Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

"Here, we developed a computational model to interrogate antibody evolution by affinity maturation after immunization with two types of immunogens: a chimeric heterotrimeric antigen that is enriched for the RBS epitope relative to other B cell epitopes, and a cocktail composed of three non-epitope-enriched homotrimeric antigens that comprise the chimera."

#Immunology #Preprint

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.02.518838v1?med=mas

'I remember as a young officer in Germany based next to Belsen concentration camp, being horrified by a memorial to the French Jews who had died there. It stated: “Aux Juifs français qui sont morts pour la gloire et la patrie.” I found the idea of French Jews dying for glory and the fatherland quite grotesque. Many years later I mentioned this to the French historian Henry Rousso. He replied: “I entirely understand your reaction, but you are completely wrong. It was the French Jews themselves who insisted after the war that memorials to their dead should have exactly the same wording as those of all the French. This was because they would never forgive Vichy for having tried to take away their French citizenship.”

#AntonyBeevor

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/eurozone-democracy-antony-beevor?ref=the-browser

#Immunology #Immunotherapy
#checkpointinhibitors

"In this Review we mark the tenth anniversary of the approval of ipilimumab and discuss the foundational scientific history of ICB, together with the history of the discovery, development and elucidation of the mechanism of action of the first generation of drugs targeting the #CTLA4 and #PD1 pathways."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41573-021-00345-8

'That movie is Yu Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu’s documentary China’s Van Goghs, which you can watch just above. Much of it takes place in the village of Dafen in China’s Guangdong province, home to thousands and thousands of oil painters, all of whom make their living making replicas (in various sizes) of famous paintings by the likes of Leonardo, Rembrandt, Dalí, Basquiat, and — above all, it seems — Van Gogh. It speaks to the speed and scale of modern Chinese industry that this activity began only in 1989, but grew such that, at one point, Dafen was supplying 60 percent of the oil paintings in the world.'

https://www.openculture.com/2022/12/a-chinese-painter-specializing-in-copying-van-gogh-paintings-sees-van-goghs-actual-paintings-for-the-first-time.html

''On the gallery walls surrounding the piece Ai pinned lists of names — thousands of them — of the dead, marked in memory despite the best efforts of Chinese officialdom to consign them to oblivion. “Straight” is the “Guernica” of our young, bloodied century, and no textual history could possibly recover, as this masterpiece does, the enormous weight of the event’s catastrophe.'

#SimonSchama

https://www.ft.com/content/c945542f-87e5-412a-b9f0-535b8190a5bf

'These data demonstrate an important physiological role of AMPKβ1 Ser108 phosphorylation in promoting fatty acid oxidation, mitochondrial biogenesis and autophagy under conditions of high lipid availability. As both ketogenic diets and intermittent fasting increase circulating free fatty acid levels, AMPK activity, mitochondrial biogenesis, and mitophagy, these data suggest a potential unifying mechanism which may be important in mediating these effects.'

#Metabolism #AMPK

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2119824119

'The above-mentioned experiment, undertaken by Sherlock Holmes, was based on the work of early forensic expert Robert Christison, who became Chair of Medical Jurisprudence (now called Forensic Medicine) in 1822. He was one of the first toxicology experts and was such a reliable medical witness in court that he became the Crown Witness for the prosecution for nearly 33 years. His discovery of post-mortem bruising occurred during his investigation into one of the most famous serial murder cases in history.'

https://surgeonshallmuseums.wordpress.com/2020/04/17/a-study-in-scarlet-where-fact-meets-fiction/

'Here a new normal was won through vaccination, to a large degree, but also through near-universal infection and mass death. So far, American Covid mortality in 2022 is below the levels of 2020 and 2021, but not that far below, with deaths this year two-thirds of those in 2020 and half as high as those in 2021. Covid-19 is on track to be the country’s third leading cause of death for the third straight year, behind only heart disease and cancer.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/opinion/china-has-an-extraordinary-covid-19-dilemma.html