Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

Social media, the prequel:

“Anonymity creates disinhibition,” Emily Cockayne writes in “Penning Poison,” a lively survey of the practice of sending anonymous letters “with the aim, or apparent aim, of unsettling the person they were sent to.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/30/books/review/penning-poison-emily-cockayne.html

'Perhaps his most famous photograph, Peter Magubane’s 1956 image of a Black maid tending to a white girl captured the racial divide in apartheid South Africa.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/01/world/africa/peter-magubane-dead.html

'The crudest form of that is "Depression is caused by lack of serotonin", which makes it sound like a vitamin deficiency that can be cured by dietary supplements. A more realistic version is "Depression is a disorder of serotonin-based signaling in particular brain regions", but that still leaves an awful lot of hand-waving to be done.'

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/serotonin-hypothesis-lives

"More than a billion dollars worth of Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral drugs procured in Europe have been wasted, according to health data, as tight controls over who can receive the medication left millions of doses unused before their expiry date."

https://www.ft.com/content/7ddd24bb-2394-4a63-96f0-464a3ccf6df6

"Attenborough and the Giant Sea Monster is a programme about happiness. I mean, ostensibly it’s a programme about the discovery, extraction and examination of the intact (in 150m year old fossil terms) skull of a pliosaur from a cliff face along the Jurassic coast. But really, it’s a study in joy."

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/jan/01/attenborough-and-the-giant-sea-monster-review-quite-possibly-the-most-deeply-joyous-show-ever-made

'We hypothesized that the disruption of Adar in beta cells in vivo may model early events in the pathogenesis of T1D and allow dissection of mechanisms by which non-viral, endogenous dsRNA can trigger islet inflammation and contribute to beta cell dysfunction or loss prior to autoimmunity'

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(23)00443-6

'As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.'

https://johnsnowproject.org/insights/endemic-sars-cov-2-and-the-death-of-public-health/

"In mammals, the heritable priming of cells by IFN is shown to last for several weeks through multiple cell division cycles, in the absence of ongoing transcription5. Despite its strong epigenetic nature, the molecular basis for what carries this memory has remained elusive."
#Preprint #Immunology #epigenetics

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.12.16.571619v1

'Human bones are fragile things, but some are more fragile than others. The larger, denser bones of adults tend to be better preserved in the archaeological record than those of children, whose bones are more like a bird’s than an elephant’s: they are smaller, more porous and less mineralised, lack tensile and compressive strength, and may not be fully fused to their shafts (in the case of long bones). These skeletons are more vulnerable to both sedimentary pressure (when buried underground) and erosion from acidic soil and biodegrading organic matter. This is one of the main reasons why telling the stories of prehistoric children has been so difficult.'

https://aeon.co/essays/what-was-it-like-to-grow-up-in-the-last-ice-age

' With stylish and clever animation, this video from TED-Ed takes a brief dive into animal vision, detailing the wide range of pupil types in the eyes of the animal kingdom, as well as the fascinating ways they can shape perception and indicate a creature’s place in their ecosystem.'

https://aeon.co/videos/to-understand-how-an-animal-sees-the-world-start-with-the-shape-of-its-pupils

"Na década que passou sobre a crise da zona euro, o máximo que a União Europeia conseguiu, durante a pandemia, foi evitar repetir os mesmos erros. Mas não há praticamente nenhuma área nova em que a Europa lidere."

@ruitavares
https://leitor.expresso.pt/semanario/semanario2670/html/primeiro-caderno/opiniao/para-que-serve-a-europa-