Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

Journal formatting requirements are a huge expense and solvable problem.

New study: "By calculating average researcher salaries in the European Union and the USA, and the time spent on reformatting articles, we estimated that ~ 230 million USD were lost in 2021 alone due to reformatting articles. Should the current practice remain unchanged within this decade, we estimate ~ 2.5 billion USD could be lost between 2022 and 2030."
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-023-02882-y

Why's this PNAS paper from Anzelika Rubina et al so cool? It suggests that virus infected cells try to shed their extracellular matrices to remove "self signals" that can inhibit NK & T cells, & that #CMV intervenes to prevent this. #Virology #Science #Immunology 🦠 🧪 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2303155120

Great news with the FDA approval of Pfizer's RSV vaccine to protect newborns via maternal immunisation.

https://www.statnews.com/2023/08/21/pfizer-rsv-vaccine-abrysvo-newborns-fda-approval/

The RSV vaccine story has an incredible history, going back to failed trials in the 1960s - a failure that taught us a lot, including lessons that were applied to Covid vaccine design. I wrote about it earlier this year for Nature Medicine.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41591-023-00017-7

@cyrilpedia @PLOSBiology

Amusing that the piece includes optical microscopy methods unrelated to neural function, such as STED, PALM, expansion microscopy and CLARITY, but ignores electron microscopy methods key to the current boom in #connectomics. In particular, Denk and Horstmann 2004 for SBEM https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020329 , Knott et al. 2008 for first application of FIBSEM to neuronal tissue https://www.jneurosci.org/content/28/12/2959 , Schalek et al. 2011 for the ATUM serial section tape-collecting system https://academic.oup.com/mam/article-abstract/17/S2/966/6947317 , Xu et al. 2017 for e-FIBSEM and Graham et al. 2019 for GridTape TEM https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/657346.abstract

#neuroscience #microscopy #VolumeEM #vEM

An antibiotic from an uncultured bacterium binds to an immutable target | Cell

New antibiotic dropped.

"we report the discovery of clovibactin.... efficiently kills drug-resistant Gram-positive bacterial pathogens without detectable resistance" #microbiology #antibiotics

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)00853-X

Brian White tells us in his
#JEB100 ECR Spotlight that working as part of a large team during his PhD was enormously rewarding and how he is looking forward to investigating a bizarre clonal ant, Platythyrea punctata, during his postdoc at the University of Toulouse, France,

https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/226/16/jeb246531/325940

Born in 1861, Nettie Stevens earned a PhD in genetics. She went on to discover sex chromosomes in mealworms. Until then, it was believed that the mother or environment determined males & females.

But... Edmund Beecher Wilson published first. He may have seen Stevens' results & also didn't quite get everything right.

Stevens' work had the correct conclusion, but Wilson is most often credited with this discovery.
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12105830/nettie-stevens-genetics-gender-sex-chromosomes #HistoryRemix #history #science

🚨 New Paper (that I forgot to share on Mastodon)! "Testing methods of neural systems understanding" by me & David Bau is online now. We argue for an explicit test of the tools used to understand 'neural systems', i.e. brains and artificial neural networks. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389041723000906
#neuroscience #AI #MachineLearning

"How wealthy "super emitters" are disproportionately driving the climate crisis — while blaming you" by @MatthewRozsa for @Salon https://www.salon.com/2023/08/22/how-wealthy-super-emitters-are-disproportionately-driving-the-climate--while-blaming-you/

Republicans love RFK Jr. What does that tell us about their health platforms in 2024?

https://www.statnews.com/2023/08/22/rfk-jr-republicans-health-debate-2024/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon_organic

82% self-citation and grave misrepresentation in an ACS Nano Focus article

https://raphazlab.wordpress.com/2023/08/22/82-self-citation-and-grave-misrepresentation-in-an-acs-nano-focus-article/

A new European heatwave dubbed Nero has raised the temperature above 0C at all of Italy’s glaciers, hastening their disappearance, and set a record for high-altitude heat in the Swiss Alps.

A weather balloon launched from Payerne in Switzerland registered the “zero-degree line” — the altitude at which the temperature falls to zero — at 5,298m, beating a previous record of 5,184m set last year.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/alps-temperatures-rise-italy-heat-storm-2023-6rs950brd

#Italy #Switzerland #Alps #Heatwave

You'd think we knew a lot about the long-term sequelae of Long Covid from these 10 reports at 2 years.

Unfortunately, there's still much we don't know, as explained here https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-term-long-covid

@cyrilpedia @schoppik
Such an eloquent reminder of why so many of us originally showed up at this door.

‘If you really can't figure out which political party or which politician to vote for, just ask if they're on the side of libraries.

Are they voting to fund their libraries?
Are they voting to keep them free?

Then vote for those guys.
They're probably the good guys.

And by the same token, the book burners, the book banners, they're probably the bad guys.’

— @neilhimself

https://ilovelibraries.org/article/i-will-always-be-on-the-side-of-the-libraries-a-conversation-with-neil-gaiman/

@bookstodon #libraries #news #reading #politics #usa #books

Pretty even-handed assessment of the success and failure of the EU-funded Human Brain Project, which is ending. Probably the most impressive thing is that, given its troubled inception, it produced some meaningful, if rather ad hoc, brain science. #HBP #brain #simulation #neuroscience

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02600-x