Country-level incidence of Alzheimer disease and related dementias is associated with increased omega-6-PUFA consumption - Communications Medicine Ciesielski et al. address the weaknesses of individual-level studies for population-level inference on the role of lipid consumption in dementia. In cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of 183 co...

Link between national levels of lipid consumption and dementia incidence - led by Tim Ciesielski - @timcies.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Studies that address a small section of the story can be statistically significant but utterly meaningless with respect to the real question. Perspective and context are so important but so often ignored.

Duke School of Medicine plans salary cuts for tenured faculty who do not meet grant expectations Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the School’s basic sciences units. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasing...

www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025...

Quote:
"Notably, those with large administrative roles including department chairs and dean/provost level roles are also exempt."
We are all in this together aren't we? Or where does the buck stop - at the lowest lever we can blame!

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

This is a message that cannot be emphasized enough!!

Sepsis research: Heterogeneity as a foundation rather than an afterthought Our understanding of sepsis has been hampered by the implicit assumption that sepsis is a homogeneous disease. In this issue of Cell Genomics, Burnham et al. have started to characterize the genetic v...

Context matters.
Heterogeneity exists.

We ignore these at our peril.

These principles are certainly relevant in biomedical research (as I discuss), but they may be generalizable. They may apply to other parts of life (which is super odd given what I just said).

www.cell.com/cell-genomic...

And who is bext?

Opinion | This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/o...

This should be read by all University administrators. And I fear the more elite the school the worse the problem

Checkout this article I found at PLOS: dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

We are trying to set standards -

Even when people agree to review papers - if they are grumpy or disenchanted with the system review quality suffers. We are there now. Also, review requires adequate perspective - something we are in short supply of these days. as training is about product not learning how to do things properly

Uncovering causal gene-tissue pairs and variants through a multivariate TWAS controlling for infinitesimal effects Nature Communications - Polygenic background effects can confound transcriptome-wide association studies aimed at identifying causal genes. Here, the authors show that TGVIS improves gene and...

rdcu.be/ewkvo

The loss of complex thinking??

Context is perhaps the single most important thing in understanding disease risk. Virtually noting is deterministic and even likelihood is soft.

The power of pseudoscience to the uneducated mind is frightening and has implications

Welcome to the brave new world. Will only get worse in short term

Two questions: What is the right thing to do? and what will doing this cost me? The order in which you ask these questions matters

How close are we to when AI generated text will be the epitome of intellectual advancement? At that point we no longer serve any purpose as a species and extinction may be the logical outcome. Talking about the meaning of life - this defines an entire new set of questions.

All for blue books

Hope it holds!!

A proposal for a new requirement to get co-authorship - agreeing to cite the paper at least once within the 24 months following publication. This will drive up everyone's h index, especially for consortia papers.

To get my mind off the crazy rest of the world - has anyone looked at the correlation between the number of authors of a paper and the number of citations?

He is one of many who choose to trust known liars

Yes

Is this the new look of a scientist in the US?

Double.

Does performing numerous small, bureaucratic tasks dull your ability to think deeply about a few important things?

A similar kind of perversion. I remember in the 80s when gad student friends of mine got audited by the IRS. They did nothing wrong and paid nothing more and even if they did would it pay for agent time? And millionaires went free of scrutiny at the same time

Yes, how many in the business world get anything like that kind of review. And remember tenure is historically in place to protect academics who study unpopular things!

Failure to replicate a genetic association may provide important clues about genetic architecture - PubMed Replication has become the gold standard for assessing statistical results from genome-wide association studies. Unfortunately this replication requirement may cause real genetic effects to be missed....

How often do we actually expect experiments ot replicate exactly in biology? The systems are complex and designs usually are not precisely reproduced. What the lack of replication tells us maybe the better question - assuming things are carefully done.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19503614/

think we know!

Perhaps the biggest impediment to gaining new knowledge is our arrogance about what we already know