Science

A US military veteran who received the world's first whole-eye transplant has made significant progress a year later and has been able to resume his normal life, researchers say.

Aaron James, 46, also received a rare partial-face transplant. He lost most of his face in an accident in 2021 while working as a high-voltage utility lineman.

His donor eye has so far maintained normal pressure and blood flow and retained its size, unlike donor eyes in animals that often shrink after transplants, researchers at NYU Langone Health said in a new study.

Mr James has not regained sight in that eye, but researchers are hopeful he might eventually be able to see out of it again.

[...]

Last May, he underwent 21 hours of surgery that involved more than 140 healthcare professionals.

The donated face and eye came from a single male donor in his 30s. During the surgery, doctors injected adult stem cells from the donor's bone marrow into the optic nerve to encourage its repair.

[...]

The 46-year-old military veteran is only the 19th person in the US to undergo a face transplant and the first person in the world to receive an entire human eye transplant.

China’s influence increasingly threatens the academic world in Brazil. In recent years, the country’s main higher education institutions, such as the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), have established partnerships with Chinese institutions at an ever-increasing rate. Experts warn of the risks of this growing soft power that Beijing uses to promote the Chinese model.

“China’s influence on Brazilian universities has never been greater,” journalist Gabriel de Arruda Castro, editor of Brazilian daily Gazeta do Povo, told Diálogo. “Obviously, this opens the door to the presence of representatives of an authoritarian regime, which is not the case when Brazil establishes academic partnerships with countries like Germany or France.”

[...]

Although agreements between Brazilian and foreign universities are common, Castro points out that these countries respect the independence and academic autonomy of their teaching centers. Chinese universities, on the other hand, are subject to the strict control of the Beijing government. “From the point of view of the Chinese regime, it doesn’t make any sense to fund any project that might be critical of the Chinese model,” says Castro.

[...]

Part of the Chinese influence in Brazilian universities is exerted through partnerships with the Confucius Institute, an entity linked to the Chinese Ministry of Education, whose official mission is to spread Chinese culture and language.

[...]

On August 13, 2020, the U.S. State Department designated the Confucius Institute as a “foreign mission” of China, noting that it promotes “Beijing’s global propaganda and malign influence campaign” in classrooms.

[...]

In 2023, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) called the Confucius Institute a tool of political influence. “China’s activities and forms of cooperation threaten to undermine academic freedom in the field of education and research,” the BfV said in its annual report, German news agency Deutsche Welle reported.

[...]

“Obviously, the official view of the regime is not challenged in these cases. The promotion of Chinese culture is therefore mixed with the promotion of the Chinese regime,” says Castro. “In my research, I didn’t find any perspective critical of China.”

[...]

He believes there may be a risk of espionage by China in these initiatives. “Perhaps because it is not perceived as a direct adversary of China, Brazil has a little less of this aspect [of espionage]. But perhaps there is ‘soft espionage’ here: knowing where Brazil stands in certain areas of knowledge, in order to later use this as a strategic advantage in a possible competition in some area or to offer solutions,” he says.

“This is more or less what it [China] does in Africa by other means. In other words: meeting local demand pragmatically at first, but making these countries increasingly dependent on China,” Castro added.

[...]

Edit: The paper is total nonsense. Sorry for wasting people's time.

https://youtu.be/Yk_NjIPaZk4?si=dasxM2Py-s654djW

Here is the study: http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344

A deadly pandemic has decimated bats in North America — and that has ultimately had harmful effects on humans, including higher rates of infant mortality, according to a new study.

The research is part of growing evidence that humans rely on the animal and plant species around them, and are harmed when those species decline or go extinct.

White-nose syndrome is a deadly fungal disease that kills an average of 70 per cent of bats it infects, and has been spreading to new areas since it was first reported on the continent in 2006.

[...]

Ecologists know that bats play a crucial role in eating up and controlling insect pests.

Because of that, Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, decided to look at what happened when white-nose syndrome spread into new counties in the eastern U.S., decimating bat populations.

He found that farmers responded to the resulting insect outbreaks by increasing their pesticide use 31 per cent. Pesticides are toxic, and often associated with human health impacts such as increases in infant deaths.

Frank found that infant mortality went up eight per cent after the arrival of white-nose syndrome in a county, according to his study published today in the journal Science.

[...]

The study shows how interactions between species such as bats and insects stabilize the ecosystems that other species rely on, including humans, who can be harmed when those species disappear, Frank said.

"These ecosystems are very complex systems with many interactions between species, and we do not fully understand what to expect or what will happen when we allow one species to fall below some viable population level or to go extinct," said Frank, who had previously linked the deaths of half a million people in India to the collapse of local vulture populations due to accidental poisoning.

Archived version

You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him.

Poldermans was a prolific medical researcher at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, where he analyzed the standards of care for cardiac events after surgery, publishing a series of definitive studies from 1999 until the early 2010s.

One crucial question he studied: Should you give patients a beta blocker, which lowers blood pressure, before certain surgeries? Poldermans’s research said yes. European medical guidelines (and to a lesser extent US guidelines) recommended it accordingly.

The problem? Poldermans’s data was reportedly fake. A 2012 inquiry by Erasmus Medical School, his employer, into allegations of misconduct found that he “used patient data without written permission, used fictitious data and… submitted to conferences [reports] which included knowingly unreliable data.” Poldermans admitted the allegations and apologized, while stressing that the use of fictitious data was accidental.

A link to the preprint. I'll do the actual math on how many transitions/second it works out to later and edit.

I've had an eye on this for like a decade, so I'm hyped.

Edit:

So, because of the structure of the crystal the atoms are in, it actually has 5 resonances. These were expected, although a couple other weak ones showed up as well. They give a what I understand to be a projected undisturbed value of 2,020,407,384,335.(2) KHz.

Then a possible redefinition of the second could be "The time taken for 2,020,407,384,335,200 peaks of the radiation produced by the first nuclear isomerism of an unperturbed ^229^Th nucleus to pass a fixed point in space."

see also Climate Policy Explorer

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2376675

Archived link

The Russian government’s spending on research will drop by 25% over the next 2 years under a plan finalized earlier this month by the nation’s Federal Assembly. The budget plan, which sets federal spending levels for 2025 and 2026, marks the latest blow to a Russian scientific community already struggling with international sanctions linked to the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the emigration of talent to other nations.

Funding for applied research, which receives roughly two-thirds of Russia’s federal research spending, will be hit hardest by the cuts, dropping from 458 billion rubles ($4.9 billion) this year to 362 billion in 2025 and 260 billion in 2026, according to a recent analysis by the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge of the Russian Higher School of Economics. Spending on basic research will remain essentially flat, falling slightly from 261 billion rubles to 235 billion in 2025, then increasing to 276 billion in 2026.

[...]

The cuts will likely make it harder for many Russian scientists to remain globally competitive, says geneticist Vladimir Volobuev, head of Russia’s National Center for Genetics Research. But he and some other researchers, as well as the government, hope to replace some of the lost funding with money from industry and other private sources.

[...]

Along with the budget cuts, government officials have hinted that they plan to keep a closer eye on how researchers are spending government funds. Earlier this year, for example, Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov said the government wants to see “results, not publication reports” from research laboratories. Some scientists fear oversight could translate into less freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research. “Scientists cannot achieve success without free creativity, as it is impossible to plan a discovery,” neurophysiologist Olga Martynova, head of a neuroscience laboratory operated by the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Novye Izvestia, a Russian newspaper.

The new budget plan is likely to make it even more difficult for Russian President Vladimir Putin to achieve ambitious science goals he announced shortly after being reelected in March. He vowed to put Russia among the “the top 10 of global leaders by the volume of scientific research and development over 6 years” and to increase research spending to 2% of gross domestic product, up from 0.4% of GDP in 2023.

This was a surprising area to see novel approaches being tried, though it doesn't seem to remotely solve the problems around cocoa beans.

Fever Feels Horrible, but is Actually Awesome!

I understand the purpose of appeals and that we rarely hear about things that are not appealed. But I don't think either the FDA or court system are functioning when people and companies go in front of a decision-making body knowing they're going to lose and viewing the ruling as the real starting gun.