Well, the difference is that one thing has been written up by our politicians as illegal, and the other has not. I think writing absurd laws are a matter of pride for many people in government.
Snark aside, typically there are catch-all laws that forbid unusual distractions or impairments to driving. So don't worry, ear-muff hats are probably illegal too. If you can't hear a siren going off nearby while inside your car, I'm sure there's some regulation that is being broken as well. Certainly, common sense says that you need to be able to hear sirens.
What is the purpose of a university? Is it a professional research organization? What is the difference between places like Salk and Broad and their academic neighbors?
If education is what distinguishes a university from an institute or professional research organization, then improving educational methods and metrics should be a goal of universities. The problem is that many people working at universities would rather be working at research institutes.
Really, many of those folks should be at research institutes. Universities need to understand how the focus on research over the past few decades has impacted the economics of time spent teaching. Fees are higher in part because the non-educational activities of universities are so lucrative. There is a market rate for professor's time, and students have to pay that market cost.
If we want to improve learning and teaching at universities, the first question that should be answered is: what is the purpose of a university?
Universities make most of their money off of either contract research and social networking, and those areas may be where their biggest contribution to society is. If we need universities to focus on education, should we split the education function out from the contract research and social networking functions?
This is similar to asking whether retail banks should also be allowed to perform investment banking. There is a potent financial and cultural pressure to optimize activities like research grants and NCAA sports. While it is possible to also be excellent at education, generally more attention, oversight, and effort is put into other activities.
I think you're arguing from the wrong perspective. It's not the government's job to protect anyone's business model, particularly if that model is facilitating serious crime. Facebook and Google built video entertainment businesses that they can't effectively manage. That's their problem, not Australia's.
People may not remember 20 years ago, but we were able to share information prior to Facebook and Google. They did not invent video sharing, free speech, or message boards.
I think the folks in Computer Science may want to talk with the biologists about what function DNA plays in nature. I'm pretty sure cells are already using DNA to perform some pretty complex and reprogrammable calculations. Just because they're done in the format you're used to doesn't mean it's not happening.
Converting CO2 into a usable or sequestered state is not a new process. It requires a very large amount of energy, but is essentially 100 year old technology. To suggest it "doesn't work" is incorrect, it "works" perfectly fine and has for decades. The basic chemistry goes back before the 20th century, and biology has obviously done this for a very long time. The problem is that none of this is economical. Economical carbon dioxide reduction would be a huge step toward stabilizing the climate and would make fossil fuels obsolete. This would be true even for high energy density needs like rocket and aviation fuel. (This is a bit of a fantasy, because "economical" is a very hard thing to pin down.)
So far, attempts to lower the cost have failed, and the part that needs the most help is the initial reduction of CO2. There are a lot of approaches to this, including engineering the enzyme RuBisCO (the main way biology reduces CO2), and looking for better chemical catalysts. The big deal with the paper here is demonstration of a better chemical catalyst.
Don't mistake an entertainment focused presentation like a TED talk for an original research presentation.
FAME and Steve Benner have been the leaders in this field for a long time. Benner made the first expansion from 4 to 6 bases about 30 years ago. SRI and Floyd Romesberg are very good, but they are following Benner here (and Romesberg is a better public speaker).
There are lots of rules about operability at the patent office with different metrics for success based on field. Most of this is not statutory, but through case law, which makes it insanely complex.
Critically, the legal responsibility for demonstrating lack of operability officially falls to people challenging a patent instead of the patent office.
This is something I've had to deal with in my patents: if someone describes how to do something in a way that does not work, they still own the rights to the functioning version of the final device. In my field, the requirements for operability are very loose, it's not at all necessary that an inventor describe something that could be done or has been done to be given a patent. The thought is that inventors in materials and electronics research should be able to anticipate advances in manufacturing technology, which sounds reasonable until actual people and lawyers are involved. I've had discussions with patent examiners along the lines of "well, obviously you would take this abandoned junk-science disclosure and apply new techniques to make it actually function, so your patent is rejected because it's obvious." Hugely frustrating (and expensive...).
That's not how this works. A patent is a legal document, it has nothing to do with establishing scientific credibility. There is no requirement to prove that a device functions in order to be patented. The required steps to "reduce to practice" (make reliably reproducible) some invention are typically not patent-able. The requirement is simply that that someone like me, a PhD Physicist with a background in materials, could build the device listed in the patent.
A peer reviewed paper is what would be required to actually show that this works, preferably from a second group...actually from any "group" as Mr. Pais seems to always work alone, a big red flag in science.
This is a kind of inverse Middle Ages philosophy: the assumption by the author is that anything coming far before the modern era has no relevance to scholarship, and it's "absurd" to attribute any origination of thought to something several thousand years old. Prior to a few hundred years ago, it would have been "absurd" to suggest that any phrase was recently invented rather than derived from several thousand year old classical or biblical sources.
Online essays seem to generally give the phrase an absurd antiquity -- they talk about Hammurabi and Moses, as if it had been translated from language to language for decades.
I would hope we're all aware that this is exactly what happened with literature in western civilization (generally the Bible and Classics), but over centuries instead of decades. Books and phrases were translated from language to language. If actual study of history is going to be replaced by what is convenient to search on Google, then we are limiting ourselves to a "history" that starts in the 20th century. Maybe this is just the way things will be in the future.
The key part of this study is that managers need to be responsive to emails. This makes sense in an organization that uses email to manage people. If your job is something else... then you should be spending only a small amount of time and attention on email.
The driving force in science today is grant funding, which is itself driven by citations. For example, the NIH measures "research productivity" primarily with # of citations/dollar spent. In nanotechnology, my field, we have also measured research effectiveness by number of citations. This is not some idle interest, but leads to how research funding is distributed by scientific field. This results in a negative financial incentive for in-field scientists to disagree, and positive financial incentive to show that related scientific fields are problematic (and thus less worthy of funding). In this context of correlation between funding and citations, reviews should be viewed with great skepticism.
In this case, science was advanced by introduction and acceptance of better statistical standards driven by competitive cross-disciplinary communication. (Leading to a main conclusion of TFA at Vox: the system works.)
In my experience, validation only happens when scientists from other fields are able to reproduce and expand upon your results.
It would have been nice if ITEP wrote this and then went on to explain their views on whether double taxation in this case would be better (there's a good argument that it could be) or perhaps that the tax code should be simplified so that this kind of research isn't necessary for the average person to understand the system.
More than that is already spent on renewable energy investment. It's not as big a number as you think.
It's great that the link to the actual GND document is posted here, people should read it.
There are a few things the GND gets right. We do need physical infrastructure upgrades, power infrastructure upgrades, manufacturing modernization, agricultural modernization, improved public transportation, and better application of science to ecology.
There are also a few things that GND gets wrong. There is very little focus, and no actual goals. Mostly, there is a depressing willingness to abandon green principles (science based ecology) for modern socialist principles. Reading the text throws into sharp relief where these philosophies clash. For example, there are many socially driven conditions and exceptions put on how and where changes can be made. If the goal is truly green, there should be no exceptions or special groups to consider. The GND follows the same philosophy as what the right has put forth in the past: ecology is great as long as it doesn't disrupt the other desires of my political base.
The most useful thing here is that we have some written policies from the left presented in an authoritative way. Perhaps the moderates can eventually piece together some reasonable set of policies from the GND and the clean coal plan so we can finish up with the politics (after 20 years...) and move on to actually doing something.
It's incorrect and naive to argue that these "privately developed" features of social credit are not government directed in China. They are. China has a different economic system and different governmental system than you're used to thinking about.
Go back a few decades and everything in China was explicitly owned by the government. Today, about 75% of companies and assets in China are owned by the government (US governments own less than 10% of total assets in the US). Any company acting against what the Chinese government sees as the public good will not be allowed to do business in China. This is a different culture. No CEO in China has a desire to have their company act independently of the government. That would be bad for business and a critical personality flaw in a Chinese CEO. Anywhere the government doesn't have explicit ownership, it still has effective control.
Also, China is not run by the "federated" idea of independent local governments we're used to. Your use of the phrase "Chinese federal government" would be very controversial in China. In the US, we're used to city, county, state, and federal governments all being elected and managed independently. There is one government in China: the Central government. If the Governor of Hebei province makes a decision the central government doesn't like, the central government can remove that official and reverse the decision. Officially, the Governor of Hebei is second in command of the province, reporting to the appointed Party Secretary for Hebei.
The reality is that that virtualization is the way the world is headed. Looking to the old days when all the politicians in DC knew each other is nice, but it's not going to happen again. The problem is not politics, but simply growth in technology and fundamental changes in how our society communicates. It would be better to figure out how teleconferencing can be used effectively in politics than to try to maintain politics as a separate sub-culture. If politicians don't talk with us and with each other in ways we recognize as "normal", we will lose trust in them and the system. The floor debates, office meetings, the way their offices are laid out, the way their staff is organized: these are all approaches to management and consensus building that would be normal and familiar 100 years ago in industry, local government, and non-profits. Today, no one sets up a new organization this way. Local governments don't work this way anymore. Eventually the national government will change too.
It is impossible today for any scientist to understand everything we've collected across science. I think it's probably impossible to do in any recognized sub-field.
A large portion of the "understanding" of science is wrong. There's bad data, bad analysis, and bad evaluations out there.
When disagreeing with some of that, it is extremely difficult to simply say people are wrong. It's much easier to say that "we're surprised" about some result. If we were really good, we wouldn't be surprised by as many things. Truthfully, we're not as surprised about as much as we say we are. We're hoping to guide the emotions of key readers of our work. However, none of us really knows what we're doing.
This is the reality we live in. It's not just big companies, it's governments, universities... just about every organization. I started my own company to break out of this, but after filtering through several layers of professional investors, you always have to deal with the root investors. Their focus is only on the return, and "they" are everyone (the mob, the masses, the average person).
In the end, it's the relatively new requirement that a narrow definition of fiduciary responsibility to the investors is the primary responsibility of a company that drives shitty behavior. This is overwhelming in the pubic markets, and you're seeing it pop up even in non-profits, but it is not likely a sustainable economic philosophy as it prioritizes short term profits over long term growth.
This paper measures normal nonlinear electrochemical effects and assumes they're superconducting. Further, there is a misunderstanding of what quantized conductance means, and how to demonstrate that quantized conductance is being measured.
There is no evidence presented of superconductivity, and no good argument for why it would be expected. It's a bit embarrassing that the author is a Physics professor.
I know this sounds exotic and exciting, but the llama angle on this story is basic biotechnology. Llamas (and several other species) make simpler and smaller antibodies than typical mammals. This makes them much easier to work with, sequence, etc. When making a custom antibody, it's not unusual to choose a llama as your "antibody development tool."
There are llama farms near biotech hubs that do nothing but repeatedly inject llamas with small doses of some protein or molecule and sell the blood (packed with antibodies) back to the pharma and biotech companies.
The actual neat part of this story is the (slow, but steady) development of a universal influenza vaccine.
Each generation has its complaints about the prior one. You see it in the posts here, with current parents comparing what we do today with the self centered hypocrisy of the boomers, and the occasional boomer complaining about the short sighted intolerance of the greatest generation.
Our kids are going to hate how we raise them.
Will they feel we allowed tech to raise them, that we were too focused on our world, our own issues and technology? (This is similar to our complaint about the boomers.) Or will the complaint be that we held the world back and were too afraid of the changes technology were bringing to see clearly? (Similar to the boomers complaint about their parents.)
They knew through biochemistry that octopuses would have the same response as well. They tested a bunch of animals and listed those that wouldn't have the same response. Then tested one from the list that would.
The reason the researchers used octopuses is not to gather any special insight into neurochemistry that an octopus may provide, but simply because invertebrates are not covered by animal experimentation laws.
Through genetic testing, the authors of this study were able to determine that octopuses and vertebrates all share the neural transmitters that MDMA acts upon.
The authors then go on to ask whether the drug functions similarly in humans and animals when it comes to social situations. I don't know how much literature there is on the social abilities of octopodes, but that this study discovers that they all prefer females over males seems to indicate it's pretty rudimentary. It's hard to believe that any real social abilities can be measured in a species so poorly understood.
On the other hand, there are tons of studies on the social habits of monkeys, apes, dogs, cats, mice... why not try one of them?
Now we're back to the top. Octopuses are not covered by the animal experimentation laws, and the authors chose to not have any oversight from their campus Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (which they could have done to be ethical, even though it's not legally required), which makes this whole study feel really gross.
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Well, the difference is that one thing has been written up by our politicians as illegal, and the other has not. I think writing absurd laws are a matter of pride for many people in government.
Snark aside, typically there are catch-all laws that forbid unusual distractions or impairments to driving. So don't worry, ear-muff hats are probably illegal too. If you can't hear a siren going off nearby while inside your car, I'm sure there's some regulation that is being broken as well. Certainly, common sense says that you need to be able to hear sirens.
What is the purpose of a university? Is it a professional research organization? What is the difference between places like Salk and Broad and their academic neighbors?
If education is what distinguishes a university from an institute or professional research organization, then improving educational methods and metrics should be a goal of universities. The problem is that many people working at universities would rather be working at research institutes.
Really, many of those folks should be at research institutes. Universities need to understand how the focus on research over the past few decades has impacted the economics of time spent teaching. Fees are higher in part because the non-educational activities of universities are so lucrative. There is a market rate for professor's time, and students have to pay that market cost.
If we want to improve learning and teaching at universities, the first question that should be answered is: what is the purpose of a university?
Universities make most of their money off of either contract research and social networking, and those areas may be where their biggest contribution to society is. If we need universities to focus on education, should we split the education function out from the contract research and social networking functions?
This is similar to asking whether retail banks should also be allowed to perform investment banking. There is a potent financial and cultural pressure to optimize activities like research grants and NCAA sports. While it is possible to also be excellent at education, generally more attention, oversight, and effort is put into other activities.
I think you're arguing from the wrong perspective. It's not the government's job to protect anyone's business model, particularly if that model is facilitating serious crime. Facebook and Google built video entertainment businesses that they can't effectively manage. That's their problem, not Australia's.
People may not remember 20 years ago, but we were able to share information prior to Facebook and Google. They did not invent video sharing, free speech, or message boards.
I think the folks in Computer Science may want to talk with the biologists about what function DNA plays in nature. I'm pretty sure cells are already using DNA to perform some pretty complex and reprogrammable calculations. Just because they're done in the format you're used to doesn't mean it's not happening.
Converting CO2 into a usable or sequestered state is not a new process. It requires a very large amount of energy, but is essentially 100 year old technology. To suggest it "doesn't work" is incorrect, it "works" perfectly fine and has for decades. The basic chemistry goes back before the 20th century, and biology has obviously done this for a very long time. The problem is that none of this is economical. Economical carbon dioxide reduction would be a huge step toward stabilizing the climate and would make fossil fuels obsolete. This would be true even for high energy density needs like rocket and aviation fuel. (This is a bit of a fantasy, because "economical" is a very hard thing to pin down.)
So far, attempts to lower the cost have failed, and the part that needs the most help is the initial reduction of CO2. There are a lot of approaches to this, including engineering the enzyme RuBisCO (the main way biology reduces CO2), and looking for better chemical catalysts. The big deal with the paper here is demonstration of a better chemical catalyst.
Don't mistake an entertainment focused presentation like a TED talk for an original research presentation.
FAME and Steve Benner have been the leaders in this field for a long time. Benner made the first expansion from 4 to 6 bases about 30 years ago. SRI and Floyd Romesberg are very good, but they are following Benner here (and Romesberg is a better public speaker).
You're right, though, that this is from 6 to 8.
There are lots of rules about operability at the patent office with different metrics for success based on field. Most of this is not statutory, but through case law, which makes it insanely complex.
Critically, the legal responsibility for demonstrating lack of operability officially falls to people challenging a patent instead of the patent office.
This is something I've had to deal with in my patents: if someone describes how to do something in a way that does not work, they still own the rights to the functioning version of the final device. In my field, the requirements for operability are very loose, it's not at all necessary that an inventor describe something that could be done or has been done to be given a patent. The thought is that inventors in materials and electronics research should be able to anticipate advances in manufacturing technology, which sounds reasonable until actual people and lawyers are involved. I've had discussions with patent examiners along the lines of "well, obviously you would take this abandoned junk-science disclosure and apply new techniques to make it actually function, so your patent is rejected because it's obvious." Hugely frustrating (and expensive...).
That's not how this works. A patent is a legal document, it has nothing to do with establishing scientific credibility. There is no requirement to prove that a device functions in order to be patented. The required steps to "reduce to practice" (make reliably reproducible) some invention are typically not patent-able. The requirement is simply that that someone like me, a PhD Physicist with a background in materials, could build the device listed in the patent.
A peer reviewed paper is what would be required to actually show that this works, preferably from a second group...actually from any "group" as Mr. Pais seems to always work alone, a big red flag in science.
This is a kind of inverse Middle Ages philosophy: the assumption by the author is that anything coming far before the modern era has no relevance to scholarship, and it's "absurd" to attribute any origination of thought to something several thousand years old. Prior to a few hundred years ago, it would have been "absurd" to suggest that any phrase was recently invented rather than derived from several thousand year old classical or biblical sources.
Online essays seem to generally give the phrase an absurd antiquity -- they talk about Hammurabi and Moses, as if it had been translated from language to language for decades.
I would hope we're all aware that this is exactly what happened with literature in western civilization (generally the Bible and Classics), but over centuries instead of decades. Books and phrases were translated from language to language. If actual study of history is going to be replaced by what is convenient to search on Google, then we are limiting ourselves to a "history" that starts in the 20th century. Maybe this is just the way things will be in the future.
The key part of this study is that managers need to be responsive to emails. This makes sense in an organization that uses email to manage people. If your job is something else... then you should be spending only a small amount of time and attention on email.
The driving force in science today is grant funding, which is itself driven by citations. For example, the NIH measures "research productivity" primarily with # of citations/dollar spent. In nanotechnology, my field, we have also measured research effectiveness by number of citations. This is not some idle interest, but leads to how research funding is distributed by scientific field. This results in a negative financial incentive for in-field scientists to disagree, and positive financial incentive to show that related scientific fields are problematic (and thus less worthy of funding). In this context of correlation between funding and citations, reviews should be viewed with great skepticism.
In this case, science was advanced by introduction and acceptance of better statistical standards driven by competitive cross-disciplinary communication. (Leading to a main conclusion of TFA at Vox: the system works.)
In my experience, validation only happens when scientists from other fields are able to reproduce and expand upon your results.
Great research and explanation.
It would have been nice if ITEP wrote this and then went on to explain their views on whether double taxation in this case would be better (there's a good argument that it could be) or perhaps that the tax code should be simplified so that this kind of research isn't necessary for the average person to understand the system.
More than that is already spent on renewable energy investment. It's not as big a number as you think.
It's great that the link to the actual GND document is posted here, people should read it.
There are a few things the GND gets right. We do need physical infrastructure upgrades, power infrastructure upgrades, manufacturing modernization, agricultural modernization, improved public transportation, and better application of science to ecology.
There are also a few things that GND gets wrong. There is very little focus, and no actual goals. Mostly, there is a depressing willingness to abandon green principles (science based ecology) for modern socialist principles. Reading the text throws into sharp relief where these philosophies clash. For example, there are many socially driven conditions and exceptions put on how and where changes can be made. If the goal is truly green, there should be no exceptions or special groups to consider. The GND follows the same philosophy as what the right has put forth in the past: ecology is great as long as it doesn't disrupt the other desires of my political base.
The most useful thing here is that we have some written policies from the left presented in an authoritative way. Perhaps the moderates can eventually piece together some reasonable set of policies from the GND and the clean coal plan so we can finish up with the politics (after 20 years...) and move on to actually doing something.
It's incorrect and naive to argue that these "privately developed" features of social credit are not government directed in China. They are. China has a different economic system and different governmental system than you're used to thinking about.
Go back a few decades and everything in China was explicitly owned by the government. Today, about 75% of companies and assets in China are owned by the government (US governments own less than 10% of total assets in the US). Any company acting against what the Chinese government sees as the public good will not be allowed to do business in China. This is a different culture. No CEO in China has a desire to have their company act independently of the government. That would be bad for business and a critical personality flaw in a Chinese CEO. Anywhere the government doesn't have explicit ownership, it still has effective control.
Also, China is not run by the "federated" idea of independent local governments we're used to. Your use of the phrase "Chinese federal government" would be very controversial in China. In the US, we're used to city, county, state, and federal governments all being elected and managed independently. There is one government in China: the Central government. If the Governor of Hebei province makes a decision the central government doesn't like, the central government can remove that official and reverse the decision. Officially, the Governor of Hebei is second in command of the province, reporting to the appointed Party Secretary for Hebei.
The reality is that that virtualization is the way the world is headed. Looking to the old days when all the politicians in DC knew each other is nice, but it's not going to happen again. The problem is not politics, but simply growth in technology and fundamental changes in how our society communicates. It would be better to figure out how teleconferencing can be used effectively in politics than to try to maintain politics as a separate sub-culture. If politicians don't talk with us and with each other in ways we recognize as "normal", we will lose trust in them and the system. The floor debates, office meetings, the way their offices are laid out, the way their staff is organized: these are all approaches to management and consensus building that would be normal and familiar 100 years ago in industry, local government, and non-profits. Today, no one sets up a new organization this way. Local governments don't work this way anymore. Eventually the national government will change too.
It is impossible today for any scientist to understand everything we've collected across science. I think it's probably impossible to do in any recognized sub-field.
A large portion of the "understanding" of science is wrong. There's bad data, bad analysis, and bad evaluations out there.
When disagreeing with some of that, it is extremely difficult to simply say people are wrong. It's much easier to say that "we're surprised" about some result. If we were really good, we wouldn't be surprised by as many things. Truthfully, we're not as surprised about as much as we say we are. We're hoping to guide the emotions of key readers of our work. However, none of us really knows what we're doing.
This is the reality we live in. It's not just big companies, it's governments, universities... just about every organization. I started my own company to break out of this, but after filtering through several layers of professional investors, you always have to deal with the root investors. Their focus is only on the return, and "they" are everyone (the mob, the masses, the average person).
In the end, it's the relatively new requirement that a narrow definition of fiduciary responsibility to the investors is the primary responsibility of a company that drives shitty behavior. This is overwhelming in the pubic markets, and you're seeing it pop up even in non-profits, but it is not likely a sustainable economic philosophy as it prioritizes short term profits over long term growth.
I am a condensed matter physicist.
This paper measures normal nonlinear electrochemical effects and assumes they're superconducting. Further, there is a misunderstanding of what quantized conductance means, and how to demonstrate that quantized conductance is being measured.
There is no evidence presented of superconductivity, and no good argument for why it would be expected. It's a bit embarrassing that the author is a Physics professor.
I know this sounds exotic and exciting, but the llama angle on this story is basic biotechnology. Llamas (and several other species) make simpler and smaller antibodies than typical mammals. This makes them much easier to work with, sequence, etc. When making a custom antibody, it's not unusual to choose a llama as your "antibody development tool."
There are llama farms near biotech hubs that do nothing but repeatedly inject llamas with small doses of some protein or molecule and sell the blood (packed with antibodies) back to the pharma and biotech companies.
The actual neat part of this story is the (slow, but steady) development of a universal influenza vaccine.
Each generation has its complaints about the prior one. You see it in the posts here, with current parents comparing what we do today with the self centered hypocrisy of the boomers, and the occasional boomer complaining about the short sighted intolerance of the greatest generation.
Our kids are going to hate how we raise them.
Will they feel we allowed tech to raise them, that we were too focused on our world, our own issues and technology? (This is similar to our complaint about the boomers.) Or will the complaint be that we held the world back and were too afraid of the changes technology were bringing to see clearly? (Similar to the boomers complaint about their parents.)
We don't know.
Does your company have a bunch of MBAs near the top? Do you think that's a STEM degree?
That's a nice bit of circular logic.
Why study MDMA?
We're not, we're studying octopodes.
Why study octopi?
Because we don't need oversight.
Why don't you want oversight?
Because we're doing sketchy MDMA studies.
Why study MDMA? ...
They knew through biochemistry that octopuses would have the same response as well. They tested a bunch of animals and listed those that wouldn't have the same response. Then tested one from the list that would.
The reason the researchers used octopuses is not to gather any special insight into neurochemistry that an octopus may provide, but simply because invertebrates are not covered by animal experimentation laws.
Through genetic testing, the authors of this study were able to determine that octopuses and vertebrates all share the neural transmitters that MDMA acts upon.
The authors then go on to ask whether the drug functions similarly in humans and animals when it comes to social situations. I don't know how much literature there is on the social abilities of octopodes, but that this study discovers that they all prefer females over males seems to indicate it's pretty rudimentary. It's hard to believe that any real social abilities can be measured in a species so poorly understood.
On the other hand, there are tons of studies on the social habits of monkeys, apes, dogs, cats, mice... why not try one of them?
Now we're back to the top. Octopuses are not covered by the animal experimentation laws, and the authors chose to not have any oversight from their campus Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (which they could have done to be ethical, even though it's not legally required), which makes this whole study feel really gross.