IST Saturday News Dump–17Feb24

lobotero

February 17

Another weekend begins as this past week slowly becomes history.

Big breaking news from yesterday....Putin critic dies.....

Vladimir Putin's most prominent critic is dead, according to Russia's prison service. The prison service in the Yamalo-Nenets district said Alexei Navalny "felt unwell" during a walk Friday and "almost immediately lost consciousness," the BBC reports. Efforts to resuscitate him proved unsuccessful and emergency doctors "declared the prisoner dead," per the prison service. The Kremlin said it had no information on the cause of death, reports the Guardian.

Navalny had another 19 years tacked on to his prison sentence in July, when he was already serving a long sentence on charges he said were politically motivated. Before the move to the remote Arctic prison was confirmed, lawyers said he had suffered "a serious health-related incident" and they were unable to find him. The US expressed its "deep concern" at the time. Navalny, who led large anti-Kremlin protests, went to Germany for treatment after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in 2020. He was arrested when he returned to Russia in 2021.

Another Putin critic down the drain.

Let's start with news from the medical field....

Remember back in school when you were taught that genes were the blueprint of life?

Were they wrong?

Since the human genome was first sequenced, popular science has dictated that genes act as a blueprint for life — but the reality, experts are now arguing, is much more complex and beautiful.

In a new book titled "How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology," British science writer and author Phillip Ball writes that the modern conception of genes as hard-and-fast cogs in the machine of life doesn't at all jive with what geneticists have learned in the intervening years: that life is a messy mystery, and the genetics encoding it are its enigmatic and chaotic instruments.

In a review of the book published by the journal Nature, where Ball happens to be a longtime editor, decorated British biologist Denis Noble quoted his fellow science writer as saying that the concept of life as a machine is a "lazy metaphor."

https://futurism.com/neoscope/genes-not-blueprint-life

Since Sue is fighting caner I am always on the look-out for news.....this report is disturbing.....

The New York Times is out with a story suggesting that medical journals provide nowhere near the kind of scrutiny necessary for papers on cancer research. The newspaper reports that a top cancer surgeon at Columbia University is under scrutiny after 26 of Dr. Sam Yoon's published studies were flagged for suspicious data, including images of cancer cells, mice, and tumors that appear to have been repurposed for different studies. One published study on stomach cancer was "quietly" withdrawn after doubts surfaced, and another medical journal recently retracted a Yoon study after inquiries from the newspaper. Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City, where much of the research was conducted, has opened an investigation.

The initial suspicions on Yoon's papers were raised by a "British scientific sleuth" named Dr. Sholto David in a blog post and science forum, per the Times. Yoon is not commenting, nor is a junior collaborator. The story details the studies in question by Yoon but also raises broader concerns about the review process for research publications. "The journals do the bare minimum," microbiologist Elisabeth Bik tells the Times. "There's no oversight." Read the full story, which notes that sleuths are using AI-powered tools in their quest to uncover other questionable research

I bet that if more investigating will find that he is not alone.

This is a grim aftermath of our society....

It's not just you — college students are having trouble reading, too, and that's major cause for concern.

In an editorial for Slate, Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor at Illinois' North Central College, said that over the past five years — four of which, of course, have been dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath — he and a lot of his colleagues have noticed that their students are really, really reticent to do the reading..

"For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation," Kotsko, whose classes largely include humanities and philosophy instruction, writes. "Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding."

While it's no secret that there's been a "very real learning loss" as a result of the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, there seems to be something much worse afoot, the author and educator muses.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/college-students-cant-read

That is so sad and a pathetic look at our educational system.

Speaking of education.....the best and worst educated states....and my state is where it always is....almost dead last....

Most educated

Massachusetts (No. 1 in both "Educational Attainment," "Quality of Education" categories)
Vermont
Maryland
Connecticut
Colorado
Virginia
New Jersey
New Hampshire
Minnesota
Washington

Least educated

Texas
New Mexico (last in "Quality of Education" category)
Kentucky
Nevada
Alabama
Oklahoma
Arkansas
Louisiana
Mississippi
West Virginia (last in "Educational Attainment" category)

There we are next to dead last.....where is your state on the list?

I always like to include a food story whenever possible and this one fits into the "Eeeww Factor"

A ton of the ultraprocessed foods we snack on were created by a process that can be described as "pre-digestion," which makes it all the less filling and all the more addictive.

As CNN reports, many of the most processed grain-based foods we eat, from burger buns and pizza crusts to potato chips and puddings, were made in a manner that is quite similar to a mama bird pre-chewing her baby's food — except in this case, it's as if she digested it before regurgitating it to her offspring.

"The bulk of what is extracted is starch slurry, a milky mixture of starch and water, but we also have extracted proteins and fibers," a video from the European Starch Industry Association explains. "Roughly half of the starch slurry goes to produce starch-based sugars and other derivatives. Those are created by hydrolysis, a process similar to human digestion."

Although starch slurries aren't at all unusual in the world of the culinary arts, what sets these apart is that rather than using cornstarch or similar ingredients, mass-produced food manufacturers make theirs' by breaking a given raw food down to its molecular level and then pounding it, along with food coloring, emulsifiers, and fake flavors, with industrial machines.

https://futurism.com/ultraprocessed-food-predigested

Just another reason I avoid processed food.

It has been a stimulating morning and my fingers are tired....

Have a wonderful Saturday and as always....Be Well and Be Safe....

I Read, I Write, You Know

"lego ergo scribo"