The fact that they are devoting two hours to tell the first part of the story gives me a lot of confidence that they are taking the time to tell the story in a deliberate way. I have written elsewhere that this series really reminds me of Mushishi and everything I liked about that show, so I am super excited that they seem to be giving it the pacing that it needs to help the story hit.

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Agree that the ending felt a bit weak. I think that picking up the pace in the show a bit more and getting further in the story would have helped things. At the moment, Raeliana is still a character without much agency, and it would be great to see a bit of her future character growth.

So, it has been a while since I read the manhwa (I haven't read the original webnovel), but I am overall pleased with how the adaptation has gone so far. You could definitely tell that there were very limited budgets. There are so many instances of slideshow animations or just still images, but they seemed to invest heavily in making beautiful stills and backgrounds.

My major complaint about the show is that, in general, it has gone very slowly. I expected them to be further along in the story after 12 episodes, but the pacing has been plodding at best. If my memory serves, I think they adapted 3 of the 7 volumes of the manhwa. I understand that a lot of shows tend to go too quickly, but this show just seems to drag out every conversation like it is padding for time (maybe to help stretch the animation budget too).

Overall happy with the show so far and hope that if it gets a second season it gets a bit more resources thrown its way.

That's fair. I couldn't find much info on their website, so I assumed this was another make insulin cheap using "biohacking" deal. I don't have any experience with small molecule synthesis or dry powder manufacturing, so I can't really speak to how feasible this may be. However, having seen first-hand all the ways simple manufacturing steps can go wrong, the risk of consuming a medication that hasn't been through rigorous QA/QC makes me very wary.

This might not quite be what you are looking for, but my favorite piece of writing that is science-adjacent is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!.

As for current stuff, I work in pharma development, so there aren't great sources out there. A lot of the studies that are published in places like phys.org or medicalxpress.com (or other wire-like services) pertain to very early stage drug discovery things, not formulation and device development. I tend to keep a tab open to fiercepharma and fiercebiotech for industry news. Other than that, there are a handful of academics that tend to share papers on linkedin or twitter that usually get passed around in the office if people find it interesting.

I commented this in a different thread on this news story, but this approval in an interesting one in that it has been approved using the accelerated approval pathway because there was an unmet clinical need. However, if you look at the clinical landscape, there are other options for treatment (also from Sarepta I should mention). Additionally, the interim clinical data showed protein expression which is what the FDA cited in their approval, however that interim data did not show significant positive clinical benefit. From PBS:

FDA scientists detailed a long list of concerns with the company’s research, particularly a mid-stage study that the company submitted for FDA review. Overall, it failed to show that boys who received the therapy performed significantly better on measures like standing, walking and climbing than those who got a dummy treatment

Accelerated approval pathways make sense in many cases they are used, however, the agency should beware allowing accelerated approval being abused by drugmakers to get a drug to market quickly and then slow-walk the post-approval obligations (which are usually very expensive phase 3 studies). Being too liberal with accelerated approvals incentivizes questionably efficacious therapies that are simply used as a profit tool before the data shows the full extent of their clinical impact.

I recently posted an opinion piece that talks about this in some more detail and provided some additional thoughts in that thread. I am not a specialist when it comes to regulatory practices or strategy, but simply a scientist in the field that is concerned about potential abuse of a regulatory mechanism that has the potential to cause harm to patients.

In my professional life, I have worked on a number of clinical phase therapeutics and authored sections of regulatory filings submitted to agencies like the FDA and EMA. Several of those assets were classified as orphan drugs and were granted accelerated approval. I think that the accelerated approval process fulfills a role that is needed in cases where there is an unmet medical need. Additionally, some indications lend themselves to proven proxy measures for efficacy that give a high level of confidence in clinical use. However, the accelerated approval process as it is currently used is prone to abuse in that the FDA is not able or willing (not sure which) to enforce post-approval actions on drugmakers in a timely fashion.

The author's example of Makena shows that over a decade can pass without showing medical efficacy in follow-up trials before marketing authorization is pulled. The author doesn't go into detail, merely linked to it, but the conditional approval granted by the EMA is much more fit for purpose. Under that process, the conditional approval is just granted for one year and must be renewed each year. I have not worked on this renewal process personally, but from experience interacting with the agencies before, they would be looking for material progress towards meeting any stated post-approval obligations. This process gives the EMA an annual chance to pull a product if there is ambiguous or no demonstrated clinical effect or if the adverse events are more severe or common than anticipated.

As an aside, I found it interesting that the impending Leqembi (lecanemab) accelerated approval is what inspired this article. Leqembi's predecessor, Aduhelm (aducanumab), was granted accelerated approval, but was so poorly received by the market/hcp's/insurance companies, that it might as well have not been approved at all.

Thank you! If I am understanding right, I think my guess was pretty bang on. Fig. 3b shows the energy dissipation from the center of the vortex blob moving outward and shows a steep drop off past where they define their edge (brown line).

Also, thank you so much for the extension recommendation! I have journal access through work for journals I go to frequently, so I forget about arxiv sometimes.

I am not in academia any longer, so I don't have access to the full paper, but I would be really curious about the boundary conditions they see. They claim to have a region of isolated turbulent mixing, however, this would mean that they no longer have a no-slip boundary layer, something that I find hard to believe in a fully fluid system like this. Instead, I imagine the best they could likely do is have a boundary region over which the Reynolds number decreases rapidly as you move from the turbulent region to the non-turbulent region.

As an aside, this reminds me of some really cool research that a friend of mine did back in grad school which is kind of like the inverse of this. They created an active system in which turbulent mixing was bound to the surface of a vesicle (video)

This pretty much lines up with my take as well. Educating borrowers via the first three bills on true costs, expected earnings, and repayment options is fine, but is mostly done already. I don't see how mandating a form that needs to be signed saying that you understand the debt you are taking on is going to change that.

The fourth bill is pretty blatantly ideologically motivated. If they truly think that these programs are worth less, then a better solution might be something like tying the cost of tuition for different majors to the expected earnings potential rather than eliminating aid eligibility.

The fifth bill would have a dramatic impact on graduate students. I am lucky enough that I did my PhD back when a graduate student stipend could (just barely) cover living expenses. However, graduate student pay has not kept up with cost of living, and grad students often take out the PLUS loans to help bridge the gap. Eliminating these would essentially price out a lot of grad students in HCOL areas that don't have family wealth to draw from. Alternatively (and preferentially), it could motivate schools to actually pay a living wage to grad students. However, the most likely outcome is that schools would just bring in more wealthy international students to fill the enrollment gap.

As an anime-only I have absolutely loved this series. I managed to go in completely blind and have been blown away. I am fully prepared to binge the manga as soon as this season is over.