Sandra Laurentino

HT @redpenblackpen.bsky.social #rejection #academia

As someone who is also trying to reach C1 and has to give a class in German next month I applaude you 👏

Who was Ada Lovelace? What were her greatest achievements? This ‘infoposter’ describes Lovelace’s achievements and describes why she’s thought of as the world’s first computer programmer.
findingada.com/resou... #ALD25

Uma curiosidade: carta de Bertrand Russel a Oswald Mosley, líder dos fascistas ingleses antes da Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Any plans to extend it to PacBio as well?

Picture of Azim Surani in a dark blue jumper and light blue collared shirt sitting by a microscope.

An Interview with Azim Surani

Ashley Moffett and @geraldinejowett.bsky.social spoke to Azim, recipient of both the 2025 Kyoto Prize and 2026 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, about his non-traditional and inspirational route into academia:

journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Absolutely inspiring interview 😍

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt win 2025 Nobel economics prize Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt won the 2025 Nobel economics prize for "having explained innovation-driven economic growth", the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said on Monday.

BREAKING: Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt win the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics for having explained innovation-driven economic growth, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said reut.rs/4olW4bE

So I'm not the only one! I've also been bombarded by it in the last few weeks, I don't remember it happening last year.

Eu sou muito oldschool, tenho um filofax e compro só os inserts todos os anos, mas em formato pocket porque os A5 são grandes demais para mim.

Há uma palavra que se aplica à decisão do Comité Nobel de Oslo de ter resistido à incomensurável pressão a que foi sujeito por parte de um poderoso auto-designado candidato ao Prémio Nobel da Paz: dignidade. A palavra seria coragem se a nomeada tivesse sido Francesca Albanese.

it's wild that R, the ubiquitous statistical computing language, was co-created by a Māori prof (Ross Ihaka) — and yet the vast majority of scientists who use R don't know

this is like inventing the toaster. possibly the largest impact of a single member of an indigenous community on modern science

Rogério Colaço: “A desistência por falta de condições económicas para concluir os cursos é um crime social” Rogério Colaço, presidente do Instituto Superior Técnico da Universidade de Lisboa, diz que o estrangulamento da ciência no país é a falta de financiamento. “Não se pode pedir omeletes sem ovos.”

"Nunca, em sítio nenhum do mundo, fundir instituições e criar uma megainstituição originou aumento de agilidade e eficiência. Originou sempre perda de eficiência. É a única coisa que posso dizer sobre a ANI e a FCT. Mas estamos aqui para ver."

www.publico.pt/2025/10/09/c...

Hoje é dia mundial da saúde mental.

Uma saudação especial para todos os que defendem que pessoas com doença mental não deviam poder nem reproduzir, nem votar.

Fuck you very much.

Ao resto do pessoal: hang in there!

Sir John Gurdon, 1933-2025 | Wellcome A Nobel-winning scientist of great modesty and humour, John Gurdon died on 7 October. He made a discovery that opened up the field of cloning research, and created one of the best environments for res...

A Nobel-winning scientist of great modesty and humour, John Gurdon died on 7 Oct. Not only did he make a discovery that laid the foundations for stem cell research, he also created one of the best environments for research at the Wellcome/CRUK Gurdon Institute wellcome.org/news/sir-joh...

Long-read sequencing reveals telomere inheritance patterns from human trios Telomeres are essential for maintaining genomic integrity and are associated with cellular aging and disease, yet the factors influencing their inheritance across generations remain poorly understood....

This suggest that telomere maintenance in sperm is more robust than in oocytes and impacts the inherited telomeres. Full paper is below. Curious to know what you think as this is a new area for us!
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congratulations! Beautiful work and confirming once again the curious paternal age effect on telomere length.

Amateurs

Sperm sequencing reveals extensive positive selection in the male germline - Nature A combination of whole-genome NanoSeq with deep whole-exome and targeted NanoSeq is used to accurately characterize mutation rates and genes under positive selection in sperm cells.

Now published! Our paper on:
(1) Accurate sequencing of sperm at scale
(2) Positive selection of spermatogenesis driver mutations across the exome
(3) Offspring disease risks from male reproductive aging
[1/n]
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Congratulations!!!

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

Khalidi Library, from the opening c. 1900. From right: Hajj Raghib al-Khalidi, Sheikh Taher al-Jaza’ireh (from Damascus), Sheikh Musa Shafiq al-Khalidi, Sheikh Khalil al-Khalidi, Sheikh Muhammad al-Habbal (from Beirut) Costumes and characters, etc. Mohammedan sheikhs and effendies in front of Bibboth Khaldieh, Jerusalem https://loc.gov/pictures/resource/matpc.06804/

The Race to Save a Medieval Palestinian Library

Ryan Byrnes on the Khalidi Family’s Battle to Protect Their Library From Ultra-Orthodox Settlers

lithub.com/the-race-to-...

#books #libraries

Obsessed with this Journal of Immaterial Science article 🔥

"For too long, we have outsourced how we define prestige to the indexers and specifically the impact factor. This has created a system in which the need to get published in prestigious journals creates bad incentives for authors to inflate their findings to tell a good story."

We've found a new low in individualizing climate responsibility.

RIP to one of the greats

Medicine Nobel goes to scientists who revealed secrets of immune system ‘regulation’ Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi discovered cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.

I would remiss if I didn't have a whoop about Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering immune cells — regulatory T cells — that help to prevent the body from attacking its own tissues

Drawing Horror A cover for Público

My latest cover illustration for @publico.pt

The Left Can’t Abandon Nostalgia to the Right The global right today excels at leveraging nostalgia for reactionary ends. Yet memories of periods of revolutionary hope and collective victories can provide the materials for a form of nostalgia tha...

Nice reading:

The Left Can’t Abandon Nostalgia to the Right

jacobin.com/2025/10/port...