science

It's not a one-off mistake, it seems systemic for some journals.

I think these 3 things are fascinating in a similar way. They all involve encoding some information or process in a way that could be replicated independent of the details of the underlying physical mechanisms. It really hammers home for me that life can be seen as a series of increasingly complex abstractions where the implementation details aren’t necessarily the defining factors. Some of that is probably because human intuition is messy and our taxonomies, though increasingly reliable, have started from a place of working backwards from that intuition.

Just had this thought stuck in my head and needed to write it out a bit.

Really neat USDA facility. It's the national backup bank which holds reserves for research, breeders, and conservation efforts. It has a 4-floor vault which stores animal/plant/microbe/insect samples- seeds, budwood, sperm, eggs. The vault is heavily reinforced to the point that it can withstand a train impact and is mostly kept at -18C and 25%~ relative humidity so that samples can be stored for decades or longer. Some samples are a neat pig, others are noxious weeds or corn with a specific target gene, others are entire ecosystems catalogued so that we can reseed them from scratch.

Some of the samples are stored bagged on racks. That section had thousands upon thousands of bags filled with seeds. Others are kept in large liquid nitrogen vats. I got photos of the insides of two, one with large canisters that are filled with individual seed collections and another with 6 species of sperm from who knows how many breeds/specimens represented. I confirmed that it's bee cum. The vats are loaded arbitrarily based on which has space available and they only last 20-30 years at a cost of $35k each.

They also have a neat clonal propagation room for when they're checking to make sure that samples are still viable. Apparently someone is growing out all of the bananas today. Like the national reserve of bananas.

Their infographic says they have 789k seed samples, 12k clones, 114k microbes, and 957k animal samples from 51k animals of 17 categories. Also the Smithsonian Institute's coral gene samples. That's outdated and apparently the collection is much larger now, growing by like 10k samples per month.

Fuck I want to work there.

headline edited because it's not a war on Hamas, it's an indiscriminate genocidal war on Palestinians

66 million years ago, a massive 17km wide asteroid impacted what is now the modern day Yucatan peninsula at 25km/s. The immediate collision was so violent that the resulting crater floor was briefly deeper than the Mariana Trench while the crater rim was briefly taller than Mt. Everest. In total, it killed off 75% of all animal and plant species on this planet, including the dinosaurs.

The linked video is a real time demonstration of the catastrophic events that would occur within the first hour after impact if a similar asteroid were to hit Earth today.

"Man and groups of men are objects of cognition in many other sciences, too, but psychology has its own approach, its own subject-matter. The subject matter of psychology as a science, the qualitatively specific ‘‘aspect”’ of man and human groups which it studies, is the phenomena, laws, and mechanisms of the psychology of individuals and groups. In the study and interpretation of the psyche, Soviet psychological science relies on Marxist-Leninist methodology as the doctrine of the general methods of cognition and transformation of the world. Strict compliance with these positions is extremely important, for psychology, from the very first days of its existence, has been an area of ideological struggle between materialism and idealism, between dialectics and metaphysics, between determinism and chance. A methodologically correct approach to the solution of psychological problems saves one from rude mistakes in theory and practice. Of fundamental methodological significance is the proposition of Marxism-Leninism that matter is primary and_ consciousness, secondary, and that man’s psyche is reflective in nature. The psyche cannot exist either as an independently acting entiry, as asserted by idealists, or as some emanations of the brain, as posited by vulgar materialists. The psyche is not emanated by the brain (as gastric juice is emanated by the stomach, for example) but emerges as a result of the impact of environment on man’s brain; it reflects reality. In recognising that psychic phenomena are caused by physiological processes in the brain, psychology concentrates on the reflective nature of the psyche, which is manifested in the psyche being the subjective image of the objective world. Psychic reflection is not passive reflection, it depends on man’s activity and his specific interaction with reality. The proposition conceming the reflective nature of the psyche is of immense significance for the theory of psychology and for practice, for it explains many psychic phenomena and, moreover, points to the principal mode of the formative and directive psychological actions: the creation of the conditions and objective influence that would produce the necessary psychic phenomena. A logical development of the methodological proposition outlined here is the thesis of the decisive role of social conditions in the formation of man’s psyche, the thesis of the social nature of the psyche. Historical materialism considers personality, group (or collective), and society in their dialectical unity. It has revealed the decisive role of labour and activity in the emergence and formation of man. Man is not a passive product of external influences—he is also the Product of his own activity."

Quote taken from:

The Psychology of Management of Labour Collectives: Guides to the Social Sciences, Chapter 1: The Methodological And Theoretical Foundations of the Psychology of Management of Labour Collectives, 1. 4. The Significance of the Psychological Factor in Management and Its Principal Characteristics, 1. 4, 2. The Subject-Matter of Psychological Science, pg. 60, by Aleksey Mikhailovich Stolyarenko

The first asteroid sample collected in space by a U.S. spacecraft and brought to Earth is unveiled to the world at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Wednesday, Oct. 11.

The science team from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) mission will provide results from an initial analysis of the sample, which landed on Sunday, Sept. 24, in the Utah desert. News conference participants include:

• NASA Administrator Bill Nelson

• Lori Glaze, NASA Planetary Directorate Science Division Director

• Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, University of Arizona, Tucson

• Francis McCubbin, OSIRIS-REx Head Astromaterials curator, NASA Johnson

• Daniel Glavin, OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt

Scientists worldwide will study the bits of asteroid to gather clues about the origin of the solar system and how life may have begun on Earth.

Watch the moment OSIRIS-REx collected the sample in 2020: https://youtu.be/xj0O-fLSV7c

Interesting.

Found this a bit of an interesting rabbit hole. Archive link: https://archive.ph/NHCjE

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-names-new-head-of-technology-policy-strategy/

Charity Weeden will serve as associate administrator for the agency’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy

A schematic depiction according to genetic studies by Alena Kushniarevich

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135820

https://archive.ph/FqyKx

Who would've thought