> ...one student isolated a Pseudomonas idahonensis bacterium from a goose feces sample that produced a new cyclic lipodepsipeptide, which .... was cytotoxic against human melanoma and human ovarian cancer cells with IC50 values of 11.06 and 10.50 μM, respectively.
It's the same thing. A brief explanation that assumes you know some term or have all the priors to deduce some meaning just creates a situation where we may have to apply the 10000 rule again. A thorough explanation on the other hand is more likely to help the reader be part of not only the 10k that get the commic today, but also the 10k that get some other fact (or several!) today.
Or to paraphrase the 10k alt text: saying "what idiot doesnt know the difference between kills and selectively kills" is so much more boring than telling them about it.
Telling them about it is great... which you can do by showing them the comic and the alt text. The wiki link is unnecessary. You could add an extra explanation onto almost anything, and do so recursively, but that quickly becomes a waste of time. When something has already been explained, explaining it again helps a lot fewer people than the 10000 rule would suggest. The returns diminish very fast, and you should wait for them to ask before piling on extra explanations. And the actual 10000 comic waits for them to ask before even showing the first, most basic version.
I'm so glad companies and in this case a university are reaching out to youth to get them excited in these fields. Just wish it was more widespread. Can you imagine being credited on a scientific paper while you're in middle school? I know they probably didn't do a lot of the hard work, but when you're that age, working with adults and being encouraged like that, I'm sure it's an amazing feeling.
>>> I know they probably didn't do a lot of the hard work
Actually it looks some work was done and made the wrong finding , but there was serepindity involved in finding a new thesis along the way:
> (student sample) contained a strain of bacteria called Pseudomonas idahonensis. The students interpreted the
> bacterium's bioassay data and concluded it had antibiotic activity and produced a never-before-seen compound.
> Then, the university researchers determined the compound's molecular structure using nuclear magnetic
> resonance and mass spectrometry, named it orfamide N after the family of molecules it belongs to, and investigated its biological activity. Although orfamide N was not responsible for the antibiotic activity that the team initially observed from P. idahonensis, the compound inhibited the growth of human melanoma and ovarian cancer cells in culture tests.
So if i read the above correctly, it seems like the students identified a new compound to do A, scientists took that new compound and tested for A, then after scientists realized it did B instead of A.
It would be weird to find such success at such a young age. Same thing with young athletes/musicians. It must be bizarre to be so celebrated when you have so little autonomy and your consciousness is barely online.
> It must be bizarre to be so celebrated when you have so little autonomy and your consciousness is barely online.
I think you’re right that it’s “weird” for most folks that age.
That said, folks with good parents/mentors/coaches will be properly humble, realizing that they basically achieved table stakes for “playing the game” (literal or figurative) at the next level.
In sports, I think the Mannings in general and Arch Manning in particular have been kept properly grounded despite a great deal of fanfare over anything they did.
In academics, I have seen quite a few professor’s kids who are keenly aware that early achievements that are sometimes celebrated by a wide audience will eventually be just one brick in the wall of their career.
I don't think many citizen science projects credit the citizen contributors on the resulting paper(s), do they? The only few that I have contributed to did not, but I'm not super familiar with what the norm is.
I think being a student and seeing your name on the resulting paper is a big part of the encouragement and excitement.
Well, yeah. Everyone knows you aren’t pulling in millions in grant money or making millions off of patentable discoveries, you aren’t a real scientist.
“Geese are intelligent enough to discern unusual people”
And intelligent enough to hold a grudge against familiar people. But I don’t think we’ve lost any hens under his watch.
I think they have a weird inflated sense of how large they are. We had some who nested outside the office years back. It seemed to have a cutoff of around 5'6. Anyone taller would get the raised wings and hissing. Anyone shorter would get chased and 'attacked.' Gotta admire the bravery, really.
"Inflated sense" of something for sure. When mine attacks, he doesn't know when to stop no matter how many times I grab his neck.
I raised this one from the egg. Once they reached sexual maturity he became an asshole, but clearly has conflicting processes — he follows me around outside, pulls weeds off the tiller with me, etc. But inevitably eating corn from my hand turns to biting my fingers. If he didn't have a female to protect (she's chill), we could probably be friends again.
Another Google Gemini gaffe for "depsipeptide" [1].
> A depsipeptide is a cyclic peptide where one or more amide groups are replaced by ester groups.
Depsipeptides are not necessarily cyclic, and I'd prefer to use "bond" instead of "group", though both are fine.
I am hitting so many of these every day. They're crazy. Hallucinations that companies are headquartered in the wrong states, incorrect math and statistics, and even outright wrong health advice.
To me it seems like magic that we possess the ability to analyse the structure of a chemical sample and then synthesize it. That is real life alchemy.
I know about some of these technologies for analysing samples. But they're all expensive as far as I know. E.g. I think home labs still use things like reagents / color change tests to get an idea if a synthesis succeeded. I wonder if there are any ways to do chemical analysis that are cheap though?
Little goose poop
You don't know what I got (you don't know what I got)
Little goose poop
You don't know what I got
Well I'm not bragging babe, so don't put me down (goose poop)
But I've got the strongest antibiotic in town (goose poop)
When superbugs come up to me, they don't even try (goose poop)
'Cause once they meet my compound, man, they're gonna die
(goose)Shit like this is exactly why failing to account for the negative externalities associated with anthropogenic biosphere collapse is so utterly shortsighted and will ultimately be the death of us all. Every extinction is potentially a loss of knowledge we can't even conceive of yet, and how many medical advancements come from the flora and fauna of the Earth?
That doesn't add up, we're not dependent on medical innovations for human survival. They're just nice to have. But we got this far as a species and expanded into the billions even while enduring all kinds of cancer and leprosy and cholera and syphilis and measles and whatever.
> One unique sample, goose poop collected at a local park, had a bacterium that showed antibiotic activity and contained a novel compound that slowed the growth of human melanoma and ovarian cancer cells in lab tests.
I hate when the press article exagerate the participation of the students, but in this case the press article is fine.
We have(had?) a similar project in our university. Students of high school (17yo?) go once per week for a semenster and help with some project. In some topics is possible to isolate the work and make an interesting task that can be teached and tried in one semester. Nobody expect a groundbreaking result, but it's an interesting aproach to encourage students.
From the abstract:
> ...one student isolated a Pseudomonas idahonensis bacterium from a goose feces sample that produced a new cyclic lipodepsipeptide, which .... was cytotoxic against human melanoma and human ovarian cancer cells with IC50 values of 11.06 and 10.50 μM, respectively.