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Red meat isn’t the only source of dietary protein

As a professor of biochemistry, I’ve always been puzzled by the equation of red meat with dietary protein. Setting aside the fact that fish, crab, shrimp and lobster are as rich in protein as red meat and poultry, what do people think plants are made of? There’s protein in nuts, fruits and vegetables, too. “Meat is indeed packed with protein, but it comes with some well-established health drawbacks. “Saturated fat we’ve known about for decades,” said Dr. Sarah C. Hull, a cardiologist at Yale Medicine. It’s common in red meat and contributes to increasing LDL cholesterol levels, hardening the blood vessels and, in turn, raising the risk of heart attack or stroke. “Moreover, “all mammalian meat tends to be very inflammatory,” said Hull, who studies the diet-related risks of heart disease and cancer. “More recently we’ve come to understand that the many pro-inflammatory compounds found in red meat” can have other downsides, she said, including “deleterious interactions with the gut microb...
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No, Trump isn't meaner than Hitler

  I just saw a headline in the Independent that “not even Hitler attacked the pope so directly.” Well, OK but there’s a big difference: the Nazi government signed a concordat (a treaty) with the Vatican on July 20, 1933, known as the Reichskonkordat. The Church agreed to keep priests and religious orders out of political activity. There is no similar treaty between the Vatican and the Trump Administration. I’m not justifying Trump’s uncivilized behavior, but Hitler wasn’t more civilized, he just sidelined the Vatican in advance, something the Vatican agreed to in exchange for the rights of Catholic education and worship, and the protection of Catholic organizations.
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Quote of the day

It’s important to note that [Orbán] was defeated by what is essentially a center-right party, led by a defector from Orbán’s party. But from appearances, at least, it’s a center-right party that plans to operate within the structures of civic democracy. I wanted to note that, perhaps in spite of himself, Orbán, bad as he is, managed to again illustrate just what a weak and fraudulent man Donald Trump is. He managed to do what Trump has never been able to do: concede defeat. ~Josh Marshall
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What’s in a name?

When I was growing up, my dad (who was nominally Jewish) told me that our family name was German and meant Iron Mountain. I only learned decades later that both of his parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. At the time my paternal grandfather arrived in New York as a child, the name was spelled “Aizenberg.” He grew up in Argentina, and when he returned to the US, had the name spelled in its current form, doubling the s to capture the soft s sound. Because my mom was Roman Catholic, my parents had to agree to raise their kids Roman Catholic in ordered to be married in the Church. Which is why I’ve had five of the seven RCC sacraments, how I came to be an altar boy at St. Mary Catholic Church, why the boy scout troop I was in was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, and how the first date for my wife and I was an ice skating party sponsored by the CYO. While I no longer identify as Catholic, I also don’t identify as Jewish, even though Israel would consider me Jewish for the right...
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Advances in cancer diagnosis

We’re used to thinking about DNA in containers: nuclei, mitochondria, bacteria, viral particles. But there’s lots of DNA pieces flowing through our bloodstream all the time. This cell-free DNA can be captured and analyzed, just like the DNA in sewerage can be tested for COVID. “UCLA scientists have developed a simple and cost-effective blood test that, in early studies, shows promise in detecting multiple cancers, various liver conditions and organ abnormalities simultaneously by analyzing DNA fragments circulating in the bloodstream.  “The test, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could offer a powerful and more affordable approach to early disease detection and comprehensive health monitoring. “Early detection is crucial,” said Dr. Jasmine Zhou, the study’s senior author, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and investigator at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Survival rates are far higher when cancers are cau...
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The laws of physics haven’t been repealed by AI

You may have read about how a colonel was rescued deep inside Iran using a technology dubbed “ghost murmer.” Great marketing, bad physics. “ By Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the CIA had deployed Ghost Murmur, a device that uses vaguely described “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find signals of human heartbeats, after which artificial intelligence software isolates each heartbeat from the noisy data. ” This is just BS on stilts. “ It’s a terrific story. It is also, according to scientists who study magnetic fields, almost certainly not true. The rescue was real—the mission involved multiple aircraft and a survival beacon carried by the airman—but Ghost Murmur, at least as publicly described, finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI, experts told me. “Quantum magnetometers are real; they are ultraprecise at, for instance, detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields (via quantum properties) produced by the cardiac muscle. T...
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Was Jesus the result of parthenogenesis?

In a resurrected recording of one of his lectures, Christopher Hitchens says that he cannot definitively rule out that the virgin birth of Jesus was the result of parthenogenesis, since parthenogenesis has been observed in other animals*. Here’s the thing, though. The Y chromosome is sex-determining in humans. If Mary had a child by parthenogenesis, it would have to be female, since Mary carries no Y chromosome. So, it would be impossible for Jesus to be the result of parthenogenesis. *for example,   Drosophila mercatorum   can reproduce by facultative parthenogenesis  
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