Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Uku Vainik @ukuvainik.bsky.social · 6h

I am sure LLM could recover lots of personality nuances from single Rorschach image rating

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Uku Vainik @ukuvainik.bsky.social · 9h

At the age of LLM one could automatically score the Rorchach test and scale up measurement at biobank level!

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Uku Vainik @ukuvainik.bsky.social · 18h

Thanks for the effort! It is a very logical thing to test, in hindsight our bariatric & GLP1 paper supports that.
I wonder if it is a power issue? Here they managed to show an effect, but the sample is bigger and also they focused on a subset that has already lost 3%. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Fig. 6: Impact of PGSLC on weight change due to ILIs. | Nature Medicine

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

www.nature.com

Reposted by Uku Vainik

Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 1d

Is dark chocolate good for you?
"Sadly for chocoholics, the health claims for dark chocolate come from wishful thinking and sly marketing, not the findings of science."
Sorry
www.economist.com/science-and-...

Is dark chocolate actually healthy?

We assess whether that tempting idea is too good to be true

www.economist.com

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Uku Vainik @ukuvainik.bsky.social · 22h

That would be really useful so that people could plan analyses before racking up the access costs with UK biobank

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Andrea Ganna @andganna.bsky.social · 1d

💥 New preprint & our first RCT! 💥

Does an extremely high or low BMI polygenic score influence weight loss after a diet intervention?

GENEROOS is a 6-month randomized diet vs. control trial testing if genetic predisposition to higher BMI affects weight loss in overweight adults

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Michel Nivard @michelnivard.bsky.social · 1d

Synthetic non-parametric UKB phenotypes straight from an R package. It pulls all the required summary data from the UKB website.. Somewhat tempted to go totally overboad and have it simulate synthetic genomes, with plausible SNP h2's and "real" top hits (which i'd pull from GWAS cat & nealelab)..

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Uku Vainik @ukuvainik.bsky.social · 1d

Very cool! This is something you're building? I cannot find it online, apart from this

biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk/synthetic_da...

UK Biobank Synthetic Dataset

biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk

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Uku Vainik @ukuvainik.bsky.social · 2d

I rarely delete anything, apart from spam. This is my history! Although, Outlook is quite poor at finding anything I need😭

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Uku Vainik @ukuvainik.bsky.social · 3d

Not to be missed!

Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 4d

Happy to announce that I'll give a talk on how we can make rigorous causal inference more mainstream 📈

You can sign up for the Zoom link here: tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRo...

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Reactor Magazine @reactorsff.bsky.social · 3d

MOOMIN MOVIE INCOMING this is not a drill!!!!

reactormag.com/rebecca-suga...

A Moomin Movie Is Coming From Steven Universe’s Rebecca Sugar - Reactor

In a just world there would be more Moomin movies than Marvel movies.

reactormag.com

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

David Baranger @davidbaranger.bsky.social · 22d

𝐀𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐬 | "Although interaction effects were detected, they were small and practically negligible in their explanation of variance in externalizing behaviors" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Additive and Interactive Relations of Personality and Cognition With Externalizing Behaviors - Nathaniel L. Phillips, Nathan T. Carter, Kevin M. King, Courtland S. Hyatt, Max M. Owens, Donald R. Lynam...

Personality and cognition offer robust frameworks to understand the individual differences associated with externalizing behaviors. However, these literatures h...

journals.sagepub.com

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Hampton Gaddy @hggaddy.bsky.social · 4d

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market | PNAS

There is a widespread belief, in both the scholarly literature and the popular press, that polygyny prevents large numbers of men from marrying by ...

www.pnas.org

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

profserious @profserious.bsky.social · 5d

Here are your 10 -essential- AI prompts for academics ... make your life easy with help from @profserious.bsky.social profserious.substack.com/p/10-ai-prom...

10 AI Prompts for Academics

making those hard jobs a little easier ...

profserious.substack.com

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Eivind Ystrom @eivindy.bsky.social · 5d

Two birds of a gene - catch Matt Keller's webinar at @uio.no on October 15th. Please share
www.sv.uio.no/promenta/eng...
@ispg.bsky.social @behaviorgenetic.bsky.social @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social @essgn.bsky.social @ibg.colorado.edu

Using structural equation models to estimate direct and indirect genetic effects and assortative mating in trio data - PROMENTA

Guest lecture by Matt Keller

www.sv.uio.no

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Simon Fisher @profsimonfisher.bsky.social · 6d

Twenty-four years ago today, our paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” was published: www.nature.com/articles/350....
A personal thread about the ups & downs of the journey we took to get to that point....1/n
🗣️🧬🧪

Image shows the first two printed pages of the paper “A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder” by Cecilia Lai and colleagues, published in Nature in 2001 (volume 413, pages 519-523). The abstract reads as follows:
Individuals affected with developmental disorders of speech and language have substantial difficulty acquiring expressive and/or receptive language in the absence of any profound sensory or neurological impairment and despite adequate intelligence and opportunity. Although studies of twins consistently indicate that a significant genetic component is involved, most families segregating speech and language deficits show complex patterns of inheritance, and a gene that predisposes individuals to such disorders has not been identified. We have studied a unique three-generation pedigree, KE, in which a severe speech and language disorder is transmitted as an autosomal-dominant monogenic trait. Our previous work mapped the locus responsible, SPCH1, to a 5.6-cM interval of region 7q31 on chromosome 7. We also identified an unrelated individual, CS, in whom speech and language impairment is associated with a chromosomal translocation involving the SPCH1 interval. Here we show that the gene FOXP2, which encodes a putative transcription factor containing a polyglutamine tract and a forkhead DNA-binding domain, is directly disrupted by the translocation breakpoint in CS. In addition, we identify a point mutation in affected members of the KE family that alters an invariant amino-acid residue in the forkhead domain. Our findings suggest that FOXP2 is involved in the developmental process that culminates in speech and language.

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

The Conversation U.S. @us.theconversation.com · 6d

Young children are capable of finding systematic solutions to complex problems without any instruction, contradicting long-held assumptions about cognitive development, according to a psychologist
buff.ly/226VzMZ 🧪

Children can be systematic problem-solvers at younger ages than psychologists had thought – new research

By cranking up the difficulty on the test task, researchers found that children are capable of finding systematic solutions to complex problems far earlier than psychologists had believed.

buff.ly

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Eric Topol @erictopol.bsky.social · 8d

Evidence keeps accumulating for the environmental toxin exposure link to Parkinson's disease, beyond pesticides. Today on trichloroethylene (TCE), used in dry cleaning
www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/...

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Elliot Tucker-Drob @tuckerdrob.bsky.social · 8d

Non-paywalled link to my commentary on @vw1234.bsky.social and colleagues new paper in @nature.com rdcu.be/eI2NG

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Shai Carmi @shaicarmi.bsky.social · 8d

There is a lot of hype around this new paper. It's a great advance, but it will never result in the birth of a healthy baby. The reason is that in this method, chrs that end up in the egg are a random sample of the 46 somatic chrs,
1/2

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Human skin DNA fertilised to make embryo for first time

US scientists testing the technique say it could help people overcome infertility and potentially allow same-sex couples to have a genetically related child.

www.bbc.com

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Elena Shekhova, PhD @lumipie.com · 9d

🧪🍎📃
It only took me 500 years to finish this 📊, but here it is 🎉

Grocery shops in many wealthy countries are oversupplied with animal-based foods. They stock far more meat and dairy than we need for human and planetary health.

🔗 www.lumipie.com/data-vis/pla...

Data visualization comparing national food supplies in high-income countries (based on GDP per capita) with planetary health intake targets. Radial charts for 12 countries (including Ireland, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, United States, Australia, Norway, Qatar, Kuwait, Emirates, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia) show that supplies of animal-based foods, especially meat and dairy, consistently exceed recommended levels of intake. Bars below each chart compare grams of plant-based, animal-based, and fats & oils in total daily supply per person. Data is from FAOSTAT (2022)

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

SSIBsociety @ssibsociety.bsky.social · 9d

Another paper from the SSIB special issue:

sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Bariatric Surgery & Alcohol Use Disorder

Recent findings reveal a concerning trend: alcohol intake and alcohol use disorder (AUD) increase significantly within two years following bariatric procedures.

Increased alcohol intake and alcohol use disorder following bariatric surgery: potential mechanisms

Sleeve gastrectomy (SG) and Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) are the most effective weight loss procedures for severe obesity. However, there is recent…

sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Tamkinat Rauf @tsrauf.bsky.social · 11d

Life satisfaction mostly declines with age. Previous findings (esp. the famous U-shaped age-SWB trajectory) were artifacts of misspecified models. doi.org/10.1093/esr/...

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

Andrea Ganna @andganna.bsky.social · 10d

🧬💥 Do the genetics that make you develop a disease also help you survive it? Not much.

Our new study in Nature Genetics including 9 disease and 7 biobanks shows:

• Susceptibility variants ≠ survival
• PRSs for onset weak at predicting progression
• Lifespan PRS predicts survival better

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Reposted by Uku Vainik

René Mõttus @renemottus.bsky.social · 10d

Early career personality researchers coming to the Edinburgh ECP22: If you want to get a link to a slightly more affordable uni accommodation option later this year, leave your email here:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Advance Accommodation Information

Primarily for Early Career Researchers (PhD, post-doc): If you would like to receive advance information about a limited number of more affordable accommodation options available for the 22nd Europea...

docs.google.com

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