Laurel Oldach
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laureloldach.bsky.social
Laurel Oldach
@laureloldach.bsky.social
1.3K followers 2.2K following 410 posts
Biochemistry & instrumentation reporter at Chemical & Engineering News. Signal: Laurel_Oldach.07
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laureloldach.bsky.social
After helping someone near to me field a just-this-side-of-plausible pitch, I'm looking for perspectives on a zero-trust future of digital correspondence. Has anybody read (or written!) something thought-provoking on wrangling your inbox in a post Turing Test world?
December 28, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
bagphos.bsky.social
You’ve just opened a Chemistry themed pub. What are you calling it?

The Flask and Column

#ChemSky #ChemChat
brachinus.bsky.social Dr. Emily Arndt 🏳️‍⚧️ @brachinus.bsky.social · 1d
You’ve just opened a Star Trek themed restaurant. What are you calling it?

Bake It So
brachinus.bsky.social Dr. Emily Arndt 🏳️‍⚧️ @brachinus.bsky.social · 1d
Oh hey, that works too. You’ve just opened a Star Trek themed restaurant. What are you calling it?

Make It So
December 27, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
It just seems strange to not trust drug companies and actual research and to instead trust "med spas" with iv's, people making peptides in their garages, and formulating pharmacies with the cleanliness standards of Boar's Head plants.
December 26, 2025 at 8:07 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
OK, but as a Marylander, it pleases me to see Oakland on the real Bay
fvehafric.bsky.social Frank Vehafric @fvehafric.bsky.social · 6d
Google Gemini Pro: please generate a map of the western united states showing cities of over 250K population
an AI generated map of the US showing cities in bizarre locations
December 22, 2025 at 5:30 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
The end of the year is a great time to boost your colleagues. If you know an amazing early-career* chemist or biochemist doing creative work on important problems, please consider nominating them to the Chemical & Engineering News Talented 12 class of 2026?

cen.acs.org/sections/tal...
C&EN's Talented 12
Know an extraordinary young researcher who is inspiring the next generation of chemists? Submit your nomination by January 20, 2026 for the Talented 12 class of 2026.
cen.acs.org
December 18, 2025 at 9:22 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
jayrosen.bsky.social
Der Spiegel arranges for an academic scholar of media to produce — quarterly — an evaluation and critique of the magazine on any subject the scholar finds important. The latest, "Knowing Ignorance," is on Der Spiegel's climate coverage. Bernhard Poerksen is the author. www.spiegel.de/internationa...
German academic Bernhard Poerksen explains what he found when he surveyed Der Spiegel's coverage of climate since the early 2007: To clarify: It is indisputable that everything can and must be politically debated and criticized. Here, in the world of opinions, personal views and ideologies, both great and small: Long live contradiction! Only the decisiveness of criticism and the diversity of voices and viewpoints, I believe, provide the democratic agora its dignity and flavor. But that’s not the problem. The problem is the conflation of opinion (which belongs in the opinion section, where everything goes) with purported factual analysis. Because here, in the physical, tangible world, is where we enter the sphere of the verifiable. Here, the decisive question is whether the earth really is warming and whether species diversity really is increasing or decreasing. Those who would seek to promote diversity of opinion in this sphere too – sometimes openly, sometimes less so, sometimes at odds with scientific consensus – produce noise, not knowledge. Blithely disseminated speculation does not, unfortunately, make droughts, storms and death less likely. It merely masks such real-world events – for a time. At some point, though, reality will peek through the veil. Sure, you can fire up the obfuscation machinery ad infinitum. That is precisely the strategy being pursued by the ridiculously anti-empirical populism that is currently celebrating success around the world. In principle, though, the trenchant formulation from the writer Philip K. Dick applies: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
December 18, 2024 at 10:18 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
Biochemistry fam, help a sleep-deprived reporter out. Let's say you wanted to explain the GPCR/G protein cycle to someone who hadn't heard of it. Would you call GTP and GDP ligands? Cofactors? Small-molecule buddies?
December 17, 2025 at 2:29 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
This filing is worth your time if you care about what’s happening to NIH.

Also: I follow this stuff for a living, and I had forgotten all about the $500 million, not peer reviewed Taubenberger/Memoli vaccine development grant
maxkozlov.bsky.social Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · 12d
She alleges violations of due process under the Fifth Amendment, the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the Administrative Procedure Act, and her rights to freedom of speech under the First Amendment and the Whistleblower Protection Act.

Full complaint:
katzbanks.com/wp-content/u...
katzbanks.com
December 17, 2025 at 4:16 AM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
ldattaro.bsky.social
For @cenmag.bsky.social, I tried to summarize what happened in science policy in 2025. Spoiler: A lot!

Thanks to Ian Banks, @jeremymberg.bsky.social, Arthur Daemmrich, @cdelawalla.bsky.social and @ucs.org Jen Jones for their insights.

Out soon: what to expect in 2026

cen.acs.org/policy/nih-n...
‘A huge rupture in everything’: US science faced major upheaval in 2025
Amid enormous shifts, many scientists pushed back and risked dismissal from their jobs even as federal agencies fired thousands of employees
cen.acs.org
December 10, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
laurahowes.bsky.social
"It’s also, @georgwinter.bsky.social says, grounds for looking very closely at the proteome-wide effects of any compound in development, no matter its putative mechanism."
PREACH #biotech #chemsky
December 9, 2025 at 4:40 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
Biology strikes again: a whole lot of kinase active site inhibitors are also targeted kinase degraders. (Sometimes not even the same kinase!)

cen.acs.org/biological-c...
Kinase inhibitors can be targeted protein degraders too
Chemists think of the 2 modalities as different, but a large screen shows some small molecules can do both
cen.acs.org
December 9, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
yalesph.bsky.social
Why do babies need the hepatitis B vaccine if they aren’t high-risk?

Short answer: Because hepatitis B is a tricky virus.

Longer answer: Continue reading ⬇️

🧵1/9 @kkjetelina.bsky.social @meganranney.bsky.social @jasonlschwartz.bsky.social @enirenberg.bsky.social
February 19, 2025 at 2:46 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
It just keeps going:
brittanytrang.com Brittany Trang @brittanytrang.com · 25d
After Richard Padzur, a longtime FDA employee seen as stabilizing to the agency, abruptly filed to retire less than a month after filling the top drug regulator post, a controversial aide has been named CDER director.

"Høeg will be the fifth person to lead the center this year."
Tracy Beth Høeg, Makary aide who investigated Covid vaccines, to lead FDA drug center
Tracy Beth Høeg, a top lieutenant to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, will be the next leader of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
www.statnews.com
December 4, 2025 at 2:22 AM
laureloldach.bsky.social
Friends, please do not buy Botox via WhatsApp to DIY wrinkle treatment at home.
www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes...
Notes from the Field: Severe Illnesses After ...
This report describes the public health response to three patients from different states who developed severe illness after self-injecting botulinum toxin.
www.cdc.gov
November 26, 2025 at 7:12 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
cenmag.bsky.social
A research team has found multiple lineages of archaea that have fully repurposed the TAG stop codon to encode the noncanonical amino acid pyrrolysine. cen.acs.org/biological-c... #chemsky 🧪
These archaea built a distinct genetic code to put pyrrolysine in proteins
That feat has synthetic biologists excited
cen.acs.org
November 26, 2025 at 6:27 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
So, remember that MAHA summit 2 weeks ago that @statnews.com broke the news of and @maxkozlov.bsky.social somehow got into for Nature, even though it was closed to the press?

The organizers posted the entire 6.5-hour conference proceedings to YouTube last week.

cen.acs.org/policy/MAHA-...
At MAHA Summit, the NIH head pushes for research that risks failure
And 4 other takeaways for life scientists from the ‘off-the-record’ Make America Healthy Again conference
cen.acs.org
November 26, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
jtimmer.bsky.social
To me, the issue is the internal editorial structure that keeps the political reporter from walking over to the science desk/slack channel and saying "hey, could you look over my coverage quickly and identify potential problems". So, I'd place this at the feet of the most senior editors.
November 26, 2025 at 12:22 AM
laureloldach.bsky.social
🧵
ondankbare-plant.bsky.social Ungrateful plant @ondankbare-plant.bsky.social · Nov 25
Even in more quantifiable fields (like biochemistry), this brute force approach cannot succeed even with the best curated data. Given the ubiquitous use of p<0.05 as statically significant, 5% of all published hypotheses should have been rejected instead of accepted given the data. This would be bad
November 25, 2025 at 5:30 AM
laureloldach.bsky.social
I am completely mystified by journalists' uncritical acceptance of the MAHA talking point (reiterated here) that American life expectancy is a KPI for the American research enterprise.

For health systems, I can see it. But for NIH?

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?
How an outsider, once ignored by the public-health establishment, became the most powerful man in science
www.theatlantic.com
November 24, 2025 at 7:06 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
joho.bsky.social
Just this week alone.
November 23, 2025 at 5:13 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
👀
maxkozlov.bsky.social Max Kozlov @maxkozlov.bsky.social · Nov 21
About that exclusive, "closed-to-press" MAHA summit last week with RFK and JD Vance: I got in.

Here's what I saw. 🧵 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
A glorious selfie with the official MAHA lanyard seconds after I made it past Secret Service screening.
November 21, 2025 at 6:59 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
What if, instead of editing every premature stop codon that causes disease, researchers edited the translation machinery to skip those codons?

cen.acs.org/biological-c...
Prime editing suppressor transfer RNAs for gene therapy
Liu lab suggests technique could provide ‘nonstop’ treatment for genetic diseases
cen.acs.org
November 19, 2025 at 5:31 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
Personal opinion that I am proud to have managed to get through as the lede of this story: differentiating between diastereomers is better left to chemists than Congress.

cen.acs.org/biological-c...
Why synthetic cannabinoids appear in the US funding bill
The law that ended the federal government shutdown also closes a loophole in cannabis regulation
cen.acs.org
November 18, 2025 at 5:45 PM
laureloldach.bsky.social
People who are interested in this MAHA summit: it's on CSPAN right now, JD Vance and RFK in conversation.

www.c-span.org/event/public...
Vice Pres. Vance Speaks at "MAHA" Summit
Vice Presient JD Vance delivers remarks at a "Make America Healthy Again" summit.
www.c-span.org
November 12, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Reposted by Laurel Oldach
chrisbaraniuk.com
I cannot stress this enough right now: share journalism that you think is good.

You might not always be able to afford subscriptions or to tip journos but since everyone seems able to hate on headlines they dislike etc., they must also have the power to elevate good quality writing! We need it.
shiplives.bsky.social Matt Shipman (he/him) @shiplives.bsky.social · Nov 11
Between the widespread layoffs in the news industry, and the widespread adoption of AI tools that consistently make up total bullshit, it is going to be more and more difficult to get accurate information about what is happening in the world.

Which is both deeply sad and utterly terrifying.
November 11, 2025 at 6:00 PM