No clue, but… maybe they are easy to catch?? From the video it seems like the bats kinda just sit there and do nothing

Eating one is a terrible idea though, bats host way too many pathogens… which I guess is what makes this research interesting and disturbing

I’m back in cancer research for my current job again. But not in prostate… and more importantly, I’m on the computational side of things instead of experimental now

Also as to the topic… there were a few people in my undergrad lab who were actively studying JQ1 (back in 2017-18), but I’ve never heard much about the drug after I left. Thanks to you I finally found out why I never heard about it again (neurological side effects) so

Bruh the cancer lab (prostate cancer out of all things) I worked in as an undergrad was studying JQ1. Couldn’t believe I’d ever hear this drug name again. Really hope this can go somewhere, reversible contraceptive sounds exciting

I think it is. The first linked paper is the one designing the scale… so they went into more details on this:

The definition of toxic masculinity fluctuates depending on context. For example, hegemonic masculinity, sometimes used as proxy for toxic masculinity, is a manifestation of masculinities that is characterized by the enforcement of restrictions in behavior based on gender roles that serve to reinforce existing power structures that favor the dominance of men (e.g., [7,8,9]). Hegemonic masculinity speaks to the systems and processes that elevated men to positions of power and maintain their dominance (e.g., [10,11]). Additionally, traditional masculinity is marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression, characterizing it by an adherence to gendered attitudes [3].

Their final scale uses five factors: “masculine superiority”, “domination and desire”, “gender rigidity”, “emotional restriction”, “repressed suffering” (and a six one that they dropped). So some of these are indeed related to enforcing narrow definitions

I’m not a subject matter expert on this so I had to look this up but… it seems that the experimental method was actually introduced over 10 years ago? They cited this paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3088) from Nature Neuroscience that I don’t have access to unfortunately

I also didn’t know this before, but it seems that maladaptive “approach-avoidance conflict” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approach-avoidance_conflict) has been known to be a symptom and a predictor of depression for a while (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0165032706000139)

Realistically I don’t think they (as in the authors) as researchers can do much… but as you pointed out, there are possible ways to deal with this. Rats are common pests and I would be surprised if there aren’t some experts out there, so I am hoping that even acknowledging this issue alone would lead to better outcomes. This paper got quite a bit of traction so it definitely helps

poor mice that sucks

Part of the necessary evils of doing science… there is the saying that the lab mice is the one who sacrificed the most for scientific research. Also there’s this cool monument in Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_laboratory_mouse

From a scientific standpoint I hope they can do something useful with this technology too

This is an excellent question… they mentioned it in the intro section that “… previous studies have shown that individual clinical and sociodemographic factors explain only a small proportion (typically less than 15%) of the variance in age at autism diagnosis”. They also addressed it a bit deep in the supplementary materials. Copied below:

5. Demographic factors: Parental characteristics

We ran a few analyses to understand if parental characteristics can impact age at autism diagnosis, primarily through gene-environment correlations.

• Longitudinal analyses: In the longitudinal analyses of birth cohorts, accounting for ethnic minority status, parental socio-economic status, material deprivation, and maternal age at birth does not impact the variance explained by the GMM latent trajectories on age at autism diagnosis.
• Genetic analyses: In SPARK, controlling for parental socio-economic status and neighbourhood deprivation does not significantly attenuate the SNP heritability for age at autism diagnosis.

So I think the answer is yes, they did control for economic factors, and the effect is minimal

I’m almost certainly convinced that good early childhood intervention helps a lot. The paper also pointed out that the late-diagnosed geoup scored significantly worse on depression, self-harm, and other metrics… Even though the late diagnosed ones probably tend to have less severe symptoms (like how my diagnosis is supposedly “low support needs”). Not sure if early intervention was the sole cause of the massive discrepancy in mental health status here but it very much could be

I think the paper is more focused on genetics simply because of the field though. It is well known that ASD has a strong genetic component so there’s no denying that. But ASD is currently linked to like 300+ genes… I would presume that genetic discrepancy is what made some researchers interested in that. There was an accepted paper earlier this year by Olga Troyanskaya’s group that was also trying to see if there are different " subtypes" of Autism so to speak (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-025-02224-z)

Also I’m hoping that works like this can lead to better early detection and intervention (and hopefully not the other way)

Don’t remind me that… I was taking a stool sample at a Chinese hospital just 2-3 months ago (allegedly the best hospital in China, btw); my Americanized brain was not able to handle… what I had to do to

Coming to you from the country where HOAs are funded by ad monitors installed in almost every elevator in commercial/residential high-rises, and public restrooms (even in the hospital!) never stock toilet paper because “people will steal it” (not joking)? Color me surprised…

Unironically… it is considerably easier to relocate as a scientist, if not only for the lack of language requirements (English is the lingua franca everywhere in academia) and being automatically a “high-skilled immigrant”

Also this is Nature News where my personal guess is 90% of their reader base work in academia sooo

Sooo what I liked about this news is… On subreddits for researchers, I see a lot of negative sentiment towards the hard numbers of ppl wanting to leave US, because “EU has even fewer funding”, “difficult to integrate”, “no one really moved during the first term”, etc… In contrast to that this is actually a surprisingly level-headed and well-written report that discusses this on a more personal level, so I do appreciate that

That checks out, thanks for pointing this out. I’m much more familiar with clinical trials where ppl’s race/ethnicity do play an importance (and is also a hot topic for debate… from both sides of the political spectrum), hence I was a bit surprised they didn’t include it. If there really is no significant cultural differences that would be amazing

Also one can dream they get 120+ participants for scanning

To give them credit… neuroscience and scanning ppl’s brain is expensive lol. But yeah, 15 participants and no open access, I have no clue exactly what or how they did this

Welcome to the Google DeepMind Minecraft SMP server : ) (/s)

So the funny thing is… the lead researcher added “finding diamonds” since it’s a niche and highly difficult task that involves multi-step processing (have to cut wood, make pickaxe, mine iron, …) that the AI was not trained on. DeepMind has a good track record with real life usage of their AI… so I think their ultimate goal is to make the AI go from “Minecraft kiddies” to something that can think on the spot to help with treating rare disease or something like that

Y’know they could have used something like Slay the Spire or Balatro… but I digress