Luke Glowacki

Uncertain Origins of Aspirin 💊 It's hard to know where this incredible pain reliever actually came from. Willow bark tea? Hippocrates? Or John Reverend Stone? The trail is littered with bad record keeping and obscure translations. Our latest explains what we know for sure.🔻

In a single E. coli, about 25 percent of all proteins use metals (like zinc, iron, copper, magnesium, etc) to do their chemistries. And yet, incredibly, fewer than ONE FREE METAL ION is present per cell on average. There are, in other words, basically no loose metal ions…

Cable bacteria link together (thousands of cells, end-to-end) to conduct electrons across distances up to 7 centimeters. They are living batteries. They were discovered in Aarhus, Denmark in 2012. I visited Aarhus last year to see them in person, and wrote about it today.

Cells are so tiny that measuring their weight seems, at first blush, like an impossible task. But back in 1953, two biologists from Southern Illinois University — supported, in part, with funding from Anheuser-Busch! — invented a super clever method for figuring out the weight…

The dataset behind this famous chart on the declining cost of genome sequencing has had its NIH funding cut. It tracked progress towards & beyond an ambitious goal ($1000 genome) that succeeded. Could any funders rescue the project? Sharing this would be very appreciated.

FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam? SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

The attack is on the bigotry, group think, and anti-scientific censoriousness of the past ten years. Diversity makes science better, while DEI has destroyed the credibility of our scientific institutions. @ScienceMagazine

The only core aspect of the scientific endeavor is the search for truth.

One of the main themes I didn't really fully internalize at the time was that courage is a scarcest and more valuable resource than intelligence alone. Be a Gryffindor. Unironically.

Occasionally my social media posts inspire heated discussion. As I see it, that’s because the Overton window has shrunk; progressives are increasingly censorious. In this essay I explain why that’s a problem and whether my provocations are productive. Link in next tweet.

📢 Job Opportunity! The University of Pittsburgh is hiring a Postdoctoral Associate to work with Professor Machery on his new project, Philosophy for Better Minds. cfopitt.taleo.net/careersection/…

We often say “it takes a village to raise a child.” But it also takes a village to raise a parent. My two cents on motherhood, on @SAPIENS_org: sapiens.org/biology/to-rai…

50 million people have walked the Guggenheim spiral. Zero fell over its 36" parapet. Today's code deems it unsafe, demands 42". When 50 million safe visits can't clear plan check, the real danger isn’t the parapet - it’s bureaucracy.

Perfect example of how Sci Fi always implies a very large human population, but no one knows how to combine high births with rapid tech advance. There are some very basic social things for us to figure out, along with physical things like space propulsion, gravity and…