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[ilovemybettafish]

Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

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[ilovemybettafish]

“Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.”

— Ted Chiang’s essay about ChatGPT is required reading

[ilovemybettafish]

I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

[ilovemybettafish]

[ilovemybettafish]

Good fucking morning from Ukraine after the massive shelling by russia with almost everything they've got. I personally heard pretty loud explosions over my head. Thanks to our air defence I am alive.

But still there are lots of injured people across all the country as well as some dead.

"Gentle" reminder that russia is a terrorist state

Upd: the numbers of injured and killed are growing

[ilovemybettafish]

Not gonna lie, my morale is at the lowest point it's been since the beginning of the invasion. Russians are successfully occupying more and more territories and shell frontline regions every day. People are dying, our culture and herritage is destroyed. International aid dwindled significantly because of american bullshit. Mobilization law has been signed and there is a chance that my family members get conscripted soon. Don't even get me started on internal political problems. A bunch of articles in foreign media talking about our defeat and "peace talks" (what a joke).

It feels like there were no at least moderately good news in a while. On top of that, the feeling that we are screaming into the void is stronger than ever. I'm happy when I see a foreigner online supporting us and spreading the word, because it gets rarer. Ukrainians feel like none of what's happening gets outside our info bubble. Most likely no one but Ukrainians will see this post either. Honestly don't know what to make of all of this.

[ilovemybettafish]

by Ephraim D. Tepler and Itamar Marcus

In an incredible and rare admission, Fatah has corroborated what Israel has been saying all along: that Hamas is responsible for turmoil connected to distribution of the humanitarian aid sent into Gaza. A Fatah TV anchor reported that throughout the war, Hamas has been committing what is essentially a triple crime—it has attacked and killed aid workers in order to control aid distribution, stolen the food and water for itself, and caused food prices to skyrocket.

[ilovemybettafish]

[ilovemybettafish]

Source

[ilovemybettafish]

If Einstein was alive he would leave America now. Why do I assume that? Based on these points:

1. We see Jewish students and professors being denied entry to universities, exactly like Germany in the 1930s. One of the main reasons he left Germany was due to his academic career being affected by these bans on Jews.

2. Left Germany when antisemitism rose. We are now experiencing the biggest surge in antisemitism in America since the holocaust, and as opposed to the 1930s in the US, this time it's led by the mainstream and not fringe political cells.

3. Albert Einstein was a zionist. He supported his people's aspirations to reestablish their homeland in their ancestral land, and donated to the cause. He was even offered the position of the first president of Israel, but refused. He left his library to the Hebrew University after his death, and you can even go over his books in the University if you want, it's still there!

4. Jews are already leaving the American academy, and Israeli academy came out with a statement today that any Jewish person in academy is welcome to join and will receive support in any way needed to fit in and find a similar position. When you're denied education in one place but welcomed at another, you tend to choose those who want you, like the US has welcomed academic refugees from European universities in the 1930s.

I think it's safe to say that he wouldn't be happy with the direction the USA is taking. Just be careful, because last time Jews left a place due to antisemitism, they invented the atomic bomb. When Jewish minds come together, they achieve great things, and you don't want those minds to leave your country...

[ilovemybettafish]

[ilovemybettafish]

One should always have at least 2 craft projects going. That way, when one of them is messed up and misbehaving, you can switch to another, and let the first one sit there and think about what it's done.

[ilovemybettafish]

[ilovemybettafish]

"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

[ilovemybettafish]

Every Jew I know, and a lot of Jews I don't know, have repeatedly said that JVP represents Jews about as much as Autism Speaks represents autistic people, so you'd think there wouldn't be as many gentiles saying "look, this demonstration where people chanted explicitly Jew-hating slogans can't possibly be antisemitic! JVP was there!" and yet

[ilovemybettafish]

western feminists utterly abandoning iranian women, who have been protesting for their rights for a long ass time and who deal with some of the worst shit women anywhere will ever face, is so par for the course i don’t know why i’m even surprised anymore

[ilovemybettafish]

leftists when white supremacists are virulently antisemitic: if there’s four people sitting at a table with a nazi, there are five nazis.

leftists when islamists, arab supremacists, and leftists are virulently antisemitic: well of course there’s bad actors at every protest, and anyway these are just outside provocateurs, and they didn’t do anything really, but if they did it’s because those jews fucking deserved it