Tom Ellis

@p_maverick_b Yup, premier league football has become tough to watch in the last 18 months thanks to teams sciencing the shit out of the rules. Hope these nerds don’t ruin the World Cup (although Trump and FIFA are ruining it already)

If you've made it this far, thank you for engaging with my sports tweets, I know they are out of network for my audience but I just think sports are neat

If you care about future of science, now is an important time to get into sports. Nerds are changing how teams play, leading to a tension between optimal play and entertainment - leagues then adjust rules to make the game fun to watch again. This is also happening with science:

Reminder that Sabastian Sawe's sponsor adidas spent $50,000 for him to be drug-tested out of competition as much as possible in 2025 and are doing the same thing in 2026. Today in London, he became the first man to break 2:00 in an official marathon. letsrun.com/news/2026/04/h…

WHAT HAVE WE JUST WITNESSED? 🤯 Sabastian Sawe has just become the first person in history to run a sub two-hour marathon in race conditions. Yomif Kejelcha was also under two hours for second!

Sub 2 hr marathon!!!

@GallowayLabMIT @KevinKaichuang Love this! A nicely balanced pair of Galloways at the microcentrifuge

Both my parents and both my siblings have phds. My dad's a professor. My maternal grandfather never got a PhD but was an engineering professor. My paternal grandfather was a doctor. Basically I'm an academic nepobaby

Plastic-eating fungi dig diapers nature.com/articles/s4158…

Just out: our forward-looking essay on mRNA “delivery cells”—engineered cells that could locally manufacture mRNA at disease sites within the body and transfer it to target cells in extracellular vesicles.

A Qubit costs ~$5,260. I built one for $39. Not a toy version. A fully working DNA fluorometer: the device you use to measure how much DNA there is in a sample. This mattered because my first sequencing run underperformed partly because I didn’t know exactly how much DNA I was loading. For nanopore sequencing, input DNA quality matters a lot. Too little and the pores are underutilised. Too much and flow cell longevity is compromised. The underlying device is not complicated. A DNA fluorometer works by adding a dye that binds to DNA, shining light at the sample, and measuring the fluorescence. The BOM is basically: > $23 optics + sensor > $8 Arduino/electronics > $6 screws/nuts > $2 enclosure plastic Biotech especially is full of equipment with insane idiot indexes. With AI you don't really have an excuse not to 1) work out what that the index for a piece of equipment is and 2) build your own version if it's irrationally high. THINK BEFORE YOU BUY.

Nature article: Quadruple pegRNA enables programmable and efficient large genomic insertion nature.com/articles/s4158…

@RaduTiciu Oh yes I see them! They actually look like roombas with robot arms. Perhaps my judgement was wrong

@ProfTomEllis I had the same feeling before noticing a couple of transportation units (but not mobile robot arms) moving between working stations at 1:03 :) Still early days, demo movies, colored water (no coffee 😃), etc. but overall looks more than promising!

Missed a huge chance here to have the robot arms independent of the equipment workstations and able to travel around the lab autonomously.

@Summersaltcloud only shown the demo - not sure of the reality

@ProfTomEllis Is there uptime good? In my (limited ) experience arms break down

@curiouswavefn There are already multiple AI-integrated automated labs like this in China and they’re cheaper, quicker and already delivering data for their biotech companies. This stuff is just catch up right now. AI is the only part of the loop that the west leads in right now.

This is fabulous, and we should do everything we can to accelerate such efforts. But the big bottleneck in drug discovery is clinical trials and regulation, and with their accelerated approval process China is eating our lunch big time, with American biopharma companies buying 30% of their assets from China. With AI + autonomous robotic labs + accelerated drug approval there will be nothing stopping us. And this is not even about one-upping China; it’s about unleashing the potential of our scientists, doctors and engineers to the fullest extent possible.

@antonioregalado @bryan_johnson Cycling extends lifetime by almost exactly the time it takes to cycle. That's why its important to cycle somewhere nice or have a useful podcast or audiobook to listen to.

@bryan_johnson How much of your time is spent not dying? If the ratio of time spent to expected time gained is <1 is it worth it?

idk if I can keep this up you guys. I just got one more to do: a five min warm eye compress before bed. I do endless things every day. From the moment I wake up to bedtime, and even when I'm sleeping, I'm always doing something and measuring it. It never ends. Help.

@DustinWalper It'll be a solved problem in a year or less - so many people working on it for various industries.

@ProfTomEllis High precision is really, really hard with mobile robots. That’s a great way to spend years mired in frontier-level control problems.

Welcome to the scientific revolution. 100s of robots. Zero coffee breaks. America’s largest autonomous lab, open today.

@baym @allisonmegow Can't be sure that everything would go so nicely if it was an ultracentriguge or 1 litre flask floor-standing centrifuge that goes wrong - but my bet is their design is also pretty good at stopping the machine jumping around when it goes badly wrong.

@baym @allisonmegow I drove it to Eppendorf in my car a couple of hours later (they were 20 min away) and they profusely apologised and gave us a new one there and then (without the transparent rotor lid). Pre smart phone years so no photos sadly.

top fears in lab 1. unbalanced ultracentrifuge 2. ultracentrifuge during earth quake 3. unbalanced centrifuge 4. centrifuge during earthquake 5. coworker running unbalanced ultracentrifuge 6. coworker running unbalanced centrifuge 7. ultracentrifuge decides it’s my time