My brother works in molecular biology; he tells me the field’s understanding of peptides have only just begun and it’s only through machine learning that they are now starting to make progress. 99% seem to be post-translational garbage, the other 1% is likely to be the basis of a revolution of treatment options.
I work in computational biophysics. The field has been slowly chipping away at the structure and function of every protein for decades (it’s a solvable problem, it’s just going to take a lot of time and energy) and recently a bunch of clueless SF tech bros have bumbled their way into the field and declared that they’ve solved everything.
Yeah, I get the same impression from my brother; he’s active on the science side of the field (recently published in Nature Communications about AI and peptides) and his pet hate is Kurzweil and their ilk.
I’m in the building sciences. The biggest unanswered question we come up against almost daily is “what the fuck was the last guy thinking?”. And we avoid, daily, admitting we were the last guy somewhere else.
How many sciences have you built?
This sounds like software engineering in a nutshell.
Software engineering is the study of constantly calling your predecessor an idiot.
Especially when you are that predecessor
Rules of Tech Support:
Rule T18 - You are incompetent. You just don’t know it. At least, that’s what your replacement will think.
Rule T18A - You will have to deal with techs who are incompetent.
Rule T18B - Sometimes, you really are incompetent.
Former intoxicology tech, was both guys daily lol.
Trying to prevent bacteria from developing antimicrobial resistance. At these rates in 30 years antimicrobial resistant bacteria are projected to kill more people than cancer.
I’ve been around the AMR space for a while, but only as a collaborator. Have helped do some bacterial assemblies and help find methods of detecting ICE. I’m a bioinformatician so I get to jump onto a bunch of different projects.
AMR is scary and not really in the public knowledge of upcoming issues. I think about it every time my son had an infection while he was very young and hope he didn’t get a resistant strain.
So are there any good news in this respect?
There was a paper back in December about a new class of antibiotics being discovered thanks to the use of Deep Learning.
This looks like a decent writeup about it, the paper itself is not open access
This is very welcome as it has been a long time since the last new class of antibiotics was discovered. Here’s a good paper that talks about the timeline of antibiotics
It’s been a little while since I took the AMR course, so I’ll let the papers speak for themselves instead of trying to quiz myself here on Lemmy.
How much of this resistance is down to feeding livestock antibiotics compared to doctors over-prescribing to people, or what is the cause do you know? Is there any way to slow down the rate?
I saw numbers on this recently. It was something like 80-90% of all antibiotics are given to livestock. So this is a huge contributor.
The level of AB use in livestock in various countries is astonishing.
Most european nations have to keep a very strict log of which antibiotics are used, and for what reason.
Meanwhile, until recently India was using Colistin as a growth promoter.Given the search summary of that one is “an antibiotic medication used as a last-resort treatment for multidrug-resistant Gram-negative infections”, that sounds very bad.
Clearly you need to figure out how to give antibiotic resistant bacteria cancer.
Uncontrolled dividing of the most dangerous bacterias known to man? What could go wrong?
We really need a big push into bacteriophage research I think. Get the bugs all killing each other so we can keep our antibiotics for emergencies.
I think there are so many new and great ideas in this space but you have to consider how science is funded. Funding bodies and reviewers want incremental research that is safe. This has led to our current situation. Phage therapy has been around for so long but is only in the last 10 years gained creditability and treated as a path to take. Ultimately, antimicrobial resistance is incredibly solvable even at a policy level and definitely across many scientific levels. But it requires more cooperation than farms, pharmacies, hospitals, states and countries can muster.
I think it’s dark matter. There are so extremely many theories around it and it’s very hard to measure experimentary.
I feel inappropriate near all the very universal questions here, but as a paleontologist specialised in some reptilian groups, the question would probably be “where the fuck do turtles come from?!” The thing is that fossil evidence points to different answers when compared to genetic evidence, and thez separated long enough from other extant groups that we keep on having new “definitive” answers every year
Genomics makes this answerable though? It’s just a matter of whether DNA is preserved or not in fossils. Genomics is more reliable than comparive anatomy. Comparative genomics can accurately place turtles in animal phylogeny. Sorry if I misunderstood your post. Or am I wrong here?
In phylogeny, genomic is just another tool. The point is that turtles are os course animals, but they do branch off of different reptile groups if you look at morphological evidence (which includes fossil data) or at molecular (genetic) evidence (which only includes extant species). This is not something frequent, as usually molecular evidence tends to strengthen previous morphologically established evolutionary relationships. And even though molecularists are more numerous today, their methods are neither better or worse than anatomy.
Phylogeny is not as straightforward as some people make it seem, and especially molecular phylogeny tends to rely on abstract concepts that can’t always be backed up by biological evidence (I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s very often very good, juste that a lot of people doing it do not understand the way it works, and thus can’t examine the process critically).
And so turtles’ origin are still very much an active debate!
Maybe we’re not talking about the same thing? I was thinking about the diapsid debate, where genetic evidence is overwhelmingly strong in favour for diapsid evolution Mitochondrial DNA evidence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC24355/ Micro RNA evidence: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21775315/
Tbh a core multi gene ML tree to all other reptiles would prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, maybe someone’s done that already but I haven’t been able to find it.
The diapsid part is very likely indeed, as fossil skulls of early stem turtles do show some temporal openings ( https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110218-024746 ) The point is more where do they nest within Diapsida, more closely to the Lepidosauromorpha, or to the Archosauromorpha, and where precisely if within one of those clades. The point is that can’t quite be proven using only extant species, whether by DNA or morphological evidence. And concerning ML, the methodology is often criticised, not because it’s bad, but because it’s opaque and thus it is difficult to justify and understand as a process
How to accurately estimate signal crosstalk and power delivery performance without FEM/MoM simulators.
For people and companies that can’t afford 25k-300k per year in licence and compute costs, there is yet to be a good standard way to estimate EM performance. Not to mention dedicated simulation machines needed.
That’s why these companies can charge so damn much. The systems are so complex that making a ton of assumptions to pump out some things by hand or with bulk circuit simulators often doesn’t even get close to real world performance.
If someone figured out an accurate method without those simulations, the industry could also save a shit ton of compute power and time.
When I was a graduate student, I studied magnetism in massive stars. Lower mass stars (like our sun) demonstrate convection in their outermost layers, which creates turbulent magnetic fields. About 1 in 10 higher mass stars (more than ~8x the mass of the sun) host magnetic fields that are strong and very stable. These stars do not have convection in their outer layers (and thus can’t generate magnetic fields in the same fashion as the sun), and it is thought that these fields are formed very early in the star’s life. Despite much effort, we haven’t really figured out how that happens.
I love how you stopped to explain stuff like what a big star is, but not the funny magnetism itself
Predictability in a chaotic system across various scales of time and space.
I’m an IT auditor. “What the fuck?” is the main question, we ask it daily
I do other audits, mostly safety and environmental, and my big question is usually “nobody made you write this, why would you write this down if you don’t want to do it?”
Can you explain? Are you referring to catching people doing stuff they shouldn’t have been doing?
For most regulations, the laws and rules say something like “companies must ensure X doesn’t happen”, and the companies themselves have to come up with a way to do that.
Let’s say the law says “companies that transport apples must be able to show which batch went where”.
Company A says “to comply with the law, whenever we move a shipment, we store the shipping order on our computers”
Company B says “to comply with the law, the truckdriver will film the place they left, count the apples when leaving, then email the entire dashcam trip, and count the apples on arrival”.
Neither process is wrong, they both follow the law. But when I go to Company B, I promise you they’re going to fail the audit. They’re (probably) not doing anything illegal, but they’re going to fail their audit because no truckdriver is going to count a truck full of apples.
They made that rule, and they really didn’t have to.
there are 2 types of rules, or controls as we call it: Legal requirements and internal policies. The first one is clear there are legal requirements in place and you have to be in compliance with. The second one is where I get the most wtfs. Internal policies are rules the company itself crated and said had to be followed. For example let’s say you are the IT manager of your company and you discover that everyones password to you system is 1234. You go out and look for market best practices and create a policy saying “All passwords must contain 6 numbers and 2 letters”. For this to be official you write it down and “publish” it internally.
Now, me as an auditor go there, look at the rule you created and check if it’s really in place or if you just wrote because. A lot of times it’s not. The company creates the rule but forgets or just postpone implementing it
Oh so so much of "dude you mande this rule up, you reviewd this document, why is this process nothing like this?!
It’d be interesting to see that answered scientifically.
I work in IT and haven’t had to go through an audit yet knocks wood
Any war stories you can share?
Mostly cybersecurity strugles. If you invest millons in a castle with a gigantic lock and a pit full of piranas, would you leave the service entrance open and give everyone in town the key? Yeah, more commom than not.
But an IT audit is only necessary if your company goes public or is the owner wants it, maybe if you are a tech company.
I’m only a professional scientist in the loosest sense of the term but for years we’ve tried to figure out why Joe can’t leave the break room to fart and who the fuck does he think he is?
He’s the president!
No one really knows how osmosis works.
I had to derive osmotic pressure for my statistical mechanics exam in my bachelor’s. So in what sense don’t we know?
We don’t know what molecular mechanism creates the pressure.
Isn’t it just water carrying stuff across a concentration gradient?
Gravity is just stuff falling, but there’s complexity there, as well.
No? Water can’t carry anything across the membrane.
Oh. Then how does the stuff get across the membrane? Does the membrane allow stuff to move over a concentration gradient without the water?
How does immunology work?
Pro tip: nobody understands immunology and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying
After covid, this strikes me as a dangerous thing to say. Are you an immunologist and could you expound on this?
My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.
And it’s true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don’t really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun™
To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.
We really don’t know what’s going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I’ve said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the “baby phase” of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything
My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)
Thanks, that was a great answer! I had no idea it was so complicated. I was definitely in the naive camp there.
field of study’s
“fields of study”.
Yea, because “What’s your fields of study most complex, unanswered question” is a perfect english sentence
No, just a misplaced comma. “What is your field of study’s most complex unanswered question?”
Origin of life matters to a lot of people I think. RNA vs other self-replicating molecules? Moon-based tidal PCR? Cell formation etc.
