Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

@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

India to mandate annual audit of pharma suppliers by drugmakers

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/pharmaceuticals/india-to-mandate-annual-audit-of-pharma-suppliers-by-drugmakers/articleshow/103815356.cms

#pharma #pharmaindustry #india

#Introduction
I was never on twitter, but I figured I'd try out Mastodon. I'm a chemist and chemical biologist by training and my work comes home a bit too often as an amateur baker. I've done bike commuting in worse climates with better infrastructure (Fort Collins, CO and PDX) and better climates with much worse infrastructure (Orange County, CA). Anti-car, pro-community.
#Science #Chemistry #ChemicalBiology #Baking #Biking #BikeCommuting

'A single intramuscular injection of Lenti-HPV-07 into mice bearing established HPV-induced tumors resulted in complete tumor eradication in 100% of the animals and was also effective against lung metastases.'
#TumorImmunology #Immunology #immunotherapy
Douguet et al @EmboMolMed

https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/emmm.202317723

'I was disturbed to learn how much worse McKinsey’s contributions became after I left. Reporting from ProPublica and The New York Times found that the firm helped increase arrests and speed up deportations. Some of its advice was so extreme that it made even ICE staff uncomfortable.'

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mckinsey-whistleblower-confessions/?ref=thebrowser.com

Factoid du jour:

"Significantly higher oxygen affinity of fetal blood is found almost universally among mammals. The only exception that has been noted to date is the domestic cat."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006497120630075#bib38

Doctors with Long Covid

~4% of UK healthcare workers
"These are doctors left at risk and let down during the pandemic, and they're still being let down with lack of support."
"We've been left to rot."
https://bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1983

'But despite the uniformity in size of any given cell type, cell sizes vary over an enormous seven orders of magnitude from red blood cells to the largest muscle fibers, comparable to the mass ratio of a shrew to a blue whale. This raises the question: What is the size distribution of cells over the entire human body?'

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2303077120

Alrighty folks, Skype a Scientist is doing alright. 1,130 classrooms signed up this fall. That's...ok!

Buuuut we have so many scientists twiddling their thumbs waiting to get matched.

SO!

Do the thing humans are built to do. Connect with people! Tell an educator you know we exist! Send them this picture! Send them a link! Send them both!

Folks can sign up to be matched on our website here https://www.skypeascientist.com/sign-up.html

Base editing makes it to clinical trials.

"Trial organizers announced on 5 September that the first participant had been treated using immune cells with four base-edited genes, equipping the cells to better target and destroy tumours. The hope is that the approach can tame trial participants’ difficult-to-treat form of leukaemia and serve as a gateway to more complex edits in the future."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02836-7?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=2e1b5e1000-briefing-dy-20230919&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-2e1b5e1000-44356001

'In 2021, slashings and stabbings were up more than 1,000 percent from 2011. In 2019, ProPublica found that McKinsey had “rigged” its violence-reduction numbers. (McKinsey denied this.) And in May 2022, New York City stopped using McKinsey’s system for classifying detainees. In the end, the city spent $27.5 million on McKinsey’s services, with precious little to show for it. McKinsey, on the other hand, collected its money and moved right along.'

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mckinsey-whistleblower-confessions/?ref=thebrowser.com

'Our observation supports the belief that protection is conferred on several autoimmune sequelae by completing a minimum of two doses of COVID-19 vaccination.'
#COVID #Covid19

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(23)00331-0/fulltext

Luckily, this problem is restricted to sports:

"The terms ‘data’ and ‘analytics’ are used interchangeably in sport, Smith points out, but in fact the gathering of data, fuelled by surging interest from sports teams and professional gamblers, has tended significantly to outpace the intelligent analytic use of that data."

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

"The IMP is looking for outstanding group leaders in these areas and is particularly interested in recruiting faculty members who will use artificial intelligence, machine learning and other computational approaches to address fundamental problems in biology"
#sciencejobs

https://www.imp.ac.at/career/open-positions/ref2310-group-leader-position

Mask by Madalena Parreira

https://madalenaparreira.com/set-design