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Douglas Chamberlain obituary

Cardiologist who empowered paramedics and the general public to restart hearts and save lives

If you had a cardiac arrest before the 1970s, an ambulance might arrive quickly, but almost all its crew could do was transport you to hospital, where your treatment would begin – if indeed you survived the journey. The cardiologist Douglas Chamberlain, who has died aged 94, realised that in order to start resuscitation in the vital five-minute window after the heart stopped beating, the ambulance crew needed the tools and skills to do it themselves.

Chamberlain’s initiative laid the foundations for the paramedic profession nationally and internationally. Working from a district general hospital in Brighton, he set up an intensive training programme for ambulance crews, equipped ambulances with defibrillators and electrocardiogram (ECG) machines, and demonstrated through a series of rigorously documented studies that the service saved lives. The only other city in the world where non-medical professionals were using defibrillators at the time was Seattle in the US.

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Weedkiller ingredient widely used in US can damage organs and gut bacteria, research shows

Diquat is banned in the UK, EU, China and other countries. The US has resisted calls to regulate it

The herbicide ingredient used to replace glyphosate in Roundup and other weedkiller products can kill gut bacteria and damage organs in multiple ways, new research shows.

The ingredient, diquat, is widely employed in the US as a weedkiller in vineyards and orchards, and is increasingly sprayed elsewhere as the use of controversial herbicide substances such as glyphosate and paraquat drops in the US.

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Patients with ultra-rare diseases worry FDA approach will leave them without treatment

Testing is difficult for drugs for rare diseases, and new rules may make it harder for sufferers to obtain life-saving drugs

US drug regulators have increasingly signaled a focus on faster approvals and rare diseases, but patients with ultra-rare ailments fear they are falling through the cracks, especially given challenges to conducting clinical trials.

One drug, elamipretide, garnered a narrow recommendation from independent advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but the agency rejected the drug’s application in May and recommended another potential pathway for approval.

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318: Linux desktop hits 5%, Wayback: X11 Desktops on Wayland, & more Linux news

video: https://youtu.be/h-qXWfz_yew

Comment on the TWIL Forum

This week in Linux, we have a huge milestone to celebrate with Linux hitting the coveted 5% market share for desktops in the US market. Then we got a few gaming topics to cover including one about game preservation and anti-cheats. Then we are going to take a look at a project to keep X11 window managers around for good. Later in the show we'll check out some new releases including a lightweight window manager called IceWM. All of this and more on This Week in Linux, the weekly news show that keeps you up to date with what’s going on in the Linux and Open Source world. Now let's jump right into Your Source for Linux GNews!

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro
00:48 Linux Hits 5% US Desktop Market Share
04:14 Stop Killing Games Initiative
11:11 Wayback: Experimental Layer for X11 Desktops on Wayland
15:39 Sandfly Security, agentless Linux security
17:34 IceWM 3.8 Window Manager Released
19:05 Anti-Cheat on Linux: THE FINALS & Broken Arrow
22:26 digiKam 8.7 Released
24:05 ProtonPlus to manage Proton layers for Gaming
25:53 Outro

Links:

Qantas attack reveals one phone call is all it takes to crack cybersecurity’s weakest link: humans

Other sectors also at risk from attacks, including healthcare, finance and telecommunications, expert warns

All it can take is a phone call. That’s what Qantas learned this week when the personal information of up to 6 million customers was stolen by cybercriminals after attackers targeted an offshore IT call centre, enabling them to access a third-party system.

It is the latest in a series of cyber-attacks on large companies in Australia involving the personal information of millions of Australians, after the attack on Optus, Medibank and, most recently, Australia’s $4t superannuation sector.

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‘You know it when you see it’: experts size up scientists’ attempt to define cool

Sought-after status moves in mysterious ways that elude rules and norms, say the initiated

It has puzzled philosophers, scholars and those aspiring to be cool for generations: what is it that makes someone cool? Now it appears that the alchemical code has finally been cracked.

There are six specific attributes needed to be cool, according to a study published this week by the American Psychological Association.

ChatGPT

Pretending not to be “on the pen” (using weight loss jabs) when you are

Cowboy boots

Labubus

Using corporate jargon outside work. For example, posting holiday photos on Instagram with the caption “highlights from Q1”

Talking about sleep scores

Giant adult sippy cups

LinkedIn

Birkin bags

Including your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator result in your dating bio

Being a member of a library

Good service – anywhere

The Row’s monthly Spotify playlists

Asking questions

Restaurants where you don’t have to shout at each another to be heard

Curaprox’s colourful toothbrushes

Ordering an object to view at the V&A East Storehouse

Not being a TV snob

Using lamps rather than the “big light” in a room

Being OK with ageing

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Can you see circles or rectangles? And does the answer depend on where you grew up? | Anil Seth

We may believe we see the world exactly as it is – but as studies of optical illusions show, it’s far more complex than that

  • Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex

Do people from different cultures and environments see the world differently? Two recent studies have different takes on this decades-long controversy. The answer might be more complicated, and more interesting, than either study suggests.

One study, led by Ivan Kroupin at the London School of Economics, asked how people from different cultures perceived a visual illusion known as the Coffer illusion. They discovered that people in the UK and US saw it mainly in one way, as comprising rectangles – while people from rural communities in Namibia typically saw it another way: as containing circles.

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