March 2022 Nuggets
A selection of interesting articles, covering science, technology, entrepreneurship, and creative writing
Here’s a selection of things that caught my eye in the past month. Some will have been heavily mediatized, others will come from more obscure corners. All of them, though, have made me think.
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Now that the obligatory and spine-chilling self-promo is out of the way, let’s get into it.
Science
Scaling laws and biochemical universality. All of known life shares certain biochemical traits, such as the use of nucleic acids for genetic information storage, the genetic code, the use of ATP as a primary fuel source, using proteins, lipid membranes… This study suggests another one: scaling laws in enzyme function. Enzymes can be categorized into functional classes. Here, researchers found that the abundance of enzymes in each of these functional categories changed in relation to the overall abundance of enzymes in an organism - according to scaling laws.
Location, location, location, even in genetic engineering. As we improve our ability to genetically engineer organisms and shuffle genes around, we start to notice that the genetic neighborhood matters too. This study uses synthetic yeast strains with ‘genomic perturbations’. The researchers found that some changes in gene expression levels had nothing to do with the gene’s sequence, but rather with sequences next to it, its genetic neighbors.
Why assess biological age? Simply quoting part of the abstract here:
What is the value of assessing the biological age and frailty and predicting residual lifespan and health status? The benefit is obvious if we have means to alter the pace of aging and the development of frailty.
…the search of frailty biomarkers and of their biological clocks helps to build up a mechanistic frame that may orientate the design of interventions and the time window of their efficacy. Among the candidate biomarkers identified, several studies converge to indicate epigenetic clocks as a promising sensitive biomarker of the aging process. Moreover, it will help to establish the relationship between personal aging and health trajectories and to individuate the check points beyond which biological changes are irreversible.
Out with the old. An interesting suggestion on how stem cells might maintain their ‘immortality’: by excreting extracellular vesicles containing damaged cell constituents. In other, more metaphorical terms: cellular garbage bags to take out the old trash and keep the inside young. Remains to be confirmed.
RNA world gets a boost. The RNA world hypothesis - that life on Earth began with a simple RNA molecule that could copy itself - gets some extra support from this long-term evolution experiment with RNA that replicates using a self-encoded RNA replicase (an enzyme that does what it says on the tin). The RNA diversified into multiple coexisting lineages, whose frequencies initially fluctuated and gradually stabilized. The final population formed a replicator network. Let the evolution games begin.
Evolution’s algorithms love symmetry. Why is there so much symmetry in nature? After all, the space of useful shapes is much larger than simply symmetrical ones. This research suggests that because symmetry is easier to encode it’s more likely to arise as a potential structural variation. Here’s a great Twitter thread by one of the authors:
Society & technology
Techno-optimism is not enough to tackle climate change. We can not afford to wait for technological fixes. Invest in climate mitigation innovation (love how that rolls off the tongue), but we shouldn’t let that lull us to sleep and forget immediate action.
(Wrongfully) arrested by AI. The chilling tale of three men who were misidentified by facial recognition algorithms and arrested for crimes they didn’t commit. Machine learning can do amazing things, but sometimes, it’s still stupid. At the same time, human complacency is to blame as well. Blindly accepting machine learning recommendations is not (yet?) the way to go.
Artificial historian DeepMind presents Ithaca, a deep neural network that is geared toward the restoration of ancient Greek inscriptions. Fancy tweet:
Biotech entrepreneurship
A decade of change in science funding. A deep dive into the changing landscape of innovative science funding by Nadia Eghbal (perhaps you know her from the Helium Grants microgrant experiment). From COVID to crypto, this is a well-done long-form article to chew on.
(She has a substack newsletter as well where she shares her thoughts on entrepreneurship, the age of online creation, etc.)
Creative writing
Narrative theory as creativity training. Since the 1950s, creativity training has been dominated by divergent thinking exercises. While they have their use, the outcomes of such training are often less ‘creative’ than expected. Here, the authors argue that narrative theory - worldbuilding, character development, plotlines - can usefully expand on creativity training. As an occasional fiction writer, I can only agree.
(I wrote a summary of the article in The Writing Cooperative.)
Love in times of… prosperity? Covering almost 4,000 years of literary fiction from 19 geographical regions suggests that love (here seen as the traditional ‘pair-bonding’) flourishes as a topic in fiction when the economy flourishes too.