Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

"In the 18th century, a young French botanist named Michel Adanson traveled to Senegal to gather specimens. He spent the rest of his life back in France, laboring on an encyclopedic classification project that went mostly unpublished. Diop, a novelist of French Senegalese origin, imagines the Enlightenment cataloger as a man haunted ever since his return by a profoundly disorienting quest he embarked on during the trip: He set out to find a woman who had been abducted and sold into slavery, but who’d managed to escape captivity."

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/12/10-best-books-2023-emily-wilson-christina-sharpe/676179/

"Recent work has ascribed contributory roles for multiple immune cell types, such as monocytes/macrophages, neutrophils, T cells, B cells, dendritic cells, and mast cells, in disturbances in glucose and insulin homeostasis in obesity. In the central nervous system, microglia and their interactions with hypothalamic neurons affect food intake, energy expenditure, and insulin sensitivity. In addition to cell-specific contributions of central and peripheral immune cells in obesity, roles for interorgan communication have been described."

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002448

Last day in Lisbon:

"FEIRA DO PRATO FALANTE December 5th & 6th at Campo de Ourique from 12h to 20h."
At atelier @almeida_felipa featuring @hunchbacksociety & more. #ceramics #Pottery #Handmade #stoneware

'The chaos at the heart of Britain’s handling of Covid-19 has been laid bare in recent weeks, with testimonies describing a “toxic” culture in Downing Street and how Johnson was “bamboozled” by scientific data.'

https://www.ft.com/content/bea342f8-9289-41cb-83ae-1e97c47e33fa

"In particular, our results show that AlphaFold predictions are not better representations of the contents of a crystal than the models deposited in the PDB, as the deposited models agree much more closely with experimental data where the predicted and deposited models differ."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-023-02087-4#Sec7

"The fact that we saw attacks on the [police] cordon and the crime scene, these are clearly organized and orchestrated activities which need quite a lot of background organization… this is where we see the far-right's use of X," he said. "They were able to get a lot of people there very quickly to basically take control of that situation, direct it."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-ireland-x-twitter-far-right-dublin-immigration/

“For years the EU has been trying to agree on a new system to respond to people moving or fleeing to Europe. The agreement now on the table would in many ways worsen existing legislation, and risks increasing suffering at European borders.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/06/eu-migration-package-risks-racial-profiling-and-discrimination-ngos-say

"After decades of steady environmental degradation in Xochimilco, Mexico wanted to know how many axolotls remained in the species’ last stronghold. Axolotls were of deep cultural importance, a feature of the region’s traditional diet and cosmology. And laboratory biologists all over the world, who for more than a century had used axolotls to study tissue regeneration, worried that their animals were becoming inbred, without a wild population from which to draw new bloodlines."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/science/mexico-axolotl-biology.html

"The test’s panel of 47 genes includes the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Certain DNA changes in these genes increase the risk of hereditary forms of breast and ovarian cancer as well as several additional types of cancer."

https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2023/fda-blood-test-hereditary-cancer-risk

Pause to remind everyone that The Last Waltz is the greatest concert film ever made

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqDqzGG8ba0

"These crises are not about the planet going haywire. They are crises caused by failures to assign and enforce social responsibilities. And the wealthiest, most powerful and most capable societies that have ever existed on this planet are behaving as if they owe nothing for what they have gained at the expense of imperiling life on Earth."

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/opinion/rich-nations-climate-change-summit.html