They try to get you to submit articles to them (usually for a fee too). But they’re kind of sham journals with no peer review or standards who no one actually reads. They’ll publish pretty much anything without even looking. They have bots that just mass email every corresponding author in every paper published just begging for submissions to their journal. Whenever an article is published in a reputable journal, one author has to have contact information publicly listed so they can answer any questions about the paper, and these predatory journals just scrape that info. It’s bad, so many emails every day.

I get the impression there is not model for why sometimes thousands of base pairs can fuck off with no impact, and sometimes it changes the organism unrecognizably.

No there’s many known reasons that can happen. Here’s just some of them, but in the end it all comes down to understanding that genes code for proteins, little molecular machines. Sometimes there are multiple copies of genes that code for similar proteins or even the same protein, so losing one or even more doesn’t really do anything as there’s more where that came from. Sometimes there are genes that used to be important but no longer have a role or were made redundant, and are free to sedit. If a gene codes for a protein called an enzyme, sometimes a change in the active site that binds the chemicals for the reaction it assists might be catastrophic, but a change elsewhere doesn’t do much because it’s not as necessary to the function of the protein. Sometimes changes even result in the a similar amino acid or the exact same amino acid getting put at thag spot (since the genetic code has some redundancies, a different combo might still end up being the same).

Many genes code for proteins called transcription factors. Transcription factors help control expression of many other genes, some of which might also be transcription factors that in turn affect other genes, etc. This can create huge cascades. For instance there are things called hox genes that are very important for creating a cascade that leads to the formation of different body segments, and differentiating the different body segments. Mutations in these genes can be devastating, in some animals leading to the dissappearance or redundant addition of whole body segments.

There is tons more to learn of course on specifics in terms of evolution, genetics, and molecular biology of course. I don’t think it’s comparable to gravity though, which we seem to have a fundamental gap and irreconcilable theories.

At least coming from a background of life sciences personally, it seems to me evolution is probably better understood than gravity. I think a better comparison to gravity in the life sciences might be abiogenesis (how pre life conditions give rise to life to begin with). Once life is going, evolution, that we have a ton on. Not that we know nothing about abiogenesis, but that it’s a difficult outstanding problem.

Have you considered answering this other question that would take three years and six figures of funding to complete? Maybe just add that to the paper quick with the next revision.

Or

Have you considered mentioning this barely relevant subject in the discussion, in particular this aspect, which has a recent paper you can cite? Totally not mine by the way, I am very anonymous. But this should definitely be mentioned.

Just to be clear on the first two points, you can designate anyone as your health care proxy. Check your state for specific applicable forms. In general if no one is designated though it will default to a spouse.

Health care proxy is also different than power of attorney, which sometimes people get confused on.

Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I was also quite worried after reading this post and you took all the words right out of my mouth. Conversations about functional disorders (if that’s what’s going on) can be very tough and aren’t always handled the best, or are unfortunately sometimes avoided entirely even if that’s the suspicion. There’s also still a ton of stigma out there about them (including inside the medical community) due to outdated Freudian theories without much if any factual basis and other myths like the symptoms are imagined or something. Different varieties of functional neurologic disorders may compromise up to a third of all outpatient neurology visits at least in part, the symptoms can be as broad reaching as the nervous system itself, and there’s still so much we don’t know about them with a great need for more research. I’ve found https://fndhope.org/ to be a great online evidence based resource for patients and families.

Totally get you. And he’s certainly taken many anti corruption actions that have nothing to do with Trump or America too.

It’s a pretty accurate descriptor of some catholic leaders unfortunately, including some who were outspoken and trying to whip up their followers with lies about the 2020 election.

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/01/12/capitol-riot-congress-trump-catholic-bishops-james-martin-239697

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/opinions/catholic-clerics-who-backed-trump-big-lie-moses/index.html

And yes it is a weird situation. Especially since Biden is actually the catholic candidate.

https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/distinctly-catholic/evangelical-catholic-alliance-becomes-conspiracy-theory-carnival

I am glad the Vatican is trying to clean house a bit though. Some of the people being removed by Francis are those in the articles above, like Strickland.

Totally this I read an absolute ton (and more even if you count audio books, which I do) and the vast majority is from the library. Even easier now with ebooks and apps. I’ve still got a pretty full bookshelf though of things like Illustrated editons, some real nice printings of some of my favorites, older books, and comics/graphic novels.

First I’m very sorry about your dog.

I don’t know as much of the veterinary world. And there’s a ton of information your vet and surgeon has on your specific case that no one online will have, so no one here is going to give you very specific answers to your case. So take everything that follows with a grain of salt, and talk more with your surgeon, not internet strangers. And it sounds like your dog was in a very dangerous situation, keep in mind a bad outcome doesn’t necessarily mean anyone did anything wrong, you and your surgeon included. I can tell you some general things about how repurfusion can be dangerous in humans though.

I was confused why both your explanations are hung up on free radicals. Not that there aren’t, I’m guessing there’d be more than usual. It’s just a bizarre explanation of repurfusion injury. There’s many dangers, but basically if you have dead or poorly perfused tissue (sounds like there was a lot of this from your description), and there’s a turniket or a hernia acting as a turniket in this case squeezing the blood supply so nothing is getting in or out, or very little is getting in or out, all of the harmful dead stuff from the process of that tissue dying is somewhat stuck there. But once this narrowing is resolved (taking off a turniket or getting the tissue out of the henria in this case) now there’s blood flow and all the material form this dying or dead tissue has a clear route back to the rest of the body. It also sound like in this case there was a really horrific large hernia with probably multiple sections of multiple organs that had already infarcted (died from lack of oxygen/blood flow) based on what you wrote. Sometimes in humans you can resect small portions of dead intestine and reconnect remaining pieces, but you can’t just take out their whole liver, they need that.

But free radicals is a weird red herring thing to talk about. Potassium is the main killer for repurfusion injury. There’s very little potassium outside cells (like in your blood and fluids), but tons inside cells. Well we have a whole mass of tissue from multiple organs that just died and that’s all getting released at once. The heart does not like this, and can go into arrhythmias and stop beating. Potassium is actually the final drug used in a lethal injection in capital punishment for instance. There’s tons of other harmful things going on too. But if large sections of multiple orgams had already died or been severely injured by the hernia, there may not have been any possible way to save them. And if you leave them that way the harmful stuff will find it’s way out eventually anyways, and the dead gi organs will cause massive septic shock as all the bacteria spill out from the inner gut through all the dead tissue into the rest of the body. Long story short, ischemia or infarction of bowels and other gi organs from a hernia or any other cause is an extremely dangerous situation requiring emergency surgery and can be fatal in humans, and even with that it may be impossible to save them. I’m guessing it’s similar for dogs.

Again take everything I said with a grain of salt, your surgeon has the best information on what actually happened. I just wouldn’t get too hung up on “free radicals.” Ischemic or infarcted orgams is an extremely dangerous situation for tons of reasons.

Yeah I feel you, the green party has some good positions. But then they go ahead and nominate people like Jill Stein, who has some good but many horrible foreign policy ideas like ending NATO and allowing Russia to do whatever it wants to eastern European countries. In climate areas has relatively good positions, but then despite claiming to follow science she will constantly reject it when it comes to her own bizarre theories about vaccines, banning wifi from areas with children, or trying to ban gmos that have extensive evidence for safety until they meet some arbitrary threshold in her own head and scientists prove a negative, which is impossible. Not to mention what that would do to food prices and create widespread shortages and hunger and cause actual harm around the world if she got her way.

I’d love viable third parties, but they’ve been picking terrible candidates lately, so I don’t really see the appeal atm. I think the path forward there is being active in primaries and pushing candidates forward in the main parties forward who support alternative voting systems like rank choice. Otherwise while we still have first past the post voting, any but the main two parties is never really going to be viable and will probably just end up being counterproductive to their own stated goals.

Not a specific community, but check out everything on mander.xyz if you haven’t yet. Lots of great science related communities on there. It’s already a pretty active instance but would love to see the communities on there get even more love.

Not really. Since we don’t have the ability to instance block ourselves yet I changed instances to one not federating with them to avoid them and similar authoritarian instances like lemmygrad and exploding heads. I swing pretty far left on the political spectrum myself, but there’s a difference between that and simping for dictators, genocide denial, and other problematic things. I don’t even get it, China and Russia can hardly be described as leftist by any definition but they’ll bend over backwards to defend anything they do, and try to change the subject to another country instead if they can’t.