Best of Twitter - Week of December 13, 2021

Jack Soslow @JackSoslow

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:

December 16th 2021

695 Retweets2,536 Likes

^ wow.

Robin Hanson @robinhanson

"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." More than half of high-impact cancer lab studies could not be replicated in controversial analysisCancer reproducibility project couldn’t assess many papers because of uncooperative authors and other challengesscience.org

December 10th 2021

58 Retweets272 Likes

Nikita S @singareddynm

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

December 13th 2021

7 Retweets79 Likes

Alexander Kruel @XiXiDu

"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." Elon Musk Is TIME’s 2021 Person of the YearVisionary. Showman. Iconoclast. Troll. How Elon Musk is reshaping our world—and beyondtime.com

December 13th 2021

11 Likes

Trevor Klee @trevor_klee

@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. – Trevor Kleetrevorklee.com

December 10th 2021

4 Retweets13 Likes

^ “Want to reverse aging? Try reversing graying, first.”

Alexey Guzey (hiring!) @alexeyguzey

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. New Science 2022 Summer Fellowship - New ScienceNew Science is a 501c3 nonprofit with the goal of facilitating scientific breakthroughs by building the 21st century institutions of basic science and empowering the next generation of scientists. We are philanthropically funded and, to date, we have raised more than $1.5m from the Survival and Flou…newscience.org

December 19th 2021

111 Retweets367 Likes

Alexey Guzey (hiring!) @alexeyguzey

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

December 19th 2021

29 Retweets158 Likes

Alexander Kruel @XiXiDu

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.

December 19th 2021

11 Retweets74 Likes

Prof. Nikolai Slavov @slavov_n

"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…

December 18th 2021

174 Retweets750 Likes

^ 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

Alina Chan @Ayjchan

@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" Scientist bitten by mouse in Taipei lab before testing positive for COVID | Taiwan News | 2021-12-10 01:36:00CECC confirms scientist bitten by lab mouse while experimenting on different COVID variantstaiwannews.com.tw

December 9th 2021

27 Retweets95 Likes

Alina Chan @Ayjchan

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."

December 11th 2021

3 Retweets26 Likes

Alina Chan @Ayjchan

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. Senior Chinese scientist acquired SARS-CoV-2 in lab infection accident, virologist says - U.S. Right to KnowIn what may be the first known case of a lab-acquired infection with the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, a senior scientist was infected with SARS-CoV-2 in a prestigious laboratory in Beijing in early 2020, according to virologists’ emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know. The National Institu…usrtk.org

December 11th 2021

9 Retweets66 Likes

Kevin Simler @KevinSimler

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

I figure it’s worth posting a summary thread about my current thoughts on COVID to refer back to: Like many great blunders in history, we went into this without an exit plan. The landscape has changed such that risk is now individual cost/benefit more than public health. 1/

December 13th 2021

13 Retweets121 Likes