Tangentially related, these articles by Maciej Cegłowski:

* The Lunacy of Artemis – https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm

* Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly – https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....

Lunacies 5, 6 & 7 are the only things that make the Artemis program useful. Landing 1t on the moon is an expensive, useless, performative flags and footprints mission. Landing 100t keeps the other moon dreams alive.

> It was much quicker and easier to get the agar to 90C temperature by putting it in a microwave for 40s at 900W

Agarose gels in molecular biology labs are prepared in a similar way. (Agarose is the main component of agar.)

It’s also the main reason those microwaves are so gross!

Since it’s relatively thick, boiling solution sputters everywhere and is—-at best—-partially cleaned up by harried scientists. Use a big container and try not to overshoot the temp.

No. In this case “Arctic Monkey” is just the pseudonym used by the guide writer.

Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_experiment

(2002)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_the_American_People

(2007)

For a site about usability, I was going to gripe about the tiny font, low contrast, and unresponsive layout until I saw that. It does look more suitable at 1024x768.

Every year was better before 2020!

> You can do horrifying and amazing things with Excel.

A friend of mine writes all of their correspondence in it.

Can you expand more on this? Is it just for drafts or do they track all their correspondence in Excel?

They literally compose and print their letters in Excel.

(2021)

math is timeless

Blog entries, alas, are not.

> Based on my quick reading, the BBC article doesn't bring up a prior publication / release from 2025 called "AI-Designed Phages," https://www.asimov.press/p/ai-phages

That link is a commentary about the preprint of the article mentioned in the BBC article.

After your editing:

> Same team, prior publication / release from 2025 called "AI-Designed Phages," https://www.asimov.press/p/ai-phages

It is the same work, just not published in Science.

Apologies was editing the comment, but I looked into it more and it wasn't a preprint. They published it. Multiple times.

"Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2," March 2026, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10176-5

However, this was a preprint, "Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models," September 2025, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1

Even older conference paper, I think, February 19th, 2025, https://arcinstitute.org/manuscripts/Evo2

All those publications describe the methodology and modelling process to generate genomes, without testing them experimentally. This article shows that their designed genomes actually work in the wetlab. Your last two links are both preprints.

That's a fair point! I think I've found a few more things, but reading through / verifying first. Will update accordingly and leave notes. Thanks for helping!

edit - I updated to delete my over claim. Thank you!

The publication: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec2657

It is paywalled, but this seems to be the corresponding preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911v1....