 5 to write it, and everyone else to get the samples, perform experiments, analyze data, etc. Pretty typical for genomics.
mmmrtl··on A DNA ‘parasite’ may have fragmented our genes
Misleading title ("Their" Genes). I don't see what introners have to do with the human genome?? They found evidence for introners in 5% of species...

Original paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209766119

mmmrtl··on A bird that’s breaking the tree of life
| Is horizontal gene transfer [1] the right term for this phenomenon?

This is "incomplete lineage sorting". There's no need to invoke anything more exotic than standard vertical inheritance, but the existence of genetic diversity within populations after they split/speciate (i.e. it's not a single Adam & Eve that give rise to a new species) produces counter-intuitive patterns of relatedness like this.

mmmrtl··on Association between ADHD medication and depression: A 10-year follow-up
The authors show increased depression risk in the 90 days PRE-exposure (before starting treatment). To me, the authors seems to have dangerously misinterpreted the data. It could easily be the case that a depression diagnosis leads to seeing a psychiatrist and deciding to treat their underlying ADHD with methylphenidate. How could being about to go on methylphenidate in the next 90 days possible be the cause of depression???
mmmrtl··on The human genome is, at long last, complete
and yet neither "A complete hydatidiform mole (CHM)"
mmmrtl··on The human genome is, at long last, complete
https://github.com/marbl/CHM13/commit/85644b74e188aa2124943b...

v2, now with a Y chromosome

mmmrtl··on The human genome is, at long last, complete
Literally any genetic disease (or shortcomings like aging) could have missing facets hidden in these newly-complete regions of the genome. It's kind of the same reason you would want a complete anything, it's not ideal to go hunting for knowledge while blinded to a nonrandom 8% of the territory.
mmmrtl··on The human genome is, at long last, complete
> [We] have decided to indefinitely postpone our next coordinate-changing update (GRCh39) while we evaluate new models and sequence content for the human reference assembly currently in development.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/grc

The complete Y chromosome from HG002 was added with v2 (after the paper was written). Probably a patched form of GRCh38 will be made using T2T sequence, but IMO it makes more sense to use T2T-CHM13 as a reference with its single origin instead of a weird chimera, at least until pan-genome graph methods mature.

mmmrtl··on Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
Dropped the citation. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2102507 Thanks to the NBA for good time series data
mmmrtl··on Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
*An Israeli Study Finds Fourth Covid Vaccine Dose Is Only Slightly More Effective Than Third Dose At Producing Antibodies Against Omicron
mmmrtl··on Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
Confirmation bias is a tricky beast...

Even if Ct values are unchanged between vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, this is conditioned on being infected in the first place, and isn't the whole story. Duration of infectiousness matters.

Yes, boosters are necessary to reduce infection with Omicron, the antibodies from the original vaccine are just too big of a mismatch. That's not news. I'm glad to hear you're not taking those negative efficacy estimates at face value - it's almost certainly the result of missing confounders present at the start of their omicron wave. Unvaccinated individuals are probably less likely to live in urban areas, travel internationally, or even seek a covid test, for example.

mmmrtl··on Israel Finds Fourth Covid Booster Is Ineffective
stopping transmission is an impossibly high bar. Vaccines reduce transmission. Really really shockingly unexpectedly well for the first few months, in previous waves, but that sterilizing antibody-mediated immunity wanes. The booster restores that efficacy against transmission, but omicron's immune evasion means that even a booster only gets to ~70% efficacy against cases/transmission, compared to the surprise finding of ~95% efficacy for the first two doses. Fewer people spreading the virus -> fewer cases -> not as bad of a time.

The other important factor is that because your immune system is primed to recognize SARS-CoV-2 after vaccination, even if you do get infected, it responds and clears the infection more quickly than it would otherwise. That could mean you're never infectious, or infectious for fewer days, reducing transmission. Pre-omicron, breakthrough infections were infectious for 5.5 days on average, compared to 7.5 days for infections in unvaccinated people (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2102507). Yes, all this to maintain some semblance of healthcare for society, and to fill up fewer reefer trucks with body bags.

mmmrtl··on Best Wordle guessing strategy
Or maximize entropy: https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1480337678281363461
mmmrtl··on Largest Flute: The Subcontrabass [video]
Wow, what a cool set of obsessions! I love that he used his own flute improv as the soundtrack to his batch snake video.
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