Second, except for the pharmaceutical industry, patents are not necessary to increase incentives to innovate (most firms would invest a similar amount in R&D without the existence of the patent system).

I ask twitter: What is so bad about chronic inflammation?

Consumption of sulfur aminoacids (The ones that in the Longevity FAQ I say you should eat less of to live longer) related to risk scores for cardiometabolic disease. The effect seems more or less linear

The latest all-things considered megapost from RCAFDM on healthcare in the US

Gwern's review of A History of Life-extensionism in the twentieth century

Gary Marcus reviews GPT2

Looking at book reviews, most of them are written by women, with only a few genres where men write more.

Ergodicity economics

Learning music will make you good at music, but not at anything else

Intelligence is unrelated to consequentialist moral reasoning

Note-taking does not improve learning (As measured 30 min after) Though of course one might argue that you want the notes to look at them later, repeatedly, and spaced repetition does work.

Understanding the brain through the optics of ML, a thread by Adam Marblestone

Diversity (As measured by varied personality, ideology, etc) hurts performance (When forecasting) in small teams; improves it in large teams; a patchwork of diverse yet homogeneous teams work best

The NYT reviews the ketogenic diet (Where most energy intake is in the form of fat) it works. Fasting also induces ketosis, it has to be noted.

AI Impacts ongoing series on trends in various technologies

Science is broken

The maddening saga of how an Alzheimer's cabal thwarted progress toward a cure for decades

The intellectual and moral decline in academic research

What happens to university-based biotech startups and why

Arbitrariness in the peer review process

More than half of all clinical trials (Registered in clinicalTrials.gov) do not report results within a year (As they are mandated to do)

The scientific paper is outdated

Most research on using AI for medical diagnosis is still not good enough to be useful

The role of postdocs in science

This is more important than just some sob story. If you care about scientific progress, well, these are the people who are doing the science. Our life science research is largely carried out by these stressed out 30 year olds, with young families and no money and horrible career prospects. They can’t really bypass this positional scarcity trap though, because of another issue: journals.

Stagnation and scientific incentives

Dying is good for citations

Cultured meat doesn't seem to be making progress

Academics in the area of climate science have blacklists that seem to severely curtail some other scientists' careers

Universities demanding candidates to produce "diversity, equity, and inclusion statements", how it works in practice, as explained by John Cochrane in Wokeademia

Science works!

University of Cardiff researchers stumble upon what could be a universal cure for cancer

Progress in developing treatments: It took 2 years to develop SARS treatment; now it seems to take only a few months for 2019-nCov

Machine learning is making advances at enabling virtual drug screening

First cheap (20x cheaper) lightweight (10x), less power hungry (35x) MRI machine approved by the FDA

Nature is publishing peer review reports

Review of gene editing trials in humans

Interview with George Church on what's in the gene editing pipeline