Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

'Consequences of not getting a Covid vaccine, especially among older adults, age 75+, in the UK: Missing 1 shot had a similar risk of severe Covid as missing all 4 shots (2.7 vs 3.1-fold, respectively), emphasizing waned immunity. Advanced age adults need a booster!

https://substack.com/@erictopol/note/c-47386032?utm_source=feed-email-digest

Austrian actress & inventor Hedy Lamarr died #OTD in 2000.

Most of her inventions were not widely used, but in the 1940s she wanted to create something that would help Allied forces fight the Nazis as part of the II WW. She worked with composer George Antheil to develop a new way to steer torpedoes. She had already discovered that radio-signals used to control torpedoes could be jammed by the Nazis, making them miss their targets, & wanted to come up with an unjammable alternative.

#science
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Another beautiful shot of the massive German protests. We need this energy in North America:

"Are you going to take off those headphones so we can discuss this like mature adults, Harry? Or, are you just going to sit there like a petulant child?"

'The last time the Northern Illinois Brood’s 17-year cycle aligned with the Great Southern Brood’s 13-year period, Thomas Jefferson was president. After this spring, it’ll be another 221 years before the broods, which are geographically adjacent, appear together again.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/19/science/cicadas-emergence-broods.html

'The primary outcome demonstrated a significantly higher unadjusted operative mortality for women compared with men (2.8% vs 1.7%; P < .001), with similarly significant results for the secondary outcome.'

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/2802111

Our paper on the ecology of the straight-tusked elephant from the Middle Pleistocene site Marathousa 1 is out!

The elephant's carcass was butchered and is therefore directly linked to hominin presence.

We analyzed C, O and Sr isotopes and found limited mobility, a mesic open woodland environment and moderate seasonality.

Results support a glacial refugium status for the Megalopolis basin in MIS12, one of the most impactful glacial periods.

https://rdcu.be/dv8g4
#openaccess #humanevolution

Owen Jones once more saying in the clearest way what needs to be said:

“Our political and media elites are complicit in Gaza’s nightmare. Any vestige of moral authority has been lost for ever”

#Gaza #Personhood

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/21/palestinian-lives-gaza-politics-media?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

The new online exhibition “Judging a Book by Its Cover” highlights bindings from the Grolier Club library (and I’m excited to see it in person next week during Bibliography Week.) https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/judging-a-book-by-its-cover

#libraries #bookhistory

"It took Israel and the US approximately 35 years to talk to what was then seen as the terrorist PLO, just as it took years for the ANC and IRA to be recognised as partners to a resolution. All those threatened or rightfully concerned about what may happen next, simply cannot afford the price of waiting that long"

An excellent article from former Palestinian negotiator Ahmad Samih Khalidi in today's UK Observer
#Israel #Gaza #Palestine #Hamas

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/21/israels-plans-for-gazas-future-will-only-keep-the-flame-of-hamas-resistance-burning

'Nazis, no thank you' and 'It feels like 1933, AfD ban now!' reads some of the banners at protests across the country.#Europe #Germany
What’s behind mass protests against Germany’s far-right AfD party?

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Germany this weekend, to protests against the extreme right and to expose the AfD for what hey really are.

#AfD #extremeright #racism #Germany

''The neurons derive from mathematical models of biological neurons originally formulated by Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts, in a landmark 1943 paper, titled “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” McCulloch and Pitts argued that brain activity could be reduced to a model of simple, interconnected processing units, receiving and sending zeros and ones among themselves based on relatively simple rules of activation and deactivation.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/how-much-of-the-world-is-it-possible-to-model

"We had done one heart transplant during my rotating internship in Nigeria. He was a kid with rheumatic heart disease, and it was the first cardiac transplant in Nigeria. I was on that service; I worked hard but unfortunately the patient died and I kept thinking it was a futile exercise. If the child had had penicillin, he would never have damaged his heart — that got me thinking about prevention. Those were moments that were transformative for me in thinking about how I wanted to spend the rest of my life as a doctor."

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/178495

"Like millions of other high-risk people who are service workers, older, chronically ill, disabled, or immunocompromised, I have done everything I can to remain as safe as possible. Due to neuromuscular disability and respiratory failure, my chances of surviving an infection are slim to none. With the latest JN.1 variant likely even more contagious – or better practiced at evading immune system defenses – than previous ones, I wonder if this is the surge when I will become infected, which is terrifying."

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/covid-isnt-going-anywhere-masking-up-could-save-my-life

'Impaired mitochondrial transport in the axon is another feature of aging and neurodegenerative diseases. Using Drosophila, we found that genetic depletion of axonal mitochondria causes dysregulation of translation and protein degradation.'

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.20.576435v1

Eric Arthur Blair, English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the name George Orwell died #OTD in 1950. He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938) are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. via @wikipedia

#books #literature