Up From Facebook

  An insider's look at the container ship blocking the Suez Canal.   http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2021/guest-post-a-menace-on-the-high-seas/?fbclid=IwAR1WLh6xzL36qititTnNjB6qWBLgOJDe9L54h5TNW0WfMFA9_8hGCD_FZg8

  "Long-term prospects for the pandemic probably include COVID-19 becoming an endemic disease, much like influenza. But in the near term, scientists are contemplating a new normal that does not include herd immunity. Here are some of the reasons behind this mindset, and what they mean for the next year of the pandemic." https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021-00728-2/d41586-021-00728-2.pdf

  Looks like the AstraZenica COVID vaccine is fine. I'm a little confused about the two-shot thing. I thought the AZ vaccine was like the J&J Janssen vaccine, one and done. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/03/24/astrazeneca-vaccine-new-analysis/

 " In order to enroll in the beta program, Tesla owners must agree to a lengthy terms and conditions agreement. But unlike a beta version of some app on your phone in which the phone's owner is the only user, Teslas are driven on public roads and occupy public spaces. When one Tesla becomes a beta test, we are all beta testers.  I never signed any terms and conditions. I never consented to become a beta tester for Musk's not-self-driving cars that  mostly  work. And if given an option by anyone, I would not consent, because it clearly doesn't work and driving is dangerous enough as it is. Unfortunately, for all its flaws, FSD still  mostly  works, and that's more than anyone can say about the regulators at NHTSA who ought to have shut it down a long time ago." https://www.vice.com/en/article/3angm3/teslas-beta-self-driving-software-sure-seems-heavy-on-the-beta

  Nuclear power needs to be part of the world decarbonization project. This article in the leading scientific journal Nature highlights important challenges facing nuclear power. But it is disappointing that the editorial ignores molten salt reactor technology as a safe alternative to the nuclear reactors that gave us Chernobyl and Fukushima. I expect better from a journal like Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00615-w?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20210311&utm_source=nature_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20210311&sap-outbound-id=EA2FDE3F9F227D30F490336AFD7092211D76AB43

  "Unlike the US and Europe, [northern Africa and the Middle East] didn't begin phasing out leaded gasoline in the '70s and '80s. That had to wait until the late '90s for some countries and a few years later for others. "Significantly, both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, ground zero for the production of terrorists, phased out lead around the year 2000, which means that teens and young men in both countries have now largely grown up without lead poisoning—and within a decade everyone under the age of 30 will be lead free. In the same way that this led to a plummeting crime rate in the US, it was almost certain to lead to plummeting terrorism rate in these two countries. "Other countries have lagged behind a bit, but most of them phased out leaded gasoline in the mid-2000s or a few years later. The laggards are Algeria, Iraq, and Yemen, and it's no coincidence that all three remain very violent places." https://jabberwocking.com/whatever-happened-to-the...

  "A review of decades’ worth of research has concluded that the human brain is remarkably similar between sexes. Contrary to the belief of "that one sexist uncle", women’s brains are no different from males, and no observed differences were consistent from one study to the next. The review, published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Reviews, is an analysis of 30 years’ worth of MRI and cadaver studies, finding that once brain size is corrected for, sex accounts for just 1 percent of any differences." Most men and women are acculturated differently from birth, both at home and in society. Culture is inherited as an incompletely penetrant autosomal dominant trait. But culture operates on a neurological substrate which is almost identical in men and women. https://www.iflscience.com/brain/almost-no-difference-between-male-and-female-brains-finds-sweeping-review/?fbclid=IwAR1PHKYsKCEWunO2jDHJwKpiZNPOR5dNqyOFvzTwz75kqYRpfD28XnF0u1s

  I see some of my purist FB friends are outraged at WV Sen. Manchin for voting against a $15/hr minimum wage. Folks, Manchin is a Democratic Senator in a Senate that is 50:50. Democrats need every vote they can get. Manchin is a Democratic Senator in a deep red state: Presidential elections, West Virginia: 2016: Trump 67.9%; Clinton 26.5% 2020: Trump 68.6%; Biden 29.7% Trump beat Clinton by 41 points. Four years later, he beat Biden by 39. Senate elections, West Virginia 2012: Joe Manchin (D) 60.6%; John Raese (R) 36.5% 2018: Joe Manchin (D) 49.6%; Patrick Morrissey (R) 46.3% Joe Manchin didn't win by much in 2018, during his state's remarkable shift to Trump. No, he didn't win by much, but he did hold on. And if he hadn't managed to do that, Mitch McConnell would still be running a Republican-majority Senate. http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2021/03/cable-star-trashes-senator-manchin.html

I've been teaching medical students for 33 years. My lecture content concerns molecular biology and genetics. I do talk about sickle cell disease specifically, in a couple of contexts (genetics, molecular biology, gene therapy). Over 20 years ago, I implemented problem based learning for the students in a course I directed. The idea was to get the students to think about the information from their basic science courses as applied to clinical problems. My hope was that they would also see the patients in the cases not as lab problems but as human beings. I've spent my career at a Jesuit Catholic University. I've never been sure what that means or how it distinguishes the sort of medicine we teach and practice from secular medical schools. When I read this article, it reminded me how much work we still have to do. "Imagine, I thought, if we all worked to create sanctuaries for our patients — in small patient-centered ways like poetry-filled rooms, but also in large syste...