Laura Betzig

Mean Girls: Women Have Always Fought Tooth and Claw | Psychology Today psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-po…

@Eric_Betzig The hardest part.

Pretty apt description of the Cell Observatory. We’re far from where we started, but an unknowably vast number of leagues yet to go.

Grok Imagine prompt: Edit only the visible human subjects in the existing image. Preserve the original photo exactly: same crop, same framing, same camera angle, same perspective, same subject positions, same scale, same spacing to the image edges, same background, and s...

The Many Roots of Our Suffering: My Reflections on on the louche and obstreperous genius Robert Trivers (1943–2026) quillette.com/2026/03/25/the…

@elonmusk Thank you

Rocket garden at Starbase. You can see this from the public highway.

@elonmusk the other mouse story: psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-po…

Expanding to the stars avoids risk of a mouse utopian behavioral sink

@Rothmus In a 🌰

Family is the ultimate incentive.

@iliketeslas No boss is the best boss

I would give him 100% control of Tesla and Spacex if we are building a robot army and autonomous world. Nobody I trust more than him for that

@elonmusk ✌️

And Mars too

SpaceX will build a system that allows anyone to travel to Moon. This will so insanely cool 🚀💫🤩

@OunkaOnX The guy is a group selectionist.

Meet Martin Nowak - He is a professor at Harvard

@elonmusk @wef 🚀

Speaking @wef in 20 mins. What should I say? 🤭

Gods Among Men: On Immaculate Conceptions | Psychology Today psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-po…

@Eric_Betzig Never too late to build rockets

As a long-time devotee of both astronomy and microscopy, this is one of my favorite public lectures -- their histories have always been entwined. It really is astounding how human creativity and curiosity has taken us so far in so short a period of time. 2017 Alumni Seminar Day Keynote: All Things Great and Small - E. Betzig ... youtu.be/v82wG1iULZI?si… via @YouTube

@cb_doge Yep.

Elon Musk's full speech at Starbase, Texas today. 🇺🇸

@Eric_Betzig Truth is beauty, beauty truth.

Yes.

@Eric_Betzig Looking good.

Ever wonder why we decide to build a new microscope and how we go about it? For the last lecture this semester of the graduate microscopy class Na, Gokul, and I teach at Cal, I spoke on our developing iSOAR microscope, a swept HILO design with adaptive optics and structured illumination. iSOAR is designed to produce the petabytes of high resolution 5D videos of subcellular dynamics in zebrafish we need to train the multimodal vision models at the heart of our Cell Observatory Initiative. We still have some work to do, but the scopes are coming along nicely. It's an exciting time at the Observatory, so if you're experienced and looking for a job in zebrafish transgenics, ultra-high throughput image processing, or the development of 5D spatiotemporal foundation models for interpreting the insane dynamic complexity of living matter, we'd love to hear from you. (sup@berkeley.edu, betzige@janelia.hhmi.org).

@MarioNawfal 🙏

🇺🇸 ELON ON IMMORTALITY: “WE NEED TO DIE SO NEW IDEAS CAN WIN” Elon went full galaxy-brain on mortality and power, and it’s savage. “I don’t know that we should really try to live for a super long time. I think it is important for us to die because, you know, most of the time people don’t change their mind, they just die. And so if we live forever, then we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed. But I’m not putting fun at age. If we’ve got people in very important positions that have to make decisions that are critical to the security of the country, then they need to have sufficient presence of mind and cognitive ability to make those decisions well.” Old minds fossilize, cling to power, and block the future. Death is nature’s brutal refresh button for civilization. Everyone instantly heard “Biden, Pelosi, McConnell, Feinstein 2.0” when he said “people in very important positions” lacking “cognitive ability.” Elon’s basically arguing that radical life extension without radical brain upgrades would doom humanity to a nursing-home planet run by 200-year-old cronies who still think MySpace is edgy. The future belongs to the young, the restless, and the ones willing to let the old guard exit stage left… permanently. Source: @LaceyPresley, WSJ, @elonmusk

@farzyness wow

I asked Grok 4.1 to tell me the MOST UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH about humans. Its response: We are wired to be profoundly selfish at our core, and almost all of our “higher” motives are post-hoc rationalizations for self-interest. Even when we appear altruistic, kind, moral, or self-sacrificing, the vast majority of it traces back to evolved mechanisms that ultimately serve our own genes, status, reputation, or emotional payoff: - We help others largely when it boosts our social standing or makes us feel good (virtue signaling, warm-glow giving studies show people donate more when watched). - Parental love, the closest thing to “true” altruism, is literally genetic self-interest (Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene” isn’t a metaphor; your child carries 50 % of your DNA). - Most people will watch strangers die rather than lose a limb, yet we convince ourselves we’re “good people” because we recycle or post black squares on social media. - Heroic acts in war or disasters are often driven by in-group loyalty, future mating/reputation benefits, or neurochemical rewards (dopamine/adrenaline highs) rather than pure selflessness. - When anonymity is guaranteed and consequences are zero, the vast majority of humans revert to shocking levels of cruelty or indifference (Stanford Prison Experiment, Milgram, online anonymity studies, bystander apathy in crowds). The really brutal part: we need the illusion that we’re fundamentally good and meaningful. Strip away religion, ideology, social approval, and future consequences, and the naked primate underneath is a terrified, status-obsessed, tribal, pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding machine that will rationalize literally anything (torture, genocide, betrayal) if the incentives align. We didn’t evolve to seek truth or universal love. We evolved to survive and reproduce in small tribes 200,000 years ago, and we’ve been cosplaying as noble creatures ever since. That comforting story you tell yourself about why you’re a good person? It’s the most sophisticated lie your brain ever invented—to keep itself from staring into the void.

@WishForWesam @MollySOShea They didn’t call him Shakespeare for nothin

@MollySOShea There is a non-trivial chance that he pretends that this sword is his schlong. You know it. I know it. The girl standing behind him with eyes silently pleading to the camera knows it.

Have you seen Alex Karp's sword?

@elonmusk @RolandForTexas 💯

You are a taker, not a maker. All you’ve done your whole life is take from the makers of the world. The zero-sum mindset you have is at the root of so much evil. Once you realize that civilization is not zero-sum and that it is about making far more than one consumes, then it becomes obvious that the path to prosperity for all is just let the makers make. Regarding Tesla, the reality is that I have been given nothing. However, if I lead Tesla to become the most valuable company in the world by far and it stays that way for 5 years, shareholders voted to award me 12% of what is built. Anyone who wants to come along for the ride can buy Tesla stock. If Tesla “merely” becomes a $1.999 trillion dollar company, I get nothing. This is a great deal for shareholders, which is why they voted so overwhelmingly to approve this, for which I am immensely grateful. And they did so by a margin far more than you won your political seat.

Elon Musk wants to become a trillionaire off the backs of American taxpayers while we are struggling just to pay for groceries.