Pratik Samant

Congratulations to Daniel McGowan on receiving the NHS South East Healthcare Science Award for Educational Leadership🏆👨‍🏫 This award is in recognition of Dan's NHS education work & for developing the MSc in Medical Physics w/ Radiobiology programme @medsci.ox.ac.uk @ox.ac.uk @ouhospitals.bsky.social

The administration is a perfect storm of dumb people who enjoy inflicting pain and are addicted to psychotic cruelty and quadrupling down. It ends in total ruin if you don't impeach him.

🧪Cancer fact of the day:

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Astronauts are at higher risk for cancer because of increased exposure to cosmic radiation in space. NASA sets the acceptable level of cancer risk from space radiation as a 3% fatal cancer risk at the upper 95% confidence interval. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

"Their struggles and their deprivation are written on their skeletons." 🏺 If you'd like to read an archaeology article that will rip your heart out and radicalise you, read this. Skip to the discussion/conclusions if graphs aren't your thing: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

🧪Cancer fact of the day: A single organism, Helicobacter pylori, is responsible for 90% of gastric cancers! H pylori has infected about 2/3 of the world's population, but is usually asymptomatic. wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yello...

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Drinking alcohol combined with smoking increases the risk of head and neck cancers by much more than either habit alone. The synergistic effect to increase cancer risk is more than multiplicative! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19190158/

🧪Cancer fact of the day: In the UK, roughly half of people will get cancer in their lifetime. www.nhs.uk/conditions/c...

just repeating the phrase "hawk tuah girl meme coin" over and over until my brain is as smooth as a polished stone

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Cancer is at least as old as the dinosaurs, and likely even older. www.history.com/news/oldest-...

How have literal billionaires convinced so many Americans that the people picking their strawberries are the villains

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Peto's paradox has led scientists to explore if humans can suppress cancers as effectively as larger mammals do. Elephant cells are more vigilant for cancer than ours, and take potential mutational threats more seriously. news.cancerresearchuk.org/2023/08/12/c...

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Radiotherapy does one better than this, by modulating delivered dose in 3D. Cancer cells are already more vulnerable to radiation, and on top of that we give them more radiation dose than healthy tissue. This minimizes side effects as best as possible.

For the first time in a while overdose deaths are declining - seven straight months of declines. The cause is complicated but appears to be the culmination of a number of different Biden admin policy initiatives coming to fruition. And yet it meant absolutely nothing politically.

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Radiation dose delivery at this level of precision doesn't happen all by itself! Engineers and physicists perform regular quality checks and corrections on every radiotherapy machine. This is one of the primary duties of radiotherapy physicists in the hospital.

This is why I got into science in the first place

🧪Cancer fact of the day: modern radiotherapy is less like a blunt instrument, and more like a precision strike. For example, stereotactic radiosurgery can treat tumours as small as 0.7-1cm in diameter (about as large as a grain of rice), while having the dose reduce by 20 fold just 1.5cm away!

Incredible how the narrative changes as soon as the election is over

Ah yes, while we're asking the Tories how best to run the economy, let's also ask the captain of the Titanic how best to get a ship across the Atlantic, Neville Chamberlain how best to avoid a European war, and Napoleon on when the best time of year is to conquer Russia.

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Cancer cell DNA is unstable, and so quite fragile. Especially as compared to healthy cells. X-ray radiation causes DNA damage to all cells it hits. Cancerous cells fare worse than healthy cells when this happens, which is why radiotherapy is an effective cancer treatment.

if you werent here in the early days of bluesky you missed some really funny stuff. a bunch of people got psyched out of their minds on having 1000 followers for the first time and tried to cancel dril

🧪Cancer fact of the day: Cancerous tumours command the body to build blood vessels around them (angiogenesis). The body obliges, therefore enabling the tumour to grow much larger than it could otherwise. Inhibiting this process has enabled effective cancer therapies! www.cancer.gov/about-cancer...

Difficult to describe what a dangerous moment we are in. The owner of Twitter/richest man in the world/closest adviser to the next US president is promoting a far-right Tommy Robinson (!) documentary to his 200 million followers. This is the mainstreaming of violent, Islamophobic fascism.

Opinion: Bluesky is a dangerous echo chamber because no one wants to hear from me, specifically

One thing I find interesting about the echo chamber complaint is that an echo chamber just won a presidential election. Put aside the convo of whether it’s “good” or “bad” for a moment. The far right has devoted enormous resources + time to building echo chambers & loathes spaces they don’t control

One of the central theses of my latest book is that in our current version of attention capitalism the *brand* is increasingly more important than the *product* and this last election sure seems like a good example.

It would be nice if one of the #MedPhys on here could build us a feed.

Have to agree with this. The great thing about Twitter was that I was able to bring so many of the right-wingers that I encountered there round to my viewpoint, with the force of my arguments

Well happy Friday! I saw @astrokatie.com talking about why following science folk is awesome—and decided to make a thread for 🧪 starter packs (these are not created by me, but the creators are usually first listed): 1. Science communication go.bsky.app/22TWpuq

Just going to drop one of my favorite websites ever: jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/ It's a treasure trove of interesting information and animations related to black hole physics. #Physics #Science 🧪⚛️

Now that I’m here let show off my poster! In this paper we found evidence for eccentricity in Binary Black holes observed by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA. You can read the paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2404.14286 and my Twitter summary here: x.com/nihar_gupte/...

Check out this poster by my friend all about searching for eccentricity in black hole binaries using gravitational waves detected by LIGO and machine learning methods 🧪⚛️🔭

🧪Cancer fact of the day: both the constellation cancer and the disease are named after the same thing: Crabs! 🦀🦀. The Greeks, Hippocrates and Galen, thought tumours with swollen veins looked like crabs (karcinos, in Greek). The Latin word for crab is cancer, and so this made its way into English!

Reposted cancer fact of the day 🧪 for our newcomers

im on every app. im in your city, in your neighborhood. the sales associate who handed you a large when you asked for a medium? that was me. i am now behind you.

🧪Cancer fact of the day: there are absolutely no herbal products whatsoever that can treat cancer. Some herbal products can even make things worse if taken during other treatment as they can interfere with how chemo or radiotherapy work. www.cancer.gov/about-cancer...

Every time I see someone post this image it goes viral

🧪 A fascinating article quantifying changes in academic publishing over the past few years. It shows clear differences between the publishers. Also: MDPI growth of IF comes mostly from self-citations! #science #publishing

🧪Cancer fact of the day, there are multiple particles with which radiotherapy can be done. Tumours close to the surface are often treated with electrons, tumours deeper in are often treated with therapeutic x-rays (photons). Some clinics even treat with protons or carbon ions!

🧪Cancer fact of the day: physicists and engineers are essential to modern medicine, and enable the use of just about every imaging/treatment device in cancer radiotherapy. However, as we're usually behind the scenes, patients (and even colleagues) sometimes don't know we exist 😅!