Now here is some potentially wonderful stuff!
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Cinnamon bears don’t sound terrible scary. Branding people!
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I wanna live with a Cinnamon Bear
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This is a “not ready for prime time but really exciting” kind of thing. First off, a screening test with 40+% false positivity rate is not great, but this was an accidental, holy shit sort of thing in a population (young, pregnant, presumably fairly healthy people) with a pretty damned low incidence of cancer. Since this test was aimed at testing for fetal abnormalities, it makes sense that it could be fine tuned as a nearly-universal cancer screening test. Combined with increasingly successful cancer therapies, this is very exciting, especially for those of us who had close brushes (or worse) with it already. My kids wil live in a very different world than I have.
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Wow, if researchers can find tune these tests that would be amazing. I had one of those tests. Nothing abnormal tho
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Good news on the horizon:
If we can truly cure heritable genetic diseases, consider the implications! (Yes, the nightmares as well, but let’s be happy for the folks who can have hope)
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Here’s another “not ready for primetime, but exciting” sort of research result. I really begin to think Imay live to see the end of horrific end of life frailty. I want to see people actually live longer, rather than just dying longer. Might just happen!
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One more “not ready for prime time but really exciting” thing coming down the highway.
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Good news, but they point out we need this solution more than other parts of the world for a reason.
The US is unusually dependent upon managed honeybee colonies to prop up its food pollination, with hives routinely trucked across the country to propagate everything from almonds to blueberries.
This is because many wild bee species are in alarming decline, due to habitat loss, pesticide use and the climate crisis, fueling concerns around a global crisis in insect numbers that threatens ecosystems and human food security and health.
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Possibly also influenced because so funding is geared to tech projects that only seek to function as rentiers.
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And basic science research is increasingly painted as unnecessary, wasteful spending instead of the essential factor in progress that it is. The fact that it has no obvious economic impact right now is used to denigrate it’s value and argue against funding. The shortsightedness and failure to acknowledge history is stunning.
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As we know more and more, it stands to reason that the rate of discoveries will slow down as we approach ultimate knowledge* asymptotically.
*42
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News you can really wrap your hands around.
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They say that isn’t the explanation because then different fields would be different distances through all their easy breakthroughs, which seems fair enough. But then they suggest part of the problem is how much time researchers have to spend going through existing knowledge…which seems like it should also vary from field to field?
It sounds more like social causes, the pressure to publish they mention and I bet very much the hatred for fundamental science that Kathy and docosc mention. I’ve run into topics that people largely gave up on advancing decades ago.
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Around?
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