A method to recycle cement without greenhouse gas emissions. I await the inevitable “I’m a cement nerd and here’s why it won’t work” Xitter thread.
When I came to the United States, I noticed showers are often covered with a thin layer of bright pink goo. I had never seen that in Europe, so I investigated – the culprit is a bacterium called Serratia marcescens, which produces red pigments. In addition to turning showers pink, it was likely the cause of numerous Church-certified Miracles, like the Eucharistic Host turning into blood, or statues starting to cry. And, of course, in 1950, the US army sprayed it all over the city of San Francisco as a part of a secret operation to save Democracy.
Eric Neyman grants an old wish of mine: shortly after surgery, he noticed the anaesthetics disabled his short-term memory, and spent the next hour conducting miscellaneous psychology experiments with his girlfriend.
A Russian bot is posting error messages saying it is out of ChatGPT credits. Then someone points out many discrepancies, suggesting that it’s an human pretending to be bot pretending to be an human. My favourite part is that AI companies worked very hard to make sure their models never use offensive slurs, so the conversations eventually decay into humans insulting each other as a proof of their humanity.
Good-looking people tend to be have more successful careers. This new meta-analysis claims that this is because beautiful people also tend to be smarter (for whatever reason). Once you correct for that (and ignore studies on prostitutes) the little effect that remains is mostly an artifact from particularly bad publication bias:
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0db2f563-5405-4059-9bcd-ec895f5766cc_442x314.png)
Exotic creature of the season: Cymothea exigua, the tongue-eating louse. “The parasite severs the blood vessels in the fish's tongue, causing the tongue to fall off. It then attaches itself to the remaining stub of tongue and the parasite itself effectively serves as the fish's new "tongue".”
Remember when, a few months ago, the Data Colada team dissected an excel file from a study about dishonesty, and found evidence of data fabrication? Here is a new story from the same folks. This time, it’s about an experiment where three participants fill a survey at the same time, in a room with three computers. The Data Colada sleuths looked at timestamps in the data and concluded that, actually, all the participants were just one person running from computer to computer and making up the responses. Then things get wild: it looks like the paper’s author has completely vanished, and the bloggers say they received death threats to prevent them from releasing their findings. Scary stuff – she could be in your neighbourhood!
(In case you still care about the previous “excel file” affair, here is Francesca Gino’s response to the accusations. It’s pretty convincing and I think she’s probably right. To settle the matter, I propose a trial by replication – if the study replicates, she’s innocent. If it doesn’t, she’s guilty of doing bad science, fraudulent or not. Most likely, nobody will bother replicating the study, because it’s on a topic nobody actually cares about.)
A bacterial enzyme that spontaneously arranges into fractal Sierpiński triangles:
Wholesale wikipedias
Man in business suit levitating emoji
I have only ever seen the pink bacteria in northern CA. Lived in NY, IL and other places. I wonder if it’s a descent of that military test
Fascinating! What do people do in Europe to get rid of the pink bath stains? Or does Serratia Marcescens have a natural predator there -- perhaps Little Cat Z?