4 ms·

This is really interesting. Clearly they're trying to control for sensitive variables that make little sense even to them, and yet they're still using rodents a

This is really interesting. Clearly they're trying to control for sensitive variables that make little sense even to them, and yet they're still using rodents as subjects and publishing studies likely without mention of these oddities. Not saying everyone is doing it wrong, but wow.

fhood 9y ago
You have to allow for some level of pragmatism. They found a method that seems to provide better data without actively biasing their results. Rodents make convenient test subjects, and no scientist wants (or more likely it doesn't even occur to them) to include an unproven methodology in their published work.
- kbutler 9y ago
  Are they publishing "make sure only [female name] handles the mice"? Or do they just publish, "X caused effect Y"? Frankly, identifying why it requires a female, or female non-cat owner sounds like it may be more interesting than whatever other result they are working on...
  - Declanomous 9y ago
    If results were thrown out because of a confounding factor then it would hopefully be mentioned in the paper. I've had a similar thought about these little insights. There are literally thousands of times more biology undergrads than there are people doing biology research. Biological experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. There are so many confounding variables, data is hard to collect, etc, that experiments bomb as often as they succeed. A lot of these experiments are extremely well supported, so you might actually be able to discover something novel if you were able to track the failures. Anyways, I don't do anything with biology anymore, but I strongly believe that biology is a field where citizen scientists could make a meaningful impact.
japhy__ryder 9y ago
Another thing to consider is epigenetics. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24677-fear-of-a-smell-can-be-passed-down-several-generations/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24677-fear-of-a-smell...

fhood 9y ago

You have to allow for some level of pragmatism. They found a method that seems to provide better data without actively biasing their results. Rodents make convenient test subjects, and no scientist wants (or more likely it doesn't even occur to them) to include an unproven methodology in their published work.

kbutler 9y ago
Are they publishing "make sure only [female name] handles the mice"? Or do they just publish, "X caused effect Y"? Frankly, identifying why it requires a female, or female non-cat owner sounds like it may be more interesting than whatever other result they are working on...
- Declanomous 9y ago
  If results were thrown out because of a confounding factor then it would hopefully be mentioned in the paper. I've had a similar thought about these little insights. There are literally thousands of times more biology undergrads than there are people doing biology research. Biological experiments are notoriously difficult to conduct. There are so many confounding variables, data is hard to collect, etc, that experiments bomb as often as they succeed. A lot of these experiments are extremely well supported, so you might actually be able to discover something novel if you were able to track the failures. Anyways, I don't do anything with biology anymore, but I strongly believe that biology is a field where citizen scientists could make a meaningful impact.

japhy__ryder 9y ago

Another thing to consider is epigenetics. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24677-fear-of-a-smell-can-be-passed-down-several-generations/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24677-fear-of-a-smell...