come for the gay tweets, stay for the pretentiously convoluted sentences
Joined December 2018
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in a twist that annoyed everyone, it turns out the astrologists were right about planetary influences but were wrong about it being time of birth instead of the moment of your conception
>be cell biology postdoc at UCLA, 1986
>job: purify vesicles from rat liver
>ez
>purify the vesicles
>something else in the tube
>weird little barrels, way bigger than a ribosome
>fkisdis
>purify the barrels instead
>mostly protein, tiny bit of RNA
>not related to vesicles at all
>new organelle just dropped?
>lab holds a naming contest
>"vaults" "sure, "great name" "
>write it up, publish
>conclusion section: "function: unknown"
>surely we'll figure it out in a couple years
>reviewers: "are you sure this isn't just a virus"
>prove it isn't a virus
>apply for grants to study it
>first question on every call: "what does it do"
>"we're working on it"
>be early 90s
>vaults hang around the nucleus
>"they must plug the nuclear pores"
>they do not
>be different scientist, Netherlands, 1995
>chasing LRP, mystery protein that shows up in chemo-resistant tumors
>clone it
>~88% identical to rat vault protein
>it was vaults the whole time
>whole cancer field piles on
>a decade of papers on vaults and drug resistance
>nobody ever proves vaults cause it
>back at UCLA
>one of the vault proteins binds telomerase
>"guys what if this is the fountain of youth"
>knock it out in mice
>telomeres fine, aging fine, mice fine
>2002
>knock out the main vault protein
>mice: perfectly healthy
>knock out all three vault proteins
>completely vaultless mice
>mice: basically fine, some subtle immune stuff
>mfw something in every cell since the dawn of eukaryotes does nothing obvious
>"just test it in yeast"
>yeast don't have vaults
>"worms then"
>no vaults
>"fruit flies"
>no vaults
>mfw every easy model organism dropped them
>try making recombinant vaults in insect cells
>expecting to get some loose protein at best
>get fully assembled vaults
>can't find a single free copy of the protein anywhere
>turns out ribosomes 3D-print the barrel straight off the mRNA
>lolwut
>still no function
>be structural biologists
>spend years modeling it as 96 proteins with 8-fold symmetry
>2009 X-ray structure
>it's 78 proteins, 39-fold
>caps still blurry
>2025: caps are closed, 13-fold, tiny hole in the middle
>still no function
>NIH funds vault research for 15 years
>NIH: "so what does it do"
>"...we're working on it"
>NIH stops returning calls
>if we can't figure out what it does, we'll make it do something
>stuff a cancer-fighting chemokine inside the barrel
>inject into mouse lung tumors
>immune cells swarm in, tumors shrink
>2011: "human trials within three years"
>2024: "human trials next year"
>2025 database: preclinical
>start a YouTube channel explaining vaults to anyone who'll listen
>be different scientist, Broad Institute
>want to record what genes a cell turned on over time
>try tethering mRNA to a bacterial protein
>doesn't work
>stumble onto a YouTube channel about some obscure barrel organelle
>engineer vaults to grab mRNA
>RNA half-life goes from ~17 hours to ~132 hours
>publish in Science, 2026
>use it to catch drug-resistance genes in lung cancer cells before the drug even hits
>the vault guy is thrilled
>still nobody knows what vaults are for
>be epigeneticists
>screen the whole genome for methylation set at random in the early embryo
>separately study kids conceived in different seasons in rural Gambia
>both screens independently point at the same gene
>it's the goddam vault RNA gene
>its methylation depends on conditions around conception, locked in for life
>linked to cancer outcomes, blood sugar, cleft palate
>mfw the mystery barrel has a mystery RNA that remembers when you were conceived
>40 years later
>one of the most abundant structures in your cells
>still not in a single textbook cell diagram
>we use it anyway because yolo
>function: unknown
this is ridiculous, i took psychology in high school and it's definitely a real thing
fun fact about me: during my teenage years i was SUPER into woo but i thought all the communities around it i could find online were cringe so i decided that inventing my own woo would be cooler, it looked basically like this
rivers retweeted
The majority of these people are teenage children that are being exploited by freelance cartoonists on the internet into spending large amounts of their parents money on custom cartoons. They are an exploited and manipulated class that has been deliberately trained to be hateful in order to aid the extraction of money out of them.
Getting real frustrated with people saying "generative AI" to me, that's the biggest red flag of anti-AI psychosis and a lack of education.
I understand they mean 2022 stable diffusion, but the world has moved on from that and I'm tired of people living under rocks who think they're authorative on the matter. It's getting tiring.
particularly because most of these people seem to be kids. like actual kids.
this is just proof that mankind was not meant to live above the horse latitudes. either sunrise is after 9 or sunset is before 5, you lose either way
ai being smarter than any human is not enough to spell our doom, for the simple reason that we are well adapted to living in such a world. that's like, our whole thing, we're primed by our biology to trust received wisdom to be more clever than we ever could be
nephew has entered a phase of rampant kleptomania. thankfully he's handing me everything he picks up so so far nothings been lost (i think)
