A single Swedish family used to own 40% of the Swedish stock market, they remain majority shareholders in multiple companies across Europe: the Wallenberg family. Bonus: They plow back some of that money into science funding, having funded in 1937 early work on electrophoresis by Arne Tiselius.

Starship is still not understood: Those big cyliders of steel are more transformational than you think.

A taxonomy of serendipity

Bryan Johnson, of Braintree and Kernel fame, is tracking his biological age (assessed by a very broad panel of biomarkers) in public

A theory of beauty from Christopher Alexander, and why many of Jeff Koons' sculptures strike us as lazy and boring whereas century-old ivory dog netsukes are fascinating. More here and here and here

Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress on C. elegans after 10 years. Do read the comments as well.

Extrapolating data from studies done in mice is nontrivial (and the origin of the IN MICE! meme). But there's work on developing models to to try to make these extrapolations more rigorous. I have not seen anyone using them though.

In a previous Nintil post I highlighted ("Stem cell depletion" section) how the brain is the ultimate micromanager: there are nerves going into the bone marrow and regulating the activity of the stem cells (HSCs) there. New article explains this is even more widespread.

Molly Mielke has started a newsletter, you can follow her here.

Folks have tried over and over again to make construction more efficient by applying lessons from manufacturing. Typically this means producing buildings in factories, instead of on-site by hand. And while it’s possible to build a building, and a profitable business, using factory methods, it hasn’t resulted in a quantum leap in construction efficiency - it often yields no cost improvement at all. My takeaway from this is that if we hope to achieve the kind of productivity improvements in construction that manufacturing has seen, we need to go beyond surface-level understanding (“factories make things cheaper, so we’ll build buildings in factories”), and drill down to the exact mechanisms at work in an improving manufacturing process. (Construction Physics)

Maciej Cegłowski is not happy with Stripe Crypto

Scott Alexander on the bliss of predictable stimuli

If one measures both RNA and proteins in a cell one tends to find far from perfect correlation. This may be just due to measurement error, not an underlying low corrleation.

Alphabet launches new company, initially headed by Demis Hassabis, to accelerate drug discovery with ML. Conceptually this is not a new thing and there are hundreds of companies doing this, but it's Demis Hassabis so one is to expect something interesting. More on ML-powered drug discovery here.

Say no to YC's SAFEs

Kary Mullis' Nobel Lecture is unlike any other

The seed oil wars continue, latest salvo is "actually, they are fine".

Part one of a proposal for a geothermal energy FRO

Lambda School shenanigans

Local techbro rents a boat, solves supply chain crisis

Molecular ticker tapes: Getting cells to write information about their activity as chains of proteins. Two important papers in the area just came out last month, one from the Cohen Lab at Harvard (Adam Marblestone: "Most significant and creative progress on molecular ticker-tapes since the concept was introduced around 10 years ago IMHO") and another from the Boyden Lab.

Outcompeting cancer?

A whitepaper I wrote in 2020 ended up becoming a $70M aging research nonprofit, the Rejuvenome.

The cutting R&D funding to increased R&D pipeline

I watch a talk on meta-science, a thread with comments

Podcast with Morgan Levine

I read "Apprentice to Genius" this month but I thought it wasn't particularly good.

New Diablo Swing Orchestra album just dropped