- What is better than a helicopter on Mars? How about a submarine on Titan. Titan is the only extraterrestrial body in the solar system with liquid on its surface; it’s just that the liquid happens to be a mixture of methane and ethane, mostly located in deep trenches around the poles, at a cool -180 degrees centigrade. If life can use hydrocarbons (instead of water) as a solvent, these oceans are where you’d expect to find it.
- You and I breathe oxygen, but the oxygen we enjoy comes from the Great Oxidation Event. Interestingly, fossil evidence suggests that the first oxygen-breathing organisms arose 500 million years before this. More commentary provided by the Weizmann Institute of Science.
- The CEO of QuantGene, Jo Bahkdi, had a very interesting discussion about his rapid turnaround COVID-19 testing service with Kevin Folta on Talking Biotech Podcast. According to Bahkdi, QuantGene’s innovation is not in their test chemistry, but in their IT infrastructure. The story is that QuantGene is able to guarantee rapid turnarounds by automating the steps to track which patient each sample came from at each step in the testing process (transport, preparation, analysis, and so forth). Delivering timely results is important, but their service still costs “just” $185 per test, which means that this innovation isn’t about to enable the large-scale deployment of pathogen testing.
- A paper from 2019 describes “The emerging role of cell-free DNA as a molecular marker for cancer management”. All cellular deaths result in the cell’s DNA being expelled in the blood, which might be possible to detect very early in a blood draw– potentially before cancers are large enough to produce symptoms.
- Jamie Metzl talks with Joe Rogan about the hypothesis that COVID-19 was created in a laboratory and was released accidentally. I hesitate to endorse Metzl’s evidence without having done due diligence myself, but he does a good job outlining the contours of the question, which are part scientific and part political.
The scientific question is whether COVID-19 genome and its evolution within human populations deviates from the patterns we expect based on our observation of other viruses that have jumped to humans.
The political question is whether, for key actors, incentives to ignore and cover up (or inflate and fabricate) evidence of a lab-break are strong enough to override a naive commitment to scientific curiosity and integrity.
- Psychiatrist Scott Siskind discusses how any bayesian reasoner (including a scientist) can get fixated on a particular idea– contra Eithan Siegel, who argues that groupthink isn’t a significant problem in the sciences.
- A few viruses cause infections that last for years in a dormant form. A prominent example of this is HIV. Ebola might also be capable of this trick, as a recent outbreak in Guinea was (allegedly) started after the virus lay dormant for 5-years(!) in a nurse. The alternate hypothesis is that there was a small, unrecognized chain of human to human transmission, in the community. Either way, it looks like we’re seeing Ebola habituate to humans, evolving to become less lethal, but by the same token, more easily spread.
- Natural selection at work, making mice who live near humans better at solving food puzzles.
- How the West Lost COVID from the New York Magazine: a long read, but a good one. One of the goals of this blog is to demystify scientific research. Although we typically speak to insiders, calibrating the public’s expectations about science is also important, and the faults in our pandemic response illustrate why. To wit: if science is expected to provide certain, definitive answers to questions of public import, organizations who purport to be “informed by science” find themselves unable to act when findings that are not very certain, which is inevitable when dealing with a novel pathogen. This leads to a sort of paralysis, which has been widely criticized. This is discussed in an excerpt from the article:
In East Asia, countries didn’t wait for the WHO’s guidance to change on aerosols or asymptomatic transmission before masking up, social-distancing, and quarantining. “They acted fast. They acted decisively,” says [Michael Mina, a Harvard Epidemiologist]. “They made early moves. They didn’t sit and ponder: ‘What should we do? Do we have all of the data before we make a single decision?’ And I think that is a common theme that we’ve seen across all the Western countries—a reluctance to even admit that it was a big problem and then to really act without all of the information available. To this day, people are still not acting.” Instead, he says, “decision-makers have been paralyzed. They would rather just not act and let the pandemic move forward than act aggressively, but potentially be wrong.
- We’ve discussed where the first organic molecules might have formed. The Earth is a contender. Mars is another. But organics have also been found on the surface of asteroids.
- The space race is polarizing: Chinese and Russian space agencies agreed to build a moon research station on the moon together, combining Chinese funds and manufacturing capacities Russian expertise in spaceflight. Meanwhile, the NASA Artemis program was recently endorsed and backed by Biden. Let us see who will build the moon base first!
