#Postdoctoral Fellow

[dr-afsaeed]

Subscribe Youtube Channel For New Jobs and Scholarships

Subscribe Youtube Channel For New Jobs and Scholarships

[tenth-sentence]

Hsu had come from Chekiang University in China in 1948 to take a Ph.D at the University of Texas; now a postdoctoral fellow in human cytology at the medical branch of the university in Galveston, he was looking at cell nuclei in preparations of fetal spleen tissue.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles

[sagunpaudel]

Postdoctoral Opportunity in Public Health/Global Health

The Norwegian Institute of Public Health’s vision is better health for all. We produce, summarize and communicate knowledge for the public health sector and healthcare services. Our main activities are emergency preparedness, knowledge and infrastructure. Infrastructure comprises registries, health surveys, biobanks and laboratory services. The Institute is a government organization under the…

[amnhnyc]

Learn about the science behind fall foliage with Daniel Hooper, a postdoctoral fellow at the Museum. The next time you’re out leaf peeping or bird watching, give thought to carotenoids—the incredible pigments that make our worlds a little rosier. ���🦩🍁

[wachinyeya]

A historically and culturally significant lake in California's San Joaquin Valley that first disappeared in 1898 has returned after last year's atmospheric rivers flooded the region.

Tulare Lake, known as Pa'ashi — or "big water" — to the local Tachi Yokut Tribe, was "once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River," per Earth.com.

Vivian Underhill, who published a paper on Tulare Lake as a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeastern University, noted it was mostly sustained by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains and was 100 miles long and 30 miles wide at its peak.

The lake served as a key resource for Indigenous Peoples and wildlife and was once robust enough to allow steamships to transport agricultural goods throughout the state.

However, government officials persecuted and displaced the indigenous communities in the late 1800s to convert the area for farming through draining and irrigation.

"They really wanted to get [land] into private hands so that indigenous land claims — that were ongoing at that time — would be rendered moot by the time they went through the courts," Underhill told the Northeastern Global News. "It was a deeply settler colonial project."

While Pa'ashi periodically reappeared during the 1930s, '60s, and '80s, the barrage of atmospheric rivers California experienced in 2023 revived the lake despite the region receiving just 4 inches of rain annually. According to Underhill, Tulare Lake is now the same size as Lake Tahoe, which is 22 miles long and 12 miles wide.

Its resurgence has led to the return of humid breezes at least 10 degrees cooler than average and native species, including fish, amphibians, and birds. Lake Tulare was once a stopping point for migratory birds traveling a route known as the Pacific Flyway.

"Something that continues to amaze me is — [the birds] know how to find the lake again," Underhill told the Northeastern Global News. "It's like they're always looking for it."

The Tachi Yokuts have also returned to Pa'ashi's shores, once again practicing their ceremonies and planting tule reeds and native sage.

[mindblowingscience]

Strawberries could be fewer and more expensive because of higher temperatures caused by climate change, according to research from the University of Waterloo. Using a new method of analysis, the researchers found that a rise in temperature of 3 degrees Fahrenheit could reduce strawberry yields by up to 40%. Canada is a major importer of strawberries from California. In 2022, Canadian imports of strawberries from California were worth US$322.8 million. "This research shows how climate change can directly impact the foods we love, emphasizing the importance of sustainable farming practices to maintain a stable food supply for everyone," said Dr. Poornima Unnikrishnan, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at Waterloo.

Continue Reading.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

DM me if you have access to the attached study: I'd like to read it and it's paywalled.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital discovered that individuals exhibiting a wide range of long COVID symptoms were twice as likely to have SARS-CoV-2 proteins in their blood compared to those without such symptoms.

A new study suggests that a persistent infection may be the cause of long COVID symptoms in some people. Conducted by Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a key institution within the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, the research identified signs of ongoing infection in 43 percent of participants who reported cardiopulmonary, musculoskeletal, or neurologic symptoms associated with long COVID. These findings were published today (October 9) in Clinical Microbiology and Infection.

“If we can identify a subset of people who have persistent viral symptoms because of a reservoir of virus in the body, we may be able to treat them with antivirals to alleviate their symptoms,” said lead author Zoe Swank, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Advanced Detection Methods and Study Results The study analyzed 1,569 blood samples collected from 706 people, including 392 participants from the National Institutes of Health-supported Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, who had previously tested positive for a COVID infection. With a highly sensitive test they developed, researchers looked for whole and partial proteins from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They also analyzed data from the participants’ long COVID symptoms, using electronic medical chart information or surveys that were gathered at the same time as the blood samples were taken.

Compared to people who didn’t report long COVID symptoms, those who reported persisting symptoms affecting heart and lung, brain, and musculoskeletal systems many organ systems were approximately twice as likely to have SARS-CoV-2 proteins circulating in their blood. The research team was able to detect the spike protein and other components of the SARS-CoV-2 virus using Simoa, an ultrasensitive test for detecting single molecules. Commonly reported long COVID symptoms included fatigue, brain fog, muscle pain, joint pain, back pain, headache, sleep disturbance, loss of smell or taste, and gastrointestinal symptoms.

Specifically, 43% of those with long COVID symptoms affecting three major systems in the body, including cardiopulmonary, musculoskeletal, and neurologic systems, tested positive for viral proteins within 1 to 14 months of their positive COVID test. But only 21% of those who didn’t report any long COVID symptoms tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 biomarkers in this same period.

It’s possible that a persistent infection explains some – but not all – of the long COVID sufferers’ symptoms. If this is the case, testing and treatment could aid in identifying patients who may benefit from treatments such as antiviral medications.

Multiple Causes of Long COVID One of the questions raised by the study is why more than half of patients with wide-ranging long COVID symptoms tested negative for persistent viral proteins.

“This finding suggests there is likely more than one cause of long COVID,” said David Walt, PhD, a professor of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Principal Investigator on the study. “For example, another possible cause of long-COVID symptoms could be that the virus harms the immune system, causing immune dysfunction to continue after the virus is cleared.”

Ongoing Research and Future Directions To better understand whether an ongoing infection is behind some people’s long COVID symptoms, Swank, Walt and other researchers are currently conducting follow-up studies. They’re analyzing blood samples and symptom data in larger groups of patients, including people of wide age ranges and those with compromised immune symptoms. This way, they can also see if some people are more likely to have persistent virus in the body.

“There is still a lot that we don’t know about how this virus affects people,” said David C. Goff, M.D., Ph.D., a senior scientific program director for the RECOVER Observational Consortium Steering Committee and director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH. “These types of studies are critical to help investigators better understand the mechanisms underlying long COVID — which will help bring us closer to identifying the right targets for treatment.”

Goff added that these results also support ongoing efforts to study antiviral treatments.

The SARS-CoV-2 blood test developed by Brigham and Women’s researchers is also currently being used in a national study, called RECOVER-VITAL, that is testing whether an antiviral drug helps patients recover from long COVID. The RECOVER-VITAL trial will test the patients’ blood before and after treatment with an antiviral to see if treatment eliminates persistent viral proteins in the blood.

Potential Viral Persistence in Other Diseases The idea that a virus can stay in the body and cause ongoing symptoms months after an infection isn’t unique to COVID. “Other viruses are associated with similar post-acute syndromes,” said Swank. She noted animal studies have found Ebola and Zika proteins in tissues post-infection, and these viruses have also been associated with post-infection illness.

Reference: “Measurement of circulating viral antigens post-SARS-CoV-2 infection in a multicohort study” 9 October 2024, Clinical Microbiology and Infection. DOI: 10.1016/j.cmi.2024.09.001 www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(24)00432-4/abstract (PAYWALLED)

[mysticstronomy]

HOW OLD IS PHOENIX A* BLACK HOLE??

Blog#380

Saturday, March 2nd, 2024.

Welcome back,

Black holes are the most massive objects that we know of in the Universe. Not stellar mass black holes, not supermassive black holes (SMBHs,) but ultra-massive black holes (UMBHs.) UMBHs sit in the center of galaxies like SMBHs, but they have more than five billion solar masses, an astonishingly large amount of mass. The largest black hole we know of is Phoenix A, a UMBH with up to 100 billion solar masses.

How can something grow so massive?

UMBHs are rare and elusive, and their origins are unclear. A team of astrophysicists working on the question used a simulation to help uncover the formation of these massive objects. They traced UMBH’s origins back to the Universe’s ‘Cosmic Noon‘ around 10 to 11 billion years ago.

Their paper is “Ultramassive Black Holes Formed by Triple Quasar Mergers at z = 2,” and it’s published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The lead author is Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian.

“We found that one possible formation channel for ultra-massive black holes is from the extreme merger of massive galaxies that are most likely to happen in the epoch of the ‘cosmic noon,'” said Ni.

UMBHs are extremely rare. Creating them in scientific simulations requires a massive, complex simulation. This is where Astrid comes in. It’s a large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulator that runs on the Frontera supercomputer at the University of Texas, Austin. Astrid’s large-scale simulations can track things like dark matter, temperature, metallicity, and neutral hydrogen.

Simulations like Astrid are ranked by the number of particles their simulations contain, and Astrid is at the top of that list.

“The science goal of Astrid is to study galaxy formation, the coalescence of supermassive black holes, and re-ionization over the cosmic history,” said lead author Ni in a press release. (Ni is a co-developer of Astrid.) A powerful tool like Astrid needs a powerful supercomputer. Luckily, UT Austin has the most powerful academic supercomputer in the USA.

“Frontera is the only system that we performed Astrid from day one. It’s a pure Frontera-based simulation,” she explained.

Astronomers know that galaxies grow large through mergers, and it’s likely that SMBHs grow more massive at the same time. But UMBHs are even more massive and much rarer. How do they form?

The team’s work with Astrid delivered an answer.

“What we found are three ultra-massive black holes that assembled their mass during the cosmic noon, the time 11 billion years ago when star formation, active galactic nuclei (AGN), and supermassive black holes, in general, reach their peak activity,” Ni said.

Originally published on www.universetoday.com

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, March 6th, 2024)

"A GALAXY THAT HAS NO STARS??"

[theburialofstrawberries]

"1987’s Fatal Attraction is generally credited with kicking off the erotic thriller craze proper, though the format had been germinating in mainstream cinema since the start of the decade via Brian de Palma’s Hitchcockian 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill and Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 steamfest Body Heat. In her 2008 memoir Send Yourself Roses, Body Heat star Kathleen Turner argues that it was precisely because they were working in an old-Hollywood framework that they were able to get away with the sexual explicitness that would set the tone for the ensuing decade: “Film noir has a formality and shape to it. Its very familiar form allowed people to accept more readily the daring content that we were presenting.”

Williams writes that erotic thrillers “operate with a constant awareness of masturbation as a prime audience response and index of the film’s success,” and it only follows that they thrived on home video. A 1993 USA Today article called the erotic thriller “one of the fastest-growing genres in video stores,” reporting that these “dressed-up and sexed-up B-movies,” could be made cheaply and quickly. But while the direct-to-video market was an important part of the overall narrative of the erotic thriller, I’m much more interested in what Hollywood got away with in the light of day (which is to say, the glow of the multiplex’s silver screen).

“The best thing to me about the erotic thriller is it takes everything that is usually sort of treated in ellipses and film and just looks at it directly for as long as it takes,” Dr. Veronica Fitzpatrick told me recently by phone. Fitzpatrick is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in modern culture and media at Brown University, an erotic thrillers enthusiast, and a contributor to the online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room, whose July issue focuses on the erotic thriller. Fitzpatrick recalled being “blown away” by the camera lingering on the sex between Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke during a recent viewing of 9 1/2 Weeks. “It just goes on so much past the duration of what it takes for you to understand, OK, they’re having sex now,” she said."

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Off-the-shelf thermoelectric generators can upgrade CO₂ into useful chemicals, which could aid Mars colonization

Readily available thermoelectric generators operating under modest temperature differences can power CO2 conversion, according to a proof-of-concept study by chemists at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The findings open up the intriguing possibility that the temperature differentials encountered in an array of environments—from a typical geothermal installation on Earth to the cold, desolate surface of Mars—could power the conversion of CO2 into a range of useful fuels and chemicals. "The environment on Mars really got me interested in the long-term potential of this technology combination," says Dr. Abhishek Soni, postdoctoral research fellow at UBC and first author of the paper published in Device. "This is a harsh environment where large temperature differences could be leveraged to not only generate power with thermoelectric generators, but to convert the abundant CO2 in Mars' atmosphere into useful products that could supply a colony."

Read more.

[cellarspider]

Good lord I take a week off of tumblr and now there’s a lot of you

Hello to everyone who’s just followed me in the past week! Most of you have come from a long ramble of mine on interdisciplinary learning, medieval head trauma, and Gallus’ well-wishings on my recent graduation (https://www.tumblr.com/gallusrostromegalus/727017193756327936), thank you to Gallus for that. Thank you to those of you who’ve commented with kind words as well. Specific shout-outs, links to relevant rambles, and questions are below, in the section “Link Roundup and Shoutouts”.

Yes, this is a post with sections. This is how we roll here.

Introduction to Spider

For those who don’t know, I’m Spider! I’ve just gotten my PhD in Mammalian Genetics, having gotten a Masters in Informatics and a Bachelors in Medieval Studies before that. I’ll quite happily ramble about any of them, with the following caveats: an undergraduate degree means I know the basics, but they may be increasingly out of date. And advanced degrees are increasingly specialized in their scope as you go along—you gain the skills to more easily understand things from related specialties, but you only become truly, deeply knowledgeable on very specific topics. However, these topics are not always limited to the field of study generally expected by the degree-granting institution! My focus ended up being significantly divergent from everyone else’s, which resulted in an interesting challenge of communicating my project to others at the institute.

The field I dove into for my PhD was systems genetics. Rather than studying individual genes and how they function, my work examined the wider view: think the difference between a local weather forecast versus modeling the global climate. Both synthesize vast amounts of information, just on different scales and levels of detail.

Many people love studying the tiny details around individual genes, because they can dig down into the mechanisms that make the gene work, how it might break and cause disease, and maybe how to fix those diseases. My love is for the global view of things, which gives you the ability to characterize general statements about how genes are regulated and modified. It’s a field that’s very hard to study without good data that’s complicated to acquire, so it’s a very exciting subject to work on! I’m looking forward to carrying that on into a postdoctoral study, in which I’ll work with a new lab and learn the dreaded skill of grant writing. I’ll be starting this month!

…As Gallus mentioned, my time until then is very much devoted to Baldur’s Gate 3. Happily for me, the new research group I’ll be joining has also been going nuts for Baldur’s Gate 3, so I’ll have a lot to talk about with my coworkers once I’m back to the lab.

In my free time, I’m happy to ramble upon request about the subjects I love, including but not limited to my fields of academic study, my constructed language hobby, scientific ethics and its portrayal in media, creepy-crawlies (always appropriately tagged for people’s phobias), and Baldur’s Gate 3.

…Lots of Baldur’s Gate 3. (I’ve only just reached the Lost Light Inn, please no spoilers!)

Link Roundup and Shoutouts

For those who are interested to see my ramble about why European medical texts in the medieval period tended to be terrible, it’s available here: https://www.tumblr.com/cellarspider/680342023316930560/hi-please-rant-about-medieval-european-medical

Thank you to all those who dug up the name of the academic text I’d forgotten! Its title, in all its wordy glory, is Injuries of the skull and brain, as described in the myths, legends, and folk-tales of the various peoples of the world, with some comments on the significance and reliability of this information in evaluating contemporary concepts as to their nature and lethality by Cyril B. Courville, 1967. It’s a fantastic book, and good lord that title just does not stop

Thank you to fellow spiders @one-spider-from-mars and @vaspider for their comments. We are many. We are mighty.

Thank you to @belovedbright for the fantastic story of the death of Conchobar mac Nessa via brain trauma inflicted by a brain https://www.tumblr.com/belovedbright/727132485919604736

To @doomhamster's question on whether egg whites were used in the medieval treatment of burns: I don’t know! Unfortunately I can’t access the translation of the medical manual I referred to back then (https://worldcat.org/title/1123716578), and the only version I can find online at the moment is in 14th century French (https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Sloane_MS_1977). Egg whites do appear 33 times in the translation, according to the limited ability I have to search the text, and they show up throughout the book.

[docgold13]

Batman: The Animated Series - Paper Cut-Out Portraits and Profiles

Harleen Quinzel

Once a talented albeit unscrupulous psychiatrist, Doctor Harleen Frances Quinzel came to work at Arham Asylum for her postdoctoral internship. Therein she met The Joker and in her youthful ambition believed that she could successfully treat the so-called clown prince of crime. At first it seemed as though Dr. Quinzel was making excellent progress with The Joker.  And yet it turned out that The Joker was slowly and successfully indoctrinating the young woman into his own twisted outlook on the world.  Employing a string of lies and false accounts, The Joker was able to make Quinzel see him as the victim.  Before she knew it, Quinzel was hopelessly and nearly irrevocably entranced by the villain. 

Fashioning herself a harlequin outfit along with a variety of thematic weapons, Quinzel broke The Joker out of Arkham and thus began a colorful career as Harley Quinn, the Joker’s partner in crime.  In her delusional state, Harley never saw The Joker as actually hurting anyone; he was merely bringing mirth and mayhem into their otherwise dull lives.  Similarly, Harley was unable to appreciate the abusive nature of her relationship with The Joker, how he mistreated her and took her for granted.  It was only through her loving relationship with fellow villainess, Poison Ivy, that Harley enjoyed a respite from the toxic thrall of The Joker.  

The wonderful Arleen Sorkin provided the voice for Quinzel, with the character first appearing in the seventh episode of the first season of Batman: The Animated Series, ‘Joker’s Favor.’       

[krchar]

To all W.I.T.C.H. folks:

An online colleague in the field of w.i.t.c.h. fan-vibes informed us that there is an actual research on w.i.t.c.h. fans and the role of magical girl stories going on at the University of Toronto, yes, people, we are that important to the world

So if you have a while you can take part in this survey, it is really fun :)

[amnhnyc]

Research alert! A new study, led by scientists from the Museum and the City University of New York, on the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano in Spain’s Canary Islands suggests that on-the-ground volcanic ash studies could be used as a near-real-time monitoring and forecasting tool.

Cumbre Vieja had been dormant for 50 years when it started erupting in the fall of 2021. Samantha Tramontano, a Kathryn W. Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum and a faculty member in the Master of Arts in Teaching program, was a student at CUNY at the time and had the rare chance to implement a system to collect the volcanic ash produced by the eruption along with her advisor, CUNY’s Marc-Antoine Longpré. For three months in 2021, a team from the Museum, CUNY, and Spanish geologic agencies collected falling ash in buckets and carefully labeled the daily samples for future chemical analysis. The samples were sent back to the Museum for study with an electron microprobe.

The research team, which published their work in the journal Nature Geoscience last week, is the first to capture daily changes in melt chemistry at an active volcano. Read about their findings in our latest blog post.