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

Hard agree. And if this is useful, let me share something that often gets omitted (not by @kakape).

Variants always emerge, & are not good or bad, but expected. The challenge is figuring out which variants are bad, and that can't be done with sequence alone.


You can't just look at a sequence and say, "Aha! A mutation in spike. This must be more transmissible or can evade antibody neutralization." Sure, we can use computational models to try and predict the functional consequence of a given mutation, but models are often wrong.

The virus acquires mutations randomly every time it replicates. Many mutations don't change the virus at all. Others may change it in a way that have no consequences for human transmission or disease. But you can't tell just looking at sequence alone.

In order to determine the functional impact of a mutation, you need to actually do experiments. You can look at some effects in cell culture, but to address questions relating to transmission or disease, you have to use animal models.

The reason people were concerned initially about B.1.1.7 is because of epidemiological evidence showing that it rapidly became dominant in one area. More rapidly that could be explained unless it had some kind of advantage that allowed it to outcompete other circulating variants.

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