Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

'Decreased access to biomarker testing can result in delays of appropriate treatment, poor outcomes related to use of ineffective treatment and lack of access to clinical trials with biomarker-based entry criteria. Thus, the opportunities to receive benefits of precision oncology are most realized in high-income, urban and academic settings.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-023-00568-1

"Similarly, reproductive aging and women’s health are finally on the scene: several initiatives have recognized not only that reproductive cessation is the earliest aging phenotype, but also that menopause itself (which is about 15 years later than reproductive aging, so not interchangeable) can cause aging, and that mid-life health may ultimately determine future longevity. This, plus the acknowledgment that female animals are important to study in all aspects of biology, may lead to the end of ignoring 50% of the aging population’s needs."

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002132

Tips on how to write an article title, courtesy of Public Library of Science (PLOS ). The second "don't" is a plea to resist temptation.

Heed it.

https://plos.org/resource/how-to-write-a-great-title/

'As a neuroscientist who works with flies, Tuthill knew that insect nervous systems shut down when the creatures get too cold, so even species that can tolerate subzero temperatures tend to do so by entering a dormant state. And yet here were insects, running about in apparent defiance of both biology and physics. “It immediately blew my mind,” Tuthill told me. That’s how he came to study snow flies.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/05/snow-flies-insects-glaciers/674240/

"As demonstrated in The US and the Holocaust—a six-hour documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein that aired on PBS last fall and is now available for streaming—antisemitic, xenophobic, and racist groups in American society had long used their political power to keep out immigrants perceived as undesirable, including Jews."

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/06/22/the-millions-we-failed-to-save-us-and-the-holocaust-pbs/

"Typing and retyping as if you know where you're going is a version of what therapists tell you to do when they suggest that you try changing from the outside in - that if you can't master the total commitment to whatever change you want to make, you can at least do all the extraneous things connected with it, which make it that much easier to get there."
- Nora Ephron.

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/09/books/revision-and-life-take-it-from-the-top-again.html

'This is where an editor steps in, a reader invested in the text but also distant enough from it to see it analytically and manipulatively. To prove this point: my best editors have been those who saw in my drafts something I had not seen myself, who pointed out to me the hidden (from me, the author) lacunae where the text could grow—or redundancies that had to be cut altogether.'

https://lithub.com/revise-revise-anna-badkhen-on-the-joys-of-revision/

File this one under "big if true":

"For decades, it was typical to use pelvic radiation. But the radiation puts women into immediate menopause and damages sexual function in men and women. It also can injure the bowel, causing issues like chronic diarrhea. Patients risk pelvic fractures, and the radiation can cause additional cancers.

Yet radiation treatment, the study found, did not improve outcomes."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/health/rectal-cancer-radiation-treatment.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Health

Let's hope they lose big.

'The pharmaceutical company Merck on Tuesday sued the government over a federal law that empowers Medicare for the first time to negotiate prices directly with drugmakers.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/business/merck-medicare-drug-prices.html

"Presently, most nanobodies are produced by immunizing camelids; however, platforms for animal-free production are growing in popularity. Here, we describe the development of a fully synthetic nanobody library based on an engineered human VH3-23 variable gene and a multispecific antibody-like format designed for biparatopic target engagement."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216612120