I’m usually a bit below 98.6, IIRC.
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/walking-with-atoms
Apparently the first real visualization of two atoms forming a chemical bond, then breaking that bond to become two independent atoms again.
This seems interesting.
Using a machine-learning algorithm, MIT researchers have identified a powerful new antibiotic compound. In laboratory tests, the drug killed many of the world’s most problematic disease-causing bacteria, including some strains that are resistant to all known antibiotics. It also cleared infections in two different mouse models.
The computer model, which can screen more than a hundred million chemical compounds in a matter of days, is designed to pick out potential antibiotics that kill bacteria using different mechanisms than those of existing drugs.
Once the model was trained, the researchers tested it on the Broad Institute’s Drug Repurposing Hub, a library of about 6,000 compounds. The model picked out one molecule that was predicted to have strong antibacterial activity and had a chemical structure different from any existing antibiotics. Using a different machine-learning model, the researchers also showed that this molecule would likely have low toxicity to human cells.
After identifying halicin, the researchers also used their model to screen more than 100 million molecules selected from the ZINC15 database, an online collection of about 1.5 billion chemical compounds. This screen, which took only three days, identified 23 candidates that were structurally dissimilar from existing antibiotics and predicted to be nontoxic to human cells.
I guess there are robots now that can perform basic lab experiments en masse and very rapidly.
Setup costs are still very high though.
Dangerous but so cool.
I was waiting for a white guy with a GoPro to zip past.
I really like this video; it jumps from many worlds to quantum immortality and lands in the Doomsday argument while referencing the Eels frontman’s dad:
Space Time is probably my favorite YouTube show. I have a Space Time t-shirt and wear my hair and beard like Matt O’Dowd does. (And my name is Matt, so that makes me extra cool.)
There is a sort of companion piece, PBS Eons, which always tickles me and is very good as well:
Not quite as cool as physics, but with some dorky secret knowledge nonetheless. The above video reprises some highlights of my 3rd and 4th years in college, including just how incredible it is that we are here at all. I mean, just the interplay between the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum and the rise of primates with their groovy forward-facing eyes and opposable thumbs. Then there was that glacial maximum 14,000 years ago, how it affected culture. Seems like they could be considered puzzle pieces in the “tuning problem”.
…but yeah, after a good Space Time episode I feel like Edward Kelly on the right:
(not equating science with the occult, just a bit of humor)
For some reason I was wondering how dense a substance would have to be to stop all neutrinos.
I ended up here. It’s a cool article.
Cool stuff! Space Time did an episode on that idea in collaboration with FermiLab a couple of months ago:
What could go wrong?
“Mushroom canoe”