Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

'An abstractionist before the official advent of abstraction, Hilma af Klint was a member of an all-female group called the Five from 1896 to 1907, participating in meditation and séances to channel the messages of mystics. In the studio, she harnessed this spiritual practice into unorthodox, nonfigurative paintings.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/books/review/hilma-af-klint-catalogue-raisonne.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Book%20Review

'In a cleverly designed experiment, Galvez-Pol et al. used electrocardiography to record the cardiac activity of participants while they performed a simple tactile discrimination task. Without looking, the participants had to figure out whether the objects they touched had vertical or horizontal grooves. They found that touches initiated during systole were held for longer than touches initiated during diastole'

#neuroscience #elife

https://elifesciences.org/articles/84298

'Whether these trees succeed in this slow-motion migration — and eventually grace new landscapes with their noble, carbon-sequestering, shelter-providing, wildlife-nourishing presence — will be a function of countless encounters between a mouse or a vole and an acorn.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/science/climate-forests-seeds-mice.html

"In 2019, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 18 superbugs—both drug-resistant fungi and bacteria—cause at least 2.8 million drug-resistant infections every year in the United States, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths (2). Of the 18 microbes, three are fungi: Candida auris, according to the CDC, is an “urgent threat,” drug-resistant Candida species are “serious threats,” and azole-resistant Aspergillus fumigatus is on the “watch list.”"

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217948119

"Picture a hot day in August 1877. Darwin, by now, is an old man, the leaping pole long since discarded. He has a long white beard that makes him look vaguely like an Old Testament prophet or, as one of his eulogists would write, ‘an ancient philosopher’. He has travelled some distance from home to attend the excavation of the ruins of a Roman villa discovered beneath a field in Surrey."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-insight-of-darwins-work-on-corals-worms-and-co-evolution

"There may be thousands of teachers of English literature who can successfully help students navigate their encounter with, say, King Lear, but hardly any of those teachers will be able to produce an extended critical analysis of the play that could come close to matching some of the magnificent readings offered by a handful of major critics in the past. Nonetheless, the current form of professionalism requires publication as an indicator of academic worth, and so teachers of English are driven down lesser paths: they provide ever more detailed contextual material relating to major works, or they undertake elaborate scholarly studies of minor works, or they write introductory guides for students."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n23/stefan-collini/exaggerated-ambitions

I like this intro jump from Mitchison to Sakaguchi (ref 21 to 22)

"Forty years ago, high-zone immune tolerance had been suggested to be mediated by suppressor T cells (21). The existence of suppressor T cells has long remained controversial and was not accepted until regulatory T cells (Tregs) were characterized more than 15 years later (22)."

#Immunology #Tolerance #Treg #Hemophilia

"Here, we analyzed natural variation in the production of 44 ascarosides across 95 wild ​Caenorhabditis elegans ​strains using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (HPLC-HRMS).
(...)
Our findings demonstrate how natural genetic variation in core metabolic pathways can affect the production of social signals."
#Celegans

cc @Odedrechavi

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.23.517769v1?med=mas