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On this day in 1813: John Snow born, pioneer in public health, epidemiology and anaesthesia #ThisDayInBiotech

'As we headed east out of Napa city he warned me about the transformation of Contra Costa since I’d last visited in the 1980s. Back then, it was a characterful sandy wasteland dominated by pylons between patches of vines farmed by the descendants of Portuguese immigrants.'

ft.com/content/dfce4894-09a5-4

'Here, we generated a mouse model with insufficient ketogenesis by conditionally knocking out the gene encoding the hepatocyte-specific ketogenic enzyme hydroxymethylglutary-CoA synthase 2 (Hmgcs2 KO). Intriguingly, erythroid maturation was enhanced with boosted fatty acid synthesis in bone marrow of hepatic Hmgcs2 KO mouse under fasting condition, suggesting that systemic ketogenesis has a profound effect on erythropoiesis.'

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Back in (very sunny) Heidelberg! Looking forward to meeting students & postdocs at the Uni and reconnecting with my former colleagues at EMBO.

'I can’t help but recall the story of Monowitz, the for-profit concentration camp the massive German chemicals conglomerate IG Farben built in 1942 four and a half miles from Auschwitz, after its plans to staff a rubber plant with slaves marched in from the camps each morning proved too costly and inefficient to deliver a speedy return on investment. So Farben bought 25,000 slave laborers, many of them children who were cheaper, to build a new camp next to the rubber plant, with even tighter living quarters and more inhumane treatment than the rest of Auschwitz.

At Monowitz, the beatings were so cruel the SS complained to Berlin, the hospitals so crowded that the SS repeatedly asked to build more; Farben refused on account of cost.'

prospect.org/culture/books/202

'To “pretend to understand a Book, by scouting thro’ the Index,” jibed Jonathan Swift in 1704, was the same “as if a Traveller should go about to describe a Palace, when he had seen nothing but the Privy.”

nybooks.com/articles/2023/06/2

An interesting story for the weekend: temperature dependent RNA editing in the octopus nervous system.

"In this study, we explore the effects of temperature on recoding across the neural transcriptome of Octopus bimaculoides, taking advantage of the extensive number of RNA editing sites in this species and its varied thermal environment"

cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8

'As we headed east out of Napa city he warned me about the transformation of Contra Costa since I’d last visited in the 1980s. Back then, it was a characterful sandy wasteland dominated by pylons between patches of vines farmed by the descendants of Portuguese immigrants.'

ft.com/content/dfce4894-09a5-4

"These data demonstrate that IL-22 promotes DNA damage response activation in proximal tubule cells, switching pro-recovery DDR responses to a pro-cell death response and worsening acute kidney injury."

biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Don't wait for the earth-shattering kaboom

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang — that is, a sudden, universal catastrophe — but with a series of smaller, more local catastrophes that keep getting bigger and more widespread."

nytimes.com/2023/06/08/opinion

Scientific publication is a complex ecosystem, and there is no shortage of views on how to improve it, support it, burn it down, rebuild it, finance it, etc

But we should be able to agree on one thing: forcing authors to format manuscripts before the manuscript is accepted is an immense waste of time.

nature.com/articles/d41586-023

Lewis Epstein's incredible book "Gedanken Physics" appears to be basically unavailable to buy in English. But the second edition is freely available on the Internet Archive! What an amazing resource. Some of the unfortunate attitudes in the book are dated but the approach to #physics through problem solving is as fresh today as it ever was.

archive.org/details/ThinkingPh

Bluesky won't be a good fit for everyone, but for the science-inclined that do make their way there, be sure you land in the What's Science feed organized by @bossett.bsky.social

"‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, the 1967 lecture that begins with the tribal storyteller, took its inspiration from avant-garde experiments with basic computers. Calvino thought that the use of machines to destabilise literary form, or produce generative disorder, was eminently human. The machine’s ‘true vocation would be for classicism’, having the capacity to infer and follow stylistic rules exactingly. It is interesting to revisit this argument in the era of AI, not least in light of Calvino’s brief, teasing claim that a true ‘literature machine’ would produce avant-garde work ‘to free its circuits when they are choked’ by classicism"

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/ja

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