Another tool in the fight against cancer

Cancer is many things, so one tool or technique cannot be used against all, but even so, it is good news every time a new tool has been discovered that can help fight some cancers.

From ScienceDaily: Light switch wakes sleeping cancer cells and makes them vulnerable again

Some cancer cells evade treatment by entering a dormant state triggered by stress hormones. ETH Zurich scientists have created a light-controlled molecular switch that selectively destroys the receptors responsible for this survival mode. In laboratory lung cancer cells, the approach woke sleeping tumor cells and could help make future cancer therapies more effective while minimizing damage to healthy tissue.

It sounds counterintuitive that you want the cancer cells to be active, but the ScienceDaily article explains it:

In certain forms of cancer, including some types of lung cancer, stress hormones can trigger this response. Specialized proteins called glucocorticoid receptors detect those hormones inside tumor cells. Once activated, the receptors can push the cells into a dormant state where cell division slows dramatically. As a result, many therapies become far less effective.

So, in other words, we can only fight them effectively when they are active.

The ScienceDaily article is based upon the paper Light-controlled disruption of cancer cell dormancy via photoswitchable stress hormone receptor degraders by Karina M. Freitag et al in PNAS.

I will freely admit that the actual paper is a bit above my biochemistry level, but the “significance” section is fairly understandable, especially combined with the ScienceDaily writeup

Stress hormone signaling through the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) induces a reversible, drug-tolerant dormancy state in cancer cells. However, systemic GR depletion is not viable due to its essential roles in non-pathological physiology. In this study, we developed light-responsive Proteolysis Targeting Chimeras (photoPROTACs) that enable reversible, wavelength-specific control of GR degradation. PhotoPROTACs featuring arylazopyrazole photoswitches showed potent, isomer-dependent GR degradation and high target specificity at nanomolar concentrations. In addition, transcriptomic profiling in lung cancer cells revealed that only the active isomer disrupts dormancy-associated gene networks, highlighting the potential of photoPROTACs to target GR-driven dormancy exclusively in cancerous tissue.

Barriers to reproducibility

I came across an interest research article in PLOS One:

What helps and hinders reproducible research? Researchers’ perspectives from a cross-disciplinary interview study by Magdalena Kozula et al.

Debates and policy initiatives addressing research reproducibility have expanded considerably in recent years. Yet, many of these measures remain generic and risk overlooking the lived realities of research practice. This study aims to explore researchers’ perspectives on the barriers, facilitators, and motivators that shape reproducible research across diverse fields and career stages, using qualitative methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 researchers affiliated with universities and research institutions across the European Union and the United Kingdom. Participants were sampled to ensure diversity in discipline, career stage, gender, and geography.

As is set forth already in the abstract, there are five themes for barriers and facilitators influencing reproducibility:

  • navigating the research ecosystem – incentives and policies of institutions, journals, and funders
  • social and cultural dynamics as drivers and barriers – disciplinary norms, generational differences, competition, and collaboration
  • resourcing reproducibility – skills, infrastructure, guidelines and standards, time, funding, and awareness
  • inside the research process – field-specific constraints, methodological transparency, research material sharing, and external restrictions
  • personal commitment to shared responsibility – reflective motivations, pragmatic drivers, and perceptions of accountability

Looking at these themes it is hardly surprising that we are still facing reproducibility issues. As the abstract goes on to explain

Researchers described reproducibility as less of an individual choice but as a socially and institutionally mediated activity, dependent on enabling conditions such as supportive policies, adequate infrastructure, and equitable resource distribution. Reproducibility reform cannot rely solely on individual researcher commitment or one-size-fits-all policies. Effective interventions must account for disciplinary and methodological diversity, provide targeted resources and training, and realign incentive structures to reward transparency and rigour. These findings highlight reproducibility as a collective responsibility across the research ecosystem, requiring coordinated action by researchers, institutions, funders, and publishers. Promoting reproducible practices in this systemic, context-sensitive manner is essential for fostering a more credible, equitable, and sustainable scientific enterprise.

The scientific process is still the best way to find out things, but unfortunately, our current system rewards new findings over reproducing findings. New discoveries get papers in Science, Nature etc. while attempts at reproduction at best get a foot-note, unless they fail, and show some theory or discovery to be wrong. And even then, most of the time, they won’t get an paper, but at most a retraction of the original paper.

I work in the world of software development, where we have the concept of technical debt. This is stuff that we ought to do, or redo, but which we postpone until the costs and consequences of the “debt” is too high to ignore. It might be some complex piece of code, that really needs to be simplified, but which works – but every time anyone needs to change anything in it, something important breaks, and a lot of time needs to be spent on fixing it.

In my opinion reproducibility is the technical debt of the science fields. It can be ignored, until the costs are too high, and it turns out that the fundament a lot of work is based on, is deeply flawed.

One way of handling technical debt in software development, is to set aside a certain percentage of your time to go back and “pay” the debt. I.e. time where you actually revisit the issues and fix the problems instead of pushing it ahead in an ever increasing pile.

Maybe something similar could be done in research. Make sure that a certain percentage of resources are set aside to replicate findings from other peoples’ research. Not in order to debunk the work of others, but in order to make sure that the fundament the current research is built upon, is firm.

Anyway, please read the article, it is interesting and also shows clearly why we are nowhere near removing the barriers to reproducibility.

—

Something completely different; while reading the PLOS One research article, I couldn’t help think about a 2019 American Economic Review article:

Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? by Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin

We examine how the premature death of eminent life scientists alters the vitality of their fields. While the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases after the death of a star scientist, the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases markedly. This surge in contributions from outsiders draws upon a different scientific corpus and is disproportionately likely to be highly cited. While outsiders appear reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive, the loss of a luminary provides an opportunity for fields to evolve in new directions that advance the frontier of knowledge

I can’t help we would something similar in regards to reproducibility. If there is a grand old man (and it is pretty much always a man) in a given field, it is highly unlikely that he and his disciples’ findings would be challenged on the grounds of reproducibility. However when the grand old man leaves the field, this might change and people will start question the validity of the original research, and try to reproduce it.

USA – 250 years later

Today is Independence Day in USA – the 250th since the original one in 1776.

In 1776, Independence Day was about the USA becoming independent from the UK, and no longer be under the rule of the British King. Reading American history books, this is when Democracy was introduced in the US, often ignoring the fact that slavery was still ongoing, and that generally only property-owning/tax-paying white men could vote (for a more nuanced look, see the timeline of voting in the US).

Since the bírth of USA, a lot of things have happened – there was a large land purchase, a civil war, another large land purchase, an invasion, an annexation (later abandoned), numerous wars, Civil Rights Acts increasing democracy, and a number of other things. Looking at the situation 20 years ago, most would say that the US was a robust democratic country with some glaring flaws, especially related to race – but even in this area, the country was improving.

There were some democratic problems like the lack of voting for congress for Washington DC and Porto Rico and for convicted felons, even after they had served their time.

But all in all things looked good, and we expected it to improve.

That was twenty years ago though. Now, the situation is much different.

Trump, the GOP and the current US Supreme Court has dismantled the railguards of democracy, nearly killed the Civil Right Acts, removing bodily autonomy from women, and making partisan decision allowing the GOP to gerrymander and disfranchise people. Now, I can best describe the US as a near-totalitarian kleptographykleptocracy where one party is enriching itself, and trying to keep in power by all means. And this doesn’t even begin to address how the rampant bigotry and oppression of marginalized groups.

I hope the midway election can change this, but in order for this to happen, the voters must vote out the GOP every way the can, in every position – the GOP has shown that they can use every position available to create mayhem, oppress people and disrupt democracy.

Lazy linking

A bunch of links to interesting content that I have come across on the internet

Public Health professor’s ‘Coverage Denied’ book dives into health insurance quagmire

Unlike most of us who stress out over and decry the ever-escalating cost and complexities of health insurance coverage, Pitt’s Miranda Yaver did something about it. She wrote a book.

Rather than a hollow rant on over-familiar complaints, however, “Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality in the United States,” points to possible paths forward. Published by Cambridge University Press and released on April 23, “Coverage Denied” — loaded with data as well as patient and physician narratives culled from 111 interviews — lays out a number of coverage-reform proposals.

US health care and health coverage is unfortunately still an incredibly important subject. The steep increase in health care costs for many Americans certainly hasn’t made the subject any less relevant.

The Age of No Innocence

What if all you knew was extremist politics? Welcome to being young in America.

Fascinating article about how the young people in USA has never known a time without extremist politics. Those of us, who are older, can remember a time before regular school shootings, Trump and far-right talking points being pushed by main-stream right-winged media, but this has been part of the whole life of young people – the first president they remember is Trump.

Why you should keep getting mRNA vaccines

The COVID pandemic ushered mRNA vaccines into the spotlight, and the technology has even greater potential. Here’s what to know about the way that they work, their safety, and more.

The article is very US-centric, focusing on US politics and US numbers (the cite a study showing that mRNA covid vaccines prevented 8 million infection in the first six months, without mentioned that this was in the US alone – worldwide numbers were much higher). Even so, the fundamental message is still worth spreading – mRNA is a safe type of vaccines, and we should use this technology in the future.

Selma Rejects Jim Crow 2.0

Half of the population in Dallas County, Alabama, where Selma is located, was African American in 1965. But less than 2% of the county’s registered voters were Black. That wasn’t for lack of trying. They were excluded by systematic racism. Leaders like John Lewis and Martin Luther King Jr. understood that being denied rights was intolerable, and that nothing would change until Black Americans had the same ability to exercise the right to vote that white citizens did.

Alabama newspapers largely ignored events leading up to Bloody Sunday in Montgomery. As marchers approached the state capitol, the local press spilled more ink over what Governor Wallace was eating for lunch as the marchers approached the city (“Roast beef, green beans, corn muffins, sliced peaches, plastic-wrapped chocolate cakes, buttermilk and iced tea,”) than they did on the march itself.

It was national media coverage that drew the public’s attention to what was happening. On March 7, 1965, when a then-25-year-old John Lewis led over 600 peaceful marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and was met with brutality from state troopers, it was the footage shown on network news that night that shocked the nation’s conscience into finally doing something. By Sunday, March 21, 1965, with the country’s attention focused on them and joined by Dr. King, the original 600 protesters swelled to close to 8,000 people and the march from Selma to Montgomery began. A federal judge, Frank Johnson, ordered the troopers who had attacked them previously to protect them. By the end of the year, the Voting Rights Act was passed and signed into law.

Protest is brewing again in Selma. In the wake of Callais, and the overt gerrymandering and dilution of the Black vote that the Supreme Court now says is legal, protestors marched today.

Once again Selma is at the front of the fight for civil rights, and once again they are largely ignored by national newspapers and other media.

Turkeys Circling A Dead Cat Are Probably Wary, Not Working Dark Magic

I think I will let the headline speak for itself, except that I will link a bluesky post that includes a gif of the video that the article mentions, since it is no longer on twitter – and since you shouldn’t give twitter traffic

[image or embed]

— grooveholmes.bsky.social (@grooveholmes.bsky.social) 15. maj 2026 kl. 04.08

If the embedded post doesn’t show, you can go to it here.

You Can’t Build Useful Alliances With Fascists, Dumbass

I hope we all now understand that forging strategic policy partnerships with fascists is like trying to develop an intimate relationship with a running chainsaw.

Great piece by Karl Bode

USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths

The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered.

“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” Gawande wrote.

This was back in November. Think of how many hundred of thousands of deaths the decision has caused since then.

Looking at the same model as the article is referring to, the impact after a year is 262,915 adult deaths and 518,428 child deaths, so 781,343 total deaths.

For some reason the impactcounter has been retired, but we can assume that the impact after the first year will be similar to the impact afterwards. This means that Trump, Musk and the Doge team have the blood of millions on their hands.

 

 

 

Shizuoka – a model city

I travelled a bit around in Japan around Christmas and New Year, and decided to stay for a couple of days around New Years Eve in Shizuoka, which lies between Nagoya and Tokyo.

Unfortunately for me, while the Japanese doesn’t celebrate Christmas, they do celebrate New Year, and most museums and other attractions were closed in the week containing the New Year. This mean that I spend a lot of time walking around outside, sightseeing.

One thing I noticed in Shizuoka, is there model city sculptures

Apparently, Shizuoka produces more than 80% of model kits in Japan, and the city decided to embrace this fact. This is all very well explained on this page (there is a video): The Model City 1:1 Scale

Not all the models they mention in the video seems to have been created, but I did find a few while walking around in the city – they are documented on my Instagram feed

 

Picking the right side

If you were active in online Atheism in 2011, you are probably aware of the Deep Rifts that formed back then, initially caused by what is now been coined Elevatorgate.

Even if you were not part of the movement back then, you will see the results of it now – the movement is split, and certain people, groups, and organizations won’t work together or appear at the same events.

Looking back at the split now, it is noteworthy that a lot of prominent, mostly male, atheists and the organizations they led, was on the side against Rebecca Watson and others who wanted to address the problem of sexual harassment (and racism and other sorts of bigotry) in the secular movement. On the other side of the split was a few noteworthy atheists, like Rebecca Watson and PZ Myers, a few conferences (e.g. Skepticon) and a lot of minor players in the movement.

Some prominent people and organizations tried to appear outwardly to not pick sides, but some showed their hands by inviting people from one fraction or the other, or by being willing to spend time with certain people.

As I said, some of the most prominent atheists at the time were on one side of the rift – these include people like Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Ronald A. Lindsay, Steven Pinker, and Michael Shermer, many of which have since 2011 been credibly accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Most of these people were connected to John Brockman, who was close to Jeff Epstein, getting a lot of funding from Epstein, and introducing him to a lot of leading scientists, including several on the list.

Lawrence Krauss was also close to Epstein, and wrote to him frequently, and often forwarded mails to him. Because of this, a number of mails by the prominent atheists have come to light through the Epstein files

Rebecca Watson covers it here:

The video is a couple of months old, but I haven’t been blogging for a while, so I haven’t come around to covering it before now.

I might be unreasonable, but if I am on one side of a schism in a movement, and I found out that people on my side of the schism is not only credible accused of sexual harassment and assault, but also have ties, in some cases close ties, to Jeff Epstein, I would very seriously consider if I am not on the wrong side.

But then, if I ever was on a side in a schism that was actively fighting social justice, I would already know I was on the wrong side.

In spite of Trump, wind energy is spreading

Among the many bad and evil things that Trump did when he got into office for the second time, was to make an executive order targeting wind and solar subsidies. This not only had the effect of blocking money to new projects, but also to cancel subsidies already granted.

This led Revolution Wind, a 50/50 joint venture between Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables and Ørsted A/S, and Sunrise Wind LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ørsted A/S, to sue the US Administration, with predictable results. Ørsted A/S is a Danish company.

Sunrise Wind resumes construction, fifth ruling overturned

A federal judge for D.C. District Court has allowed Sunrise Wind to resume work after granting a preliminary injunction against the administration’s lease suspension and construction pause issued December 22, 2025. 

D.C District Judge Lamberth ordered the action to be “arbitrary and capricious” after having reviewed classified information and agreed that irreparable harm standards were met given the loss of specialized vessels that would cause a “cascade of delays” preventing the project from meeting its obligations. 

Previously, Judge Lamberth ruled in favor of Revolution Wind’s construction resumption twice, most recently under the same lease suspension and stop construction order affecting Sunrise Wind, and again in September 2025 when the federal administration issued a stop work order directly for Revolution Wind. The administration referenced undisclosed “national security concerns” that arose from a recent classified Department of War study alleging that turbine structures cause interference with military radar systems.  

…

Sunrise Wind is 45% complete and set to provide 924 MW of power generation to New York. The project’s supply chain stretches across 34 states and has driven more than $1.9 billion worth of investments while supporting more than 4,290 American jobs across the construction, operations, shipbuilding, and manufacturing sectors. Ten shipyards in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Texas built or retrofitted the more than 16 vessels operating at the site. Most notably, the first U.S.-built subsea rock installation vessel was constructed at Hanwha Philly Shipyard.

The above article mentions that the Judge had previously ruled in favor of Revolution Wind. 

Ørsted A/S put out a press release a couple of weeks ago, stating Revolution Wind begins delivering power to New England

Revolution Wind, LLC, a 50/50 joint venture between Global Infrastructure Partners’ Skyborn Renewables and Ørsted, announced today that the Revolution Wind project has started delivering power to New England’s electric grid, strengthening the region’s power supply and helping reduce costs for consumers.

Revolution Wind, a 704 MW offshore wind energy project, is expected to supply enough electricity to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses. The project will deliver power under fixed-price, 20-year agreements with energy utilities in Rhode Island and Connecticut, providing price certainty and stability for consumers.

So in spite of the best effort of the Trump administration, US households are starting to get wind energy, with more to come as other projects finishes.

Twitter’s feed algorithm is harmful

We all know that Twitter is a cesspool of spambots, far right users, incels and outright Nazis. We know this has much to do with who gets promoted by the algorithms they use. One of these algorithms is the feed algorithm.

If you don’t know, most social media don’t show you just the posts from people you follow, in the order they are posted. Instead they fill your feed with suggestions – and they post the posts completely out of order. This is nominally done to create engagement, but in Twitter’s case, it is also used to push specific transphobic, misogynist, racist viewpoints.

In Twitter you can choose between algorithmic suggestions and getting a chronological timeline of the posts by the accounts you follow. If you choose a chronological feed, it will revert ba ck to the algorithmic feed after a while (or at least it did so when I was active on Twitter).

An interesting study in Nature by Germain Gauthier, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, shows the danger of Twitters algorithmic feed

The political effects of X’s feed algorithm

Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

There is no disclosure of Twitter’s ranking of suggestions, so people have no way of knowing that using the algorithm. will expose them only to one biased, and often highly incorrect, worldview.

This is something that both the EU and the US need to address legally. No platform should push one specific viewpoint over another, and definitely not in such a hidden way. Yes, the usership of a site have biases, which will probably reflect in the algorithmic feed, but the bias should not be pushed by the website itself.

Lazy linking

A few, often slightly older, articles on the internet that I have come across and find interesting enough to share.

The Collectible Coins That Celebrate the Dark Side of American Policing

The first military challenge coins, one story goes, were handed out in 1969 by a US Army colonel to build camaraderie in his Special Forces unit. He took the idea from a National Guardsman who had required his troops to always keep a sixpence coin on them in order to buy drinks for their buddies. (Soldiers caught empty-handed during a “coin check” typically must buy a round.) By the 1980s, the silver dollar–size medallions had taken off in the military and beyond. Corporations gave them out to employees. Numismatists collected them. And as cops began equipping themselves and acting more like soldiers, they started minting their own. These law enforcement challenge coins often embrace the unpolished side of the “warrior cop” ethos—the violence, racism, and impunity that have sparked our current reckoning with American police culture.

The AI Boardroom Gap (pdf)

There’s a widening gap between bold AI ambition and reality. Most organizations aren’t failing at AI because of the technology, but because their foundations can’t support it.

This report is quite uncritical of AI, but it shines the light on a very real problem – the differences in AI ambitions and the reality of a lot of companies. In my opinion, this is to a large part due to AI being oversold to the CEOs and boardmembers of companies, so they expect a lot more from it, than is realistic in most organizations. For example, AI has been promoted as a tool to make programmers up to a magnitude more productive, but we struggle to find any real evidence of this. If you base your strategy around 10x programmers, then it will not work.

Speaking of evidence for AI and system development:

Does AI Really Make Coders More Productive?

The big headline? On average, AI coding assistants give developers a 15-20% productivity boost across industries. That’s solid—imagine finishing your work 15-20% faster! But it’s not the same for everyone. Claims that developers see a ten fold (10x) boost in productivity are not very contextually helpful. Some teams saw huge jumps, while others actually got less productive. Why? It depends on a few key factors.

On top of that, I can add that this article from last year, showed that AI can decrease productivity in some cases:

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how early-2025 AI tools affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers working on their own repositories. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower. We view this result as a snapshot of early-2025 AI capabilities in one relevant setting; as these systems continue to rapidly evolve, we plan on continuing to use this methodology to help estimate AI acceleration from AI R&D automation.

In fairness, I should add that they have found more AI-positive results in later studies, but they find their their own design lacking and states “We are Changing our Developer Productivity Experiment Design“

Old Copenhagen

I came across this long YouTube video showing how Copenhagen looked like in 1934.

The major differences between then and now, is that we no longer have trams, and, of course, the sheer volume of cars