Weekly Links #1

Ribosomes make cyclic polymers, NIAID scraps HIV vaccine research, and more.

I’m trying out weekly links posts again. These are meant to just be skimmable, short, and enjoyable. You can unsubscribe from Links posts by clicking the button at the bottom of this email.

1. Interview with Manu Prakash.

2. The measles vaccine has saved >90 million lives in the last 50 years.

3. Best paper I’ve seen in the last two weeks; mapping hundreds of proteins that bind to the human genome, with single amino acid resolution.

4. An ancient protein fold works in both mirror-image forms; it has no ‘handedness.’ It can bind to both L- and D- forms of double-stranded DNA.

5. NIAID is scrapping funds for “two major consortia” developing HIV vaccines.

6. A cannabis plant pangenome assembled from “181 new and 12 previously released genomes”.

7. SeedLLM-Rice is “a 7-billion-parameter model trained using 1.4 million rice-related publications, which represent nearly 98.24% of global rice research.”

8. Good overview of efforts to make therapies that can cross the blood-brain barrier.

9. The first Enhanced Games (basically the Olympics where athletes can take whatever drugs they want) will happen May 21-24 in Las Vegas.

10. Excellent article on the flawed ‘Linear No Threshold’ model for radiation safety, and how it hamstrings nuclear energy.

11. Neuralink raises $600M at $9B valuation.

12. Tracking how a drug gets made, from start to finish, across 63,000 kilometers of supply chains. Recommended. Comments from Derek Lowe.

13. A single mutation in a gene on chromosome 4 helps protect grapevines from heat stress.

14. Pivot penalty: “the impact of new research steeply declines the further a researcher moves from their previous work.”

15. Hacking the ribosome to make cyclic polymers.

16. Mapping the activities of 500,000 different guide RNAs in E. coli K12.