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These days I am organizing a collaborative effort to write an article on holistic optimization of experiments and complex systems. "So what is the news," I could hear say by one of my twentythree  faithful readers(cit.) of this blog. Well, the news is that I am making some progress in focusing on the way the interplay of hardware design and software reconstruction plays out in some typical systems, and I was thinking I could share some of those thoughts here, to stimulate a discussion, and who knows, maybe get some brilliant insight.

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A new computer simulation says that climate change may may ruin the tall beech trees common in Europe. Unfortunately, many other simulations already said it was too late to curb runaway emissions by India and China as of 2016.

For the last 2,000 years, the area from southern Sweden to central France has been a 
temperate deciduous forest zone, and beech tries thrived. The new estimate says that future summers will be warmer, drier and reminiscent of the Mediterranean climate, which are fine for people but not beech trees.

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We usually associate smell with bad things, like body odors or fire or a gas leak, but a keen sense of smell helps us enjoy food and other pleasures in life.

Many things cause loss of smell; aging is number one, but also brain injuries and loss of smell was a common complaint about COVID-19 infections. It's not a life-threatening condition, which may be why there are very few effective treatments.

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In all racket sports, a well-executed serve can establish a real advantage. Badminton is played by around 220 million people across the globe and a“spin serve” took badminton by storm when a Danish player at the Polish Open 2023 badminton tournament used it to dominant effect.

Like in table tennis, a spin-serve in badminton adds pre-spin before the racket touches the shuttlecock and the natural spin determined by its feathers’ inclination angles plus the pre-spin makes the flight trajectory even more unpredictable.

Naturally, instead of expecting players to adjust and improve, the community demanded the Badminton World Federation ban it. Coaches and players said extended rallies were more exciting for fans than good serves.

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The most common cancer-causing strain of human papillomavirus, HPV16, can reprogram immune cells surrounding the tumor to help cancer grow, and new work in mice blocking this process helped treatments prevent the spread of cancer.

HPV is common in humans and in most cases clears naturally but HPV16 is linked to over half of cervical cancer cases and roughly 90% of HPV throat cancers. The HPV vaccine can prevent those cancers if vaccination occurs prior to HPV exposure but young people are the first generation to have the vaccine readily available.

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You have probably heard the phrase “follow your gut” – often used to mean trusting your instinct and intuition. But in the context of the gut-brain axis, the phrase takes on a more literal meaning. Scientific research increasingly shows that the brain and gut are in constant, two-way communication. Once overlooked, this connection is now at the forefront of growing interest in neuroscience, nutrition and mental health.

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       Let’s write a letter to Donald Trump. Trigger warning: Lots of sarcasm here.

Not-so-dear Don,

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Until the 1980s, the modern-day Malthus acolytes like Drs. Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren predicted Population Bombs and advocated for government-mandated sterilization and abortion to prevent it.(1)

Science didn't buy into the doomsday narrative and the poor have benefited.

Rather than the world starvation social authoritarians claimed only they could prevent, food has become so plentiful and affordable that modern social authoritarians now demand poor people be banned from buying food that government panels segregate. For the first time in the history of planet earth, the poorest people can afford to be fat.(2)

That was not a problem for the poor even 50 years ago.(3)

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"If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program instead of independent investigator driven discovery, you'd have the best iron lung in the world, but not a polio vaccine." - Dr. Samuel Broder, M.D., former Director of the National Cancer Institute

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A new study describes a new liquid phase in thin films of a glass-forming molecules. These results demonstrate how these glasses and other similar materials can be fabricated to be denser and more stable, providing a framework for developing new applications and devices through better design.

New research has identified potential treatment that could improve the human immune system's ability to search out and destroy cancer cells within the body. Scientists have identified a way to restrict the activity of a group of cells which regulate the immune system, which in turn can unleash other immune cells to attack tumours in cancer patients.

University of Washington scientists have developed a statistical framework that incorporates key COVID-19 data -- such as case counts and deaths due to COVID-19 -- to model the true prevalence of this disease in the United States and individual states. Their approach projects that in the U.S. as many as 60% of COVID-19 cases went undetected as of March 7, 2021, the last date for which the dataset they employed is available.

Mice exposed to the opioid oxycodone before birth experience permanent changes in behavior and gene expression. The new research published in eNeuro highlights a need to develop safer types of painkillers for pregnant women.

Researchers have identified a rare class of genetic differences transmitted from parents without autism to their affected children with autism and determined that they are most prominent in "multiplex" families with more than one family member on the spectrum. These findings are reported in Recent ultra-rare inherited variants implicate new autism candidate risk genes, a new study published in Nature Genetics.

An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and the University of Åarhus in Denmark have discovered that bacteria from the plant microbiota are adapted to their host species. In a newly published study, they show how root-associated bacteria have a competitive advantage when colonizing their native host, which allows them to invade an already established microbiota.

A new study reports that among individuals who had an allergic reaction to their first mRNA COVID-19 vaccine dose, all who went on to receive a second dose tolerated it. Even some who experienced anaphylaxis following the first dose tolerated the second dose.

Researchers from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital and the University of Queensland have developed a new formulation based on regulatory T-cell exosomes (rEXS) to deliver vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibodies for choroidal neovascularization therapy.

Lonely, older adults are nearly twice as likely to use opioids to ease pain and two-and-a-half times more likely to use sedatives and anti-anxiety medications, putting themselves at risk for drug dependency, impaired attention, falls and other accidents, and further cognitive impairment, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco.

What The Study Did: Survey data were used to investigate the relationship between loneliness and high-risk medication use in adults older than age 65.

What The Study Did: The association between Medicare eligibility at age 65 and changes in racial and ethnic disparities in access to care and self-reported health was evaluated in this study.