Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

Good for them:

"Thousands of early-career researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have kickstarted the process to form a union. They are calling on the NIH — the world’s largest biomedical funder — to raise pay and improve benefits, as well as to bolster its policies and procedures against harassment and excessive workloads."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01845-w

'Illicit fentanyl kills users more quickly than any other drug to ever appear on American streets. Preliminary data from the CDC show that overdose deaths hit an all-time high in 2022, at nearly 110,000—almost 70 percent of which involved fentanyl.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/harm-reduction-decriminalization-fentanyl-meth/674214/

Brave new world

'In the ChatGPT era, we face a future of low-quality content automatically churned out, itself “read” only by other algorithms as they train themselves up and by bots generating fraudulent ad clicks—a “gray goo” internet created by algorithms, for algorithms, and shunned by everyone with a pulse.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/06/advertising-revenue-google-meta-amazon-apple-microsoft/674258/

'Old and newly synthesized histones are asymmetrically distributed and inherited in Drosophila intestinal stem cell divisions. Disruption of asymmetric histone inheritance compromises stem cell differentiation, indicating a role in regulating cell fates in adult stem lineages in vivo.'

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.202256404

'This is also a broader issue. The UK’s share of global pharma R&D has dropped sharply since 2012, from 7.7 per cent to 4.2 per cent in 2020. Manufacturing has fallen since 2015, according to the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, along with exports. '

https://www.ft.com/content/aed6c929-6eeb-4f6d-bce7-d36445fc5ebf

'All​ over Europe, the police made the mistake of assuming that the next revolutionary outbreak would be the work of a handful of trained conspirators. The explosion of almost spontaneous mass uprisings by ‘the people’ – the pattern of 1848 – took governments, liberal reformers and even Count Metternich, the supreme architect of Europe’s post-1815 order, by surprise'

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n11/neal-ascherson/kings-grew-pale

'The essential problem is that human language is not just about saying what and where things are and which qualities they harbor, such as being green or tall. Language is about what happened, what’s different, what’s on the move. At its core, language is all about the action — to wit, the verbs.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/opinion/verbs-language-instruction.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Guest%20Essays

'At best, Brenner says, scientists can develop therapies that maintain the health of older people and help keep them out of the hospital—an increasingly important goal as the average age in the United States and elsewhere keeps climbing. Brenner is tackling this problem as the chief scientific advisor of a bioscience company called ChromaDex, which markets supplements for “healthy aging.” But believing we can rewrite the operating manual for lifespan itself, Brenner told me, is like “believing in the tooth fairy.”

https://nautil.us/the-longevity-skeptic-305806/

'We posit that future models purporting to explain the etiology of mammalian mutagenesis need to capture the fact that more closely related species have more similar mutation spectra; a model that fits each marginal spectrum with high cosine similarity is not guaranteed to capture this hierarchy of mutation spectrum variation among species.'

#preprint
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.31.543114v1

Outra grande ideia do Moedas:

'Sobretudo esta ideia de tirar os pobres do centro da cidade e juntá-los a outros pobres que vivem em bairros sociais é uma ideia errada e ultrapassada de cidade. Estigmatizar cada vez mais os bairros carenciados e limpar as zonas privilegiadas da cidade do mau aspeto de quem literalmente não tem onde cair morto. Como é que ainda estamos aqui?'

https://www.publico.pt/2023/06/02/opiniao/opiniao/arrumar-pobres-devido-lugar-2051888