Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

'Removing barriers for international researchers to work in the UK by reducing the upfront costs for visas. Currently, it costs a family of four £20,980 upfront for a five-year Global Talent Visa, which is multiple times greater than similar visas in other countries'

https://wellcome.org/what-we-do/policy-and-advocacy/how-next-UK-government-can-support-UK-research?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=o-wellcome

'In a pre-print paper posted earlier this month, four researchers from Germany's University of Tubingen and Northwestern University said they were inspired by studies that measured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at excess deaths compared to the recent past. By taking a similar look at "excess word usage" after LLM writing tools became widely available in late 2022, the researchers found that "the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words" that was "unprecedented in both quality and quantity."'
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/07/the-telltale-words-that-could-identify-generative-ai-text/

'And yet, for all of its familiarity, there is an enigma at the core of lager’s long story, one that has fascinated and frustrated me for years: We don’t know where lager yeast came from, or how it developed.'

(via The Browser)

https://www.goodbeerhunting.com/blog/2024/6/18/the-past-present-and-future-of-lager-yeast?ref=thebrowser.com

'In 2021, Jonathan Weissman, a biochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and his colleagues developed CRISPRoff — an editing tool that adds a chemical tag, called a methyl group, to the DNA strand, which reduces gene activity without altering the genome. But the tool cannot be delivered to brain cells, because its genetic components are too large to fit into an adeno-associated virus (AAV) — a common vehicle for ferrying gene therapies inside cells. “The real challenge was delivery,” says Weissman.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02115-z?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=nature&utm_source=Twitter&error=cookies_not_supported&code=a045b81c-40d4-4a2d-8d9e-cb37ce469fea#Echobox=1719566472

'American democracy in action. A star chamber of preening, self-aggrandising politicians issuing offensive performative and partisan attacks against a man who has served his country for decades as a scientist and scientific administrator. The hearing was a spectacle of embarrassment for a country that has proven unable to face up to the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic.'

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01338-2/fulltext

'Recent analysis for the Royal Society found that the largest upfront cost for researchers taking a post in Britain is the immigration health surcharge, which increased 66% in February to £1,035 a year. A researcher coming to the UK for five years would need to pay for the full period upfront before a visa was issued.'

https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/jun/29/top-scientists-turning-down-uk-jobs-over-tax-on-talent-says-wellcome-boss

'A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted Hoau-Yan Wang, a professor at the City College of New York, on charges of falsifying data to obtain grants totaling roughly $16 million from the National Institutes of Health.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/health/wang-cassava-alzheimers-fraud.html

'A bionic leg driven by the body’s nervous system restores a natural walking gait much more effectively than other prosthetic limbs, a clinical trial led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown.'

https://www.ft.com/content/b6053b82-cffb-462e-bc17-f5c062f18dce

This is not some nutjob's blog, it's a dissenting opinion from a Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor:

"The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organises a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

https://www.ft.com/content/2e93e123-e5ba-4940-b3fe-03f2124bbdd0