We enjoy Matt Reynolds’ writing (especially this piece on ORS), so it was very nice to receive a shout-out in his new piece for WIRED: Potatoes Are the Perfect Vegetable—but You’re Eating Them Wrong

A New Atlantis: “Britain should reclaim an area the size of Wales from Dogger Bank, the area of the North Sea where the sea is only 15-40m deep. We could do it for less than £100bn.” 

Everyone please welcome Matt Quinn to the online science effort to cure obesity. See for example his response to a response to A Chemical Hunger and his Potassium Maxxing – the results. 

10 technologies that won’t exist in 5 years: “Technological progress is not a mystical force that delivers the most important [technologies] first. Some problems are hard to solve, and won’t make you much money even if you succeed, and don’t get talked about on the news. What people choose to work on determines what new technologies are made. The 10 technologies above are worth working on.” We really love this one!

Jalapeños really are getting less spicy

Thermobolic on twitter reports “total failure” on a Personal Fat Loss / Coconut Oil Maxxing Experiment. We’re glad to see this report, null results are also important!

Friend-of-the-blog Uri Bram writes for the Atlantic: The Cure for Hiccups Exists. Among other things, it’s an interesting account of the interplay between reddit research and mainstream medical science.

Moctezuma III on twitter: “i love wikipedia, because you can have a random thought like ‘when was pocky invented’ and then learn that the companies president was kidnapped in 1984 by a criminal that called themselves ‘The Monster with 21 Faces’ and who was never caught.”

Streamer Perrikaryal claims to be able to play (and win) games using a non-invasive brain-computer interface (plus eyetracking), with a recent claim of beating the first Shadow of the Erdtree boss without touching a controller. (See also: “a clip of what mental controls I use and how I get around”). Big if true but unfortunately, easily faked by having someone else holding the controller off-camera, or any number of other methods. On the other hand, you could certainly try to replicate it at home. 

Even better new prosthetics?

Empirical tubetti: A Better Way To Cook Pasta? Doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of “see how many pasta rules we can break”, but it’s a nice start. 

The Time magazine article, “Science: Fudging Data for Fun and Profit” gives an interesting look at the state of science fraud and institutional confidence back in December 1981.

A recent paper, Bilateral gene therapy in children with autosomal recessive deafness, reports using gene therapy to treat hereditary deafness in five children. According to the paper, gene therapy worked: 

All patients had bilateral hearing restoration. The average auditory brainstem response threshold in the right (left) ear was >95 dB (>95 dB) in all patients at baseline, and the average auditory brainstem response threshold in the right (left) ear was restored to 58 dB (58 dB) in patient 1, 75 dB (85 dB) in patient 2, 55 dB (50 dB) in patient 3 at 26 weeks, and 75 dB (78 dB) in patient 4 and 63 dB (63 dB) in patient 5 at 13 weeks. The speech perception and the capability of sound source localization were restored in all five patients.

The Whitworth Three Plates Method

Origins of the Lab Mouse — the author says, “My new essay for Asimov Press is ostensibly about the unlikely origin story of the lab mouse. But it’s actually about the role of chance in scientific discovery, and how random contingencies can lead to technological lock-in.” For example, “In one case, a gene that appeared to be toxic to the liver when using one substrain of black 6 as a control seemed to instead protect liver function when a different substrain was used.” If this is true, how can we possibly expect any mouse research to generalize to humans? In fact, how can we expect something true for some humans to be true for any other humans? To be honest, a more likely explanation is that the described result is simply not true, and is actually the result of p-hacking or other research malpractice. In general this is a good background piece on specifically why not to take mouse research too seriously.

The compound bow combines two ancient inventions, the bow and the pulley. But it wasn’t until 1967, “after six years of development in the garage of its inventor in Missouri, a strange looking device, described as a ‘compound’ bow was born.” ZyMazza on twitter expounds, “A brilliant innovation hidden to humanity for like 4000ish years. What two things are waiting to be combined today?” 

DefenderOfBasic on twitter, “sick & tired of not being able to share links to my articles on twitter. having to share a screenshot and say ‘link in bio’ like a goddamn porn bot” decided “enough is enough” and “made a little tool to circumvent this stupid censorship”. May be helpful for those of you on both twitter and substack. 

Sensitivity to visual features in inattentional blindness:

Naïve observers fail to report clearly visible stimuli when their attention is otherwise engaged—famously even missing a gorilla parading before their eyes (Simons & Chabris, 1999). This phenomenon and the research programs it has motivated carry tremendous theoretical significance … However, these and other implications critically rest on a notoriously biased measure: asking participants whether they noticed anything unusual (and interpreting negative answers as reflecting a complete lack of visual awareness). Here, in the largest ever set of IB studies, we show that inattentionally blind participants can successfully report the location, color and shape of the stimuli they deny noticing.

Best summation of how we feel about semaglutide: