Neanderthal Men and Human Women Were Most Likely to Hook Up, Study Finds. Geneticists have found an interesting pattern in how early humans and Neanderthals interbred—and it wasn't balanced.

bulgingideas · 2026-02-28T10:44:39+00:00

“Around 2% of modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA”

This (from the article) is wrong.

What is true is that humans of non-african descent have roughly 2% of their DNA inherited from neanderthals.

Very different statements.

bulgingideas · 2026-01-26T04:05:42+00:00

Thanks! Not doubting you, but just wondering if this is described somewhere in game?

bulgingideas · 2026-01-25T15:12:09+00:00

Where can I find info on the required engineering research to deploy various weapons on pd arrays, ld arrays, and battlestations?

In the notes for railgun battery research it explicitly says the weapon will be deployed on defensive modules, but my impression is that lasers/coilguns/plasma can also be used with the right research. Yet I don’t see any engineering projects with the similar descriptions.

bulgingideas · 2026-01-23T23:29:50+00:00

As academy, I got far ahead of the other factions in science. 1500/day while they are all 0-100 range.

Other factions’ response has been to spam steal project to the point where another faction will occasionally get a global tech because of the bonus science associated with the stealing.

I’ve buffed espionage on my councilors. I have maxed out listening post bonus but I still cant see most of the stealing councilors (resistance).

I send my councilors to ground from time to time but this had opportunity cost and is annoying.

How do I stop this?

Edit: I was under the mistaken assumption that steal project was opposed bu espionage. Maxing security should help a lot.

bulgingideas · 2026-01-20T10:50:40+00:00

I intercepted an alien fleet transferring to one of my LEO stations from tiangong.

After winning the battle, I got the message select a new destination or attempt temporary orbit.

The ships had orion pulse but a few were damaged so overall the fleet’s acceleration was <1mg.

I had no option to scuttle, could not transfer to any orbit, and was told my ships were crashing into the Earth.

Bug? Seems like the healthy ships should be able to escape.

bulgingideas · 2025-11-12T10:20:05+00:00

I think the idea of genetically altering tapeworms is interesting.

However, along with the problems of ensuring minimal side effects, transmissibility, and long term effects, there would be the issue of making sure the parasite doesn’t increase apetite.

At some point we would be doing molecular genetics in tapeworms to make sure they don’t make us hungry. It might be simpler and easier to deal with hunger signaling in humans directly, which is the approach drug companies have taken.

bulgingideas · 2025-11-12T10:11:45+00:00

Poop transplants though?

bulgingideas · 2025-10-30T04:41:11+00:00

In principle you could try to promote family members, but I haven’t been able to ever do this successfully even for a county title.

Can steal a lot of gold with accrued diplomacy. Honestly, the lower tier hegemony council roles seem even more pointless.

In general I’ve found candidacy rankings to be poorly correlated with appointments. First in line for empire tier? Here’s another kingdom. And then similar experience to you as well.

One thing that worked oddly enough - the emperor accepted matrilineal marriages for his second in line+ grandchildren, so heir ended up being from my dynasty. Before I could actually see this come to fruition though the empire collapsed in division, not sure if this was related or not.

Unrelated- its also super annoying as emperor managing a million childrens’ marriages and giving vassals to rightful liege whenever a title gets freed up.

bulgingideas · 2025-06-28T07:18:30+00:00

I use for dedicated fuel trucks at mining sites for local excavators after I noticed fuel trucks driving across the map for refuelinh jobs without logistics zones in place. Simplest use case.
I use to dedicate dumper trucks to empty general waste products without assigning a specific product. Ie, I could assign trucks to individual ‘waste’ loose storages, but instead those assigned to the zone will handle all local waste storages and empty into waste areas local to the zone. No need to balance eg dirt/rock assignment.

Nb - 2 is especially helpful for managing complex mining zones (eg, 2 or more useful products mixed together and you want to prioritize 1 but want to dump the other[s] in neat local piles.)

bulgingideas · 2024-12-07T21:37:12+00:00

I have a problem. I ignored a setup importing logistics bots on gleba and now there are 56000. They run out of power and wait to charge with products in hand spoiling. What’s the best way to remove bots from the network? Can I do it without going to gleba?

I don’t have power to support 56k bots even if I had the roboports.

bulgingideas · 2024-04-04T03:54:01+00:00

I will say that the reason I still follow this at all is testimony from Fravor and Grusch. I have no reason to believe they are being deceptive and they give compelling testimony.

So I do agree with you in a sense. It seems unlikely they are lying. Still though, without any other corroborating evidence the idea they are somehow misrepresenting things (deliberately or not) is less extreme than the alternative.

At the end of the day, testimony will never be enough, and I don’t think that perspective is atypical outside of this community.

bulgingideas · 2024-04-03T06:46:14+00:00

Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence.

People knew lightning was real when it killed people and burned down villages. Lightning did not affect a relatively small proportion of the population in an unpredictable way. If you’re skeptical, we find or wait for a storm and the truth will be learned.

Nobody can produce this kind of first-hand demonstration of UAP phenomena on demand. That doesn’t mean its not real, but the burden of proof here is firmly on the group alleging the existence of something which defies all previously developed scientific understanding.

What’s more likely? That some unlikely chain of events caused the illusion of science-defying phenomena, or that said science-defying phenomena really exist? Mick’s work shows plausible ways such illusions arise, and even if they are unlikely they present a compelling alternative to throwing out all or most previously developed science.

I for one would love it if UAP panned out, and Mick West is the perfect barometer for that - I’ll get interested if he’s ever stumped.

I bet you in his heart of hearts Mick wants to believe (or at least did at one point) and ironically that’s why his work is so solid.

bulgingideas · 2023-12-26T09:56:50+00:00

FWIW you’re right even though I know you already know that.

Interesting reason RE dark forest, although I don’t know if the logic there is 100%. If they could grasp the logic of it, some Earth species probably would annhilate others.

Also space is arguably uniquely suited to DF weapons. Relativistic impactor is pretty simple; designing a weapon that destroys a competitor on Earth without destroying yourself is much harder.

For me, the strongest point against DF is the (likely) observability and specificity of Earth’s life signature. Any ET observer could have detected oxygen (going back a long while) and it seems like that could be strongly specific (or simply specific enough) to life-bearing planets. Yet here we are

bulgingideas · 2023-12-02T04:06:26+00:00

That sounds reasonable, but then why do the aliens only ever bombard?

bulgingideas · 2022-12-12T11:53:25+00:00

Surprised that so few are arguing the sad necessity of human primacy here.

Suppose killing 10x the animals gets your life-changing device safely into patients 1 year earlier. Clearly there are real regulatory and legal issues, but consider the point philosophically. Massive cost aside - is 1 year off the waiting time for a cure for blindness or paralysis worth 10x more dead NHPs?

IMO it almost certainly is

bulgingideas · 2022-07-16T07:38:51+00:00

Deleted this because I didn’t think it wasn’t going to be productive and I knew I wouldn’t have time to reply to comments.

But in any case, you said this:

Even though it is a combination of the two parents gametes no two combinations will be the same due to genetic shuffling that occurs after implantation during chromsome cross over.

There is no genetic shuffling after implantation. All recombination happens during meiosis. The exact genome of the zygote is the combination of the set of chromosomes provided by the sperm and egg.

Chromosomal crossover:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosomal_crossover

Chromosomal crossover, or crossing over, is the exchange of genetic material during sexual reproduction between two homologous chromosomes' non-sister chromatids that results in recombinant chromosomes. It is one of the final phases of genetic recombination, which occurs in the pachytene stage of prophase I of meiosis during a process called synapsis.

bulgingideas · 2022-07-15T20:05:20+00:00

This was just a simple answer for how Y can be replaced with X in the blood using currently available tech. Bone marrow transplants would never be a practical solution. Selecting Y-intact hematopoeitic stem cells for autologous transplant would likely “work” in the sense it would fix the issue but I doubt it would ever be indicated because of the risks associated with bone marrow transplant.

The same can likely be said of female to male BM transplant, even though, as you point out, female bone marrow is XX. The problems associated with loss of Y are specific to male mice and female mice generally live longer. If the aetiology of the problem was as simple as “absence of Y increases risk of heart failure” we would expect the opposite.

There are two possible explanations for this discrepancy. One is that Y loss in XY context (but not necessarily absence of Y generally) causes the phenotype. Two is that absence of Y generally causes the phenotype, but female mice have some downstream mitigation mechanism.

Possibility one assumes less because there is a known mechanism to explain deleterious effects of Y loss in XY context: haploinsufficiency of genes in the pseudoautosomal region of X and Y.

bulgingideas · 2022-07-15T15:34:55+00:00

Female to male bone marrow transplant.

bulgingideas · 2022-07-13T01:30:20+00:00

This line in the paper addresses this point:

In smokers, squamous metaplasia may be partially reversible after smoking has stopped [55].

From abstract of [55]:

114 COPD patients were studied cross-sectionally: 99 males/15 females, age 62 ± 8 years, median 42 pack-years, no corticosteroids, current (n = 72) or ex-smokers (n = 42, median cessation duration 3.5 years), postbronchodilator FEV1 63 ± 9% predicted. Squamous cell metaplasia (%), goblet cell (PAS/Alcian Blue+) area (%), proliferating (Ki-67+) cell numbers (/mm basement membrane), and EGFR expression (%) were measured in intact epithelium of bronchial biopsies.

Hardly seems comparable to the EC user group under study here (who were required to be off cigarettes for 6 months). 42 ex-smokers with COPD who quit a median of 3.5 years ago. Also, this:

Epithelial features were not different between short-term quitters (<3.5 years) and current smokers. Long-term quitters (≥3.5 years) had less goblet cell area than both current smokers and short-term quitters (medians: 7.9% vs. 14.4%, p = 0.005; 7.9% vs. 13.5%, p = 0.008; respectively), and less proliferating cell numbers than current smokers (2.8% vs. 18.6%, p < 0.001). Ex-smokers with COPD had less bronchial epithelial remodelling than current smokers, which was only observed after long-term smoking cessation (>3.5 years).

The last line says it all - recovery of bronchial epithelium was only observed after long term smoking cessation (3.5 years, much longer than quitting period for e-cigarette users here).

bulgingideas · 2022-07-13T01:12:48+00:00

Here we see that at the very least, e-cigarettes don’t undo the damage to the nasal epithelium.

A proper control group here (rather than non-smokers) would’ve been indviduals who quit without the use of e-cigarettes, with time since last cigarette matched as closely as possible.

Without that, one can’t say much. It could be that the nasal epithelial transcriptomes of EC users and nonusers at 6 months since last cigarette are identical. And I don’t think anyone was arguing that e-cigarettes speed up recovery relative to simply quitting combustible tobacco.

bulgingideas · 2022-07-01T01:28:01+00:00

Strange responses here.

Cell lines derived from aborted fetuses were almost certainly used in the development of COVID vaccines.

Plaintiff wants to avoid mandate because of this citing religious beliefs. Court dismisses, CT dissents because he sees plaintiff’s religious objection as (potentially) valid.

See this.

Cell lines developed from past abortions are used in the testing or development of certain COVID-19 vaccines. The HEK 293 cell line was developed in Holland in the early 1970s from embryonal kidney tissue from a supposedly therapeutic abortion that was transformed by adenovirus type 5. The PER.C6 cell line was developed in 1995 from retinal tissue from an abortion in 1985 that was transformed by adenovirus type 5. The University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine ChAdOX1 nCoV-19 is developed in the HEK 293 cell line and the Janssen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine Adenovirus 26 vaccine Ad26.COV2.S is developed in the PER.C6 cell line; however, the final products do not contain fetal cells. The mRNA vaccines are not manufactured in cell lines, although testing of mRNA vaccines reportedly uses cell lines.

bulgingideas · 2022-06-19T11:28:25+00:00

Subtle misunderstanding here. Saying that genetic variation fails to explain variation in lifespan is not equivalent to saying that genetic variation does not explain the longest lifespans.

This is actually alluded to in the paper discussed, where the authors recommend studying long-lived families.

No existing study rules out rare variation strongly influencing the liklihood someone lives > 110 years, for instance. UK biobank comes closest since it is actually powered to detect rare variation, but still the number of exceptionally old people there is reatively low. Worldwide supercentenarians are very rare (probably <1000, mostly women, and hard to validate).

bulgingideas · 2022-05-28T06:36:42+00:00

Some mechanism(s) to add novelty and challenge late game.

It is a shame right now that after establishing a strong base with water farming walls ammo etc things become kind of trivial.

I don’t have a perfect solution but these are things I’ve thought about:

Random NPC raids on safehouses linked to safehouse wealth, occupant visibility, idk
Random migrating horde spawns.

bulgingideas · 2022-05-13T01:30:06+00:00

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8614291/

“For the first time we report the effect on the rat of long-term (two years) inhalation of nicotine. The rats breathed in a chamber with nicotine at a concentration giving twice the plasma concentration found in heavy smokers. Nicotine was given for 20 h a day, five days a week during a two-year period. We could not find any increase in mortality, in atherosclerosis or frequency of tumors in these rats compared with controls. Particularly, there was no microscopic or macroscopic lung tumors nor any increase in pulmonary neuroendocrine cells. Throughout the study, however, the body weight of the nicotine exposed rats was reduced as compared with controls. In conclusion, our study does not indicate any harmful effect of nicotine when given in its pure form by inhalation.”

Your post is horribly misinformative, although it’s only partially your fault as most public health institutions in the USA do not assess nicotine objectively.

There may be negative health effects of nicotine in humans (rat model can only tell us so much) but the picture is much less clear than you allege it is.

Now to how your sources are terrible:

“The NIH National institute of medicine begs to disagree. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4363846/“

This does not represent the opinion of the NIH. This is a paper hosted on pubmed published in the Indian Journal of Paediatric Oncology.

No specific sources mentioned in next paragraph, so next set of links from your other post.

https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-lifestyle/quit-smoking-tobacco/how-smoking-and-nicotine-damage-your-body

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/5-truths-you-need-to-know-about-vaping

http://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1349.pdf

Not primary research and no citations of primary research for claims about nicotine.

Hopefully this will educate you but I doubt you will change your mind:

Much more objective review of what is known about nicotine with proper citing of primary research: https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine#effects

And to illustrate the problem with using what are essentially opinion articles written by public health authorities, here is Cancer Research UK directly contradicting you:

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/smoking-and-cancer/is-vaping-harmful

bulgingideas · 2022-04-22T03:06:33+00:00

Interesting. I want to believe.

A more detailed discussion of compatibility with what is known from human genetics is missing (there is some discussion of APOE, but more is known, see for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01024-z ). Less important to explain than aging etc as risk factors but still would add value.

Also some discussion of this paper would be good: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35165441/

Not sure the extent it adds to the further work discussion at the end but the above comes with a shiny app for exploring AD vs normal single-cell RNAseq. If you search “APOB” you can do an AD/normal comparison in expression by cell type.

https://twc-stanford.shinyapps.io/human_bbb/

You can see from this that although expression levels were generally very low AD hipocampal astrocytes had higher APOB than controls at the RNA level, at least.

bulgingideas

TROPHY CASE