Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

A reflection on leaving academia by Brooke Morriswood at @TIR_scienceblog
This is one of my favorite blogs, with thoughtful pieces on topics like how to write a paper, so I'll be watching this space to see what Brooke does next.

"After 24 years in academia – 8 years as an undergraduate and postgraduate, 8 years as a postdoc, and 8 years as a group leader – I’m leaving. It’s a decision and a choice helped by the realisation that a change was coming regardless of what direction I went in."

https://totalinternalreflectionblog.com/2023/03/19/changing-lanes/#more-3029

"The intense political debate, now in its fourth year, has at times turned scientists into lobbyists, competing for policymakers’ time and favor. Dr. Relman is just one of several researchers and like-minded thinkers who has successfully worked the corridors of power in Washington to force journalists, policymakers and skeptical Democrats to take the lab leak idea seriously."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/politics/covid-origins-lab-leak-politics.html

"But in September 1943, as Stalin imagined a role for a victorious Soviet Union in a postwar world, he began to reconsider his government’s position with regards to the Russian Orthodox Church, and eventually to the entire question of the role of religion in an atheist empire. At this meeting, Stalin presented these men with a bold proposal: the same Soviet state that had destroyed their Church was now going to devote its resources to bringing it back."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-stalin-enlisted-the-orthodox-church-to-help-control-ukraine

Protip:

If you're working on the Great Immunological Novel, make sure your characters from the 70s say "suppressor T cells" and not "Tregs".

(fm Benjamin Dreyer's wonderful 'Dreyer's English).

"What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html

"In this video essay, the US graphic designer and video producer Jeremy Shuback explores the map’s structure and the breadth of its illustrations, detailing how this imaginative piece of medieval cartography binds history, geography, mythology and religion to form an invaluable sketch of the Middle Ages."

#cartography

https://aeon.co/videos/the-famed-medieval-map-that-stretched-beyond-earth-to-heaven-history-and-myth

From Carl June et al

"A fundamental limitation of T cell therapies in solid tumors is loss of inflammatory effector functions, such as cytokine production and proliferation. Here, we target a regulatory axis of T cell inflammatory responses, Regnase-1 and Roquin-1, to enhance antitumor responses in human T cells engineered with two clinical-stage immune receptors."

#Immunology #immunotherapy #CARTcells

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2218632120

Time to get some duck eggs

The inner homunculus

"Penfield found those visceral signals harder to decipher than the brain's map of the body's surface. Brain regions responsible for different internal sensations seemed to overlap. Sensory regions were hard to distinguish from those that sent motor instructions such as telling the intestines to contract. Penfield once asked participants to swallow an electrode to detect changes in gut contractions while he stimulated their brains. But his map of the inner organs was blurry and ambiguous—and stayed that way for most of the next century."

https://www.science.org/content/article/newly-detailed-nerve-links-between-brain-and-other-organs-shape-thoughts-memories-and?utm_campaign=SciMag&utm_medium=ownedSocial&utm_source=LinkedIn

Lynch lays out the complex reasoning behind his decisions to make the occasional commercial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiP85kdyRLo