As you may know, William and I have been working on a project for a while - 155 days, or 42% of a year, to be exact. Welp, today's the day we launch - Facebook officially!
This is Project Credo, a tool for curating, commenting on, and sharing lists of research papers.
If you've ever done research on how coffee affects your body, interventions or preventative measures for cancers, or how to build muscle mass most effectively, you're not alone...and now you can work together to research the questions that vex humanity.
It is a humble first step on what is hopefully a path towards greater scientific consensus among both academics and laypersons.
In its current form, you can create lists, add papers to those lists, and comment on them with whoever you like. Voting helps sort lists and comments - you should vote on items that you think other users should see first.
Lastly, if you like what you see, there are a few ways you can support us:
At our Patreon page, which is our only source of funding at the moment (currently: $0/month 😭): https://www.patreon.com/projectcredo
Through code reviews or contributions (we have a lot of work to do): https://github.com/projectcredo/projectcredo
Join us on Gitter.im to chat: https://gitter.im/projectcredo/Lobby
And any contributions to the site add to our combined knowledge, so please create and contribute to lists on the site.
I'm excited and kind of scared to post this - we'll do our best, but please note that this site should be considered extremely beta! A tutorial video is in the works and will be released shortly. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to ask myself or William.
Last night, as the temperature in Standing Rock plunged below 30 degrees, hundreds were blasted with water cannons.
"Supply note: With at least two hundred injured last night, Standing Rock medics are in critical need of the following items:
Milk of Magnesia Wool socks Wool blankets Space blankets Hand warmers Trauma kits (portable) Suturing kits Straw bales
Supplies can be shipped to: Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council PO Box 1251, Bismark ND, 58502 or if you are shipping via UPS or Fed Ex, please use the address: 220 E. Rosser Ave. 1251, Bismark, ND, 58502
...
If you cannot travel to Standing Rock, or support or organize an action where you live, consider contacting one of these Sheriffs and police departments that have loaned out the officers who are abusing Native peoples in Standing Rock. Jam their phone lines and tell them to bring their people home. If your community is on this list, actively organize to recall the deployment.
Michigan City Police Department Michigan City, IN (219) 874-3221
North Dakota Highway Patrol Offices across North Dakota (701) 328-2455
Hammond Police Department Hammond, IN 219-852-2900
Munster Police Department Munster, IN (219) 836-6600
Griffith Police Department Griffith, IN (219) 924-7503
Anoka County Sheriff's Office Andover, MN (763) 323-5000
Washington County Sheriff's Office Stillwater, MN 651-430-6000
Marathon County Sheriff's Department Wausau, WI (715) 261-1200
La Porte County Sheriff's Office La Porte, IN (219) 326-7700
Newton County Sheriff's Office Kentland, IN 219-474-3331
South Dakota Highway Patrol Pierre, SD 605-773-3105
Jasper County Sheriff Rensselaer, Indiana 219-866-7344
Lake County Sheriff Sheriff's Department Crown Point, IN 219-755-3333
Laramie County Sheriff's Department Cheyenne, WY 307-633-4700
Wyoming Highway Patrol Cheyenne, WY 307-777-4301
Ohio State Highway Patrol Columbus, Ohio 614-466-2660
Nebraska Emergency Management Agency Lincoln, NE (402) 471-7421"
Over the past several decades, China has transformed from a largely poor and rural farming nation to a world power with massive economic heft and a rapidly growing urban middle class. While access to the global economy offers the emerging generation of young adults unprecedented access to material goods and a wide range of lifestyles, consumerism has come at a cost for some Chinese millennials who are seeking something beyond money. With a contemplative style that evokes its subject, the Beijing-based filmmaker Ellen Xu’s Summoning the Recluse introduces several young Chinese urbanites who are embarking on spiritual quests. Through a hermit’s lifestyle that draws on Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian traditions – either for a brief respite from modern life, or for the long haul – they focus on studying religion, meditation and connecting with nature, seeking meaning in what they describe as an ‘ancient way of life’.
Hundreds of Jewish scholars of the holocaust have signed a statement condemning the “hateful and discriminatory language and threats” against minorities during Donald Trump's presidential campaign, and called on Americans to "resist attempts to place vulnerable groups in the crosshairs of nativist racisms."
After months of speculation and leaked documents , NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published . And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work.
Been thinking about doing this for a while. Also, it didn't exactly work:
"...tweets from black bots with few followers (the type of bots that I thought would have a minimal effect) actually caused an increase in the use of racist slurs."
Scientists from the National Institutes of Health have identified an antibody from an HIV-infected person that potently neutralized 98 percent of HIV isolates tested, including 16 of 20 strains resistant to other antibodies of the same class. The remarkable breadth and potency of this antibody, named N6, make it an attractive candidate for further development to potentially treat or prevent HIV infection, say the researchers.
I read through the original paper (https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2016.10.027, paywalled).
In essence, an antibody called N6 was extracted from an HIV patient. The patient is a long-term nonprogressor who has had HIV for 21 years, but an exceptionally low viral load of <1000/mL and normal CD4 T-cell count. This indicates that his immune system has kept the virus at bay for all these years with essentially no ill effect. HIV viruses have a surface protein complex called Env, which binds to the CD4 surface protein to gain entry to T-cells (part of the immune system). HIV cannot transmit without this protein complex, and so certain parts of the complex are very well conserved across different HIV strains.
N6 binds to this part of Env, in some sense "simulating" CD4. However, because it's just an antibody and not a cell, once Env is bound it cannot infect anything. This is what makes N6 a neutralizing antibody.
The thing that makes N6 special (more potent and more broadly applicable) is that it is able to avoid the parts of Env that HIV doesn't need for replication. Imagine Env as a wrench. The head of the wrench is a specific hex shape to mate with CD4 and can't change. Antibodies can grab on to the wrench handle to prevent infection. But the handle can change, and HIV regularly mutates this part to avoid being caught - adding side branches, changing the shape, and so forth. N6 is cleverly arranged so that it can strongly bind to the wrench without grabbing the handle too strongly - in other words, it tightly binds the head of the wrench like a person wrapping a thumb and index finger around it (this hand analogy appears in the paper). The result is that HIV has a much harder time getting out from under the antibody, since mutating itself to alter the head shape would also affect infectivity.
Now that larger HIV screening trials are done, and the technology has advanced to better detect such super-antibodies, more of these clever antibodies may be discovered. We may yet have a good shot at defeating this tricky virus!
"As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
- William O. Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Parts from every domain of life put together and optimized.
Take a moment to appreciate the scale of this accomplishment. In four billion years of evolution, life has only managed to evolve six known pathways that start with carbon dioxide and build more complex molecules. In just a few years, a bunch of grad students in Zurich added a seventh.
The Illinois Senate voted 38-18 on Wednesday to override Gov. Bruce Rauner’s veto of an automatic voter registration bill. The bill was co-sponsored by Sen. Daniel Biss (D-Evanston) in the Senate and introduced by Rep. Robyn Gabel (D-Evanston) in the House. It would automatically register voters who are seeking a new or updated license, or...
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