Benjamin Casterline

Babies are born into a world full of microbes. What determines which ones colonize the skin? Really enjoyed reviewing the immunological and microbiological factors @Ped_Research, many uncovered in just the last few years pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32919387/

Reasons to brush your teeth: 1) bacterium from periodontal disease colonizes the brain and uses proteases to make Alzheimer's disease-causing plaques advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/ea… 2) bad breath

@Tarver25th What DO you like about this bill? You spoke against it but then you voted to let business interests push drugs into our communities.

@Tarver25th @ShiaKapos @cljmitchell Disappointing vote. Equity and fairness means decriminalizing possession and voiding unjust sentences. Justice stops there. Legalizing recreational use & encouraging distribution of drugs in our communities because the state wants a cut of the profits is not just.

Back to marijuana: Rep. Curtis @Tarver25th expresses concerns of some in Black Caucus. "This isn't about criminal justice reform. It's about money." And "it's offensive" to say otherwise. If it weren't for Dep Gov @Cljmitchell "I wouldn't support this bill." So grudgingly, yes.

@ChicagoMaroon What's the basis for the bill? Are student life fees used to fund abortions? @bazbarbin

One attendee just threw an egg at a protest at Reynolds Club about the recently introduced College Council bill that would prevent student life fees from being used to fund abortions.

@Chicago_Reader Reifman's motto -- "you grow or you die" -- may or may not be true, but his favored approach, using tax dollars to subsidize billionaires, doesn't appear to be working. The population of Chicago shrunk every year of his tenure.

As the Department of Planning and Development commissioner departs, megadevelopers lose one of their biggest cheerleaders. chicagoreader.com/chicago/david-…

@stacylindau @UChicagoMed Very upsetting. Are these data published? Wondering does drug overdose exclude prescribed drugs & what constitutes other injury

Maternal mortality increasing in US and decreasing in every other industrialized nation. White women in IL more likely to die of drug OD, Black women of homicide, Hispanic women of suicide. Hard to sit still in obgyn grand rounds today - action needed. @UChicagoMed

@MikeIsaac What's that? One to two weeks revenue? $5 bn is inconsequential. It sounds like a big fine only because we've lost sight of how big the company actually is.

Facebook expecting to be hit with an FTC settlement charge that could be as high as $3-5 BILLION bucks story coming

@hyperplanes Depends on the technique they used. Determing sex from DNA is not as easy as relatedness. Problem explored in this paper sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@lymanstoneky This lit review is thorough. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30594197 Includes this study of 36,000 nurses. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26724803

Air pollution seems to effect women pretty early in pregnancy. There's a grant-funded project out there (doesn't seem to have clear results yet) to study this in even more detail. grantome.com/grant/NIH/K99-…

So regular followers know that I'm a big believer that air pollution is super-duper bad. One study I want to see conducted is the connection between air pollution and fertility, on a large-scale, econometrically meaningful basis.

@matthewstoller @ewarren Seeking monopoly is a felony yet no one is willing to say so.

The @ewarren plan to undo mergers and conflicts of interest is the *moderate* approach. Keep in mind the Sherman Act is not just a civil statute but a criminal one. Monopolization is a crime.

@matthewstoller There's danger in conflating weather and climate like this because skeptics have their own weather extremes to point to.

This new aggressive posture will work. Climate change is going to continue to poll relatively low as a priority until the next major climate disaster. Which will happen soon. And then again. And again. And again. And again.

@matthewstoller There's an important distinction in the drug legalization debate that gets lost. Unlike opiates, weed is to be legalized without a prescription and marketed (ultimately by big tobacco, no doubt) as a recreational drug.

Here’s the thing about drug legalization. We’ve already made heroin legal, as long as it’s called OxyContin and the dealers endow professorships at Harvard.

@Ameya_Pawar_IL Income tax is mostly a tax on professionals in what's left of the middle class. The rich are getting richer from investments, not income.

The top marginal tax rates for the very wealthy were 90% after WWII. And our economy was strong. President Kennedy kept top rates at 70%. Still strong. President Reagan cut top rates to 50% and Bush cut them again to 28% in 1988. The rich got richer, the middle class evaporated.

@matthewstoller "History makes clear that when consumers get what they want, it's different from our abstract notion of what they want and must be stopped."

This is the key line: "Our own antitrust history makes clear that when competition policy is guided by popular opinion and intuition drawn from incomplete evidence, it is competition and ultimately consumers that are harmed."--> "Popular opinion"

Just want to note how the genuine guardians of the status quo are in the antitrust establishment, and how much they hate democracy. I'm reading this comment on whether there has been rising corporate concentration. twitter.com/ProfWrightGMU/…

One-size-fits-all fails again. Time for a more targeted approach to probiotic therapy?

What makes a "pathobiont"? Some ideas with @alhecht cell.com/cell-host-micr…

@teohwp85 @alhecht Thanks!! Great to see it in print

@teohwp85 @alhecht The finest around I'm told. I have high hopes

@surt_lab Another nice example m.jbc.org/content/286/2/…