Will Owens

@VaGentleman Why?

Life at low Reynolds number

Building a moonbase doesn't produce abundance, it simply shifts wealth from some (earth homeowners) to others (moon homeowners). On net, society is no better off.

Vids like this give me hope that content longer than 2 minutes isn’t dead youtu.be/YGLNyHd2w10

> be me > exponential curve supervisor > get to work > check-in on the curve > it’s sigmoid

@malikules Synthego is going under?

🪦 Graveyard of Biotech Startups (2025, YtD) Arkeon Bio (gas ferm | CO2 →proteins ) Photanol (CO2 → chemicals) Global Bioenergies (SAF | green isobutene) Omega Therapeutics (epigenomic mRNA) Molecular Templates Inc. (cancer) AmplifyBio (next-gen vaccines) Synthego (CRISPR products) Affimed (immuno-oncology) Benson Hill (advanced breeding for soybeans) BIOMILQ (culturing mammary cells)

the 1989 University of Utah cold fusion T-shirt unironically goes hard

Solving the "replication crisis" is dumb because (1) it's not a crisis, (2) the medicine is worse than the disease. Much of this is because people want science to be more like engineering, and it's not. It's fundamentally different and trying to treat engineering processes like scientific ones is going to turn out poorly. I came into biology during the late 90's, when systems bio was taking off. Biologists aren't quantitative enough, and therefore we physicists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists will show you how it's done. Made lots of models of various processes such as immune responses to stress/insults. None of them worked in retrospect. Not because the the math or code were wrong. The models themselves were missing key players that we didn't learn about until later. So the field as a whole was wrong (but again all replicable). How would one know that? More recently, we've been working on a small molecule corrector of p53. We went through all the patents and literature. Almost all of it was wrong when we put everything across a fixed set of assays/cell types. It's not that these papers were all non-replicable, it was just a small part of a bigger picture that those papers didn't have. That's the generous conclusion, the not-so-generous one is that people are just crafting the best story they can, and will often explain away or just not do a negative result. The problem isn't replicability, it's actually that most scientific results are likely lacking context, don't generalize, and are wrong in the more general sense of the word. There is a range of truth-seeking in practitioners, and it's true the most rigorous truth-seekers aren't always rewarded, but again, this is not something new. That's always been true in science, and well described in book's like Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The potential solutions involve replication studies and publishing negative results. These things won't help the broader and more general problem. People want this the scientific process to be a very linear path full of incremental improvements that suddenly lead to a change. It's not how it works.

@Andercot orionsarm.com/eg-article/467…

If someone told me it's been scientifically proven there's intelligent plasma entities living in the magnetic convection oceans high above the Sun's photosphere, I'd say "yeah that makes sense"

they made the framework laptop into a car

"man why is the reddit thread so interesting" all posts from 13+ years ago

@will_barrcode God help you if you move your Rstudio monitor to another window

Spending hours tweaking aspect ratios on a ggplot is the next billion dollar problem

yep boss, the promo video is going great. got the twitching humanoid robot strung up on a meat hook and flickering lights. they’ll love it

when someone asks if you'd be willing to volunteer to have your brain scanned, you say yes

@josiezayner @TheODINInc i'm curious, have you ever tested for mycoplasma after 10+ passages?

Academia still living in 1990 We sell a kit that allows you to do human cell culture in your kitchen without any incubator, without any flowhood and without any contamination @theodininc

"I never see you at the club" Cool, I never see you at the vegetative electron microscopy core retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/veg…

When you’re getting a tour through hell and the guide asks you to put your phone away

it's giving Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

Man some people don’t have to spend time waiting for cells to grow and it shows

humble beginnings