Month: October 2023
The Kaiser strike is just part of the problem with the U.S. health care
Health care workers in the US went on a four-day strike on Sunday over workplace conditions. Six of 19 stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers in 2023 were in health care. The unions said Kaiser Permanente engaged in unfair labour practices, refusing to bargain in good faith to solve the staffing crisis. They added that more people would be incentivised to stay at Kaiser.
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According to the European climate agency, Earth is on track for its warmest year yet
The average temperature in September was 0.93C above the 1991-2020 average for September, making it the warmest month since Copernicus Climate Change Service started keeping records 83 years ago. Earth is on track for a warmest year ever, with an average temperature of about 2.5C hotter than pre-industrial times. The global threshold goal of 1.5C is for long-term temperature averages.
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The UK Biobank has rare variant associations with plasma protein levels
We identified all variants reported in the NHGRI-EBI catalogue of human GWAS74 in high LD with sentinel pQTLs based on UKB-BI data and Icelandic SomaScan data. In addition to high LD between the disease-associated variant and both the pQTL and a variant in the credible set, we estimated the posterior probability of statistical colocalization for the variants associating with disease and protein levels when they were not identical.
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Large-scale comparisons of genes and diseases
To determine the colocalization of coronavirus variants, we identified a 95% credible set of variants likely to include the causal variant76. We identified primary associations through clumping 1 Mb around the significant variants using PLINK60. An enrichment analysis hypergeometric test was performed to estimate enrichment of the associated pQTL variants in specific consequence or regulatory genomic regions.
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SBF on trial: Is he a math nerd or was his empire built on lies?
Former FTX CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, on Monday pleaded not guilty to seven charges of fraud and money laundering. Bankman-Fried is facing trial in New York for allegedly running a Ponzi scheme and defrauding customers, investors and lenders by selling stock in FTX and borrow millions from lenders by lying. Bankman-Fried’s former roommate Adam Yedidia also testified at the trial.
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The pioneers of vaccine invention won the medicine portion of the prize
Katalin Karik and Drew Weissmann have won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries that enabled the development of COVID-19 vaccines. “The ideas [that] she and Drew Weismanndeveloped were critical for the success of RNA vaccines,” said John Tregoning, a vaccine immunologist at Imperial College London, in a press statement for the UK Science Media Centre.
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