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These were cases in which a fetus might be suffering from a heart or lung problem that could kill or severely injure an infant after it was born. To repair the damage before birth, teams made incisions not only into the mothers, but also into the fetuses themselves. Throughout the procedure, the fetuses would always remain connected to the mothers through the placentas and umbilical cords. After these procedures, Hariri watched two remarkable things happen. First, the babies that were born almost always fared far better than they would have if the surgeons had waited to operate after they were born. And second, the new infants showed no scarring or incisions from the prenatal surgery. The placenta had pumped so many fresh stem cells into the fetus before birth that the body had entirely regenerated!
Immortality, Inc.
Chip Walter
Comic strip writer Randall Munroe illustrated some of the failings of this threshold for scientific publication: The comic shows some scientists testing whether jelly beans cause acne. After finding no link, someone recommends they test different colors individually. After going through numerous colors, from salmon to orange, none are found to be related to acne, except for one: The green jelly beans are found to be linked to acne, with a p-value less than 0.05. But how many colors were examined? Twenty. And yet, explaining that this might be due to chance does little to prevent the headline declaring jelly beans linked to acne. John Maynard Smith, a renowned evolutionary biologist, once pithily summarized this approach: “Statistics is the science that lets you do twenty experiments a year and publish one false result in Nature.”
The Half-Life of Facts
Samuel Arbesman
Two days. Forty-eight hours without flow plunged people into a state eerily similar to a serious psychiatric disorder. The experiment suggests that flow, the deep sense of engagement that Motivation 3.0 calls for, isn’t a nicety. It’s a necessity. We need it to survive. It is the oxygen of the soul.
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