Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

Alternative medicine:

"When it came to the treatment of diseases, the ancient Romans had no shortage of magical remedies, several of which involved iron nails. To cure epilepsy, the first-century historian Pliny the Elder advised driving a nail into the ground at the spot where the afflicted person’s head lay at the start of the seizure. The Romans hammered nails into doors to avert plagues and pounded coffin nails into thresholds to keep nightmares at bay. Nails from tombs and crucifixions were sometimes even worn around the neck as talismans against fevers, malaria and evil spells."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/25/science/archaeology-ancient-rome-tomb.html

"In 1965, six years after the invention of the transistor, Moore forecast in a magazine article that the number of transistors and other components on a chip would double every year for the next decade. The prediction, dubbed Moore’s Law by an Intel colleague, has come to exemplify the onrush of technological advance ever since."

https://www.ft.com/content/fd02fefd-5312-432a-b1df-9668b438443d

“There is substantial risk, even if you’ve gotten all the vaccines,” Bernard Black, a law professor at Northwestern University who studies health policy, told me. More than 300 people still die from COVID each day, and the overwhelming majority of them are older. People ages 65 and up are currently hospitalized at nearly 11 times the rate of adults under 50.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/03/older-adults-covid-health-quality-of-life/673507/

Tools (#preprint)

"Our platform is built around a commercial instrument and integrates the handling and transfer of samples to and from the instrument, autonomous control of the instrument's software, and the algorithmic generation of sorting gates, resulting in walkaway functionality."

#FACS #FlowCytometry

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.24.534165v1

"Tumor-associated neutrophil (TAN) effects on glioblastoma biology remain under-characterized. We show here that 'hybrid' neutrophils with dendritic features - including morphological complexity, expression of antigen presentation genes, and the ability to process exogenous peptide and stimulate MHCII-dependent T cell activation - accumulate intratumorally and suppress tumor growth in vivo."

#Immunology #Preprint

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.24.534105v1

@xtaldave They should make the most of these last small distinctions between heir headlines and reality...

@clathrin Great piece - the Final Cut is underrated & Gunner's Dream is a masterpiece (the cadence in "after the service when you're walking slowly to the car" makes you feel like you *are* walking towards the car).

"Understood as a form of erasure, decolonisation easily becomes an impossible or even undesirable task. But the problem with this interpretation is that it completely turns the meaning of decolonisation on its head. As I explained above, decolonisation entails first and foremost a profound and critical engagement with the colonial past, not its erasure."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-do-you-decolonise-the-english-language

'In Iraq and Kuwait they have become routine. Further west, even cities on the Red Sea such as Yanbu have seen 50°C. The Gulf is both at the centre of global hydrocarbon production and at the fore of its climatic effects. The average temperature rise in the region is already well over two degrees above pre-industrial levels.'

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/march/fifty-degrees-in-the-persian-gulf

'When I saw that second MMWR, that changed my life. I said, “Oh my God, this is a brand new disease.” There’re no such thing as brand new diseases, but this is a brand new disease. I made a decision then that, again, even my mentors discouraged me from doing that. Because they’ve said, “Why? You’re on the peak of this incredible trajectory. What are you doing?” I said, “I’m going to turn around and pivot completely the direction of my career and focus entirely on studying this mysterious disease without a name.” That’s when I just laid down one spear and picked up another.'

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2300938?query=featured_home