Carl Zimmer and Marco Hernandez for The NYT: This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. And It’s Manmade. “Dr. Adamala named her creation SpudCell, after its potato-like appearance. Rather than patent it, she and Dr. Endy are organizing a community of scientists to focus on making SpudCells more fully alive and adapting them to new kinds of experiments.” Bravo! Maybe science isn’t a complete lost cause.
M Auerbach, MY Lim, GM Rodgers, and T DeLoughery for Sensible Medicine: When Normal Isn’t Normal: Non-anemic Iron Deficiency. A very academic group of authors makes a very good case for treating low iron levels in the absence of overt anemia. This is in response to an earlier text which poo-pooed the practice as “overmedicalizing normality”. Adam Cifu from Sensible Medicine proposes randomized controlled trials, though if symptoms of low iron are as diverse as restless leg syndrome, “brain fog” and craving for ice it would be a challenging endpoint to establish. Boy, isn’t medicine hard.
Titotal (pseud): The best cause will disappoint you: An intro to the optimisers curse.
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ᔥAndrew Gelman] Mathematical demonstration of why effective altruists are, at the end of the day, a bunch of bozos. And not just them: America is the land of hyperoptimizers and if Taleb’s Incerto wasn’t a convincing enough case for why that doesn’t end up well in the long run, well, here is a much shorter Substack post that shows one facet of the problem.
Ed Conway: The Apple-Banana Paradox. On the incredible flattening of banana prices in the last 25 years, and the incoming threat of another fungal infection that could wipe out the current Cavendish banana monoculture. On the other, could this be an opening for a Honeycrisp of bananas? One can hope.