Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

"Like millions of other high-risk people who are service workers, older, chronically ill, disabled, or immunocompromised, I have done everything I can to remain as safe as possible. Due to neuromuscular disability and respiratory failure, my chances of surviving an infection are slim to none. With the latest JN.1 variant likely even more contagious – or better practiced at evading immune system defenses – than previous ones, I wonder if this is the surge when I will become infected, which is terrifying."

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/covid-isnt-going-anywhere-masking-up-could-save-my-life

'Impaired mitochondrial transport in the axon is another feature of aging and neurodegenerative diseases. Using Drosophila, we found that genetic depletion of axonal mitochondria causes dysregulation of translation and protein degradation.'

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.20.576435v1

Eric Arthur Blair, English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the name George Orwell died #OTD in 1950. He is known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), and Homage to Catalonia (1938) are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. via @wikipedia

#books #literature

#OnThisDay, 21 Jan 1648, Margaret Brent demands the right to sit on the Maryland council in her duel roles as a land-owner and Lord Baltimore's attorney. She was denied her place, and left saying she "protested against all proceedings in this present assembly unless she may be present and have vote."

#WomenInPolitics #WomenInHistory #Histodons #AmericanHistory

'Power analysis currently dominates sample size determination for experiments, particularly in grant and ethics applications. Yet, this focus could paradoxically result in suboptimal study design because publication biases towards studies with the largest effects can lead to the overestimation of effect sizes'

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002423

'When news of the study broke, Chuck Stone, a journalist and former Tuskegee Airman,responded with an impassioned editorial, writing, “It either takes a tough constitution or a rancid morality to sit quietly by and watch 200 men die without doing anything about it. I call it genocide. Have you got a better name for it?”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-newly-digitized-records-reveal-about-the-tuskegee-syphilis-study-180983568/

'Hilariously, Sunak insists anyone failing to get behind all this just wants to take us “back to square one”. Square one? Oh man – who wouldn’t take square one in a heartbeat? We’re somewhere near square minus 39 here, receding backwards through the squares until the place of utter darkness beyond all squares'

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/19/tories-squid-game-rwanda-policy

Don’t forget, if you’re a researcher in Mexico, the #eLifeAmbassadors at Encuesta Mexicana sobre salud mental would love for you to fill out their survey to learn more about the mental health of academics. https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e182f8d5/mental-health-in-mexico-a-survey-of-researchers-in-academia?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic

Back in the 90s, when I was in grad school, sensory decisions were analyzed with “signal detection theory”. Since then, many have found it more fruitful to use logistic classification: the observer weighs the factors, uses their sum to bias a coin, and flips the coin.

However, a student starting today would find the relevant information scattered around. To fix this, I wrote “Sensory decisions as logistic classification": https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.17.576029v1. If you have suggestions, please let me know!

It’s the nature of grant-funded research, but it still sucks — my current funding is ending, new funding is not a certainty, and I am therefore on the job market.

I’m interested in writing software to support science. My PhD-level expertise is in computational methods development for structural biology (X-ray crystallography and cryoEM), and I have some experience in several areas further afield (math, phys, CS, chem, bio). I have HPC (Slurm, SGE and LSF) and GPU experience, 11 years of python and bash, lots of scripting, automation, and parallel computing, and a smaller amount of a bunch of other stuff. Plus I’m a quick learner and love a challenge.

I’d love to stay in the Bay Area if I can, but will consider any other major cities, US or further, that are safe for trans people. Seattle and Boston are already on the radar.

Any recommendations, tips, or general advice is appreciated! #job #jobs #jobSearch

P.S. for the 2-3 months I’m likely to be between jobs, I would be thrilled to do a short gig assisting on a research vessel at sea — definitely shoot me any news of those!

More Israeli cultural destruction of Gaza

The IOF occupied Israa University for 70 days, turning it into a military base, centre for sniping civilians, & temporary detention centre for interrogating Palestinians.

They then "looted rare artefacts held by the university before demolishing the museum building to cover up the traces of their crime."

Israel has now destroyed all seven of Gaza's universities as part of its cultural genocide.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240118-israels-military-occupies-and-destroys-israa-university-in-gaza/

#USPol #Israel #Gaza

post-doc and research scientist I positions in HIV-1/SIV Immunology

tulane national primate research center

See the full job description on jobRxiv: https://jobrxiv.org/job/tulane-national-primate-research-center-27778-post-doc-and-research-scientist-i-positions-in-hiv-1-siv-immunology/?feed_id=70442

#hiv #immunology #virology #ScienceJob...
https://jobrxiv.org/job/tulane-national-primate-research-center-27778-post-doc-and-research-scientist-i-positions-in-hiv-1-siv-immunology/?feed_id=70442

Latest comic on pundits still making excuses for Trump

#fascism #authoritarianism #democracy #journalism #media #insurrection #election #politics #cartoon #comic

Botticelli’s 92 Surviving Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1481)

https://www.openculture.com/2014/06/botticellis-92-illustrations-of-dantes-divine-comedy.html

What explains the rich exchange of information here on Masto? It's really a great community.

It's a deafening silence over at Bluesky... And the other place is not for many people for obvious reasons.

#neuroscience