Entire fields are based upon the existence of crispr now, it demonstrated its impact. It has been 2? 3? years, people who were making papers anyway have implemented AlphaFold, it hasn't exactly spawned a new area.
My two cents having formerly worked in perovskites trying to upscale the process:
Perovskites are exciting (or were exciting) because they have a high theoretical efficiency, are relatively simple to prepare, and the "worst" component in them is lead (an incredibly abundant material). The big problem with them is that they are famously horrifically unstable in ambient conditions.
Roll-to-roll processing means that you can fabricate them in mass scale. Ambient means that they claim to have solved issues like working in glovebox conditions.
Even if the price of solar panels has come down below labor, the fact that they are produced from rare earth minerals goes (in my opinion) underreported.
Consider the relationship between perovskites and multi-junction solar cells similar to the comparison between sodium and lithium ion batteries. Lithium will always have a higher capacity, but sodium is so abundant that for many applications it just doesn't matter anymore.
They produce 60-80 milligram of calcium carbonate 'per fiber', per 30 hours. I'm interested to know how they keep the bacteria alive over time, through the concrete curing process (high temperatures, high level of carbon dioxide, making any liquids in the vicinity highly acidic), and how the bacteria remain viable over time. Concrete we consider to last over decades, or a century?
Can you elaborate about what you define as "used against you" even if it is entirely inaccurate? What is the use case of inaccurate data with which you are concerned?
You're correct on all accounts, save for my optimism. Maybe the Riff can only work for something of this style when data feedback losing 10 lbs is large, compared to supplements, and the confines of the experiment are relatively limited (30 days). In hindsight, my comment was supposed to be 'its exciting that random people can get together and try to figure something out', and less about the difficulties of biology in science.
p values are meant to relate whether or not 'some' hypothesis is statistically relevant versus a control study. For something like biology, human nature, dieting, weight loss, in a world where you can't really control how stressed someone is, how far they walk to work, among 100 other things... if you're trying to find out how 'the potato' works, safe citizen science (a Riff trial) may be far more effective than 'traditional' proofs to get to the bottom of something that works, and then someone can do a controlled study.
Beautiful. We are in a golden era of citizen science, where access to knowledge, tools to connect, tools to process data, and the ability to communicate this is at an all time high. The kind of stuff you see on Youtube is amazing: people like AppliedScience achieving incredibly things in the garage, or recently NileRed took a nature paper [0] 1 step further and published it on youtube [1]).
From a chemist/material scientist perspective: Whether the results of the Riff trial may ever have a p value suitable for nature/science, likely not. When it comes to the human body and our biology, a mass trial like this may even be more useful than traditional studies, where pre-existing biases in data collection may weed out the most useful 'Riff'. Better than that, the information collected by mold_time is regularly released and discussed, in the open, on twitter/x [2].
To make a comparison: it is also 'theoretically' easier to teach people not to shoot eachother, rather than to restrict their access to a technology which makes killing very simple. I think keeping the 'activation barrier' to bad actor induced, AI-aided stalking high is a good thing, even if it is only a temporary solution.
Microplastic detection is a large focus in sensing right now. Its expensive and hard for the very same reason microplastics are so difficult to stop: they're chemically inert and small. Most detection methods rely purification and microscopy, which is for now mostly manual labor.