Back in 2020 when I wrote the Longevity FAQ I had a section on telomeres and some cursory examination of how much they might matter for aging. Now that I know more it's time to revisit it, including also some historical notes and some papers that came out after I wrote that FAQ. The direct reason for writing this post is that often when I say that I work on aging (at Retro Biosciences, we are hiring!) I am asked if "that's the telomeres thing". For some reason, telomeres became tied to aging broad…

Target-based drug discovery hasn't worked that well historically. Metformin, most likely not a longevity drug Anduril Interesting new paper on LLMs being dumb in an weird way: training a model on "A is B" does not necessarily confer the knowedge that "B is A"; another LLMs are less impressive than we thought here. Scott Alexander comment highlights on his Elon Musk post Against and For Automaticity A step towards delivery of gene therapy to the brain: using ultrasound to disrupt the blo…

I recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk. I liked the book's little anecdotes describing the way Elon is in his high and lows. I didn't come out of reading the book thinking that one has to be yelling at people and being obnoxious to get things done, though certainly being willing to have difficult conversations is something one needs. Rather the main things I took from the book that make Elon Elon are two things: Questioning life's default settings. If there's an option that others usually…

I've written in the past a couple of blogposts on education and learning: these two on Bloom's two sigma and mastery learning, and spaced repetition systems (SRS) are the main examples. Something I noticed today is that on the one hand I have these blogposts, and I find SRS valuable in theory but in practice what I do is something quite different: massive input. I refer to this concept in passing in Scaling tacit knowledge The interesting thing of language learning is how effortless it seems to be for chil…

Stuart Buck's personal metascience history Heidi Williams on accelerating scientific progress Claire Hughes Johnson interview Ben Reinhardt on K-99 The placebo effect, less real than it originally seemed The allele in the DEC2 gene that lets humans sleep less (which I have!) makes flies also sleep less -and- live longer Pooled screens meets microscopy Novo Nordisk (Ozempic, Wegovy)'s market cap is not larger than its home country (Denmark)'s GDP Self-coercion, a thread For a long time I assumed calling peop…

Is erithrytol bad? Is aspartame bad? As I noted in my Alzheimer's series, a promising target to treat the disease is phosphoryated tau (the 'fire' the keeps the disease burning) as opposed to amyloid beta (the 'spark' that triggers AD but does not keep it going). A recent attempt at reducing tau A reason why microbiome research is widely thought to be not of high quality: Small variations to sample preparation techniques seem to have large effects on the bacteria that end up being analized "Fake work&q…