Shahaf Peleg 🌅

Schweinsteiger who?

A new finding after stopping GLP-1 drugs in a large cohort with Type 2 diabetes: rapid erosion of CV benefit/protection New @bmj_latest by @zalaly @Biostayan bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/5/1/e0… See thread: x.com/zalaly/status/…

Richard Feynman’s savage takedown of pseudo-science still burns in 2026: “Social science is an example of a science which is not a science. They follow the forms… but they don’t get any laws. They haven’t found out anything.” He goes harder: Experts who “sit at a typewriter and make up” claims — “organic food is better,” “this diet cures everything” — as if it’s settled science, when no rigorous experiments or checks have been done. Feynman: “I know what it means to really know something. How careful you have to be. How easy it is to fool yourself. I see how they get their information… and I can’t believe that they know.” The Nobel physicist calls it straight: most of what passes for “expert” opinion is noise dressed up as knowledge. In an age drowning in TikTok “science,” influencers, and clickbait studies — Feynman’s 1:52 rant feels more relevant than ever. Who’s the biggest pseudo-expert that grinds your gears right now? Clip is timeless fire — watch it and feel the clarity.

@TSchmauck @TheFangGroupUiO @NatureAging Congrats Tom!

DR is the oldest intervention to extend max lifespan, and still the strongest we have for mammals. Yet after a century of research, many key questions remain. In our latest @TheFangGroupUiO paper with 310+ refs in @NatureAging we try to answer this... 🧵🧵 nature.com/articles/s4358…

I find that one of the important thing I have learned the last few years is trying to separate those investors that invest in aging for the sake of their own financial profit, vs the investors that invest to see real progress in the field. The latter is far more rare

@MaxUnfried Lets move on Max…

Sad story that that’s all that diet gets you. Time to develop real rejuvenation drugs.

@BShenhar @ScienceMagazine Congrats Ben and Uri and team!

Our new paper on reassessing the heritability of human lifespan is out in @ScienceMagazine! 🧬 For decades, the consensus has been that genetics explains just 20–25% of lifespan differences. We found that after accounting for extrinsic mortality, that number jumps to ~50%. A 🧵

@MaxUnfried why is it a significant finding? how it further our understanding of aging? can you explain?

Probably one of the most significant findings of the last year. No more lifespan is only 20-30% heritable please. It’s about 50% like many other traits.

First test of partial epigenetic reprogramming to reverse aging for two eye conditions (glaucoma and NAION) gets FDA go ahead @lifebiosciences Based on 2020 @Nature paper pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33268865/ endpoints.news/exclusive-fda-…

@davidasinclair @elonmusk David, why Elon does not invest more money into aging actually?!

You’re right @elonmusk. Focus on this topic. Aging has a relatively simple explanation and is apparently reversible. Clinical trials begin shortly🤞

ELON: AGING'S A SOLVABLE PUZZLE, BODY HAS A SYNC CLOCK FOR 35T CELLS "I haven't put much time into the aging stuff. It is a very solvable problem. When we figure out what causes aging, we'll find it's incredibly obvious. The reason I say it's not a solid thing is because all the cells in your body pretty much age at the same rate. I've never seen someone with an old left arm and a young right arm ever in my life. So why is that? That means that there must be a clock, a synchronizing clock, that is synchronizing across 35 trillion cells in your body." Source: @elonmusk

‘Remote controlled’ proteins illuminate living cells nature.com/articles/d4158… @drmichaellevin @DocLarus

The second law of thermodynamics

@MaxUnfried 100%

Most of the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century would not have been able to make their discoveries in the current academic environment.

@VallonVaclav 1897 Stollwerck

@DocLarus Cool! What are they? Don’t know such cards

I love vintage

This paper is wild. After 3 rounds of directed evolution, they converted a DNA polymerase into an enzyme that can do: - RNA synthesis - Reverse transcription - Synthesis of "unnatural" nucleotides - Synthesis of DNA-RNA chimeras One of the best papers I’ve read recently. For context: In nature, it is DNA polymerase that takes a DNA sequence as a template and then copies it. These enzymes are crucial in replicating the genome for cell division, and they are EXTREMELY specific for DNA over RNA. This is key because RNA nucleotides are present in the cell at concentrations ~100x higher than DNA nucleotides, so the enzyme has evolved clever strategies to select one over the other. RNA polymerases, for comparison, are the enzymes that take a DNA sequence as template and then convert it into RNA. They are involved in gene expression, for example. To convert a DNA polymerase into an RNA polymerase (and all the other functions I mentioned earlier), the authors did a fairly straightforward directed evolution experiment. First, they took four DNA polymerase enzymes belonging to various archaea. These DNA polymerases don’t check for DNA vs. RNA as stringently as other types of cells, so they’re a good starting point to evolve RNA polymerases. The authors inserted some targeted mutations into these enzymes, based on known mutations in the literature. For example, they swapped the amino acid at position 409 for a smaller amino acid, thus removing a “gate” that keeps RNA building blocks from entering the enzyme. Next, they took the four genes encoding these DNA polymerases and cut them up into 12 segments each. They randomly stitched these 12 segments together — from the four different genes — to build millions of unique variants. Each shuffled gene was inserted into an E. coli cell. Then, they grew up these cells (each carrying a unique polymerase) and put them into microfluidic droplets. A device isolates each droplet, lyses the cell open, and releases the polymerase. The droplet also contains RNA building blocks and a DNA template, encoding a fluorescent reporter. If the polymerase begins synthesizing RNA, it will produce a detectable signal. They screened about 100 million droplets in 10 hours of work, searching for those with a signal. For each well that yields a fluorescent signal, the researchers isolated the DNA and sequenced it to figure out which polymerase it was. They repeated this 3x times, finally isolating a really excellent RNA polymerase variant which they called "C28." C28 has 39 mutations compared to the wildtype enzymes. It incorporates about 3.3 nucleotides of RNA per second, with 99.8% fidelity. The crazy thing is that this enzyme can also copy DNA or RNA templates back into DNA (reverse transcription), or use chimeric DNA-RNA molecules as a template and amplify them. It is just a super versatile polymerase that can act on DNA, RNA, or modified nucleotides, to build just about anything.

Thoughts about scientific herd

@MaxUnfried The Morgul vale.

What’s the best region to find a female mountain troll?

@MaxUnfried And yet, endless posts on lifestyle to fight aging. What point of time did aging scientists lost their creativity, turning into a herd Max?

If I ever get to the age where I start pushing for lifestyle longevity and small molecule interventions for healthspan, instead of rejuvenation biotech solutions to reverse aging and extend maximum lifespan - just let me know that my time has come to leave the aging field. 💙