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Pruney fingers in water aren't caused by skin absorbing water—it's an active nervous system reflex (www.oddlyclear.com)
submitted 8 hours ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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Common myth: skin wrinkles in water because of osmosis/swelling.

Reality: it is an active, involuntary vasomotor response. The nervous system constricts blood vessels under the skin to form ridges—acting like tire treads to channel away water and improve grip on wet objects. Patients with severed median nerves don't wrinkle at all.

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[–] 5 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Thank you. I appreciate you getting a link to an actual scientific source. There are way too many of these slop sites around these days.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 4 hours ago (1 child)

    All 7 peer-reviewed PubMed/DOI papers (including Wilder-Smith, Lewis & Pickering 1936, Changizi 2011, and Kareklas 2013) are linked in the References section at the bottom of the article!

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  • [–] 2 points 50 minutes ago

    Have you tried following any of those so-called "references"? They're all hallucinated.

    Eg the first one:

    Kareklas K, Nettle D, Smulders TV. Water-induced finger wrinkles improve handling of wet objects. Biol Lett. 2013;9(2):20120999. PMID 23303785

    Links to:

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23303785/

    If you follow that link you get to:

    Polioudakis D, Bhinge AA, Killion PJ, Lee BK, Abell NS, Iyer VR. A Myc-microRNA network promotes exit from quiescence by suppressing the interferon response and cell-cycle arrest genes. Nucleic Acids Res. 2013 Feb 1;41(4):2239-54. doi: 10.1093/nar/gks1452. Epub 2013 Jan 8. PMID: 23303785; PMCID: PMC3575845.

    The citation the LLM was failing to hallucinate properly is:

    Kareklas K, Nettle D, Smulders TV. Water-induced finger wrinkles improve handling of wet objects. Biol Lett. 2013 Jan 8;9(2):20120999. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0999. PMID: 23302867; PMCID: PMC3639753.

    Absolutely everything a LLM outputs has subtle errors. That's how the technology works, it is essential for it to approximate data so it can merge contexts and output text that "looks about right".

    However that's also what makes them unreliable and useless for anything that matters. Verification takes as much or more work than doing the entirety of the work without the LLM.

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