Intersting, however, there is something about this format of headline that always makes me twitch a bit inside. There should be a law of scientific headlines, something along the lines: Whenever a reporter writes, "Scientists finally discover why...." you can be sure to interpret as "Scientists have even more questions about why...". The phrasing confuses the understanding of the general public about how sciences and scientists actually work.
One analogy I like is to imagine our scientific knowledge as on a land map.
We have a large sheet of all there is to know. There is a small area in the middle that is mapped, that's what we know, it is surrounded by blank space, that's what we don't know. As we explore further, the small area expands, but by doing so, its border also expands, meaning that the more we know, the more unknown we are exposed to.
We expanded the area a little on the tardigrade side, so as expected, it revealed more areas to explore than what we discovered. As a general rule, science more often expands our borders than fills up holes, meaning that the more we know, the more we realize the extent of what we don't know.
Yep, it's the same pattern of thinking generally in the media and populous. Some law or politician 'solved' some problem. Then you dig deeper and see they changed how they count the stats to hide it, or just shifted the problem to some other part of the system that isn't really any better. Or eating eggs will kill. Next they're healthy so eat as many as you want. No, let's go back to them being unhealthy.
The main problems is that hides the name of companies and laboratories under an anonymous goop. Is not different than saying: "programmers invented a phone called i-phone" or "politicians gave an speech". Is stupid.
The second problem is that gives the false feeling that science works like a religion, where everybody has the same ideas and moves in the same direction as in a priesthood following divine rules. Couldn't be more wrong and damaging.
Saying "scientists" does not add relevant info. "We finally figured out why..." or using the passive voice would be the same, but less insulting. "A team in the university/company X" would be even better. Is the right way to show a minimum respect by all the hard work of this people.
Journalists don't do this by inertia because science was never in their pool of potential customers paying for advertisement, so they traditionally "don't deserve" the right to be treated as individuals.
And when they pay, here comes the overcompensation. The equally annoying opposite effect, where entire articles are centered around worshiping the person. Building a polished public image of TV celebrity. All his bullshit about their epic journeys and how they managed to help everybody despite everybody putting obstacles in the path. If you are lucky, you can find a couple of lines about the real discovery, placed between a photo of somebody eating ramen and another doing surf.
I think it's a fair headline, since they did find out why. It's just that, in science at least, every answer opens up a new set of questions, indefinitely IMHO.
Interestingly, that's my main gripe about scientists. Rarely does any of them actually dare to find anything out and settle a case. You can bet your aunt that the conclusion ends with "further research is warranted"... how better to secure your job!
> If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant
Well I have a newfound fear of humans creating a bacteria as hard to kill as a tardigrade…
I mean all we need now is to find out how to make a prion that forms TDPs so we can glue it to the outside of COVID-19 in some twisted gain of function research.
This is such a sad exemplar of where we've gone as a technological society. Thirty years ago, you could have suggested releasing a virus that destroyed cancer, and people would have cheered.
P. aeruginosa is an incredible organism. Not only is it antibiotic resistant, but it also is starvation resistant. So even when you have antibotics that work, it's often to difficult to get them to all the cells, since cells at the bottom of a biofilm just shut down completely for weeks on end. End the course of antibiotics, and they pop back up and start growing again.
Thankfully, there are major tradeoffs associated with those traits, which makes them not particularly virulent to healthy people.
That feels like fatally flawed reasoning. Nature took billions of years to sequester carbon. It’s taken a few hundred to release an amount that’s permanently altered the climate of the Earth.
There’s lots of problems humans can create that “nature” couldn’t precisely because we drastically compress time scales that make adaptation exceedingly difficult.
A different article from 2022 claims that following work found a different mechanism.
"""However, last year another team of Japanese scientists called this "vitrification" hypothesis into question, citing experimental data suggesting that the 2017 findings could be attributed to water retention of the proteins. This latest study supports that counter-hypothesis. "Our data suggest a novel desiccation tolerance mechanism based on filament/gel formation," the authors of the new study wrote."""
When desiccation begins and TDP is activated, it engages a process known as vitrification. Boothby said, “The glass is coating the molecules inside of the tardigrade cells, keeping them intact.”
Readit News
We have a large sheet of all there is to know. There is a small area in the middle that is mapped, that's what we know, it is surrounded by blank space, that's what we don't know. As we explore further, the small area expands, but by doing so, its border also expands, meaning that the more we know, the more unknown we are exposed to.
We expanded the area a little on the tardigrade side, so as expected, it revealed more areas to explore than what we discovered. As a general rule, science more often expands our borders than fills up holes, meaning that the more we know, the more we realize the extent of what we don't know.
> Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is.
> It's hard to describe it in words.
> So, I use pictures.
The second problem is that gives the false feeling that science works like a religion, where everybody has the same ideas and moves in the same direction as in a priesthood following divine rules. Couldn't be more wrong and damaging.
Saying "scientists" does not add relevant info. "We finally figured out why..." or using the passive voice would be the same, but less insulting. "A team in the university/company X" would be even better. Is the right way to show a minimum respect by all the hard work of this people.
Journalists don't do this by inertia because science was never in their pool of potential customers paying for advertisement, so they traditionally "don't deserve" the right to be treated as individuals.
And when they pay, here comes the overcompensation. The equally annoying opposite effect, where entire articles are centered around worshiping the person. Building a polished public image of TV celebrity. All his bullshit about their epic journeys and how they managed to help everybody despite everybody putting obstacles in the path. If you are lucky, you can find a couple of lines about the real discovery, placed between a photo of somebody eating ramen and another doing surf.
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Well I have a newfound fear of humans creating a bacteria as hard to kill as a tardigrade…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonas_aeruginosa
Eventually we'll get to a point where nothing will work against these
Thankfully, there are major tradeoffs associated with those traits, which makes them not particularly virulent to healthy people.
There’s lots of problems humans can create that “nature” couldn’t precisely because we drastically compress time scales that make adaptation exceedingly difficult.
Article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/scientists-glean-new...
Going from "Tartigrade-specific intrinsically" to a single T in the acronym is rather interesting...
That acronym.
Funny, I always thought the electron microscope images of tardigrades looked like the monsters in HAZMAT suits from Monsters Inc.
https://www.intelligentliving.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/...
When desiccation begins and TDP is activated, it engages a process known as vitrification. Boothby said, “The glass is coating the molecules inside of the tardigrade cells, keeping them intact.”
Not that cryonics are necessarily in a better position about that, so I guess for comparison between those methods the point stands regardless.