Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

I’ve been asked to write two promotion evaluation letters for people in US universities recently. I’m aware that we Europeans have a different (more muted) letter writing tone. Any advice on how I should approach these letters? Do I need to ham it up or risk scuttling the applicants? Thx

#pedscardiology @NEJM Infants undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass often receive perioperative glucocorticoids to limit systemic inflammation, but evidence for this practice is lacking. New research findings are summarized in a short video. nej.md/3EUOP5
https://www.nejm.org/do/10.1056/NEJMdo006817/full/

Beautiful neuroanatomical study:
RT Jonathan Whitlock https://twitter.com/jonrwhitlock/status/1601182066460463105?s=46&t=QxgPjtBlHD2Sq_lPfym69g
⬇️
To anyone with eyes: ever wonder how visual signals get to the motor system? We did. So we mapped the anatomy in mouse cortex and made it into sweet eye candy: the great work of @KarolineHovde @Idavrautio Andrea-Marie Hegstad, with Menno Witter!
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

"Twitter has proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians’ failure to cut pollution. But many are now fleeing Twitter due to a surge in climate misinformation, spam and even threats that have upended their relationship with the platform."
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/12/09/news/climatescam-denialism-twitter-scientists-worried

Japanese dengue vaccine becomes second approved by EU

Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda said the European Union had given the green light to its dengue fever vaccine, making it the second jab preventing the disease to be approved by the bloc.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-12-japanese-dengue-vaccine-eu.html

‘In the early 2010s, new social media sites like Facebook and Twitter were tools for emerging protest movements; now, they increasingly act as a substitute for them.’

@michael_chessum@twitter.com on the solution to digitally-enabled inaction:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/december/disruptive-capacity

New structural insights into DNMT1 function! This protein remains full of surprises. From @KyoheiArita@twitter.com's group, with help from our neighbors @Kosuke_Y_1989@twitter.com and @DefossezPierre@twitter.com. Congrats all! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34779-4

#Advent Day9: Now we jump to the subgenus #Drosophila (confusing, I know) and meet the root of the taxonomic mess: D. funebris. This species cannot be renamed without an act of god (or the ICZN https://doi.org/10.21805/bzn.v67i1.a14 ), so we must either rename melanogaster or live with paraphyly https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/185/2/703/6096929 . When not upsetting taxonomists, Dfun is a human commensal that likes farmyard manure and nearly made it as a lab model https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.1400510206 , but hasn’t done much in the lab since the 1980s

Having read this book by @drcpennington already, I can really not recommend it enough. From all texts on open science and the replication crisis, this is the one I would give to my students. A comprehensive, *optimistic*, and inspirational overview of the topic!

https://mastodon.social/@drcpennington/109483173597517330

Exciting new paper on dopamine (DA).

Bellman: created an equation describing how to make choices to maximize value. But it required infinite memory.

Sutton & Barto: Came up with a new way, by calculating the difference between what happened & what you expect. This 'reward prediction error' was mapped to DA in the brain.

New paper: not quite. Instead, the brain computes whether a stimulus precedes reward beyond that expected by chance (causality).

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq6740

#introduction
Hello everyone!
I’m an assistant prof at Virginia Tech studying viral and microbial diversity. Lately my group has been focusing on giant viruses, but we are also interested in other protist viruses, and the role of viral endogenization in host genome evolution.
#GiantViruses #ViralDiversity #TreeOfLife #Protists #Microbiology #Bioinformatics #Evolution #Virology #Genomics
Most recently we found endogenous giant viruses in the green alga C. reinhardtii!
https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/8/2/veac102/6767315?searchresult=1

The @nytimes in no small part helped to normalize the pandemic--remember #Omicron is milder--while making cases against mitigation as doing more harm than good (causing everything from teen suicides to car crashes).

Now this piece by David Wallace-Wells just says the truth out loud. We're see massive death still and it's not just a "pandemic of the unvaccinated." It's our grandparents who are dying. We are sacrificing our elders for our thirst for normal.

#COVID

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/opinion/environment/covid-19-pandemic-elderly-deaths.html