Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

"Picture a hot day in August 1877. Darwin, by now, is an old man, the leaping pole long since discarded. He has a long white beard that makes him look vaguely like an Old Testament prophet or, as one of his eulogists would write, ‘an ancient philosopher’. He has travelled some distance from home to attend the excavation of the ruins of a Roman villa discovered beneath a field in Surrey."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-insight-of-darwins-work-on-corals-worms-and-co-evolution

"There may be thousands of teachers of English literature who can successfully help students navigate their encounter with, say, King Lear, but hardly any of those teachers will be able to produce an extended critical analysis of the play that could come close to matching some of the magnificent readings offered by a handful of major critics in the past. Nonetheless, the current form of professionalism requires publication as an indicator of academic worth, and so teachers of English are driven down lesser paths: they provide ever more detailed contextual material relating to major works, or they undertake elaborate scholarly studies of minor works, or they write introductory guides for students."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n23/stefan-collini/exaggerated-ambitions

I like this intro jump from Mitchison to Sakaguchi (ref 21 to 22)

"Forty years ago, high-zone immune tolerance had been suggested to be mediated by suppressor T cells (21). The existence of suppressor T cells has long remained controversial and was not accepted until regulatory T cells (Tregs) were characterized more than 15 years later (22)."

#Immunology #Tolerance #Treg #Hemophilia

"Here, we analyzed natural variation in the production of 44 ascarosides across 95 wild ​Caenorhabditis elegans ​strains using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry (HPLC-HRMS).
(...)
Our findings demonstrate how natural genetic variation in core metabolic pathways can affect the production of social signals."
#Celegans

cc @Odedrechavi

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.23.517769v1?med=mas

"The altered CD8+ T cell metabolism did not affect the expansion potential, but enhanced the granzyme B and IFN-γ production capacity. In vivo, memory CD8+ T cells cultured under low oxygen pressure provided protection against bacterial rechallenge. Taken together, our study indicates that strategies of cellular immune therapy may benefit from reducing oxygen during culture to develop memory CD8+ T cells with superior effector functions."

#Immunology #Metabolism #Listeria

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/eji.202249918

On Ralph Ellison, photographer.

"Judging the photographs of an artist who is not primarily a photographer raises a prickly question. Are you assessing the photos on their own merits or examining them to better understand the artist’s main work? With an artist like Degas, his photos can be regarded as preparatory sketches for paintings. But what happens when the artist is not a painter but a writer?"

"Without modern mechanised transportation and confronted by enormous distances and varying weather by season, the ancient perception of distance had to have differed from our own. A long-distance journey in the Roman Empire, it has been posited, was anywhere beyond five days’ reach: quite the departure from our current ideal of anywhere not accessible within a few hours by car, plane or train."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-roman-empire-was-a-cosmopolitan-network-of-adventurers

"The endothelium is a vertebrate specific specialization of the circulatory system that enabled a critical new level of vasoregulation. The evolutionary origin of these endothelial cells is unclear. We hypothesized that Mir-126, an endothelial cell-specific microRNA may be informative."

#Preprint #Evolution #Development #endothelium

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.23.517662v1