Week of January 22, 2024
I have many snack-size, single-serving, and forgettable conversations when traveling. Last week, my Uber driver from the airport answered my "Where are you from?' question with, "The country that is, for now, still called Nigeria." A 25-minute mini-lecture on the ethnic and political tensions between the Igbo and Hausa-Fulani ensued. Uber is a fantastic forum for testing random knowledge and conversation skills. Sometimes you learn about good restaurants or local history. And sometimes, you struggle to recall your undergraduate comparative politics seminar on cross-cutting political and ethnic tensions in post-colonial Nigeria. Welcome to San Diego.
Background
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/africa-jan-june07-ethnic_04-05
And thanks to Chuck Palahniuk for the phrase "single-serving friends."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2f6fjMJrG0
---
Hospitalizations (a lagging indicator) are still rising. While all age groups are still experiencing rising rates, the most impacted individuals are over 70. Wastewater RNA concentrations are now falling, consistent with a falling infection rate, which means we have most likely passed the peak of JN.1 infections for the winter season.
The N.Y. Times COVID Tracker reflects only CDC-gathered hospital data. Hospitalization data are a (lagging) indicator.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html
Wastewater monitoring is more of a LEADING indicator.
------
COVID articles
Looking at large volumes of antibodies to coronavirus, U.S. and Italian scientists identified pan-betacoronavirus antibodies that bind to the spike proteins of multiple SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and additional coronaviruses that infect other species. Remember, the immune system makes antibodies to various proteins on the outside layer of bacteria and viruses. We could develop a universal coronavirus vaccine by finding antibodies to the outer proteins common to all coronaviruses (rather than just the spike protein on the latest variant). These data imply such antibodies can exist, meaning we could develop vaccines that induce the creation of these antibodies.
This article is not yet peer-reviewed -
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.15.575741v1.full
Here is a variety of Twitter posts - highlighting this article and, more broadly, the hope for broader coronavirus vaccines
https://twitter.com/search?q=pan-betacoronavirus&f=live
GoodRx offered a roundup of nasal sprays for COVID, including nasal vaccines. The article is from September 2023 - but is still timely and topical.
https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/covid-19/nasal-spray-covid
Medical Trends and Technology
When you mix global warming, melting permafrost, and increased human activity in the Arctic, you get disconcerting and alarming articles about the potential for pandemics driven by long-frozen zombie viruses - AKA "the Methusela virus." While I am all for appropriate monitoring and research of newly re-emerging microbes in an increasingly warming environment, this article felt slightly alarmist. Nevertheless, it is an excellent example of the changes global warming can bring to human health.
More CRISPR-based therapies are coming. Clinicaltrialsarena.com offered a thorough review article of Phase II and III clinical trials of the gene-editing technology, offering therapy for a myriad of hematologic diseases.
In the spirit of "take your readers to work day," I want to share a great article (sent to me by a loyal reader) describing the struggles of identifying and caring for patients with kidney disease. It sums up much of what nephrologists focus on.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/why-kidney-disease-so-often-missed-2024a1000182
Infographics
The Chemistry of Popcorn
We are all comforted by aromas of 2,3-butanedione (diacetyl) and 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline.
https://twitter.com/compoundchem/status/1748449914030297588/photo/1
Things I learned this week
Like Monty Python's Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog, I learned that the world's most successful predator cat (and the second-most successful Apex predator) is as adorable as it is deadly. Meet the Black Footed Cat of Southern Africa. You may also want to spend some time with the BBC Wildlife article discussing measured "predation success rates" - a metric I have numerous questions about.
and
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/hunting-success-rates-how-predators-compare
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_of_Caerbannog
I learned there are meetings of the American Dialect Society (ADS) that determine various "words of the year" in categories such as "most useful," "political," and "Overall." In December, ADS linguists gathered in New York to select the 2023 Word of the Year: "enshittification: worsening of a digital platform through a reduction in quality of service." I highly recommend looking at the lists of winners and runner-ups. I particularly enjoyed:
Kenaissance: a renaissance in the wake of the Barbie movie's depiction of Ken.
Stochastic parrot: A large language model that can generate plausible synthetic text without having any understanding.
Hard pants: pants that lack an elastic waistband or stretchy fabric, unlike the "soft pants" favored by those working from home during the pandemic
see
https://americandialect.org/woty/all-of-the-words-of-the-year-1990-to-present/
and
Living with A.I.
The New York Times offered a "test your ability to distinguish A.I.-generated from non-A.I.-generated faces" page. I failed. To quote the 1980s philosopher C3PO, "We're doomed."
Some perspectives on A.I. from the Davos conference.
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/19/davos-2024-wef-ai-artificial-intelligence
Thanks to a friendly game of Scrabble with cousins, I learned using ChatGPT mobile can ingest a cell phone picture of your Scrabble board, and when you tell it what letters you have, it can suggest the next moves. It is imperfect (for now) but is another excellent example of A.I. image recognition combined with data transformation. (To be clear, we played with integrity! We only did this at the last move of the game.)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UbqP9wdfgv-iSWlubGI-q6dgEq66fGJd/view?usp=sharing
A.I. art of the week
I went for a hyper-precise description and got a reasonably amazing result. Here is the prompt and the first round of output: "From the perspective of a person in the back seat of a car. There is a Vermeer-style oil painting of a cute kitten wearing a ninja-yoroi, driving a car. He is turned backward, facing the passenger in the backseat. There is an Uber-like logo on the windshield. A speech bubble emerges from the cat, saying, "Would you like to play Scrabble?" You can see scrabble tiles hanging from the rearview mirror."
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GRr-nq_9EzicaaiAzkqtleTi6Uh-TMJF/view?usp=sharing
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
Comments
Post a Comment