[Ultimatt]

I really hate how shitty science reporting has become, you can tell all science journos aren't actually current or well read in the science they report on. This isnt some new miracle find this is a well described and growing phylum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobdellota Having genome reduced symbionts of dinoflagellates is an even more common and general phenomena, its almost the definition of a dino to have a weird zoo of peculiar friends and things becoming endo symbionts. This finding is definitely cool, but I dont understand why the article has to make out its a "breakthrough" or "astounding" rather than actually the more astounding thing is how normal this very weird thing is!

[agentcoops]

I fell into a rabbit hole when I was looking for coverage of a recent relatively technical biological result and the most prominent Google results were from 'evolutionnews.org' aka 'scienceandculture.com', run by the 'Center for Science and Culture.' Imagine my surprise to find this is all run by a 'Discovery Institute' with tens of millions in funding dedicated to pushing 'intelligent design' and behind the campaign to have anti-evolution views taught in public high school science courses.

Not of course to say these outfits are behind the decline in science reporting, but it's a real tragedy how difficult it is to find actual and competent scientific journalism today, a tragedy that makes the job of such charlatans all the easier. I'm glad that Quanta Magazine seems to be doing well enough, which certainly isn't perfect but I've read some good articles from them.

[fluoridation]

Out of curiosity, what was the result in question? The director of the DI is a molecular biologist and I've seen his name attached to a paper that reported a pretty humdrum technical result about... (actually checking my notes) the statistical improbability of enzymes arising by purely random assemblage of unrelated protein folds.

[Mars008]

Now imagine that this is being used to train LLMs. Then fed back to users.

[gus_massa]

I agree. It's just a tiny parasite archea. It's common for parasites to get smaller and lose features over time. So it's clearly alive, and the title is linkbait (or totaly wrong).

I made a similar comment in an old thread about this but I can't find it. My biology is not good enough to give details about the phylum (or whatever, I never remember the classification), but I have the same annoyment in many posts about math or physics.

[twic]

Indeed. This is a cool discovery, but there is absolutely nothing shocking about it. Endosymbionts with reduced genomes are well known, and this is just an extreme case. This new thing is in no way "a new category of life, suspended somewhere between archaea and virus". It's just an archaean.

[IAmBroom]

> Having genome reduced symbionts of dinoflagellates is an even more common and general phenomena, its almost the definition of a *dino* to have a weird zoo of peculiar friends and things becoming endo symbionts.

I spent too long trying to figure out why dinosaurs were a part of this discussion.