Laurel Oldach
@laureloldach.bsky.social
Biochemistry & instrumentation reporter at Chemical & Engineering News. Signal: Laurel_Oldach.07
Friends, please do not buy Botox via WhatsApp to DIY wrinkle treatment at home.
www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...
www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...
Notes from the Field: Severe Illnesses After ...
This report describes the public health response to three patients from different states who developed severe illness after self-injecting botulinum toxin.
www.cdc.gov
November 26, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Friends, please do not buy Botox via WhatsApp to DIY wrinkle treatment at home.
www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...
www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
A research team has found multiple lineages of archaea that have fully repurposed the TAG stop codon to encode the noncanonical amino acid pyrrolysine. cen.acs.org/biological-c... #chemsky 🧪
These archaea built a distinct genetic code to put pyrrolysine in proteins
That feat has synthetic biologists excited
cen.acs.org
November 26, 2025 at 6:27 PM
A research team has found multiple lineages of archaea that have fully repurposed the TAG stop codon to encode the noncanonical amino acid pyrrolysine. cen.acs.org/biological-c... #chemsky 🧪
So, remember that MAHA summit 2 weeks ago that @statnews.com broke the news of and @maxkozlov.bsky.social somehow got into for Nature, even though it was closed to the press?
The organizers posted the entire 6.5-hour conference proceedings to YouTube last week.
cen.acs.org/policy/MAHA-...
The organizers posted the entire 6.5-hour conference proceedings to YouTube last week.
cen.acs.org/policy/MAHA-...
At MAHA Summit, the NIH head pushes for research that risks failure
And 4 other takeaways for life scientists from the ‘off-the-record’ Make America Healthy Again conference
cen.acs.org
November 26, 2025 at 3:58 PM
So, remember that MAHA summit 2 weeks ago that @statnews.com broke the news of and @maxkozlov.bsky.social somehow got into for Nature, even though it was closed to the press?
The organizers posted the entire 6.5-hour conference proceedings to YouTube last week.
cen.acs.org/policy/MAHA-...
The organizers posted the entire 6.5-hour conference proceedings to YouTube last week.
cen.acs.org/policy/MAHA-...
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
To me, the issue is the internal editorial structure that keeps the political reporter from walking over to the science desk/slack channel and saying "hey, could you look over my coverage quickly and identify potential problems". So, I'd place this at the feet of the most senior editors.
November 26, 2025 at 12:22 AM
To me, the issue is the internal editorial structure that keeps the political reporter from walking over to the science desk/slack channel and saying "hey, could you look over my coverage quickly and identify potential problems". So, I'd place this at the feet of the most senior editors.
🧵
Even in more quantifiable fields (like biochemistry), this brute force approach cannot succeed even with the best curated data. Given the ubiquitous use of p<0.05 as statically significant, 5% of all published hypotheses should have been rejected instead of accepted given the data. This would be bad
November 25, 2025 at 5:30 AM
🧵
I am completely mystified by journalists' uncritical acceptance of the MAHA talking point (reiterated here) that American life expectancy is a KPI for the American research enterprise.
For health systems, I can see it. But for NIH?
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
For health systems, I can see it. But for NIH?
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?
How an outsider, once ignored by the public-health establishment, became the most powerful man in science
www.theatlantic.com
November 24, 2025 at 7:06 PM
I am completely mystified by journalists' uncritical acceptance of the MAHA talking point (reiterated here) that American life expectancy is a KPI for the American research enterprise.
For health systems, I can see it. But for NIH?
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
For health systems, I can see it. But for NIH?
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
Just this week alone.
November 23, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Just this week alone.
👀
About that exclusive, "closed-to-press" MAHA summit last week with RFK and JD Vance: I got in.
Here's what I saw. 🧵 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Here's what I saw. 🧵 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
November 21, 2025 at 6:59 PM
👀
What if, instead of editing every premature stop codon that causes disease, researchers edited the translation machinery to skip those codons?
cen.acs.org/biological-c...
cen.acs.org/biological-c...
Prime editing suppressor transfer RNAs for gene therapy
Liu lab suggests technique could provide ‘nonstop’ treatment for genetic diseases
cen.acs.org
November 19, 2025 at 5:31 PM
What if, instead of editing every premature stop codon that causes disease, researchers edited the translation machinery to skip those codons?
cen.acs.org/biological-c...
cen.acs.org/biological-c...
Personal opinion that I am proud to have managed to get through as the lede of this story: differentiating between diastereomers is better left to chemists than Congress.
cen.acs.org/biological-c...
cen.acs.org/biological-c...
Why synthetic cannabinoids appear in the US funding bill
The law that ended the federal government shutdown also closes a loophole in cannabis regulation
cen.acs.org
November 18, 2025 at 5:45 PM
Personal opinion that I am proud to have managed to get through as the lede of this story: differentiating between diastereomers is better left to chemists than Congress.
cen.acs.org/biological-c...
cen.acs.org/biological-c...
People who are interested in this MAHA summit: it's on CSPAN right now, JD Vance and RFK in conversation.
www.c-span.org/event/public...
www.c-span.org/event/public...
Vice Pres. Vance Speaks at "MAHA" Summit
Vice Presient JD Vance delivers remarks at a "Make America Healthy Again" summit.
www.c-span.org
November 12, 2025 at 5:35 PM
People who are interested in this MAHA summit: it's on CSPAN right now, JD Vance and RFK in conversation.
www.c-span.org/event/public...
www.c-span.org/event/public...
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
I cannot stress this enough right now: share journalism that you think is good.
You might not always be able to afford subscriptions or to tip journos but since everyone seems able to hate on headlines they dislike etc., they must also have the power to elevate good quality writing! We need it.
You might not always be able to afford subscriptions or to tip journos but since everyone seems able to hate on headlines they dislike etc., they must also have the power to elevate good quality writing! We need it.
Between the widespread layoffs in the news industry, and the widespread adoption of AI tools that consistently make up total bullshit, it is going to be more and more difficult to get accurate information about what is happening in the world.
Which is both deeply sad and utterly terrifying.
Which is both deeply sad and utterly terrifying.
November 11, 2025 at 6:00 PM
I cannot stress this enough right now: share journalism that you think is good.
You might not always be able to afford subscriptions or to tip journos but since everyone seems able to hate on headlines they dislike etc., they must also have the power to elevate good quality writing! We need it.
You might not always be able to afford subscriptions or to tip journos but since everyone seems able to hate on headlines they dislike etc., they must also have the power to elevate good quality writing! We need it.
An optimistic-about-science thread is a rare pleasure these days
A few weeks ago I attended the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival. I went as someone who is interested in most everything in the world, lives in a wet, fungi filled temperate rainforest, and is mostly ignorant about fungi. Here are some things I learned:
November 11, 2025 at 3:41 AM
An optimistic-about-science thread is a rare pleasure these days
One problem with said training data:
yes. I worry the "let AI do the science for us now" means we end up trying to milk more and more out of the same data. we're already looking for our keys in the lamplight, and AI encourages this more with an even narrower beam... But I think an author-facing tool to improve papers is different
November 9, 2025 at 7:11 PM
One problem with said training data:
I missed this news amid all the chatter about Watson on Friday. I wonder what they’re planning to do about the well documented problems with the training data?
apnews.com/article/chan...
apnews.com/article/chan...
Zuckerberg, Chan shift bulk of philanthropy to science, focusing on AI and biology to curb disease
For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal — “to cure, prevent or manage all disease” — if not in their lifetime, t...
apnews.com
November 9, 2025 at 7:08 PM
I missed this news amid all the chatter about Watson on Friday. I wonder what they’re planning to do about the well documented problems with the training data?
apnews.com/article/chan...
apnews.com/article/chan...
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
I lift the silly weights in the gym. I will mess around with my own words and sentences and thoughts out of it. See where it all takes me.
November 8, 2025 at 12:39 PM
I lift the silly weights in the gym. I will mess around with my own words and sentences and thoughts out of it. See where it all takes me.
This obituary-slash-“what happened to Watson?”, by the late great Sharon Begley, makes me grateful that prewritten obits are a thing.
www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...
www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who died Thursday at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers.
www.statnews.com
November 8, 2025 at 3:13 AM
This obituary-slash-“what happened to Watson?”, by the late great Sharon Begley, makes me grateful that prewritten obits are a thing.
www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...
www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/j...
This account is always interesting- on this piece especially
November 6, 2025 at 6:58 PM
This account is always interesting- on this piece especially
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
Quite a world when a federal judge has to call in a federal official to specifically tell him he can't use tear gas on children in Halloween costumes
October 28, 2025 at 3:19 PM
Quite a world when a federal judge has to call in a federal official to specifically tell him he can't use tear gas on children in Halloween costumes
Torn between asking “how the F did they obtain century-old embryonic DNA to train on?” and “how heavily does the model weight ZIP code at birth?”
October 22, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Torn between asking “how the F did they obtain century-old embryonic DNA to train on?” and “how heavily does the model weight ZIP code at birth?”
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
Wow, this is an interesting and rather sobering story: the commonly used drug rapamycin turns out in this particular application to be working via a completely different mechanism from its usual one, which no one had predicted.
Never assume that you know all about what any drug molecule is doing in the body - where it's going, what it's binding to. A new example:
Rapamycin's Secrets
www.science.org
October 15, 2025 at 9:41 PM
Wow, this is an interesting and rather sobering story: the commonly used drug rapamycin turns out in this particular application to be working via a completely different mechanism from its usual one, which no one had predicted.
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
My 14-yr-old and I were playing with Sora, gave it two prompts of things I/we had done that day 1/n
The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”
OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT
GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.
www.theverge.com
October 11, 2025 at 3:04 PM
My 14-yr-old and I were playing with Sora, gave it two prompts of things I/we had done that day 1/n
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
This means that we can screen for potential novel drugs for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in easily-grown skin cells, using mitochondria as a simple readout. In fact, a team at NIH’s NCATS is working on this now! Stay tuned.
October 10, 2025 at 4:47 PM
This means that we can screen for potential novel drugs for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in easily-grown skin cells, using mitochondria as a simple readout. In fact, a team at NIH’s NCATS is working on this now! Stay tuned.
My colleagues @rowanwalrath.bsky.social and @maxhenrybarnhart.bsky.social watched yesterday’s ACIP meeting so you won’t have to.
They caught this particularly confidence-eroding scientific critique…
💀
They caught this particularly confidence-eroding scientific critique…
💀
September 19, 2025 at 2:45 PM
My colleagues @rowanwalrath.bsky.social and @maxhenrybarnhart.bsky.social watched yesterday’s ACIP meeting so you won’t have to.
They caught this particularly confidence-eroding scientific critique…
💀
They caught this particularly confidence-eroding scientific critique…
💀
I hadn’t heard of Maxine Scates before reading this poem, but she nails the moment:
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
“Our Elsewhere”
“I wanted to tell you about what it’s like here now, / I wrote to my friend David.”
www.newyorker.com
September 18, 2025 at 2:10 AM
I hadn’t heard of Maxine Scates before reading this poem, but she nails the moment:
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...