2026-03-20
Ryan Hill and Carolyn Stein have a new working paper on how AlphaFold has affected protein structure research in the five years since its release. They ask three primary questions: Did experimental (i.e., non-computation…
While you’re thinking about that, let’s stay with science. Does MAGA Actually Want American Science to Win? is the latest from Ari Shulman, writing in The New Atlantis. Shulman argues that MAGA’s critique of the failings…
Got your guesses about Alphafold ready? Here’s what Hill and Stein found. Did experimental (i.e., non-computational) structure determination decline? The rate of experimental structure determination is unchanged, and the…
Back in 2023, we asked Michael Wiebe to take a look at a 2021 article by Enrico Moretti titled “ The Effect of High-Tech Clusters on the Productivity of Top Inventors. ” We were interested because one of the inputs to ou…
Brian Potter examines the elusive cost savings of the prefabricated home , and as someone now living through the third modular construction hype cycle of my career, the piece is a useful corrective. There’s a reason we k…
Separately, Jerusalem Demsas writes about how urban divestment is ( still , as Pete Saunders reminds us) a much larger problem in the US than urban “gentrification”, but compositional & mimetic drivers of un-representati…
It’s official: the Trump administration is suspending the Jones Act , which bans non-US flagged vessels from traveling between US ports, for sixty days in an attempt to keep gas prices low amid the Strait of Hormuz crisi…
One of the big challenges in permitting reform is that it’s really hard to forecast how changing one piece of the massive US legal/regulatory permitting system will play out. At a more micro-level, it’s also a headache f…