Linkpost May 2025
Everything Biology
Music in Human Evolution - Melting Asphalt
Comments on Compassion, by the Pound - Reducing Suffering
The SolidWorks Model of Simulation - Corin Wagen
Beautiful examples of modelling as an ideal. Who cares if it’s unphysical, if it’s useful?
Informative on how do people use simulation right now in the life sciences - i.e. what is the current state?
The indifference engine - ponnekanti
Why takeoff? Why now? Three hundred thousand years then talking machines.
Ponnekanti is the first place I’ve heard of “computational psychiatry”. Which sounds so promising, as a field! But the journals and top links are super brain-based - a lot of imaging and category deconstruction from the images and so on. Is anyone doing comp-psych, but for images and textual descriptions? For example, evaluating likelihoods of psychiatric conditions from freeform text, or even given a big set of all the images you’ve taken in your life? I would think there is not non-zero signal in these things way, which has recently been enabled for machines.
Scalable tissue biofabrication via perfusable hollow fiber arrays for cultured meat applications - Trends in Biotechnology
Hollow fiber bioreactors (for cultivated meat) have been improved by arranging the perfusion fibres in a grid. Previously the fibres have been arranged at random, due to the way the fibres were positioned randomly to each end when the HFBs were made.
This resulted in the largest piece of single-cut cultivated meat we’ve yet made (11g, chicken-nugget sized").
Hidden away in the evaluation section:
Electrical stimulations were performed to verify the contractile function of the fabricated chicken meat tissue.
With active perfusion, the contractile length of the tissues was significantly improved compared with control tissues.
Contraction… of the perfused tissue was visible… with an amplitude of ~5 μm.
The muscle is (at least a little) functional when you run a current through it!
Texture profile analysis (TPA) and free amino acid (FAA) analysis were performed.
The measured [mechanical] stress was significantly higher for the perfused tissues [when under mechanical strain - i.e. it is tougher].
The amount of FAA and the fraction of sweetness and umami were [also] higher for the perfused tissue [i.e. it will taste better].
Which just makes it seem like having a functional circulatory system (running a perfusion, with evenly distributed circulatory vessels) is an obvious improvement for all aspects of tissue health.
This was featured in NBC and The Guardian.
Progress in artifical wombs.
After building embryoids for 10 years, we succeeded in generating structures with brains, hearts, neural tubes, somites with a yolk sac. Both original submissions using two different approaches. - Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, X
Cleared for Takeoff? Cultivated Meat’s Commercial Flight - Faraz Harsini, via Linkedin
Comparing cultivated meat to aviation in terms of product attributes and how those determine the development timeline and market structure.
If you want to watch The Big Short (I assume. I don’t remember much from the Big Short). But in text. And in biotech. And there is a happy ending (instead of the aftermath of a financial crisis).
This formula seems like something I would find in effective altruist spaces - which of course it is, since both BridgeBio and EA have some of their roots in quantitative finance.
Why is drug discovery structured unlike other technologies?
The downstream effects of therapeutics’ tight correspondence between discovery, patent, and product is that in the world of therapeutics:
Academic research, which is particularly good at discoveries, is directly connected to products.
The lines around patent infringement are reasonably clear.
Because there’s a close correspondence between patent and product, patents get in the way of innovation relatively infrequently (Their effect on drug prices is another issue.)
Because of #2 and #3, patents actually serve the purpose they were intended to and incentivize work by enabling an inventor to capture the value of their work.
Because of #4, it’s common and straightforward for the discoverer of a drug to become wealthy off of its sales.
None of these are the case for most other technologies.
✨introducing: Chicken Credits✨ - Louis Arge, via Twitter (X)
Onboarding Strategy for EA Groups - guneyulasturker🔸, via EA Forum
Q: How did medicine historically progress? A: Surgeon by surgeon.
“Most painful condition known to mankind”: A retrospective of the first-ever international research symposium on cluster headache - Alfredo Parra🔸, via EA Forum
The economics of fish farming and fish welfare in Europe, a systematic review - Ren Ryba, Animal Ask
Starcraft and the current state of AI Agent Management.
Really enjoyed this month's edition!