Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼 With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars. To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials. The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey. This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier. It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️

Read more about Radial's support of @PrismScienceOrg from @beckypferdehirt. asterainstitute.substack.com…

Conducting blind challenges well is becoming increasingly important to enable true step changes in ML/AI x Bio. Our team at @radialscience has been incredibly impressed with OpenADMET's leadership here, and are enthusiastically supporting this expanded effort to build scalable, reusable, open, blind challenge infrastructure. If you are working on other blind challenges for ML/AI x Bio, or have ideas how they could be run more effectively - reach out!! I'd love to talk.

Deadline this Friday: Our Hidden Science Competition pays grad researchers $10K to publish work that never made it into a journal — null results, abandoned datasets, useful methods that went nowhere. 1-page proposals due Aug 21.👇 astera.org/hidden-science-co…

Most structures in the PDB report one set of coordinates. The experimental data behind them, in both X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM, is produced by an ensemble. New work recovers that hidden signal at scale in over 60,000 structures. thestacks.org/publications/q…

1/ I’m hiring people to build nanorobots at my Astera Residency. Real ones. Not the kind from the movies that swim through your blood. Memes tell us those have to copy themselves and that's the hardest part of the idea. We do it another way.

We're honored to be partnering with the National Science Foundation on transforming scientific publishing to be more data-centric! See @NSF announcement here: nsf.gov/tip/updates/nsf-anno…

Today, we’re thrilled to announce a partnership between @AsteraInstitute and @NSF on the Programmable Cloud Laboratories Test Bed Initiative. The initiative will enable automated experimentation, standardized data generation, and rich metadata capture. We see it as a great opportunity to produce scientific data that is reproducible and AI-ready from the start. This is a natural fit given Astera's long-standing commitment to data-first and utility-focused open science. We’re excited to contribute funding and support to help compound the public benefit of this major federal investment! astera.org/astera-partnering…

Some great ideas in the @asterainstitute essay competition! Thanks to @seemaychou for supporting it. I asked Claude to create a taxonomy of the public goods identified in the essays. These are resources that benefit the field, but not the individuals that create them. As Claude notes, “The reward system pays for novel positive claims, not for the connective tissue that makes the whole enterprise work.” Claude identified seven categories, such as negative results; capturing and documenting tacit and knowledge; the curation of data for reuse and recombination; standards for measurement and protocols; the format of scientific knowledge (e.g. not PDFs, but a machine-readable, queryable cumulative structure); and the ability to identify and pursue collective priorities. This suggests some new directions for what @michael_nielsen and @kanjun have called “metascience as design practice.” What are the tools, institutions, experiments, incentive structures that enable the identification, creation and maintenance of these public goods? How can we learn from the successful and failed efforts of different fields and sub-fields to support these public goods? How might we create new roles – such as the “research software engineers” that develop and maintain software on behalf of different research communities? What if funders explicitly allocated some share of their budgets to public goods? What are the tools that make it easier for people to contribute to these public goods? Link to the Claude summary in the reply.

I have endless admiration for people who, in the middle of scarcity, can think beyond their immediate needs to a radically different future. I think that describes the essayists who submitted to the Astera Essay Competition. You should check out the winning essays. I want to give a special shout out to @_JaeeonLee_, whose essay absolutely nails many of the issues plaguing systems neuroscience: the work unit of a career-defining single paper, the poor coordination across labs, and the lack of a general theory (see his spicy take on IBL). The specific example he chooses—the need for a general theory of dopamine function that explains all the data—certainly seems like an apt target to me. All this said, I don’t believe benchmarks and leaderboards are a one-size-fits-all solution. Terence Tao made a great point in a recent podcast about how new and ultimately correct theories are often initially worse in many ways, and Copernicus's theory of the planets made poorer predictions than Ptolemy's theory. But the observation that in systems neuroscience we need to find a way to work together in a radically new mode, to tackle problems that are bigger than what any one single lab can solve, is something I absolutely believe in. I hope to share my own vision for how we can achieve this at Astera Neuro soon.

Astera's metascience essay competition was very interesting to participate in as a judge. Here's the announcement of the winners, along with a lot of information of broader scientific and metascientific interest