Uncertain Origins of Aspirin 💊 It's hard to know where this incredible pain reliever actually came from. Willow bark tea? Hippocrates? Or John Reverend Stone? The trail is littered with bad record keeping and obscure translations. Our latest explains what we know for sure.🔻

We just launched Issue 07 of Asimov Press! Our opening article aims to separate myths from facts about the origins of aspirin. (Hint: The drug is not as ancient as you probably think.)

In a single E. coli, about 25 percent of all proteins use metals (like zinc, iron, copper, magnesium, etc) to do their chemistries. And yet, incredibly, fewer than ONE FREE METAL ION is present per cell on average. There are, in other words, basically no loose metal ions

A VISUAL GUIDE TO GENE DELIVERY There are at least 10,000 known monogenic diseases. Many scientists are trying to build gene therapies to cure some of them. Learn about tradeoffs between the various delivery options—from AAV to LNPs to Herpes Virus—in our latest article.

Where does sunlight go? Hall of fame Sankey diagram from Sam Clamons That's a lot of sunlight seemingly going to waste, but photons aren't the scarce resource for photosynthesizers; it's competition for water, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc. Great article

Jungle Dyson sphere by 2028

If you only see biotech happening in major research universities and FDA-compliant biopharma companies, you are missing this completely An emerging subculture with *totally* different values and goals, funded by Silicon Valley money, is going to build a new kind of biotech

Is anyone making a grounded data-driven case for non-diabetic / normal weight people to take GLP-1s for longevity yet?

I get the quandary that AI labs are in regarding perceived biosecurity risk, but having to jailbreak models to answer benign molecular biology questions is tiresome

Sen. Todd Young is introducing four biotech bills. The second of these "would establish a federal effort to catalog genomes on federal lands, starting with national parks." I think this is a good idea. But naturally, I wondered: What biotech tools have come from U.S. lands?

Alec Nielsen Would you like to clone gfp into puc19 (the hello world of bio)? lol glhf

My wife was looking at my timeline and asked what ‘puke 19’ is

Calling it now: within 5 years there will be a Minecraft/Roblox-scale cultural phenomenon built on generative interactive worlds

Pretty sure I have PTSD from reading The Hot Zone in middle school. Ebola is scary Glad to be working with BARDA to rage against it

Brb making a $100B unsolicited longshot offer to buy deepmind

While making the second Asimov Press book, we asked CATALOG (a DNA computing company in Boston) if they could write it in DNA. And they said yes! But the encoding steps, or how the book was converted to nucleotides, wasn't obvious. Now a new paper explains it all in detail.

I've written up some thoughts on publishing for machines. 10M research papers are published per year and there are 227M total - machines will be primary producers and readers of publications going forward. It's time to revise the scientific paper.