Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

"Scientists need the time and security to investigate questions that may lead to dead ends or, alternatively, yield new understandings of the world. This rarely happens if their research is driven by short-term responses to market demands."

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-cultural-contradictions-of-modern-science/articles/trivial-pursuits-the-decline-of-scientific-research

I was recently asked by postdocs if the way the Portuguese FCT plays a call-date & regulations guessing game every year is normal.

It's not.

"Para além da escassez de financiamento, poucas coisas há que afetem mais o trabalho científico que a imprevisibilidade. Uma vez mais, os concursos dos NIH e do ERC servem de exemplo para como as coisas devem ser feitas. Todos os anos estes concursos abrem, o período de candidaturas termina, e os resultados são anunciados nas mesmas datas."

https://www.publico.pt/2023/11/14/ciencia/opiniao/truques-subterfugios-fundacao-ciencia-tecnologia-2069198

"Animals lacking microglia show increased metastasis, decreased survival and reduced natural killer and T cell responses, showing that microglia are critical to promote anti-tumour immunity to suppress breast cancer brain metastasis."
#Immunology #TumorImmunology #Microglia

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41556-023-01273-y

"(...) Trump has declared that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that, to steal from the late, great Molly Ivins, might sound better in the original German."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/opinion/columnists/trump-immigrants.html

"The gap in life expectancy between men and women in the United States grew to its widest in nearly 30 years, driven mainly by more men dying of Covid and drug overdoses, according to a new studyin The Journal of the American Medical Association."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/health/men-life-expectancy-drops.html

Meanwhile, in Ireland

"Kilkenomics, the world’s first economics and comedy festival, brings together some of the world’s leading economists, including the odd Nobel prize winner, financial analysts and media commentators with some of our funniest, sharpest stand-up comedians."

https://kilkenomics.com

"Deepening the concern, the dossier also highlights evidence that dozens of papers from Zlokovic’s lab—including many supporting the idea that the compound was ready for human testing—contain seemingly doctored data that suggest scientific misconduct. The whistleblowers say apparent changes to images used for protein identification and other purposes seem to skew results in favor of the scientist’s hypotheses, which include influential ideas about the blood-brain barrier and its role in stroke and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as how 3K3A-APC supposedly affects it."

#Neuroscience #ResearchIntegrity

https://www.science.org/content/article/misconduct-concerns-possible-drug-risks-should-stop-stroke-trial-whistleblowers-say

'The leadership of Telex, one of Hungary’s few remaining independent media outlets, recently issued a public warning that “under the guise of protecting sovereignty”, Orbán’s government has “declared war on the critical press”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/13/hungary-plan-target-foreign-influence-ngo-media-fears-sovereignty

'Every plant biologist has a story (usually multiple stories) of attempting to educate an animal biologist who does not know that plants have microtubules or cells or DNA. I once listened to a radio show about Darwin and his fascination with plants. My soul almost left my body when I heard the guest explain that Darwin would visit the plants in his greenhouse daily and “talk to them as if they were alive.”

https://unprofessoring.substack.com/p/why-study-plants

"By analysing single-cell sequencing data from patients receiving cell therapy products that are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration or are in clinical studies, we identify the presence of HHV-6-super-expressor CAR T cells in patients in vivo."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06704-2?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=nature&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1699461023

'What looks like the aftermath of a war zone is in fact an urban environmental disaster of allegedly man-made origin, which has forced an estimated 55,000 people to permanently evacuate their homes in the seaside city of Maceió, north-eastern Brazil.'

https://www.ft.com/content/35dbff19-26b7-4df8-ad78-2b2259ff7c8c

"This paper shows unique evidence on multidimensional inequality during Sweden’s COVID-19 pandemic, along four different social gradients. We consider nine diverse outcomes, which are rarely considered together and in the same statistical framework, given existing disciplinary boundaries. With few exceptions, direct and indirect burdens of the pandemic fell heavier upon more disadvantaged social groups."
#covid19 #covid #publichealth

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2303640120#sec-2