Well that didn't last long. Hospital admissions look like they are bottoming out for now. Too early for XBB so maybe due to an increase in CH.1.1.
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Clare Wilson
@ClareWilsonMed
New Scientist medical journalist. Personal account. Clare.Wilson(at)newscientist.com. Read my stories at bit.ly/3lykDl5 Weekly newsletter bit.ly/2NPDv0F
LondonJoined June 2011
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PHW had noticed that asymptomatic testing in care homes produced far higher numbers of positives from this one lab: 2.66 vs 0.45%. This was deeply statistically implausible. They had also spotted that a lot of the positives were very weak - suggesting contamination
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I love this picture of a wolf, supplied by the researcher, who found wolves have switched to a sea food diet after eating all the local deer. Looks like he's saying: "Yeah, I eat sea otters now - so what?"
Emotional blunting is one of the commonest side effects from SSRI antidepressants. Now more light has been shed on how these medicines affect our reward sensitivity abilities
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This week I covered a campaign against the ban on fluids for two hours before surgery. Looks like it is doing us more harm than good. But what other infamous medical U-turns are out there? I explore a few in Saturday's Health Check newsletter. Sign up here
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Message to all I communicate with electronically: I'm going to stop putting an exclamation mark after I say "Thanks" going forward. Please don't take it personally, I'm doing this with everyone as a time-saving measure.
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Is this saying the quiet part out loud in journal impact factor manipulation?
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Whoa.
Manuscript sent to @ScienceDirect's International Journal of Hydrogen Energy gets desk-rejected because it did not have enough citations from its own journal.
That is one way to get an impact factor of 7.
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came up with a groundbreaking new way to tweet to make sure no one gets mad at you
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Great piece on piss-taking companies that still blame covid for poor service. Now we need a snappy name for it - Covid-Excusing? OK that's rubbish, does anyone have a better one?
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Three years since the start of Covid, why are so many companies and organisations *still* offering rubbish customer service?
This week’s column for @TimesBusiness:
thetimes.co.uk/article/0e335b
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More about the reasons why that happens at bnacredibility.org.uk/our-manifesto and bnacredibility.org.uk/what-is-credib
read image description
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Flu arrived early and hit pretty hard this year. But it’s all over bar the shouting. Hospital admissions with flu have plummeted in the last 3 weeks.
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl
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1980s called. It wants its Cosmopolitan cover back.
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This is a disgrace @BBCWorld. Jacinda Ardern has been a longstanding leader and international hero. Because of her, many more women have bigger aspirations and will enjoy bigger successes. She did it all.
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The replication crisis in science is now so bad, scientific bodies have to give prizes to people trying to stop the publishing of flawed/fraudulent research. Here's my long read on the how the problems should be fixed. bit.ly/3XFryfd
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The 2023 BNA Credibility Prizes recognise outstanding efforts to make neuroscience as credible as possible.
There's a cash prize for the student category, and all winners receive passes to our 2023 International Festival of Neuroscience.
Full details: bnacredibility.org.uk/prizes
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New Scientist news meeting has just been stunned by the fact that star fish seem to have been rebranded as sea stars and no one told us
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It is basically impossible to explain what a Mendelian randomisation study is in simple language in one sentence, isn't it?
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Changes in SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels in England by age: Dec 2020 to Dec 2022
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no worries
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We may need to completely rethink the causes of most mental health conditions – as I explain in Saturday’s Health Check, New Scientist’s free weekly health news email. Sign up here
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The Economist's on the risks of people taking psychedelics to try to improve their mental health
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One brain network may be behind 6 different mental health conditions: depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar, addiction, OCD
UK cases of strep A and scarlet fever are now falling, says UKHSA bit.ly/3ivAUva
Children living near small airports are being exposed to dangerous levels of lead, from the leaded fuel still used by small planes
It is normal for young children to get up to 11 respiratory infections a year and half the time symptoms last longer than 10 days, says in his latest substack
This is a really helpful short thread on one of the problems with talking about consciousness research - "consciousness" has several meanings
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Discussions of consciousness would be really clarified if people defined the sense in which they mean it by contrast with antonyms: non-conscious, un-conscious, sub-conscious...
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Going to watch Avatar 2 soon, so have already started dehydrating myself in preparation - a 3-hour-plus film should have a toilet break.
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Come on You guys can stop this in its tracks. You've got the title of the paper under review at one of your journals, just look it up. Then please publicly name and shame the authors. If your submission agreements don't permit this, then change them. 😼
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We just found a new anatomical structure in the brain – and it might shed light on Alzheimer’s disease. Find out more in tomorrow’s Health Check, New Scientist’s free weekly health newsletter, sent to your inbox every Saturday – sign up here
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No idea who made this but it's absolutely ruined me
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It is impossible for me not to see these as little arms waving about.
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A short clip of the incredible pyruvate dehydrogenase complex (from the Krebs cycle) in action via @DNA_RNA_Uni
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You may have never seen DNA imaged with an electron microscope, so here it is
[source: bit.ly/2yd7EB8]
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It is a moving picture, but sadly there are many fewer organ transplants in Japan than there could be, because of cultural and legal obstacles to organ donation after death
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This is so moving.
#organdonation twitter.com/SaleyhaAhsan/s…
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Do these authors just tweet "Told you so" once a day?
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Paper in PNAS submitted June 2020– predicted non-COVID infection outbreaks due to 
susceptible population pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn
susceptible population pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn
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Similar to US
covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tra
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Plot twist.
Greta ordered the pizzas.
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Could new parents be sent home from hospital with a batch of these tests for giving out to relatives? But they need a better name than multiplex.
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Lots of potential for rethinking how we keep infections away from vulnerable groups... As one example, standard advice is to not visit newborns if you've got viral symptoms – why not supplement this with additional info from a multiplex rapid test? twitter.com/TAH_Sci/status…
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What would be the point of stopping people arriving from China when there are more than a million people with covid currently in UK? And China is the last place you'd expect an immunity-evading variant to arise, as there is so little immunity there compared with other countries.
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