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Pratik Samant

@samantp.bsky.social
281 followers 121 following 142 posts

He/Him | NHS Radiotherapy Physicist | I occasionally post cancer/physics facts | Views my own | 🇨🇦 in 🇬🇧 www.oncology.ox.ac.uk/team/pratik-s…

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Reposted by Pratik Samant
University of Oxford Department of Oncology @oncology.ox.ac.uk · 21/03/2025
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
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
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.
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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 13/01/2025
first of all, some housekeeping. you may be seeing mentions of "RN" thinking it's referring to RedNote, a tiktok competitor. this is incorrect—RN stands for ReNner, as in the Jeremy Renner app
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 10/01/2025
🧪Cancer fact of the day:
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
🧪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...
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Carcinogenesis induced by space radiation: A systematic review
The carcinogenic risk from space radiation has always been a health risk issue of great concern during space exploration. In recent years, a large number of cellular and animal experiments have demons...
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Colleen Morgan @clmorgan.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
"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...
journals.plos.org
The expendables: Bioarchaeological evidence for pauper apprentices in 19th century England and the health consequences of child labour
Child labour is the most common form of child abuse in the world today, with almost half of child workers employed in hazardous industries. The large-scale employment of children during the rapid indu...
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
🧪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...
wwwnc.cdc.gov
Helicobacter pylori | CDC Yellow Book 2024 Homeexpandexpandexpandexpandexpandexpandexpandexpand
Information about how to order the U.S. government publication about traveling titled "Health Information for International Travel" (also called the "Yellow Book")....
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 09/12/2024
🧪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/
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Interaction between tobacco and alcohol use and the risk of head and neck cancer: pooled analysis in the International Head and Neck Cancer Epidemiology Consortium - PubMed
Our results confirm that the joint effect between tobacco and alcohol use is greater than multiplicative on head and neck cancer risk. However, a substantial proportion of head and neck cancers cannot...
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 06/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: In the UK, roughly half of people will get cancer in their lifetime. www.nhs.uk/conditions/c...
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
just repeating the phrase "hawk tuah girl meme coin" over and over until my brain is as smooth as a polished stone
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
🧪Cancer fact of the day: Cancer is at least as old as the dinosaurs, and likely even older. www.history.com/news/oldest-...
history.com
How Old Is Cancer? At Least as Old as the Start of the Dinosaurs, Fossil Shows | HISTORY
A malignant tumor found in a 240 million‑year‑old turtle bone shows that cancer has been plaguing living things since the Triassic Period.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Cancer fact of the day 🧪: early radiotherapy largely relied on one element, radium. The metal was therefore extremely valuable and needed to be kept in vaults. One gram of radium used to cost ~£1.6 million in today's currency, which is more than its weight in diamonds!
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God @thegodshow.com · 03/12/2024
How have literal billionaires convinced so many Americans that the people picking their strawberries are the villains
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
🧪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...
news.cancerresearchuk.org
What can elephants teach us about cancer? - Cancer Research UK - Cancer News
For World Elephant Day, we're taking a look at why elephants so rarely get cancer. Could the ways they protect themselves help people too?
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
🧪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.
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Chris Boyd @paperghost.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
while "open borders UK" is in the news: here's someone caught by the minimum income requirement increase from £18k to £29k, and now has to crowdfund 17 grand for the savings route so their spouse isn't kicked out of the country
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
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.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
🧪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.
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Skeleton Claw @skeletonclaw.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
This is why I got into science in the first place
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
🧪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!
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Keith Edwards @keithedwards.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
Incredible how the narrative changes as soon as the election is over
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
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.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
🧪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.
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merr-itt came from outer space @merrittk.com · 30/06/2024
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
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
🧪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...
cancer.gov
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Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
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.
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The Beaverton @thebeaverton.com · 22/11/2024
Opinion: Bluesky is a dangerous echo chamber because no one wants to hear from me, specifically
thebeaverton.com
Opinion: Bluesky is a dangerous echo chamber because no one wants to hear from me, specifically
They just… blocked me. Like I’m some kind of annoyance, rather than the iconoclastic and fascinating truth-teller which I know myself to be.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
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
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
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.
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Saturn's Herb Garden 🌿 🖤 @satanspetgoat.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
So that's why things that cause cancer are called carcinogens?!?!?! I love etymology.
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Sonja Dieterich @sonjadieterich.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
It would be nice if one of the #MedPhys on here could build us a feed.
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Cslmn @rapsacnomlas.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
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
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Brandy Schillace @bschillace.brandyschillace.com · 22/11/2024
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
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Andrew J. Steinmetz @ajsteinmetz.com · 22/11/2024
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 🧪⚛️
jila.colorado.edu
Andrew Hamilton's Homepage
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Nihar Gupte @nihar-gupte.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
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/...
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Phil Lynch @physlynch.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
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 🧪⚛️🔭
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
🧪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!
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Reposted cancer fact of the day 🧪 for our newcomers
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
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.
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
🧪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...
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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Every time I see someone post this image it goes viral
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January Weiner @january3.github.io · 19/11/2024
🧪 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
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
🧪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!
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Pratik Samant @samantp.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
🧪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 😅!
DID YOU KNOW?
It takes at least two physicists
to work out a safe treatment plan
for your radiotherapy treatment.

DID YOU KNOW?
Academic scientists transform physics
and engineering principles into leading edge healthcare research.
DID YOU KNOW?
Teams of engineers and scientists check every machine hospitals
to keep them working properly.
DID YOU KNOW?
Engineers and physicists in industry work together to develop
the latest generation of radiotherapy treatment machines.
DID YOU KNOW?
A technologist is needed to perform some
of the scans doctors use for your diagnosis.
DID YOU KNOW?
Every piece of imaging equipment using x-rays is tested by a scientist to make sure it is safe.
DID YOU KNOW?
Rehabilitation engineers design high-tech ways to make patients more comfortable and independent.



Without physics and engineering there would be no
modern healthcare,
Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine
@ipemnew
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Erin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
They’re complaining about Bluesky because no one follows or engages them here. People are tired and don’t want that bullshit. Don’t let those anti-bluesky takes give them what they ultimately want: engagement from angry people who boost their stories.
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Erin Biba @erinbiba.bsky.social · 17/11/2024
Lottttta posts going around about “who owns and funds Bluesky” and definitely worth asking yourself this when you read them. (The rest of this thread worth reading re:that as well.)
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Frances: Meh and Loving It @francesmeh.reviews · 10/11/2024
one of the reasons bluesky works differently is because early users waged a successful fight to get the devs to prioritize safety features to protect communities at risk as a result bluesky now has a suite of controls that i think are unmatched on social media here’s the list, lmk what i’ve missed
A Probably Incomplete List of Bluesky User Safety Mechanisms

Protecting your posts
• disabling replies on your posts
• limiting replies on your posts to people you follow, mention, or include in specific lists
• disabling quote posting on your posts
• detaching your post from someone else's quote
• changing the above interaction settings even after a post is sent hiding replies to your posts for yourself or for everyone
• self-labeling your media for adult or graphic content to protect other users
• limiting account visibility only to logged in users
• note: this is not 100% enforceable but all major bluesky clients and apps support it

Limiting your interaction
• blocking users from seeing or interacting with your posts
• if you block after an interaction, they vaporize
• if they've replied already, the entire thread below their reply is cauterized for everyone, floating in space detached from your post
• note: your blocks are publicly visible via 3rd party apps
• muting users to remove them from your notis and feeds, and hide them in replies
• note: your mutes are private
• muting or blocking entire moderation lists of users
• note: inclusion in a list is public via third party apps. muting a list is private, blocks via a list are public
• subscribing to other people's mod lists
• note: your subscription is private, muting & blocking work the same
• subscribing to labelers (moderation services) from bluesky or third parties
o decide whether to show, warn, or hide posts that have been labeled in each category
• report content that should be labeled to bluesky and/or third parties labelers
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