Qs people asked on science and my replies to them - Part 186

Now you need to validate and see whether what you studied and observed agrees with natural or universal scientific principles or not. Whether it works or not. Whether the results are reproducible or not.

Because of the complexity of human nature, many psychology studies are not reproducible making the main stream scientists questioning psychology’s claim that it is science. The same applies to ‘social sciences’ too.

We have pseudo-sciences too that claim to be highly systematic like astrology, homeopathy, DMIT, …

The definition of science is getting changed. We now have very stringent rules to identify genuine science.

So don’t try to call everything you can study systematically ‘science’. It is not! Not according to modern definition.

Q: What is a preprint?

Krishna: Preprint is one term of art for an academic paper that hasn’t been peer reviewed or published yet. Medical research often involves questions of life or death that presumably deserve more pre-publication scrutiny. Peer-reviewing and publication of papers take a very long time. To speed up things, especially in a critical situation like global pandemic COVID 19, more and more researchers are going for preprints to help one another and spreading knowledge at a fast rate.

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, Yale University and The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) started a new “preprint server” for medical research called MedRxiv, last year. Page views to the MedRxiv site are now averaging 15 million a month, up from 1 million before the pandemic. Something significant has changed in medical research.

Many of the coronavirus-related papers being posted on MedRxiv are rushed and flawed, and some are terrible. But a lot report serious research findings, some of which will eventually find their way into prestigious journals, which have been softening their stance on previously released research. Researchers are encouraging posting to preprint servers as a way to share information immediately and speed up research to help the world. Lot of  research is out there, being commented on and followed up on by other scientists, and reported on in the news media. The journals, which normally keep their content behind steep paywalls, are also offering coronavirus articles outside of it.

This is the future for scientific communication that has been predicted since the spread of the internet began to enable it in the early 1990s (and to some extent long before then), yet proved slow and fitful in its arrival. It involves more or less open access to scientific research and data, and a more-open review process with a much wider range of potential peers than the peer review offered by. It has both pitfalls as well as hightened efficiency. It depends on how you use it or misuse it. screws are also being tightened. 

BioRxiv and MedRxiv don’t accept every submission. Pure opinion pieces aren’t allowed — there has to be actual research involved. Beyond that if something goes up on BioRxiv it just means we don’t think it’s dangerous and it’s probably not crazy nonsense. While for MedRxiv there’s heightened scrutiny of potentially dangerous claims plus a checklist of conditions that any clinical research paper must satisfy. Both servers also recently began declining papers that pointed to treatments for the coronavirus based purely on computer modeling.

Earlier in 1991, physicists began sharing theirs on the internet on a server that came to be called ArXiv (pronounced “archive”). Mathematicians, astronomers, economists and scholars in a few other disciplines soon followed suit — some on ArXiv, some on other sites.
Working paper is another (art). They’ve been distributed at meetings and seminars as long as anyone can remember.

But most problems and confusion are arising because of the media picking it up, interpreting in strange ways and reporting it irresponsibly. 

That is why we have 'infodemic' along with this pandemic. 

Q: Why don't bats get diseases despite carrying deadly viruses?

Krishna: Good question. 

Coronaviruses such as MERS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and more recently the COVID19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus, are thought to have originated in bats. While these viruses can cause serious and often fatal disease in people, bats seem unharmed.

The bats don't get rid of the virus and yet don't get sick. The MERS virus doesn't shut down the bat immune responses as it does in humans. 

Researchers found that cells from an insect-eating brown bat can be persistently infected with MERS coronavirus for months, due to important adaptations from both the bat and the virus working together. Instead of killing bat cells as the virus does with human cells, the MERS coronavirus enters a long-term relationship with the host, maintained by the bat's unique 'super' immune system. SARS-CoV-2 is thought to operate in the same way.

Stresses on bats—such as wet markets, other diseases, and possibly habitat loss—may have a role in coronavirus spilling over to other species. When a bat experiences stress to their immune system, it disrupts this immune system-virus balance and allows the virus to multiply. The MERS coronavirus can very quickly adapt itself to a particular niche, and although we do not completely understand what is going on, this demonstrates how coronaviruses are able to jump from species to species so effortlessly.

When exposed to the MERS virus, bat cells adapt—not by producing inflammation-causing proteins that are hallmarks of getting sick, but rather by maintaining a natural antiviral response, a function which shuts down in other species, including humans. Simultaneously, the MERS virus also adapts to the bat host cells by very rapidly mutating one specific gene. Operating together, these adaptations result in the virus remaining long-term in the bat but being rendered harmless until something—such as disease or other stressors—upsets this delicate equilibrium.

And need I say, we, the human beings, are creating this stress and inviting the disaster to fall upon ourselves?

Q: What type of knowledge is science, and how is it different from other kinds of knowledge?

If you ‘believe’ in ‘pseudo-science’, you no longer can claim you are rational.

Because both belief and pseudo-science denote irrationality.

Now choose whether you want to be rational or irrational.

Q: Scientist invented which animal doesn't need oxygen to survive?