Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

'Stanford’s railroad companies employed 10,000 to 12,000 Chinese laborers, whom they exploited even more brutally than they did the smaller number of mostly Irish white immigrant workers. To lay the rails and build stations, they displaced Native Americans from their lands: the federal Pacific Railway Act of 1862 undertook to “extinguish as rapidly as may be the Indian titles to all lands falling under the operation of this act.” The journalist and writer Ambrose Bierce called the Big Four the “rail-rogues” and referred to Leland Stanford as “Stealand Landford.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/06/22/a-poisonous-legacy-who-killed-jane-stanford/

'People have been vaccinating domesticated animals for centuries, but only two reasons justify immunizing wildlife, says Tonie Rocke, a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey: “to prevent spillover to domestics and humans of a zoonotic disease, and for conservation purposes.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/06/vaccinating-wildlife-population-disease-bird-flu/674399/

Pause

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXNKQhFUhiE

I love it when authors include the proper primary references:

"The discovery of dead, fungus-covered flies in elevated locales has fascinated the scientifically curious for at least the past 150 years (Berisford and Tsao, 1974; Cohn, 1855; Gryganskyi et al., 2013; Mullens et al., 1987)."

"For at least two centuries, scientists have been enthralled by the “zombie” behaviors induced by mind-controlling parasites. Despite this interest, the mechanistic bases of these uncanny processes have remained mostly a mystery."

https://elifesciences.org/articles/85410

The view from the new terrace at EMBO #Heidelberg

'The analyses of RANK and RANKL expression in large cohorts of breast cancer samples and functional studies in RANK+ breast cancer patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) revealed a key role for RANK in postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor negative (ER-) breast cancer.'
Ciscar et al @EmboMolMed
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.202216715

Primer on the clinical uses of base editing tech @PLOSBiology
"In this Essay, we highlight base editing technologies and their development from bench to bedside. Base editing, first reported in 2016, is capable of installing C•G to T•A and A•T to G•C point mutations, while largely circumventing some of the pitfalls of traditional CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing."
#MolecularBiology #GeneTherapy

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002071

"Using bibliometric data that cover the past two decades, we show that, while female researchers continued to be underrepresented among internationally mobile researchers, and migrated over shorter distances, this gender gap has been narrowing at a faster rate than the gender gap in the population of general researchers."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214664120

'Financial Times analysis of data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine shows that over the past three decades cancer rates in the G20 group of industrialised nations have increased faster for 25- to 29-year-olds than any other age group — by 22 per cent between 1990 and 2019. Rates for 20- to 34-year-olds in these countries are now at their highest level in 30 years.'

https://www.ft.com/content/90d5f2e3-d539-4149-a503-2114ac3ef355

'Aprender debe ser un placer. Nuestros jóvenes tienen que poder entender el mundo, y la forma de hacerlo es adentrarse en el mundo microscópico de las moléculas. Ahora es posible gracias a la enorme capacidad de crear animaciones precisas que recrean la química a nivel molecular. En mi trabajo la visualización es esencial. Pero incluso mis estudiantes de los últimos cursos de carrera en la universidad tienen muchos problemas para visualizar la química. Creo que esta capacidad tiene más de arte que de ciencia. Imaginar los electrones saltando de un átomo a otro causando reacciones. Es una comprensión visual, igual que en el arte.'

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2023-06-16/morten-meldal-premio-nobel-la-quimica-clic-nos-ayudara-a-vencer-al-cancer-y-al-alzheimer.html

'E a ministra ainda ajuda, retirando do financiamento para a investigação um subsídio à contratação de docentes que deveria ser feita através do financiamento direto às instituições. Desta paupérrima proposta, oficialmente, nada mais se sabe. Nada. Ao ver a grande manifestação de 16 de maio, a ministra do transístor em papel fez o papel de um interruptor e apagou-se. Não esclarece, não reúne, não discute, não negoceia.'

https://www.publico.pt/2023/06/18/ciencia/opiniao/emprego-cientifico-fcttenure-alguem-segure-2053389