Donald McNeil, formerly of the New York Times, wrote a primer on the monkeypox outbreak which is well worth the 10 minutes' reading time. The bottom line: not great, not terrible. For now.

“This was an ambitious report recommending all sorts of ways to reform government, but no one was given a mandate and timeline to actually carry out the recommendations.”

Thus ends every attempt to reform administrative burden of research, according to the Good Science Project.

“The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology was an 8-year effort to replicate experiments from high-impact cancer biology papers published between 2010 and 2012.”

Out of 193 experiments from 53 papers, only 50 (26%) were successfully reproduced, and in those the effect sizes were 85% smaller on average. Scientists at Bayer did the same thing 10 years ago, with identical results: only 20-25% of experiments reproduced.

With foundations like this, it is amazing that there has been any progress in the clinic.

Several imprecisions in this essay on IRBs should not detract from its key point: social sciences don’t need IRB oversight, biomedicine needs it to be less byzantine and more transparent. Status quo is untenable.

Give a lecture once and you help a few hundred people (if you’re lucky). Post the lecture to YouTube and you help millions. 7 years later, I am yet to find a better guide to academic writing.

NB: it’s good to have a live audience.

“Whether hot or cold water freezes faster remains unknown.”

Thus begins a wonderful Quanta Magazine article about the “Mpemba effect”, named after a Tanzanian teenager who saw something funny happen to his home-made ice cream. Reality is complicated.

“A lot of people simply won’t read a 15-page whitepaper, but will be impressed by flowcharts. By making the language of Web3 meandering and impenetrable and by building a culture that is very self-referential, investors make criticism harder to come by.”

Today’s Galaxy Brain newsletter is about Web3, but replace “whitepaper” with “manuscript” and “investors” with “researchers” and you get bad science in a nutshell.

“If you are trying to figure out a thinker and his or her defects, see if you can spot that person’s “once-and-for-all” moves. There will be plenty of them.”

Cowen is right, though we can debate whether early closure is a defect or a feature.

“This contains a combination of various life-extension medicines (metformin, ashwagandha, and some vitamins), and covid defense gear: a CO2 meter… masks, antigen tests and fluvoxamine.”

The reddest of crypto world’s red flags is their belief in longer life through chemistry.

“The convergence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor directly or the blood (known as liquid biopsy)—matched with the appropriate therapy is leading to outcomes that are being described as ‘unheard-of’ by expert oncologists.”

So writes one Eric Topol, who seems to have made a career out of telling high-status people what they want to hear. For reasons why most of what he wrote is wrong, take a few minutes to watch Vinay Prasad’s reviews of the articles in question.

The trend disrupting medicine back when Dr. Topol was writing about its Creative Destruction turned out to be not technology but rather the opioid epidemic. As a non-expert oncologist I would wager something other than liquid biopsies is leaving its hallmark on the field right now.