Does the skull bone marrow harbor its own immune system? Researchers suspect mice skull bone marrow has a separately regulated immune system, even containing follicular T-cells! I've not heard of that outside the thymus. It's suspected that humans has something similar. What it all means will be fascinating to unravel, such as why a separate system was felt to be necessary, and how does it interact with the immune system outside the CNS.
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Meta's recording glasses are showing up in public now, and it's getting hard to avoid being recorded. Even teen boys are using them to harrass girls. Some needs to invent jammers for these devices. But then Apple may put cameras in AirPods, making these things ubiquitous. Fck.
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The city of Cupertino is 70.9% Asian. But the TV show Cupertino has no Asians. They have an Indian guy in a minor role but that doesn't really count, does it? It's not really Cupertino is it? I'm already used to movies set in Japan have a Caucasian lead, but at least there are Japanese people in it, too. I guess they didn't want the TV show to have kung-fu or have any subplot with organized crime or prostitution. The Asian activists are already up in arms about this, but give it up already. When I was a kid, I watched the TV series Quincy, and remember seeing Robert Ito play a regular lab assistant, Sam Fujiyama. But true to the stereotype, even at home, he had a lab where he did extracurricular work. 😆 Let's face it – Hollywood doesn't know what to do with Asians.
––– 良くない––– Speaking of Asians, here's an important study: Cognitive performance among diverse Asian American subgroups. Some interesting observations. Filipinos started lower in executive function and declined the most. Japanese participants started with higher executive function but eventually declined to join the others. And this was concerning: "Interestingly, we found that Japanese and Filipino participants who were born in the US and had ≥college education had faster declines in executive function and verbal episodic memory." They didn't specify why the declines were different, but it was speculated that it might have to do with blood pressure. I suspect it's dietary and genetic as well.
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Shenzhen Night Walk. This is what life looks like in a country where they don't fret with climate change crap, and where people are respectful of property and behave themselves. You can have nice things. Wow.
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Something positive from OHSU: Triple-dose regimen may permanently clear HIV in infected newborns. This study is interesting, and was done in rhesus macaques at the Oregon Primate Research Center, so it's good that this still exists, despite all the activists that want to close it. The treatment consisted of the antiretrovirals: tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, emtricitabine, and dolutegravir, as well as neutralizing antibodies, PGT121 and VRC07-523LS, given subcutaneously. But the secret sauce was the agent leronlimab, which is a monoclonal antibody against CCR5, a chemokine receptor and a co-receptor for HIV binding. (Chemokines are fascinating.) I remember that the Vancouver biotech company, CytoDyn, tried to develop this, and experimented with this as a cancer treatment. They even tried to see if it might be effective against COVID-19. The company had a stormy period, and I'm glad that it survived with new leadership. Paper here.
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Of course. LinkedIn Has Accidentally Become a Dating Site. Now you can't trust anyone's profile.
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Oura faces lawsuit accusing it of misleading consumers about sleep-tracking accuracy. This would be the only reason I would get an Oura ring, but after doing some research, I wasn't convinced it would give me the information I really wanted. To really track sleep accurately, you need a more cumbersome and expensive device. Not for just the mildly curious.
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Alcohol use disorder slowly declines across the USA, but cannabis addiction climbs fast. In China, cannabis is illegal, and although Japan has legalized it, their laws pertaining to use are strict, such that a 2019 survey found that only 1.8 percent of people in Japan had used marijuana at least once in their lifetime, compared to 44.2 percent of Americans and 41.5 percent of Canadians. I suspect this is why Oregon is the way it is. We have more stoners than other states – 10% are regular users.
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For decades, we were told to choose low-fat dairy. New research says otherwise. So drinking whole milk is OK now?
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