How 'Recognition and Rewards' in Dutch academia turned metrics into incentives https://doi.org/10.36850/p761-ey93
"In the end, we should realize that ‘recognition and rewards’ is not about quantitative or qualitative indicators: it are the social and political goals of science that are at stake"
'Pot1 is a subunit of telomere capping complex that binds to the G-rich overhang and inhibits the activation of DNA damage checkpoints. In this study, we explore new functions of fission yeast Pot1 by using a pot1-1 temperature sensitive mutant'
@miguelgf et al
'Vacuum tubes could allow systems to be reprogrammed; they could be used repeatedly and flexibly. The tubes made complex computations possible, but they were unwieldy, both prone to breakage and laborious to repair. ENIAC, the US army’s world-leading computer, introduced in 1946, used 18,000 vacuum tubes to calculate artillery trajectories faster and more accurately than any human. That made it revolutionary, but its utility was limited by the fact that it was the size of a room, and that whenever a single tube failed, which happened on average every two days, the whole machine broke down.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/john-lanchester/putting-the-silicon-in-silicon-valley
'The writer’s laptop, a MacBook Air, uses another ‘system on a chip’, Apple’s M2. That single chip contains 20,000,000,000 transistors. The laptop contains so many transistors that if the writer travelled back in time to 1983, he could give every single person on the planet a transistor radio and still have a billion of them left over.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/john-lanchester/putting-the-silicon-in-silicon-valley
'Wired reports that Twitter is planning to charge researchers a minimum of $504,000 a year to access less data than they used to get for free.'
@NicoleCRust @MatteoCarandini @Iris @knutson_brain @albertcardona @schoppik @cyrilpedia
Niv, Y. (2021). The primacy of behavioral research for understanding the brain. Behavioral Neuroscience
'A large-scale screening identifies an inhalable polymer nanoparticle formulation that safely and effectively delivers therapeutic mRNA molecules to the lungs of several animal species.'
How to Speak: Watch the Lecture on Effective Communication That Became an MIT Tradition for Over 40 Years
https://www.openculture.com/2020/10/how-to-speak-mit-lecture.html
A conversation I had with Marcel LaFlamme @PLOS on #preprints, #peerreview, AI, and, of course, #ReviewCommons has just been posted on the @ReviewCommons site
"As we ask peer review to do more and more things, should we also be looking at new ways to recognize the work of reviewers?
Another way to ask that question is: should outputs other than published articles and big grants count toward research assessment and the development of scientific careers?"
1/6
😲 Two recent studies from China look at the truly wide diversity of RNA viruses found in ticks.
"Extensive diversity of RNA viruses in ticks revealed by metagenomics in northeastern China"
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0011017
"Metavirome of 31 tick species provides a compendium of 1,801 RNA virus genomes"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-022-01275-w
A lot of insights in these two studies, so I'll just point out a few things that I personally found interesting.
'Graham’s blue eyes lasered in on me. “This woman has untreated diabetes,” he said. “It’s caused her to have thousands of small strokes that have killed all these parts of her brain. That’s what’s causing her dementia.”
“I didn’t know it could do that,” I said—a response that revealed my ignorance. I’d never even looked up the symptoms of untreated diabetes; I had assumed that a patient would never grow this sick from a common and manageable disease.'
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-medicine/the-assumptions-doctors-make
Cochrane Reviews has issued an editor's statement about the mask-wearing paper that has been getting so much attention lately.
Below, the statement, in which they both endeavor to clarify the implications of the study and take responsibility for the poor initial job of public communication.
This sort of post-publication clarification is a valuable service, and indeed it's not the first time that such as has been necessary for a paper about the efficacy of masks.
A 2020 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine was so frequently misrepresented by anti-mask commentators that it now carries the following editor's note prominently at the top of the article webpage.
7/6
🦠 RNA Viruses in Ticks — Ticks that Feed on Bats! 🦇
In addition to the above studies ☝️, a new study looked at the #RNA #virome of ticks— specifically ticks that feed on bats in Sweden.
• Found 16 viruses from 11 #virus families, of which 15 were novel!
• Authors suggest that such surveillance might help identify potential zoonoses.
"Substantial viral and bacterial diversity at the bat–tick interface"
https://doi.org/10.1099/mgen.0.000942
#virology @virology #epidemiology #InfectiousDisease @eddieholmes
"As an early-stage Professor at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, Pascale made a discovery that ‘triggered a whole tsunami in the field’. She discovered the mechanisms of how L. monocytogenes uses the actin of a host to move and spread across tissue."
https://academic.oup.com/microlife/article/doi/10.1093/femsml/uqad004/7074126?login=false
New article! Read Immune correlates analysis of a phase 3 trial of the AZD1222 (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) vaccine https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-023-00630-0?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon in npj Vaccines
"We show that loss of FH leads to early alterations of mitochondrial morphology and the release of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) into the cytosol, where it triggers the activation of the cyclic GMP–AMP synthase (cGAS)–stimulator of interferon genes (STING)–TANK-binding kinase 1 (TBK1) pathway and stimulates an inflammatory response that is also partially dependent on retinoic-acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I)."
'TIR has previously provided a general summary of how to write scientific reports/papers, as well as more detailed and specific advice on writing Figure legends and Materials & Methods sections. Now we turn our attention to the real food & drink of any manuscript: the Results section.'
Leonardo Da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man
--[Calculate] the measurement of Milan and Suburbs.
--[Ask about] the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese.
--Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle.
I've worked on all of science, from B cells to T cells.
https://fellowsherpa.com