The machinery of the cell. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.
That's the title of a wonderful post by Rafael Irizarry ( The TL;DR is the post's byline: "UMAP is a powerful tool for exploratory data analysis, but without a clear understanding of how it works, it can…
That's my favorite quote from Derek Lowe's Science opinion, "The End of Disease". And Derek was kind enough to collect links to all his AI-based drug discovery opinions from the past few years, a treasure…
) Now for something a bit different for my rabid followers: a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I thought a lot about swarms, real or virtual. And I always had this fantasy of proving that ant…
This article that just came out in Neuron (paywall but free preprint here: but has already attracted a lot of attention, including a piece New York Times ( I went through the New York Times comments and found…
... in depressed patients. A small study (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03142919) published this month suggests that patients with depression and a higher level of systemic inflammation are more sensitive…
That is the title of a recent Nature Aging article (the question mark is my addition) led by teams from the University of Sherbrooke and Columbia University reporting on their analysis of biomarkers of…
This kicks off a series of posts on inflammation, specifically chronic low-grade inflammation (CLGI), a common condition that is not considered a disease but is likely the precursor of many, many diverse…
It has been almost one month since DOC happened, the curiously strong gathering curated by Jordan Shlain, MD and John Battelle. Which means I had some time to unpack the experience, the intent (“Truth in…
Antibiotics have been much maligned for promoting resistant strains of pathogenic bacteria and wiping out good bacteria in the gut. While caution is definitely warranted, it turns out that a number of other…
An article (Open Access! by a team led by Nicholas Christakis at Yale University reports studies of microbiome compositions from 18 isolated villages in Honduras and how they correlate with social interactions…
The second volume of Tim Opler's Women's Health history is finally out! It has all the hallmarks of Tim's outstanding reports. To be clear, this is a retrospective volume and as such does not lay out what the…
I was recently reminded of the existence of a mysterious organelle discovered in 1986 by @nancy kedersha and @leonard rome, about 3 times the size of ribosomes, that inhabits most of our cells, and the cells…
A cool review article, sadly behind a paywall, in @science last week by a @northwestern university and @czi Chicago Biohub team led by @Shana Kelley, “From reactive to proactive: Continuous protein monitoring…
That's my (slightly clickbaity) summary of this article, which I am sure will reverberate in the haging and healthspan scientific community. To be clear, the inclusion criteria for this (BMI ≥ 25 and ≤ 47…
Always stimulated by Derek Lowe's writings (in spite of an average 50% agreement rate), I tried (a condensed version of) his OpenAI Deep Research prompt on the toxic effects of thalidomide with Perplexity Deep…
There is ample evidence that chronic, systemic low-grade inflammation (CLGI) can be a precursor to a number of diseases. Midlife elevations or rising trajectories of hs-CRP/IL-6 predict incident type 2…
It is with some excitement that I started reading the @The Lancet Healthy Longevity article "Biological age measured by DNA methylation clocks and frailty: a systematic review and meta-analysis" by a National…
In a clever Science Magazine article "Competitive Social Feedback Amplifies the Role of Early Life Contingency in Male Mice" (paywall but preprint here with a slightly different title: Cornell University's…
...unless you go to the strain level! Or, put differently, what matters is "functional identity", not cladistic assignment. I have always been skeptical of microbiome relative abundance analysis (in the gut or…
As Brooks Leitner reminds us ( VO2max, a measure of cardiorespiratory fitness, is also a strong independent predictor of all-cause mortality. Of course I wanted to explore possible correlations between serum…
An article that came out this month (by a serious team, with open review, always an interesting read, f1000research -though it has one notorious reviewer) could change how we view viruses and how to fight…
This is mind-blowing work by Nikolai Slavov, Shira Tsour and team. And it goes to show how little we still know, and how blind our tools are to what is really going on inside cells. RNA-Seq was supposed to…
A great resource just published in Cell by Cell Press by a stellar group of authors, Guido KROEMER, Andrea B. Maier, Ana Maria Cuervo (Albert Einstein College of Medicine), Vadim Gladyshev, Luigi Ferrucci,…
An intriguing article ("Imbalance in gut microbial interactions as a marker of health and disease", Roberto Corral López, Juan Bonachela, Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello, Michael Manhart, Simon Levin, Martin…
That antibiotics damage your gut's microbiota is a well known side effect and one reason (the other being pathogen resistance) why we should limit their use to specific situations. We also know that it can…
Dr Tamsin Lewis thank you for that! The key here, as with some of the other, more visible, stressors (poor sleep, ultra-processed food), is compounding: the continuous accumulation over time of tiny…
Now for something unexpected: Midjourney Medical. Yes, the company that generates images from natural language prompts and is the subject of multiple lawsuits for copyright infringement. But it was never your…
An interesting take from one of the most brilliant minds of microbiology, Itzhak Mizrahi. I love the paper he is highlighting, the results are impressive and exciting, it took a lot of "fundamental…
This timely report (in press) of the American College of Cardiology summarizes evidence and recommendations around Cardiovascular (CV) disease and (chronic, systemic, low-grade) inflammation (CLGI). The…
Another insightful visual from the Global Burden of Disease reports (this one from This shows 70q0 in 1990 and 2023. 70q0 is the probability of death between the ages of 0 and 70 years, i.e., the likelihood…
A timely review article about “The role of Ultra Processed Foods (UPF) in obesity” (by a team from the University of Sao Paulo and NYU) summarizes a lot of evidence that sounds obvious e.g., diets “high in UPF…
This may be controversial. But useful for the many who are "spiritual but not religious". Most organized religions create a sense of community and have regular practices, some individuals, most collective.…
No surprise there you say? Diet, exercise and sleep will improve your odds? Yes. But the surprise is the magnitude of the control we have over the risk factors for some of the worst diseases of aging: we can…
One of the most surprising things I learned at DOC in October 2025 came during this session (and that's saying a lot because I learned a ton in just a couple of days) about brain disease breakthroughs.…
The Global Burden of Disease Study 2023 reports were just published in the Lancet ( with a mind-blowing number of insights, some obvious, some hidden in plain sight and some just hidden but accessible to all…
We all have seen in one form or another these depressing (if you are in the US) graphs showing how much of an outlier the US is in terms of return on healthcare expenditures (first graph on the deck). There…
Fascinating article ("Identification of human gut bacteria that produce bioactive serotonin and promote colonic innervation", by a University of Gothenburg-led group (although I recognize many great scientists…
After the discovery that the long-lived, virtually cancer-free naked-mole rat cGAS enzyme, that differs by 4 amino acids from the inflammatory, DNA repair-inhibiting human cGAS, has the opposite, DNA…
Nature Medicine article by a @Stanford University team led by @tony wyss-coray (@Hamilton Se-Hwee Oh, @Yann Le Guen, @Nimrod Rappoport, @Deniz Yagmur Urey, @Amelia Farinas, @Jarod Rutledge, @Divya Channappa,…
A fascinating Nature article (Human and bacterial genetic variation shape oral microbiomes and health, reminds us that our microbiome (here oral microbiome) is influenced by our genes and in turn influences…
While some bacteria may boost the immune system and drive better immunotherapy outcomes in cancer patients, other bacteria produce molecules that promote inflammation. In fact, the same molecule can be…
, starting in middle age (mid-50s), well before you'd be considered "elderly. A team lead by Claire Gustafson, Ph.D., Peter Skene (both at the Allen Institute for Immunology) and Jane Buckner, MD (Benaroya…
As a follow-up to the Health-Associated Core Keystone (HACK) index I wrote about yesterday, today I found another article (Specific microbial ratio in the gut microbiome is associated with multiple sclerosis,…
Remarkable preprint by a team that includes Caterina Gasperini and Lee Rubin of Harvard Medical School: the title "Microbiome depletion rejuvenates the aging brain" is click-baity (and misleading: DO NOT TRY…
That’s the title of a great Trends in Biotechnology article led by @the align foundation’s @erika debenedictis. I loved the preprint, I am thrilled to see it published. The Align Foundation is a @schmidt…
An intriguing paper just came out in Cell Reports by Cell Press by a team from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. Their Health-Associated Core Keystone (HACK) index ranks 201 gut taxa…
Super-interesting Nature Medicine article (A multimodal sleep foundation model for disease prediction, link in comments) from a team supervised by Emmanuel JM Mignot and James Zou at Stanford University…
Really cool research and very cool Science Advances paper (OMG these illustrations!) by Guillaume Dera, Elise Nardin, Laurent Risser, Marius Albino, Quentin Garnier, Marion Kardacz and Lea Monge-Waleryszak,…
Some folks are wondering why all of a sudden their LinkedIn feed is inundated with my posts and in particular a picture of a much younger-looking Bonabeau eating a 3D-printed appetizer in a weird T-shirt. Both…
Some folks are wondering why all of a sudden their LinkedIn feed is inundated with my posts and in particular a picture of a much younger-looking Bonabeau eating a 3D-printed appetizer in a weird T-shirt. Both…
As a follow-up to the Cell article "From geroscience to precision geromedicine" ( there is a great 2022 article in Aging (Aging-US) by Alex Zhavoronkov and colleagues that neatly captures the…
Promising research from a Google Research and University of Cambridge's Institute of Metabolic Science suggesting a possible path for making insulin resistance detectable early (way before onset type II…
Amazing resource put together by Stifel Bank Tim Opler on the history of aging. The deck here is truncated by a dozen pages as it is more than the max 300 pages allowed on LinkedIn! While I don't necessarily…
The estate of Ansel Adams complained to Adobe on Threads about images generated by invoking an "Ansel Adams-style" landscape. Using genai to produce content that is "in the style" of an artist goes against…
Very useful review Leonard Guarente (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), David A Sinclair (Harvard Medical School) and Guido KROEMER (INSERM) under the banner of Academy for Health & Lifespan Research.…
My friend Daniel Levitin wrote "This Is Your Brain on Music." My friend J. Galen Buckwalter might one day write "This Is Music on Your Brain". Galen is making music with his brain! A diving accident left him…
That is the title of a remarkable study that I didn't see until now (it's like a month old, can you believe??) by a German team, Marcel Bausch, Johannes Niediek, Thomas Reber, Sina M., Prof. Dr. med. Jan P.…
I just received Blaise Aguera y Arcas's wonderful little treasure, 'What is Life?", a play on Erwin Schrödinger's opus of the same title, published as the first tome of the Antikythera series as part of…
It may be sponsored but this is a great collection of articles for a broad audience by Scientific American custom media (supported by Google Cloud, the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Optispan, and…
Zealand Pharma's decision to "pause" development of its dual GLP-1/GLP-2 receptor agonist dapiglutide due to a lack of clinical differentiation in a crowded obesity marketplace is notable and viewed largely in…
My colleague Germán Plata pointed me to a super interesting "chatGPT" for biology, bioloGPT ( developed by Conner Lambden. It may sound boring -you know, yet another chatbot, or why not use Perplexity. But…
As much as I enjoy Longevity.Technology, I find their recent article about a study in press in eClinicalMedicine – The Lancet Discovery Science ("Effects of nicotinamide riboside on NAD+ levels, cognition, and…
"Validation of L-type calcium channel blocker amlodipine as a novel ADHD treatment through cross-species analysis, drug target Mendelian randomization, and clinical evidence from medical records" ( hides a gem…
A recent fantastic Science Magazine article by a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Richard Young and Henry Kilgore of the Whitehead Institute and Regina Barzilay of MIT Computer Science…
Intriguing article by a team led by Moritz Gerstung (DKFZ German Cancer Research Center), Tom Fitzgerald and Ewan Birney (European Bioinformatics Institute | EMBL-EBI Hinxton, UK) reporting on the use of…
Such a transformation in public perception cannot be attributed to a single factor and I would point to at least a couple: (1) A messaging shift in the community from longevity to healthspan: while the former…
I just came across this fascinating PNAS article by Enrique Muro, Fernando Ballesteros, Bartolo Luque Serrano and Jordi Bascompte, "The emergence of eukaryotes as an evolutionary algorithmic phase transition"…
It has been known for a decade or so that the gut microbiome influences the success of cancer immunotherapy: if the right bacteria are present (e.g., Ruminococcus spp. and Prevotellaceae spp.), they can boost…
Ruminant animals are a major source of methane gas emissions: “cow burps” and other ruminant burps are responsible for about 30% of anthropogenic methane emissions. A new study published yesterday in Science…
A great Quanta Magazine article by Gabriel Popkin focuses on how "crowded" and active cells are: "the packing of molecules into tiny spaces is emerging as a fundamental way that cells have evolved to harness…
Ok, that is my short summary interpretation (for AI nerds) of an intriguing article by a Cedars-Sinai-led team. From the abstract: "Here we characterized the representational geometry of populations of neurons…
I love Quanta Magazine! In this article ( Viviane Callier does a great job of laying out in simple terms a very complex topic: in fact, that is the point, the cell is a complex object (a recurrent theme) and…
Now that the article is out and Open Access on Cell, I am reposting a comment I made a few months ago about a super interesting preprint, "How to Build the Virtual Cell with Artificial Intelligence: Priorities…
We know that there are numerous interactions between the brain and the immune system. This Nature Neuroscience paper, "Neural anticipation of virtual infection triggers an immune response" ( by a team led by…
A stunning report by Uri Alon of the Weizmann Institute of Science and colleagues Ben Shenhar, Glen Pridham, Thaís Lopes de Oliveira (Karolinska Institutet), Naveh Raz, Yifan Yang, Joris Deelen (Leiden…
The placebo effect (and its evil twin, the nocebo effect) has always been a fascinating topic to me, a miracle to some and a plague to the pharmaceutical industry, especially in therapeutic areas that involve…
In a fascinating and exciting article (Engineered commensals for targeted nose-to-brain drug delivery, Cell 188, 1545-1562) by a @NUS team led by @matthew wook chang, the authors: Identified lactic acid…
Scientists from the University of Basel in Switzerland studied the exploratory behavior of different species of cichlid fish from Africa’s Lake Tanganyika. The 240 species found in the lake evolved from the…
This is a big deal. A team from Eligo Bioscience were able to deliver a plasmid with a base editor that targets specific Escherichia coli genes using a phage-derived vehicle and designed to be non-replicative,…
8 months ago I was marveling at the mysterious vaults that abound inside our cells ( which we still don't much about. But just because we don't really know what they are supposed to do does not mean we can't…
has a nice summary of the two back-to-back landmark papers on thymic health published in Nature ( and last week by a team led by Hugo Aerts. It is a big deal in many ways, in particular because they show that…
I had fun thinking about, and playing with, the 2026 Longevity Bracket ( organized by Optispan's Matt Kaeberlein with a committee composed of Kayla Barnes-Lentz, Nicole Byrne, MD, Brian Kennedy, Siim Land, and…
Great article with a misleading title: "A synthetic protein-level neural network in mammalian cells" (Science Magazine: free bioRxiv & medRxiv preprint: The premise that cells are (fast) information-processing…
Around age 45, I felt like my body was suddenly becoming more fragile. According to an article in Nature Aging on August 14th, 2024 by the prolific Michael Snyder and his team at Stanford University (Nonlinear…
In the eight years leading up to a dementia diagnosis, the median U.S. household net worth drops to less than half that of households without dementia: $104,000, compared with $217,000. A short article by MIT…
"The New Science of Aging Can Predict Your Future": Misleading title but excellent opinion article in the The New York Times today by Eric Topol, MD ahead of his upcoming book "Super Agers: An Evidence-Based…
One short tangential thought from the Demis Hassabis and Dwarkesh Patel podcast for the microbiome-minded. Demis states that the brain is an "existence proof" of the feasibility of…
Fascinating study showing that fat cells have a memory of... obesity and continue to behave (i.e., gene expression) just like they did during a period of abundance (i.e., obesity) and don't revert back after…
Another fantastic report by Stifel Financial Corp.'s Tim Opler on the history of women's health. Given its "Volume I" subtitle, I am eagerly expecting Volume II. Women's health has been under-invested and…
Cool article in Cell Metabolism by Cell Press, "The gut microbiota shapes the human and murine breath volatilome" by a team led by Andrew Kau and Audrey Odom John. I became aware of the vast quantities of…
I missed this paper by Arash Grakoui and colleagues at Emory University but I think it is worth bringing it up: they show that bacteria in dysbiotic mice (fed a high-fat diet) can migrate straight to the brain…
It is important to recognize the crucial role played by large, well-organized data in the emergence of powerful AI methods. ImageNet is widely considered a catalyst for the sudden success of deep learning and…
As an obituary for Sir Michael appears in Science this week, an article is came out the same day in Nature ( on the elucidated role of IL-27 in the Epstein-Barr virus infection, and Sir Michael's legacy…
If "biocomposite TPU" can be developed into a viable, marketable product, it may a first step toward compostable plastics. By integrating spores of a strain of Bacillus subtilis evolved to be heat-tolerant and…
II Updated and now also as spreadsheet To help with the 2026 Longevity Bracket ( organized by Optispan's Matt Kaeberlein with a committee composed of Kayla Barnes-Lentz, Nicole Byrne, MD, Brian Kennedy, Siim…
Very cool! Mapping 2,600 previously uncharacterized human proteolytic peptide fragments cleaved by prohormone convertases 1/3 (PCSK1/3) using a computational prediction model, a team led by Stanford University…
Oh no... "...the widely reported U-shape is largely an artifact of methodological biases, instead of a robust empirical pattern. A study recently published in European Sociological Review, describes a…
A beautiful piece of art (and science) provides a great introduction to the promise and necessity of Healthy Longevity ( The project, spearheaded by Raiany Romanni-Klein, PhD with Richard Evans, Jason…
Here comes the first convincing evidence from a The University of New Mexico-led team that at least some vertebrates have a brain microbiome, that is, microbes (bacteria, ..) in their brains ( Given the…
Yes, it is time to move beyond fecal matter transplants (FMTs) and it is also very hard. As I mentioned in a previous post, the success of FMTs against C. diff infections is our "existence proof" (in the same…
"The Greenland shark is the world’s longest-living vertebrate (400 years +). [...] Researchers have long thought that the Greenland shark lost its eyesight over the course of evolution due to its lengthy…
Relax! That's basically the message for the over-measured, metrics-obsessed population, from the Wall Street Journal's "The Wearable Showdown: Oura Ring 5 vs. Fitbit Air vs. Whoop MG vs. Apple Watch", which…
Down regulating the inflammatory cytokine IL-11 with an antibody increases healthspan in older mice, significantly. Well-done study that suggests the same approach could work in other mammals -pets and humans.…
Not one but two studies published in this week's Nature Magazine on bacterial ubiquitination to defend against phages. Ubiquitination is the first step in protein degradation, labeling the protein for…
For those who were excited to see a zebra's butt on my LinkedIn feed yesterday, here it is again. Why, you ask? I have just discovered, 25 years late, from the Princeton University Press website (!!) that this…
. Joking aside, a fulfilling social life is one of the key drivers of healthy aging. A stressful (or non-existent, which I am not sure is exactly stressful for some) social life now has a plausible association…
So tired of correlations being SOLD as causal in longevity "science". Because let's face it, there is money , a lot of it, that depends on this repulsive practice. Even respected scientists give in. It's true…
Understanding Cognitive Biases Through a Sampling Limitations Framework: A Comprehensive Review and Theoretical Integration Abstract This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical framework that…
Eli Lilly's Chorus unit, established in 2002, emerged as one of the most successful innovations in pharmaceutical R&D productivity, achieving 3-10x productivity improvements over traditional development models…
The original “fitness beats truth” (FBT) theorems do not require an explicit assumption that “seeking truth is costly.” The key requirement, instead, is that evolution favors any perceptual or cognitive…
School teaches five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The body actually runs many more sensory systems than that, monitoring both the outside world and its own internal state at all times.…
One caveat up front that matters for reading the table: "scout fraction" is not measured the same way across studies — some report a dedicated scout caste, others a trail-lapse rate (foragers that ignore an…
AI agents have been around for quite some time ("multi-agent systems" are one classical embodiment), but of course in 2024 LLM Agents are all the rage. With the explosion of agentic applications and agents'…
I was heartbroken when Harvard Business Review editors decided to title my 2003 article “Don’t Trust Your Gut” ( certainly a buzzier catchphrase than “How To Leverage Your Intuition With Analytics” or other…
I was heartbroken when Harvard Business Review editors decided to title my 2003 article “Don’t Trust Your Gut” ( certainly a buzzier catchphrase than “How To Leverage Your Intuition With Analytics” or other…
In his 60 minutes interview with Anderson Cooper two years ago, legendary music producer Rick Rubin gave viewers, as usual, incredible insights into his success and also about the future (of humans and AI).…
Wow, July 16th, 2025 was Gut Microbiome Day in Nature and Science! I am excited to see this Science paper (Controlled colonization of the human gut with a genetically engineered microbial medicine by Whitaker…
I am a scientist with lots of ideas, all the time. But I make a lot of calculation errors, and I am a slow coder. Most of my ideas go untested. On the flip side, I can easily and quickly verify whether a…
I was hit hard by learning about Danny Kahneman's very deliberate decision to end his life by assisted suicide in Switzerland last year (Danny's former collaborator on the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and…
Timely article by Xuekun WU, Matthew Wu, James Zou, Nicole Kleinstreuer, Joseph C. Wu: Over 90% of drug candidates that succeed in preclinical animal studies fail in human trials. One (but not the only) big…
Even if you happen to intuitively agree with the conclusions, this the kind of dangerous and uninformed statement from a bestselling author that spreads like wildfire and becomes impossible to contain. The…
Sergey Kornilov thank you for sharing and for your analysis! Interesting results that point to problem areas and raises some questions... but the results come with enormous caveats. The biggest, I think, are:…
's requests for startups are always a good place to peek into the zeitgeist (at least the Silicon Valley zeitgeist). A few comments (on things I know a little bit about): #3: the n-of-1 is great on paper…
Some 27 years ago, I was so impressed by Pablo Funes' work (with his PhD advisor the always ideating Jordan Pollack) (P. Funes and J.B. Pollack, “Evolutionary Body Building: Adaptive Physical Designs for…
If you are like me and have been following the rise and rise and rise of GLP-1 analogues and other incretin drugs against obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, w̶o̶r̶l̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶f̶l̶i̶c̶t̶ and more, you…
Ok, by evolution I mean evolutionary computing (EC), meaning algorithms inspired by natural evolution such as genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, genetic programming and more. Why? Everyone, their…
A useful preprint (Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce; by Stanford University's Yijia Shao, Humishka Zope , Yucheng Jiang, Jiaxin Pei, David…
Of course this caught my attention: LLMs and Swarm Intelligence! According to this study by a team from Renmin University of China, LLMs differ significantly in decentralized swarm scenarios based on their…
Not ONE but TWO AI (Co-)Scientist articles popped up in Nature today under Accelerated Review. 1⃣ A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery by the never-shy folks from FutureHouse/Edison…
A clever computational model leveraging differential exposures to daylight by US location and the CDC PLACES health data by county was used to determine the possible health outcomes of switching from the…
There is something happening in all kinds of business contexts, but most prevalent in the expensive content business, aka consulting: a lot of mediocre content (AI slop) is being generated by AI tools,…
I found a description of the following experiment at (an intriguing discussion of AlphaGo's famous "random" or "genius" move 37). These two pictures were presented in 1966 by A. Michael Noll, a Bell Labs…
Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicilin is a classic example of serendipitous discovery. "Fleming kept a messy lab. He left petri dishes, microbes and nearly everything else higgledy-piggledy on his lab…
As we're witnessing generative exaggeration in humans on social media discussing LLM social agents (or artificial social crustaceans as David Ha would put it), a timely article by Walter Quattrociocchi and…
In the fourth major deal with a Chinese biotech in just a few months ( Merck (MSD) is paying Hengrui Pharma $200m upfront (and up to $1.77bn on milestones plus royalties on net sales if approved) for a…
In a fun and short speculative PNAS article titled “Could humans and AI become a new evolutionary individual?” (PNAS 122 (2025) No. 37 e2509122122), Paul Rainey (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology…
Yesterday I found myself excitedly analyzing my p̶o̶o̶p̶ fecal matter's microbial composition, as one does (in certain circles). And I have a high abundance of this weird Prevotella mizrahii, which I was…
One consequence of the current genAI hype is companies, large and small, rushing to apply it to use cases that are either inappropriate or for which the technology is not yet ready. Of course, the more…
A new wave of AI generation tools for images and videos has triggered a lot of excitement and fear. The reaction goes something like this: "Wow! Look at how realistic this image is. Can you tell this image is…
I am late to the armchair quarterbacking on DeepSeek, as I wanted to let the dust settle a little before forming an opinion. I think this work by a team from HKU, University of California, Berkeley, Google…
Tim O'Reilly wrote a concept-rich piece that I found incredibly novel and refreshing. Lots of ideas in Tim's article, and the one that stuck is best captured here: "... in the long term, if people stop…
In a thought-provoking blog post a little more than 2 years ago ($200 Billion in Revenue: How an Aging Drug Will Conquer Pharma, age1's Alex Kesin, Maggie Li and Alex Colville wondered who will pay for an…
The ability to create agentic workflows that can call tools and LLMs (Large Language Models) is opening up a universe of possibilities (and dangers too, but that’s for another post). Among them is verification…
I missed this paper in Nature last week, which reports "the discovery of a natural protein, citrate synthase from the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus, which self-assembles into Sierpiński triangles."…
A creative tour de force in molecular design in this article "GLP-1R–GIPR–PPARα/γ/δ quintuple agonism corrects obesity and diabetes in mice" by Timo Müller and a team the includes Jonathan Douros and Patrick…
Cool Springer Nature article on "emergent misalignment" (Training large language models on narrow tasks can lead to broad misalignment, Jan Betley, Niels Warncke, Anna Sztyber, Daniel Tan, Xuchan Bao,Martín…
In last week's issue of Science Magazine, Melanie Mitchell reminded us that the narratives we weave depend crucially on the metaphors we use to describe a situation, an event, a concept, a tool, or AI. We are…
An interesting statement made by Erik Brynjolfsson during his AI, Science and Society Conference AIActionSummit at École Polytechnique/Institut Polytechnique de Paris. The "at least for now" part. Erik made…
I will come back to the topic of food printing in the context of generative thinking -and, of course, generative AI. That was the reason behind our first (2005) foray into food printing and the premise of…
In an interview for the fantastic Longevity.Technology, Nir Barzilai lists the 4 highest-scoring FDA-approved drugs for humans. It is striking that 3 of the 4 drugs were primarily developed as anti-diabetic…
Thank you Kristen Fortney and BioAge Labs for a fantastic gathering of friends, old and new, with a timely topic: "Extending Human Healthspan: Beyond Weight Loss to Metabolic Resilience." Great timing on the…
Even if not pursuing microbiome therapeutics, Pharma/Biotech should be interested in interactions between drugs and (mostly gut) microbiome. But it is too complex for an industry that is still "throwing sh*t…
Intriguing article by a group at Columbia and TU Denmark Lingby: orally delivered E. coli Nissle 1917, a workhorse of synthetic biology and the preferred chassis in a number of attempts for human therapeutics,…
One irregular dispatch when a new piece lands: notes on AI, evolution, complexity, and the biology of discovery. No noise.
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