since I started doing this, any cold I’ve gotten has been short and mild. It’s really interesting because it suggests that basically a topical treatment on your throat can kill or slow the growth of respiratory viruses, which seems like a modality with a lot of untapped potential

🚨☣️BREAKING: Plague outbreak expands, Russia BSL-3 lab accident - FIVE hospitals now quarantined🚨☣️ The plague outbreak in Siberia, Russia has expanded w/5 hospitals now under QUARANTINE: Irkutsk Hospitals No. 1, No.3, No.10, Ivano-Matreninskaya Children's Hospital, and an unnamed maternity hospital (Lyudi Baikala news, Moscow Times). Quarantine is NOT voluntary. Even in the U.S., quarantine is among the most extraordinary measures gov't can impose on American citizens who haven't been convicted, or even accused, of committing a crime. Quarantine means being forcibly confined and medically examined by law. U.S. quarantine can be imposed on anyone infected by a legally quarantinable disease listed below (this can change). One should assume Russia's quarantine protocols are even more severe. As of 2026, under Executive Order 14047, legally quarantinable diseases in the U.S. are: ■ Plague ■ Smallpox ■ Viral hemorrhagic fevers ■ Cholera ■ Diphtheria ■ Yellow fever ■ Infectious tuberculosis ■ Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) ■ Flu that can cause a pandemic ■ Measles Photo: Russia’s RKhBZ defense troops perform nuclear, biological, and chemical defense training (w/permission from the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation) — from BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton, 2026).

I am confused, ~all the people doing the policing are EA people.

pondooring what it's like to be a guy who hears "impossible" and thinks "yeah that's about 10%"

Today in @Nature, we report a new approach to studying human brain development and modeling disease in vivo. Human neural #assembloids and #organoids have opened new ways to study development in vitro, but they also have important limitations. Transplantation can provide a more physiological environment, yet human cortical cells then develop within a rodent brain that matures much faster, constraining their growth and integration. To address some of these limitations and obtain more advanced functional readouts relevant to disease biology, we generated #apallial mice, in which ~98% of the cortex and hippocampus fail to form, creating space for transplanted human cortical organoids to grow and integrate extensively. We call these #xenocortical mice (XCX). Nearly 7 years in the making. Congratulations to an extraordinary team and wonderful collaborators! Link to the article below 👇

4 years of my life...

how many grams of protein are in the warm touch of a woman

Leo lost $20 billion this day. It was the best day of his life. There’s a lesson here.

i continue to be jarred by the whiplash of living in sf, and by how easily you learn to look away. the first time i visited, it made me unsure i could live here. now i’ve decided that i can, but i don’t want survival to harden into indifference. some degree of turning away may be necessary, but how do we keep it from becoming numbness?

Take part in our attraction study by rating faces! programs.clearerthinking.org…

I’m at the c*rgi c*fe and a guy with a YC sticker on his laptop just tried to sell me fent

we got two generational image in one day

Tomorrow on Feeling Machines: my interview with @bolekkerous, bootstrapped founder of Animi — an empathic computing app for alexithymia. Roughly 1 in 10 people can't reliably name what they're feeling. It skews heavily toward men and neurodivergent folks.

What you are looking at is, An electric arc furnace is one of the few machines on Earth that deliberately creates controlled lightning. Three graphite electrodes, each weighing 1-2 tonnes, carry up to 150,000 amps, generating an electric arc approaching 4,000°C while melting hundreds of tonnes of steel at around 1,650°C. A single electric arc furnace can pull up to 300 MW of power, enough electricity to power roughly 265,000 homes, yet it concentrates that same energy into a few metres of space to create a controlled 4,000°C electric arc. The graphite electrodes slowly consume themselves every heat, while hydraulic controls continuously adjust their position to keep the arc stable as the scrap collapses beneath them. The real engineering challenge isn't creating the heat. It's keeping the furnace alive. Behind the arc sits a lining of MgO-C refractory bricks and water-cooled panels, designed to survive relentless thermal shock, chemical attack from molten slag, and temperatures that would destroy ordinary materials in seconds. A modern ultra-high-power electric arc furnace costs roughly $50-85 million, while a complete EAF steel plant can exceed $1 billion. What looks like an old dusty factory with glowing molten steel is actually one of the most advanced industrial systems on Earth, Billion-dollar machines combining extreme electricity, materials science, and automation to produce the steel that powers modern economies. 🎥anshanjusthigh

Valonia ventricosa, or “sea grape,” is the largest single-celled organism on Earth. It’s three-to-four orders-of-magnitude larger than most “normal” microbes. (Yes, the green ball in the image below is a single cell.) More than 95% of the cell’s volume is taken up by a vacuole. This vacuole is not like cytoplasm; it’s acidic and packed with ions. It’s also filled with big sugar chains, which the cell uses to repair damage on its cell extremities. Each cell has dozens or hundreds of nuclei, pressed tightly against the walls. One cool thing about sea grapes is that (because they are so huge, and visible to the naked eye) you can directly inject them with chemicals. I gave a $1,000 microgrant (courtesy of Astera) to a team of six working on scaling up Valonia cells as "living bioreactors." They are based out of SPLAT, a community lab in Durham, North Carolina. Today, when scientists want to “design” a new metabolic pathway, they often use E. coli. The microbes are engineered to express each gene in the pathway, and then these genes are swapped and replaced until the metabolic network starts working. This takes a lot of work and usually requires months of genetic engineering. But with Valonia, what if we could instead test out metabolic pathways by injecting molecules straight into their vacuole? Perhaps sea grapes could become a sort of self-replicating, cell-free system for prototyping ideas. That's the SPLAT team's idea. I think it's really cool, even though I’m skeptical that Valonia will become a model organism anytime soon. Nobody has ever engineered these cells, for a few reasons: - They have hundreds of nuclei, each sharing a common cytoplasm pool extending as a thin layer around the whole cell. (Perhaps an extrachromosal plasmid would work?) - Their cell walls are thick, so electroporation is unlikely to work. - Nobody knows their genome sequence! - Even if you get DNA inside, you need to make sure that DNA matches the cells’ abnormal genetic code. After millions of years of evolution, Valonia has reassigned its TAG and TAA stop codons to glutamine. There are also issues with injecting chemicals into the vacuole. The vacuole is *not* like cytoplasm; it is acidic and packed with molecules that would likely interfere with proteins. So you’d need to find some way to engineer the vacuole environment, and maintain that environment, before you turn Valonia into a prototyping platform. Not an easy problem to solve! If this idea did pan out, though, the SPLAT team told me that they could transform sea grapes in bulk (”potentially hundreds of thousands at once”) and then grow them to the size of cherries. It’d be a totally new way to prototype metabolic pathways and manufacture chemicals. And despite the barriers, I’m surprised more people are not studying these organisms. At the very least, we should have better microscopy images and a complete genome sequence. So best of luck to the SPLAT team. I’m glad they are working on hard problems!