Dilip Simeon's blog

Many cancer treatments are notoriously savage on the body. Drugs often attack both healthy cells and tumor cells, causing a plethora of side effects. Immunotherapies that help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells are no different. Though they have prolonged the lives of countless patients , they work in only a subset of patients. One study found that fewer than 30% of breast cancer patients respond to one of the most common forms of immunotherapy. But what if drugs could be engineered to attack only tumor cells and spare the rest of the body? To that end, my colleagues and I at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have designed a method to keep one promising cancer drug from wreaking havoc by “masking” it until it reaches a tumor.... https://theconversation.com/masked-cancer-drug-stealthily-trains-immune-system-to-kill-tumors-while-sparing-healthy-tissues-reducing-treatment-side-effects-183588

Apocalypse is an alarming idea, commonly taken to denote catastrophic destruction foreshadowing the end of the world. But in the original Greek, apokálypsis means a revelation or an uncovering. One vernacular definition is “to take the lid off something”.  That latter feat is exactly what Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, achieved last week, possibly inadvertently, when he suggested Britain was facing “apocalyptic” levels of food price inflation. Tory ministers fumed over what they saw as implied criticism of the government’s masterly economic management. In fact, Bailey was talking as much about the drastic impact of Ukraine-war-related rises in food costs and food shortages on people in poorer countries. “There’s a major worry for the developing world as well ... Sorry for being apocalyptic for a moment, but that is a major concern,” he said ....   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/21/apocalypse-now-the-alarming-effects-of-the-global-food-crisis ...

In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published a seemingly pretentious but otherwise innocuous paper entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity  in the postmodern journal  Social Text.  After its publication, Sokal announced that the paper was designed as a deliberate parody of post-modernism’s appropriation of scientific jargon. It was filled with largely meaningless or even absurd claims that nevertheless “flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” Sokal immediately became infamous across the academic world, with some welcoming his efforts and parody and other’s accusing him of dishonesty and a lack of integrity. More importantly, Sokal’s parody immediately set off a political firestorm.  Fashionable Nonsense; by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont Reviewed by Matt McManus Many on the Left accused him of lending ideological support to conservative efforts to repress critical and transgressive scholarship. And...

Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it… Grandpa had a system of sludge distribution. He never filled the buckets fully so that, when he carried them, the sloshing goop wouldn’t spill over onto his boots. Sometimes he carried the buckets by hand, sometimes he balanced them on a  koromyslo  – an arched wooden pole placed over the shoulders to distribute weight evenly. He poked small holes in the tomato patches where the dried-up plants carried no fruit that sewage could contaminate – and poured the goo into them, covering the holes with soil. He splashed some around the roots of the apple and cherry trees and raked some leaves over so that, when we walked around, we wouldn’t get any on the soles of our feet. And he also dumped a bunch into one of the compost pits, adding it to the heap of other organic refuse. The compost pits were where Mother Nature forged its black gold. And there was a system to...

What was the name of the female scientist who pioneered the mRNA research behind the success of recent COVID-19 vaccines? Who was that 16th-century catholic nun from whom René Descartes stole the evil demon thought experiment that secured his place in public memory as the father of modern philosophy? I doubt you remember either woman. Their names appeared recently in newspapers, on social media, and within academia. But recalling them is difficult. Seldom have women thinkers been more acknowledged and lauded than today. But how many of their names have we retained in our memory? The mechanisms of collective forgetting are fascinating and important. Our practice of writing genealogies determines who gets remembered, and who doesn’t. It is also haphazard. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, if our lines of transmission remain co-opted by strategic omissions, the selective erasure of names will continue. Many names that have faded from history were women’s. That’s no coin...

Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some locations creating vast fields of large, sunken polygons. It’s evidence that permafrost, the long-frozen soil below the surface, is thawing. That’s bad news for the communities built above it – and for the global climate. As an  ecologist , I study these dynamic landscape interactions and have been documenting the various ways permafrost-driven landscape change has accelerated over time. The hidden changes underway there hold warning for the future. Permafrost is perennially frozen soil that covers  about a quarter of the land  in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in Canada, Russia and Alaska. Much of it is rich with the organic matter of long-dead plants and animals frozen in time. These frozen soils maintai...

Decades of political campaigning against climate science and medicine have made public health a battleground of beliefs. Vaccine hesitancy, as seen in eastern Europe, based on distrust in authority, can’t be solved with rationality alone. So what might the antidote be?    Rejecting science is not so much a grass-roots movement, says Péter Krekó, in conversation with Réka Kinga Papp, as it is a position based on political affiliation and acculturation.  While acknowledging that the excessive mystification of scholarly knowledge and the natural sciences can harm the democratization of these fields, Krekó argues that tackling anti-science requires investigation too. Perhaps disinformation and junk science cannot be eradicated, but critical skills can help navigate an accelerated digital media environment. Find Péter Krekó’s latest article, ‘ Mutations of science in the pandemic  in Eurozine, along with his  previous articles  dealing with disinformation, socia...

The IITs have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. This time it is not about the fat pay packets their students have got in the institute placements, but about ghosts and steppe people invading, or rather not invading, Bharatvarsh. First, the ghosts. The director of an IIT posted a video on social media where he claimed he had exorcised ghosts by chanting mantras and espousing the wisdom of the Bhagwad Gita. Then, IIT Kharagpur, the oldest amongst these venerable institutions, brought out its 2022 calendar.  Ordinarily, these things are either harmless propaganda for the institution’s great work or contain innocuous photographs of flora and fauna. What made this particular piece of work remarkable was that it claimed to be debunking certain myths about ancient India…. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/peddling-anti-scientific-beliefs-by-academia-must-worry-us-7755612/ Shobhit Mahajan - An Infinity of Questions Shobhit Mahajan: Incredible Indians S...

The production and release of plastics, pesticides, industrial compounds, antibiotics and other pollutants is now happening so fast and on such a large scale that it has exceeded the planetary boundary for chemical pollution, the safe limit for humanity, a new study claims. We asked Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a PhD candidate at Stockholm University and one of the authors of the study, to explain what this means. What are planetary boundaries?: In 2009, an international team of researchers identified nine planetary boundaries that maintain the remarkably stable state Earth has remained within for 10,000 years – since the dawn of civilisation. These boundaries include greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, the ozone layer, an intact biosphere and freshwater. The researchers quantified the boundaries that influence Earth’s stability and concluded in 2015 that human activity has breached four of them. Greenhouse gas emissions are pushing the global climate into a new, hotter sta...

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to unveil its measure of how close human civilisation is to the edge of extinction On 24 October 1962, an American nuclear chemist, Harrison Brown, started to pen a guest editorial for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists just as the Cuban missile crisis reached its climax. “I am writing on a plane en route from Los Angeles to Washington and for all I know this editorial … may never be published,” Brown said. “Never in history have people and nations been so close to death and destruction on such a vast scale. Midnight is upon us.” With this dire warning, he was referring to the  Doomsday Clock , which has been the Bulletin’s iconic motif since it was founded 75 years ago by Albert Einstein and some of the University of Chicago scientists from the Manhattan Project. Their work had contributed to making the atomic bomb, but many of them had been outraged when the US used it against Japanese cities. The image of the clock ticking away to midnigh...

Astronomers have detected a record number of gravitational waves, in a discovery they say will shed light on the evolution of the universe, and the life and death of stars. An international team of scientists have made 35 new observations of  gravitational waves , which brings the total number of detections since 2015 to 90. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, created by massive cosmic events – such as pairs of black holes smashing together – up to billions of light years away... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/08/record-number-of-new-gravitational-waves-offers-game-changing-window-into-universe

An experiment that hung rhinoceroses upside down to see what effect it had on the animals has been awarded one of this year's Ig Nobel prizes. Other recipients included teams that studied the bacteria in chewing gum stuck to pavements, and how to control cockroaches on submarines. The spoof prizes are not as famous as the "real" Nobels - not quite. The ceremony couldn't take place at its usual home of Harvard University in the US because of Covid restrictions. All the fun occurred online instead. The science humour magazine,  Annals of Improbable Research , says its Ig Nobel awards should first make you laugh but then make you think. And the rhino study, which this year wins the award for transportation research, does exactly this. What could seem more daft than hanging 12 rhinos upside down for 10 minutes?  But wildlife veterinarian Robin Radcliffe, from Cornell University, and colleagues did exactly this in Namibia because they wanted to know if the health of the ...

Almost everyone knows the name of Einstein, but that of Lev Landau is familiar only to a few followers of the exact sciences. And yet, both of them share several common features: They occupy first-rank positions in the short list of the greatest geniuses of the past century. They distinguished themselves by their freedom of thought and the non-conformity of their lives. And above all, they shared political positions usually treated, and rather correctly, as “extremist”, revolutionary and subversive of any established order! Positions of which “naturally”, nobody has ever spoken to you... https://www.cadtm.org/Einstein-and-Landau-Scientific-geniuses-as-well-as-anti-capitalists-and-anti Landau: “Comrades, the great cause of the October Revolution has been ignobly (...) Einstein, the anti-capitalist and anti-bureaucrat! Why socialism? JIMENA CANALES - This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No Nobel for Relativity Einstein’s God: What did the great physicist really beli...

NB : In the midst of an unprecedented global catastrophe, political leadership is engaged in ruthless quest for power, destruction of democratic institutions, clampdown on honest journalism, instigating communal and racial hatred, and increasing defence budgets. Whenever society faces mortal danger, we attack the poor, invent enemies and scapegoats on all sides, and engage in verbal abuse and physical violence. Even the capacity to speak is being destroyed. We live in the era of Rule by Political and Ecological Imbeciles. There is no more time to waste. We need a new internationalism devoted to collective action on global warming, preservation of liberty and firm regulation of corporate capitalist enterprise (armaments, aerospace, oil, coal, nuclear power, plastics, pharmaceuticals, etc.). Without this the future will be devastating for the coming generations. And we will have no one to blame but ourselves. DS The IPCC report is clear: nothing short of transforming society will avert c...