Week of July 31, 2023
While waiting for my son to have his wisdom teeth removed last week, I saw three parent-teenager duos walk into the oral surgeon's office - all with the same expressions. Like me, the parents broadcast anxious empathy, and the teenagers projected somber resignation and apprehension. I do not typically spend extended windows of time as an observer in medical office waiting rooms. I wonder how often patients walk into my office with similar expressions - am I as anxiety-provoking as an oral surgeon (or an oncologist)?
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COVID cases are starting to rise. The hospitalization rates nationally are trending up, driven by clusters of counties in almost every state (see N.Y. Times map). As I wrote last week, wastewater coronavirus RNA concentrations have risen over the previous few weeks and continue to increase in all regions.
The N.Y. Times COVID Tracker reflects the changing data quality - only CDC-gathered hospital data as a surrogate (lagging) indicator.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html
Wastewater monitoring is more of a LEADING indicator.
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COVID articles
Engineers from Washington University in St. Louis published data on a prototype air filtration and sampling device that can detect airborne coronavirus in real-time (in 5 minutes of air sampling). The system combines novel tech to concentrate viral particles from the air and biosensors impregnated with Llama-derived nanobodies to identify the virus. I suspect the device could detect other viruses and airborne materials if the correct biosensors were attached. Of note, the authors state that the device is loud.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39419-z
Local T.V. (Chicago) interviews the author
https://twitter.com/Viletas2cozy/status/1679153064312274944
An aside - you may recall how unique llama antibodies are:
I found an interesting series of articles in a Twitter thread on COVID ear, the viral infiltration, and damage to various inner ear cells responsible for hearing and balance. New data out of Finland demonstrates a marked increase in patients with diagnosed hearing and balance dysfunction on medical charts (via ICD10 codes H60 through H95).
consumer-level article from 2021
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/11/18/covid-ear-virus-implicated/
and scientific communication from 2021
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-021-00044-w
and
recent data from Finnish medical registries:
https://twitter.com/jukka235/status/1684771149903749121
and
https://twitter.com/ejustin46/status/1684580073167556610
Medical Trends and Technology
The signs of aging are sometimes subtle. "Last of Us" PTSD is one of those signs. (I was left deeply unsettled by the HBO series' dystopian plot). Thus, the article "Dangerous fungus is becoming more prevalent. Scientists believe climate change could be to blame" is quite evocative. Learn about Candida Auris.
https://apnews.com/article/dangerous-fungus-climate-change-new-york-c1b5ab8f4232a5f2320929dae3b80200
and
https://twitter.com/boulware_dr/status/1684877325404704768
European biologists recently "woke" 46,000-year-old Siberian nematodes (a type of microscopic roundworm) from a state of biological hibernation. The goal is to understand hibernation mechanisms better and measure how roundworms have evolved in the last fifty thousand years.
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article
and
There is now considerable clinical data on a polyvalent sublingual pineapple-flavored spray vaccine that protects individuals who experience frequent UTIs from the most common bacteria. The vaccine, administered daily for three months, contains whole-cell heat-INACTIVATED strains of E. Coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Enterococcus faecalis, and Proteus vulgaris). Data from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, demonstrated that among 67 participants with three or more UTIs per year, 40.6% of those receiving a 3-month vaccine course had NO UTIs during the 9-month post-vaccination study period. The same patients had a UTI rate (in the year before vaccination) of 0.56 UTIs per patient per month. The reduction in UTI rate was 75.3% for the 9-month efficacy period (0.14 UTIs per patient per month).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10052183/
and
https://twitter.com/sailorrooscout/status/1684219173675622403?s=20
Infographics
The Chemistry of Lipstick
https://twitter.com/compoundchem/status/1685295032650145792/photo/1
I missed formally celebrating national lipstick day on July 29, but Lego Dave Grohl did not (he never misses a day):
https://twitter.com/LegoDaveGrohl/status/1685235710335361024/photo/1
from
https://twitter.com/LegoDaveGrohl
Things I learned this week
Bees and wasps that depend on hexagonal comb structures sometimes build 5- and 7-sided cells to accommodate size variations in the hexagons. Imagine the social stigma of being the worker bee who consistently makes inappropriately sized hexagons, requiring the other bees to fix the spacing with pentagons and septagons. Do they have bee H.R. and worker bee performance reporting? If only Gary Larson were still around. ("Harold, your hexagon sizes were off again this quarter. We're going to have to let you go. Hank here will help you pack your pollen, larvae and fly you outside the hive.").
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/geometry-architectural-problem-bee-wasp
and
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002211
Gary Larson may be retired, but there is often an applicable XKCD
I learned that competitive hobbyhorse riding(?) is a sport. The Finnish popularized the sport, which involves individuals performing gymnastics while "riding" a stick with a horse head. (To be clear, this is unrelated to the COVID ear data from Finland mentioned above.) If, like me, you are late to the news, there are movies and plenty of YouTube videos to catch up with quickly. Most of all, I am impressed that there is a single Finnish word, "Keppihevosharrastajat," that means "stick horse enthusiast." I commend the video editors who offered highlights of the 2023 Finnish championships (see the first link). My younger son will be applying for a hobby horse college scholarship. Ivy League hobbyhorse teams should be a thing, right?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKaONUkiyCo
and
https://www.visionsdureel.ch/en/film/2017/hobbyhorse-revolution/
and
https://skhhry.fi/en/the-finnish-hobbyhorse-association-2/
Living with A.I.
Google is embedding A.I. in robots. Watch what happens when an LLM (like Bard or ChatGPT) connects to real-world devices. It is not hard to predict this will be much more common and impact many industries.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/technology/google-robots-ai.html
A.I. art of the week
Terrifying.
"A dentist cleaning the teeth of a stick with a horse head in a dental chair in the style of Thomas Eakins."
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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