Butler presents: The Seven Stages of Reading Scientific Papers
1. Okay, how long is this one without the references?
2. Twelve pages? Bloody hell, better have another coffee.
3. Right, introduction… blah blah blah, I know all this already. I guess these two sentences at the end are sort of interesting though.
4. Materials and Methods… hah, yeah right.
5. Now the results. Oh my god, there isn’t enough coffee in the world. What the hell is going on in this chart? Does anyone need to know th- oh, THAT’S what it means. Actually that IS pretty cool.
6. Discussion, home stretch. Yes I know, you just said as much in the results. Wait, these other authors said WHAT? I should look into that.
7. This cycle is never going to end, is it?
Read the introduction and the discussion first. Only after you have decided it is worth your time do you read the stuff in the middle.
Butler presents: The Seven Stages of Reading Scientific Papers
1. Okay, how long is this one without the references?
2. Twelve pages? Bloody hell, better have another coffee.
3. Right, introduction… blah blah blah, I know all this already. I guess these two sentences at the end are sort of interesting though.
4. Materials and Methods… hah, yeah right.
5. Now the results. Oh my god, there isn’t enough coffee in the world. What the hell is going on in this chart? Does anyone need to know th- oh, THAT’S what it means. Actually that IS pretty cool.
6. Discussion, home stretch. Yes I know, you just said as much in the results. Wait, these other authors said WHAT? I should look into that.
7. This cycle is never going to end, is it?
I always had a stage 0.
Read the title. Frown. Reread the title. Google that one acronym I'd never heard before. End up at the paper where that acronym was first coined. Try to read that paper so I can understand the title of the paper I'm trying to read. Repeat forever.
Butler presents: The Seven Stages of Reading Scientific Papers
1. Okay, how long is this one without the references?
2. Twelve pages? Bloody hell, better have another coffee.
3. Right, introduction… blah blah blah, I know all this already. I guess these two sentences at the end are sort of interesting though.
4. Materials and Methods… hah, yeah right.
5. Now the results. Oh my god, there isn’t enough coffee in the world. What the hell is going on in this chart? Does anyone need to know th- oh, THAT’S what it means. Actually that IS pretty cool.
6. Discussion, home stretch. Yes I know, you just said as much in the results. Wait, these other authors said WHAT? I should look into that.
7. This cycle is never going to end, is it?
I always had a stage 0.
Read the title. Frown. Reread the title. Google that one acronym I'd never heard before. End up at the paper where that acronym was first coined. Try to read that paper so I can understand the title of the paper I'm trying to read. Repeat forever.
Butler presents: The Seven Stages of Reading Scientific Papers
1. Okay, how long is this one without the references?
2. Twelve pages? Bloody hell, better have another coffee.
3. Right, introduction… blah blah blah, I know all this already. I guess these two sentences at the end are sort of interesting though.
4. Materials and Methods… hah, yeah right.
5. Now the results. Oh my god, there isn’t enough coffee in the world. What the hell is going on in this chart? Does anyone need to know th- oh, THAT’S what it means. Actually that IS pretty cool.
6. Discussion, home stretch. Yes I know, you just said as much in the results. Wait, these other authors said WHAT? I should look into that.
7. This cycle is never going to end, is it?
I always had a stage 0.
Read the title. Frown. Reread the title. Google that one acronym I'd never heard before. End up at the paper where that acronym was first coined. Try to read that paper so I can understand the title of the paper I'm trying to read. Repeat forever.
That's usually what I do when I try to read wikipedia articles about maths.
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LuvTheMonkeyHigh Sierra SerenadeRegistered Userregular
The way my Prof taught me to read scientific papers was to skip to the results, complain a lot that they rigged it for best results, then try to use their procedures to the benefit of our research
Taking into consideration the climate conditions needed for survival for bird species, and the rapid changes in climate that we've been observing, many species may be seeing massive reductions in livable range very, very quickly.
They found that the bald eagle, for example, could see its current range decrease by nearly 75 percent in the next 65 years. The common loon, an iconic bird in Minnesota and Maine, may no longer be able to breed in the lower 48 states as soon as 2080, according to the report.
And these aren't dramatic, overblown long-term forecasts:
We're talking about things that are happening now and through the end of the century. This year, in southern California, 90 to 95 percent of raptor nests failed. There were no baby raptors because of drought. These things are happening now. This isn't some distant future.
There are models, there are forecasts that are far more extreme than this report. If anything, this report is conservative. At every step of the way, we took great care to not overstate data or conclusions. Nothing would make us happier than to be wrong about the fate of many of these birds.
This article goes hand-in-hand with reports from other institutions. The Smithsonian discusses the risks facing our bird species in this article, Most Extensive Report Ever Published on American Birds Says There's Cause for Concern. We recently passed the 100-year anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, and while the U.S. has in some places done good work in creating coastal regions and thereby boosting populations of wetlands bird species, there are still very serious threats that we aren't even close to addressing.
“The news is not good,” Marra explained in an interview earlier in the week. There are 800 million fewer birds in the United States than just 40 years ago, the researchers found. Birds in forest and arid land areas, as well as long distance migrants and seabirds, are all experiencing dramatic declines.
“It’s a cause of great concern,” adds David Pashley of the American Bird Conservancy, another author of the report. Pashley singles out Hawaiian birds as the most threatened bird population in the country, if not the world. Those birds appear on a Watch List, included with the report, which names 230 bird species that are facing threats.
(That article mainly discusses information in relation to The State of the Birds Report that was just published. If you are curious about what species are most at risk, and why, I recommend checking it out.)
Additionally, the Audubon Society has some wonderful resources on this very not-wonderful state of affairs. Their Climate Report allows you to not only research the impact climate change is having on native bird species, it has a truly massive and easy-to-comprehend database of at-risk species along with their current and predicted ranges for summer and winter, and the forecast for range loss in the future. For instance, this little dude is a Baird's Sparrow:
And by clicking on his name above the picture, you can see the map version of his very troubling future.
By 2080, this grassland bird is expected to lose 100 percent of its current summer range and 22 percent of its winter range, according to Audubon’s climate model. It remains to be seen if the bird possesses the behavioral and genetic plasticity to adapt to the coming changes.
This small, brown-streaked songbird is somewhat nomadic. It is adapted to grassland habitats that have always varied from year to year, owing to the effects of drought, rain, fare, and herds of grazing animals. It forages for insects and seeds among grasses, and nests on the ground, scratching out little hollows in the earth and lining them with grasses, stems, and roots in preparation for its clutch of speckled eggs. A migratory bird, the Baird’s Sparrow winters in north-central Mexico and parts of the southwestern United States, and summers in south-central Canada and the north-central United States. The prairie lands it breeds in are vanishing due to farming, invasive plants, and fire suppression.
The Birder's Report has also covered this issue. Here are ten other species the Birder's Report lists as at risk of losing upward of 99% of their current range:
I'm sure we'll hear about Bald Eagles not being patriotic enough if they go extinct due to climate change.
Battletag BYToady#1454
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WeaverWho are you?What do you want?Registered Userregular
Poor birds
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
edited September 2014
I sat in on a talk at a festival recently by some people who'd spent a year in the safari industry travelling around southern Africa. Apparently several people they spoke to who work in conservation predict lions will be extinct in the wild by 2020.
That's not a typo. 6 years from now.
We're living through a mass extinction event and we mostly just ignore it.
Brovid Hasselsmof on
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Lost Salientblink twiceif you'd like me to mercy kill youRegistered Userregular
Don't forget that Western Black Rhinos were declared extinct last year.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
I can't access the full thing, and I'm not the best at parsing these things, but I got passed this by a friend working on his masters in (some form of) biology.
I sat in on a talk at a festival recently by some people who'd spent a year in the safari industry travelling around southern Africa. Apparently several people they spoke to who work in conservation predict lions will be extinct in the wild by 2020.
That's not a typo. 6 years from now.
We're living through a mass extinction event and we mostly just ignore it.
We're seeing species extinction rates unprecedented since the dinosaurs got wiped. Actually this one might be worse, by the end. It's completely horrifying.
I can't access the full thing, and I'm not the best at parsing these things, but I got passed this by a friend working on his masters in (some form of) biology.
I thought that said artificial sweaters and was really intrigued.
Don't forget that Western Black Rhinos were declared extinct last year.
They were declared extinct 3 years ago. They haven't been seen in the wild since 2001, and suspected to have died out in 2003.
However, most people only learned about it when CNN processes updated a two-year-old article last year and sent it into the RSS feed during a slow news cycle, meaning it got picked up and reposted as if it were new information, like the last one died last year or something.
An outpouring of grief on social media for a thing that happened over a decade ago, was swiftly ignored, and forgotten.
That's unbelievably cool. Your new name is cool guy. Let's have sex.
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Lost Salientblink twiceif you'd like me to mercy kill youRegistered Userregular
You're right, and I had forgotten when Nat Geo did the big Rhino Wars issue that I own, additionally
Time keeps on slippin', slippin'?
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
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FishmanPut your goddamned hand in the goddamned Box of Pain.Registered Userregular
Time to take it to the I'm gettin' old thread, where we can shake our heads and talk about the good old days, when there were Rhinos and Eagles and Ice Caps.
Permian extinction vs. Anthropocene extinction rrrrrrrruuuuummmmbllllllleee
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BaidolI will hold him offEscape while you canRegistered Userregular
Let's talk about Emil Fisher a little bit. Turn your calendars back to the 1880's to a time long before we could observe organic molecules using modern spectroscopic methods. Back then, if you wanted to "characterize", or figure out, what a compound was, you had a few options.
1) Melt it
2) shine some plane polarized light through it
3) use chemistry to turn it into something that was hopefully recognizable
Not many tools in the toolbox back then.
Sugars are compact, complex little molecules that, within a sugar family, differ from each other only in the 3-D orientation of the various pieces. In other words, they all had the exact same atoms connected to the exact same other atoms, just sometimes connecting to the right side instead of the left side. We knew the chemical formula of the sugars and the basic structure of the molecules, but not their 3-D orientation.
This would be the point were I would summarize his logic and his actions to prove the structure of all of the sugars (both natural and synthetic ones he produced), but that's a longer post than I want to make, and not really the point of this story. If you want a good summary, here is an open-course video of a professor at Yale talking to a second-semester freshman organic chemistry course (click the link for lecture chapter 4). Some basic organic chemistry knowledge if obviously beneficial, but the guy does a decent job detailing the consequences of the various reactions, which is independent of the reactions themselves, so a knowledge of the reactions is not strictly necessary.
The point of this story is the thoughtful preparation Fisher put into this. Fisher developed a series of testable hypotheses that, if true, would provide information and, if false, would also provide information. That is the essence of science that I think gets forgotten sometimes. The doing is the part that get's the glory because it is the doing that creates the wonders we can play with. Greatness starts before performing the experiment, however. To do great things, you need good experiments that have sound reasoning. Fisher got the second Nobel Prize in Chemistry ever awarded because of what he did, but that only came about after he put the thought into deciding what experiments he was going to run and what they would tell him in a time when your chemistry tools were incredibly limited. Our tools are better now, but the need to think and plan carefully have not changed, which is something that should be remembered.
A sleep-promoting circuit located deep in the primitive brainstem has revealed how we fall into deep sleep. Discovered by researchers at Harvard School of Medicine and the University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, this is only the second “sleep node” identified in the mammalian brain whose activity appears to be both necessary and sufficient to produce deep sleep.
“To get the precision required for these experiments, we introduced a virus into the PZ that expressed a ‘designer’ receptor on GABA neurons only but didn’t otherwise alter brain function,” explains Patrick Fuller, assistant professor at Harvard and senior author on the paper. “When we turned on the GABA neurons in the PZ, the animals quickly fell into a deep sleep without the use of sedatives or sleep aids.”
How these neurons interact in the brain with other sleep and wake-promoting brain regions still need to be studied, the researchers say, but eventually these findings may translate into new medications for treating sleep disorders, including insomnia, and the development of better and safer anesthetics.
“We are at a truly transformative point in neuroscience,” says Bass, “where the use of designer genes gives us unprecedented ability to control the brain. We can now answer fundamental questions of brain function, which have traditionally been beyond our reach, including the ‘why’ of sleep, one of the more enduring mysteries in the neurosciences.”
Kinesin is a protein that moves things around the cell. That filament is a protein strand that gives the cell structure. That vesicle is a big blob full of cellular trash or some product that the cell wants to get outside of it. So the kinesin walks that vesicle down the filament kinda like a train on a rail until it reaches the membrane of the cell and tosses it out. This is an absolutely literal depiction of how it happens. Proteins are like little robots that your cells can animate using a molecule called ATP. ATP is how most work gets done in your body and is created by the process that converts oxygen into carbon dioxide. You eat stuff, breathe in and out, ATP makes little protein machines do stuff and life happens. Biology is so fucking Disney.
Edit: to clarify, before someone calls me out on it, I'm p sure that vesicle came from the rough endoplasmic reticulum and is being transported to the golgi apparatus for further processing so it's not necessarily gonna be dumped out of the cell just yet, might not get dumped out at all...
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Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
Kinesin is a protein that moves things around the cell. That filament is a protein strand that gives the cell structure. That vesicle is a big blob full of cellular trash or some product that the cell wants to get outside of it. So the kinesin walks that vesicle down the filament kinda like a train on a rail until it reaches the membrane of the cell and tosses it out. This is an absolutely literal depiction of how it happens. Proteins are like little robots that your cells can animate using a molecule called ATP. ATP is how most work gets done in your body and is created by the process that converts oxygen into carbon dioxide. You eat stuff, breathe in and out, ATP makes little protein machines do stuff and life happens. Biology is so fucking Disney.
Edit: to clarify, before someone calls me out on it, I'm p sure that vesicle came from the rough endoplasmic reticulum and is being transported to the golgi apparatus for further processing so it's not necessarily gonna be dumped out of the cell just yet, might not get dumped out at all...
Posts
Read the introduction and the discussion first. Only after you have decided it is worth your time do you read the stuff in the middle.
1. read the abstract
2. watch cartoons
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
I mean its only a 100 years old and not that old but still cool!
4 dollar bills!
the two isn't that old
You're fired.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
That's like.
Ten generations!
I always had a stage 0.
Read the title. Frown. Reread the title. Google that one acronym I'd never heard before. End up at the paper where that acronym was first coined. Try to read that paper so I can understand the title of the paper I'm trying to read. Repeat forever.
Ahh, the joys of recursive jargon.
Just keep Lex away from the desserts!
And that's terrible.
That's usually what I do when I try to read wikipedia articles about maths.
Boeing, SpaceX poised to build 'space taxis' for NASA
So, two types of space taxi?
I wonder if I should start reapplying for sheet metal positions for this.
Steam
Good people, doing good stuff.
Then I moved to Seattle to, theoretically, be near Boeing. It's a strange world.
50% of U.S. Bird Species at Risk
Taking into consideration the climate conditions needed for survival for bird species, and the rapid changes in climate that we've been observing, many species may be seeing massive reductions in livable range very, very quickly.
And these aren't dramatic, overblown long-term forecasts:
This article goes hand-in-hand with reports from other institutions. The Smithsonian discusses the risks facing our bird species in this article, Most Extensive Report Ever Published on American Birds Says There's Cause for Concern. We recently passed the 100-year anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, and while the U.S. has in some places done good work in creating coastal regions and thereby boosting populations of wetlands bird species, there are still very serious threats that we aren't even close to addressing.
(That article mainly discusses information in relation to The State of the Birds Report that was just published. If you are curious about what species are most at risk, and why, I recommend checking it out.)
Additionally, the Audubon Society has some wonderful resources on this very not-wonderful state of affairs. Their Climate Report allows you to not only research the impact climate change is having on native bird species, it has a truly massive and easy-to-comprehend database of at-risk species along with their current and predicted ranges for summer and winter, and the forecast for range loss in the future. For instance, this little dude is a Baird's Sparrow:
And by clicking on his name above the picture, you can see the map version of his very troubling future.
The Birder's Report has also covered this issue. Here are ten other species the Birder's Report lists as at risk of losing upward of 99% of their current range:
American Avocet
Black Rosy-Finch
Brown-headed Nuthatch
Chestnut-collared Longspur
Rufous Hummingbird
Northern Gannet
Northern Saw-whet Owl
Trumpeter Swan
White-headed Woodpecker
Yellow Rail
And in closing, here's a really good video about the issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN2-a82_3mg
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
That's not a typo. 6 years from now.
We're living through a mass extinction event and we mostly just ignore it.
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
I can't access the full thing, and I'm not the best at parsing these things, but I got passed this by a friend working on his masters in (some form of) biology.
We're seeing species extinction rates unprecedented since the dinosaurs got wiped. Actually this one might be worse, by the end. It's completely horrifying.
I thought that said artificial sweaters and was really intrigued.
They were declared extinct 3 years ago. They haven't been seen in the wild since 2001, and suspected to have died out in 2003.
However, most people only learned about it when CNN processes updated a two-year-old article last year and sent it into the RSS feed during a slow news cycle, meaning it got picked up and reposted as if it were new information, like the last one died last year or something.
An outpouring of grief on social media for a thing that happened over a decade ago, was swiftly ignored, and forgotten.
Time keeps on slippin', slippin'?
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
"Sandra has a good solid anti-murderer vibe. My skin felt very secure and sufficiently attached to my body when I met her. Also my organs." HAIL SATAN
1) Melt it
2) shine some plane polarized light through it
3) use chemistry to turn it into something that was hopefully recognizable
Not many tools in the toolbox back then.
Sugars are compact, complex little molecules that, within a sugar family, differ from each other only in the 3-D orientation of the various pieces. In other words, they all had the exact same atoms connected to the exact same other atoms, just sometimes connecting to the right side instead of the left side. We knew the chemical formula of the sugars and the basic structure of the molecules, but not their 3-D orientation.
This would be the point were I would summarize his logic and his actions to prove the structure of all of the sugars (both natural and synthetic ones he produced), but that's a longer post than I want to make, and not really the point of this story. If you want a good summary, here is an open-course video of a professor at Yale talking to a second-semester freshman organic chemistry course (click the link for lecture chapter 4). Some basic organic chemistry knowledge if obviously beneficial, but the guy does a decent job detailing the consequences of the various reactions, which is independent of the reactions themselves, so a knowledge of the reactions is not strictly necessary.
The point of this story is the thoughtful preparation Fisher put into this. Fisher developed a series of testable hypotheses that, if true, would provide information and, if false, would also provide information. That is the essence of science that I think gets forgotten sometimes. The doing is the part that get's the glory because it is the doing that creates the wonders we can play with. Greatness starts before performing the experiment, however. To do great things, you need good experiments that have sound reasoning. Fisher got the second Nobel Prize in Chemistry ever awarded because of what he did, but that only came about after he put the thought into deciding what experiments he was going to run and what they would tell him in a time when your chemistry tools were incredibly limited. Our tools are better now, but the need to think and plan carefully have not changed, which is something that should be remembered.
Also, a gif of neurons:
also, another pretty science gif today
a nice description, thanks to some person on reddit
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Hater's gonna hate.gif