Or Shahar ๐ฌ๐๐๐ฝโโ๏ธ๐ฆ๐๐๐๏ธ
1.5K posts

Or Shahar ๐ฌ๐๐๐ฝโโ๏ธ๐ฆ๐๐๐๏ธ
@OrDShahar
Scientist, Head of the Molecular Neurodynamics Lab @CollegeTelhai Molecular dynamics in the brain, genomic instability & cultured fish meat.



Important announcement!!!๐ซต๐ฅ๐ซ Would you have a tooth pulled if it helped your chances to get an important grant funded? Absurd question (obviously), but the situation right now is so bad funding-wise, that I bet some of you actually considered it for a secondโฆ Well, donโt get desperate - we created a new tool that might help! (keep your teeth!) Iโm excited to announce that as of today we are officially releasing โQED for Grantsโ for everyone. What started off as an extension of our existing paper review platform, grew in the last few months to an entirely new design. Weโve been working like crazy on this, and although we have more things we want to add in the (very near) future, we decided to release our AI for grants NOW, earlier than planned. Itโs not perfect, no AI is, but for the first time, when I run my own grants through @qedscience, I feel it gets the research, finds real problems, and gives me very useful feedback that I can implement before submission. Itโs like sending it to 20 scientists from my domain, knowing theyโll agree to dedicate their entire week to carefully read and comment on every line. Itโs very important to write your own grants yourself, it makes you think hard and you learn a lot from doing it, and q.e.dโs system is designed to preserve these positive aspects and augment them - you get feedback on your own writing, we donโt write for you!! But at the same time, a typical PI spends many months every year writing proposals and sadly only a tiny fraction gets funded, even if the ideas are good. When you are forced to submit an unreasonable amount of grants the quality of the writing drops, and rejection rates increase. Not because the essence is bad. Itโs simply too competitive right now (the cuts made it so much worse) and if your proposal is not super clear and tight, and if itโs not a perfect fit for the grant youโre submitting, youโre doomed. Our grant solution is not an authoring, text-generating tool. It gives you constructive feedback on your writing (it comments on the deep things, not grammar and typos). Itโs meant to help you with the questions that torment you late at night (โis this a good fit?โ, โIs this novel enough?โ, โDid I miss something?โ). Tens of thousands of you already use q.e.d to improve your manuscripts and critically read papers, we built the grant tool by the same principles (youโll identify many of the features that you told us you like). Weโve processed thousands of proposals, learned where things fail, where reviewers get stuck, why good ideas come out weak. We interviewed hundreds of scientists, and also experts who work in funding agencies and university research authorities, and implemented their feedback (weโre constantly looking for more feedback). Our AI is always happy to give you constructive (and polite!) critique, and it will go through your grant line-by-line, forcing you to improve clarity, flag weak points, and push the whole thing to a higher standard. We study, in scale, what gets funded and what doesnโt, and what is the perfect fit for each type of grant. So please, use it, pressure-test it, tell us where it fails, and together weโll improve it every day to put you in the best position for actually testing your ideas in the real world. As always with q.e.d, the system is completely secured and private, and we are NOT training on your data (see the FAQ on our website). Please like, retweet, and share with your favorite colleagues! (link to the platform below in the thread๐)


Humanity is notorious for leaving problems for the next generations, but in animals we are discovering the biological mechanisms: we found that C. elegans develop germline tumors if THEIR GRAND GRANDPARENTSโ cells fail to clear the garbage from their body cavityโฆ What the hell, you ask? Read our new preprint! ๐ Congrats to Itai Rieger, Yael Mor, Itamar Lev, and all the other authors on a superb job (this was many years in the making): โScavenger Cells Failure to Maintain Systemic RNA Homeostasis Causes Epigenetically Inherited Germline Tumorsโ biorxiv.org/content/10.648โฆ





Iโm 25. Give me oddly specific life tips. No general โsurround yourself with positive peopleโ tips. I want the most random, specific advice possible.





Lifespan is 50% heritable, twice previous estimates! In our new paper out today in @ScienceMagazine , we used mathematical modeling to remove extrinsic mortality, and validated with new twin data.










