I have a Schrodinger's cat joke, but I don't

Lifestyle strategies and mechanistic implications for slowing neurodegeneration nature.com/articles/s44324-0…

The turning point for rare diseases, which affect >300 million people around the world. A call to get rid of its many structural obstacles, to consider it as molecular surgery unlike drug treatments gift link: nytimes.com/2026/04/09/opini…

Human #neuroimaging data across five major #psychedelics reveal a convergent #brain signature, highlighting a shared pattern of large-scale network #reorganization. These findings help understand how #psychedelic compounds reshape brain architecture. nature.com/articles/s41591-0…

We should be prioritizing prevention of cancer instead of the major focus on detection and treatment. A new @CellCellPress perspective cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092…

This is really cool (and wild): Scientists simulated a complete living cell for the first time. Every molecule, every reaction, from DNA replication to cell division. The paper (Luthey-Schulten et al., Cell 2026, doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2026.…), just out today, used JCVI-Syn3A — a synthetic minimal bacterium with fewer than 500 genes. A 3D time simulation of the full 105-minute cell cycle: DNA replication, protein translation, metabolism, division. Every gene, protein, RNA, and chemical reaction tracked through physical space. It took years to build. Multiple GPUs. Six days of compute time per run. And this is the simplest possible cell. A human cell has ~20,000 genes. It lives in tissue. It interacts with neighbors. It differentiates. It responds to drugs in ways that depend on context we haven't fully measured. Mechanistic simulation of the minimal cell costs 6 GPU-days for 105 minutes of biology. You cannot scale that to human cells. The complexity isn't 40x harder. It's exponentially harder. This is why the field pivoted to data-driven models. You can't hand-encode the regulatory wiring of a human hepatocyte. But you can learn it — if you have the right perturbation data collected across enough diverse biological contexts. The two approaches aren't competing. Papers like this generate the ground truth that future ML models need for validation. But the path to a clinically useful virtual cell runs through foundation models, not through scaling up mechanistic simulation. Amazing work!

Next time somebody asks about sudden deaths after COVID vaccines: the actual number is as close to 0 as it can be journals.plos.org/plosmedici…

We've come a long way, but current policies risk reversing the progress we've made in the fight on AIDS. You can read more about the decreased access to HAART here: thehill.com/policy/healthcar…

For those worried about #Nipah virus: Yes, it's a dangerous disease. Yes, India has recently reported 2 cases. But Nipah doesn't spread as easily as Covid. "WHO assesses the risk posed by Nipah to be moderate at the sub-national level, and low at the national, the regional and global levels." who.int/emergencies/disease-…

I would offer that Alex Pretti putting his body—with his hands up—between a woman and the BP agent who had just violently shoved her into the snow, offer stark competing visions of manhood. Pretti, a nurse caring for veterans, who took a face full of pepper spray to shield that woman, is a much better masculine ideal that the masked coward shoving the woman and executing a man on his knees. MAGA may venerate the latter, but most people in a healthy society want the former.