For those diet coke drinkers among you, yes aspartame is perfectly fine. It probably is not some kind of secret nootropic either.

IVF is a procedure commonly associated with infertility treatments as a last resort option. It is also a requirement if one wants to do any embryo screening. There's a small rabbithole to be explored (I didn't fully go into it) of potential adverse effects of IVF: it might increase in risk of cerebral palsy among others, which could defeat the point of the screening itself (Except if a particularly nasty monogenic disease is present). Older work (Kamphuis et al. 2014) points to IVF being riskier whereas newer work says it's probably fine and the older data is an artifact of older IVF tending to lead to twins (Spangmose et al., 2021)

Ultima Genomics, a company building DNA sequencers, at last launched, at prices substantially lower than market-leading Illumina (Also cheaper than BGI which already was cheaper than Illumina). Some caveats of their technology in this twitter thread. A Tiktok explains it

Remember that book on NY party life I linked to here? A Nintil.com reader did a conceptual replication of the premise of the book.

An evaluation of NSF's SGER ("high risk high reward") programme

Clinical trials on plasma aphaeresis for lifespan

Scott Alexander on a nootropic recommendation engine

Derek Lowe asks: How long as we going to keep doing this [trying to reduce amyloid in the brain to treat Alzheimer's]? My answer: As long as pharma credibly believes they can shitpost their way past the FDA and make money off it with questionable clinical trials, same thing as in cancer research. Though that heuristic doesn't quite fork for Alzheimer's, because cancer drugs do get approved and with the exception of aducanumab, Alzheimer's drugs do not. This might be some kind of Pascal's wager? An act of desperation? (If not amyloids then what?). It does seem to me an exercise in mass irrationality.

Though I'm not a doomer about cancer therapy in general, these results seem legit, doomer in chief Vinay Prasad likes the trial

AGI doomerism, with some commentary

Combined treatment continues to show promise for lifespan, in flies

Cognitive apprenticeship via expert streaming

Ben Kuhn on 10x engineers

Sam Bankman-Fried thinks (as do I) big tech companies could work as well with substantially fewer employees

You have seen sequence to structure predictions (AlphaFold), watch a human do structure to sequence

New Science just launched their fellowship

Younger people are more pro- political violence. Is that an age effect (Young people in each time period tend to be more pro) or a cohort effect? (Society is becoming more pro-political violence). It seems the latter to me. Thread here

Why metformin is not so exciting for longevity

Early transoceanic telegraphy was not strictly better than carrying messages in steam boats

New longevity-funding foundation just dropped

Michael Nielsen on Effective Altruism, with some commentary in the replies

Ben Reinhardt on asking good questions to map research fields

A case for more career scientists

A japanese company is publishing their total fertility rate to show they are family-friendly

The story of how one Dr Cowie singlehandedly? raised US IQ by 15 points