Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

'The charged status of race in the census did not end there. Contemporary arguments about racial ‘degeneration’ and the changing composition of the US population fed directly into the census of 1920, in which almost half the form was devoted to questions about where people were born and what their parents’ mother tongue was.'

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/john-lanchester/get-a-rabbit

This story is crazy. A small town Texas bigot tries to run a gay couple out of town, but in the process of fighting back, they discover that the bigot has been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the town. So she apparently burned down the town hall, fled the state, and is living homeless in a Colorado park.

#Texas

https://themessenger.com/news/2-gay-dads-helped-uncover-767000-embezzlement-scheme-in-texas-town-where-officials-called-them-homophobic-slurs

They carry a gene for ALS but aren’t sick. What does medical research owe them?

https://www.statnews.com/2023/09/21/als-gene-carrier-riluzole-toferson/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon_organic

Our September issue includes a new Letter (https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evad105) from Deborah Charlesworth et al. that provides a counterpoint to a GBE article published in March by Lydia Fong et al. (https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evad030), along with a response from Fong et al. (https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evad128). #science #evolution #biology #genome #evolgen_paper

Nature’s take on the IIT as consciousness debate:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1

Online Now: Hormone-induced enhancer assembly requires an optimal level of hormone receptor multivalent interactions https://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/fulltext/S1097-2765(23)00690-1?rss=yes&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Just a note that AlphaMissense is not the "Alphafold for point mutants" that some seem to be saying it is.

"Notably, AlphaMissense does not predict the structural changes of the mutated amino acid sequences but instead predicts pathogenicity as scalar values."
#StructuralBiology @strucbio

Accurate proteome-wide missense variant effect prediction with AlphaMissense | Science https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg7492

@proteomicsnews blog post | It's September 21st! There is a mass spec symposium all day in Rockville today! | https://proteomicsnews.blogspot.com/2023/09/its-september-21st-there-is-mass-spec.html #proteomics

'Son los retrovirus endógenos humanos (HERV, por sus siglas en inglés), reliquias virales sin capacidad infectiva que se quedaron en el organismo tras infecciones que sufrieron nuestros ancestros hace millones de años.'

https://elpais.com/salud-y-bienestar/2023-09-20/el-misterioso-rol-de-los-virus-ancestrales-incrustados-en-el-adn-humano.html

'Some selection-based theories propose that genome streamlining, favoring smaller genome sizes, is advantageous in nutritionally limited environments, particularly under P-limitation. To test this prediction, we conducted several experimental evolution trials on clonal populations of a facultatively asexual rotifer that exhibits intraspecific variation in genome size.'

https://academic.oup.com/evolut/advance-article/doi/10.1093/evolut/qpad144/7277129?searchresult=1

"The moment you and your story are overwhelmed by the furious storm of the times - that's when the real novel begins."
Walter Mosley, Elements of Fiction.

#books #bookshelf #writing #bookstodon

@yoginho
Really great! I'm also reminded of this article:

Philosophical Plumbing,
by Mary Midgley

Plumbing and philosophy are both activities that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences.

Each system supplies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as a whole. There have been many ambitious attempts to reshape both of them, but existing complications are usually too widespread to allow a completely new start ...

When trouble arises, specialized skill is needed if there is to be any hope of locating it and putting it right. Here, however, we run into the first striking difference between the two cases. About plumbing, everybody accepts this need for specialists with painfully acquired technical knowledge. About philosophy, people—especially British people—not only doubt the need, they are often sceptical about whether the underlying system even exists at all ...

H/T to @awaisaftab for the pointer

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/royal-institute-of-philosophy-supplements/article/philosophical-plumbing/A852BF55F9DF8506898FB51C6E4E41B1

Germany's Merck puts $1.3bn into AI drug development through new deals with Exscientia and BenevolentAI

https://pharmaphorum.com/news/merck-puts-13bn-ai-exscientia-benevolentai-deals

#pharma #pharmaindustry #AI #artificialintelligence #exscientia #benevolentAI #merck #MerckKGaA