Ask Lemmy

Oh man, you just got my hopes up long enough for me to finish reading that sentence. Sad sigh.

To the point that it compares with asbestos, radiation and tobacco.

This is kind of ambiguous; it's in the IARC group 1, which indeed includes asbestos and radiation. It also includes a lot of other things, like therapeutical hormones, many viruses and bacteria, being a firefighter, leather dust, being a painter, processed meat, wood dust, plutonium, vinyl chloride and outdoor air pollution.

TBF ingesting anything that's not what the orifice in question is intended for might be harmless, but probably isn't. Don't breath smoke, don't drink a concentrated light organic compound.

I clicked one of the links, and read the study.

450ml of liquor per week isn't light to moderate by most definitions? If you don't drink 2 nights a week that's 5 medically significant binges per week, every week. One "drink" in this context is 1oz (~29ml). Most of the doctors I've been to, when asking how much you drink, will even ask of you have 15 drinks per week. They cut that off at 7+.

While a lot of us don't know the link to cancer, I'd imagine most of us know there's something there.

I'm fine with doing alcohol like we did cigarettes, I was just kinda shocked that they called "5 medically significant binges per week" light to moderate drinking??? Even when I was drinking an amount that people were talking about doing an intervention for, it was less than half of that (1oz (29.5ml) per day)

X to doubt.

You can find single studies claiming all kinds of crazy things. It keeps the popsci sites in business and apparently looks good to whoever is employing the yahoo researchers in question.

If there's a credible medical breakthrough you'll know because all kinds of scientists won't shut up about it. After CRISPR was discovered back in 2016, it was absolutely everywhere for months.

Grocery store basil normally has about 3 plants (like the other person is saying). For best success, buy the SMALLEST plans, and un pot them when you get home. Shake them apart, but be carefull with the roots. A few broken minor roots is OK, but try not to break the major roots. Then plant them separately into their own pots. When watering, do not water from the top. Get a pot with multiple drain hole at the bottom edges (not the singular center hole kind) and place it in a watering saucer. Fill the saucer and let the soil wick up the water. This makes it easy to see when it needs water and makes it basically impossible to over or under water, just keep the saucer fill. Try to keep the plants in a warm and humid place if possible.

If you do it right, it ends up being easier to maintain and grows larger plants. If you want to look into how to grow the biggest basil plants then look into the pruning techniques to encourage growth. I have grown some monster basil bushes and they all started from grocery store plants unless I wanted a specific type.

Idk about where you are, but basil plants sold in grocery stores by me are always way way too densely planted. They throw like 25 seeds in one small pot, which puts out a lot of foliage to look good for a very short window. If you harvest basil like you are "supposed to", any regrowth becomes basically impossible, and the plants die. The better way is to just cut off whole stems until there's only one or two. Or, if you want to keep a basil plant, just buy one from a gardening store, not a grocery store.

Leukemia patients have been successfully treated for the last 30 years.

This reads like those "we're all glowing!" pop-science papers that don't mention "black body radiation". (As in, every 300 K lump of matter in the universe emits a non-zero number of photons in part of the em spectrum that human eyes could see if there were enough of them.)

Photons carry energy. Water does interact with light, which is why it gets dark deep in the sea. While I'm sure they're measuring something, I don't know if the obvious null-theory is skipped over by the reporter or the scientists. (What's the control on that green light? Was it the same output wattage as others? What's the thermal change with and without the light?)

I'm a researcher myself, so I feel like I can weigh in on the "reproducibility crisis". There are several facets to it: One is of course money, but that's not just related to corporately funded research. Good like finding or building an independent lab capable of reproducing the results at CERN. It basically boils down to the fact that some (a lot of) research is insanely expensive to do. This primarily applies to experiments and to some degree to computationally expensive stuff.

Another side is related to interest. Your average researcher is fired up by the thought of being the first person to discover and publish something no one has seen before. It's just not as fun to reproduce something someone else has already done. Even if you do, you're likely to try to improve on it somehow, which means the results may change without directly invalidating the old results. It can be hard work to write a good paper, so if you don't feel your results are novel enough that they're worth the effort (because they're basically just equivalent to previously published values) you might not bother to put in the effort to publish them.

Finally, even without direct reproduction of previously published results, science has a way asymptotically approaching some kind of truth. When I develop and publish something, I'm building on dozens of previously published works. If what they did was plain wrong, then my models would also be liable to fail. I've had cases where we've improved on previously published work, not because we tried to reproduce it, but because we tried to build on their results, and found out that their results didn't make sense. That kind of thing is fairly common, but not reported as a "reproduction study".

There's also review articles that, while they don't do any reproduction themselves, collect and compare a bunch of comparable work. They usually have some conclusions regarding what results appear trustworthy, and what appear to be erroneous.