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I like the idea of the list as well. Anyone know of resources that are on a similar theme? Only rethinkx “rethinking humanity” report comes to mind.

Corresponding paper to RFdiffusion: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.09.519842v2

Some context: Been waiting for this to come out for a while! Main innovation is leveraging RosettaFold (protein folding neural net) to generate protein backbones via diffusing in 3D space! From backbones, we can generate sequences that would fold into said structures via design algorithms (check out: proteinMPNN, Rosetta FastDesign).

In terms of applications: This is super relevant for our ability to create strongly binding protein binders (ex timely creation of proteins that bind to virus spike proteins), and designing enzyme from scratch!

Prior methods suffered from much lower success rates for generating “good” backbone structures. Extremely exciting!! If you want to learn more, check out the Baker group at UW!

Yup. It’s great, but there are still many aspects to unpack and work on. Hence why Rosetta is a thing.

I like idea (1), where kids don’t have mental space to sort thoughts out. Although I disagree that most kids are too busy for it. It may be that habitual social media use decreases kids’ free time, as they use social media/their phone as soon as they’re free, rather than sit, think, and process thoughts.

I think this is also applicable to adults, although it’s effects could be less since smartphones weren’t prevalent when current adults were children.

I’ve always thought of it as that. More generally, idea could be applied to YouTube, podcasting, etc. One person has ability to broadcast to millions, while the millions can’t broadcast back equally.

The idea is pretty cool! I think it has potential, as when I used instagram, people seemed to enjoy the “closed friends” feature, and also created separate IG accounts to follow close friends.

Tragic. It’s always scary to handle needles in a lab. Even with good needle safety protocols, accidents are bound to happen.

There’s this case that my PI showed me of a student who pricked his finger with a needle filled with DCM [1] (which is very common solvent in used in lab). The residual DCM at the tip of the needle caused the damage shown in the pictures.

When your work involves handling tens of needles daily, accidents are bound to happen. I pricked myself once with a needle. Thankfully it was brand new and dry, so nothing happened. It was just the idea of it was terrifying. In an alternate world, I could’ve gone to the ER because of it. Hope someone invents a safer needle.

[1]: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/gruesome-accident-prompt...