Why universities need to be unbundled and how to do it

Or: My Experience In Modern Forecasting

Plus: news.

New York City’s Office of Policy and Strategic Planning is a group of tech-savvy and civic-minded number crunchers analyzing city statistics for solutions to some pressing and convoluted problems.

TSNE is a method for visualizing high-dimensional data that preserves local neighborhoods on a two-dimensional plane.

Type 2 immunity helps protect the host from infection, but it also plays key roles in tissue homeostasis, metabolism, and repair. Unfortunately, inappropriate type 2 immune reactions may lead to aller...

Identifying the baby in the bathwater

I was thinking about my reading habits.

Good model performance is only one of many steps towards clinical trial adoption.

In the year 2029, the barriers of our world have been broken down by the net and by cybernetics, but this brings new vulnerability to humans in the form of brain-hacking. When a highly-wanted hacker k...

A practical guide

Li et al. identify a human TCF1-expressing stem-like T cell population that is associated with immune-mediated pathogenesis in ulcerative colitis.

Why it's hard to generalize lessons from the world of therapeutics

The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information....

For better or worse, it's time to sell.

SARS-CoV-2 infects SUS and BGC in the olfactory epithelium, causing an impairment of structural support and integrity of olfactory sensory neurons that can result in severe olfactory dysfunctions. We ...

There are no actual rules about the order of authorships of papers in academic journals.

YouTube video by user400293

The compulsion to see what lies beyond that far ridge or that ocean—or this planet—is a defining part of human identity and success.

Jack is one of the sharpest thinkers on the pharmaceutical industry, with a talent for coining terms that then propagate among industry insiders and into wider tech circles.

Read the latest article version by Charity W. Law, Kathleen Zeglinski, Xueyi Dong, Monther Alhamdoosh, Gordon K. Smyth, Matthew E. Ritchie, at F1000Research.

as shown by an analysis of DepMap data

Mast cells act as “signal converters,” translating immunological and tissue signals into host-protective behaviors. They sense antigen and possibly toxins driving avoidance behavior, which can prevent...

Despite what grad school admissions committees seem to believe, outside interests are good.

Occasionally, when a paper is published with a new interesting dataset, the GEO accession is locked as ‘private’ until a certain release date.

Two physical constraints — surface area and diffusion — explain why cells are (usually) tiny.

A drug for multiple myeloma should have been an early warning that China is racing ahead in biotech

or how your textbook lies

Computational biologist Ewan Birney describes the elation of making a breakthrough while three other scientists tell us how their work plays on their emotions

Every few years, biology gets a new phrase that sounds inevitable.

2.8k words, 12 minute reading time

A few notes on authorship in Big Life Sciences

Hand drawn data visualizations by artist Doug MacDowell.

We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force. Doing this to malaria-carrying mosquitoes could allow us to wipe out humanity's most d...

YouTube video by Wild Card with Rachel Martin

It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my thir…

I was reminded that about a year ago (May 2025) I investigated whether LLM-based website crawlers could be used to extract how many cells were collected for individual single-cell papers. I used a ser...

The 10x Genomics Flex kit for single-cell RNA-sequencing relies on a fixed set of gene probes as opposed to untargeted RNA-sequencing.

A lot of what I do with graduate students is what I call unteaching school.

Last year, the company I work for rebranded as Tahoe Therapeutics. It is named after Lake Tahoe at the border between California and Nevada.

A previously unappreciated sympathetic–immune axis links psychological stress to eosinophil recruitment and consequent worsening of atopic dermatitis.