Posted by fuidani 4/17/2025
Headline writing is the art of taking something that a journalist has thought about in detail and carefully crafted and making it into something that someone with low to zero interest in the topic might want to read.
Having done both, I got annoyed when headlines misrepresented what I’d written, and journalists got annoyed when I took their perfectly crafted but pedestrian articles and gave them punchy headlines in a desperate attempt to get people to read them...
- K2-18b
- detected dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide, false positive possibility is now very low
- "produced by marine-dwelling organisms on Earth", possibility they were produced by other processes (unrelated to life as we know it) not high but maybe unknown unknowns
- other factors like distance from the star are in favor of life & water
- previous studies detected methane and carbon dioxide
It's not that low, unfortunately. From the article:
> They say their observations have reached the ‘three-sigma’ level of statistical significance. This means there's a 0.3% probability the detection occurred by chance. And to reach the accepted level that would mean scientific discovery, observations would have to meet the five-sigma threshold. In other words, there would need to be below a 0.00006% probability they occurred by chance.
No, it means we will soon discover how these compounds form naturally. Would love to be wrong, of course.
From the source paper. It is a very important result but not definitive, false positive is still possible as well as us finding a new way in which DMS can form without a biological process.
Still freaking exciting and fantastic scientific achievement. JWST is already bearing incredible fruits.
I do wonder why I was stupid enough to pay for a phone with a bigger screen as it just seems to mean more and bigger ads on screen at once and the same amount of content.
Morons, I'm surrounded by morons.
That would upend a lot of religious teachings which say we're unique and that the world was given to us, as the unique creations of a creator, to consume for our own benefit.
It seems like there could be many practical benefits to showing that's not true. Hey, maybe the concept of infinite exponential growth is a bad idea. Maybe we shouldn't burn the skies and boil the seas. Maybe we should be nice to other intelligent animals, at the very least.