under the microscope

‘Disruptive’ science has declined.

“The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead would cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, […]

fun facts

The Bangladesh water machine.

“Published in Science, the study said that groundwater-fed irrigation had transformed much of Bangladesh’s single-crop, rain-watered floodplains into highly productive double-cropping and, in places, triple-cropping lands to make the country the world’s fourth highest producer of rice.” | learn more

under the microscope

Massively parallelizing everything.

The first two parts of this series were Sequencing and Synthesis. This part, called Scale, builds on the idea that the underlying breakthroughs enable automation that drives the pace of science much faster, creating totally new types of biotechnology. | learn more

fun facts

An octopus breeding program proposal.

“Octopuses are surprisingly intelligent, and reproduce at 1 year old. If we’d started a breeding program 50 years ago, we probably could’ve gotten them smarter than dolphins by now. A disappointing failure of the long-term mad science ecosystem.” | learn more

fun facts

How to hug, according to science.

“Love them or hate them, hugs are part of Western culture. They don’t just confer emotional closeness, they’ve been shown to improve our mental and physical health. But hugging is not as straightforward as it may seem. Where do your […]