bglazer

26 ms·

301.
by bglazer 3y ago
We're talking about biomedical science here. Things move slowly because the domain is exceptionally complex and human lives are in the balance. AlphaFold catapulted protein structure prediction forward, and it's hard to overstate
302.
by bglazer 3y ago
I wonder if this would be useful as a dataset for economics research. Lots you could conceivably pull from the ads: fine grained pricing, company formation and destruction, trends in standards for components, performance specs of components
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Absence of near-ambient superconductivity in nitrogen doped lutetium hydride(nature.com)
4 points by bglazer 3y ago|0 comments
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by bglazer 3y ago
There are various strategies that cancer cells can use to evade the immune system. They can simply stop expressing the neoantigen. Also tumor cells can express proteins that suppress immune cells. The genetic instability works both ways, th
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by bglazer 3y ago
This sounds very familiar to when I was a young man and I was given a lot of painkillers and had a very high fever due to an infection. I had a very intense waking dream where I felt like I was hurtling into an infinite void. I had a few fl
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by bglazer 3y ago
Yeah that’s how they immediately struck me. I have mixed feelings about Haeckel. He was definitely a eugenicist and his ideas may have had some influence on the birth of Nazism. So as much as I’m entranced by his very beautiful renderings o
307.
by bglazer 3y ago
No it means he knows his audience. He does broadly interesting projects, but doesn’t lose them in technical detail. For many people it’s mindless entertainment, but for some it will inspire them to look more deeply. Then, as you know, there
308.
by bglazer 3y ago
Mark Rober is easily one of the most popular science/engineering channels on Youtube. I find the corniness a bit irritating and lacking in detail, but he gets tens of millions of views so he’s doing something right. I get the impressi
309.
by bglazer 4y ago
I'm surprised there's not closed loop control for feeds and speeds. Like, it seems relatively easy to tell when the tool is chattering, even a simple microphone and audio processing would probably give a decent signal that could t
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by bglazer 4y ago
How does a corporation filing a sham bankruptcy to avoid paying out a legally mandated penalty improve justice? I can just as easily say that this tactic degrades prosecutorial effectiveness because it disincentives lawyers from taking case
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by bglazer 4y ago
Is the engine 3d printed? Or at least components of it? The only footage I’ve seen of their 3d printing process is on, relatively parts like tanks. That may just be to protect IP, but I would be very impressed if they’re printing and using
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by bglazer 4y ago
The adhesion of the gecko’s foot is caused by van der waals forces, not the Casimir effect, just fyi
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by bglazer 4y ago
Yeah but what does that have to do with this keyboard in particular?
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by bglazer 4y ago
What’s the joke here? I don’t understand
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by bglazer 4y ago
Yeah they haven’t made much of an impact yet but I’m almost certain they’ll help improve biological models in the future. Check out INDRA ( http://www.indra.bio/ ). It uses standard NLP tech to convert natural language refere
316.
by bglazer 4y ago
I’d say it’s a pretty even mix of matlab and python. My advisor would be upset if I didn’t plug his framework: https://pysb.org/ As far as textbooks go, I guess I’d recommend Uri Alon’s book: https://www.routledg
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by bglazer 4y ago
These models are not exactly state machines, they’re usually expressed as systems of differential equations. They’re sometimes expressed as stochastic equations, which are like random state machines, I think. But yeah, SBML is the standard
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by bglazer 4y ago
Interesting to see Biomodels on HN. This kind of computational modeling is still fairly niche in biology but I think it’s going to play a much larger role in the future in understanding biology. If you look at a graph of all the interaction
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by bglazer 4y ago
Certainly, Mendelian diseases are a case where gene editing is currently justifiable. In fact, researchers have already cured “bubble boy” syndrome in several kids so that they can get a normal cold and recover just like anyone else. Remark
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by bglazer 4y ago
We understand biology extremely poorly. It’s only been twenty years since we got a decent look at the genome, and like 5 since we could start changing it at all reliably. What we’ve found is that human gene regulation is almost immeasurably
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Biology Is a Burrito(cell.substack.com)
2 points by bglazer 4y ago|0 comments
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by bglazer 4y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285583/ The link above is a fairly readable summary of a conference in which academics debated the need for gain of function research. As you can see, this was not a settled t
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by bglazer 4y ago
Has Pfizer done any gain of function research?
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by bglazer 4y ago
Curious why you think antifraud is “unsexy”? I worked in the field for a few years. My experience was that the bulk of fraud is easily detected with bog standard models (most people doing fraud are lazy). But, there’s a long tail of super s
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by bglazer 4y ago
I don’t think this is an area in which pure first principles reasoning leads to good outcomes. People are resistant to any sort of genetic restrictions on procreation for a couple reasons. First, the historical precedent of eugenics is so
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by bglazer 4y ago
Luciferases are proteins that catalyze light emitting reactions. Fireflies are the most well known example, but they occur in a wide variety of forms across the tree of life. They’re also spectacularly useful in biological research. A commo
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De novo design of luciferases using deep learning(nature.com)
3 points by bglazer 4y ago|1 comments
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by bglazer 4y ago
It’s a social failure that we put the cost of caring for very young children exclusively on the shoulders of their young parents. As a society, we collectively pay for the healthcare of old people as a shared burden spread across our whole
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by bglazer 4y ago
Biochemistry is wild! Measuring is an absolutely fascinating procedure. The predominant method is called sequencing by synthesis. Illumina is the company that basically rules the market for this technology, they have some decent explanatory
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by bglazer 4y ago
Yep!

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