Best of Twitter - Week of December 13, 2021
2021 was the year of VR, and I have one stat to show you why:
This year, Oculus has sold more headsets than Microsoft did Xboxs.
This marks the beginning of ARVR's predominance.
A thread on ARVRs growth, use-cases, and future below:
^ wow.
"ambitious project that set out 8 years ago to replicate findings from top cancer labs … reports today that when it attempted to repeat experiments drawn from 23 high-impact papers published about 10 years ago, fewer than half yielded similar results."
We haven’t fully imagined possible immunology innovations. Lungfish self-inflict skin damage to generate a powerful mucus layer of antimicrobial extracellular DNA - what if we appropriated this “cocoon” for human health? We need to go balls to the wall in bio
"This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman...In other words: Get in, loser. We’re going to Mars."
@ArtirKel wrote an essay that might interest you. It's about what I see as the challenges of longevity research, using the lens of how difficult graying research is: trevorklee.com/want-to-revers… .
^ “Want to reverse aging? Try reversing graying, first.”
1/ Today, @newscienceorg announces its inaugural project: the 2022 Summer Fellowship.
With the NIH allocating <2% of its funding to scientists <=35yo, it's our responsibility to enable young scientists to pursue independent, high-risk, basic research.
5/ 70 years later, the NIH has effectively abdicated its responsibility to the next generation of scientists, allocating 7 (!) times more funding to scientists >65 years old–who would’ve been in mandatory retirement had they been serving in the military–than to those <=35yo
There has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion: marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…
The graph shows the ratio of rationality words to intuition words over time in different corpuses.
"Each chromatid would consist of one giant hereditary molecule made up of two mirror strands that would replicate in a semi-conservative fashion using each strand as a template; each gene would be a segment within this molecule"
--- Nikolai Koltsov, 1927
nature.com/articles/35088…
^ geneticists were mass imprisoned/murdered in 1930s in USSR which is probably why we haven’t heard of this. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Quarantined section
@chasewnelson @spectralcodex @keverington News update on the SARS-CoV-2 lab leak of a Delta variant from a Taiwan BSL3/P3 lab:
"A female researcher was bitten by a lab mouse while running experiments on COVID before testing positive for the virus"
Even in a BSL3: "some tables, doorknobs, and other surfaces had tested positive for COVID, while all tests on facilities outside the lab were negative. He said it was possible the scientist had contracted the virus from the lab environment rather than the mouse bite."
When SARS-CoV-2 infected a scientist in a Beijing lab, we only found out more than a year later through US emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.
This is not how lab-acquired infections should be reported.
Covid is now endemic, and the calculus for interventions like vaccines and masks is increasingly a matter of personal choice rather than public health
👇 Important thread
William Eden @WilliamAEden