🔥The 9th Round of Easy Loan, Earn $40 Reward is in progress❗️ ⏰ Promotion Period: January 15th - Feburary 15th, 2025 👉 Register now and check more details at gate.io/campaigns/358

How will we be able to make strong life detection claims? Harrison Smith and I argue that until Astrobiologists decide what we’re looking for when we look for life, most of our attempts to detect life outside the solar system will be futile. arxiv.org/abs/2205.07921 🧵1/9

Seems like even Randall Munroe is trolling us today...

How can we make strong claims about life detection outside the solar system? Harrison Smith and I argue we cannot without a theory of life. But there's plenty to do in the meantime! Our work on this finally made its way through peer review (Open Access): onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

Will detecting a gases in an exoplanet's atmosphere - any gases - ever be convincing evidence of life? Unless we learn a LOT more about planets, maybe not. I've been working on something like this story for about a year now. Feels almost surreal to finally see it publish.

5. If the models have reached an asymptote of baseline intelligence, then adding *search* to them will help for a while... but you can't search your way to AGI or superintelligence, anymore than I could search my way to a ToE by having 10,000 physics undergrads vote on proposals

My lab at UCSF (hsiunglab.org) is looking to recruit multiple postdocs across the spectrum of wet/dry lab interests to contribute to our research in synthetic gene regulation, combinatorial genetics, and tissue biology (including liver biology and immuno-oncology). We

Come to Marburg!

watched the Attention Is All You Need re-release on IMAX 70mm.. so epic

📢 PhD Opportunity Alert! 🌍🔬 Join the ProtoSigns Lab to explore novel biosignatures for microfossil interpretation! Fully-funded 4-year PhD with fieldwork, cutting-edge facilities & interdisciplinary training. 🔗 Apply by 31 Jan 2025 Full details: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/302167

Express your interest to attend FALCON: Frontiers in Astrobiology and Origins of Life Conference! Organised jointly by AbGradE and OoLEN. Reykjavik (Iceland🌋) on June 26-29, 2025 (right before the BEACON conference)! Open to all early-careers. abgrade.eu/falcon2025/

New book "Explanation in Biology" w Cambridge University Press is out & open access! Covers (1) causal explanation & (2) non-causal/mathematical explanation in life sciences--bio, neuro, etc 🌿🧬🧠 Intro to philosophical work on scientific explanation! cambridge.org/core/elements/…

Registration is open for FALCON 2025 (Frontiers in Astrobiology and Origins of Life Conference), AbGradE and OoLEN’s collaboration to be held in Reykjavík Iceland June 26-29 2025. Aimed at early-careers in astrobiology and origins of life. See: abgrade.eu/2025/02/04/reg…

📢JOB ALERT 📢 We are looking for a postdoc and a PhD student for an European Research Council (ERC) funded project at HUJI on the role of sugars in prebiotic chemistry. Interested in studying the chemical origins of life? Then DM me.

Our new preprint on the application of Assembly Theory to solid state materials. arxiv.org/abs/2502.09750

Update on OoLEN’s Social Media Presence:

Is attendance at a funeral a form of speech?

Today we're featuring an Opinion article from Hessam Mehr (Hessam Mehr), discussing digitisation as part of a larger paradigm shift in experimental chemistry. Read the open access article here: doi.org/10.1039/D5DD00…

Need phosphorylating power? Maybe our universal polyphosphate kinase can help! ATP✅ GTP ✅ CTP ✅ UTP ✅ in vitro transcription ✅ An energizing collaboration with matsuura_tomoaki. Check it out here: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

As promised

Just a few more days remain to submit your applications for the 2025 Young Scientist Program! Applications are due by 11 April at 20:00 Pacific Daylight Time. bmsis.org/ysp/projects/