In the previous post I have described some of the main functionalities of the RadiaCode 103 radiation spectrometer, which the company graciously made available for my tests. Here I want to discuss some additional tests I have done, using radioactive samples from my minerals collection as well as a couple of test sources we have in our Physics department in Padova.

Scientists led by Dr. Pamela Ting have reported the discovery and characterization of the first molecular glue degraders of the WIZ transcription factor for fetal hemoglobin derepression in Sickle Cell Disease, which means a pill-based therapy for humans could begin development.

Sickle Cell Disease is a genetic life-threatening condition caused by mutation in β-hemoglobin. Inducing fetal hemoglobin safely has been the goal for years but has remained out-of-reach. The discovery of dWIZ-1 and dWIZ-2 molecular glue degraders of the WIZ transcription factor that induce HbF in erythroblasts is a milestone toward a pill for therapy. The authors say WIZ is a previously unknown repressor of HbF.

A few days ago I put my hands on a RadiaCode 103, a pocket radiation counter, dosimeter, and spectrometer that has recently appeared on the market. The company that produces it, RadiaCode, is located in Cyprus (see https://radiacode.com). The instrument is a portable device that pairs up with a smartphone or a PC for maximum functionality, but can well operate as a standalone unit to provide quite a bit more functionality than the standard monitoring and dosimeter capabilities of other instruments.
Here is the unit as it comes, packaged in a style similar to that of smartphones. The package contains the unit and a USB-C cable, plus a card with a QR-code link to the manuals and software.

There are five professions(1) but lots of occupations and trades lay claim to being the oldest one despite predating the concept by millennia.

Farming is around 14,000 years old but a new study reveals one less-considered trade predates it by tens of thousands of years: fashion.

Humans wore clothing prior to that, but fashion is a different animal skin. It is clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity. Paleolithic eyed needles are now known to be as old as 40,000 years, and with it came the evolution of dressing. 

Time and again, I play a "good" blitz chess game. In blitz chess you have 5 minutes thinking for the totality of your game. This demands quick reasoning and a certain level of dexterity - with the mouse, if you are playing online as I usually do.
My blitz rating on the chess.com site hovers around 2150-2200 elo points, which puts me at the level of a strong candidate master or something like that, which is more or less how I would describe myself. But time is of course running at a slower, but more unforgiving pace in my life, and I know that my sport prowess is going to decline - hell, it has already. So it makes me happy when I see that I can still play a blitz game at a decent level. Today is one of those days.

Suicide is the runaway leader in gun deaths in the United States and a new demography paper says more government control of the alcohol business might provide a solution for that, and homicides also.

This was a statistical analysis, so only EXPLORATORY, but they correlate more restrictive alcohol laws with a reduction in specific states’ homicide rates. The authors at RAND used the Alcohol Policy Scale index, which measures state-year alcohol policy environments, higher is more social authoritarian, lower is more freedom, plus vital deaths data (total homicides, total suicides, firearm homicides, and firearm suicides) drawn from the National Vital Statistics System.

Each year when air conditioners are needed, California has to ask EPA for permission to violate federal emissions standards and burn enough natural gas to keep the brown-outs that nearly got Governor Gavin Newsom recalled from happening again.

Yesterday I was in Oslo, where I was invited tro serve as the leading opposer in the Ph.D. defense of a student of Alex Read, who is a particle physicist and a member of the ATLAS collaboration. Although I have served in similar committees several times in the past, this turned out to be a special experience for me for a couple of reasons.

There are lots of stories about the poor in America, and have been for decades. Smart demographers know that, like racism, if everyone is talking about The Poor, it's almost eliminated.

One of the giant cracks in the communist dictatorship called the USSR last century was when the television program "60 Minutes" had a segment on poverty in America. It was designed to tug at the heartstrings of those with more money. The USSR ran it for their citizens but it actually backfired. Being in 'poverty' in America meant having a television and more living space than anyone not an elite in the Soviet Union had.

If you tell me an old white person in America opposes nuclear power, I can tell you how they vote. I can also tell you with alarming accuracy what they think about lots of science, like food and medicine. They think natural gas is why climate change happens.

The reality is that climate change happened due to...them. Democrats gutted nuclear energy in America 30 years ago. Democrats cheered when Senator John Kerry and President Bill Clinton declared that any nuclear energy research could be a nuclear bomb. This was the capstone of a 30-year effort to undermine nuclear power in America, with politicians, their supporters, and allies in corporate media invoking the Precautionary Principle and saying any risk was too much.