Physicians and scientists have long known that (1) women get more autoimmune diseases than men; (2) dosage compensation for the second X chromosome in female cells likely played some role in that; (3) RNA-protein complexes are often targeted by autoantibodies; and (4) Xist is part of an RNA-protein complex involved in X inactivation. Yet no one had ever looked to see if Xist itself might underlie the greater propensity of women to develop autoimmune diseases. Finally, someone put all these logical pieces together and found out that it does. Hopefully, this research will reveal some new and effective targets for the diagnosis, monitoring, stratification, and treatment of this suite of diseases.
Single paper, mouse subjects, further study needed, all the usual caveats, but having a target to look at may improve outlook for managing autoimmune disease far better than “yeah, it really sucks to have XX chromosomes, right?”
I’m pleased anyone is doing this research. It’s been a low low priority for a long time.
“This time, we’re definitely going to punch a hole in the fabric of space-time.”
coincidentally, i listened to that episode last night. it was so good!
In September 2023, Inna Zakharevich of Cornell University and Thomas Hull of Franklin & Marshall College showed that anything that can be computed can be computed by folding paper. They proved that origami is “Turing complete” — meaning that, like a Turing machine, it can solve any tractable computational problem, given enough time.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to-build-an-origami-computer-20240130/
Now I can start planning that trip to Australia.
Now I can stick my hand in that hole by that big oak.
Be sure to hug that platypus tight.
Well good news, it may be that scientific breakthroughs aren’t actually slowing.
A new pre-press paper on arXiv reanalyzes the data used by the widely covered Nature paper claiming the decline and finds it was caused by a host of errors from erroneous data to a bug in the visualization software used in the original paper.
Their conclusion: the curves that supposedly show declining disruption of scientific and technological work instead trace how metadata quality has increased over time.
More tech rentiers is good news?
Why do you hate the free market, Kathy! WHY?!? /s
No? Science not slowing is the good news.
Also science catching errors in science, FTW.
No. ArXiv is a popular pre-print server where people archive their papers before publication in peer-reviewed journals. I should have noted that for people who don’t read a lot of papers in the fields it’s popular in. Mea culpa. It’s in submission.
I ran part of the analysis done in the paper this morning. While I didn’t dig as deep as I could, it does appear that the visualization software ended up dropping data with the highest values due to a floating point error which hid the existence of outliers. Those outliers do appear to be papers with zero references and a CD index of 1 (the maximum disruption of science) - representing about 20% of the data and they do appear to be declining, relative to the total number of papers, over time. I pulled up a dozen random papers up they had sampled and and sure enough, they actually have references (which would have lowered their CD index).
I can’t verify that they actually cited random papers (there does appear to be a possibility of bias due to limiting checks to ones with accessible PDFs) and it’s a bit too time consuming to try hunting down papers directly on a Sunday and there could be some error in their data, but it’s pretty convincing.
ArXiv is generally a very good thing for fields that use it.
