I tried to update today an earlier blog post but neither VIDI (started in 2012) nor VITALITY (started in 2014) posted or published any allergy result so far.
VITALITY seems to have some 2,681 participants under observation according to their study website while VIDI published only unrelated stuff about 801 participants.
Jan 9, 2024 update
According to an email yesterday, Vitality will publish primary outcome data in Q3 2024.
New work by Harvard colleagues shows how sunshine hormone D constrains inflammation by modulating the expression of key genes on chr17q. It builds on earlier collaborative work on the vitamin D receptor in 2004 (see their ref 5) as well on my annotation of IKZF3 (aka aiolos aka god of winds) in 2008 and again in 2022.
While our focus on allergy development was on vitamin D supplementation of newborns, the interest of Weiss et al. was on vitamin D deficiency in pregnancy. Vitamin D deficiency may not be attributed to the rise of the asthma and allergy epidemic although this remains the never ending obsession of Weiss et al.
Nevertheless, also a wrong hypothesis may lead to new insights. IKZF3 clearly is a key player where more recently heterozygous missense/LOF variants have been found in families with B-lymphopenia and EBV-associated lymphoma while the allergy proning effect is more in the 5-prime region.
The new study shows (again) that cholecalciferol suppresses the activation of the IL-2 pathway. But what is the net effect of artifical cholecalciferol exposure on naive T cells? Unfortunately the new paper narrowly focuses on cytokine production in Th2 cells only and even misses the famous Cantorna review that clearly says
Since 1983 it has been described that 1,25(OH)2D inhibited T cell proliferation and the secretion of select cytokines after mitogen stimulation. Moreover, 1,25(OH)2D directly inhibited IL-2 and IFN-γ transcription [17,18]. More recently 1,25(OH)2D has also been shown to inhibit IL-17 secretion by Th17 cells. The effects of 1,25(OH)2D on Th2 cells is more controversial with evidence that 1,25(OH)2D inhibits IL-4 transcriptionally as well as evidence that 1,25(OH)2D upregulates IL-4 in mouse and human T cells.
So we need to rephrase the finding of an “immune protective effect of vitamin D in allergic lung inflammation” to an overall “immune suppressive effect of vitamin D” which is basic textbook knowledge. Unfortunately the early origin of allergy induction remains a mystery.
Another round of the elitist science carousel that stopped again for some underdogs… wired.co.uk
She recalls spending one Christmas and New Year’s Eve conducting experiments and writing grant applications. But many other scientists were turning away from the field, and her bosses at UPenn felt mRNA had shown itself to be impractical and she was wasting her time. They issued an ultimatum, if she wanted to continue working with mRNA she would lose her prestigious faculty position, and face a substantial pay cut.
”It was particularly horrible as that same week, I had just been diagnosed with cancer,” said Karikó. “I was facing two operations, and my husband, who had gone back to Hungary to pick up his green card, had got stranded there because of some visa issue, meaning he couldn’t come back for six months. I was really struggling, and then they told me this.”
Continue reading A Nobel prize for resilience
Kann man:frau unbegrenzt Wissen schaffen?
Die Wirtschaftswissenschaften beschreiben den Grenznutzen wo der Zuwachs nur noch durch den Einsatz enorm hohe Aufwands erzielt werden kann – wenn trotz des hohen ökonomischen Aufwandes der Nutzenzuwachs gering ist oder sogar gegen Null geht.
Der Grenznutzen liesse sich im Prinzip auch von der DFG bestimmen, von Universitäten und Forschungsorganisationen wenn sie nur Interesse daran hätten.
Haben Sie aber nicht.
Warum es KZ Buchenwald und nicht KZ Weimar heisst? Es gab dazu Streit, so der mdr
Die Bezeichnung [Weimar] lehnte die Weimarer NS-Kulturgemeinde ab, da diese doch zu sehr mit der von den Nazis für sich reklamierten Weimarer Klassik mit Goethe und Schiller verbunden war. Eine Benennung nach einer kleineren Ortschaft in der Gegend [Ettersberg] lehnte wiederum die SS ab, da sie dann eine geringere Besoldung erhalten hätte. Schließlich wurde das KZ auf Weisung von SS-Reichsführer Himmler “K.L. Buchenwald/Post Weimar” genannt und unter diesem Namen auch im Telefonbuch eingetragen.
Bis heute sind die Daten der Häftlinge nicht erfasst – wer will kann dabei helfen, Dateikarten im Arolsen Archiv zu digitalisieren #everynamecounts.
über Oktavio Paz (1914-1998) auf infobae
Paz verwendet das literarische Genre des Essays, dessen Flexibilität es uns ermöglicht, über ein Thema nachzudenken, ohne den Vorwand zu haben, zu lehren oder universelle Gesetze aufzudecken. Der Aufsatz teilt einen reflektierenden Pfad, der gewissermaßen der Fluss des eigenen Bewusstseins ist. Der Autor weiß, dass Identität wie ein Labyrinth ein zu lösendes Problem ist. Für Mexiko ist es das Labyrinth der Einsamkeit[…]
Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter…
Rettung der Weimarer Aschebücher
Is there a life after scientific misconduct?
Jonathan Pruitt journalist
Dean Hamer film maker
Friedhelm Herrmann medical doctor
Marion Brach biotech entrepeneur
French Anderson prisoner
Joachim Boldt (vanished)
Silvia Bulfone-Paus second life
He Jiankui second life
Paolo Macchiarini heartbraker
more…
A recent Nature commentary defines pseudoscience as everything that cannot be empirically tested. Wikipedia is more comprehensive
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method
with a long footnote pointing towards Oxford English Dictionary 1989
A pretended or spurious science; a collection of related beliefs about the world mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method or as having the status that scientific truths now have.
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science 1988 gives probably the best definition
[w]hat is objectionable about these beliefs is that they masquerade as genuinely scientific ones… claims presented so that they appear [to be] scientific even though they lack supporting evidence and plausibility” … In contrast, science is “a set of methods designed to describe and interpret observed and inferred phenomena, past or present, and aimed at building a testable body of knowledge open to rejection or confirmation”.
Here is my own definition of the scientific method in the ethics lecture 2021 (which is close to the initial statement).
Whatever I wrote before different methods to detect AI written text (using AI Text Classifer, GPTZero, Originality.AI…) seems now to be too optimistic. OpenAI even reports that AI detectors do not work at all
While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport to detect AI-generated content, none of these have proven to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content.
Additionally, ChatGPT has no “knowledge” of what content could be AI-generated. It will sometimes make up responses to questions like “did you write this [essay]?” or “could this have been written by AI?” These responses are random and have no basis in fact.
…
When we at OpenAI tried to train an AI-generated content detector, we found that it labeled human-written text like Shakespeare and the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.
…
Even if these tools could accurately identify AI-generated content (which they cannot yet), students can make small edits to evade detection.
BUT – according to a recent Copyleaks study, use of AI runs at high risk of plagiarizing earlier text that has been used to train the AI model. So it will be dangerous for everybody who is trying to cheat.
which is from the letter by Saint Paul in his second letter to the Church at Corinth (chapter 11) while today’s quote “neither suffers fools” is adapted from Walter Isaacson’s biography on “Elon Musk” published today
In the rarefied fraternity of people who have held the title of richest person on Earth, Musk and Gates have some similarities. Both have analytic minds, an ability to laser-focus, and an intellectual surety that edges into arrogance. Neither suffers fools. All of these traits made it likely they would eventually clash, which is what happened when Musk began giving Gates a tour of the factory.
A Mozilla Foundation analysis
The car brands we researched are terrible at privacy and security Why are cars we researched so bad at privacy? And how did they fall so far below our standards? Let us count the ways […] We reviewed 25 car brands in our research and we handed out 25 “dings” for how those companies collect and use data and personal information. That’s right: every car brand we looked at collects more personal data than necessary and uses that information for a reason other than to operate your vehicle and manage their relationship with you.
https://www.darkfactor.org defines the score as “the general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility — disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others —, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications.”
