Heike Larson

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

Yep, totally dumb. Teens can hail an Uber or Lyft in other states, in addition to driving. I'd much rather a teen daughter ride in a Waymo than with an older potentially inebriated young adult.

[Timothy B. Lee @binarybits]

Wait so in California a 17-year-old can drive a car but can't be a passenger in a Waymo by herself?

[chris keefer @Dr_Keefer]

I had an elderly patient in the ER the other day: lost his house, living out of his car, drinking more than he should.., in rough shape.

I asked him what he used to do for a living.

"Draftsman at Ontario Hydro."

I probed further. Turns out his career included drawing up blueprints for every one of Ontario's nuclear power plants.

I told him I was interested in nuclear power, which he interpreted as me being an anti. "Yeah, a lot of people don't like it"

I clarified my position and thanked him for being a part of the great generation that helped to build the infrastructure that underpins our wealth and prosperity to this day.

He looked surprised. His eyes lit up with pride and a sense of dignity which shone through his dishevelled appearance lying sick in an emergency room hospital bed.

As my generation struggles to build megaprojects: light rail, subways and yes nuclear power plants, we owe a debt of gratitude to our parents and grandparents who so competently worked their fingers to the bone to provide us with the infrastructure that underlies our material comforts.

The overhead lights in that hospital hallway, reflected in that man's eyes as we chatted about more than just his broken body, were the fruits of his labour.

As a society we finally seem to have reached a political consensus that we should not be tearing down the industrial cathedrals that have been built for us by this great generation: edifices like our nuclear power plants at Pickering, Darlington and Bruce.

The champions of that kind of vandalism have been decisively defeated. Im glad to have played my role in that battle. Now it is time for a reorientation towards gratitude and appreciation. It is time for us to take inspiration and pick up our tools to get building for our children and grandchildren so that they too may prosper.

It was an honour to care for this man, this builder, this patient and bring a sense of pride and a smile back to his face.

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

@kingofthecoastt @cremieuxrecueil Separating garbage into what a bunch of different bins is one of the most annoying make-work things in German households. Yellow bag, paper, compost, glass (sorted by color), reused bottles and non-reused but fee carrying bottles. Such a waste of time

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

@TopGrafx And if things go well they’ll call you in the middle of the night from college to tell you about something important for them, become your travel adventure partners, and send photo messages of whatever they are now excited about.

[ApoStructura @ApoStructura]

The only organizations in the world that can reuse rocket boosters are 2 American private companies.

Reusability has eluded the biggest world governments for decades and was solved by private capital.

That’s a great demonstration of the power of free enterprise and capitalism.

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

Yay for medical progress!

[Bo Wang @BoWang87]

Pancreatic cancer has one of the most suppressive tumor microenvironments in oncology.

But two pancreatic cancer results dropped today. Both matter.

1. BioNTech mRNA neoantigen vaccine: nearly all responders still alive at 6 years. 98% of induced T cells were de novo — the immune system learned to see a cancer it had always been blind to.

2. Daraxonrasib: 47% ORR, 92% disease control as first-line monotherapy. KRAS G12D, undruggable for 40 years, finally has a drug.

Different mechanisms. Same disease. Both working.

<13% of patients survive 5 years. That number is about to change.

great day for science! 🔥

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

Wow! I didn’t believe this but several sources confirm this account. Impressive how a low-tech approach can create such progress!

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

It’s amazing that this even needs to be said in 2026, but the collapse of communism was a good thing:

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

100%: kill the invaders (the tiny biting ones); kill them all!

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

SoCal has the best climate on Earth and for the last 15 years invasive mosquitos have been spreading, making it very difficult to actually be outside, risking disease.

Official guidance is "err, eliminate standing water".

It's 2026. We have crispr, gene drive, and a local pest control budget that's high though to run a space program.

Who do I have to fuck to get these mosquitoes extincted? They aren't native, they're displacing local species, they spread disease, they don't have rights.

Kill them all!

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

Capitalism creates prosperity

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

BREAKING: The bipartisan Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act (SAMA) just passed the House UNANIMOUSLY and is headed to the Senate.

Supersonic flight isn't red or blue. It's Red, White, and Blue.

🇺🇸✈️💪

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

This is what insurance is actually supposed to be: take low-frequency, high-cost random events and bundle them to smooth over the variance. When it is required to cover routine care, it becomes a subscription service with a needless and costly layer of extra bureaucracy.

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

100% this! I love Project Hail Marry, the book--and I am very impressed with how well the movie does it justice. Struggle isn't always between villains; struggle is (more often in real life!) between humans and nature, and that drama is inspiring!

[Mark Wallace @wallaceme]

I enjoy a dystopia as much as anyone, but we seem to have forgotten there’s a place and a role for optimistic sci-fi. Andy Weir’s heroes solve problems using science and intelligence, which is not only positive but the story of human history.

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

You can just fix things—even in public organizations.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

I think it bears repeating that BART installed tall gates to enter the subway and they're gaining $10m in revenue a year plus the need for maintenance is down by

*95.7%*

Passengers who were unwilling to pay a few bucks were causing 96% of the public cleanliness problems!

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

https://t.co/S7tXum85dc

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

A statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

https://t.co/Gg7Zb09IMR

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

Think about the power Hegseth is asserting here. He is claiming that the DoD can force all contractors to stop doing business of any kind with arbitrary other companies.

In other words, every operating system vendor, every manufacturer of hardware, every hyperscaler, every type of firm the DoD contracts with—all their services and products can be denied to any economic actor at will by the Secretary of War.

This is obviously a psychotic power grab. It is almost surely illegal, but the message it sends is that the United States Government is a completely unreliable partner for any kind of business. The damage done to our business environment is profound. No amount of deregulatory vibes sent by this administration matters compared to this arson.

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

Our near-peer mentors for *Progress in Medicine* are truly outstanding.

I'm jealous of the high school students who will spend time with them. They'll see a wide range of ways to improve the world in medicine/bio/health.

Encourage teens to apply for this summer program!

[Roots of Progress Institute @rootsofprogress]

High school students: want to see what “medicine” looks like before you commit to a track? Meet Gavriel Kleinwaks, a near-peer mentor for Progress in Medicine (PiM). She works on preventing airborne infectious disease by making clean indoor air as universal as clean water.

Profile: https://t.co/2yrgSirzoW

[Heike Larson @HeikeLarson]

Exactly. All the “free” stuff in Europe isn’t free; it’s paid for by extremely high taxes starting at surprisingly low income levels.

E.g. I’d rather pay $15k per year tuition for my kids’ college for 2-4 years than pay $18k more per year in perpetuity in taxes

[Simon Sarris @simonsarris]

If you make 90K USD (75K EUR) your net pay after taxes is:

72,145 USD living in New Hampshire, USA
54,151 USD in Berlin, Germany

difference is almost "work for 2 years, get 1 year of salary free"

[Brad Polumbo @brad_polumbo]

The ICE officers' masks have to come off.

All threats against federal agents & officers are unacceptable & should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

But we cannot have Secret Police roaming the streets and arresting people.

We ask judges, politicians, and police officers to be publicly identifiable despite the threats of retaliation they routinely face.

We can and should expect the same from ICE officers.