Ahh that's wack. The article it's based on is open-access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5
But if they know they're getting ecstasy, the improvement might originate from placebo which means that they're not actually getting better from ecstasy. They're just getting better because they think they should be getting better
From the article:
Squeezed in alongside their main projects, the investigation took eight years and included dozens of participants. The results, published in 2016, were revelatory [1]. Two to three months after giving birth, multiple regions of the cerebral cortex were, on average, 2% smaller than before conception. And most of them remained smaller two years later. Although shrinkage might evoke the idea of a deficit, the team showed that the degree of cortical reduction predicted the strength of a mother’s attachment to her infant, and proposed that pregnancy prepares the brain for parenthood.
From the article:
To demonstrate model collapse, the researchers took a pre-trained LLM and fine-tuned it by training it using a data set based on Wikipedia entries. They then asked the resulting model to generate its own Wikipedia-style articles. To train the next generation of the model, they started with the same pre-trained LLM, but fine-tuned it on the articles created by its predecessor. They judged the performance of each model by giving it an opening paragraph and asking it to predict the next few sentences, then comparing the output to that of the model trained on real data. The team expected to see errors crop up, says Shumaylov, but were surprised to see “things go wrong very quickly”, he says.
What they see as "bad research" is looking at an older cohort without taking into consideration their earlier drinking habits - that is, were they previously alcoholics or did they generally have other problems with their health?
If you don't correct for these things, you might find that people who are not drinking seems less healthy than people who are. BUT, that's not because they're not drinking, it's just because of their preexisting conditions. Their peers who are drinking a little bit tend to not have these preexisting conditions (on average)
Here's an actual explanation of the 'sneaked reference':
However, we found through a chance encounter that some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles’ metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases. The result? Citation counts for certain researchers or journals have skyrocketed, even though these references were not cited by the authors in their articles.
I know that in Lithuania, they drink lightly salted water: https://www.kaina24.lt/s/vytautas-mineralinis-vanduo/
So while I don't doubt your taste buds, I think it's a cultural thing whether a bit of salt in water tastes bad 😄
When talking about measurements, "precision" and "accuracy" have slightly different meanings See here
You will transfer the economic copyright to most journals upon publication of the typeset manuscript meaning that you're not allowed to publish that particular PDF anywhere. However, a lot of journals are okay with you publishing the pre-peer reviewed article or even sometimes the peer-reviewed, but NOT typeset article (sometimes called post-print article). Scientific publishing is weird :-)