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Language + Flying dinos + Autopsy rates fell for years, then Covid-19 came along

#1
C C Offline
Cognitive elements of language have existed for 40 million years
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...180740.htm

SUMMARY: Humans are not the only beings that can identify rules in complex language-like constructions -- monkeys and great apes can do so, too, a new study has shown. Researcher used a series of experiments based on an 'artificial grammar' to conclude that this ability can be traced back to our ancient primate ancestors... (MORE)


The first flying dinosaurs were a failed evolutionary experiment
https://www.newscientist.com/article/225...xperiment/

INTRO: The first dinosaurs to take to the air were a failed evolutionary experiment. They had wings made of a skin membrane, similar to bats, but they were bad at flying and were soon outcompeted by birds. “They were badly designed gliders,” says Alex Dececchi at Mount Marty University in South Dakota. “They got squeezed out.” (MORE)


Autopsy rates were falling for years. Then Covid-19 came along.
https://undark.org/2020/10/21/covid-19-autopsies/

EXCERPTS: . . . since 1950, pathologists in the U.S. have gone from conducting autopsies on nearly half of all patients who died in hospitals to less than 5 percent of them. In part, that’s because advances in imaging technology have given physicians more confidence in their diagnoses. But “our ability to determine the cause of death is pretty bad unless you do an autopsy,” says Mary Fowkes, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. She says about a quarter of autopsies reveal something the clinician did not know about the patient’s cause of death.

[...] Most experts point to 1970 as a turning point. Autopsy rates had begun to decline a decade earlier, so in 1965, the Joint Commission, an organization that evaluates and accredits hospitals and other medical facilities and personnel, began requiring that hospitals autopsy at least 20 percent of their patients who died to identify opportunities to improve care. In 1970, the Joint Commission removed the requirement. At least some doctors welcomed the change: One physician, for example, explained in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association that hospitals were wasting time conducting autopsies simply to meet the metrics, rather than selecting valuable cases and using them to learn.

Autopsy rates declined dramatically. Recent policy changes threaten to push the number of autopsies even lower [...] Shrinking operating margins have also imperiled the practice. Insurance doesn’t generally cover autopsies.... Autopsy rates have dropped in other countries, too...

But pathologists say autopsies offer a level of detail that doctors can’t see in the living. “When you’re able to see what’s happening at the level of the cells, you just have a broader picture of the potential mechanism by which the disease is happening,” says Amy Rapkiewicz, a pathologist at NYU Langone Health.

Those benefits could seem especially important with the onset of Covid-19 — a novel illness with effects on the body that scientists and physicians are still scrambling to understand. [...] But as cases spiked this spring, a shortage of protective equipment and concerns about the possibility of catching the novel coronavirus from patients’ tissue initially kept autopsy rates low.

[...] Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the College of American Pathologists published guidelines for safely conducting the procedures, requiring full-body protection and recommending the use of specially ventilated chambers that most hospitals don’t have. As a result, “most institutions were not prepared” to do autopsies of Covid-19 patients, says Hewitt, and “even the groups that were willing to do the autopsies scaled back their protocols,” to look at specific organs instead of the whole body.

[...] Many pathologists hope that renewed respect for their work will have lasting consequences. Rapkiewicz, though, is not optimistic. Unless “there’s more of an operational change” she says, like reinstating policies that require a certain percentage of patients to be autopsied at each hospital, “I don’t see that there’s going to be a major shift.” (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
(Oct 22, 2020 05:47 PM)C C Wrote: Cognitive elements of language have existed for 40 million years
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...180740.htm

SUMMARY: Humans are not the only beings that can identify rules in complex language-like constructions -- monkeys and great apes can do so, too, a new study has shown. Researcher used a series of experiments based on an 'artificial grammar' to conclude that this ability can be traced back to our ancient primate ancestors... (MORE)

Really? Animals react differently to sounds they haven't been trained to recognize? 9_9

That tells us zero about complex language. Moron scientists.
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