Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

The best explanation and summary of Long Covid that I've ever read by Prof Trish Greenhalgh, written to coincide with her brilliant Lancet review out today.

https://open.substack.com/pub/independentsage/p/long-covid-a-dystopian-game-of-pinball?r=315tdh&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

'Reliant largely on dwindling supplies from Soviet and American cold war-era stockpiles of precursor radioactive materials, companies have struggled to obtain enough actinium to treat the thousands of patients being enrolled in clinical trials.'

https://www.ft.com/content/6ce668bc-4180-4e84-9feb-f25ac0e83f6f

Metformin + anti-PD1

"We found that the combination therapy promotes the pericyte coverage of tumor vascular endothelial cells (ECs) to improve blood perfusion and that it suppresses the hyperpermeability through the increase of VE-cadherin. Peripheral node addressin(PNAd) and vascular cell adhesion molecule (VCAM)-1"
#Immunology #Immunotherapy
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2404778121

'Similar to SARS-CoV-2, BANAL-CoVs use human ACE2 to enter cells. However, whether BANAL-CoVs can overcome human innate and adaptive immunity and undergo efficient transmission represents a crucial knowledge gap. Characterizing and defining barriers to efficient human infection is critical to better predict the zoonotic potential of bat CoVs and to enhance pandemic preparedness'
#Covid #Coronavirus
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01765-z

“We’re half an hour in, and they’ve still only made it to Masculin Féminin,” said three-time Olympic medalist Lebron James, speaking for the majority of the 10,500 athletes in attendance'

https://www.theonion.com/paris-opening-ceremony-features-tedious-45-minute-discu-1851601939

If you're thinking "hey, what I need right now is more dystopia", this is the novel for you.

'Atomic People does not mark a major anniversary. It is simply that time is running out for the long-silent survivors to tell their stories, to have them heard and to let them function – insofar as is possible in this war-ravaged world – as a warning from history.'

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jul/31/atomic-people-review-surviving-hiroshima-documentary-bbc

'We discovered high-titer neutralizing autoantibodies against interleukin-10 in a child with infantile-onset inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a phenocopy of inborn errors of interleukin-10 signaling.'
#Immunology #Autoimmunity

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2312302

#ThinSectionThursday A beautifully zoned epidote crystal with an older brown allanite core in Lewisian gneiss from the summit of Dun I, the highest point on Iona. From the #Hunterian collections in Glasgow. Field of view about 0.5mm across. See Alt text for more... #Geology #Iona #Mull #Lewisian #Microscopy #Mineralogy

Just stop paying lip service on publication integrity
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02449-8
#research #integrity #publishing #COPE

BBC News: Southport protests: More than 100 arrests as disorder spreads - BBC News

Let's reframe this positively: 100 families are spared from yet another evening of domestic violence as a bunch of knuckle-dragging racist yobs with more teeth than brain cells are detained.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4ng1254ndeo

Tools
"To address these issues, we present a scalable and reproducible pipeline for Proximity Labeling-based proteomics (Fig. 1), incorporating automated enrichment of biotinylated proteins in a 96-well plate format and an optimized proteomics method for reproducible protein quantification."
#Proteomics
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/s44320-024-00049-2

“You can imagine a situation in which life arises and has some effects on a planet, but remains a relatively minor part of the scene,” he says. “But oxygenic photosynthesis made life into a major player on Earth. It didn’t just change the living world, it changed the mineral composition and geological processes of the Earth.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/28/peter-godfrey-smith-other-minds-living-on-earth?CMP=share_btn_url

'Upworthy was a venture-capital funded startup “that explicitly intended to bend the algorithmic logic of Facebook and other platforms toward socially responsible things.” Pariser is proud of much of Upworthy’s work, he added, “but at the end of the day our impact was constrained by algorithmic choices that prioritized the company’s engagement metrics and the limits of what is possible in a VC backed business.” Now, “New_ Public picks up where that leaves off, in my mind, by attempting to meet some of the same goals — a healthy digital public sphere — through more fundamentally public-spirited ends.”
https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/07/could-social-media-support-healthy-online-conversations-new_public-is-working-on-it/

'One drunken night, a superb painter let me take a brush to a canvas that she said she was abandoning. I tried to continue a simple black stroke that she had started. The contrast between the controlled pressure of her touch and my flaccid smear shocked me, physically. It was like shaking hands with a small person who flips you across a room.'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-art-of-dying-peter-schjeldahl

Primitive Baptist?

'Bryan and William Bell Riley both urged the state of Tennessee to enact a law against teaching evolution in the schools. In January 1925, John W. Butler, a Democratic farmer-legislator and Primitive Baptist lay leader, introduced a bill making it a misdemeanor punishable by a fine for any public school teacher “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man had descended from a lower order of animal.”'

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/11/19/darwin-in-dayton/

Probably still better than jagermeister

'The drinkability all depends on how well it was sealed, said David T. Smith, a British drinks writer and consultant who once tasted a shipwrecked gin — with unexpected seawater notes. (“Disgusting.”)'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/25/world/europe/baltic-shipwreck-champagne.html