Because they can’t smoke, obviously
It’s because they’re microdosing CBD (non-seed) oils.
I absolutely despise this flavor of science content. Real science does not lend itself to quick cut/tiktok cadence videos and presenting it this way only degrades its legitimacy.
Edit: And after looking into it this all stems from an incredibly hyperbolic university press release. The paper is in a sub-sub-Nature family journal and in no way supports the claims that it makes, let alone the wildly overblown claims that the press release and subsequent slop tsunami make.
I don’t think this is that bad. The video content basically follows the content of the abstract of the paper, and he promotes a longer deep-dive video he apparently has elsewhere in his channel, I haven’t gone looking. Part of science communication is being able to summarize the core narrative of the research, sometimes to an audience who are not experts in that field. This is crucial if you want interdisciplinary collaboration, if you want cross-pollination of findings between fields, and if you want the public to care about what you are doing and support funding you.
That said, this guy needs to link the research in the description.
Here’s the summary the University of Rochester put out https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/why-dont-bats-get-cancer
And here’s the non-paywalled paper in Nature Communications https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59403-z
A) I read the press release and the paper within about 10 minutes of making the post, which is in my edit. I’m not sure if you responded before or after I added that so maybe we’re just ships passing in the night on this point.
B) The absolute number one goal of science communication is to maintain the credibility of the field. Making some goofy ass Cocomelon/tiktok short about a research paper doesn’t lend any credibility to legitimate science. Pretending like a paper has “found” something that is in no way supported by the data in that paper is a disservice to the field. This reeked to me of some overzealous university comms department trying to pump up a publication for cheap PR and it turned out to be exactly that. This shit makes legitimate scientists look like assholes and liars in the minds of laypeople when they find out that the hyped up story that went viral was actually a nothingburger.
C) If someone is going to call themselves a “science communicator” they had God damned well better be able to interpret research rather than just gobbling up abstracts and press releases like a little baby bird.
yeah, I never saw the edit. I thought you objected to the brevity and non-technical language of the video. As for the content, I’ve only read the abstract and I don’t know that much about this field, so I can’t really object on scientific grounds.
they’re just not smart enough to understand that cells are the building blocks of life, duh
They weren’t taught about mitochondria in bat school
Jee Billy, why does your mom let you have 2 copies of p53?
Kind of a cool discovery. Makes sense that bats have giga immune systems. Their viruses coevolve to become gigachad and then become a zoonotic infections. Short of giving people a second p53 via genetic experiments or installing Linux for the immune system I don’t see it helping in the short term.
We’ve known that bats have highly active immune systems for decades upon decades. It also looks like these bats have evolved a second copy of p53 because they’re exceedingly vulnerable to p53 inactivation, not because they’re trying to become immune to cancer.
It’s also not like p53 is some esoteric protein, it’s the most heavily studied tumor suppressor gene probably by a factor of 5 to 10. This feels like saying there’s a paper claiming to have discovered that you can stop having shit on your ass by wiping it. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not a discovery and it’s not even the best way that we’re currently aware of to get shit off your ass.
installing Linux for the immune system
Of you can install Linux on a dead badger I am sure you can install it on a immune system.
