henry copeland @hc

Creating https://t.co/yaIkIOcF20, an online toolkit the average person can use for personal (n-of-1) experiments. Way back when: Y84, bond trader, journalist.

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Scientists' sex

A project launched in the 1960s asked school children to “draw a scientist”. By 1983, it had collected 5,000 drawings, of which only 28 depicted a female scientist. By 2018, 33% of the more than 20,000 gathered drawings, showed women. In science, too, there has been a shift towards gender equity. But serious obstacles remain, says science writer Lisa Munoz in this practical analysis, complementing it with female scientists’ vivid career stories. “No single intervention, policy, or law is enough,” she rightly notes.

Don Lemon interrogates Elon Musk on depression, his 'prescription' ketamine use and Trump in interview that got him fired from X | Daily Mail Online

'There are times when I have a negative chemical state in my brain, like depression I guess, or depression that's not linked to any negative news, and ketamine is helpful for getting one out of a negative frame of mind,' he added.  When asked if he has ever 'abused' the tranquilizing drug, Musk continued: 'I don't think so... if you use too much ketamine you can't really get work done, and I have a lot of work.'  'It's a prescription from a real doctor, not a, you know...' he added, as the conversation stalled and became awkward.  'Putting in 16-hour days, that's normal for me, and it's rare for me to even take off a weekend day, so I don't really have a situation where I can be not mentally acute for an extended period of time.

Are your earliest childhood memories still lurking in your mind—or gone forever? | Science | AAAS

Research with young rats and mice suggests they, too, can access suppressed memories with a little help. In a 2016 study, Cristina Alberini, a neuroscientist at New York University, and her colleagues gave juvenile rats a foot shock when they stepped into a dark compartment within a white box. The young animals learned to stay out of the dangerous compartment, but forgot soon after. Once the animals were older, the researchers found they could jog their memory by showing them the white box and shocking them in a different colored box. Then, when the researchers returned the rats to the original white box, the combination of the two cues made the rodents remember to stay out of its dark compartment.

Can the Ketogenic Diet Treat Mental Illness? | MedPage Today

Though 3 patients were unable to adhere to the diet for more than 14 days, the researchers concluded that following the ketogenic diet for treatment-refractory mental illness was "feasible, well-tolerated, and associated with significant and substantial improvements in depression and psychosis symptoms and multiple markers of metabolic health." More than 40% of patients experienced remission from their diagnosis, Ede said, and 64% left the hospital on less psychiatric medication than when they entered.

High-intensity Exercise Can Reverse Neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s Disease < Yale School of Medicine

Following the six-month program, brain imaging showed a significant increase in both the neuromelanin and DAT signals in the substantia nigra. This suggests that high-intensity exercise not only slowed down the neurodegenerative process, but also helped the dopaminergic system grow healthier. “Where we would have ordinarily expected to see a decline in the DAT and neuromelanin signals, we saw an increase,” says Bart de Laat, PhD, associate professor adjunct in psychiatry and the study’s first author. “We had hoped to see that the neurodegeneration would not progress as quickly or stop temporarily, but instead we saw an increase in nine out of 10 people. That was remarkable.” The study highlights the importance of including an exercise regimen as part of one’s Parkinson’s treatment plan. “The medications we have available are only for symptomatic treatment. They do not change the disease course,” says Tinaz. “But exercise seems to go one step beyond and protect the brain at the neuronal level.”

High-intensity Exercise Can Reverse Neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s Disease < Yale School of Medicine

Prior research has shown that many forms of exercise are linked to improved symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But there has been no evidence that hitting the gym could create changes at the brain level. Now, a small proof-of-concept study involving 10 patients showed that high-intensity aerobic exercise preserved dopamine-producing neurons, the brain cells that are most vulnerable to destruction in patients with the disease. In fact, after six months of exercise, the neurons actually had grown healthier and produced stronger dopamine signals. Dopamine is a chemical that helps brain cells communicate with each other.

Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure of Divorce

To cope with the stress, I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years. Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.

We finally know why live music makes us so emotional | New Scientist

The researchers found that live performances of both the negative and positive pieces consistently led to increased brain activity in the left amygdala – the region of the brain that is strongly linked to assigning sensory stimuli, such as sounds, to certain emotions.

'Eye Opening': Chatbot Outperforms Ophthalmologists | MedPage Today

The ChatGPT chatbot powered by GPT-4 scored better than the panelists on measures of diagnostic and treatment accuracy when it analyzed 20 real-life cases and considered 20 possible patient questions, reported Andy S. Huang, MD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, and colleagues in JAMA Ophthalmology opens in a new tab or window .

Cortical signatures of sleep are altered following effective deep brain stimulation for depression | Translational Psychiatry

eep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subcallosal cingulate cortex (SCC) is an experimental therapy for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Chronic SCC DBS leads to long-term changes in the electrophysiological dynamics measured from local field potential (LFP) during wakefulness, but it is unclear how it impacts sleep-related brain activity. This is a crucial gap in knowledge, given the link between depression and sleep disturbances, and an emerging interest in the interaction between DBS, sleep, and circadian rhythms. We therefore sought to characterize changes in electrophysiological markers of sleep associated with DBS treatment for depression. We analyzed key electrophysiological signatures of sleep—slow-wave activity (SWA, 0.5–4.5 Hz) and sleep spindles—in LFPs recorded from the SCC of 9 patients who responded to DBS for TRD. This allowed us to compare the electrophysiological changes before and after 24 weeks of therapeutically effective SCC DBS. SWA power was highly correlated between hemispheres, consistent with a global sleep state. Furthermore, SWA occurred earlier in the night after chronic DBS and had a more prominent peak. While we found no evidence for changes to slow-wave power or stability, we found an increase in the density of sleep spindles.

'Revelatory' study finds a smoking impact that remains after quitting

People who smoked had increased inflammatory responses, but those higher levels were transient, dropping after smoking cessation. But the effects on the adaptive response persisted for many years after quitting, changing the levels of cytokines released after infection or other immune challenges.

Still Fab

Carroll James wasn't a rock DJ, and his audience was mostly grown-ups. James did a talky afternoon drive-time show for WWDC, a popular AM station. Back then, WWDC was a laid-back outlet with a so-called "middle of the road," or MOR, format that was aimed at an older audience. What did it do besides break the Beatles? When it wasn't running its oddball contests, the station drew on a mostly pop play list, mixing Andy Williams and Al Hirt with soft-rock acts like Ruby and the Romantics, Bobby Vinton, and Ben E. King. WWDC's morning guy had been around for decades, played the organ behind his own wake-up patter, and had a pair of miked, twittering canaries in the studio with him. At night, WWDC didn't play any music at all; it interviewed touring book authors. The only show it aimed at a young audience was in the evening, when its preferred adult listeners were watching TV, and that show was targeted at the dutiful children of the station's core middle-class following. The "teen" show was called The House of Homework, and its gimmick was letting kids call in to ask for help with their assignments. In short, WWDC was a station for dorks.

A local tip helps reveal an ancient ‘arcade’ in Kenya’s highlands | YaleNews

“Modern people in the region tend to play games like Mancala when they are out herding,” she said. “That’s probably what they were doing here. People tend to look at early life as brutish, nasty, and short. But perhaps life was not all about survival.”

Amid $1 billion Medicaid shortfall, Indiana cuts aid to aged and disabled

Davis hasn't had a job in 15 years because taking care of her son is a full-time occupation. The Davises have been approved for nursing hours since 2016 but have never been able to find a nurse to hire. In 2018 Anastasia Davis learned of the program that would pay her for her caregiving, but she was unable to enroll until 2022. The financial strain of caregiving without income sent the family into debt, she said.

Consumption of coffee or caffeine and serum concentration of inflammatory markers: A systematic review - PubMed

Fifteen studies (8 involving coffee and 7 caffeine) were included. Increased adiponectin levels were found in four of seven trials comparing filtered coffee/caffeinated coffee with placebo or comparing its levels at baseline and after consumption of medium or dark roasted coffee, but no change was seen in caffeine trials. None of the five studies assessing the effects of coffee found changes in C-reactive protein (CPR), but one out of three trials found decreased CPR levels in response to caffeine. Interleukin (IL)-6 was increased by caffeinated coffee compared with placebo in one of four coffee trials, and by caffeine in three out of five studies. Caffeine increased IL-10 levels in two of three trials. These data suggest a predominant anti-inflammatory action of coffee but not of caffeine consumption. Moreover, the proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory responses to caffeine point to its complex effects on the inflammatory response.

Music Printing – Pay for Play: How the Music Industry Works, Where the Money Goes, and Why

However, popular styles in Europe during the Renaissance and later periods (such as the French Chanson) were also frequently notated. While we might suppose that the early music printing industry was supported largely by trade in what we now refer to as classical music, the opposite was actually the case: the music printing industry flourished primarily through the sale of books of popular songs rather then sacred or other more serious styles. This is an important historical fact, because it gives context to the rise of the American music print industry in the late 19th century, which also gained traction primarily through sales of printed popular songs in the so-called Tin Pan Alley style.

The Single Best Way to Ease Inflammation and Boost Your Immune Health | Columbia Magazine

Eating more plant-based food is also important because our gut bacteria feast on plant fiber and need a lot of it — ideally more than the US government’s daily recommended twenty to twenty-five grams for women and thirty to thirty-eight grams for men, according to Ravella. “Those guidelines should be considered a bare minimum, yet 95 percent of Americans don’t even get that much,” she says, noting that members of many traditional agricultural communities around the world consume vast quantities of fiber — around a hundred grams per day or more — and tend to have low rates of chronic disease. “A bowl of oatmeal contains about four grams of fiber, as does an apple or a serving of broccoli, and a cup of cooked beans contains about fifteen grams,” she says. “So you can see that it takes a sustained effort to get the fiber your body needs.”

The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo review – a break for the border | History books | The Guardian

Review The Picnic: An Escape to Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain by Matthew Longo review – a break for the border The US academic has written a thoughtful and vividly realised account of the extraordinary chain of events around a summer party in Hungary that precipitated the end of Soviet power in central Europe Tim Adams @TimAdamsWrites Sun 7 Jan 2024 02.00 EST Last modified on Sun 7 Jan 2024 03.17 EST 5 A t a time when we have become bleakly accustomed to political capital being made of militarising borders and building walls, it is a timely corrective to read a book devoted to the romance of the alternative. The Picnic re-examines events in Hungary in 1989 that precipitated the collapse of Soviet power in central Europe. In particular, it recreates, through intimate personal histories and eyewitness recollection, the ways in which one idealistic, grassroots protest – the staging of a summer party in a field near the Austrian border – became a catalyst for the dramatic peaceful revolutions that reunited the continent. The idea for that summer gathering was first imagined by a young Hungarian radical, Ferenc Mészáros, at a meeting organised by a European figure from a very different age: Otto von Habsburg, heir to the long-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire, who was, in 1989, president of the pan-European movement. Habsburg was in the Hungarian city of Debrecen in June 1989 as a guest lecturer at a university founded by his ancestor and he used the opportunity to connect over dinner with covert groups opposed to the communist government. At that dinner, Mészáros floated to “Uncle Otto” his notion of a gathering near the border, perhaps an afternoon picnic, at which Hungarians and Austrians could be permitted to come together in a tiny gesture towards a new pan-European spirit. How a pan-European picnic brought down the iron curtain Read more From Megalopolis to Joker 2: the 2024 films Guardian writers are most excited about Mészáros’s idea was originally dismissed as trivial in the earnest politics of the underground Hungarian democracy movement, but over that summer it gained support and traction, eventually becoming a pivotal – and exhilarating – moment in late 20th-century history. As Matthew Longo’s book deftly dramatises, great geopolitical shifts always happen at both a macro and a micro scale. The possibility of relaxing border controls had been set in motion that March by Hungary’s communist leader Miklós Németh in a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow at which the Soviet leader suggested he would not stand in the way of greater openness.

Trump's Messianic Video About God Sending Him To Save World

I need somebody who can shape an ax but wield a sword. Who had the courage to step foot in North Korea? Who can make money from the tar of the sand turned liquid to gold? Who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation? We’ll finish this 40 hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in another 72 hours. So God made Trump.

Young-Onset Dementia Tied to New Risk Factors | MedPage Today

"We found both vitamin D deficiency and high CRP levels were associated with increased risk of young-onset dementia," the team added. "It has been suggested that vitamin D acts as a neurosteroid that protects against neurodegenerative processes. Notably, CRP was only significantly associated with young-onset dementia when vitamin D was included in the model."

Brain Implants Helped 5 People Recover From Traumatic Injuries - The New York Times

A study published on Monday has offered them a glimpse of hope. Five people with moderate to severe brain injuries had electrodes implanted in their heads. As the electrodes stimulated their brains, their performance on cognitive tests improved.

Bring your text to life with our “Text annotator” template | The Flourish blog | Flourish | Data Visualization & Storytelling

Ah, the memories of being a student and diligently highlighting key phrases and scribbling notes into the page margin of a handout or textbook. But annotating a text with explanatory notes isn’t just for students: it’s also a great way to explain to an audience the inner meaning of anything from a poem to political speech. Hence our new premium template: “Text annotator”. The template allows you to present text to your audience with interactive annotations that add extra context or explanation. Try clicking on the highlighted phrases in the example below.

Harvard, Penn Presidents Walk Back Genocide Answers Made at Antisemitism Hearing - Bloomberg

Some saw legal strategy in Gay’s testimony because of a complaint opened by the US Education Department. Harvard’s effort to shield itself from litigation led to Gay “grotesquely claiming that calls for genocide are acceptable on campus,” said Rebecca Brooks, director of advocacy for the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association. […]“Harvard is retroactively inventing an interpretation of its own guidelines to pretend that it has complied with its policies and hasn’t shirked its most basic duties to protect students on campus,” said Brooks.

Salesforce Jobs Become Less About Perks After Layoffs - Bloomberg

Benioff had another, more important insight, as well. At the time, most computer programs were sold like computers themselves—you buy it for a large upfront cost, set it up yourself and then use it until it breaks or you want something nicer. Benioff decided his customer relationship management software wouldn’t come on a CD. It would be hosted remotely, on the web: Clients wouldn’t buy the CRM software, they’d lease it. The user interface for the site came to Benioff in a dream. “I could see this app that looked like Amazon,” he says, “and it said ‘Contacts,’ ‘Accounts,’ ‘Opportunities,’ ‘Forecast Reports,’ as tabs. No one had ever built enterprise software quite like that before.”

Henry Kissinger, America’s Most Notorious War Criminal, Dies At 100 | HuffPost Latest News

The former led to perhaps the most infamous crime Kissinger committed: a secret four-year bombing campaign in Cambodia that killed an untold number of civilians, despite the fact that it was a neutral nation with which the United States was not at war. During his time in charge of the American foreign policy machine, Kissinger also directed illegal arms sales to Pakistan as it carried out a brutal crackdown on its Bengali population in 1971. He supported the 1973 military coup that overthrew a democratically elected socialist government in Chile, gave the go-ahead to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor, and backed Argentina’s repressive military dictatorship as it launched its “dirty war” against dissenters and leftists in 1976. His policies during the Ford administration also fueled civil wars in Africa, most notably in Angola.

Stock Market Today: Dow, S&P Live Updates for November 28 - Bloomberg

The most-active investors in the Treasury market are as bullish Bloomberg Terminal as they’ve ever been, according to a weekly survey conducted by JPMorgan Chase & Co. since 1991. JPMorgan’s Treasury client survey for the week ended Nov. 27 found that 78% of active clients were positioned long relative to their benchmark, up from 56% the previous week. None of them were positioned short for a second straight week, for a 78% net long position that was the biggest in the history of the survey. The remaining respondents were neutral.