Links for you. Science:
High concentrations of floating neustonic life in the plastic-rich North Pacific Garbage Patch (good explainer thread with great pictures and video here)
Deep immunological imprinting due to the ancestral spike in the current bivalent COVID-19 vaccine
Letter to a Medical Student: There Is No Elite RCT Strike Force
The D.C. Region’s Ash Trees Are Dying Off. This Project Is Documenting The Few Groves Still Living
‘Too greedy’: mass walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
A Mutation Turned Ants Into Parasites in One Generation. A new genetics study of ant “social parasites” shows how complex sets of features can emerge rapidly and potentially split species.
Other:
What has gotten into Republican women? GOP women freak out over losing reproductive rights, but embrace cruelty when it’s someone else’s rights at stake
How the media can cover Trump better this time
THE RINGLEADER’S LAST(?) CIRCUS: Observations from inside the Proud Boys Seditious Conspiracy Trial
Mass shootings, homicide, and suicide in the USA
With Malice Aforethought: The Killing of Jordan Neely and the Virtual Lynch Mob
Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible
Do Evangelicals Think Trump Is Jesus?
Cute! New York Times Helps Elizabeth Holmes Launder Her Reputation Before Prison
He Marched At The Nazi Rally In Charlottesville. Then He Went Back To Being A Cop. An exclusive HuffPost report confirms that Massachusetts police officer John Donnelly played a key role in the violent Unite the Right rally five years ago.
Enough is enough. Clarence Thomas must resign — or be impeached.
Democrats may not retake control of Supreme Court until 2065 unless they expand the bench: legal experts
Indoctrination Nation: Convinced schools are brainwashing kids to be left-wingers, conservatives are seizing control of the American classroom.
The Gun Industry Wants America’s Malls and Schools to Be War Zones
The Crypto-Reactionary Deficit Scolds: Squint at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and you see MAGA conservatives endorsing legislative hostage-taking.
Independents back abortion rights. They’re less sure Democrats do.
Pickleball is the worst (the curmudgeon is strong in this one)
Leonard Bishop Wants to Give Incarcerated People Access to D.C. Council Hearings and ANC Meetings
These ten books are considered pornography in Ron DeSantis’ Florida
Why The Right Will Never, Ever Support Gun Control
The Democrats Need to Destroy Clarence Thomas’s Reputation
We Should Not Endure a King
Jim Jordan spends 65 pages demanding that 51 private citizens be silenced.
Students can’t get off their phones. Schools have had enough.
Charlize Theron vows to ‘f**k anybody up’ who comes for LGBTQ+ people
A D.C. fentanyl case shows how hard the opioid problem is
Savvy and Irreverent
mikethemadbiologist
That letter to a medical student was excellent, though I think the author could have made a stronger argument in Challenge 1. Even if you ignore informed consent and had billions of dollars and magical medical fairies to do your bidding, I can’t imagine how you could design an RCT to figure out if allowing hospital visitors or not had a public health impact during COVID.
A decision had to be made, and they made it on basic principles. The hospitals were jammed with seriously ill patients with an unfamiliar contagious disease. The staff was under stress. Many were out sick. PPE was in short supply. Limited elevator capacity alone would have been a good argument against allowing visitors, and – basic principle – all hospitals have limited elevator capacity even without COVID.