On the statistics of individual variations of productivity in research laboratories

Everything you always wanted to know about saturated fat

Peter Mitchell and the ox phos wars, when OXPHOS was controversial

Langmuir on pathological science

Sydney Brenner "How academia and publishing are destroying scientific innovation"

What people don’t realise is that at the beginning, it was just a handful of people who saw the light, if I can put it that way. So it was like belonging to an evangelical sect, because there were so few of us, and all the others sort of thought that there was something wrong with us.

They weren’t willing to believe. Of course they just said, well, what you’re trying to do is impossible. That’s what they said about crystallography of large molecules. They just said it’s hopeless. It’s a hopeless task. And so what we were trying to do with the chemistry of proteins and nucleic acids looked hopeless for a long time. Partly because they didn’t understand how they were built, which I think we molecular biologists had the first insight into, and partly because they just thought they were amorphous blobs and would never be able to be analysed. [...]

“A Fred Sanger would not survive today’s world of science. With continuous reporting and appraisals, some committee would note that he published little of import between insulin in 1952 and his first paper on RNA sequencing in 1967 with another long gap until DNA sequencing in 1977. He would be labelled as unproductive, and his modest personal support would be denied. We no longer have a culture that allows individuals to embark on long-term—and what would be considered today extremely risky—projects.”

Clinicians and statisticians fight over whether the FDA should approve a new Alzheimer drug. (I think they should not)

Cells in general have antennas in them, called primary ciliums, and so do neurons.

Quanta Magazine on the end of physics and what is a particle?

Some success in using CRISPR to target cancers (Including the nastiest of them all, glioblastoma multiforme) in mice

What used to take a US supercomputer (Joule 2.0) built ~ 2018 now can be done by a single huge chip.

How long does it take to go from science to technology? 20 years. Hard to say, if one looks at the history of lasers for example

What is going on with Amyloid in Alzheimer's?Good news for beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease patients.

Genetic circuits for precision immunotherapy

My favorite anti-aging intervention, partial reprogramming, now applied to the brain of aged mice.

Progress in making cheap hydrogen. This matters because cheap hydrogen is the key to affordable hypersonic airplanes among other things.

At last, room-temperature superconductivity (At extremely high pressures)

Self-replicating antiviral molecular machines (!)

Michael Levin's two volume Ahead of the curve, reviewing old papers that were ignored when first released but that turned out to be important or that may turn out to be. Intriguingly here mitogenetic radiation appears as an underrated discovery while Langmuir above classifies this as pathological science. With frontier science this is not that surprising.

Nintil is a COVID-free territory, but an exception can be made for the super-fast development of mRNA vaccines.

Electric storage keeps getting cheaper

How much does it cost to test compounds in vitro, test in animals, house mice, etc.

How "possibly" becomes a fact

Tanner Greer on substack

Josh Mitteldorf on that recent hyperbaric anti-aging therapy

Dietz Vollrath and Eli Dourado on economic gowth and stagnation

IMO scores seem to predict well mathematical achievement

Effective theory and Mercury's anomalous perihelion precession, an alternate history to the development of General Relativity.

A rapamycin clinical trial for longevity. At last!

RNA as a universal computer. With some examples.

Turbocharged CAR-T with multiple base edits

Thread on the effects of the Bayh-Dole act

Bayh-Dole is a law that stipulates what federal agencies must include in a patent rights clause in a funding agreement. Those clauses establish the conditions upon which an owner of a subject invention is permitted to retain ownership. But Bayh-Dole does not require that any federal agency actually enforce any of those clauses. Thus, Bayh-Dole looks good (sorta) but ends up in practice being a do WTF you want law, but with useless administrative overhead (such as duplicating the reporting inventions and the like).

Michael Nielsen's Principles of Effective Research

Myths about naked mole-rat biology

Epigenetics also at the root of cancer?

Why tunnels in the US are so expensive

The second decade of synthetic biology

Full-text search anything

A writer on the censorship she suffered from various parties (Amazon, media) after the publication of her book on gender transition

Highly targeted senolytics

No X-ray crystallography? No problem

Apple's insanely fast M1 chip, benchmarked.

20% of Singapore's energy will be provided by a massive (50 square miles) 10GW solar power station in Australia.

Getting a Nobel Prize doesn't mean you are not a purveyor of fake news and scientific fraud.