Saloni
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scientificdiscovery.dev
Saloni
@scientificdiscovery.dev
35K followers 1.1K following 3.7K posts
Co-founder & editor, Works in Progress. Writer, Scientific Discovery. Podcaster, Hard Drugs. Advisor, Open Philanthropy. // Previously at Our World in Data.

Newsletter: https://scientificdiscovery.dev
Podcast: https://harddrugs.worksinprogress.co

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scientificdiscovery.dev
This seems like a highly unfortunate misspelling of funeral.
The Doll's Funreal by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
November 8, 2025 at 11:18 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
It's surprising how long it took for people to accept the theory of continental drift, considering:
Ireland with a koala outline drawn over it
November 8, 2025 at 3:12 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Write for us!

Here are 26 ideas of articles we'd like to commission.
www.worksinprogress.news/p/more-artic...
Drugs that last for months. A new generation of long-acting drugs like lenacapavir points to a different approach to prevention: take one dose, stay protected for half a year (and possibly more). What are the different ways scientists are designing medicines that last so long in the body, and what trade-offs come with durability? Crafting a universal flu vaccine. Each year, scientists study the strains circulating in the population, predict which will dominate, and reformulate the vaccine to match. When those predictions miss, protection drops, and updating the formulation takes time. Could we create a single vaccine that protects against all forms of influenza? The mosquito we should just get rid of. One mosquito species is responsible for most cases of dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya: Aedes aegypti. It thrives in cities, breeding in bottle caps and flower pots, and has adapted perfectly to human life. But now scientists have tools, like gene drives and Wolbachia bacteria, to suppress or even eliminate it. What makes this one mosquito species so harmful to us? How might we eliminate it? Successful pension reforms in recent history. Australia successfully moved its population to a retirement savings plan (‘Superannuation’) in the early 1990s. Silvio Berlusconi’s governments in Italy drove reforms that moved much of the population from ‘defined benefit’ pensions to savings-focused ‘defined contribution’ pensions. What can other states learn from these experiences to reduce their own future retirees’ dependence on working age populations? Heathrow’s surprising efficiency. Europe’s busiest airport desperately needs more physical infrastructure, especially runways. But it is remarkable how well it has done with just the two runways that it has. What has it done to engineer around this constraint? Everyday progress in cosmetic technology. Plastic surgery was once a byword for wealth but many interventions are now commonplace. The frontier seems to be pushing out as well: consider the latest Kardashian facelift or the improvement of hair systems. We want to read a piece on the lack of stagnation in appearance-enhancement, either a case study on a specific procedure or an article on the field overall. Blockers to AI automation. We recently ran a piece on why AI hasn’t replaced radiologists. What are similar stories in other fields? The type of piece we will consider is a detailed case study of capability that already (plausibly) exists, but that has been less impactful than people hoped. We’re not that interested in speculation based on abilities that models may have in the future. Inversely, if there are areas which haven’t been covered well elsewhere where models have been surprisingly effective at displacing humans, feel free to pitch us as well. The land that lived with malaria for millennia. For thousands of years, malaria haunted the Italian peninsula, from the Pontine marshes near Rome to its southern coasts. Then, within a few decades in the mid-20th century, it was eliminated. How did a disease so deeply rooted in Italy’s history disappear so quickly, and what does the story tell us about public health and environmental change? Why does Asia have higher density than Africa? Across MENA, South Asia, and South-East Asia, many cities are made up mostly of mid-rise apartment buildings, often clustered together at densities equal to or greater than those of nineteenth century Europe. In Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, urban densities tend to be low, with single-story buildings making up most of the urban area. This pattern holds even in cases of African countries with higher incomes than many Asian countries (e.g. Botswana, South Africa, Gabon, Rwanda). What is the cause of this? What does it teach us about the drivers of urban density?
November 8, 2025 at 3:06 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Saw this in a book and I hope the author didn't have other children not listed here
For Christopher and Andrew My favourite sons
November 8, 2025 at 12:35 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Reading Rosalind Franklin's Wikipedia page when suddenly
Franklin was 11 when she went to St Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, west London, one of the few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry.[29][31][32] At St Paul's, she excelled in science, Latin,[33] and sports.[34] Franklin also learned German, and became fluent in French, a language she would later find useful. Franklin topped her classes, and won annual awards. Her only educational weakness was in music, for which the school music director, the composer Gustav Holst, once called upon her mother to enquire whether she might have suffered from hearing problems or tonsillitis.[35]
November 8, 2025 at 12:25 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Oh no
A little boy sitting on the dog bean bag
November 6, 2025 at 9:46 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Me and my buddies in my dreams realising I can sleep for longer
Simpsons meme of people holding hands and going around in a circle in front of a rainbow
November 4, 2025 at 9:38 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
I've changed my mind about LinkedIn - it's good now.
Yegor Korovin Data Scientist at MindWalk 7h ago Recently I’ve listened to an amazing episode of Hard Drugs podcast (https://lnkd.in/dnMZUudf by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen) on HIV drugs. From there I learned that the virus keeps its RNA and associated proteins in a viral capsid. HIV capsid transports virus’ deadly weapons to the host’s cell’s nucleus, where via a devilish mechanism RNA gets reverse-transcribed into DNA, which in turn integrates into human genome. These capsids are variable in shape and size, but ALL of them have exactly 12 pentagons! This reminds me of a beautiful mathematical result explaining where this magical number 12 comes from. Here is a short article I wrote to describe this connection between abstract Mathematics and HIV:
November 4, 2025 at 1:49 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Almost fell for a scam call today, and realised that if I simply never picked up the phone, I'd easily avoid loads of potential scammers
Meme of soldier protecting child from weapons, but it's phone anxiety protecting zoomers from endless scam calls
November 1, 2025 at 6:05 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
🤦‍♀️
Robert Koch, who came on to the scientific scene in the 1870s, used his great authority to criticize the use of carbolic acid on the grounds that it failed to destroy anthrax spores. Although such criticism was scarcely relevant to an operating surgeon, Lister switched to the even more toxic mercuric chloride.
October 31, 2025 at 8:03 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Will our next episode be 15 minutes or 4 hours long? It's impossible to say
A roller coaster line graph showing the length of Hard Drugs episodes over time
October 30, 2025 at 11:16 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
A youtube comment by 'inquisition3000': Real question is "will i finish this podcast by 2035"
October 29, 2025 at 8:48 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
MFW my co-host @jacobtref.bsky.social is telling me all about the drug development pipeline.
And then if that all looks good, you're going to submit a huge data package to the FDA and say, "Can I please sell this drug in America?" The FDA will take 6 to 10 months and review your data, review your thousands of pages of submission and get back to you with a thumbs up or a thumbs down. After you're selling your drug, you're still collecting data. The FDA might require further studies after they approve your drug if there are particular questions they have that things should be addressed. If in those studies you end up with a negative result, they might withdraw your ability to sell the drug; that happens somewhat frequently. Also, you're going to be collecting in the real world, more side effect data. Once hundreds of thousands of people are using a drug, you will spot more side effects. They won't be randomized, so you won't necessarily get as high quality data, but you at least get more data as things come in, so the evidence collection does not stop once you get approval. Saloni Dattani: Wow, great. That's a very long process. So I have two things about mice that I wanted to talk about.
October 29, 2025 at 4:24 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Smh he's watching TV again
Bean bag dog sitting on my couch next to a TV remote
October 29, 2025 at 8:24 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
I love telling people I got a new dog, watching the start of their reaction, and then showing them this
A squishy dog filled with beans
October 28, 2025 at 8:31 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Playing catch with my new dog
October 26, 2025 at 11:31 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Found a tiny joke book at home
Did you hear about the two eggs boiling in a saucepan? One said "phew, it's hot in here." The other said "That's nothing. Next they'll crack your head open."
October 25, 2025 at 2:04 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
I just found the virus version of Labubu
Poster that says LaFluFlu
October 23, 2025 at 9:48 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Apparently some people think I'm AI generated, because... I don't blink enough
YouTube comment that says "Fascinating! Almost didn't realise this was AI generated content until I noticed the blink rate and ran it through a model."
October 19, 2025 at 7:21 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Got my flu shot today! 💪
October 17, 2025 at 9:15 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Well hey, I got new sunglasses as a belated birthday present for myself

(•_•)

( •_•)>⌐□-□

(⌐□_□)
Me wearing new sunglasses
October 17, 2025 at 11:31 AM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Had quite a lot of doughnuts to eat for my birthday but I managed it 😮‍💨
krispy kreme bag with birthday box inside Me eating a krispy kreme A box of krispy kremes
October 6, 2025 at 3:23 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
What is going on with Spotify's autogenerated transcript 😭

We actually fixed up a transcript manually, but Spotify seems to replace it with an autogenerated one regardless... 😵‍💫
Welcome to hard drugs. I'm Soloni d'atani and this is Jacob Gefethin.
October 4, 2025 at 5:47 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
I also made this earlier, not sure if that's what you mean. You could easily add age too by highlighting a row. It's basically a modified Lexis diagram

ourworldindata.org/period-versu...
Period vs cohort diagram
October 3, 2025 at 6:02 PM
scientificdiscovery.dev
Me (coughing, sneezing): Let's find out what this was.

Narrator's voice: I did not get closure.
A rapid test for covid and flu, but both are negative.
October 3, 2025 at 2:42 PM