real productivity gains for prior technological advances came not from individual workers learning to use eg electricity, the internet but entire workflows, factories, processes, businesses being set up around the use of new tools (in other words, management)

Such an interesting topic. I wonder if our standards for rigor and safety lead us to miss out on some of these accidental discoveries today. Not to suggest we get rid of safety and rigor in the lab, but just thinking what, if anything, might be lost.

How do we diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease? It’s one of those questions that I thought I knew the answer to, until I was asked and found myself fumbling. So I dug into it and wrote up a short essay on the topic. smrithisunil.substack.com/p/how-do-we-di…

Today we are launching Issue 08 of Asimov Press. There will be at least 2x new articles each week for the next two months (and...a podcast?) Coming up: - A deep history of electron microscopy. - How to see microbes from the sky. - Making computers smell. ... and much more.

My short reaction for Works in Progress on why Joel Mokyr’s economics Nobel win today is such a fantastic, fantastic day for history. worksinprogress.news/p/what-makes-j…

The Roots of Progress Institute conference was incredible. Might need help lifting my carry-on with this haul. But soon I might not have to carry on at all if Blake Scholl 🛫 has his way.

i wrote about literature-based discovery, a field dedicated to finding existing but inexplicit links within scientific literature, and what LLMs can add to it

New essay on electron microscopes, an incredible machine fabricated by a long line of brilliant engineers. This bit was surprising to me: "Conceived in the 1930s, [the electron microscope] promised theoretical resolutions on the order of angstroms, nearly a hundred times finer

My essay on the making of the electron microscope is out Asimov Press. A quest to understand short circuits in power lines sparked one of the greatest inventions in science. One that now reveals biological structures in atomic detail.

By day: keeping cells alive, painstakingly preparing samples, manually annotating images. By night: writing about how to re-engineer research institutions. The whiplash is real.

I can see how people get obsessed with language development. In a matter of months my daughter went from barely any words, to more than I can keep track of, to sentences, to now speaking so fast I can barely understand her. What’s going on in there??

"Science is big and heterogenous; our engines should be too." Great read!!

The resolution revolution in cryo-electron microscopy came from combining three unique breakthroughs. My latest essay traces how they came together to bring biology into atomic focus: engineering-discovery.com/p/from-blobs-t…