Top Stories Daily
The latest thought-provoking Fediverse stories
He called himself an ‘untouchable hacker god’. But who was behind the biggest crime Finland has ever known?
theguardian.com · Jan 17
How would you feel if your therapist’s notes – your darkest thoughts and deepest feelings – were exposed to the world? For 33,000 Finnish people, that became a terrifying reality, with deadly consequences
Worth reading
The Discourse is a Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack
joanwestenberg.com · Jan 17
In September 2016, the security journalist Brian Krebs had his website knocked offline by a botnet called Mirai. Hundreds of thousands of compromised devices, mostly cheap webcams and DVRs manufactured with default passwords that nobody ever changed, all simultaneously requesting his homepage. No...
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brettrick
(@brettrick) ·
Jan 18
🔁 @Daojoan:
The philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked that the fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
I think the discourse has broken this relationship. It's not that intelligent people have become stupid. It's that the incentive structure of public conversation rewards cocksureness regardless of actual intelligence...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-discourse-is-a-distributed-denial-of-service-attack/
COVID pandemic enters seventh year with no end in sight
boingboing.net · Jan 17
It's strange to think that the COVID-19 pandemic, which sent the world into lockdown seven years ago never ended. It continues to kill and cripple us, to this day. We…
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31 others.
Ultra Verified 🇺🇦
(@Ultraverified) ·
Jan 18
🔁 @DenisCOVIDinfoguy:
COVID pandemic enters 7th year with no end in sight.
"It's strange to think that the COVID-19 pandemic, which sent the world into lockdown 7 years ago never ended. It continues to kill and cripple us, to this day. We simply stopped talking about it."
Source: https://boingboing.net/2026/01/16/covid-pandemic-enters-seventh-year-with-no-end-in-sight.html
Worth reading
Personalized Cancer Vaccines Are Almost Here—But Federal Funding Cuts Could Derail Them
scientificamerican.com · Jan 16
Vaccines based on mRNA can be tailored to target a cancer patient’s unique tumor mutations. But crumbling support for cancer and mRNA vaccine research has endangered this promising therapy
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Chuck Darwin
(@cdarwin) ·
Jan 18
By May of this year another threat to personalized mRNA vaccines for cancer was coming into focus:
🔥mounting federal hostility to vaccines.
Senate Republicans convened a hearing entitled
“The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies,”
featuring the false claim that as many as three out of four deaths from COVID were caused by mRNA vaccines deployed to stop the pandemic.
(In fact, COVID vaccinations saved an estimated 2.5 million lives between 2020 and 2024,
according to a study published earlier this year.)
In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices,
which makes recommendations on federal vaccine policy.
He eventually replaced them with his own advisory committee,
which includes several anti-vaccine stalwarts.
Kennedy has also slashed research funding for mRNA vaccines.
In August he canceled nearly $500 million supporting the development of mRNA vaccines against viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and influenza.
The move intensified the fears of researchers who want to develop mRNA vaccines for other illnesses,
among them cancer.
After my visit to Memorial Sloan Kettering, Balachandran’s team shared a chart that plotted Brigham’s immune response to her personalized mRNA vaccine.
Along the bottom, triangles marked the dates of her surgery
and each of the nine doses of the vaccine she received over the course of a year.
Above them a cluster of brightly colored lines showed the share of her body’s
T cells targeting the specific mutant proteins in her cancerous tumor.
At first, when Brigham’s tumor was removed,
cells trained to go after each cancer clone were somewhere on the order of one in 500,000 T cells in her blood.
A few months after surgery,
when she’d had four doses of the vaccine,
the lines shot up almost vertically, showing that the most common cancer fighter at that point accounted for around one in 20 to one in 50 T cells
—an increase of more than 20,000-fold.
Those T cells dipped a bit in the months before Brigham’s last booster shot,
given almost a year after her tumor was removed.
But they remained in the same range even three years on.
A phase 2 clinical trial evaluating the safety and efficacy of the vaccine in a larger patient group is currently underway.
The vaccine for Brigham’s cancer was just nine tiny vials of liquid administered through an IV,
a private message that only her immune system was meant to decode.
But the effort that delivered that coded message was a deeply collective enterprise,
one that stretches back through the hundreds of thousands of tissue samples collected,
stored and analyzed at Memorial Sloan Kettering,
-- each one taken from the body of a patient who might not have survived their cancer.
Also in that vaccine were the contributions of generations of taxpayers who never got to see these results.
Perhaps their descendants will be able to beat the disease
—if society continues to support this vital work.
#micrometastases #neoantigens #driverantigens
#passengermutations #neoantigens #checkpointinhibitors #WilliamColey #immunotherapy #stroma #MHC
Dispatch from the occupation
donmoynihan.substack.com · Jan 17
What life is like in Minneapolis now
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19 others.
The Flight Attendant
(@CosmicTraveler) ·
Jan 17
🔁 @donmoyn.bsky.social:
New at Can We Still Govern?
"I am writing as an ordinary citizen of Minneapolis/St Paul...to share with the outside world what is really going on ─ the terror being inflicted upon a U.S. city and state by our federal government."
Please read, share, help. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/dispatch-f...
Dispatch from the occupation
Worth reading
The Dilbert Afterlife
astralcodexten.com · Jan 17
Sixty-eight years of highly defective people
Scientists Make Stunning Find Inside Prehistoric Wolf’s Stomach
404media.co · Jan 17
Scientists sequenced the genome of an extinct woolly rhinoceros that was found in a wolf belly that lived 14,400 years ago.
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14 others.
Coach Pāṇini ®
(@paninid) ·
Jan 18
🔁 @acdha:
“Incredibly, scientists were able to sequence the genome of the rhino, which revealed that this individual still had a high level of genetic diversity in its lineage, and no signs of inbreeding. Considering that woolly rhinos vanished from the fossil record around 14,000 years ago, this study suggests that they may have experienced a very sudden population collapse, rather than a gradual demise.”
https://www.404media.co/scientists-make-stunning-find-inside-prehistoric-wolfs-stomach/
Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities
crimethinc.com · Jan 15
The rapid response networks people organized to defend their communities against federal agents seeking to kidnap, brutalize, and terrorize them have undergone a whirlwind evolution to keep up with...
you have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass
geohot.github.io · Jan 17
I had a dream last night I went to work at Amazon. Joining the Bezos neofeudal empire. This post is directed at anyone with talent who works at a tech company ushering in this future.
There are no more posts at this time, but we are constantly looking for new ones.