There are also wimps. They might be dark matter.

I really like RING - really interesting new gene.

And his wife’s was Smith. They combined their names when they married.

It should be said that this is from Science Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Wienersmith.

If you want to be able to write practically anything on mobile, including ≠, ≈, ‰, ℝ etc., have a look at Unexpected keyboard. No spellcheck or autocomplete, though.

Oh, that sounds reasonable.

Thank you! It looks like it needs more people for more excitement, but on the other hand, one-man projects look possible. Should be fun :-)

So… What is it exactly?

Cosmology and astrophysics are considered classical? I would expect both quantum physics and relativity to play a major role nowadays.

For plants, PlantNet works very well for me.

I didn’t read the original paper yet, perhaps it’s there, but it isn’t in the linked article nor its source Ars Technica article. Can authors themselves upload their papers to these archives, and if so, how to do it correctly to make it findable both by DOI and other means? Does anyone know?

I agree with the other reply that pdfs are terrible for e-readers. That being said, Pocketbooks can open them (which is not that common) and it is possible to read them, although it isn’t so comfortable, especially for A4 pdfs. It can also open wide range of other formats and I’m quite happy with it in general. You can connect it to a computer and simply copy your books there, among other means of getting books there. But I have to say I have no first hand experience with competition.

We see the same side all the time.

Not completely same all the time:

That sounds very interesting. The time I saw total eclipse, at 99 % I was to excited about totality and it was cloudy. But I think I remember seeing the shadow rushing over the landscape.

What percentage was the eclipse? It probably got dim, but human eyes are very good at filtering out wide range of intensity changes to handle both full sun and cloudy sky. You really only notice an eclipse maybe at 80-90 %. But it isn’t that special even at 99 %. On the other hand, total eclipse is absolutely incredible.

There were some compatibility problems that required genetic engineering of the pig. I don’t remember specifics, but there was talk about potential dormant viruses in pig DNA that need to be removed first, possible problems with glycolsylation (sugar chains on the proteins outside of cells) and maybe more. The article also mentions that the pig had some human genes, I’m sure those help compatibility too. So many changes would be next to impossible to do until relatively recently, before use of CRISPR-Cas9. Also, it must’ve taken some time to certify the procedure. That’s why it took so much time since the topic was hot.

Wow, thank you, this is a great source! So less than 90% of the income is used to run the companies and do all the R&D. Honestly, that’s less than I thought and shows how greedy they are. If I read it right, they are more profitable than other large companies. Wow. So a state-owned non-profit pharma company could in theory produce new medicine 10 % cheaper and still be fine. Provided that state-owned company could be as efficient as a private one…

You don’t need profit in the sense of making lots of extra money compared to how much money you actually put in. I would be very interested in how much net profit is compared to gross in relative numbers. It’s a lot in absolute numbers, but I suspect not so much in relative. The problem why drug development is so very expensive is that you don’t just pay large sums for the drugs that are developed, but also for all those that are not, because they prove not useful during the testing. And there is way, way more than the successful ones, perhaps 100 to 1? I don’t have numers at hand. So in the end, you have to charge a lot of extra money above the production cost if you want to have enough money to develop any drugs at all.

Of course, that isn’t true for old drugs. Which is a reason why generics are so much cheaper. And also why patents need to exist.

I’m sure pharma companies abuse the system as much as they can, but not as much as it might appear at a first glance.

A state doesn’t have this kind of money to burn. If they did it, the money would have to come from somewhere. So either you increase taxes, decrease spending elsewhere, or start a business making a lot of money. Such as, say, selling the newly developed medications at a markup… It’s sad, but I’m not aware of a better way.

That being said, the cost of medications in the US is utterly ridiculous.

In a considerable part of the world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_driving_ages