Best of Twitter - Week of July 12, 2021 (1/2)
Ages of Founding Fathers in 1776:
James Monroe: 18
Alexander Hamilton: 21
James Madison: 25
Thomas Jefferson: 33
Thomas Paine: 39
John Hancock: 39
🇺🇸
^ in Russia, drug-related deaths increased 60% in 2020.
I just found out Henry David Thoreau’s mother brought him a sandwich every day and washed his clothes for him while he was writing Walden.
That changes things a bit doesn’t it.
I think 21st century America, will be far more like 15th century Portugal, than 20th century Britain.
Americans are tired of hegemony, but enlivened by the renewed prospect of becoming a spacefaring people.
We seek a cosmic Plymouth Rock.
Axial Wanderer @EricWollberg
"the 21st century could see our civilization develop technologies allowing rapid expansion throughout our currently-empty galaxy. And thus, that this century could determine the entire future of the galaxy for tens of billions of years, or more."
Yep! 😀
cold-takes.com/all-possible-v…
^ Holden Karnofsky’s new blog
Gilbert and allies struggled to get the US to invest in war capacity because it was bad for the economy (subtracting from GDP being categorised as intermediate good), so they recategorised it as final output now adding to GDP... accounting shaping economic ‘reality’
Nathan Tankus @NathanTankus
Wow: Mammalian stem cells protect themselves from RNA viruses using a spliced isoform of Dicer, like insects and worms, which also use Dicer-dependent RNA interference in antiviral defense) and in contrast with mammalian differentiated cells, which rely on the interferon system
Enzo Poirier @EnzoZ_P
What I find amazing about space is that in every era, the press, politicians and cultural critics have repeatedly told us that it’s not popular, it’s not important and it’s not the right time to focus on space.
It’s rarely popular to do hard things.
Let’s do them anyway.
I was put on the pill at 17, years before I became sexually active, because I had painful periods. I went through my entire adolescent identity-formation period, and then some, before learning a whole lot of women experienced — as I did — extreme mood instability & lack of libido
^ thread
"We don't think people should publish negative results"
"Also, this conflicts with previously published [positive] results"
Hmmmm... let's think about that for a bit.
Prof Nichola Raihani @nicholaraihani
Today we released a preprint biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
where we take a step towards the next challenge:
building a nanopore single-molecule PROTEIN sequencer! 😳
Awesome experiments by postdoc Henry Brinkerhoff of our #CDlab, augmented with MD simulations of @aksimentievLab
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