https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_diversity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeta_diversity

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783260

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

They acknowledge that fame is potentially confounding: Risk factors (impulsivity, substance use, etc.) -> Fame achievement | Risk factors -> Early mortality

The authors also appear to conclude that fame is semi-causal of the mortality risk. If, taking a causal statistical approach, the authors conditioned on the collider:

Risk factors (substance use, personality traits, mental health vulnerabilities) -> Becoming/staying a professional singer <- Talent/drive toward fame

I do applaud them for preregistering the study, but I think this paper needed a little more rigor in peer review.

This is a decidedly Eukaryote-centric take. Homeostasis in higher mammals is a complex network of genes -> RNA -> proteins -> metabolic pathways

Reproduction is also far more simple in organisms with binary fission cellular division.

A more appropriate scientific term would be obligate commensalism vs. "parasitic". That actually encapsulates their need for metabolic precursors from the host, but allows for tRNA, rRNA, origin of replication, etc...present in the organism's genome.

The actual paper states that the genome encodes transfer RNA's and ribosomal RNA's. I think that's a really important biological distinction missing from the popular press junket. The primary source material is well written and elucidates a lot more than the Quanta article. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651781v1

Allan Konopka does a good deep dive into "The Great Plate Count Anomaly" here: https://thinkmicrobe.substack.com/p/the-great-plate-count-an...

This seems really interesting for local LLM experimentation.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45687895

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

This! The amount of clinicians I know who simply read the abstract of a case study, with no real statistical interpretation of results, is a non-zero number.

Whenever I see some hyped up popular press article about a scientific study, my immediate reaction is to go to the primary literature. First, I read the study design and analysis methods, then I determine if its even worth continuing to read the rest. Study pre-registration should be a must and papers need to be more explicit about being exploratory when the sample size dictates it.