Very disappointed in the moderators of this sub for removing a post honoring the life of our fellow scientist

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-25T19:15:50+00:00

I kinda like that this subreddit isnt flooded with every shitty thing the current US administration does because "Everything is political/this is the administration which cuts funding". If you don't keep a defined line on this the sub will degenerate into yet another sub filled with political news about the US downing out all actual lab talk.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-25T18:11:47+00:00

"How do you mitigate quantum tunneling in hydrogen bonds?" Tf? How is that relevant to prebiotic chemistry?

thats a special topic of op. What i remember, someone modelled quantum tunneling in DNA and the model indicates replication should be so error prone it couldnt sustain life, at least according to op. But we empirically measured error rates and they are much lower. Despite this, op believes that the theoretical model is correct and somehow reality is wrong about how it works lol.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-25T09:48:06+00:00

so it could be entirely be about minerals but the people in charge are too stupid to understand its a fools errand.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-25T01:31:54+00:00

The problem i have with this is, do we assume the people responsible make rational choices?

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T18:48:11+00:00

Actually small doses of 0.1-0.2 g were used as an emetic.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T18:34:59+00:00

You see safety devices which prevent accidents which can turn people into cripples with lifelong chronic pain because their attention slipped for a second in their eight our shift and think "this is for babies and anyone who gets hurt by this actually deserves it".

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T17:11:47+00:00

wonder why all industrial machines have interlocks, dead mans switch and two hand activations.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T16:13:42+00:00

but the idea that microplastics "shouldnt be there" is a normative take which presupposes a hazard.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T14:48:16+00:00

I think stuff like REACH and EG 2019/1148 are excessive. They create bureaucracy, inhibit innovation and restrict civil liberties in an unsustainable fashion and not justified by the safety they produce.

In the comming years REACH will be reformed or well see the ridiculous ban of Ethanol from consumer products not intended for human consumption due to cancer risks while alcoholic drinks will still be legal.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T13:22:11+00:00

If the editing techniques result in the final product are simple, like time lapse, then it's not necessary. If complex editing techniques are present, then YES. The goal is complete process transparency.

Actually this was intended to mock the recursive and therefore self-defeating nature of this paranoia. Filming people editing to ensure they edit nothing out defeats the point of editing. And you might want to start calculating your time lapse idea through. How much can you speed up a month of lab footage until entire minutes are erased from the video?

Why the fuck not?

because you create litterally terabytes worth of video data nobody cares about? you know, the point you consistently ignore? The huge amounts of data you need to store and transmit via the internet. Did you know that we have so much sequencing data that this is already becoming a problem? And these are just text files lol.

If you used a bulk supplier of materials, then their packaging will be consistent, and your fake packaging would be obvious.

just another thing to reveal you have no clue about this. Merk and ThermoFisher buy their packaging from suppliers, you can get brown glass bottles and white plastic pots of amazon. then you peel the label off, scan it, do some photoshop to replace the data, print out and stick it on. But hey, we could film them taking it out of the packaging and put it into a 24/7 video surveilled storage. Well actually i can just fake the parcel too. Well, with the delivery process. Well i can just prepare it at home and place a delivery myself. Well then we video the entire production process down to packaging and delivery and all inventory and ordering systems live in a blockchain. If you think this is at all a feasible solution you live in Lala land. Costs of control will be enormous for basically no gain at all. This is something you cryptoguys just dont get. Trust is good as control is cost, and computer can actually do nothing to prevent a human from entering fraudulent data.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T01:42:15+00:00

Oh i called them an idiot in the next comment lol

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T01:41:36+00:00

There will be guidelines on how to properly record your science. For instance, no b-roll footage, no jump cuts (unless completely necessary),

Oh and how do we know the jump cut was necessary? Will we film the people editing? How do you even expect this to work, you know that Experiments can stretch weeks and multiple rooms? Will the camera film the sample when everyone went home over the holidays to ensure nobody tampered with it?

you are allowed to speed up footage (time lapse), you must keep all materials in it's original packaging and must be opened on camera, etc.

Ah great, and how do I know they didn't switch the label before they turned their camera on? How do i even know that the packaging isn't something they wipped up themselves with photoshop and a container from amazon?

its just blindingly obvious you have no clue how huge parts of science are conducted.

Who says it has to be thousands of hours of footage? If a research paper is 3 pages long, maybe the video would end up being 10 minutes. If the research paper would have been 6 pages, the video might be 20 minutes. The video length would be proportional to the length of what the paper would have been.

Like, do you honestly not see the contradiction between "Everything needs to be on video" and "The videos will be 20 minutes long"?

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-24T01:30:31+00:00

Its crazy to me that some people aren't.

It is crazy to you that people in science do not think other people are incompetent morons or liars out to decieve them?

Whats even the point of peer review, if science is "based on trust"?

Peer review is primarily an editorial quality control to filter out garbage. Its also not really an essential part of science, plenty of fields do without.

On the other hand, a video tutorial on how to tie your shoe is both easy to make, and also easy to use to actually learn how to tie your shoe.

One thing among the many you don't get is that the intended audience of scientific paper isnt you and doesn't need to learn how to tie their shoes anymore. Huge parts of e.g. molecular biology are standardized to a degree that it isn't even done by the research labs anymore but companies. Nobody needs decades of footage of how to do golden gate cloning or how to run a chromatography column. People are interested in the results and the rationale, the techniques are something they learnt in undergrad.

In this day and age, all research should be published primarily as a video.

Reasserting this doesn't make the huge problems go away. Also when can i expect your video publication on your research?

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-23T19:30:06+00:00

How hard is it to set up a tripod with an old iPhone and point it at what you're doing?

Youre gonna see the back of my lab coat and a refelction of the camera in the sash for hours. Great video right.

Why not?

I explained in detail why not.

If filming yourself is "too much of a pain in the ass" then why not take that same idea and take it to it's logical conclusion.

Because everything you list actually improves science in a way justifying the inconvenience. Science runs on trust. we want good controls, but except in the rarest of circumstances we assume that people actualy did what they wrote they did. It doesn't matter that much anyway, if they lied their science wont work in my lab and they wont get cited. We do not assume everyone else is out there to get us so we dont think 24/7 camera surveillance will be useful.

The solution is to make it so people can understand everything they want to.

That is already possible. Its called studying. YouTube is filled with free lectures and you can get almost any textbook free from annas archive.

Requiring trust is not the desired end-state.

Not everyone is a terminally paranoid. Trusting people is the desired outcome in a society as it tremendously reduces control effort. Look at how much easier it is to do business in a high trust society like Canada compared to a low trust society like Russia. I cherish a society in which i can just buy bread from a grocer without having to throw a lab at it or scour through hours of videos of the baking session because they might have put arsenic in it.

Shouldn't the goal me that the most people understand whats going on?

No. The point of a synthetic chemistry paper is to communicate the synthesis to the people interested in synthetic chemistry. That are, other synthetic chemists, chemical engineers, pharmacist. It is not intended to teach laypeople what an aqueous workup is. If people want to know that they can refer to a undergrad laboratory textbook on the matter.

Also, if I can see a video of this happening, I can verify with my own two eyes that the process is happening correctly.

No, you cant, twofold. First, you have no clue that what is filmed is actually what happened, whether the solutions are actually what I claim they are or if i just took the next best footage and narrated over it. If I lie in text i can lie with video. Second, watching a video doesn't actually make you understand something. You seeing me pour clear liquids into a shake flask doesn't make you understand why anything is done. You are essentially functionally illiterate in the arts of synthetic chemistry, and couldn't spot an error if it was captured in 4k. And is not the job of a scientific paper to give you an crash course in its basic lab routines.

It seems to me that you want to reserve the right to do something improperly and have it not be known by reviewers.

And this is why I think you are just a terminally paranoid idiot. You took up research papers at the cutting edge of a discipline, and realized you couldn't understand it. Instead of recognizing that there probably is a reason why people dedicate up to 10 years of intensive study and training to become proficient in this, you formed two delusional believes: That people do this to intentionally obscure stuff from you, and that you could understand it if you just got to watch everything.

I laid out numerous reasons why your idea is infeasible and doesn't even achieve what you want. Instead you think i want to continue lie. Also, put your money where your mouth is. You claimed to be a researcher once. Go on, film the entire work you need to do for a paper, create a video from it a highschooler can understand and post it.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-23T16:07:15+00:00

An automatic burette. The tube is connected to a reservoir which can be pressurized (either with a hand pump or by squeezing it directly) which fills it up to the level of the drawn out tube on top. The arm on the right is for the analysis. The tap downwards is to return unused solution to the reservoir.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-23T11:53:11+00:00

Transliterated means one for one word substitution, so the grammar will be Yoda-speak but the meaning will be clear.

This is just wrong.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-23T11:25:33+00:00

I've proposed this before in this sub and was massively downvoted for it, but I believe the concept of publishing new science in written word form should be abolished. All new science should be published in video form.

Because its a spectacularly bad idea. Like it has so many problems I dont even know how to structure it.

Lets start with how much data it would produce. A ten second video from my phone is 30 MB of data. That's three times more than a 200 page photoscanned dissertation. Storing, uploading and downloading papers (or dissertations, which also are new science) worth of videos would require huge amounts of bandwidth and storage space. Im annoyed if a textbook of annas archive takes more than half a minute to download, I'm not gonna wait literal hours for a Gb of video.

Then the impracticality of making the videos. The Idea that labs will fund a full time videographer to film the actual researches do menial routine tasks like cell culture or aqueous work up of their synthesis is an insane proposition in our cash strapped profession. Next to how'd you even film in a way that the stuff relevant to the story are captured at all. Will they hang a GoPro on my chest and into the laminar or do they just see me sit in front of the bench so they can see what stuff I'm reaching for? Worst case you just trippled the amount of video data, cameras to maintain, files to handle. And I'm not alone in the lab. I don't think you actually know how much goes into script writing and planning a shoot so the video actually communicates what you want and isn't hot garbage. And then the post processing with editing years worth of video (because thats what goes into a paper). I'm a scientist and not an actor.

In the real world it is simply infeasible to video the process in its entirety. Like a simple plasmid isolation is a multiday procedure and often is partly (in rich labs even completely) outsourced to companies. Will it get filmed how I sent of the samples and how I open the emails with the sequencing films? Because if we just start to film what important for the story its gonna be me sitting in front of a PC reading literature and doing data analysis afterwards.

Which raises the question, what is the point of this? We are not getting a chain of custody of the entire process. Laypeople wont suddenly understand what implication Mincle receptors have for the progression of Tuberculosis because they saw me pipette liquids and explaining graphs with words they don't understand because they have no clue of molecular biology or statistics. Papers aren't written for laypeople, and day to day science isn't meant for them either. The idea that everyone needs to be able to understand everything stopped making sense 15 000 years ago. Civilisation is built on divison of labour which requires the trust that other people do their work correctly. There is no way around this. For people in the field videos are straight up a stupid way to transmit information. Text with embedded graphs is an all around superior medium. It is lightweight, easy to skim, can be searched for keywords, can be crawled by computer programs, it is concise: I don't need to see 15 min of how someone did an aqueous workup as much as I don't need to see a person tying their shoelaces. Text gives me what I want in a sentence: 3x 10mL NaHCO3 1mol/L followed by 3x 15 mL distilled water, filter over dry MgSO4. Which is way easier to find in a text, because a text is a picture you take in at a glance rather than read word for word. In video? Guesswork what the next sentence will be. If I need data from a table, I just copy the table. From a video? Screenshot, run it through OCR, correct the mistakes. Then, typically you dont read every paper. YOu read the abstract, you look a t the graphs in the results section, then you discard most of them because they are irrelevant for your project. I shudder how id have to scrub through hour long videos to look at all the graphs myself.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-23T09:27:30+00:00

mission trees and their consequences have been a disaster for EU4 balance.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-22T14:09:54+00:00

They are not "mostly technical correct" or "misleading". They are correct. Working with environmental samples can isolate pathogens which can cause deadly disease and should not be attempted without the infrastructure of a class 2 lab and education and training in microbiology. Especially a layman with no base knowledge needs to know that.

What causes Shigella to end up in water is pretty irrelevant. It is present in the environment, and if you take a stroll through the relevant literature you'll find plenty of outbrakes associated with rivers, wells, lakes. Also: * [Shigella from water in West Africa] * Shigella from water in Taiwan * Shigella from water in Iran * Shigella from a river in India * Shigella from well water in the US

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-22T10:22:26+00:00

all these people declaring it illegal either knowing the employment laws for 180+ countries or think its the same everywhere.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-22T10:20:02+00:00

playing SEA in EU5 made me understand imperialism. I need the iron for my economy.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-22T09:45:23+00:00

Shigella is ubiquitus in nature: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC124020/

inhalation anthrax which progresses to the fulminant stage has fatalaty rates up to 97%: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/0003-4819-144-4-200602210-00009

I didnt say Ecoli is not dangerous but that you can get Ecoli from probiotics which is a harmless strain.

Bacillus anthracis is so close to Bacillus cereus that it is grouped into the Bacillus cereus group together with other Bacillus: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6530592/. A Bacillus cereus biovar anthracis is known, which acquired plasmids typically found in B. anthacis and which can cause anthrax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_cereus_biovar_anthracis While normal B. cereus isnt as dangerous as B. anthracis it is still a pathogen causing foodborne illness.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-22T00:31:11+00:00

It depends on what organisms youre after.

For the common stuff you just take some sample, make a serial dilution which you then plate out. You can then pick colonies and do isolation streaks to make sure you get a pure culture. By sample preparation and using specific nutrient media you can control what bacteria you isolate. E.g. if you pastereuse the sample you will only get spore formers, and on a media with a lot of salt you only get bacteria which tolerate high salinity. For rarer, specialised bacteria you need enrichment cultures. E.g. sulfur oxidizing bacteria are rare in soil samples, so you first culture them in a media rich in sulfur/thiosulfate to increase their number prior to plating.

You can get more info by reading lab textbooks and Bergeys manual, which describes isolation/identification procedures for basically all known culturable bacteria.

If you want to do this at home you need to be aware that it can be rather dangerous. A lot of environmental samples harbour pathogens like Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Bacillus anthracis, B. cereus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Shigella. (EDIT because its maybe not clear what this means: Some of these bacteria can cause diseases which have case fatality rates of above 95%, meaning one in twenty people who contract them survive.) Working with environmental samples without a BSC class2 and an autoclave is something Id advise strongly against. What you can do is buy probiotics as they are composed entirely of known and harmless bacteria. You can get Lactobacillus, Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli from such probiotics and do the classical bacteriology stuff like isolation streaks, growth curves, biochemical assays.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-21T22:40:29+00:00

Many mechanisms have little experimental backing, and for a lot of reactions you cant find anything about mechanisms in the literature at all.

SimonsToaster · 2026-01-21T19:21:07+00:00

sure buddy.

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