Best of Twitter - Week of September 6, 2021 [1/2]
Personal news:
I'm extremely excited to announce that in the last two months @newscienceorg has become a team of four.
The brilliant David Girardo has joined as a co-founder and Head of Strategy.
David Orion Girardo 🏳 @dailectic
While the equally brilliant authors of the blog SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD have joined as Head(s) of Content.
We are continuing to grow and are still hiring for the Head of Program position and for the Living Library position. Join us!! newscience.org/jobs/
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD @mold_time
Finally, New Science is now a 501c3! We are continuing to fundraise and if you're interested in potentially being remembered as someone who helped to instigate the creation of new institutions of basic science 🙂 email me at alexey@newscience.org
This video is a masterclass in psychology.
The first person to do something always looks weird. People laugh. Then somebody else joins. Then the crowds come in and the person who started the whole thing goes from looking like a goon to looking like a genius.
In 2017, I interviewed with Elizabeth Holmes to be Head of Finance at Theranos.
I'm convinced I learned more in those 45 minutes than I did in 10 years of school and work.
So when I heard Elizabeth was on trial I couldn't help but recall that moment.
Time for a story 🧵 :
Fun reminder of massive transformation afoot in how we support breakthrough science. Not Altos, but this little scoop within the scoop: "To speed research, Jensen says this year he will be giving out $20M worth of rapid turn-around “Impetus” grants using funds from donors." 🔥
Antonio Regalado @antonioregalado
Let's talk about why mammalian red blood cells (erythrocytes) don't have nuclei.
~85% of all your cells are erythrocytes, 20-30 trillion of them in an adult.
You produce >2 million every second & they represent half of all your blood volume. So why don't they have any DNA?
"Man in Baghdad married 2nd wife, first wife (+friends) attack new wife home."
This is why in the Kurdistan Region, by law, the first wife must approve the marriage of the second wife (to same husband)
Video: Babylonfm
Today is Sci-Hub anniversary the project is 10 years old!
I'm going to publish 2,337,229 new articles to celebrate the date. They will be available on the website in a few hours (how about the lawsuit in India you may ask: our lawyers say that restriction is expired already)
If I lived alone, I’d always have my house listed for sale at 50% over market. It’s a matching market, you never know whose out there!
Underacknowledged social disability: having a strong sense that “the ball is in their court” and always waiting on other people to engage back
+
@drethelin it took me embarrassingly long to realise that "they should take the initiative half the time, so I should be able to do nothing and only lose half the opportunities" is completely wrong
^ my social life only started to improve once I decided to stop being resentful for people not wanting to hang out with me and decided to be ok with initiating 90% of contact
Mesmerizing video of mitochondrial ATP synthesis.
(Graphics have gotten so much better than when I tried memorizing this stuff in the Pleistocene!) #MolecularBiology #Chemistry
Quarantined section
With dozens of researchers at Yale, Stanford, Berkeley and IPA and several other organizations, we ran a cluster randomized trial involving almost 350,000 people and 600 villages in Bangladesh to assess the impact of community masking on COVID.
The reduction was larger in villages where we (randomly) used surgical masks than those where we used cloth masks; in surgical mask villages, we saw a 12% reduction in COVID overall and a 35% reduction among those aged 60+.
My accurate quote from Science, one of the leading scientific journals, was marked misleading by Twitter, despite also being tweeted by 1000s & covered by many leading experts. I didn’t write against recommending vaccination, as the misleading label insinuates. This is defamation
Eli Klein @TheEliKlein
^ (I verified that the quote is accurate and not out of context)
Correction
Correction to last week’s tweet about 17 women reproducing per 1 man. According to the paper cited, this was the case at some very brief point, most of the rest of the time the ratio was only about 3: