Words of the Day 2025-07-03

Caturday:

Cat WWE 🥊 pic.twitter.com/4jlh62sbyj

— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) May 26, 2025

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Geopolitics:

“And the last thing the sailors of the USS George Washington saw….”

“Why More Adults Than Ever Are Being Diagnosed With Autism” [Wall Street Journal]. “People diagnosed as adults typically don’t have severe communication challenges or intellectual disabilities, clinical psychologists said. But they have struggled socially, and show subtle repetitive behaviors like rocking in a chair, or nearly obsessive interests in certain topics. They often have other continuing mental-health conditions, such as anxiety, bipolar disorder or ADHD.” • If their “obsessive interests in certain topics” include pandemics, or climates, or oligarchy, perhaps we should be seeking them out and listening to them (instead of turning everything over to Silicon Valley oracles).

“Exercise-induced Changes in Microclotting and Cytokine Levels Point to Vascular Injury and Inflammation in People with Long COVID” (preprint) [Research Square]. N = 48. From the Discussion: “[W]e demonstrate a novel insight into the behaviour of microclots in response to a safe sub-maximal exercise protocol. Whilst it is documented that graded exercise therapy can prompt a worsening of symptoms for people with Long COVIR, our focus was not to assess whether exercise resolves microclots, but rather to examine how microclot profiles dynamically respond to repeated exertion across consecutive days. Our findings reveal that submaximal exercise induces a shift in microclot size distribution: specifically, a decrease in the proportion of larger microclots (100–3000 µm²) is accompanied by a relative increase in smaller microclots (> 0–30 µm²) post-exercise. This change corresponds with a reduction in O2 at submaximal thresholds combined with reduced O2 pulse which highlights impaired O2 transport and/or utilisation. The patterns demonstrated here suggest that larger microclots undergo fragmentation rather than clearance during exercise, revealing an important mechanistic insight into how microclots behave under physiological stress that may be at least in-part responsible for reductions in O2 transport and utilisation during physical exertion in people living with Long COVID.” • Hmm.

“T Cells Take Up Residence in the Healthy Brain Via a Gut-Fat-Brain Axis” [Yale School of Medicine]. “The researchers believe that the immune cells may be signaling the status of the body to the brain through a previously undiscovered form of gut-brain communication. The highway of information between the digestive system and the brain, also called the gut-brain axis, plays many important roles in our health and well-being, but previous studies had not uncovered a direct route for immune cells to enter the brain from the gut.” And the fat part: “The T cells could be telling the brain about the body’s nutrition status, but they could also be conveying other important signals such as the state of the gut microbiome, the researchers hypothesize. Wang believes they might be stopping in fat tissue on their way from the gut to the brain as a sort of quality-control checkpoint, but that remains to be tested.”