Yearly cursed/nightmarish science articles thread. Will include articles from past years for completeness since old threads have been lost.

(04/25/2017) An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep — and humans could be next
https://t.co/Vk1Ot8hK0l
(05/17/2017) Exposure to BPA potentially induces permanent reprogramming of painted turtles' brains
https://t.co/8N3wWkRtSl
(07/23/2017) A Spanish scientist is making robots that he thinks could end sex between humans
https://t.co/80CwxRsINP
(03/08/2018) It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids.
The humanzee is both scientifically possible and morally defensible.
https://t.co/R925n7ieWz
(03/16/2018) Artificial wombs intended to save premature babies — for now. Next step could be 'immaculate gestation'
https://t.co/TqLAZ4rYqr
(09/04/2018) Sperm Count Zero
https://t.co/SUFhq27RmJ
(10/12/2018) Chinese scientists have created healthy baby mice with two mothers and no father, pushing back the barriers to same-sex reproduction in humans
https://t.co/5JQuThCDob
(11/01/2018) Male Breastfeeding Kit Could Let Dads Nurse Their Babies
(11/25/2018) On the eve of a major summit to discuss ethics of gene edited babies....looks like it already happened in China
https://t.co/Gj8fT33JSU
(11/30/2018) The First Clinical Trial of a Male Birth Control Gel Is Under Way
https://t.co/GyhuoIrlWG
(12/06/2018) This womb transplant breakthrough could open up pregnancy to all sexes
https://t.co/3xRJBJZg9t
(01/30/2019) The Death of a Dreamer
https://t.co/5VUT5lZF92
(02/08/2019) Transgender women 'should be entitled to womb transplants' so they can have a baby
https://t.co/dNX4mbTifk
(03/26/2019) Male pill - why are we still waiting?
https://t.co/YLW5Vv5wl0
(04/04/2019) The engineering of living organisms could soon start changing everything
https://t.co/Tbta3PBNag
(04/10/2019) UC Berkeley researchers develop hormone-free birth control pills for both men and women
https://t.co/umWSLnfekV
(04/11/2019) Chinese scientists put human brain genes into monkeys
https://t.co/99poklXBdP
(04/16/2019) First U.S. Patients Treated With CRISPR As Human Gene-Editing Trials Get Underway
https://t.co/UDzTzCVHDb
(04/19/2019) The Helmet That ‘Resets’ Your Brain - Magnetic stimulation is helping some people with depression
https://t.co/rAWZivAXdP
(05/14/2019) Human babies born using an artificial womb ‘possible in a decade’
https://t.co/UWyG3BLkL6
(06/10/2019) Upgrade Your Memory With a Surgically Implanted Chip
https://t.co/Piy8c5nK53

More from Science

@mugecevik is an excellent scientist and a responsible professional. She likely read the paper more carefully than most. She grasped some of its strengths and weaknesses that are not apparent from a cursory glance. Below, I will mention a few points some may have missed.
1/


The paper does NOT evaluate the effect of school closures. Instead it conflates all ‘educational settings' into a single category, which includes universities.
2/

The paper primarily evaluates data from March and April 2020. The article is not particularly clear about this limitation, but the information can be found in the hefty supplementary material.
3/


The authors applied four different regression methods (some fancier than others) to the same data. The outcomes of the different regression models are correlated (enough to reach statistical significance), but they vary a lot. (heat map on the right below).
4/


The effect of individual interventions is extremely difficult to disentangle as the authors stress themselves. There is a very large number of interventions considered and the model was run on 49 countries and 26 US States (and not >200 countries).
5/
Hugh Everett's birthday! Pioneer of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Let us celebrate by thinking about ontological extravagance. I will do so by way of analogy, because I have found that everyone loves analogies and nobody ever willfully misconstrues them.


We look at the night sky and see photons arriving to us, emitted by distant stars. Let's contrast two different theories about how stars emit photons.

One theory says, we know how stars shine, and our equations predict that they emit photons roughly uniformly in all directions. Call this the "Many-Photons Interpretation" (MPI).

But! Others object. That is *so many photons*. Most of which we don't observe, and can't observe, since they're moving away at the speed of light. It's too ontologically extravagant to posit a huge number of unobservable things!

So they suggest a "Photon Collapse Interpretation." According to this theory, the photons emitted toward us actually exist. But photons that would be emitted in directions we will never observe simply collapse into utter non-existence.

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.