Verba volant, scripta manent.
Observing the world, reflecting on current affairs and social phenomena, and sharing recent advances in STEM with a dose of rational thought.
By the first week of November the semester has crossed its midpoint, and the exams that go by the name of midterms arrive not as an event but as a collective state. They divide the term into two halves the way a cut divides a film, and they do something to the rhythm of the weeks that no syllabus quite accounts for.
In a paper recently published in Cell, an international team led by the University of Eastern Finland reports that the fatty acid DGLA is depleted in senescent cells, and that restoring DGLA, or inhibiting the enzyme that consumes it, triggers iron ferroptosis selectively in senescent cells while sparing healthy ones. Aged mice given oral DGLA showed fewer senescent cells and improved liver and kidney markers, and a Finnish cohort linked a DGLA-boosting gene variant to lower senescence markers in fat tissue.
Three months into my first term at Sichuan University in Chengdu, the novelty has worn off and the ordinary days have begun. A short essay on dormitories, dialects, and the slow realisation of what leaving Chizhou actually is.
In November 2025 the Japanese prime minister tied a possible Taiwan contingency to Japan’s ‘survival-threatening situation’ trigger and floated military intervention in the strait. A year on, the damage to Sino-Japanese relations is still accumulating.
The first large-scale rollout of a dengue vaccine began this month in Southeast Asia, timed to the start of the wet season when the mosquito-borne disease peaks, and the campaign is a test of everything that makes dengue a difficult target: four virus types, a waning immune response, and a vaccine that works best on people who have already been infected. The rollout is the most careful immunization campaign the tropics have ever mounted.