What does it mean to understand something in biology?
There are of course Tinbergen's four questions to understand systems in biology. Tinbergen separates explanations into:
What's the function of X, evolutionarily speaking?
How did X evolve?
How does X work?
How does X develop as an organism grows?
So for vision, wikipedia gives the following example:
Four ways of explaining visual perception:
Function: To find food and avoid danger.
Phylogeny: The vertebrate eye initially developed with a blind spot, …
Back in 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote Science The Endless Frontier. The monograph itself aims to justify the establishment of what would later become the NSF (altough it was not the first time such a thing had been proposed), and Bush even proposes the exact structure and budget it should have.
But, despite the title, the essay does not talk at all, implicitly or explicitly as science being an endless frontier. There is talk of science being an open frontier ripe for exploration, but that's as close as it gets.…
George Selgin starts his series on the economic effects of the New Deal
OpenAI releases GPT-3, their latest general purpose language model. It represents a vindication of those who argued that "just more weights and data" would lead to a step change in performance. Gwern has more on this. Still far from AGI, but it's substantial progress.
There are some senescent cells -in the liver, in this case- the cleareance of which is bad for the organism
Andrew Gelman on peer review
And peer review is broke…
It has recently been found possible to estimate age, mortality risk, or general health by looking merely at the epigenome. The models used to do so are referred to as epigenetic (or methylation) clocks.
Epigenetic clocks are increasingly becoming a popular choice for scientists in the field of aging research to measure the putative efficacy of anti-aging interventions. They may make it possible to get results before full Kaplan-Meier curves are available, and they could serve, at least seemingly, as a repla…
Big Ball of Mud, an essay on why software systems end up being ones, and why that's to be expected given real world constraints. (h/ Andy Matuschak)
Very high-molecular weight hyaluronan in naked mole rats is thought of as one of the keys to them being almost immune to cancer. New study tests if cultivating mouse and human cells with that added substance has protective effects (Against senescence) and it does, even when it suppresses gene p53 which is a tumor suppressor.
How doctors broke the US healthcare …
If you've been following Nintil -or been moderately curious1- you have probably come across claims that Science is broken in some way or another, that we live in an era of scientific stagnation, or some horror stories about researchers spending their lives applying for grants and not doing research. Here's a reading list that you may find interesting to navigate this conversation. Each piece includes a brief fragment from the source that describes its content. This is not intended to be a collection of ever…