Talent (Tyler Cowen & Daniel Gross, St. Martin's Press, 2022) is a book about discovering (and hiring) talent. Most highly sold books about hiring are rather about being hired, whereas Talent is primarily about the opposite problem. Talent comes in all shapes and sizes, so this book is attempting something harder than a book that tries to prepare for a particular kind of interview (like a software engineering interview), Talent aims to be relatively general in the observations it makes.
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Working towa…
Cool study, but no lifespan effects bro
— Everyone, including myself until recently
The aging field has historically focused on the twin aims of longer and healthier lives. As a trend, interventions that extend lifespan also tend to improve health whereas the opposite is not true. I suspect that some would even consider lifespan extension in some model organism as one of the necessary conditions to call something a promising aging drug. This heuristic has limits.
When I wrote the Longevity FAQ I reviewed …
Multiple Sclerosis, a disease of hithertho unknown etiology has been somehwat elucidated: Infection with the Epstein-Barr virus is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for it. Moderna is working on a vaccine for EBV at the moment. More here.
Cambrian Bio's secret master plan to build aging drugs.
Some people have trouble recognizing faces. Others remember them all
Progress in storing data in DNA
The Charisma of Leaders (ht/ Molly Mielke)
Quanta's The Year in Biology
Apprenticeship Online
Are warp dri…
Last year in my end of year review I wrote that
What is the plan for 2021? The year will start with some posts in the Fund People, not Projects series that I just started. Having an answer to "What's the best way to structure science" would be nice. Maybe by the end of year we'll have that answer. I am also working on some longevity-related stuff but that will take a while to be made public.
Indeed 2021 started with that, I added a few more entries to the Fund People, not Projects series. Some o…
Survey of the origins of some foundational techniuqes in biology
Markus Strasser's post-mortem of his work on knowledge extraction from academic publications. A must read for everyone interested in the broad tools for thought category.
Antiaging diets: separating fact from fiction. A review of what is known about various diets claimed to help with lifespan/health in humans
In my immunosenescence explainer I noted that levels of zinc go down with age. Zinc is key for the immune system. Recent review on this …
Nobel Prize winner P.B. Medawar once wrote, in Advice to a Young Scientist, that 'any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems.' But what makes a problem "important"? And how do you know it when you see it? The answers don't come from reading them in a book, or even by explicitly being taught them. More often, they're conveyed by example, through the slow accretion of mumbled asides and grumbled curses, by smiles, frowns, and exclamations over yea…