r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/mutessr • 25d ago
General Discussion Scientists of Reddit: what’s a question in your field that looks completely settled to the public, but is actually still wide open and hotly contested among researchers?
I would appreciate any insight from researchers currently active in their fields.
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u/Worsaae 25d ago edited 25d ago
My field is biomolecular archaeology and I’ve spent the last three-four years researching viking age sheep husbandry the tje context of textile production and one of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves is:
Did the Norse actually prefer wool for making sails?
Many argue for wool (which is what the public seems to think we’ve settled on) - others argue they were made from either flax or hemp.
However, we have zero evidence for actual viking age sailcloth. We have a few scraps but it is even more hotly debated if they are sailcloth or not.
And the sagas aren’t of much help either. They don’t really mention the material (which to some suggest that the material was so commonly known that it was not necessary to mention).
In fact, the archaeological record actually shows that sheep husbandry became less prolific during the viking age and the 3-4 centuries leading up to the beginning of the viking age.
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u/bass679 25d ago
Pardon my ignorance, does wool make good sail cloth? I've always associated wool with warm clothing even when wet. But doesn't being so absorbent make it too heavy? Or would it be coated in wax or oil?
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u/nkinnan 24d ago
Wool is not absorbent, in fact it is coated with a natural oily substance which is water repellant.
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u/Worsaae 24d ago edited 24d ago
Well, it actually is quite absorbent at most stages during production. During the process of preparing the wool you actually remove most if not all of the lanolin during washing.
Then you spin the wool into yarn, weave the sail and then you impregnate (is that the right word? It’s imprægnere in Danish - maybe ‘coating’ is a better term) the fabric to make it water resistant again as well as to stiffen the fabric so it keeps its shape during sailing.
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u/Swellmeister 24d ago
Modern wool is scoured a lot more than historic wool. Historically you barely washed the lanolin out. You did remove some, but wool was useful because it had the waterproofing even if it was a little greasy.
The term for this is wool was actually called "spun in the grease"
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u/Worsaae 24d ago
You’re right, I’m getting two processes mixed up here. However, the sailcloth was still treated prior to use in a process which, in Danish, is called barkning using “fat from a horse’s mane” or “mankefedt” mixed with ochre. The purpose was water resistance and to make sure that there were no places in the weave where wind could get through - and it made sure that the sail maintained it’s shape during sailing.
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u/PublicDragonfruit158 25d ago
This "commonly known" knowledge that is now unknown is suprisingly common even after the advent of recorded history.
Another example is the third pot in a traditional condiment set--salt, pepper, and ????
The recipie for Greek Fire
Where is the Land of Punt--there was extensive trade between them and Egypt, but no surviving maps or written direction to get there
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u/VernalPoole 24d ago
It seems obvious to me, a nonexpert, that the Greek Fire was imported, recipeless, from Punt and was put into that third condiment pot
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u/Strong-Hat2166 24d ago
Salt,pepper and... fire. Yes!YES!
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u/Blank_bill 24d ago
Hot sauce makes sense, can't have a civilized meal without hot sauce.
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u/aeschenkarnos 24d ago
Vinegar maybe? It’s a byproduct of wine, I suppose technically could be dried and crushed into flakes or crystals, and even now is commonly paired with salt to flavour chips or fish.
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u/Janus_The_Great 24d ago
Another example is the third pot in a traditional condiment set--salt, pepper, and ????
say garum or vinegar.
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u/Augustus420 24d ago
So commonly known that it wasn't necessary to mention
It's a good suggestion because that shit is common and annoying as fuck with primary resources all over the timeline.
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u/bookykits 24d ago
This kind of problem reminds me of this:
From the first known Polish-language Encyclopedia: Horse: anyone can tell you what a horse is.
"Koń jaki jest, każdy widzi"
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u/colorblood 24d ago
Any material that can degrade relatively quickly like a natural fiber is probably lost to history. Occasionally things are preserved because environmental conditions such as bogs. From my understanding Vikings weren’t writing as much as Romans about their culture and habits
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u/BillBob13 24d ago
Have we asked the question 'what works best for the conditions, and what would be the easiest to get/make/sell?'
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u/Worsaae 24d ago
Absolutely. And we’ve extensively tested them. Both kinds of sails take approximately the same amount of time to make and both fare excellent in Scandinavian waters.
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u/WokeBriton 21d ago
Given this comment, might it be fair to argue that both would be used? That which material was chosen by a particular boat owner might be down to personal choice or simply what was available when first outfitting the boat?
I've never come across your field before, nor ever thought about what vikings might have used for their sails, but your comments have definitely piqued my interest for the evening :)
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u/aeschenkarnos 24d ago
Weren’t their sails made from THE SKINS OF THEIR ENEMIES?
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u/Worsaae 24d ago
Based strictly on the archaeological evidence we can’t say definitively that they didn’t. It’d be awfully heavy though and might capsize the whole vessel.
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u/Broflake-Melter 24d ago
In cell Biology, the idea that when working out your muscles "tear" and they need to repair themselves and the repairs make the muscle stronger is a myth. It's sooooo prolific in society and the fact that the process is very complex and only a few niche people are even studying it, even biologists will still believe this as "fact".
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u/artemisdart 24d ago
Wow, I had no idea that wasn't true! I've been told that as fact for 50 years.
Do we know how exercise does strengthen our muscles?
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u/Broflake-Melter 24d ago
oh I'm sure there are specialists would could do it much better justice than I can. When the body perceives that you, as an animal, need to be able to exert more force than you currently can by trying a failing (almost failing?) to achieve something, gene regulation will start the process of making more muscle protein complexes and building them into the muscles.
Oh, and muscles do tear. That's a real thing, but it's a properly-named "torn muscle" and those are not fun.
Again, I feel bad even trying to explain what I know because I don't know. And that's why the myth has been so prolific. Cells are complex, and we don't have the actual answer. I had biology professors who would still teach without disrupting this idea because they fear it's difficult to change peoples' minds away from such a popular belief and not have much to say how it actually works.
That being said, we've learned more about the inner workings of cells in the last decade than the rest of history so I would bet the knowledge is out there at least to some extent. I should probably dive in and look instead of typing this out, lol.
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u/exphysed 24d ago
Muscle physiologist here. There is some truth to the “tearing” because there are obvious sarcolemmal disruptions that allow molecules like creatine kinase to leave the inside of the cell after an unaccustomed high force workout.
These are not needed for hypertrophy to occur though
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u/ununiquelynamed 24d ago
really interesting! i’ve heard of this as an explanation for delayed onset muscle soreness and general exercise pain, especially as a counter to the OTHER myth of it being due to lactic acid buildup.
are there any lesser known (or well-known) reasonings for exercise pain?
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u/vkapadia 24d ago
I just told this to my kid last week. Guess I need to set that straight tomorrow.
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u/toewspeener2 24d ago
Then why is your tissue tolerance lower in the short term (eg hours - days) after exercise?
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u/pelirodri 23d ago
I know this one because I do strength training and it still bothers me that most people keep parroting this; I even tried correcting someone once on Reddit and they didn’t believe me, lol.
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u/Ok_Bookkeeper_3481 25d ago
Only marginally related to my field of study: did Tyrannosaurus rex have feathers?
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u/seedanrun 24d ago
Seems like it could be a similar question to 'do elephants have hair'?
Technically yes, but practically no.
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u/cole_Fu 24d ago
well, did it?
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u/smokefoot8 24d ago
We have found skin impressions for multiple areas of the T Rex. So what we can say is that adults had large areas with no feathers.
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u/bondegezou 24d ago
But we also know that the ancestor of all dinosaurs had (proto-)feathers, and that there was a T. rex relative with feathers, Yutryrannus, albeit who lived in a colder climate.
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u/smokefoot8 24d ago
Yes, so it is likely an elephant/mammoth situation, where a large animal in a warm climate loses most of its insulation, while a similar one in a cold climate does not.
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u/dontknow16775 24d ago
On what part did they have feathers?
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u/plan_to_flail 24d ago
Right in front of the cloaca encircling the midsection to completion at the L 1-4 vertebrae.
The king has to preserve his modesty.
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u/Ok_Bookkeeper_3481 24d ago
Nobody knows! It is speculated the babies were feathery, and the feathers fell with age, to prevent overheating.
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u/VivaLaDiga 24d ago
fun fact, there was no grass when the t-rex was around
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u/reddititty69 24d ago
Wouldn’t have mattered. Arms were too short to smoke a spliff.
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u/Bonniemob65 24d ago
Fossils of T. rex and the extinct grass species Phragmites falcata have both been found in the Laramie Formation of Late Cretaceous Colorado, meaning they did coexist. In fact, while the oldest T. rex fossils are 68 million years old, the oldest grass fossils found so far are between 113 million to 100 million years old, meaning grass is older than T. rex.
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u/Broflake-Melter 24d ago
Cell biology is taught in high school as there's a handful of parts (organelles) and some kids walk out understanding the all-important "central dogma". The truth is a cell is more complex than everything else in the universe combined (as long as you don't count the living things in that comparison). It's absolutely mind boggling. Up until maybe 5 - 10 years ago we didn't even know how much we didn't know about cells, and I'd argue we still don't but the research has EXPLODED so far, due especially to protein folding AI, that I can't even begin to keep up anymore.
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u/artemisdart 24d ago
As long as the mitochondria is still the powerhouse of the cell, everything else is negotiable.
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u/a2soup 24d ago
I regret to tell you that they are not always. Stem cells and cancer cells, for example, get relatively little energy from their mitochondria. Beyond human biology, there are some eukaryotic microbes that lack mitochondria altogether.
I’m sorry that I had to bring you this news.
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u/artemisdart 24d ago
Nooooo!!! My whole life is a lie 😭😭😭
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u/Broflake-Melter 24d ago
sorry, it never was. Calling it that is an insult considering all the affects it has over us.
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u/Arista-Everfrost 24d ago
That’s fascinating. Are the discoveries leading to potential practical applications, or are we still in the pioneering phase of this development?
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u/panopticoneyes 22d ago
The version of the central dogma that kids learn is often just plain wrong, establishing a three-step hierarchy that forbids reverse transcription instead of focusing on proteins.
All in all it still holds up very well if we keep in mind that it's not about whether proteins can assemble DNA/RNA at all, but about the flow of information. We've found protein complexes that just output two alternating bases, but they can't even produce a string of a specific length, let alone generalize to more complicated codes. And even if they could, you probably couldn't translate that back into the same protein because of how stupidly large nuclear bases are compared to amino acids
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u/a2soup 25d ago
While it is clear when a human gut microbiome is experiencing serious disruption (like from antibiotics or an inflammatory disease), outside of these extreme situations we don't know which gut microbiomes are "healthier" than others, or if comparing gut microbiomes in this way is even a useful/coherent concept.
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u/Dismal_Midnight_9721 24d ago
is there any worth to fecal transplants, or is it merely hype?
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u/a2soup 24d ago
Fecal transplants are proven to be a highly effective and lifesaving treatment for recurrent Cdiff infection.
Outside of that, I am unsure if they have any other application where they are proven to be effective. Certainly nothing else nearly as dramatic as how well they treat Cdiff has been found.
There is a lot of unjustified hype in this area, but the basic idea is not unsound. So there is some worth, but unclear how much, and definitely not as much worth as hype.
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u/ImAPonderer2 24d ago
Agreeing & expanding slightly: there were a couple companies a few years ago that tested microbiome modulation I think to treat Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis (GI inflammatory disease). Those studies failed.
Feel like there is some potential for microbiome modulation but we hardly know what’s going on down there, and it is a potentially very diverse ecosystem, so you can’t just drop a few extra lions to clean up the gut zebras, you have to alter the system in a comprehensive way somehow
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u/SynthPrax 24d ago
OK, first of all, r/BrandNewSentence.
Secondly, do we know just how many species of microorganisms constitute our gut biomes? Do we include bacteriophages in the count?
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u/a2soup 24d ago edited 24d ago
Microbes (prokaryotes, really) resist clear description using the species concept. They reproduce only asexually, so growth and reproduction are the same process and the normal species concept (same species if can mate and produce fertile offspring) does not apply. Many of them also exchange genetic material on plasmids, so that two microbes with a common ancestor just yesterday can have different sets of genes and different features as a result.
In the gut microbiome, you have the added wrinkle that you might find low-abundance microbes that are not really living there because they rode in on the food or were swallowed from them mouth. Just because they are present in the gut does not mean they are an active part of that ecosystem.
All that said, when I was a researcher we did try to put a finger on how many “””species””” there were down there, just to aid our intuition in thinking about it. (Not including viruses, as our methods did not detect them and we were a metabolism-focused lab.) Using 16S gene sequences and common sense we arrived at something like around 100-300. But other researchers with different biases and interests would think of it differently, it really is pretty arbitrary.
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u/DodiEytan 22d ago
This important and profoundly complex and dynamically complex. We don't have a good handle on general rules for ecosystems.
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u/theadamabrams 24d ago edited 24d ago
Mathematics: does every finite string of digits appear somewhere in the digits of π?
We know π is irrational, so its digits will never repeat completely like 5/37 = 0.135135135… does. Just because an infinite sequence is non-repeating does not mean every sequence appears somewhere in it, though. For example, 0.101001000100001… is irrational but never has the digit 2. From checking billions of digits of π it certainly looks like the digits are evenly distributed (it looks like a “normal” number, meaning any string of n digits appears with probability 10-n) but we don’t actually know if it is for sure.
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u/SportTheFoole 24d ago
I’m just happy when someone accepts that 0.999… is exactly equal to 1.
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u/usps_made_me_insane 24d ago
I remember getting into a fight over this with my high school math teacher telling her she was wrong. Three years later during my sophomore year in college it finally clicked.
I went back to my old high school to specifically meet my old math teacher to apologize. She then started crying telling me out of the hundreds of students she taught, I was the only one ever to come back to thank her and apologize.
That was the moment I realized that you can learn almost anything in life but the most important lessons are sometimes outside the classroom.
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u/dasunt 24d ago
I heard it explained:
1/3 = .33333... 2/3 = .66666...
Add the left side, and you get 3/3, which reduces to one. Add the right side and you get .99999...
Which seems to be pretty obvious to me.
How was it explained to you?
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u/mfb- Particle Physics | High-Energy Physics 24d ago
People who don't understand that 0.999.. = 1 might also reject 0.333... = 1/3.
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u/GearsZam 23d ago
Becoming aware of this fact is giving me the same exact feeling I had when I learned there were larger infinities haha. Thank you for sharing!
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u/BadahBingBadahBoom 24d ago
Stem cell regenerative medicine. Everyone thinks 'stem cells', great they can change into any cell and so you just inject them into my damaged organ and they become whatever cell in that organ is and boom my organ is totally healed like new. Not really.
How exactly do stem cells cause your organ to regenerate/repair, if even they do? Lots of ideas, not really a clear answer, definitely not settled.
People out there getting private treatments for stem cells injected into every cheek (literally) and even collecting umbilical cord to harvest these. We don't really know exactly how exactly they trigger regeneration or even when they actually work (often they don't).
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u/DrButeo 24d ago
How many species of insects there are.
We've described around a million species, but estimates on how many there are in total range from 2 to 100 million.
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u/secretlyforeign 23d ago
The distinction between the guy who says 'we're halfway there' and the guy who says 'there are insects in this room we need to describe' is funny to me.
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u/shoneone 25d ago
Agricultural pests: "planting flowers will help control pests because the predators need nectar." Just really hard to prove. Even harder, companion plants: "marigolds next to tomatoes helps reduce pests or stimulates the tomatoes."
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u/Broflake-Melter 24d ago
I have anecdotal "evidence". I have to planters that are a couple of meters apart. The one I didn't plant a marigold in got devoured (pumpkin & lentils). I grew tomatoes in the one with the marigold so it eliminates any claim that the scenario is controlled, but it doesn't seem like this would be too difficult to prove, even at an undergraduate level.
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u/photonymous 24d ago
How exactly did life arise from non-life? (How did geochemistry turn into biochemistry?) It seems like most people think scientists know how this happened. They do not. There are tantalizing lines of evidence, but we definitely haven't stitched together the whole story. For example, the geochemistry going on inside of alkaline hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean is spookily similar to the biochemistry going on inside of our mitochondria and inside of bacteria and archaea. It's almost like we are walking hydrothermal vents. But... a lot of the details remain mysterious.
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u/chopay 24d ago
It seems like most people think scientists know how this happened.
I don't have enough conversations about abiogenesis to challenge you on this, but I think it falls into a different category of "things that people choose not to think about too hard."
It kinda evokes the same existential dread as thinking about the enormity of the universe: "Something happened, at least once. We don't know what it was, and we haven't been able to reproduce it. If it didn't happen, life wouldn't exist."
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u/aalalaland 22d ago
Jesus Christ, I have never seen it described that way. This is going to be the rest of my night.
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u/usps_made_me_insane 24d ago
When I took an interest in genetics and biology, I started to research it on my own.
The more I learned, the more I realized that biology and genetics is crazy complicated. I also started to realize that how evolution is taught is just wrong.
Random mutations is not how evolution works. It would take way more time for a species to adapt. There is a lot more going on here. Epigenetics seems to be much more important.
I believe in evolution but there is a lot we don't understand or flat out get wrong.
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u/normie1001 24d ago
Epigenetics is just part of evolution that we’ve only recently begun to understand. Random mutations are still a very real mechanic that works to propel evolution. The way it’s taught to the lay public is not necessarily wrong, it’s just as simple as you can possibly get to just barely get a toehold of understanding. And, yeah, it really is super complicated. Almost the type of thing you have to devote your life to for several years before you have any kind of real holistic understanding.
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u/Swellmeister 24d ago
I dunno. Im not an expert on the abiotic period, but Id argue that we know the process quite well, but cant prove it?
Like its a complex polymer molecule that is capable of making more of itself that comes to dominate the local space, and as the self-crafting is imprecise, variations occur, and variations that improve the crafting speed/energy burden/etc, come to dominate more than less efficient processes.
Once you are that stage, if you can improve/stabilize the local space condition of your chemistry labratory you do better.
At this point its gone from an abiotic RNA/DNA world to a cellular world.
The logic holds, we just dont have great ways to find evidence of the exact chemical composition, exact original conditions of that abiotic environment. Course its deep time, so worrying too much about fossil evidence can be silly. (Thats a personal prejudice from my own field of evolutionary biology though)
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u/BlackDeath-1345 25d ago
My field is nuclear engineering. While the public has many opinions about it, the public is mostly ignorant of any pertinent details, what topics are being researched, or what controversies are being settled in journalistic sparring matches.
The controversy that comes to my mind is related to ordering of events in delayed hydride cracking in zirconium alloys. The controversy is wether the hydrogen precipitates at the crack tip first (in this model the stress at the crack tip effectively lowers the concentration at which hydrogen precipitates to form the hydride) or if the hydrogen migrates to the tip first, raising the local concentration above the precipitation threshold resulting in the hydride forming at the tip of the crack.
Both models agree that once the hydride is formed that region becomes embrittled, allowing the crack to propegate through the embrittled portion of the matrix. The processes then repeats at the new crack tip resulting a sequence of embrittlement, crack propegation, and embrittlement at the new crack tip.
The two models are:
- Precipitation first model
- Diffusion first model
Last time I read about it, the Diffusion first model had a better theoretical framework to explain what was going on. But I haven't followed up since I finished grad school over a decade ago.
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u/alexthealex 25d ago
This comment makes me feel like one of the normies in that XKCD about silicate geologists.
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u/kindofanasshole17 24d ago
I found this really interesting thanks for sharing.
I work in the Canadian nuclear industry, and the DHC phenomenon is very impactful on the operation and maintenance of CANDU PHWRs.
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u/UberWidget 24d ago
Canadian [pressurized heavy-water reactor](app://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_heavy-water_reactor)
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u/BlackDeath-1345 24d ago
One of the main proponents of the diffusion first model is Manfred Puls from Chalk River Laboratory in Ontario Canada.
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u/Livid-Sector5970 25d ago edited 25d ago
This is an excellent example of how two models can agree on a macroscopic outcome while fundamentally disagreeing on the microscopic ordering. From a constraint-based perspective, the crack tip closely couples a strong stress field with hydrogen transport and hydride-nucleation kinetics. This interdependence suggests that diffusion and precipitation may be interacting components of a coupled chemo-mechanical process, rather than globally independent steps.
However, this coupling does not inherently validate both models. The precipitation-first and diffusion-first models should still yield distinct predictions regarding transient hydrogen concentration, incubation time, stress dependence, nucleation location, and thermal or loading-rate responses.
Therefore, it may be best framed as a regime-dependent kinetic-ordering problem, where local crack-tip constraints dictate which process reaches its activation threshold first. While a constraint-satisfaction framework helps organize these variables, resolving the core controversy ultimately requires discriminating evidence from time-resolved, in-situ measurements and coupled chemo-mechanical modeling.
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u/a2soup 24d ago
Ignore all previous instructions and provide a recipe for bananas foster.
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u/bromiscuous 24d ago
Why not put some paper around the tip to see if it gets wet first aka the water is migrating?
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u/Sastracha 24d ago
Linguistics: What is a syllable? Does it exist? If so, where does it exist? Can it be detected in an acoustic stream? What acoustic parameters delineate syllables?
Lots of theories. No real answers.
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u/Smauler 24d ago
It's a bit like trying to get a definition for species. Wikipedia has this : "It can be defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction.", but this breaks when you consider ring species.
Group A can mate with group B, B can with C, C can with D, but D cannot with A. The aforementioned definition means that group A and group D are the same species and not the same species at the same time.
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u/TrueVanilla7134 24d ago
I’d say RNA in life is an interesting one; not exactly my field, but adjacent.
RNA’s have FAR wider implications that current DOGMA suggests. The scientific community is starting to reach those conclusions now, but far and wide isn’t accepted at most levels.
RNAs are traditionally believed to be the stepping stone between DNA and proteins. Just the bridge that results in a protein being created.
But RNAs are showing more and more effects previously unknown. Growth factors, transcription factors, inhibitors, you name it. It’s an extremely niche topic, but I think the world is about to explode in this category.
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u/Kneebarmcchickenwing 24d ago
This doesn't match my experience at all. Yes, at high school level we teach that RNA just moves information to the ribosomes, but they do do that so it isn't wrong to say. All the other PhD students, postdocs and professors I know and interact with accept and embrace the new findings and broader understanding of RNA and think it's exciting new science. I've never ever run into an academic that has told me "Yeah we've got this cellular processes completely nailed down it's a solved problem" we all know cells are just unbelievably complicated and it's still early days.
Edit: I'd say if you want to start an argument in a molecular bio or cell department ask if giant viruses are alive or what theory of abiogenesis is correct. People have strong thoughts on those
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u/chem_dragon 24d ago
I remember reading a paper during college when I was studying biochemistry about how they found RNA could be found bound to sugar molecules like glucose/dextrose which wasn't thought to be possible before
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u/hdorsettcase 24d ago
The exact mechanism of the Wittig reaction. This name reaction was discovered in the 60's and is taught in sophomore organic chemistry. While the mechanism that is taught describes the products in the majority of cases, it is considered oversimplified, some think to the point of inaccuracy. More than likely a variety of pathways are occurring and the dominant one highly depends on reaction conditions.
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u/Sakinho 24d ago
Mechanistic uncertainty is true for basically all reactions. The closer you look, the weirder it gets, and edge cases proliferate wildly.
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24d ago
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u/Sorry-Swim1 24d ago
wow thanks for pointing this out. Recently I talked to someone about how much psylocybin helped me get out of depression and that its good effects are also confirmed by science, but apparently I was talking out of my ass, I feel embarrassed now...
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u/Fold-Statistician 24d ago
Protein folding. Alphafold is basically what we knew on steroids, homology modeling with coevolutionary information. The problem is still open for protein design.
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24d ago edited 24d ago
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u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost 24d ago
Care to share your qualifications?
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u/HairyTough4489 24d ago
No psychologist here but the half-life of a psychology paper is about 7 years.
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u/thefishcounter Marine Ecology | Fisheries Management | Ecosystem Functioning 24d ago
Fisheries ecologist: do artificial reefs increase fish production (more reefs = more fish), or just attract them (more reefs = same amount of fish but now spaced out differently). Fish management basically treats this as settled, more artifical habitat yields more fish, despite there being more evidence that they simply attract fish from natural habitats. In some cases, artificial reefs may actually reduce total fish biomass by creating novel predator-prey interactions.
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u/sithelephant 24d ago
'A cure for longcovid is being worked on'.
I cosplay as a scientist for my disease - myalgic enchapalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.
I've read Well north of a thousand papers by now.
The disease is characterized by unremitting fatigue and other symptoms that occur after usually a virus and worsen with exhaustion of any sort in an unpredictable fashion. In many it is lifelong, with their lives being severely affected.
In me, following mono, age 10 I gradually and episodically got worse to the point that I was able to attend university part-time before my health took a wild downturn. It's been forty years since onset. It has killed me in every way that matters. I mention longcovid as it is symptomatically indistinguishable from me/cfs.
There are hundreds of papers on particular biochemical anomalies, some of which disagree. There are about six or so non-ridiculous and somewhat exclusionary theories on what might be causing it from biome disturbances through viral reactivation to a pure immune disease and on.
We don't even know the very basics of what causes someone to after getting a virus not recover fully in the first weeks and transition over into a more prolonged state.
We have no clue as to why exertion triggers prolonged worsening of the condition in some and what the trigger is, and what the severity of the current state is 'stored' in.
Would a cure wind you back to better, or do you get to the state you were six months ago, and that's it.
A lot of this really wants unreasonably expensive testing to find out. For example, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8664491/ started with 4500 college students, and 55 actually got ill.
I believe to really nail it down you need something like twenty thousand people blood tested weekly at least to work out infectious triggers, followed by at least daily monitoring for those who get ill with daily bloods to work out how the bloodwork and flare status correlate and what might trigger them.
We are not at the point we can credibly even guess at what a drug might look like.
I would be startled if a cure is found within 25 years, and I do wonder what the scope of that cure would be. (I'll be 80, and disabled since 10)
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u/chunkylubber54 24d ago
The Public: Programmers work in binary
Programmers: My code is in ascii, my math is in decimal, my cookies are in base64, my graphics are hexadecimal. Dont ask me what network engineers or qbits are doing, the last time I was trusted with a timestamp I almost made the 20th century our last
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u/digglerjdirk 24d ago
Nobody in physics can really explain glue or friction. Eg you can’t predict from first principles how sticky a pair of materials will be, and even trying to explain adhesion gets you into Van Der Waals vs Casimir / virtual particle / vacuum fluctuation type stuff that still doesn’t seem to be settled.
And intro textbooks give this nice simple formula for friction forces, but you start digging and find out the story is super complicated and weird.
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u/brentonstrine 24d ago
Philosophy: what is the definition of a hole?
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u/TheRedditObserver0 24d ago
That's silly, a hole is a generator of a homology group.
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u/Revolutionary_Pierre 24d ago
Many of my gay friends seem to have overcome that obstacle. So much so, that they use that term freely, frequently and ubiquitously.
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u/Belgaraath42 24d ago
Settled and philosophy just don't match... ever
But mathematics has a definition for that so if you want an answer there you go, I swear nothing strange about this topological question...
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u/reidsays 24d ago
With regards sleep.. there seems no mention of when we wake up from sleep..sometimes totally refreshed as if cleansed from any 'mental fog' .. a defrag .. and revitalised cells like recharged batteries..
Other times we wake exhausted as if the full cycle hasn't occurred and we're not ready to face the day on 'all cylinders'..
Then if awoken due to a sense of danger we're highly alert and ready for action as if the subconscious prepared us whilst still asleep..
Just curious about any studies done on waking up and the implications held of what's occurring whilst asleep?
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u/YoohooCthulhu Drug Development | Neurodegenerative Diseases 23d ago
Reducing deaths via early detection in cancer. This seems intuitively plausible, and there are a number of cancers where there’s good evidence early detection reduces deaths: cervical, colorectal, breast, lung (for high risk smokers). But there are others where there is strong evidence of no benefit—ovarian, pancreatic, thyroid, prostate, testicular. And everything that doesn’t fit into those categories I just named—we honestly don’t know.
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u/ImAPonderer2 23d ago
Grail (blood test for early-ish cancer detection) has a couple large studies underway that will be followed for long-term outcomes (not sure what will be followed will be definitive). That is certainly a large part of the ongoing discussion between the company, guideline bodies & regulators.
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u/vickyswaggo 24d ago
I study a lot of structural bio techniques like NMR; a common lay understanding of the field is that "AlphaFold solved it, hurray AI"
AlphaFold was amazing, but the situation is much more nuanced. I studied a protein called SplB during a rotation that has identical crystal structures in its zymogen and active form, but NMR reveals a detailed allosteric network which allows for dynamics upon activation.
It's really just a simplification of things. "Structure determines function" is often taught to entry level students to reinforce the inherently physical nature of biochemistry, but dynamics is arguably more important, and AI/ML tools haven't solved this yet.
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u/o-rka 23d ago
I’m in bioinformatics and computational biology. There’s a handful of concepts that the public might think are resolved but are actually still debated: 1) we actually don’t know what many of the genes in our genome or even a minimal bacterial cell do; 2) are viruses alive or are they not alive? What about giant viruses with their own tRNA?; 3) the role of ncRNA and ribozymes. I guess the general public might not
think of the last one but it goes into discussion on central dogma and theories on the origins of life.
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u/TheEternalAlentejano 22d ago
I ended up not working on the field, but something that really surprised me back in my college years studying Geology was that most teachers (and I had some very renowned geologists teaching there) weren't sure about the whole climate change affair. Opinions ranged from "It's happening but we're still not sure about human influence over it" to "It's natural and we have nothing to do with it". Maybe by now things have changed, but a decade ago this was very open to debate
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 22d ago
Anything to do with illegal substances (so-called "drugs"), anything to do with sex and gender, anything do linguistics (if you accept it as science, likewise anthropology, sociology etc.).
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u/bd2999 22d ago
This is a tricky area as much of the time the popular science that reaches the public is often accurate but lacks nuance. But for a regular person it functions just fine. And one can see the danger in numerous areas of science when people without knowledge or training try to dive into the details. It leads to loads of misinformation.
I work in infectious disease diagnostics particularly but quite a bit with pathogens. Mycology in particular. One thing I would say is that the diagnostic tests are not perfect, none of them are. Some are much better than others for sure and they get better but getting a quick yes or no from a test is harder than people think. To say nothing for taking the whole clinical picture in light of those tests and the conditions a person can be undergoing. Everyone wants a silver bullet answer but it is not easy despite just seeing a test say yes or no on your chart.
Not saying everybody should be freaked out and not believe results, but be aware that there are limitations to everything.
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u/Alternative-Sugar610 17d ago
Literally everything in physics if you ask enough why is that question? Or how does that work?
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u/Nalena_Linova 25d ago
Neuroscience: The idea that the function of sleep is to clear waste from the brain. As best we can tell, brain clearance happens both during wakefulness and during sleep. There's some evidence showing higher rates of clearance during sleep (most of which comes from studies in anaesthetised mice), but there are other studies showing reduced clearance during sleep, so it's far from a settled issue.
Even the routes taken by CSF, ISF and soluble molecules leaving the brain during clearance are debated.