cyrilpedia

cyrilpedia, 4 days ago to random

'The computerization of everything, from tractors to toothbrushes, has compelled fervent activism under the banner of “right to repair.” Advocates aim to secure a universal legal right for consumers to modify and repair the things they own, including tools used in essential activities, like growing food.'

https://placesjournal.org/article/step-by-step-repair-manuals-political-ecology/

cyrilpedia, 14 hours ago to random

"Normally, I celebrate when my papers are accepted, but not this time. This paper frustrated me because my article was accepted only after I reluctantly changed my writing from first person (“I”) to third person (“the author”). This change introduced false modesty, took away my agency, and made many sentences difficult to read and imprecise (which author—me, or one of the 77 authors I cited?). The third-person voice also inserted unnecessary barriers between me and readers."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316966121

cyrilpedia, 12 days ago to random

'The debates about embryo research and in vitro fertilisation in the 1970s and 1980s raised very different issues. But in many respects, Harding argues, they anticipated a lot of the ethical, moral and technical issues that surround AI. The philosopher Mary Warnock, who chaired a committee to consider these dilemmas, did a remarkable job in delineating clear moral lines and practical avenues for regulation in her report published in 1984. These rules have since enabled some 400,000 IVF babies to be born in the UK, and encouraged the development of a vibrant life sciences industry. Contrary to the familiar trope that regulation kills innovation, Harding argues that in fact the political, moral and legal clarity provided by the Warnock commission spurred investment and economic growth.'

https://www.ft.com/content/32f6a003-e5b4-442a-9a5d-37bdc1c6d392

cyrilpedia, 23 days ago to random

'Regardless of whether this virus sparks a full-blown pandemic, “we are completely ignoring the public-health threat that is happening right now,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. The fumbles of COVID’s early days should have taught the government how valuable proactive testing, reporting, and data sharing are. What’s more, the pandemic could have taught us to prioritize high-risk groups, Sosin told me. Instead, the United States is repeating its mistakes.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/04/bird-flu-response-failing/678243/

cyrilpedia, 24 days ago to random

'Five for profit publishers (Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor Francis and MDPI) publish over 50% of all publications. In economics this is called an oligopoly, where a small number of companies control the market. Worse, because scientists “have” to publish in top journals, publishers have even more power than the oligopoly nature suggests.'

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of-academic-publishing-in-3-graphs-5-trends-and-4-thoughts/

cyrilpedia, 26 days ago to random

'They don’t tell you beforehand that it will be a choice between having a career in science or starting a family. But that’s the message I heard loud and clear 17 years ago, in my first job after completing my Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. During a routine departmental meeting, a senior academic announced that pregnant women were a financial drain on the department. I was sitting visibly pregnant in the front row. No one said anything.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/opinion/women-science-motherhood.html

cyrilpedia, 27 days ago to random

'Scientists now warn this form of avian influenza is likely more widespread in cows, and was transmitting for longer than official reports suggest. And while American officials are ramping up testing — all in an effort to keep sick cows from being moved between states — others say we're already several steps behind the spread of a disease that could pose a major threat to human health'

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/h5n1-second-opinion-april-27-cattle-1.7185165

cyrilpedia, 3 months ago to random

The Mole & Velazquez

"And, of course, who gets to judge? Who would we want to judge? Well, the little five-year-old girl in Las Meninas is giving us the most mischievous and heart-felt smile. A smile that speaks of respect and love, but also self-confidence born of the strength that emanates from the center of her attention (the royal couple, perhaps, or we, who stand in their place). Maybe it would all be worth it if our scientific `children', our students and trainees, were to look at us that way. Maybe that would be something worth striving for."

https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article/117/9/1615/28076/Eyes-on-the-prize

cyrilpedia, 1 month ago to random

"Compared to 2021, we now have almost seven times as many editors in Latin America and more than five times as many in Africa. Specifically, while Latin American and African editors combined made up less than 1% of our editorial board in our last report, currently 7% of eLife editors are based in Latin America and 3% are based in Africa (Figure 1). The number of eLife editors in Asia has also grown, at the moment constituting 14% of our editorial board compared to 11% in 2021."

https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e3b5c5c9/elife-latest-2024-update-on-the-diversity-of-our-editorial-community

cyrilpedia, 1 month ago to random

I've never had a discussion about education with a working scientist who was not painfully aware of the lack of the teaching of how science is done at most schools, and in many college-level courses. The fact is, that to do this well would require extensive retraining of teachers; I also don't think it is compatible with the current goal of basic education in most countries, which is to raise standardised test scores.

"What is apparent from the surveys is that a better explanation of the nature of science—that it is revised as new data surface—would have a strong positive effect on public trust. Because scientists are so aware of this feature, it is often taken for granted that the public understands this too."

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp7153?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_content=alert&utm_campaign=SCIeToc&et_rid=33954923&et_cid=5173502

cyrilpedia, 1 month ago to random

'Half of the study’s participants received a single invitation for a PSA test. After 15 years there was little difference in the number of men who died from prostate cancer, whether or not they had received the test, according to the research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Saturday.'

https://www.ft.com/content/b34a46b5-3986-4333-bec3-1fa516bb422d

cyrilpedia, 1 month ago to random

'In contrast to economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx through John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and even Milton Friedman, we have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being. We are technocrats who focus on efficiency.'

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/03/Symposium-Rethinking-Economics-Angus-Deaton?ref=thebrowser.com

cyrilpedia, 1 month ago to random

Materials & Methods:
"The experiment that brought sleep science to global attention was one that Kleitman performed on himself. In 1938 he and a graduate student, Bruce Richardson, descended into the depths of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, where they spent the next 32 days a quarter of a mile from the nearest chink of daylight, maintaining an artificial sleep-wake cycle of 28 hours. They kept time with alarm clocks, took their temperatures regularly, grew beards, stashed chamber pots in the cave recesses, ate fried chicken and smoked cigarettes, all on a rigid timetable of nineteen hours awake followed by nine asleep."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n07/mike-jay/zzzzzzz

cyrilpedia, 1 month ago to random

'In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00816-z

cyrilpedia, 1 month ago to random

'In 2017, Thai health experts tried to stop aggressive advertising for all formula — including that made for toddlers. Officials feared company promotions could mislead parents and even persuade mothers to forgo breastfeeding, depriving their children of the vital health benefits that come with it. At the time, Thailand’s breastfeeding rate was already among the lowest in the world.

But the $47 billion formula industry fought back, enlisting the help of a rich and powerful ally: the United States government.'

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-america-waged-global-campaign-against-baby-formula-regulation-thailand?ref=thebrowser.com

cyrilpedia, 2 months ago to random

'For all the angst about polarisation and disinformation, something very different is in fact going on in news consumption: the mass-media age is ending. We’re returning to a time when most people get almost no news. Growing numbers of citizens are oblivious to current affairs, much like most ordinary Britons before the first popular newspaper, the Daily Mail, appeared in 1896. Opinion-formers who lead the political conversation tend to overlook this shift, because they, by definition, care about news. What happens to a society when the majority switches off?'

https://www.ft.com/content/451e7466-7a91-4784-aa37-02993ff0fc9e

cyrilpedia, 2 months ago to random

"Anthony (Tony) Epstein, co-discoverer of the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV), was the founding father of research into the part that viruses play in the development of human cancers. Today, seven types of viral infection — more than one of which can be prevented by vaccination — are known to cause specific cancers in people. Collectively, virus-associated tumours account for up to 15% of cancer cases globally each year. Yet, when Epstein began his research in the early 1960s, the concept of a link between viruses and human cancer was deeply unfashionable. Epstein’s discovery has had an enormous influence on the direction of cancer research, from underlying mechanisms to new prospects for prevention."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00763-9

cyrilpedia, 2 months ago to random

"Brazil is seeing an unprecedented surge in dengue, a viral disease that can cause excruciating pains and is sometimes fatal. Its spread is fueled by a hot rainy season and Brazil’s rapid, unplanned urbanization. Health officials have reported more than 1 million suspected cases in January and February, four times as many as in the same period in 2023, and hundreds have died. But the country has far too little vaccine to protect its population."
#Dengue #PublicHealth #Vaccines

https://www.science.org/content/article/dengue-raging-brazil-promising-local-vaccine-least-year-away

cyrilpedia, 2 months ago to random

“The worldwide neurological burden is growing very fast and will put even more pressure on health systems in the coming decades,” said Dr Valery Feigin, a co-author of the paper and director of Auckland University’s National Institute for Stroke and Applied Neuroscience. “Yet many current strategies for reducing neurological conditions have low effectiveness or are not sufficiently deployed.”

https://www.ft.com/content/8c90fb61-e43b-4bdd-bbec-a0ce1722274b

albertcardona, 2 months ago to random

What new fresh hell is this:

Fire Weather Watch

A FIRE WEATHER WATCH MEANS THAT CRITICAL FIRE WEATHER CONDITIONS MAY OCCUR. LISTEN FOR LATER FORECASTS AND POSSIBLE RED FLAG WARNINGS.

cyrilpedia, 2 months ago to random

"Then there’s A.I.’s energy use, which could double by 2026, according to a January report by the International Energy Association. That’s the equivalent of adding a new heavily industrialized country, like Sweden or Germany, to the planet"

https://newrepublic.com/article/179538/environment-artificial-intelligence-water-energy

cyrilpedia, 2 months ago to random

'Mayo also supported eugenic sterilization and was proudly identified as “an apostle of the school of eugenics.”2 Mayo’s sentiments were not unique: his was just one of the prominent voices in U.S. medicine that normalized advocacy for eugenics in the pages of the Journal.'

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2307346?query=featured_home

cyrilpedia, 2 months ago to random

'We are not, however, the first generation to confront the challenge of authoritarian propaganda. And as I looked for past experiences to inform our own, I discovered a British second world war media operation that managed to engage huge audiences who had been loyal to the Nazis and undermine their faith in Hitler’s regime. If we think reaching people in “echo chambers” today is tough, think about how hard it was to persuade Germans to trust the people who were literally trying to kill them.'

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/02/the-man-who-tricked-nazi-germany-lessons-from-the-past-on-how-to-beat-disinformation

cyrilpedia, 2 months ago to random

“There are trillions of cells, and the more we explore cellular diversity at the single cell level, the more we learn about this continuum and complexity of cell-state,” said Aaron Streets, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley. “It would never be possible to imagine capturing enough single cells to create a Human Cell Atlas without microfluidic technology.”

https://www.the-scientist.com/microfluidics-biology-s-liquid-revolution-71667