Will emend this post tomorrow with corrections after reading carefully. I can say with reasonsble assurance that no one has measured and weighed more mouse brains than I have ;-) (except you John Wong)
The preprint is available here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.04.10.588953v1....
Out of curiosity how many would that be? Thousands? Tens of thousands? How long does it take to measure a mouse brain? When you do it does someone remove them for you or you also have to remove them before measuring?
As for the measurement of brain size, it is a planimetric projection of the area of the dorsal surface of the neocortex. This is a lame way to do morphometry. Squish the brain a bit and the area will expand beautifully—and by way more than 6.5%.
One last comment on the genetics of these animals. The are probably incorrectly stated to be at least F8 progeny of the mixed 129-B6N embryonic stem cells. I hope they mean N8 backcross progeny––that is to say, 8th generation congenic lines. But in this case they appear to have backcrossed weirdly to a different type of B6; the standard C57BL/6J strain. All of this means that even in the best case, they have three different genomes banging around in supposedly co-isogenic cases and their controls: 1. chunks of 129 strain chromosomes that will still be common even at 8 generations, 2. chunks of B6N chromosomes that will also be common at 8 generations, and of course the B6J background strain. You would have to carry out sparse whole genome sequencing or use the GigaMUGA array to unconfound the genetics in this study.
Is it possible that they are 2a and 2b in the preprint?
Do they have a control group? (Bonus for a blind control group.)
Is the 6.5% statisticaly significant?
How many mice?
The comparison of best-of-the best is not that useful in practice because you have to filter through so much noise to find it, so the average case is more useful in practice.
That is the random peak that results from lucky combinations in some corners of a space - it is not owing to how the channel works, it is not owing to the culture it promotes.
Everything is fine, give it some time.
Here's a formula you can try :
Title : "I made a AI powered insert tool use-case"
Article: "Hey look what I did ! By hooking up insert LLM model to this insert random tool in a few hours of vibe coding I got it to do something that vaguely resembles something useful and made no effort to evaluate performance/compare to anything. Here's my toy demo example."
Should be front page material, going on the last few months.
> They’re into crypto now.
(:shrug: I get it... Sore point... The apocalypse isn't a humorous thing to joke about, what with it being in the midst of actually happening and all ... but if I don't try to find myself a little giggle here and there once in a while I'ma literally go insane, so whatever. Down-vote away. Don't really care anymore.)
While I already think it's unethical to use animals the way we do, the idea that we're experimenting with how close we can get to bestowing them with human intelligence before killing them is saddening.
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