Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Summer events June 11 - August 9, including many silent discos. Calendar.
Twenty five years ago, the rapper provoked outrage with his third LP, which shot him to superstardom, and was notorious for its offensive lyrics. Now it has become an even more divisive listen.
The study is the first to directly measure inflammation in long COVID
patients and bolsters theories that the pernicious brain fog and fatigue
are not just mental issues, but linked to a biological cause that
can be objectively assessed, the authors say.
...
The authors found that those with the symptoms had lower serum levels
of nerve growth factor, or NGF, a protein that plays a key role in
neuron development and maintenance of the brain's plasticity. NGF is
associated with high-level cognitive functions that require memory
and mental flexibility.
Rejecting some safety measures even though they saved lives was probably
the right call. Still, I didn't want to win this hard. People are saying
things like "COVID taught us that scientists will always exaggerate how
bad things will be." I think if we'd known at the beginning of COVID that
it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that
whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being
proposed, were - if anything - understated.
...
We fight over lockdowns, lab leaks, long COVID, and vaccines,
all of which have people arguing both sides, and all of which let us
feel superior to our stupid and evil enemies. But there's no "other side"
to 1.2 million deaths. Thinking about them doesn't let you feel superior
to anyone - just really sad.
The Simons Collaboration on Plasticity and the Aging Brain (SCPAB) aims to discover mechanisms of resilience and functional maintenance in the aging brain, and to establish a baseline for plasticity-related changes with age across many model systems. The SCPAB's focus on the basic biology of cognitive aging is foundational to future translational approaches aimed at minimizing cognitive decline and extending healthy lifespan.
The genetic variant is one of a handful that have been identified in people who don't need a lot of sleep.
Most people need around eight hours of sleep each night to function, but a rare genetic condition allows some to thrive on as little as three hours. $
Not soulmates. Not clones. People who see the world a little crooked compared to me. People who confuse me just enough to keep me alert. I want friends who force translation. Friends who make me earn the connection. That's the good stuff. That's the fertile ground for growth. ... quotes ... There's a cost to optimizing your social life. You get comfort. You lose the surprise. Surrounding yourself with "perfect people" might feel like intellectual spa water, but you miss the tension that carves out new parts of yourself. You lose the joy of stumbling across an unexpected truth. You trade expansion for reinforcement. That trade comes with a hidden receipt.
The past 60 years have seen huge advances in many of the scientific, technological and managerial factors that should tend to raise the efficiency of commercial drug research and development (R&D). Yet the number of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent on R&D has halved roughly every 9 years since 1950, falling around 80-fold in inflation-adjusted terms. There have been many proposed solutions to the problem of declining R&D efficiency. However, their apparent lack of impact so far and the contrast between improving inputs and declining output in terms of the number of new drugs make it sensible to ask whether the underlying problems have been correctly diagnosed. Here, we discuss four factors that we consider to be primary causes, which we call the 'better than the Beatles' problem; the 'cautious regulator' problem; the 'throw money at it' tendency; and the 'basic research-brute force' bias. Our aim is to provoke a more systematic analysis of the causes of the decline in R&D efficiency.
Beaks have grown longer and larger, and ranges have expanded to follow the feeders
Including government spending in GDP distorts our understanding of value: spending more on tanks and bullets doesn't mean civilians are getting wealthier during wartime.
No one at HHS should use this study as a basis for doing anything about some supposed link between fluoride and IQ.