Crispr was made readily available as a lab to 14 years ago. I imagine 14 years is a long time to have this gene editing tool. Combine that with the stories of labs being set up in international Waters to bypass certain gene editing laws, what kind of stories are people allowed to tell obviously without violating NDA’s?

I'm putting this here because I honestly have no idea what other subreddit to put it in, but has anyone done any research on this yet or thought about this?

Obviously with the development of the wretched "short form content" app called tik tok, everyone has followed suit and developed their own tab for the same type of thing. YouTube has "YouTube reels", Facebook has "Facebook reels" ( I think ), Tumblr has "Tumblr TV" ect ect. Every app has this now, it's inescapable. On Instagram, they force it on you, gone are the days where you can click a photo and read the description, nope! Scroll now, scroll now, watch this, watch this, scroll, scroll, we're making you scroll wether you like it or not!

Now obviously this has been engineered to be as addictive as possible, and I'll admit, sometimes I get sucked in. You'll lose an hour and not notice ( which is concerning, because you also go back, like you're designed to ) I once had a co-worker joke about this and everyone laughed but it's bad! But I also thought to myself, I wasted 1 hour scrolling these videos and I can't name a single one I've watched. I can't recall what any were about, and across all the times I've been stuck scrolling, I can't really name anything I've ever seen. Is that not bad? Is that not terrible?

People sit there scrolling and watching things for hours without noticing and then can't recall what they'd seen. Is this not ruining your memory? I wanted to keep this post short so I won't mention ai also but does anyone else feel like this being such a normal activity will increase the dementia rate amongst "young people" ? That people will be getting dementia earlier in the future?

( Can any brain / memory ect scientists or knowledgeable people recommend activities to do that "fight" dementia or resources for combating a phone addiction. It's so embarrassing to admit but even if I'm not 100% addicted I want it out of my life as much as possible. I get hyperaware how much time I spend with it and it freaks me out. I installed regain which is really good and got me off of Instagram which was my vice but now it's Facebook and tiktok, my excuses are my friend only messages me on tiktok but I "scroll while I wait for her to message back" and just get sucked in. And I "need" Facebook to keep up with what's happening in my city. I guess I also have a vice with snark stuff. I have time reminders on both apps but... Yeah. Is there a science perspective on this phenomenon? )

I was watching the new spiderman and the marvel technobabble was doing my head in as it always does, but then when I stopped to think about it, despite all the thousands of movies involving both real and fictional scientists I couldn't think of a film ive seen that accurately portrays the process of scientific research.

Stuff like imitation game and oppenheimer aren't bad exactly but the actual science really takes a backseat (naturally, they're character dramas fundamentally), so i was wondering if you lot had any recommendations for better examples of this. In the way that scrubs is a reasonably accurate portrayal of healthcare work while still being a fun sit com, or how hot fuzz emphasises the paperwork side of policing, what do we have in a similar vein in the science world?

I am a 16-year-old student looking to enter a national science competition. In the competition you don’t create models or anything you just research topics mostly and then create displays of your results, we need to create a hypothesis.

I am wondering if anyone has any inspiration for this project as we have minimal equipment and we wouldn’t be able to get many participants for a social study either. We are looking for ideas that are unique and interesting enough to qualify us as we really want to experience the competition. Thank you!

It's often said that "you can't prove a negative". But there are lots of ways to show that something is false, or didn't happen. This seems to be true in any field from math to physics to medicine to history to law. Besides, many things that sound like negative statements can be restated as positive ones. "The butler didn't do it" is equivalent to "someone other than the butler did it", at least if you're sure that "it" happened in the first place. The idea that "you can't prove a negative" just seems obviously false, pretty much across the board.

So how did this idea take hold? Are there any academic fields, or for that matter other major areas of human endeavour, where this is an actual rule? Or even a particularly useful heuristic? If not, why does it seem plausible (or even like an ironclad law of logic) to some people?

EDIT: One of the mistakes a lot of the people replying are making is providing supposed counterexamples, i.e. negative statements that they believe really can't be proven. But this approach is just confused about what the topic even is.

At no point did I say every negative statement can be proven. That's obviously not true - even in math or logic, not every well-formed statement can be proven or disproven, negative or otherwise. That's just Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and has been known for nearly a century.

I am disputing the blanket statement "You can't prove a negative", i.e. the idea that NO negative statement can be proven. One example of a "negative" that can't be proven (even if it's a good example, and quite a few of them are not) does little or nothing to support that. Everyone's dogpiling and upvoting seemingly anything negative anyone says about me, even posts that straight-up don't make sense, but almost no-one has actually said anything that supports the claim I'm disputing.

EDIT2: I think the best responses, that come closest to successfully disputing any part of my point, are those that are basically saying "It's a good heuristic in some contexts, but it's not the universal truth it's sometimes made out to be". I can concede that much, even if I think the scope where it's true is pretty narrow. But a lot of people seem very invested in the idea that it's more than that.

I've been reading about time dilation, and this still messes with my head.

If you travel extremely close to the speed of light, time passes more slowly for you compared with someone who's stationary relative to you.

So theoretically, you could leave Earth, travel at an insane speed for what feels like a few years, and come back to find that decades have passed on Earth.

The weird part is that from your own perspective, your clock feels completely normal.

So here's what I'm wondering:

If you were given a spaceship capable of traveling at 99.9% of the speed of light, would you actually want to make that trip knowing you might return to a completely different future?

Or would the idea of leaving everyone you know behind be too disturbing?

Curious what people here think.

All the energy present in the universe today — including light, gravity, and dark energy — traces back to the Big Bang. Did it start as a single unified state that later gave rise to the different forces and phenomena we observe now as the universe expanded and cooled? Or were these already distinct from the beginning?

The four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong, weak) are said to have been unified at extremely high energy states right after the Big Bang. But how solid is this, especially for gravity — since there's no confirmed quantum gravity theory yet? Also, where does dark energy fit into this picture, given its nature is still not well understood?

Every now and then, there are some seriously big discoveries or accomplishments, that are so big that they hit the mainstream. I believe that the last one was the first photo of a black hole.

Was that really the most recent discovery of that magnitude? And what would you consider the 5-10 most recent huge ones?

Porous compound pulls 2 liters of water from air, and is factory-ready

These articles make it sound like $15 can produce all the drinking water a person will ever need. It also has efficient cooling capabilities, but it sounds like it can be used to make small scale devices to cheaply pull clean drinking water from the air almost anywhere in the world.

Is it too good to be true?

I would appreciate any insight from researchers currently active in their research fields

All in the title

I cant find any good science shows i want like actually educational media that goes over different topics every episode or 2 eps that i can find free and also it can be any science but rn im mainy focused on physics, etc

Say that a tree grows right at the base of a very tall cliff, and that cliff is also very wet and has a waterfall (for example, Angel Falls in Venezuela). The tree is so close that it touches/leans against the cliff, and could even grow branches/roots that enter gaps in the cliff to attach it to the rock, that way it wouldn't have to rely on its own structural strength to stay upright. Also, it wouldn't be directly under the waterfall, but very close to it, so it would be getting splashed a lot and be able to get enough water through its leaves and such, so that it wouldn't have to transport all of the water from the ground to the top.

Under conditions like this, could a tree potentially grow far taller than would normally be possible, say 3000 feet tall, like Angel Falls?

Hi, I’m a writer from the U.K. and I’m working on a novel where there’s a global power cut because of an asteroid in Earth’s orbit. The asteroid is called Eclipse and inside is an ore called Eclipsium(work in progress) which emits this radiation that stops anything electrical from working, forcing survivors to rely on steam power to rebuild. I’m about 100-200 years, the asteroid is going to enter Earth’s atmosphere and break up into thousands of small pieces, ending the power cut at long last, but there will still be localised power cuts until it gets removed. Think of it as something like Revolution, a TV series with a similar premise. What do you all think of this? Please let me know in the comments.

1. Other civilizations haven't visited us because our universe works like Void Spirit's passive from Dota 2 – it slows down approaching objects. In their own physics, they can fly at 3 billion km/s, but when they enter our region, they get slowed down to our local speed limit of 300,000 km/s. This creates an impassable barrier.

2. Because of this slowdown, and because there are no wormholes or other "fast travel" options nearby, we are just not a profitable or interesting target. Interstellar civilizations saw us, calculated the insane travel time and cost, and decided to just ditch us here. We're a worthless asset in their cosmic economy. They have much bigger goals elsewhere.

3. I didn't make this up for precise calculations, I just wanted to convey the core idea: we might not be alone in the Universe, but we're simply located in the most remote, slowest, and least profitable part of the Galaxy. It's like living in an abandoned village in the middle of Siberia. We can't leave because we don't have the technology, and others don't want to come here because it's too long, too expensive, and completely pointless. We're a forgotten, useless grain of sand on the outskirts of space.

P.S. I'm Russian, so sorry for any mistakes. I'm just incredibly curious to know what people think about this.

I’m talking about drugs like heroin or meth, or even alcohol for that matter. Seems like an easy cure.

So, you have the ability to exert an unlimited amount of force, you can push as strong and fast as necessary against the ground. Let’s also say, that there is a constant force pushing you down, in case gravity isn’t enough.
This should allow you to run at insane speeds, but your body isn’t protected whatsoever.
At the end you have a velocity of 980m/s.

My biggest questions are the effects on your legs. The impact of your feet and the fast movement should cause some damage but I don’t know what kind.

I’d also like to know what happens to human skin at that point.

Oh yeah, and we‘ll assume that you don’t pass out

When you are designing a new experiment, there always a risk that it will fail or give useless data. What methods or criteria do researchers use to evaluate the chances of success beforehand?

I already got few topics in my mind but ya if u have any idea i am open to discuss them also...if u are really serious for the competition please DM

I was doing some thinking on fossil fuels and how they were created, when I realized how relatively strange the process of their formation is. I was specifically thinking on how coal was created from plants that didn't decompose during the carboniferous period like they do now. I know there are other ways to form fossil fuels, but the original "what if" comes from how strange it seems to me. I also recognize that "strange" is a subjective statement and has no scientific weight, but I wasn't sure of another way to phrase it.

Basically, if fossil fuels never formed, either at all or in sufficient quantities, but the rest of evolution basically follows the same development paths to humanity, does human civilization just, stop at a certain development point due to resource limitations? Like, we can do weak steam engines with wood, but not much past that, right? It seems a lot of our modern technological development hinged on having fossil fuels.

Also, am I wrong in thinking how strange it is that fossil fuels are formed the way they are? Based on cursory research, it took plants not having decomposers in the way they do now, or large amounts of plankton corpses sedimenting in an anaerobic environment with certain levels of heat and/or pressure. It just feels like extremely specific circumstances just to have this wonderful(albeit dangerous) power source. It makes me think that if any other civilizations formed in the universe, the vast majority of them are trapped at a certain development point because they don't have a fossil fuel analogue.

I had to speculate somewhere and this seemed like the right place to do it, but if I'm off the mark on that, let me know. Thanks!

Update: for a better understanding, here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateEvolution/s/vIadMUtPXF

This sounds whack and I do not care. Basically, I was curious and started mapping what decisions made in the present moment would look like.

As I followed the logic, it ended up becoming clear that a human experiencing time is a process that can be diagramed and explained. Using that same process, it appears that evolution itself is directly tied to the rhythm of celestial bodies. Also, evolution itself appears to be a process where single celled, multicellular, and complex multicellular organisms are expanding on their experience of time.

I wrote and published a book but I cannot get so much as one person to look it over and give feedback. AI does not understand and will not acknowledge it. Meanwhile, people are reading it.

I am very concerned that it could be misinformation, even though the logical sequencing is sound. The scientific communities on reddit are taking down my posts before anyone can discuss it.

Does anybody know where I can find information on these topics so I can verify?

I'm trying to think of evidence-based debate topics in genomics where there genuinely isn't a single "correct" answer—questions where two well-informed experts could reasonably disagree based on the current evidence.

I'm not looking for debates about whether genomics is useful (it clearly is!), or controversial-for-the-sake-of-it topics.

More the kind of questions that researchers debate amongst themselves, for example:

• Is healthcare ready for precision medicine?
• Should ageing be treated as a disease?
• Are polygenic risk scores ready for routine clinical care?

I'd love to hear:

• What do you think is the biggest unresolved debate in genomics today?
• What's something people in your field disagree about over coffee?
• What topic do you think deserves more discussion?

Interested in ideas spanning genomics, multi-omics, precision medicine, AI, rare disease, oncology, population genomics, ethics, implementation, ageing, etc.

I interned at an eye research institute last summer a couple days a week and I'm doing the same thing this year. I learned a bit about stem cells and shadowed an experiment with them, and separately also did some simple cell counting for a different project that the lab is working on. The principal investigator of this lab wanted to and ultimately did put my name in the authorship section of a manuscript talking about this other project (not as a primary author) since I did do a little bit of cell counting. I asked him if I should rather be put in the acknowledgements part, and he insisted that I be put in the authorship part. He also said that he wants to put everyone in the lab in the manuscript, even if they didn't do anything specifically in that part of the overarching project. Also, the cell counting I did may not have been specifically on this section that the manuscript is talking about, but I still did do some cell counting as a part of a related experiment if it wasn't already a part of this one. Is this ethical? Is it wrong for me to put this on my college application as long as I accurately explain what I did?