It's very Onion of them that I got two modern day, fully content-obscuring pop-ups on mobile when I clicked the link

Academic publishers are parasites.

I have been working through a textbook this week that has a copyleft statement on every page, and was written by a government scientist who did not get paid to do it. When you access it through the publisher website there is a copyright and they're charging $200 for access.

Replacing the human expert with a word-guessing machine is a logical progression in their unabashed rent seeking.

I feel like this is a phenomenon that should have a name, but I don't know what it is...

As you get older and more experienced, you get better at driving. The average driver, though, generally does not get better because of turnover due to age on both ends. This means that from your relative perspective people seem to be getting steadily worse at driving.

Of course there is day to day fluctuation, and some factors (e.g. cell phone use) may have large impacts, but I'm convinced that most of what we feel is connected to the former effect.

The university is exploiting your idealism to get you to work without being paid enough. You aren't "in a position to help people", you are doing a job for an organization with revenues. They could allocate more revenue to accomplish this work without forcing you to work until 1 AM, but they have made the choice that the work is not worth paying for.

That being said, most good people will go the extra mile if they think it can make a difference, but I see too many who take full responsibility on themselves and "cover" for financially-motivated organizational decisions, which in turn encourages the people who make those decisions to cut even more.

Then in the middle of the hardest hitting writing in SciFi there's a ham-fisted, horribly directed episode about King Arthur coming out of Vorlon deep freeze or whatever

Edit: Sorry I am sleep deprived and read both "Ronald D. Moore" as JMS and Battlestar Galactica as Babylon 5

The author's credentials do not indicate any professional scientific training. Their only professional affiliation is the "institute" that they founded and has no other apparent membership. There are three manuscripts associated with their ORCID, all single-author with the same affiliation above. Two of those manuscripts have definitely not passed peer review, the third likely has not either but it's not immediately clear. On the institute's website the author is called a "revelation philosopher". This PowerPoint graphic claims to explain their theory https://siel.global/...

Any one of these things would be a red flag for scientific legitimacy. Together they are a recipe for pseudoscientific nonsense

Completely agree with your comment about "hitting a wall at running speed" . I switched my music production PC to Linux in a fit of pique at Microsoft. I have used Linux/unix for 25 years at this point, but this move and the resulting technical hurdles took my output to 0% and it hasn't recovered in a couple of months.

I don't want to switch back but I also really miss my hobby and main creative outlet

Popular Science/Mechanics have been clickbait since before the dawn of the internet. I wish I knew how to filter them out of my feed

I've been working as a biochemist for over 25 years. The claim that burners "waft away bacteria" is absurd and I'd worry about the education of anyone who claimed so.

Sterility is (or at least was) usually created using alcohol or bleach. The flame was just for small tools. For example, when plating bacteria you'd wipe down the bench with ethanol or IPA. Sometimes for fun we'd burn the excess off, but that was mostly just for a lab goof. We used metal loops to spread the bacteria on plates, and those got flamed in between samples to clean them, sometimes after dipping them in alcohol. As others have said, nowadays most people use single-use plastic labware to do the same job. Most lab fire safety people ban burners for this type of general work.

Chitin is a real biopolymer that makes up shells.

There are some organisms that have been modified to produce polymers from varuous food sources, but those are more for biofermentation production processes than something the organisms would use as a shell

Wednesday https://en.wikipedia.org/...

Interesting. This feels like a variant of EMDR which is a pretty well-known therapy but isn't mentioned in the article

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/...

More like 16,000 x g for a normal desktop centrifuge and 80,000 x g+ for an ultracentrifuge

I was thinking Synonym Toast Crunch

Sorry we all live in the same world you do

That's a reference to the Blues Brothers movie

The Years of Rice and Salt changed my brain

Any more context on this image? My understanding is that AA guns are shockingly inefficient, and I'd expect a tank gun to be almost useless unless it's a specific tactical scenario.

I don't know the full process for making these, but I can take a fairly educated guess.

First they are going to take the DNA sample and use a reaction called PCR to amplify it. This will copy a small section of DNA, not the whole sequence. For the PCR to work for all of their customers, this has to be a region* that nearly everyone has in their DNA.

They then take the PCR product and treat it with different enzymes that are like molecular scissors which will chop at specific sub-sequences. The personal nature of the art comes from small differences between people in the region amplified in the original PCR. Different sequence = different cuts = different lengths of pieces.

They then run the enzyme digests on a gel, which is like a slab of thick jello. The bigger the piece, the slower it moves so the pieces separate. The lanes on the sides are a standard "ladder" of known sized pieces. You can visualize these gels under a UV lamp.

They can either use molecular tags or, more likely, photoshop to make the art piece look more interesting.

There is not any actual sequencing of the DNA happening in this process, and the band patterns are pretty low-resolution so it's unlikely that this could be used to identify someone.

If this is a legitimate operation, then there is not a situation where the art company has an unsecured disk with lots of DNA sequences on it.

All that said, the concern about sharing genetic material with random companies is valid because they could also sequence it if they wanted to, but that would be relatively expensive and actively malicious. I believe the risk is low but non-zero, and everyone will have a different comfort level with that.

If you want alternative options you might be able to find an open lab or local college that will work with you to run your own PCR and gel, then photoshop the result yourself.

Hope that helps you make a more informed decision.

*To be a little more pedantic, everyone has to have the same ends of the region where the copying starts and stops. The part in between, which is a small fraction of your total DNA, can still be different.

How high was the person who thought of this