Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

MPI postdoc survey:

"Approximately 27% of all postdocs are parents, and almost 40% of German postdocs are parents. We observe that female postdocs with caring responsibilities stand out from other subgroup analyses. We find that mothers are most unhappy, depressed, anxious, stressed by care work and their work as postdocs. They report more personal conflicts (e.g., with their partner) and are most socially isolated."

https://www.postdocnet.mpg.de/134932/survey-2022

"Françoise Gilot, an accomplished painter whose art was eclipsed by her long and stormy romantic relationship with a much older Pablo Picasso, and who alone among his many mistresses walked out on him, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Manhattan. She was 101."
(photo credit Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/arts/francoise-gilot-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Obituaries

"Compared with other bacteria, #Salmonella, a facultative anaerobe, has higher motility and accumulation in tumors and a special advantage in targeting tumor quiescence, possibly via the chemoreceptors of Salmonella"

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(23)00189-1

SCOTUS rules agains Amgen, 9-0. An important decision because Amgen wanted to enforce a patent on any monoclonal against a particular target (the PCSK9 receptor), which would have set a terrible precedent.

"This case does not involve those antibody-specific patents. Instead, it involves much broader patents Amgen obtained, which cover every antibody that binds to the same sweet spot and works the same way, a class that includes potentially millions of antibodies."

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/05/supreme-court-rules-invalid-amgens-patent-on-cholesterol-lowering-drug/

'Those careers are now few and far between. About 60% of life scientists who earned a Ph.D. in 1963-64 secured tenure within 10 years. But by 2021, only 3.5% of biology Ph.D.s working at universities had been tenured within a decade of graduating, according to a National Science Foundation survey.'

https://www.statnews.com/2023/06/06/postdoc-system-teetering-imperiling-life-sciences-diversity/

'Here, we summarize progress and challenges in the development of broad-spectrum antivirals that target either viral elements (proteins, genome structures, and lipid envelopes) or cellular proviral factors co-opted by multiple viruses via newly discovered compounds or repurposing of approved drugs.'
#Virology #Antiviral #drugdevelopment

https://www.jci.org/articles/view/170236

'What’s more surprising is that, of all the online search experiments that took place during this period – including commercially focused search systems like Lockheed’s Dialog, which has since become an enterprise product – SUPARS mimicked contemporary web search more closely than any other, prefiguring several primary features of web-search protocols we rely on more than 50 years later.'

https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search

'Decreased access to biomarker testing can result in delays of appropriate treatment, poor outcomes related to use of ineffective treatment and lack of access to clinical trials with biomarker-based entry criteria. Thus, the opportunities to receive benefits of precision oncology are most realized in high-income, urban and academic settings.'

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-023-00568-1

"Similarly, reproductive aging and women’s health are finally on the scene: several initiatives have recognized not only that reproductive cessation is the earliest aging phenotype, but also that menopause itself (which is about 15 years later than reproductive aging, so not interchangeable) can cause aging, and that mid-life health may ultimately determine future longevity. This, plus the acknowledgment that female animals are important to study in all aspects of biology, may lead to the end of ignoring 50% of the aging population’s needs."

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002132

Tips on how to write an article title, courtesy of Public Library of Science (PLOS ). The second "don't" is a plea to resist temptation.

Heed it.

https://plos.org/resource/how-to-write-a-great-title/

'As a neuroscientist who works with flies, Tuthill knew that insect nervous systems shut down when the creatures get too cold, so even species that can tolerate subzero temperatures tend to do so by entering a dormant state. And yet here were insects, running about in apparent defiance of both biology and physics. “It immediately blew my mind,” Tuthill told me. That’s how he came to study snow flies.'

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/05/snow-flies-insects-glaciers/674240/

"As demonstrated in The US and the Holocaust—a six-hour documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein that aired on PBS last fall and is now available for streaming—antisemitic, xenophobic, and racist groups in American society had long used their political power to keep out immigrants perceived as undesirable, including Jews."

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/06/22/the-millions-we-failed-to-save-us-and-the-holocaust-pbs/

"Typing and retyping as if you know where you're going is a version of what therapists tell you to do when they suggest that you try changing from the outside in - that if you can't master the total commitment to whatever change you want to make, you can at least do all the extraneous things connected with it, which make it that much easier to get there."
- Nora Ephron.

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/09/books/revision-and-life-take-it-from-the-top-again.html

'This is where an editor steps in, a reader invested in the text but also distant enough from it to see it analytically and manipulatively. To prove this point: my best editors have been those who saw in my drafts something I had not seen myself, who pointed out to me the hidden (from me, the author) lacunae where the text could grow—or redundancies that had to be cut altogether.'

https://lithub.com/revise-revise-anna-badkhen-on-the-joys-of-revision/