Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

'Stanford, the SIO’s institutional home, denies that it is dismantling the unit and loudly proclaims its commitment to independent research. On the other hand, according to DiResta, the university has run up “huge legal bills” defending SIO researchers from harassment by Republican politicians and conservative conspiracy theorists, and may have decided that enough is enough.'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/29/closing-the-stanford-internet-observatory-will-edge-the-us-towards-the-end-of-democracy

Here's a different bird flying with a stickleback that it just snatched from the surface of Lake Washington.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s plan to annex the West Bank would see over 60% of the territory becoming a part of Israel. But Palestinian experts say it is “already happening.”

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/06/israels-leaked-plan-for-annexing-the-west-bank-explained/

#Palestine #Israel #Gaza
@palestine @israel

'Protein synthesis and decay rates must be tightly coordinated to ensure proteome homeostasis. How this coordination is established is unknown. Here we use quantitative live cell imaging combined with computational inference to determine how changes in global protein synthesis rates alter protein decay rates'
#Preprint
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.04.602056v1

'The High Court in London on Tuesday found that Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine infringed a patent that Moderna filed in 2011 covering a part of the mRNA platform, which was central to the jabs.'

https://www.ft.com/content/c57bc08f-50b3-42ef-ad44-4d592b189ce7

'In our opinion, focus should shift toward supporting and enhancing the oversight framework for high-complexity clinical laboratory-developed testing procedures. This can be achieved through a reform of the CLIA, collaborating with other regulatory entities such as CAP, and working closely with state agencies like NYSDOH. This collaborative effort aims to harmonize clinical laboratory testing, ensuring a robust, cost-effective, streamlined, and flexible regulatory ecosystem.'
https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0012116#sec004

"But whilst it will have its benefits, the process of datafication also raises important methodological and ethical questions. Who has access to the data that is collected and why? How do the new data flows change everyday research practice? Are scientists being subjected to “dataveillance”, and if so, what does this mean for their privacy? To ensure that the scientific community embarks on a critically informed journey towards a datafied research ecosystem, these questions need to be addressed."

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/s44319-024-00153-2

'Some now seek to scare leftwing and centre-left voters by claiming that the NFP’s programme for government would be dangerous for the French economy. They are wrong. We are not claiming that this manifesto is perfect – how could it be given that Macron only allowed three weeks to organise for elections? But in historical context, it should be considered a pragmatic, social democratic set of proposals aimed at reducing inequalities and preparing for the future. There is nothing radical in this agenda.'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/03/france-hard-left-new-popular-front-far-right

'Many Americans began to feel what we, in other parts of the world, had felt when we read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time—that it was not some farfetched dystopia set in a remote place and time. It was already here. It was already happening.'

https://lithub.com/75-years-of-1984-why-george-orwells-classic-remains-more-relevant-than-ever/

'Without judges having access to rigorous evidence relating to issues such as clean water and the application of artificial intelligence, the AAAS’s Joanne Carney told me, “We risk the safety and health of the public in certain cases.”

https://www.ft.com/content/aa853601-2560-4aeb-8be6-90a73dab99e1

'Now, with 2 high-impact malaria vaccines becoming available, how has this milestone influenced malaria vaccine research and development efforts? This article aims to explain more about the current landscape of #malaria vaccine development.'

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1012309

'Here, we show that the conclusions of a microbiome research study are greatly dependent on the time of sample collection, and that experimental and control groups undergo a cycle of diverging and converging microbiome composition depending on the nature and timing of experimental interventions.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-024-01064-1

'Dr. Jordan was in many ways an old-school researcher. He insisted that a drug should be investigated for all its potential applications, not just the ones that might make money or be the quickest to market. And he believed that scientists should be transparent about side effects, even if it meant reducing a drug’s appeal. He called his work “conversations with nature.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/science/v-craig-jordan-dead.html

He should have published it in J Exp Med!

'Mr. Towne also worked for years on the script for “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.” But he was so disappointed with the finished film, directed by Hugh Hudson and released in 1984, that he insisted on replacing his name in the credits with “P.H. Vazak,” shorthand for the name of his beloved Hungarian sheepdog, Pannonia’s Hira Vazak. His “Greystoke” screenplay was nevertheless nominated for an Oscar.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/movies/robert-towne-dead.html

'Here we studied the endogenous TLR pathways in human and mouse macrophages. We provide evidence that myddosomes are dynamic and long-lived entities, numbering in the dozens within individual cells. We demonstrate that the complex cellular responses of the entire TLR pathway are coordinated and executed from within these structures.'
#Immunology #InnateImmunity
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07614-7

"Here, we identify dexamethasone treatment-induced cellular and molecular changes associated with improved survival in COVID-19 patients. We observed a reversal of transcriptional hallmark signatures in monocytes associated with severe COVID-19 and the induction of a monocyte substate characterized by the expression of glucocorticoid-response genes. These molecular responses to dexamethasone were detected in circulating and pulmonary monocytes, and they were directly linked to survival."
#Covid #Covid19
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00654-8

'Heinrich von Kleist, the German writer, once said that looking at a seascape by Caspar David Friedrich was like having your eyelids cut off. You were staring directly at death, at the loneliest center of the loneliest void. What could be better than that?'

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-art-world/the-man-who-could-paint-loneliness

'The data showed that, compared to normal births, preterm births are associated with higher levels of proteins that attract white blood cells and promote inflammation, such as IL-6 and IL-1β. Vaginal fluids from individuals who went on to have an early preterm birth where the amniotic sac ruptured before labor, contained lower levels of proteins known as defensins, which defend the body from bacteria.'
#Immunology
https://elifesciences.org/articles/90943

'Reviewing the literature, the paper suggests that over 70% of the putative "dark metabolome" is merely an experimental artifact. This is of course not good news for all the people who have been trying to assign these peaks, nor for the other groups who have been trying to model metabolism computationally based on the typical mass spec assumption that any unassigned peaks are due to separate new species. People are going to have to rethink a lot of the ESI mass spec data out there, it seems.'
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/phantom-metabolites