With Trump's attempt to appoint RFK to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a lot of people are talking about how our foods and medicines are poisining us.
These days, the main food boogeyman seems to be seed oils. Yet if you try to figure out why people are so worked up, you'll find it's basically nonsense. Seed oils seem not particularly different than other oils, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to think they affect the human body differently. It reminds me of like 10-20 years ago when people were similarly worked up about corn syrup. Similarly, if you look into corn syrup, you'll find that it seems not particularly different than other sugars, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to think they affect the human body differently.
Now I love a good conspiracy, and I even believe in some myself, but nearly everything related to obesity seems to be conspiratorial thinking and motivated reasoning. People don't want to accept the most likely truth. And yet, Occam's Razor provides it for us:
People are eating more food, mostly because food is really cheap and delicious these days.
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Wikipedia defines the Dunning-Kruger effect as:
a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is
Look it up on Google Images and you'll find various summary images, like these:
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The Large Hadron Collider is a marvel of modern technology. It is also an endless source of juvenile amusement, since the word "hadron" is very similar to "hardon". The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European research organization CERN ("CERN" means "science" in European). At CERN's official website, there are currently 141 articles which mistakenly use the word "hardon" instead of "hadron". The first result is the title of one poor guy's PhD thesis.
One of my main scientific goals is the application of mathematical models to find interesting insights into biological systems. This is a really broad goal, as depending on the area, there may be very different ways to gain insight. Here, I want to discuss one example, an interesting paper by Sriram and coworkers that was published in PLOS Computational Biology last year entitled "Modeling cortisol dynamics in the neuro-endocrine axis distinguishes normal, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in humans".
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Very recently, I've been intrigued by control theory applied to systems biology. This strategy seems to often produce insightful and unintuitive results. In this blog post, I'm going to take a look at a very cool article by Ben-Zvi and coworkers that applies control theory to a mathematical model of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and hopefully put it in a bit of a broader context.
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It's hard to deal with introversion. Even a scientific approach doesn't offer many solutions. Sure, you can observe extroverts in their native habitats, but it often seems as if much of their power derives from some combination of status and network effects. No status, no network, no effects.
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In 1957, we knew what DNA was. We were pretty sure that proteins were determined by sequences of DNA. But we didn't know exactly how this happened. In other words, the genetic code was still a mystery back then. This was a particularly perplexing problem, because a very simple question could be stated with no obvious answer: How does a language (DNA sequences) with four letters (the nucleotides A, C, G, and T) get translated into a language (protein sequences) with twenty letters (amino acids)... and furthermore, is there some higher purpose to having these two different alphabets?
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