Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

"I fairly often encounter people who believe that Europe suffers from mass unemployment and has lagged far behind the United States technologically. But this view is decades out of date. At this point adults in their prime working years are actually somewhat more likely to be employed in major European nations than in America. Europeans also know all about information technology, and productivity — gross domestic product per hour worked — is virtually the same in Europe as it is here."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/opinion/europe-economy-problems-policy.html

'The technology may transform agriculture in LMICs beyond the genomic level: local farmers seem happy, Runo told the journal Nature, to source seeds from regional researchers rather than multinationals. The global spread of gene-editing technology may end up dispersing the commercial power currently concentrated in corporate labs — and raises the prospect of African-grown gene-edited crops being sold beyond the continent.'

https://www.ft.com/content/10a7cd0c-78f0-409a-9808-a71a11e7b46a

'Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston announced Tuesday that it had developed an experimental drug that relieves moderate to severe pain, blocking pain signals before they can get to the brain. It works only on peripheral nerves — those outside the brain and the spinal cord — making it unlike opioids. Vertex says its new drug is expected to avoid opioids’ potential to lead to addiction.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/health/vertex-pain-medicine-non-opioid.html

'Embora bom e barato seja um objetivo apelativo, não é realista querermos investigação científica de qualidade e, ao mesmo tempo, não investirmos de forma consequente nesse desígnio. Seguramente que os recursos destinados ao SNCT têm necessariamente de ser adequados à realidade do país, mas se este investimento for demasiado curto, imprevisível e mal estruturado dificilmente pode originar os retornos que queremos.'

https://www.publico.pt/2024/01/31/ciencia/opiniao/omeletes-ovos-ciencia-portugal-2077903

If you're in Berlin:

"The show, “Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion,” which runs through April 28, is a small but dense and deeply imaginative reconsidering of her life and work. The museum’s director, Klaus Biesenbach (formerly of MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) has curated the show with the artist Kandis Williams, the scholar Terri Francis and the curator Mona Horncastle: The result emphasizes the importance of multiple interpretations."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/arts/design/josephine-baker-exhibition-berlin.html

'The Duchess was a vanishingly rare creature: a self-taught natural philosopher writing in the decades when natural philosophy was developing into what we now call science, a professionalized field that would embrace the new disciplines of astronomy, geography, mathematics, and physics. She also belonged to an emergent species: the female intellectual.'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/pure-wit-the-revolutionary-life-of-margaret-cavendish-francesca-peacock-book-review

'There are lots of lurid tales about the Wa, who once made a practice of beheading intruders. But the book’s bigger story involves America’s hapless war on drugs. Winn spent several years interviewing Wa citizens, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency lifers and CIA spies. He learned that Wa-produced heroin found its way to American soldiers in Vietnam, and in the years that followed, CIA-linked opportunists helped the Wa become a force in Southeast Asia’s meth trade.'

https://crimereads.com/patrick-winn-narcotopia-wa-state/

'The Shanahan Foundation Fellowship at the Interface of Data and Neuroscience was created to provide freedom and flexibility to promising young scientists from diverse fields, as they work alongside neuroscientists at the Allen Institute and University of Washington. The three-year fellowship provides Ph.D.s from data science, computer science, physics, mathematics, and many other fields the mentorship and support to pursue their own research interests with our data.'

https://alleninstitute.org/careers/internships-and-postbac/shanahan-foundation-fellowship/

'The present study illustrates great potentials of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) cells targeting B cell maturation antigen in treating anti-signal recognition particle myopathy, with sustained depletion of autoantibodies and therapeutic efficacies beyond 18 mo.'
#immunotherapy #CARTcells

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2315990121