AbouBenAdhem

Wikipedia’s current events portal covers current events and conflicts with links to plenty of background info.

That article reports that a drug targeted at clearing amyloid proteins didn’t suffice to restore the brain’s waste-clearing functionality; this article reports that a drug targeted at repairing the blood-brain barrier does restore waste-clearing functionality (including amyloid proteins). So they’re not completely contradictory.

It looks like the research was done by academic and government-sponsored institutions in Spain and China, so hopefully it won’t just become a profit-making tool for the biotech industry.

Montreal is just a subspace of Montcomplex.

For the new study, she and 16 graduate and undergraduate students gathered nearly 20,000 photographs of raccoons across the contiguous U.S. from the community science platform iNaturalist. The team found that raccoons in urban environments had a snout that was 3.5 percent shorter than that of their rural cousins.

Or maybe people in cities take more photos of “cuter” animals?

Probably the same way Putin feels about Dobby.

How will we pay each other for our thoughts?

Sign language isn’t just another way of expressing English that can be picked up like learning a different alphabet or a secret code. It’s a full, independent language with its own complete vocabulary, syntax, inflectional system, etc. that takes as long to learn as any other natural language.

It would be great if more people knew it for the sake of communicating with the deaf, but as a means of foiling surveillance, there are many other approaches that would be more effective for less time investment. (Hell, you might as well learn a really obscure spoken language that would be less likely to be recognized or deciphered than ASL.)

Before trains, sea travel was the standard way to travel long distances even if a land route was available. Sea voyages came to represent any destination that was far enough away that communities wouldn’t be in regular contact.

I had a really good pizza topped with stinging nettle once. (It doesn’t sting after cooking.)

Assuming that

• human phenotypic traits that correlate more closely with mouse traits have more-predictable outcomes with mouse-tested medicine, and

• more-predictable medical outcomes correlate with higher survival and reproductive rates,

can’t you plug that straight into the Price equation?

So 58% of districts are at or above median income, but only 24% of districts have more drivers than riders?

Could it be that both variables are closely correlated, and the latter is just sampling closer to the tail end of the distribution?