The problem is that with the potential damage to the body and their career this is exactly what happens. Only the retired or mid performers are willing to actually take on the experiment. Top athletes already use some forms of doping but are very protective, since they have more to lose. Only those with nothing to lose will go all in on the enhancements.

Magnitude matters in a system designed to reward rich people. You can’t afford rent, so you will have to settle for sleeping in your car. Altman can’t afford a $100MM house, so he will have to settle for sleeping in a $20MM house.

Poverty in the end is about lack of access to better conditions of living. Some people are running away from war zones with nothing but the clothes they have on. They are broke, but they’re not “can’t live in the metropolitan area of NY and has to settle for the suburbs” kind of broke.

I think the on screen keyboard is the main culprit. That thing is incredibly buggy sometimes. Some games just don’t know what to do with that virtual keyboard.

Most likely. Some fossils are, although very hard, rather brittle as well.

I wish people on the internet that adamantly want to argue would stop to actually read the shit they quote, instead of pretending that a half assed google search is some kind of gotcha. Your peer reviewed article that says otherwise actually doesn’t mentions cancer, not even once. It is about external and internal contamination. It doesn’t assign causality between contamination rates and dogs genetic makeup, whatsoever (it might actually be due to human intervention, feeding them with clean food). I also used cancer just as one example of the effects of radiation, it is not the only way that radiation kills. (I also fail to see what hormesis have the fuck to do with any of the discussion, but I guess you find it a fun scientificoid word that makes you sound smart).

I never said it was a genetic change, but epigenetic adaptation. As in, the things that are not in the genome but affect genome expression and are inherited. There’s a ton of studies on these dogs, they all point to a higher rate of genetic differentiation and fast adaptation due to environmental pressure factors like isolation and inbreeding. It’s not just the radiation, it’s what happens when you let a bunch of domestic animals back into nature.

They are surviving in big part due to human care, which is the only thing protecting them from other stuff like hypothermia during winter and parvovirus. That kills them at a higher rate than radioactive contamination. Yet they still seem to be breeding so fast that neutering them is a perfectly valid option.

But anyways, back to the main point. Here’s the main reason they are good for genetic studies:

Our examination of dogs from Ukraine and neighboring countries in Eastern Europe revealed that both the Chernobyl City and CNPP populations have a similar genetic structure to free-breeding dog populations, reflecting a history of admixture, indicating that dogs have existed in the Chernobyl region for a long period of time, potentially since the disaster, or even earlier. Genetic differentiation from other purebred and free-breeding dogs suggests that the Chernobyl populations have a unique genomic signature, supporting their utility in further genomic studies – The dogs of Chernobyl: Demographic insights into populations inhabiting the nuclear exclusion zone

They seem to be genetically distinct enough that they might have some adaptations:

We detected a significant degree of genetic differentiation between the two populations of dogs sampled at the Nuclear Power Plant and in Chernobyl City, along with almost complete clustering at the population level through the DAPC and PCA, corroborating trends that were seen in identity by state clustering analyses in Spatola et al. (in press). […]

we identified genomic regions that have diverse allele frequencies between the populations, including candidate genes such as xrcc4 and cntnap2. Our findings are likely to inform future studies, where we intend to search these genomic regions and candidate genes for variants, novel and previously documented, to further evaluate the degree of local adaptation within the Nuclear Power Plant and Chernobyl City populations. – Population dynamics and genome-wide selection scan for dogs in Chernobyl

So, in summary, the current consensus is:

It’s possible that the dogs that survived long enough to breed already had genetic traits that increased their ability to survive. So perhaps there was extreme selective pressure at the start, and then the dogs at the power plant just remained separate from the city population. Investigating that question is an important next step that we are now working on. – Deep Dive Into Genome of Dogs Within Chornobyl Exclusion Zone Shows Genetic Differences Are Not Due to Mutations

So I reiterate my point. Dogs are no less no more complex than humans. Just like everything, this is survivorship bias. The dogs of Chernobyl are simply the descendants of the dogs that didn’t die. It’s ok to not be an expert at something, I’m not a biologist either (nor a nuclear physicist). But at least I bother to read sources before spouting BS on the internet. Shout out to my bro who actually is a biologist and taught me this factoid and shared the links to these studies.

Also, are you really suggesting that evolution doesn’t occur in small scale? 50 years is 30 generations of dogs, that’s a shit ton of breeding.

This is false. Dogs are no less no more complex than humans. Tons of dogs got cancer and died. Just like everything, this is survivorship bias. The dogs of Chernobyl are simply the descendants of the dogs that didn’t die.

They are particularly hardy at withstanding radiation … because they are the descendants of the dogs that didn’t die. And even then it is not a massive genetical difference, it’s mostly about epigenetic adaptations. It’s why they are being studied for better understanding of radiation and cancer. They also still die more than dogs who are not constantly being bombarded by radiation.

The same is true for almost all of the fauna around the incident site, dogs are just cuter and easier to make fun journalist pieces and nicer to work with in labs. And also plants and fungi show the same hardiness. There’s nothing special about specifically the dogs.

I mean, it depends. If you’re storing cesium, it’s a fine assumption. Iodine though…

My condolences for your advanced case of retrograde amnesia.

Plus the millions of people that coal plant’s smoke kill…with radiation. Coal has killed more people by radiation in the US alone than nuclear accidents all over the world, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined.

I didn’t make clear, that I mean using something for measuring really large distances, like the length and width of a large building’s base. A typical measure stick would have less stretching than rope, sure, but would also be tedious to measure with. Counting the spins of a wheel as you roll it is trivially easy and quick in comparison. Wood warps, but not really that much.

The spoke of the wheel is the same length used to measure the blocks. Other comments here have gone into detail. If the height of the blocks is the same as the diameter or radius of the wheel used to measure the base, then the relations will always be some function of pi. You don’t have to know any definition of pi for this to always be geometrically true.

Wheels are always a fraction of pi. Whether you like it or not. Lengths of string can be arbitrary, but a circle’s dimensions are always tightly related to and proportional to pi in some way. I also recall that wheel measurements are more precise for large scale building because, unlike rope, leather and cloth, a wooden wheel doesnt stretch. Two wheels made similar will stay more between a much tighter error factor than two pieces of rope. The rope might start at the same length but will deform differently as they are used.

Search YouTube or revanced or whatever other free service for Technology connections, also the alt channel Technology Connextras.

We used purpose made floor pedals on the sociology research office to control a transcription software. It allowed precise control over a voice recording so any of us lowly students could quickly transcribe interviews and focus groups without removing the hands from the home row of the keyboard. It was already 30 years old technology by the time I got to college. It was apparently first invented for work with actual tape players.

First time on Lemmy?

The RAE is not a prescriptive institution at all. They fight people on social media over that. They’re not shaming anyone for spelling a word different, just describing what the language users are doing.

You sound like the kind of person who beat up black people because they don’t speak good enough according to you.