iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 10h

London City Airport is my favourite one in London in part because the descent has views like this

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 28/09/2026

I don't mean to brag, but this is one of the best videos I have ever taken, feat. @dingdingpeng.the100.ci

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 27/09/2026

Omg thanks to @dingdingpeng.the100.ci I'm now the proud sponsor of a Gila monster at the zoo 🦎 One of the most important lizards in medical history! There it is, sleeping on the right.

Me holding a Gila monster plushie in front of a Gila monster exhibit

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/09/2026

New post and game by me! Some people claim that AI will cure all diseases in 10 years. Others are more skeptical, arguing that experimentation and clinical trials are the bottleneck. Who's right? I designed a game to find out.

clinicaltrialsabundance.blog

The clinical trial bottlenecks game

Where’s the bottleneck in curing diseases? I designed a game to find out.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/09/2026

clinicaltrialsabundance.blog

The clinical trial bottlenecks game

Where’s the bottleneck in curing diseases? I designed a game to find out.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/09/2026

Happy Friday! Iʼve created a game for you to play! Will AI cure all diseases in 10 years? Inspired by bottlenecks discourse, I created a game to help build your intuitions. Play it here: game.clinicaltrialsabundance.blog Naturally, it’s bottle-themed with bubbles and there are leaderboards too.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/09/2026

Very fun to see how many people have played already. Each line here represents a successful completion, and there were many different ways to solve the game!

A mysterious unlabelled chart of solutions to the game.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/09/2026

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/09/2026

. @dingdingpeng.the100.ci's baby is so chubby, I had to find out how our face sizes compared, side by side. Unfortunately I still can't tell. It's debatable

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 24/09/2026

I have just eaten my first Spaghettieis. It felt very unnatural to eat it with a spoon.

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Dan Quintana @dsquintana.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

New preprint! 🎉 I analysed 1660 papers from 4 psychology journals and found materials sharing went from 9% of papers in 2015 to 82% in 2025, and these materials *do* get downloaded — a median of 135 times each. BUT shared code is often hard to run. doi.org/10.31234/osf... Let's walk through it 🧵

Two-panel figure. Panel a is a flow diagram tracking 1,611 empirical psychology articles from publication year (545 in 2015, 552 in 2020, 514 in 2025) to repository-link type: 785 link an OSF project, 85 link another platform, and 741 link no repository. Of those with an OSF link, download counts were retrieved for 670 and not retrieved for 115. Panel b is a line chart of the share of empirical papers linking OSF across 2015, 2020 and 2025. The overall rate, shown as a dashed black line, rises from 9% to 57% to 82%. All four journals rise steeply and end close together: Psychological Science 92%, JESP 89%, JML 83%, Cognition 76%, with Psychological Science highest throughout.

Three-panel figure. Panel a: ridgeline plot of downloads per file by material type on a log scale, with the percentage never downloaded labelled for each — archive 16% of 545 files, documents 20% of 2,970, code 12% of 3,471, other 17% of 1,646, data 21% of 10,051, media 35% of 2,120, images 35% of 4,102. Most files cluster between 1 and 10 downloads, with long right tails past 100. Panel b: ridgeline plot of downloads per paper by journal, log scale, with dashed median lines; Psychological Science is highest, then JESP, JML and Cognition. Panel c: stacked bars showing, for documents, data and code separately, the share of papers by download band (0, 1–10, 11–100, more than 100) in 2015, 2020 and 2025. The share exceeding 100 downloads falls sharply over time in all three types, from roughly two-thirds in 2015 to a quarter or less in 2025, as the 1–10 band grows.

Four-panel figure. Panel a: statistical languages detected among 333 papers with retrievable code — R 88%, SPSS 12%, Stata 4%, SAS 1%. Panel b: code red flags among those 333 papers — 34% hard-code an absolute path, 40% reference a missing file — above documentation among 672 OSF-linked papers — 21% have a README, 30% are documented by README, description or wiki. Panel c: among 562 Elsevier papers with no repository link, 44% (245) host at least one journal supplementary file but only 14% (77) host data, code or an archive. Panel d: composition of those 448 hosted files — documents 52%, data 21%, media 9%, other 7%, archive 6%, code 3%, images 1%. The code panels are green, the journal-supplement panels blue.

Coefficient plot (download predictors)

Dot-and-whisker plot of three standardised predictors of OSF download volume, each with a 95% confidence interval. Repository size (number of files) has the largest effect at about 0.76, citations about 0.38, and altmetric attention about 0.12. All three intervals sit entirely above zero, so each predicts more downloads, with repository size roughly twice the effect of citations and six times that of attention. X-axis: standardised effect, −0.2 to 1.0.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 18/09/2026

Cluster analysis can be applied to these, and clusters will be found. But that doesn’t mean those clusters are meaningful.>

man to computer: Find clusters
computer: >CLUSTERS FOUND
man: oh my god.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 18/09/2026

This is an *excellent* post on cluster analysis. If you ever thought about applying cluster, latent class or latent profile analysis to psychological scales, you absolutely should read this!>

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 17/09/2026

OMG I am my favourite type of potato

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 13/09/2026

Is there any way to turn off Gemini from automatically responding when you search on Google? I've tried and can't figure out how to do so, if it's possible at all.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 13/09/2026

I'm going to encourage all my parent friends to get back into fitness by lifting their babies. Why buy a kettleball when you could simply use a kettlebaby? youtu.be/IPDmGhbXGYY?...

youtu.be

25 MIN BEST FULL BODY WORKOUT WITH BABY - Postpartum Mommy Baby Fitness At Home I With Instructions!

YouTube video by Fit With Sally

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 12/09/2026

I spoke too soon! Got about a dozen emails from bots trying to collect rewards from my bug bounty since yesterday. 4 were legitimate errors though very minor, relating to my vaccine discovery dataset.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 12/09/2026

Ordered a "baklava sandwich" yesterday, not knowing what that meant. It turned out to be layers of baklava with cream on top and pistachio ice cream inside. Probably in the top 3 desserts in my life tbh.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 11/09/2026

I'm having a similar experience, although have only received a few emails like this so far. Some are so stingy about tokens that they don't start trying to check the work unless I confirm it's eligible for a reward.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 08/09/2026

Wrote a paragraph that elicited the comments “Yuck!” and “This is horrific!” from my colleagues. Mission accomplished.

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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

One reason England does so well is our second generation immigrants outperform their peers which is not true in most OECD countries. We are also very good at integration. And it's v sad that this is never acknowledge in debates on immigration.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 07/09/2026

A lot of people made fun of this at the time, but I actually don't think it's that bad. Mostly it amuses me to imagine feeding two birds one scone.

Peta's stop using anti animal language campaign

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 07/09/2026

The AI bots have discovered my 'bug bounty' system, spotted an important error in my code, and sent me an email to notify me. Guess what the error was? An undefined colour palette.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 07/09/2026

*trying to impress a culture critic* You know, I accidentally tried reading a Bruno Latour book once.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 05/09/2026

I like the new map projection, but India looks more like a pizza slice than I'm used to

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 05/09/2026

Unfortunate - the Lp(a) lowering trial that everyone (nerds) were waiting for was unsuccessful. It could've meant a highly effective new method to reduce heart attacks and strokes. I'd still like to see the detailed results, but I take this as some evidence against the causal relationship.

statnews.com

Novartis’ experimental cardiovascular drug fails a pivotal study

A closely watched cardiovascular drug from Novartis failed in a pivotal study, the company said Friday, a major blow to the firm.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 05/09/2026

This is interesting. You get assigned to being born at a random place and time in history, to see what a typical person's life might have been like then. Unfortunately I was born in 1403 in the valley of Mexico and died at age 4 from dysentery.

anyhumanever.com

Any Human Ever

One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived.

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/09/2026

Shoutout to Muli cycles for making small bikes that enable me to transport anything from a chonker-sized baby to a Saloni-sized adult @scientificdiscovery.dev

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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

It's a systemic problem in science reporting that these summaries exaggerate the evidence. In the actual candy study, the participants were all students, status was manipulated in the lab by telling some students they were better than others, and "nearly twice" means 1 piece vs 2 pieces.

Piff and his colleagues found that upper-class drivers were more likely to cut other cars off at junctions and ignore pedestrians at crossings. Wealthier people also appeared more willing to lie at work. In one experiment, volunteers were left alone with a jar of sweets ostensibly meant for children. When the researchers returned, upper-class people had snaffled nearly twice as many candies as lower-class people.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 03/09/2026

That's crazy. ... Must be because of the -loni in her name. I have no conflicts of interest to report.

Meloni's government becomes the longest serving in Italy since 1943

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 02/09/2026

I wrote briefly on the recent antibody image scandal for our weekly round up www.abundanceandgrowth.org/p/california...

Can antibody explain these images? — Saloni Dattani
Back in May, science sleuth Sholto David came across a suspicious image from the major life-sciences supplier Thermo Fisher. It was a Western blot showing the performance of one of their antibodies that is commonly used in cancer research. On the blot, four apparently separate protein bands were copies of the same shape, duplicated and flipped or rotated to produce the others.

Since then, Reese Richardson, a metascience and computational biology researcher and other sleuths uncovered many more by increasing image contrast and searching suppliers’ catalogues for repeated visual fingerprints, partly using image-search tools. According to Nature, they have now found over 18,000 questionable images across 15 commercial suppliers, with digital alterations such as repositioned bands, painted-over regions, and reused background noise. For the last category, Elisabeth Bik (who some say has forensic laser eyes) told Nature, “That particular type of image alteration or manipulation suggests that these antibodies were never tested at all in the lab.” Weirdly, identical images were sometimes used by multiple suppliers, which suggests that they came from the same third-party manufacturers.

The images don’t necessarily mean the antibodies themselves are flawed, but since other research has found that commercial antibodies are commonly unreliable, I wonder whether this is just the tip of the iceberg, and how much of scientists’ time has been wasted chasing false leads. One takeaway is that researchers should avoid relying on suppliers’ images and independently validate their antibodies. But given how time consuming and repetitive it would be for individual scientists to validate them, a wider effort seems worthwhile. For example, the Canadian open-science company YCharOS tests some commercial antibodies head-to-head and publishes their results openly, and the University of Leicester’s ‘Only Good Antibodies’ hosts this data on a searchable database, though neither are comprehensive. The sleuths themselves also host a Zenodo repository with their findings.

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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 28/08/2026

The reason you want an actual humanitarian aid system and *don’t* want to force everybody to rely on online mutual aid is because online mutual aid *forces people experiencing horrific trauma* to perform on the Internet for survival.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 29/08/2026

I find it a tiresome trope now how many TV shows have good protagonists that turn bad over time. I've stopped watching multiple shows that did so, and most instances don't even improve the story.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 27/08/2026

There are entire articles written around the problem of why the prevalence of type 1 diabetes has risen - nutrition? toxins? - that don't even consider whether it might be because fewer patients are dying young & continue to be in the numerator. This should be step 1

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 26/08/2026

I wrote about the Moderna cancer vaccine news briefly for our weekly round up www.abundanceandgrowth.org/p/cancer-vac...

Personalized cancer vaccines are now real — Saloni Dattani
Researchers have spent decades trying to develop personalized cancer vaccines, and last week, the first one succeeded. It’s called intismeran autogene (mouthful), was developed by Moderna and Merck, and involves sequencing melanoma patients’ cancer mutations, creating a custom mRNA to target them, and delivering the vaccine to stop the cancer recurring. The news came as the drug passed its interim goal in a phase three trial, where it was given to people with high-risk resected melanoma.

It led to Moderna’s stock jumping 177%, which was apparently the largest one-day gain by any S&P 500 stock this century. I found the size of the surge surprising because you could have already been fairly confident that the drug would succeed since at least June: as I wrote in an earlier post, the company presented data from their phase 2b trial at an oncology conference almost three months ago, which showed a 49% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death (p = 0.0075). But, according to financial analysts, the huge market reaction was probably down to a short squeeze and the belief that mRNA could be a more widely useful platform to develop other cancer vaccines too.

That makes sense, but it’s worth knowing that melanoma is a much easier disease to develop cancer vaccines for than others. It carries a very high number of mutations, so you have thousands of possible ‘neoantigens’ to select from and can choose those that look strong on many measures, but this isn’t the case for many cancers. Many cancers have far fewer mutations to select from, and it’s currently hard to predict whether their mutations will be displayed or measure which ones actually are displayed.

But very few people thought this attempt would work either, until recently. According to a very interesting new STAT article detailing how this cancer vaccine came about, Moderna’s own executives didn’t expect it would work until 2023; it first entered clinical trials in 2017. In case you’re interested in more about personalized cancer vaccines, I’ll once again recommend this great podcast episode, How to design a cancer vaccine, hosted by Owl Posting and featuring Alex Rubinsteyn and Benjamin Vincent, two scientists whose work focuses on cancer immunology and vaccines.

Chart of Moderna share price

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/08/2026

The Clinical Trials Abundance Blog has a new member! It's Enlli McAleese and she has a really cool post today about a tool she built to help navigate regulatory pathways to get new drugs approved in poorer countries. Those choices can affect whether countries get access to medicines at all.

clinicaltrialsabundance.blog

Google Maps for Medicines

A new tool to help you navigate drug approval routes in lower and middle income countries

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 25/08/2026

Most people have never heard of siRNA, but it’s going to change the face of medicine. In a new article, Jacob Witten explains this magic button to silence genes. worksinprogress.co/issue/the-ki...

worksinprogress.co

The kill switch for harmful genes - Works in Progress Magazine

What if instead of editing a gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 25/08/2026

If you want to know how my generation of women used to have fun, search for “woman laughing alone with salad”

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 24/08/2026

Amusing to learn that a goddess became largely redundant as a result of the smallpox eradication campaign en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitala

Shitala (Sanskrit: शीतला, IAST: śītalā, lit. 'coolness'; also spelled as Sheetala, Śītalā and Seetla) is a Hindu goddess venerated primarily in North India.[2] She is regarded as an incarnation of the goddess Parvati and is believed to cure poxes, sores, ghouls, pustules, and diseases, and most directly linked with the disease smallpox. Shitala is worshipped on Tuesday,[3] Saptami and Ashtami (the seventh and eighth day of a Hindu month), especially after Holi during the month of Chaitra. The celebration of the goddess Shitala on the seventh and eighth day of the Hindu month is referred to as the Shitala Saptami and Shitala Ashtami, respectively.[4]

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 22/08/2026

I had a dream last night that I had to prepare for a stand up comedy routine and I only had a few minutes left, omg. Like one of those exam dreams but everyone was waiting for me to tell jokes

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 20/08/2026

(Almost) everything you'd want to know about cancer vaccines can be heard in this great @owlposting1.bsky.social podcast episode from June, feat. @alexr.bsky.social and @benjamingvincent.bsky.social. Highly recommended! www.owlposting.com/p/how-to-bui...

owlposting.com

How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time

8.4k words, 38 minutes reading time

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 18/08/2026

The tools to develop new drugs and vaccines have improved enormously, so why haven't we cured all diseases yet? Medical innovation isn't just about the science - it's about the funding, incentives and institutions, and most importantly, on people who choose to solve problems.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 17/08/2026

It's finally here! I gave a TED talk in April in Vancouver, and it was released online today. You can watch it here: ted.com/talks/saloni... I've also adapted it into an article, which was published last week: worksinprogress.co/issue/future...

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 17/08/2026

Has anyone written a good piece about the incoming AI science slop tsunami and what to do about it?

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vincentholst.bsky.social @vincentholst.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

In 2023, @nature.com published 'Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time', receiving world-wide media attention. Our Matters Arising, published after a 32 month delay (more on that soon), shows that the reported decline can largely be attributed to dataset artefacts. 🧵

The average CD_5 index per year for Web of Science. The original Park et al. decline (top curve) becomes essentially flat (bottom curve) when removing papers with CD_5=1. Those papers largely correspond to dataset artefacts.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 15/08/2026

There are two types of people in this world. Some can read between the lines. And others

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Jenn Dowd @drjenndowd.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

A highly recommended read for those weighed down by the heavy public health news as of late. Love all of the content from @scientificdiscovery.dev! www.worksinprogress.news/p/future-of-...

worksinprogress.news

Cure all diseases

Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 13/08/2026

The vast majority of people care about animal welfare, but factory farming continues growing. Will animals always suffer? In a brilliant new piece, Koji Flynn Do and Martin Gould argue there’s a Kuznets curve for animal welfare: we can turn things around. worksinprogress.co/issue/will-f...

worksinprogress.co

Will farm animals always suffer? - Works in Progress Magazine

Economic growth gives us cleaner air, healthier rivers, and safer workplaces. Happier animals could be next.

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Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev · 12/08/2026

This is an appreciation post for @sarahzhang.bsky.social who is so good! I love her articles. They also have hilarious titles.

theatlantic.com

Kill the Ticks

America needs a bigger plan to control its tick problem.

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