alevskaya

10 ms·

61.
by alevskaya 6y ago
I worked as a genetic engineer in human cell therapy: developmental biology doesn't really work that way. You can't just "decephalize" without causing massive secondary effects in body development and maturation - the n
62.
by alevskaya 7y ago
I've been involved w. jax/stax/trax/flax - I think the real issue w. the stax-like functional form is that it gets unwieldy very quickly when dealing w. more complicated models that are natively general-graphs as opposed
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by alevskaya 7y ago
It's still early days for JAX, but there's neural tangents https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.02803 and reformer https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04451 from iclr.
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by alevskaya 7y ago
Genetic engineer here (though I've mostly worked in humans). Cross-kingdom gene transfer has been occurring due to pathogen vectors amongst plants for as long as plants have been around. On a geological time scale the amount of gene-
65.
by alevskaya 7y ago
Some relevant context here contesting this view: https://twitter.com/lteytelman/status/1216770668475252738
66.
by alevskaya 7y ago
Hey - author here, that price does seem high - I don't remember it being that much... the only reason I linked to Zazzle at all was that they were the only printer at the time offering a simple API for single-button forwarding of image
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Show HN: Eschersket.ch – a symmetry drawing app to design custom wrapping paper(eschersket.ch)
386 points by alevskaya 7y ago|27 comments
68.
by alevskaya 7y ago
You're thinking of Dr. Sarah Taber, an ag tech and food safety consultant with lots of past exposure to startups as well. The relevant twitter thread: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/117189565787294
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by alevskaya 7y ago
Science hasn't stagnated yet. As someone with a long career in physics/biology, this attitude only reflects the myopia and ignorance of the people that hold it. We're in the middle of a revolution in our understanding of bi
70.
by alevskaya 7y ago
This is an excessive overestimate by not carefully considering the known types of afferent (incoming) fibers and their average firing statistics (most neurons fire sparsely). See the comment on that thread by "JohnShaft" who noodl
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by alevskaya 7y ago
Yes but keep in mind that this data is immediately and heavily compressed and encoded - the data sent into the brain from the retinal ganglion cells has been estimated to be on the order of 10s Mbit/sec from careful studies on rodent R
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by alevskaya 7y ago
This is something we run into even when pushing transformer-style models (which can be viewed as a partial step towards some of these capsule ideas) into new areas like computer vision. There are places where you can beat convolutions in t
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by alevskaya 8y ago
I have the misfortune of having cofounded Cambrian Genomics with Austen. I led all of our technical work. I have almost never spoken publicly about the experience. Cambrian Genomics was a small team working on building a high-throughput D
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by alevskaya 8y ago
What is it about biology that attracts crazy people? As a profession genetic engineer (I've worked on successful engineered CAR-T cell therapy startups, etc.) the most appalling thing about this isn't the hubris or defiance of no
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by alevskaya 8y ago
As someone who's often implementing models from ML papers, the issue is that english-language descriptions of methods is often found to be sorely lacking. Even good authors simply forget to mention small critical details of model desi
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by alevskaya 8y ago
No one is claiming that BM is a replacement for local civic involvement! But I also don’t like the moral tone of claims about what other people -should- be doing with their time. Sure, some people just go out there to party - who cares?
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by alevskaya 8y ago
I started and ran a science-oriented theme camp out there for over a decade as an impoverished academic, and a lot of my friends in the Bay Area help build or manage the event. I’m neither rich nor a hippy. To me, the fundamental idea of t
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by alevskaya 8y ago
Kudos! This is a beautiful intro to the planar symmetries. If anyone here wants to play around with doodling their own planar symmetry patterns, I made a weird little tool to do that at https://eschersket.ch/
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Show HN: Eschersket.ch – a symmetry drawing app to design custom wrapping paper(eschersket.ch)
24 points by alevskaya 9y ago|3 comments
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by alevskaya 9y ago
I wouldn't be quite so worried. If the effects truly do end up being due to soluble signalling factors in the younger blood (and not immune cell implantation or some other physiologic quirk of the cross-wired parabiosis experimental s
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by alevskaya 9y ago
Very over-simplified: You have a random library of many billions of cells each making a single unique antibody that was created via random combinatorial genetic shuffling early on. The ones that accidentally bind to your own natural protei
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by alevskaya 9y ago
I fully support basic science pursuing crazy ideas. I think this is a very interesting piece of basic science, it's just at an incredibly speculative stage that's unsuitable for clinical investment. Efficient delivery of novel p
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by alevskaya 9y ago
The reason this isn't getting funded is because it's extremely unlikely to work in reality. They've engineered synthetic protein sensors of dsRNA that induce apoptosis on detection - this mimics the natural viral detection s
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by alevskaya 9y ago
"Eliminates" is a very loaded term in viral therapy. This paper doesn't show elimination of virus, it shows that the integrated viral genome can be excised in -some- cells by administration of adeno-associated virus harborin
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by alevskaya 10y ago
You're shouting conspiracy because I studied neuroscience at Stanford? Dude. Just glad you didn't dig up my links to the International Order of the Prismatic Leopard.
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by alevskaya 10y ago
Hence the word 'consensus'. There are plenty of scientists that don't believe in climate change. Most of them don't work on climate data. I've met vanishingly few biologists that think GMOs pose a health risk to
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by alevskaya 10y ago
I engineer proteins for a living. I know that glyphosate is a glycine analog. Re: bacterial processing -- We've fed tons of glyphosate to mammals to see if it causes cancers - it doesn't seem to. Mammals don't absorb it we
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by alevskaya 10y ago
You don't need to convince me of the potential malfeasance of US corporate interests - I grew up in West Virginia, a state that's more or less been run by the coal industry for a century. :) We should always remain vigilant of una
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by alevskaya 10y ago
I'm not asking you to believe anything from Monsanto. There is a vast field of researchers that care deeply about what causes cancer and what can be done to prevent and treat it. Most of us aren't for sale. There are sensitive,
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by alevskaya 10y ago
There are many conflicts of interest in the world - organic farming is an industry too. e.g. at least one of those 14 experts is an active member of the organic industry and has long had a beef with the GMO industry: https://www

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