小樋井蓮人

大学生(B2)、1000年先の科学をやっています。

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

The human brain can bring rubber to life with one simple trick: Cover a person’s hand and place a rubber hand next to it, then stroke their hand and its facsimile, and suddenly the person will begin to “feel” the touch in the fake appendage. The rubber hand illusion helps demonstrate how our senses work together to create the feeling of ownership over our bodies, a fundamental part of self-awareness.

A 2025 study demonstrated that octopuses also fall for the rubber arm trick—the first documentation of the phenomenon outside of mammals: https://t.co/1V5KVb1y1F #ScienceMagArchives

[Quanta Magazine @QuantaMagazine]

In the cellular world, complex living machines endure physical forces and stresses, much like machines in a factory. How does the spindle, the fibrous “rib cage” driving cell division, manage the strain?
https://t.co/9X13Jv5wXL

[Shunzhi Wang @wang_shunzhi]

Impressive integration work, but the hype outpaces the paper. This "synthetic cell with a complete cell cycle" (Gaut et al. https://t.co/Ug7qTwGzMA) has big caveats the headlines skip:

1) The 5-generation "cell cycle" used mechanical extrusion for division, not the genetically encoded division. Those were separate experiments. The full autonomous cycle was never run for 5 gens.

2) It's an extreme heterotroph: ribosomes, polymerases & the entire PURE system are fed in via feeder liposomes. The cell can't make its own machinery.

3) "All plasmids inherited"? Only 30% of cells retained the full 7-plasmid genome after 5 gens. No segregation mechanism.

4) It's selection among pre-made variants, NOT Darwinian evolution, mutations were introduced artificially. The authors say so themselves.

Great milestone. But "life created" framing is misleading.

[Olivier Borkowski @O_Borkowski]

A Chemically Defined Synthetic Cell Capable of Growth and Replication

https://t.co/y5dhtHGa8r

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

人類は機械の生殖器である

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

私は反物質推進に反対。理由はガンマ線を推進力として利用するのが非常に困難であり、それ以前に反物質の生産と保存は宇宙船の推進力として利用するにはコスパが悪すぎるから。反物質は核融合の点火剤にして、メインはレーザーや荷電粒子ビームで推進力を得るようにする方が良い

[NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman @NASAAdmin]

@elonmusk I support antimatter propulsion.

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

核融合って質量の0.7%しかエネルギーに変換できないのか。そうかんがえるとなんか効率悪いな

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

生物学は最後のブレイクスルー説

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

地球に宇宙人が侵略して来ないのは銀河で最も多い赤色矮星に比べて太陽のようなG型主系列星は数が少ない上に寿命が短いから、という説を推したい。

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

鏡像生命はセントラルドグマまでだな。それ以上はリスクとリターンの採算が合わない

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

Beauty should be a core pursuit of biotechnology. There should be companies and nonprofits that engineer organisms solely for the sake of crafting beautiful things.

A few reasons why:

1/ Biotechnology has historically worked in reductionist ways, but many useful functions only emerge at the systems level. By engineering a systems-level outcome, like beauty, we will get much better at engineering organisms in predictable ways.

When I say "reductionist," I mean that most useful things in biotechnology (drugs and tools) were discovered by stripping molecules from their natural contexts. Scientists collect organisms from soil or wherever and then study their molecules in isolation. This basic approach has yielded everything from rapamycin to antibiotics and CRISPR.

This reductionism, though, means that that we know disturbingly little about how life actually works at a systems-level. My core argument is that, by studying beauty, we can remedy this.

Beauty has persisted through tens of millions of years of evolution because it is functional; bright colors help attract pollinators to a plant, for example, which helps the plant breed. If evolution has created all of this beauty for functional reasons, then it stands to reason that by trying to create **new** forms of beauty, we'll be able to discover and understand how these systems-level functions work! Indeed, we may even be able to create entirely new functions that biology hasn't evolved yet. These functions will not possible to understand via isolated molecules or reductionism.

Therefore, a company pursuing engineered beauty for the sake of beauty will probably make many fundamental discoveries about how organisms develop, interact, adapt to their surroundings, and so on.

2/ Beauty is a way to grow the field and bring more people into biotechnology. Nick Desnoyer’s flower design work, for example, has probably reached hundreds of thousands of people. The glowing plants from Light Bio, too, were featured in the mainstream press. You may not think that these examples are “important” for the universe relative to, say, an incrementally better cancer therapeutic, but there’s no question that they are way more popular to mainstream audiences and good, overall, for the field.

3/ The market is huge! Breeding is already widely used to engineer beauty, or at least to select for aesthetic preferences. Pugs are evolutionarily suboptimal, but they've been bred precisely to satisfy a certain aesthetic desire are now a multi-billion dollar industry. The Juliet Rose, developed via breeding over a 15-year period, debuted at the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show and is enormously profitable today. Why should deliberately engineered forms of beauty be any different?

If you are building a biotech company or nonprofit that is pursuing beauty, please reach out! I’d love to help.

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

不可能を可能にするよりも、理論上可能を現実的に可能にする方が難しい

[Science News @ScienceNews]

A newly discovered organelle, the hydrogenobody, found in protozoa living in cattle rumens, may hold the key to reducing methane emissions from cow burps.
https://t.co/qY2UJfhrzF

[Shunzhi Wang @wang_shunzhi]

1/ Excited to share our new Review in @Nature:
“The past, present and future of de novo protein design.”
Here, we mainly focused on structure-guided protein design. The field is entering a new phase: now that we can design new proteins, what should we build next?

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

一般相対性理論がよくわからない

[Tom Ellis @ProfTomEllis]

Does this new paper mean we can stop worrying about MIRROR LIFE? > Natural eukaryotic proteases cut mirror form peptides https://t.co/Cmg0g4nwek

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

探せばやっぱ出てくるものだな

[News from Science @NewsfromScience]

For decades, biology textbooks have enshrined a simple rule: DNA is made by copying a template. After one enzyme unzips a DNA double helix into separate strands, another called a polymerase builds a complementary sequence, base by base, for each strand. Presto: two copies of the original DNA.

But new research into how bacteria defend themselves from viruses now shows this synthesis rule isn’t absolute.

Now, a team describes a bacterial enzyme that synthesizes DNA without a nucleic acid template, using its own structure as a guide.

Learn more: https://t.co/bpVgr0KMdR

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

ゲノム編集が禁止されているのであって、1からゲノム合成して受精卵の核と入れ替えるという抜け穴がまだある。なお合成コスト

[あ〜る菊池誠(反緊縮)公式 @kikumaco]

これは地味に重要な話

「ゲノム編集ベビー」禁止法案を閣議決定　違反の場合は罰則も｜日テレNEWS NNN https://t.co/pteWsRllwJ

[小樋井蓮人 @CoherentTheWave]

エウロパに生命がいたとしても、地表の放射線量が強すぎるから地上に上がるような進化ができないという悲しさ