Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

"I sorted the catalog by graduation year. A few rows down the first page, I saw the name of a UChicago physicist: Willetta Greene-Johnson, who defended her dissertation in 1987. I scrolled through the next page, and the next, and kept scrolling until I finally reached another UChicago entry in 2015. Her name was Cacey Stevens Bester.

That can’t be it, I thought. That meant I was on track to be number three."

https://www.wired.com/story/the-unwritten-laws-of-physics/

@mike I suspect they were carefully chosen.

'Human coronaviruses, which cause colds, don’t trigger long-term immunity after infection. But studies suggest reinfection occurs on average about a year after a previous infection; one study suggests the interval is much longer. So how do we make sense of intervals of mere weeks?

Perlman doesn’t know, though he notes it’s not clear if these are reinfections or relapses, because the viruses from the sequential infections were not isolated and compared.'

#COVID #COVID19 #SarsCov2 #PublicHealth #Coronavirus #Virology

https://www.statnews.com/2022/12/27/covid19-pandemic-what-most-surprised-experts/

"Used widely in classrooms after its release, Gattaca remains as relevant as ever, a lens on modern uses of genetics. A quarter century later, we look back on the film, considering it from our perspective as geneticists. We organize our discussion around major scenes in the movie, taking up its depiction of genetic discrimination, genetic prediction, embryo selection, genetic investigations of crime, gene-by-environment interactions, and related topics. Along the way, we briefly review some technical aspects of contemporary genetics work related to Gattaca."

https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/222/4/iyac142/6758250?searchresult=1

"But critics worry that if wealthy individuals dominate, future advances could create an elite not of designer babies but of designer elderly. Christopher Wareham, a bioethicist at Utrecht University who studies the ethics of ageing, says advances in longevity science risk widening the gaps between the rich and poor in health, wealth and power, including concerns that dictators could extend their lives."

https://www.ft.com/content/649b0446-698c-4363-82ad-0be5b5faa68f

'An important aspect of this study is that we inferred the fitness landscape based on antibiotic resistance profiles and not genotypes. Although previous studies have focused on constructing fitness landscapes based on mutations for a few genes [4,6], because the number of possible genotype changes (e.g., nucleotide changes) associated with antibiotic resistance evolution is immense [32], empirical fitness landscapes based on genotypes were not capable of predicting/controlling evolution.'

#Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #antibioticresistance #FitnessLandscape @PLOSBiology

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001920#sec008

Senhor Presidente.

#LULApalooza

"The 18-month investigation, initiated by two congressional committees after the F.D.A. approved the drug, also strongly criticized Biogen, Aduhelm’s manufacturer. Internal documents showed the company set “an unjustifiably high price” of $56,000 a year for Aduhelm because it wanted a history-making “blockbuster” to “establish Aduhelm as one of the top pharmaceutical launches of all time,” even though it knew the high price would burden Medicare and patients, the report found."

#Aduhelm #MonoclonalAntibody #Alzheimer #AlzheimersDisease #Aducanumab

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/health/alzheimers-drug-aduhelm-biogen.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Health