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'Japan now counts over a thousand varieties of miso, and each region is synonymous with a local recipe: Edo sweet red miso in Tokyo (the city being previously known as Edo) and sweet white miso in Kyoto. In the Chūkyō region it’s dark brown and bitter; in Kyushu it’s made with barley (mugi). As Kazutoshi Endo, chef-patron of the Michelin-starred London sushi restaurant Endo at the Rotunda, puts it, “miso equals culture”.'

theguardian.com/food/article/2

Dahlia (of some sort), Botanical Gardens, Copenhagen

Have to love the joyful dahlia blooms in summer; one remarkable year I actually had them bloom in my garden, but the snails and slugs munch them down to nothing every year since then.

#bloomscrolling #dahlia #Botanical #BotanicalGarden #flowers #flower #summer #Photography #pentax #PentaxK70 #PentaxK70_RN

From @pluralistic:

“For all that the right has bombed so many of the roads to a prosperous, humane future, it's a huge mistake to think of the right as a stable, unified force, marching to victory after inevitable victory.

“The American right is a brittle coalition led by a handful of plutocrats who have convinced a large number of turkeys to vote for Christmas.”
💯💯

pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fra

#PhysicsFactlet
If you ever studied any Physics in school you probably know that the trajectory of an object thrown in a uniform gravitational field will be a parabola.
But if the drag (e.g. due to the atmosphere) is not negligible, the trajectory will be much more skewed, and it will fall almost vertically after reaching its maximum height.
#Physics #ITeachPhysics

'When I was starting my group, I was reading advice on Twitter. A lot wasn't very useful, but somebody asked, ‘What is the single most important advice to a new PI?’ Somebody answered that it was to ‘grow slowly’, and I couldn't agree more. I tried to take the same approach: I will only hire someone in my lab if I'm absolutely sure they'll be a good fit. I think that has worked well so far.'
journals.biologists.com/dev/ar

'The SNSF Swiss Postdoctoral Fellowships 2024 call document is already available. The other relevant documents (Instructions for submitting an application via mySNF and the Research Plan Template) will be updated and published by 2 September 2024 when the call for proposals opens.'

snf.ch/en/m1NtWp4nTELQixlu/fun

Issue 13 is complete!

Explore our ToC here: journals.biologists.com/jcs/is

Our cover image shows a bead sprouting assay of HUVECs expressing a constitutively active c-Src mutant (magenta). The cells exhibit irregular blood vessel formation with actin shown in green and DAPI in blue. journals.biologists.com/jcs/ar

Also in Issue 13:
- Research Highlights on CEP41, exocytosis, retromer & retriever and c-Src
- Interview with Rob Parton
- Review on lymphocyte activation
- Review on chromosome interlocks

"Concomitant to the unravelling of bacterial immune defence was the realisation that some antiphage systems are in fact conserved in eukaryotes [7–9]. For example, cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS)-like enzymes, which produce cyclic dinucleotide second messengers upon pathogen detection, and viperins, which generate modified nucleotides blocking viral replication, protect bacteria and humans alike. Contrary to the conceptual framework of clade-specific immune mechanisms, a fraction of immune modules (domains or proteins involved in defence) are conserved between prokaryotes and eukaryotes."
journals.plos.org/plosbiology/

Inarguably the most important human genetics paper of the year, and a landmark moment in the history of neurodevelopmental disorder (NDD) genetics.

Mutations in RNU4-2, encoding a small nuclear RNA (snRNA) are among the most frequent genetic causes of NDD, explaining up to 0.4% of all cases. Yet, these variants have not been found all these years, despite the big advancements in genome sequencing in the past years.

The mind-blowing part: just a region of 18 base pairs that encode a critical part of the snRNA holds all the NDD mutations, a majority of them are insertion mutations. A 18bp noncoding region explaining 0.4% of all NDDs is really huge. This knowledge will solve (already solving) genetic diagnoses of thousands of NDD patients around the world.

The 18-bp region is highly constrained. Natural selection is actively removing the mutations from the population, yet the region keeps mutating again and again and again. The next important follow up will be to find what drives such a high mutation rate in this region, particularly insertion mutations.

The authors add a new twist to the story: the majority of the maternally inherited. This is surprising, as the origins of NDDs are typically paternally biased. The mechanism is going to be absolutely mind-blowing.

Congrats Nicky and team on this remarkable work.

This is one of the biggest success stories of 100k genomes project by Genomics England. Whole genome sequencing is already making a big impact in the rare disease space!

bird.makeup/@nickywhiffin/1811

'The Electronic Bard is not easy for Trurl to make. In thinking about how to program it, Trurl reads “twelve thousand tons of the finest poetry” but deems the research insufficient. As he sees it, the program found in the head of even an average poet “was written by the poet’s civilization, and that civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time.” The complexity of the average poet-machine is daunting.'
newyorker.com/science/elements

'Women taking the anti-diabetes medication Ozempic might have an extra reason to pat their tummies. Not only does the injectable drug lead to weight loss, a finding that has sparked frenzied off-label demand worldwide, but in recent months it has also been linked to a surprise baby boom.'
ft.com/content/bf52faa7-9428-4

If... future... hinges on our capacity to create something different... then what... matters is whether we... rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place... We are projects of collective self-creation... What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?

#DawnOfEverything : A New History of Humanity by #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow ; Ch 1.

@donar @xChaos

#tg845716998

The Russians are coming...again.
"Russian state media and online accounts tied to the Kremlin have spread and amplified misleading and incendiary content about US immigration and border security. The campaign seems crafted to stoke outrage and polarization before the 2024 election for the White House, and experts who study Russian disinformation say Americans can expect more to come as Putin looks to weaken support for Ukraine and cut off a vital supply of aid." motherjones.com/politics/2024/

'The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled today that the European Commission did not give the public “sufficiently wide access” to Covid-19 vaccine contracts, finding irregularities in its justification for redacting parts of the documents.'
politico.eu/article/eus-top-co

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