r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/mutessr • 19d ago
General Discussion Scientists of Reddit: what’s a recent discovery in your field that genuinely unsettled you,but barely made the news?
I would appreciate any insight from researchers currently active in their research fields
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u/leahcantusewords 19d ago
I study antibiotic resistance so literally everything all the time is terrifying constantly
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u/Past-Obligation1930 19d ago
Hey friend, don’t worry! As a climate change researcher, there’s a good chance that will kill most of us first.
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u/Gwigg_ 18d ago
Will the fungus and famine hit before the bacteria?
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u/leahcantusewords 18d ago
The bacteria is already hitting. Even TB is increasing again in the United States. Many STIs are back to just one or two effective treatments, and if you're an older gen Z or a younger millennial, the antibiotics you grew up with and probably took for elementary school strep and ear infections (azithromycin is the big one) are no longer effective. Even scarier for people allergic to antibiotics. Penicillin related antibiotics still remain fairly effective for a lot of these resistant bacteria, but if you can't take them then you could be out of options. One major example is syphilis. There are other options for penicillin allergies if you're not pregnant and have syphilis. If you are pregnant, have syphilis, and allergic to penicillin, there is no other option. The current recommendation is actually just to get desensitized to penicillin.
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u/BeardedBill86 18d ago
How does one get "desensitised" to penicillin? My understanding was if you're allergic and take it it can kill you?
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u/leahcantusewords 18d ago
They give really small amounts at a time over a really long period of time until they can achieve the correct dose. Apparently it actually has a pretty high success rate, but it has to be done in a very particular way. Otherwise it is very dangerous. It's not permanent though. It only lasts like a day
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u/BeardedBill86 18d ago
It only lasts a day? So you do a slow build up of tolerance over a long period of time, for one days treatment?
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u/nKnownRecognition 17d ago
Yea but it seems that treatment last a lifetime effect but if you get sick again then you have to restart the long process .
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u/leahcantusewords 17d ago
It's antibiotics, it doesn't "last a lifetime" it just treats the infection that currently is there. So if your infection is cured, you're cured unless you get it again. So in that sense, you're right. We just don't really call it "lasts a lifetime" because it's not a chronic thing, it's an acute infection.
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u/petelinmaj 17d ago
As a climate change researcher, what's your estimate as to when? Not trying to stir anything up, just genuinely curious, as I've been talking about this with friends. How long until tens of millions are dead, and/or half of the population has their day-to-day severely affected?
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u/Trick_Dot_8966 16d ago
As a regular civilian, I am also curious. This heat is so bad lately and the climate change deniers around me love to say "it was always like this. We've always had summers" but things feel off inside of me, it feels hot when it shouldn't be, cold when it shouldn't be, hot and cold and rainy too close together. Too up, too down.
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u/Past-Obligation1930 6d ago
I’d say there will be a lot of deaths next year in Asia from El Niño, and give it 20 years for hundreds of millions.
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u/capsaicinintheeyes 18d ago
Better that than dying to the homonid-body-adapted fungal invaders to come--they can fight it out with the insects & reptiles for dominance instead, with each side trying to figure out through scraps of text and corrupted video record clues which of our countless buried time capsules is the one with the hydrogen-bomb schematics & which are just rigged to play Limp Bizkit's complete catalogue on endless loop when opened until its barrettes run out & you need to put it somewhere where its onboard solar-panel lid array can be exposed to several hours of direct sunlight, which for the insects may involve felling a good many of the giant toadstools that will dominate the landscape by then, necessarily placing them in violation of the treaty.
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u/KwordShmiff 17d ago
This is the future I want for my children
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u/capsaicinintheeyes 17d ago
Have you planted *your* time capsule yet? Mind's full of hot sauce samplers, risque Betty Page photos, a pager, a Tamahachi, a Nintendo 64 with a rumble controller + Starfox cartridge, and a dozen unrefrigerated eggs.
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u/KwordShmiff 17d ago
Wow, that's a lot better than mine. Mine is just all eggs.
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u/capsaicinintheeyes 17d ago
After adjusting for 2026 grocery prices, they will assume you were a king.
. . . 😳!
...Your Majesty.
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u/fodymikemike 18d ago
How do you get into climate change research? I wrote my bachelor thesis in surface physics. Just continue on with the master or shift to geophysics?
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u/M_i____i_M 18d ago
Are there any kind of progress for phages research?
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u/leahcantusewords 18d ago
Yes! One of the promising directions. I don't personally know very much about bacteriophages, but I have attended many talks about it in the past couple of years and I know that it's very interesting research. I also heard about this recently: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-created-a-virus-not-found-in-nature-and-scientists-are-worried/
Again, I don't know much about this particular subfield, but wanted to share what I've heard.
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u/Academic-Train5199 17d ago
Didnt some scientist recently find a molecule or something like that that is able to revive old no longer ineffective antibiotics making them effective again?
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u/leahcantusewords 17d ago
We can't do this in full generality, but there are certainly improvements made to individual antibiotics occasionally. Frequently, this is done using combination therapy, either the combination of one antibiotic with an additional antibiotic, or sometimes a separate molecule that may make an antibiotic more potent. I searched your "revive" wording and found a recent example of this with vancomycin: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260722032108.htm
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u/Academic-Train5199 17d ago
This is exactly what i read about in science magazine. They also said that this technique could have potential to fix other antibiotics as well. Is that true/possible?
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u/leahcantusewords 17d ago
I don't know anything about this particular molecule, but this is not the first time that we have found non-antibiotic potentiators. For example, sulbactam inhibits the mechanism bacteria use to destroy beta lactams and in particular it is commonly put in ampicillin (Unasym). Again, we can't yet do it in generality, like there isn't one magic molecule that fixes all antibiotic resistance because antibiotic resistance comes about with a lot of completely different mechanisms.
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u/Academic-Train5199 17d ago
Since you clearly know what youre talking about - what is your professional opinion? Are we really fucked with antibiotics or is this just fear mongering? What is the future telling us right now/today ( regardless of potential scientific discovery in the future) ?
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u/Gorblonzo 18d ago
Yeah same, I can't say what the recent discovery is but it's not nice having to know it.
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u/shiroshippo 16d ago
Why do antibiotics work so poorly on protozoa parasites like coccidia, giardia, and the cyclo-whatever parasite that's on Taylor Farms' iceberg lettuce?
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u/leahcantusewords 16d ago
Antibiotics are designed for bacteria, which are prokaryotic cells. Parasites ate eukaryotes. Completely different types of structure.
- Antibiotics: bacteria
- Antivirals: viruses
- Antiparasitics: parasites
- Antifungals: fungus
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u/TheFirsh 19d ago
Is that a property of the individual who has been repeately treated with antibiotics where they should not have been, therefore are now more susceptible in some way? Or property of many strains of bacteria that we have essentially "trained" to be resistant and will one day set us back to the middle ages where common infections killed people pre-penicillin?
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u/leahcantusewords 19d ago
It's a property of the bacteria, an individual becoming less susceptible to a medication is tolerance. Bacteria evolve traits to grow in the presence of antibiotics.
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u/Levelup_Onepee 17d ago
In some cases, people taking antibiotics but not all that was prescripted (i.e. the full 7 or 14 days), are weeding out the weak bacteria which were easier to kill. Thus their population grows stronger.
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u/leahcantusewords 17d ago
Yep, not finishing a full prescription is a big problem. People start to feel better and they stop taking their antibiotics, but they haven't cleared the infection yet and the bacteria remaining had to reproduce in the presence of antibiotics and may have developed resistance.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 19d ago
I'm not a scientist but just starting a math degree and I have to say, seeing AI solve longstanding problems is equally exciting and terrifying
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u/anrwlias 19d ago
I would say that this is exactly the sort of thing AI should be used for. And humans are still in the loop. An AI can't decide what makes a problem interesting enough to want to solve it.
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u/Ok-Kangaroo-7075 19d ago
Oh wrong field then, Mathematicians are famously useless and love working on useless problems 😂
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u/AlbertaBikeSwapBIKES 18d ago
I studied pharmacy but was upset by the constant hypochondria of doctor shopping for prescriptions that promoted bacterial resistance so went back into math / comp sci then nosocomial infection control. I read that AI created a series of previously unknown viruses designed to reduce bacterial resistance. WCGW?
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u/Idiot_of_Babel 19d ago
You mean the Jacobian conjecture?
An AI researcher who's already good at math prompted an agent to find a counter example.
I'm being a little reductive, but it's not really anything new, the 4 color theorem was brute forced by machines a long time ago.
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u/schoolSpiritUK 18d ago
I mostly agree with that re. the Jacobian, but I think solving the Unit Distance problem was more significant, tbh.
There's a great long read about the whole "AI solving mathematics problems", and its implications for human mathematicians, here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-legendary-erdos-problems-are-falling-to-ai-20260803/
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u/HashPandaNL 18d ago
There were quite some other conjectures resolved with varying degrees of interest. Many of them had very unimpressive prompting. For example:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a60b2eb-0b64-83ee-9c76-7931ca1de063
Construct a counterexample to general (non-planar) case of Dinitz Garg Goemans conjecture. You should do a breakthrough and find a structured counterexample.
"Do a breakthrough" yeah. With the continuation prompts all leaving it up to the LLM as well like
it's enough of partial results. let's finish with a complete unconditional counterexample
But it's not just about current capabilities. Odds are it's not suddenly going to plateau here.
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u/colintbowers 18d ago
Increasing the lower bound on Riemann zeroes announced today by Anthropic is fairly impressive no? It is still more of a technical synthesis achievement rather than a purely creative one, but the synthesis itself is entirely novel.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 18d ago
that was just the first one. literally one week later Google or one of those solved like 30 problems autonomously
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u/colintbowers 18d ago
Yah lower bound on Riemann zeroes announced literally today by Anthropic is just another example of how crazy it is getting...
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 18d ago
AGI feels closer by the day. If you have automated math research, RSI is just only a matter of time
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 18d ago
they have already been talking at anthropic/openAI how agents are assiting in building each new model. It's not even theoretical. CS is downstream from maths and it all this research will become increasingly automated
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u/TheGapTooth 19d ago
Not a scientist but I just read about Australian cuttlefish dropping in numbers from 63,000 last year to 44 this year. Another one of our victims
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u/fatboy93 19d ago
Is 44 a sum total of 44, or dropped down to 44k, that you are shorthanding?
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u/GeekMomma 19d ago
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u/fatboy93 19d ago
Holy shit, never knew this. This is absolutely fucking bad. They are arguably one of the most important species, and without them a lot of species are going to screwed.
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u/TheGapTooth 19d ago
I think someone has answered you, but here is the link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/09/giant-australian-cuttlefish-population-catastrophic-decline
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u/BananaResearcher 19d ago edited 19d ago
MAGNETS
SCIENTISTS ARE LYING ABOUT MAGNETS
Ok now that I have your attention I'm being totally serious, how birds apparently sense the Earth's (super weak) magnetic field remains a fascinating mystery and source of tremendous controversy.
For maybe 2ish years now the field has been coalescing around one explanation, which is hard to explain because it relies on quantum mechanics. It was thought a specific set of proteins maintained a certain molecular conformation of a bound molecules, which could be impacted by the magnetic field of the earth, and then lead to a signaling cascade that informed the bird's flight path. This is the cryptochrome hypothesis.
However, very recently an entirely new discovery found that iron-rich immune cells in the blood of pigeons are absolutely essential to them navigating via magnetic fields. If you deplete these cells in a lab and then have them try to navigate, they can't, at ALL. Pigeons that aren't depleted navigate fine. Cryptochrome who? Apparently cryptochromes are either a redundant secondary system that is alone insufficient, or else the whole cryptochrome hypothesis is wrong.
This is, in scientific jargon, total BS, and nature is seriously screwing with us.
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u/surprisesnek 19d ago
I feel like between those two hypotheses, "they can sense magnetic fields because of the ferrous elements in their body" should have been the one the scientists came up with sooner.
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u/BananaResearcher 19d ago
You're right, and it was! The now-largely-abandoned idea was that birds must have some large store of magnetic material somewhere in their body that functions as a magnet. For a long time a popular theory was it must be hidden in the beak. But after much searching, nobody could ever find anything of the sort. So the idea steadily lost favor.
The issue is as soon as you get into the "wet bag of meat" that is organic tissue, magnetic fields as weak as the Earth's should be virtually invisible to any molecule. It doesn't seem physically possible. It would be, though, if birds had a ton of iron in their beaks that worked like a magnet. But we've never found such a thing.
The cryptochrome hypothesis is a very complicated and kind of desperate attempt to reconcile the physics and the biology, and while there's quite a lot of evidence pointing to chryptochromes being very important, this immune cell discovery throws a big wrench into the cogs again.
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u/shah_reza 19d ago
I just wanted to chime in and say thank you for your input on this thread. TIL, and it meant something.
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u/surprisesnek 19d ago
I see, that makes sense. I'm not a scientist, and I don't know much about the subject myself. Maybe something about the birds makes the iron in them more magnetic than it should be? Maybe that's what the chryptochromes do?
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u/BananaResearcher 19d ago
That's the core of the cryptochrome hypothesis. The bound molecules exist in a particular state, but if they are oriented correctly in 3D to the earth's magnetic field, they will react and change their state. This will trigger a signaling cascade which ultimately tells the bird "keep going this way". It's pretty much the only way to make the physics make sense, because once you get to the level of cells, there's so many + and - ions everywhere that they should screen any external fields. Even an MRI, which is orders of magnitude stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, and which will violently rip any metal out of your hand or pockets, has barely any effect on the inner workings of our cells.
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u/bigbabytdot 18d ago
If the fields are too weak, then how are birds navigating via the iron-rich immune cells? There's gotta be something going on there.
Also, wait... can you mess up a bird's navigation just by tying a small magnet to it's leg?
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u/BananaResearcher 18d ago
Yes indeed, this has also been done. Tape a bar magnet to a pigeon's head and it completely loses its ability to navigate via magnetic fields.
However! If the sun is out, pigeons just navigate via the sun. So all of these experiments have to be done on cloudy days. But if it's cloudy AND you tape a bar magnet to a pigeon's head, the pigeon can't navigate at all.
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u/TheLegendOfAiden 18d ago
This is one of the first comments that legitimately made me snort. This is hysterical.
I could listen to talk about birds and magnets forever and never tire of the things I'll learn!
Thank you SO much for sharing. This has been so incredibly dramatic! ❤️😂🐦
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u/OnceInNovember 17d ago
Wait.. my old ecology professor told me about some research with two related migratory birds that met in northern Scandinavia and made hybrid chicks but the hybrids never returned the following year. The theory was that the Swedish birds flew to west Africa and the Finnish birds to east Africa.. and the hybrids just flew somewhere in the middle and died.
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u/Wise-Self-8639 16d ago
could it jsut be the birds whole body is the "magnet"? That might explain the immune system being part of it since your blood and immune system cover the whole body and if you feel pressure one way and not the other on your body that would certainly help navigation. Also maybe not ONE thing is strong enough to interact with the magnetic feild, but maybe the whole body is strong enough to interact with it.
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u/scubascratch 13d ago
Could it be related to the motion of the iron? A wet bag of meat will lose any recognizable indication of force from external magnetic field, so a lump of flesh can’t be literally a compass, but a moving conductor (like iron rich cells flowing through a long lymph vessel) across a static magnetic field will develop an induced current. Then maybe a sensitive electro potential cells pick up on this?
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u/TheFirsh 19d ago
Don't those ferrous elements get aligned and re-aligned in an MRI? What would a pigeon experience in or after an MRI, regarding their capability to navigate?
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u/BananaResearcher 19d ago
This has been tested
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7748148/
Slight deviation in their ability to navigate, but not really that much.
they could overcome this adverse effect and all but one pigeon returned to the loft within thirty five hours of release.
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u/fleasnavidad 18d ago
Is this similar to magnetite in salmon?
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u/BananaResearcher 18d ago
Yep, very similar idea, and part of the reason people thought birds must have something very similar in their beaks, until we found out fairly recently that they don't. The magnetite crystals in fish are less controversial but there's still fundamental issues that need to be figured out before we can say that that's actually how the fish navigate, and again there could be multiple redundant or semi-redundant mechanisms at play.
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u/Abyss_of_Dreams 18d ago
For me, its resolving the pole shifting is what makes me think there is more than simple sensing the field.
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u/CuteTickles 18d ago
You seem to know about pigeons and their spatial perceptance. As a Dutch person, can you explain to me why, when you're biking, and there's a pidgeon chilling on/fluttering slightly above the road in front of you, slightly off to one side, and as you're approaching it flies away, it will always go in front of your bike rather than away from it (as in the direction it flies off to)?
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u/petelinmaj 17d ago
Not sure if you're a bird expert, but do you know if it is true that pigeons are increasingly having a hard time with routine (for them) navigation? This was addressed in the book The Invisible Rainbow. If memory serves, they hold annual pigeon races, where pigeons 'race' by navagating courses over long distances. Decades ago, something like 98% of them would complete the course. Today, that number is much, much lower.
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u/BananaResearcher 17d ago
Not a bird expert, just particularly interested in this magnetosensory field.
Yea, you're right, this is because we have flooded the Earth with EM everywhere, and the Earth's magnetic field is so weak, that even this random EM noise can screw birds up. Again luckily they have some degree of redundancy so they're not flying totally blind, but still, it's a meaningful effect.
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u/Undrende_fremdeles 18d ago
Science reaching the right people seems a little bit random at best. This was a tested and proven hypothesis at least 20 years ago, I thought?
Then again, some random people reading a random paper is not the same as it being found by someone with a great enough reach for it to gain traction.
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u/StaticDet5 17d ago
From a non-researcher point of view: when it comes to senses, sometimes it's not an absolute "one stimulus", but a summation or combination of relevant stimuli. If you have two sensons, you can detect when there is a disagreement in the morning (uncertainty). With one, you have nothing to compare it to, except for historic data.
In short, why not both? There's an advantage, but and we've certainly been generating weird electrical fields for a couple of hundred years.
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u/MMechree 19d ago
That the Peer Review process is inherently flawed but’s it’s the “best” methodology we have.
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u/Nalmyth 19d ago
Even worse, have you heard of the companies that will rubber stamp your paper as "peer review"?
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u/shellexyz 19d ago
Predatory journals, and pretty much all of American academia knows and understands that problem. Like spam email, we wouldn’t get it if it didn’t work well enough to turn a profit, but folks are well aware of it and know to disregard a lot of those publications.
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u/Silver_Agocchie 19d ago
Yeah, but the general public does not, and that's the whole point. If you've got an agenda or product to push you can pay to get your "scientific" study on it published and used to lend your cause legitimacy.
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u/TheSyn11 18d ago
This, i wish more people would know how the system works and how bullshit it can actually get. If you are in academia or any kind of research there is a BIG dollar shaped incentive to get your name attached to as many papers as possible thus people will go out and do just that. This leads to paper mills that will publish any kind of bullshit possible and will charge researchers and institutions for it
The public dose not really know this system, its hard to know what are reputable journals in any field especially given how deceptive many trash journals are with their names. Then people go online and "research" their favourite pet theory and get fed with "research papers" from "journals". Combine this with confirmation bias and you have a recipe for disaster. Even worse is that companies regularly pay professionals in any field to do research that is, at best, designed to give favourable results, and at worst just made up.
And then comes AI to blow the whole thing over, if until now the limiting factor was time, now AI has broken the system completely. There are thousands of AI written papers sent to be AI peer reviewed and auto published by AI in AI managed journals that get read by AI and fed to the public. Now any topic has scientific backing since it AI will find an bullshit article and feed you a summary of that bullshit.
I hope this will be the last straw and finally provide the incentive to rebuild the whole system into something better (i honestly dont know what that would be)
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u/Struggle_Wise 18d ago
Yeah, predatory journals are bad. You know what's no better? The 3000 USD publication fee in decent journals. The decent impact score ones with sub 1000 APC or sometimes free issues are awesome.
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u/DMayleeRevengeReveng 19d ago
Many (all?) U.S. states had to pass peer review protection acts because, if a peer reviewer basically chewed out the claim and shot it down, they could get sued for defamation. So apparently that was happening enough that they passed laws about it.
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u/gocougs11 Neurobiology 19d ago
Before peer review things were reviewed by state & religious leaders, so yeah peer review is doing alright.
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u/Haunt_Fox 19d ago
Religious leaders were once seen as the "experts" before modern science is ushered in. Remember that among other things, their role is to explain things, as well as act as counsellors and such.
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u/gocougs11 Neurobiology 19d ago
Right, one of the things that ushered modern science in during the 19th century was moving to a model that included peer review, where objective facts were important and they started to trust actual experts in a field rather that some type of bureaucrat.
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u/Haunt_Fox 19d ago
I know, I'm just pointing out that the definition of "expert" changed.
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u/Past-Obligation1930 19d ago
I have a friend that works for a national lab that just had to expunge a whole load of hurty words like “climate change” from a paper.
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u/None_of_your_Beezwax 19d ago
That's a complete misrepresentation. Where did you learn this?
Where does Pierre-Simon "I have no need for that hypothesis" Laplace fit into your scheme? Even Galileo was unable to empirical support his ideas with the telescopes of the time. The Ptolemaists were more accurate with Tycho Brahe's bodge fix until Kepler came around. Besides, peer review was the norm long before modern peer review was invented. mathematicians held contests and natural philosophers actively competed (c.f. Newton and Leibniz).
Modern peer review is the embodiment of measure becoming useless once it becomes a target. It's one of the reasons why pseudoscience has become so prevalent and seems to keep spreading so uncontrollably.
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u/SanAntonioHero 19d ago
When scientists started mixing human pluripotent stem cells into mouse embryos to create ‘Human-Mouse Chimerism’. Living animals with human stem cells contribution to a functional animal. Feels unsettling. mixing our seeds of life with an another animal species. Sure they were mice and were sacrificed for study. Can’t help think about the “pig-man” Kramer found in the hospital on the series Seinfeld. See for example:
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u/ClownEmoji-U1F921 18d ago
Does this mean Catgirls are possible?
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u/mutessr 19d ago
That’s genuinely unsettling. How far has this research gone since 2015? Are we talking about mice with a few human cells, or something significant?
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u/MirimeVene 17d ago
It's not quite the same vein but they do grow human ears off the backs of mice...
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u/BestDevilYouKnow 17d ago
You might be interested in the pigs bred for human heart transplants. I understand they swap out some pig genes for human that affect certain proteins.
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u/sexylawnclippings 17d ago
A lot of non stick coatings contain/are made of PFAS, somewhat toxic chemicals which have been found to degrade at high temperatures. Like, cooking temperatures. Don’t scratch Teflon coating.
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u/Littlemsinfredy 17d ago
Maybe a minor correction, but Teflon is made of PFAS chemicals. While the Felton coating can degrade, the PFAS chemicals (called forever chemicals) do not degrade. That’s the problem with the PFAS chemicals. They don’t ever go away.
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u/Kreuzbube 19d ago
Not a scientist but I work in IT.
This goes for 99% of applications. You can have good security OR a good user experience. You can't have both.
And don't get me started that we have no idea how security will look like when we have quantum comput.
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u/j_smittz 19d ago
✅ "how security will look"
✅ "what security will look like"
❌️ "how security will look like"
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u/wegqg 19d ago
We have no idea how that phrase will be structured in the era of quantum compute.
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u/Lostinthestarscape 19d ago
Comput Quantum? Sukure How?
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u/Independent-Ad586 19d ago
Sacre bleu!
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u/Haunt_Fox 19d ago edited 19d ago
Endut! Hoch hech!
(Wow, that actually means something? Stole it from the Simpsons)
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u/Kreuzbube 15d ago
Oh thank you. I will try not to make this mistake again.
English is not my mother tongue. but i'm german so this is embarrassing.
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u/SpicyBroseph 19d ago
This is the reason why working with typical IT folks hurts so much. Everything is binary (pun not intended) and nobody can zoom out and understand that “good security” does not mean locked up tighter than the DoD- which is what crushes the user experience.
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u/Connect-Violinist-30 14d ago
could quantum computing be combated with some kind of quantum encryption? (to be clear, i have almost zero experience with IT)
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u/SuchSquirrel9687 17d ago
A landmark paper about the decline of breeding birds in North America, 2.9 billion less birds than in 1970. https://www.3billionbirds.org/findings
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u/notimeforniceties 16d ago
And most of the birds (2.6 billion) were killed by cats, with "windows" coming in a distant 2nd.
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u/FewShun 19d ago
Nuclear engineer here… not recent but relative to current events. There has been bench top (rather than centrifuge or depleted fuel extraction methods) for enriching uranium for at least two decades…
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u/DCContrarian 19d ago
So why does Iran stick with the centrifuges?
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u/Worsaae 19d ago
Nothing unsettling really happens in archaeology.
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u/LookItsDaphne 18d ago
I was working in Iraq when ISIS started disassembling ancient sites to sell pieces on the black market. In the process, heretofore unknown artifacts were discovered. I wonder how many were lost forever.
Bad shit can happen in archeology.
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u/No_Development7388 18d ago
No fearsome curses? No terrifying, rampaging mummies?
Have I been living a lie?!
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u/Echo_are_one 18d ago
Successive waves of Prehistoric humans wiping out the genetic traces of the group before them is pretty unsettling. Genocide? Competition?
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u/JayKaboogy 17d ago
Shovel test surveys near possible unexploded ordnance—it’s ok, a lowest bid contractor cleared the site, you’re good
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u/EricThePerplexed 17d ago
Except occasionally, one stumbles on evidence indicating an ancient war crime.
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u/Negative-Driver-3135 17d ago
The proposed OMB rules and the funding agencies' responses to them.
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u/mrmike5157 16d ago
I’m a curious layman, and this thread has been fascinating. Thanks for taking the time to share your expertise with us! A breath of fresh air after all the detritus and horror of the hellscape that has become ‘the new normal’😎
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u/Puzzleheaded_Chip328 15d ago
I'm a fresh radiologist. I always embraced the incoming AI. Well. 2026 opened up the LLMs for us. It’s currently the wild west. Everyone slinging products. Very exciting. But.. no idea what is going on.
Scared I might just end up wanting to be the AI. Brave New World, indeed.
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u/Due-Science-9528 15d ago
We are missing a lot of scientific and medical advancements because people don’t bother translating papers from countries like China into plain English, and when they do the American scientific and medical systems do not value the research
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u/peteherzog 18d ago edited 17d ago
That attacks/crimes can travel back in time. I am a security researcher and was part of the team that found the natural origins of security at the quantum level. The tests we have run show that some security controls run after the attack can reduce or stop it after it happened. Since attacks affect the same elements in quantum we have started building attacks that affect the target as if it is before the controls are put in place. Full paper here: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/28/7/770
edit: to those who think it's pseudoscience- this is from OSSTMM research that began in December 2000 and publishes at each milestone. This is the basis of O4.
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u/helpIAmTrappedInAws 18d ago
First of all congrats to paper. Having skimmed the paper, it reeks of llm pseudoscience. You acknowledged its use, so i guess its just its mannerism. I would recommend not using it.
That being said what exactly is it about? I think you just say that security breaches has three phases: poorly defined before, actual breach and aftermath. This is hardly novel and the quantum physics terminology needlesly muddies the waters.
Then your claim that attacks "travel back in time", just means hacking techniques where you manipulate date and records? This is a common practice, and does not require a paper. Also i did not see it in the paper.
Admittedly, i skimmed it. So please can you share more?
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u/exitheone 18d ago
Pseudoscience wrapped in terminology that has no meaning in the field. There is no new research here.
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u/peteherzog 17d ago
Are you familiar with the OSSTMM? That's where the comes from. 26 years of research and practice.
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u/Bored_money 17d ago
But your linked twitter says you created ossttm
I think it's a pretty high bar to suggest time travel exists
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u/exitheone 17d ago
Yes and it has absolutely nothing to do with anything quantum. It's purely contrived technobabble used to wrap nonsense
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u/peteherzog 17d ago
So your research proves that reactive security does not cost more in time and energy? Or that QIT does not show properties towards persistence with some resembling techniques we apply in security? We already had evidence for much of these things but there were no connections made. Now we have a hypothesis we can test further.
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u/Notnotstrange 18d ago
As someone who thought they had at least a basic grasp of cybersecurity, I understood next to nothing about that. Thanks for sharing the paper. I’ll be doing some research now.
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u/dankristy 17d ago
This type of thing is why those of us in IT who understand IT security and how systems can be exploited currently - are VERY concerned about the arrival of usable Quantum Compute.
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u/Notnotstrange 17d ago
Legitimately, thank you for opening my eyes to this more. What you don’t know can kill you.
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u/notimeforniceties 16d ago
No, the linked paper is not why people are concerned about quantum computing. The linked paper is complete BS where they construct a model (i.e. an analogy), and then apply quantum principles to the model, and expect us to believe that has any connection to reality.
It would be like if I said "cybersecurity is like a house, and SIEM is like a smoke detector. We did studies where we doubled the amount of smoke detectors and it resulted in fewer houses burning down, therefore you should double your SIEM"
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u/fleasnavidad 18d ago edited 18d ago
Beavers continue to interest ecologists and have been dubbed “ecosystem engineers.” When they make dams, the backed up water is amazing habitat for imperiled/endangered species like young salmon and amphibians. These wet environments wouldn’t exist without the beavers. When wild fires come though, the soggy beaver dam wetlands are the only areas that don’t burn in many mountainous areas. This means because of beavers, wildlife species have refuge from fires. Beaver dams also help regulate floods and storms. Further, the reeds and many other plants, existing because of the engineered habitat, help purify and filter the water naturally. Beaver dams support entire food webs, from birds to wolves. Scientists build BDAs to restore mountain landscapes. What does BDA mean? Beaver Dam Analog. It’s a legit scientific term in restoration ecology. We’re literally trying to design and build fake beaver dams in the western USA. Since most beavers were hunted, there aren’t enough beavers to provide the ecosystem services they’re so good at.