Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

My week 1 contribution to the #DuBoisChallenge2024 to recreate hand-drawn graphics from W.E.B Du Bois' 1900 Worlds Fair exposition using modern tools.

💻R code here: https://github.com/makuhs/DuboisChallenge

#rstats #dataviz

A bit surprised to see this on a JHU Med facts page.

"Depression is ... a chemical imbalance in your brain that needs to be treated."
"Depression is caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals."

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/major-depression

While the evidence suggests that antidepressants are effective in some cases, it's much less clear that "rebalancing chemicals" is how they operate. From Principles in Neural Science:

"Although antidepressant drugs bind to and inhibit MAO, NET, or SERT with their first dose, several weeks of treatment are typically required to observe a lifting of depressive symptoms. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this delay. One is that a slow buildup of newly synthesized proteins alters the responsiveness of neurons in a manner that treats the depression. Another is that increases in the levels of synaptic transmission of serotonin or norepinephrine rapidly increase plasticity in different emotion-processing circuits and that the latency to therapeutic benefit reflects the time it takes for new experiences to alter synaptic weights. A third hypothesis is that antidepressant efficacy is mediated in part by enhancement of hippocampal neurogenesis. Narrowing down the possible therapeutic mechanisms is challenging because of the lack of good animal models of depression. Without an animal model, it is not possible to know which of the many observable molecular, cellular, and synaptic changes cause depression or underlie the therapeutic actions of effective antidepressants."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Neural_Science

CNN blocking the default configuration of Safari is a bold move.

"Overall, our work establishes that G4 structures are important features of transcriptional regulation that coordinate recruitment of key chromatin proteins and the transcriptional machinery through interactions with DNA secondary structure, rather than primary sequence."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2320240121

The "Ten simple rules" series over at PLOS Computational Biology presents good advice on designing your graphical abstracts. What's also very useful in this piece are all the resource links in the article.

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011789

"Physicists in Europe this week unveiled a €16bn bid to build the world’s costliest instrument dedicated purely to scientific inquiry. They plan a giant particle accelerator in a 91km ring beneath the Swiss-French borderlands, in which subatomic particles will collide almost at the speed of light. The project has crystallised a debate about whether so many billions should be ploughed into fundamental research or spent on more practical issues, such as pandemic readiness and climate change."

https://www.ft.com/content/4b3d1a11-3fb7-4516-9dbf-f6ed2bf79abf

This is mind-blowingly bad. Most up-to-date study on Atlantic Ocean currents system shows signals of collapse. This could happen in 2025-2095 with 95% probability. Land to grow wheat may drop by half. Winter temperatures in Northern Europe could drop between 10 and 30 °C. "Once we have a definite warning signal it will be too late to do anything about it, given the inertia in the system",says
@rahmstorf,one of the greatest experts in the field. 1/🧵
1/5

Anonymous. Acrobats of the Japanese Edo Period, 19th c.

#Painting

Support libraries of ALL sizes!

🏛️

Cartoon by David Ostow:

https://www.davidostow.com/

#libraries #books #Bookstodon #reading #cartoon

Drawings of hands and arms (1504- 1511) by Michelangelo Buonarroti. via @WikimediaCommonsBot

#art #paintings #drawing

This Week in Science (4 -10 Feb) 🧪

Breakthroughs in breast cancer treatment, a new type of multifocal lens, potentially earlier global warming than we thought, images of Jupiter's moon, Io, and plenty more!

--- Full articles 👇 ---
Cancer drug: https://bit.ly/3Oz7WYf
Io images: https://bit.ly/49kp6ki
1.5 degree threshold: https://bit.ly/3w7lFyV
Depression & temp: https://bit.ly/3w3Wtta
Contact lens: https://bit.ly/49rV9yS
Kinetic magnetism: https://bit.ly/3wayj0h

"Here, we compile a dataset of ~1.6 million profiles on Google Scholar to examine instances of citation fraud on the platform. (...) Intrigued by a citation-boosting service that we unravelled during our investigation, we contacted the service while undercover as a fictional author, and managed to purchase 50 citations."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04607