stenl

The single-letter variable names and the lack of types (beyond some duck-typing using bold and uppercase) is what makes math so difficult to read (for me). There must be tons of errors in math papers that go undetected just because there’s no type checking.

Hey vanderZwan, we have a paper in the collection (there’s 17 brain atlas papers in this issue of Nature) on human, marmoset and mouse motor cortex (my group did the human). I think it’s cool that pretty much all the cell types could be aligned between those species, which diverged 90 million years ago.

Our full human brain cell type atlas is work in progress but hopefully we’ll post the preprint early next year.

(Edit) Direct link to the papers, which are all open access: https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/598/issues/7879

The size of the tumor likely makes a big difference too: a centimeter-sized lump contains 1000x more cells than a millimeter-sized one. It will contain 1000x more drug-resistant cells (given identical mutation rates). For example, a human brain tumor is likely to already contain hundreds of cells carrying a mutation for every amino acid in every protein. Thus for any inhibitor drug you try, hundreds of cells will already be resistant, and they will grow back the tumor in just a few months. That’s much less likely to be the case in a mouse tumor.

It’s just a protein, so it’s not very expensive to make. I guess a few hundred dollars? Here’s one seller: https://listlabs.com/products/bacterial-toxins/?sub=botulinu...

I once bought some pure botulinum toxin for an experiment (it blocks the release of acetyl choline at neuromuscular junctions). I want to say it was a milligram, but I don’t remember (that would have been 1000 times the lethal dose by inhalation). We had to get special export permission from the US government.

When the tiny vial arrived in a very large multilayered package, I sat down and read the Materials Safety Datasheet and contemplated the implications. I then decided never to open the package. We stored it under a big hollow block of concrete until the hazardous waste disposal people could figure out what to do with it.

In first grade we were given a workbook for learning how to write the letters. There was one whole page of A, one page of B, etc. You had to write maybe 100 As in a row. The kids quickly figured out that the fastest way to do it was to first write the left slant 100 times, then the right slant 100 times and finally all the 100 crossbars. So yes, you do need a little variety to defeat such shortcuts.

Cool. Ulrika’s office is across from mine, and this is a more extensive follow-up of work we did together in 2018 to map neuron types in the gut (and in the whole nervous system). I’m pretty sure Ulrika wouldn’t claim to know how the ENS works (nor do I) but having the parts list is incredibly important. For example, it enables genetic manipulation to delete cell types or activate them on-demand using light. Those things are what will lead to understanding how the system works.

Video is here, and a link to the paper: https://twitter.com/SciRobotics/status/1395413569571786752

There’s massive innovation in biotech right now. RNA vaccines are winning the COVID battle, based on extremely cool technology (pseudouridine to evade innate immunity, two prolines to lock the spike in prefusion conformation, lipid nanovesicles for delivery,...). RNA drugs are also being developed to treat cancer (by vaccinating against patient-specific neoantigens), MS (by inducing immune tolerance to suppress autoimmunity), etc.

AlphaFold2 appears to have solved the protein structure problem entirely in software, which will lead to breakthroughs in drug design.

Deep learning is being used to augment microscopy leading to amazing advances in resolution.

I could go on. Last year saw the greatest number of new drug approvals in a long time, and VC funding levels were also very healthy.

Biotech is where it’s at.

I once departed Stockholm on Jan 1st, flying to San Francisco. The route goes north, across the polar circle and over Greenland, then south towards the US west coast. As we passed the polar circle, the sun set. A few hours later, we passed it again and the sun rose, only to set again as we approached the evening in US. So I got two sunrises, two days and two sunsets that single day, which I thought was so wonderful I still remember it.

There is lag in the reporting I think. The total number of patients increased by 39 from yesterday, but those were probably assigned to multiple dates in the past. Therefore it will always look like the last few days are declining.

James Watson - who was as close to royalty as you can get in science - worked very long and hard to get himself fired. It wasn’t just ”an interview”, but a lifetime of racism and sexism. Lior Pachter has a handy collection of quotes with links to sources: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/james-watson-in...

More importantly, the specific and incredibly successful class of immune checkpoint inhibitors(PD-1 inhibition is one example) got the Nobel Prize in medicine 2018, awarded to Tasuko Honjo and James Allison. See https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/10/advanced-medicine...

Seems like only a small win for such a large key. I type a lot of math and have been happy mapping Caps Lock to ”Change keyboard layout to Greek” (macOS). It gives me quick and effortless access to the full greek alphabet.

Obama pursued policies that arguably (https://www.amnestyusa.org/the-obama-bush-doctrine/) amount to war crimes, and refused to allow the obvious war crimes of the preceding administration to be investigated. He got a Nobel peace prize essentially for being less terrible on that front than his predecessor, George W Bush.

For those who didn't get the reference, "Bowling alone" refers to an influential 1995 essay and a book by Robert Putnam about the decline of social capital in the United States since 1950: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone.

The title of the post is wrong though. He’s talking about migrating outside the solar system (i.e. to exoplanets), not just to other planets (e.g. Mars).

Everybody (90% of over-12s) has a smartphone but you can also use a computer. 98% have internet at home.

Edit: latest statistics show >95% have BankId on a smartphone. See https://www.bankid.com/assets/bankid/stats/2019/statistik-20...

Sigma Aldrich sells a kilo of pure bromoform for about $300. I’m sure bulk bromoform is much cheaper.

In Sweden, the password is BankId, a two-factor authentication app that everybody has on their phones. It’s used by all government agencies, banks and insurance companies etc to establish identity. You literally use your ssn as username to login, plus a pin, to generate a one-time passcode (which happens behind the scenes so you don’t have type it in).

International law definitely exists. In fact, Wikipedia has a whole long and interesting article about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law

Another example: international law bans torture, enforceable under ”universal jurisdiction”. That might be one reason why Bush and Cheney haven’t been to Europe since their days in office.

For example, the Iraq war was not approved by the UN Security Council, which is the only forum that can approve the use of force between (UN member) countries, apart from self defence. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_War for more details.

Related Science paper from last summer ”All-Optical Machine Learning Using Diffractive Deep Neural Networks” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.08711.pdf and https://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6406/1004

$1300/month is absolutely crazy. In Sweden, a whole year’s worth of injection insulin is about $600 (actual cost to the government, including the disposable injectors) and $0 to the end user.

Why do they claim that Word ditched its equation editor? I believe I’m on the latest Word and it certainly still has the editor.

Word’s equation editor is hands-down the best WYSIWYG equation editor I ever used. The results are beautiful and if you want a tilde you just type a f*ing tilde instead of spending an hour figuring out which combination of packages and fonts will cause LaTeX to grace you with this standard unicode character.

I guess maybe MS discontinued the old plugin equation editor (which was terrible, agreed), but the built-in one is still there.

InDesign is great, but how do you typeset equations in it? Genuine question, as I’ve searched far and wide for a viable solution. The best I have so far is ”create in another software and insert as an image”, which is unsatisfactory.

US taxes on average-ish incomes are definitely among the lowest in the OECD (as expected): http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/24/among-develo...

Unfortunately we are still vastly better at making a worse mouse (or cow) than a better one, to paraphrase biologist Anne McLaren. Sure, evolution did eventually make a super smart chimp, but it took 7 million years of tinkering.

Sweden, all of it, walked out in July and we’re doing fine. I doubt any PhD students avoid our institutions because of it, and we somehow manage to get the papers we need anyway. Asking on twitter is effective, or directly from authors. And there’s always scihub...

Sweden has recently cancelled all Elsevier subscriptions, so we can’t access the journals anyway (except Open Access papers)