What happened when a woman tried to help her friends detained by ICE
This explains a lot about NYTimes coverage
Paired action for election security
I find microbiome research fascinating. (Though what I really want is a probiotic for under-arm odor that actually works…)
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
August 3, 2019 at 2:02 pm
Honestly, if I were going to try to find a probiotic for underarms, I’d try to find MotherDirt AO+ Mist (the product from David Whitlock’s company- https://www.livescience.com/52719-do-we-need-showers.html).
I can’t say it’s effective. I can say David Whitlock is painfully earnest and smells fine to me :-)
Re: the various microbiome findings…
I do tend to believe the microbiome-transfer-made-mice-fat kinds of studies, that is I think they are telling us that one force that could push some people toward obesity is a particular microbiome.
I am less convinced the “obesity impairs vaccinations” data are important; in animal models when developing immunization approaches we commonly scale for body weight and we don’t do that much in real human vaccines. So while it might be true, and might even be telling us something interesting about metabolism and inflammation, I don’t think the trivial explanation (“vaccines are less effective because they need a higher dose based on body mass”) is fully excluded.
One thing that I think is great is that in addition to using antibiotics to get animals to gain weight, you can also use probiotics. The ones I know the most about are for cows, and if I recall correctly they aren’t supplementing the rumen microbiome in a way particularly likely to carry over to humans. Plus, less use of antibiotics in agriculture is very much to the good.
It’s a cool time to be a microbiologist. Of course, so was Pasteur’s day. #MmmWine
August 5, 2019 at 5:12 am
Re Weisman: I agree this explains the NYT all too well. As a person who grew up in the south but does not fit a lot of southern stereotypes, I’ve always hated “you’re not really from here, are you” and regional stereotypes in general. I am white, Jewish, and a faculty brat, and I never felt menace from that phrase, only exclusion. But it is all too easy to see how that phrase can be loaded with toxicity. Also, someone once told me that NY was the extremely provincial (albeit in a very cosmopolitan way).
August 5, 2019 at 9:29 pm
Minnesotans are pissed off. Yep.
August 5, 2019 at 5:36 am