cyrilpedia

cyrilpedia, 3 months ago to random

"With the rise of year-end reading goals on sites like Goodreads, even those of us who actually like to read can get caught up in the commodification of reading, where productivity must increase year over year. Optimization and efficiency leave very little room for meandering walks with great big books that require deep thought and engagement. And I don’t know about you but that’s what I love about literature the most."

https://lithub.com/against-disruption-on-the-bulletpointization-of-books/

cyrilpedia, 3 months ago to random

'Latest figures from the WHO’s cancer arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, makes plain the growing burden of cancer, rising from 14.1 million new cases and 8.2 million deaths worldwide in 2012 to 20 million new cases and 9.7 million deaths a decade later.'

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/01/global-cancer-cases-to-rise-by-more-than-75-by-2050-who-predicts

cyrilpedia, 3 months ago to random

'Scientists are among those most trusted by the survey’s respondents to tell the truth about innovations and new technologies, with 74% of respondents saying they trust scientists to tell the truth. A similar proportion said that they wanted the introduction of innovations to be led by scientists. By comparison, just 47% of respondents said that they trusted journalists and 45% trusted government leaders to tell the truth on innovations.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00238-x

cyrilpedia, 3 months ago to random

This is big news:

"Word came this morning that Biogen is dropping their anti-amyloid antibody (Aduhelm, aducanumab), so it's time to take stock. I was never happy about the FDA's decision to approve it, and that's putting it lightly."

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/goodbye-aduhelm

cyrilpedia, 3 months ago to random

The New Yorker & single cell seq

cyrilpedia, 3 months ago to random

'Karikó’s career, however, is a story of snakes and ladders. The first snake was the late Robert Suhadolnik, who had invited her to join his biochemistry team at Temple. He could be an encouraging, even inspiring boss, but was also a temper-driven tyrant. When Karikó was offered a job at Johns Hopkins University, an enraged Suhadolnik sabotaged the move and reported her to the US immigration authorities for visa violation. But she managed to avoid deportation and found positions at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences outside Washington DC, then at the University of Pennsylvania.'

https://www.ft.com/content/37edfe5f-1a29-4bba-88aa-ba464a163f49

cyrilpedia, 3 months ago to random

'Half of the $18.7bn spent on R&D to tackle priority diseases between 2014 and 2022 was provided by the US government. The reliance on US funding was a “major vulnerability” that leaves pandemic preparedness “very sensitive” to political upheavals, the 100 Days Mission report said.'

https://www.ft.com/content/b2cc3bef-926b-44a2-b948-d7156c62e405

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

'As a result, scientists have begun planning an Arctic monitoring network that would pinpoint early cases of a disease caused by ancient micro-organisms. Additionally, it would provide quarantine and expert medical treatment for infected people in a bid to contain an outbreak, and prevent infected people from leaving the region.'

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/21/arctic-zombie-viruses-in-siberia-could-spark-terrifying-new-pandemic-scientists-warn

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

'Hilariously, Sunak insists anyone failing to get behind all this just wants to take us “back to square one”. Square one? Oh man – who wouldn’t take square one in a heartbeat? We’re somewhere near square minus 39 here, receding backwards through the squares until the place of utter darkness beyond all squares'

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/19/tories-squid-game-rwanda-policy

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

'iBiology Courses, designed by Science Communication Lab, is a no-cost resource that provides full courses to life science trainees on the process and practice of science, as well as related content for educators to use in their own classrooms and training programs.'

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002458

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

“The U.S. market is the bank for pharmaceutical companies,” said Ameet Sarpatwari, an expert in pharmaceutical policy at Harvard Medical School. “There’s a keen sense that the best place to try to extract profits is the U.S. because of its existing system and its dysfunction.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/17/health/us-drug-prices.html

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"The three-year fellowship provides Ph.D.s from data science, computer science, physics, mathematics, and many other fields the mentorship and support to pursue their own research interests with our data.

Applications for the Fall 2024 cohort are due on February 1st, 2024."

https://alleninstitute.org/careers/internships-and-postbac/shanahan-foundation-fellowship/

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

'Putin’s goal is not just a little more turf. Russia has a lot of that. His telos—his endgame—is the destabilization, the overcoming, of the whole Western order. This sounds fantastical to Americans because we’re an ahistorical people. That doesn’t mean we’re ignorant of history, although there’s a great deal of that, too. It means the categories with which we apprehend the world are not defined by the past, and we can’t really understand how it could be otherwise.'

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/the-secret-source-of-putins-evil?ref=thebrowser.com

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"In their recent study, Kevin Aslett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and his colleagues found that people who used Google Search to evaluate the accuracy of news stories — stories that the authors but not the participants knew to be inaccurate — ended up trusting those stories more. This is because their attempts to search for such news made them more likely to be shown sources that corroborated an inaccurate story."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00030-x

NicoleCRust, 4 months ago to random

Done writing the book.

(Deep inhale).

~90K words. A few years of work. A transformative journey that did not end at all as I thought when I started. I'm grateful to have done it - what a privilege. A much bigger conceptual project than anything I've done up to this point.

I got to think intensely for a better part of a few years (in parallel to running a lab and teaching as a professor). Somehow there was not time for that before. I'm not exactly sure where I found it; I just did.

There will be many revisions going forward. And it won't hit the shelves anytime soon. But I'm going to pause and celebrate this moment, where every one of the bits are finally in place. I learned so much along the way. Even today, on the last day, I was fascinated, and I'm grateful. (That said, I'm also a bit tired).

What's the book about? A slice of the spirit behind it is captured here: https://www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neuroscience/is-the-brain-uncontrollable-like-the-weather/

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"More than 1,600 ancient genomes have helped to trace the roots of a host of genetic traits found in modern Europeans. The genomes suggest that many characteristics — including a heightened risk for multiple sclerosis — were carried to Europe by people who migrated to the continent in three distinct waves starting around 45,000 years ago."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00024-9

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"Scientists found the thickly contextualised, sharply focused histories of now-discarded science irrelevant and indigestible. Historians bridled at the scientists’ demands for a mythologised and anachronistic version of the past. We think it’s time to restart the conversation, for the benefit of both scientists and historians."

https://aeon.co/essays/science-and-history-cannot-afford-to-be-indifferent-to-each-other

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"Substack’s argument in response to the Atlantic article was a masterclass in how not to do it: the best way to defeat these ideas, it claimed, was through scrutiny. Frankly, if scrutiny was going to defeat neo-Nazis or the idea that the Cultural Revolution had some upsides, it would have done so already."

https://www.ft.com/content/648ec2c0-d71b-4dc6-af15-56fedc54eb2d

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"The woman’s case wasn’t a one-off. Just about every time an embryo implants and begins to grow, it dispatches bits of itself into the body housing it. The depositions begin at least as early as four or five weeks into gestation. And they settle into just about every sliver of our anatomy where scientists have checked—the heart, the lungs, the breast, the colon, the kidney, the liver, the brain."

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/fetal-maternal-cells-microchimerism/676996/

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

'A number of employees debated Musk’s actions in the company-wide #social-watercooler channel, and, the day after, we woke up to find many of their accounts gone. “So is this like a Candyman situation?” someone posted. “Mention Elon three times and we get deactivated?”

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/what-we-lost-when-twitter-became-x

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"Drugs that originate from public health organizations in Brazil or India are often different in key ways from ones developed by a pharmaceutical company in an industrialized country, Dr. Kratz said: The scientists creating them think about access from the start, knowing that whatever they design will have to be delivered by a low-resource health system."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/health/leishmaniasis-fly-treatment-colombia.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HE0.XrPX.y5IlLyEZAMXt&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

'Also in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson needled erroneous recession soothsayers: “Economic models of the future are perhaps best understood as astrology faintly decorated with calculus equations.”'

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/opinion/2023-journalism-writing-sentences.html

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"The most important challenge is that of fairness or “linguistic justice”. A common language is a bit like a telephone network: the more people know a language, the more useful it becomes to communicate. The question of fairness arises because individuals face very different costs to access the network and are on an unequal footing when using it. Those who learn English as a second language incur learning costs, while native speakers can communicate with all network members without incurring such costs. It’s like getting the latest smartphone model and sim card with unlimited data for free."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/27/english-world-power-language-linguistic-justice?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

"The rate of serious medical complications increased in hospitals after they were purchased by private equity investment firms, according to a major study of the effects of such acquisitions on patient care in recent years."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/upshot/hospitals-medical-errors.html

cyrilpedia, 4 months ago to random

'The book that gives us Calvino the romantic and Calvino the craftsman in equal measure is “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.” It is the book that makes people fall in love with Calvino, because it is a book about falling in love through reading—specifically, “reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”' (Illustration by Daniele Castellano)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-worlds-of-italo-calvino