Niko McCarty

Cambridge

Founding Editor at Asimov Press

Science. Biology. Progress. Founding Editor @AsimovPress / Subscribe! Head of Creative @AsimovBio

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Articles

Weekly Links #4

1 week ago | nmccarty.com | Niko McCarty

The FDA has approved lenacapavir, a twice-yearly injection that is nearly 100% effective at preventing HIV. I hate the name Yeztugo. More on this remarkable drug from Asimov Press and ‘Hard Drugs’ podcast. The problems with cancer screening, from Siddhartha Mukherjee. Chemical reactions affected by stir bars. A synthetic cell phage cycle.
Weekly Links #3

1 week ago | nmccarty.com | Niko McCarty

PandemicLLM, modeling the spread of diseases using text-based data. “The brain works at more than 10 bits per second.” (Apparently during movement.)Genetic tools to engineer Xenorhabdus griffiniae, a non-model bacterium that lives inside nematodes. Perturb-Multi merges “imaging with scRNA-seq for pooled CRISPR screens” in intact, mammalian tissue. The way a person breathes through their nose is enough to uniquely identify them, much like a fingerprint.
Moats Against AI

3 weeks ago | nmccarty.com | Niko McCarty

Good writers should not fear AI. Many types of writing that people enjoy reading cannot easily be replicated by machines. Also, writing is a good way to think and you shouldn’t let machines think for you. Instead of trying to compete directly with AI models, then, the best writers will instead adapt and double down on the parts of writing that celebrate their humanness. Unfortunately, I know many good writers who fear AI models.
Weekly Links #1

3 weeks ago | nmccarty.com | Niko McCarty

Interview with Manu Prakash. The measles vaccine has saved >90 million lives in the last 50 years. Best paper I’ve seen in the last two weeks; mapping hundreds of proteins that bind to the human genome, with single amino acid resolution. An ancient protein fold works in both mirror-image forms; it has no ‘handedness.’ It can bind to both L- and D- forms of double-stranded DNA. NIAID is scrapping funds for “two major consortia” developing HIV vaccines.
The Case for Bridge Editors

4 weeks ago | nmccarty.com | Niko McCarty

Arc Institute researchers recently published a preprint showing that their gene-editing technology, called Bridge recombinases, work in human cells. Many people applauded the paper on social media, while others asked, “Wait, how does this tool even work? And why does it matter?”Fair questions. The preprint is not easy to understand, and the reasonsfor inventing a new type of gene-editing tool in 2025 are even less obvious.
Animals as chemical factories

1 month ago | worksinprogress.news | Xander Balwit |Niko McCarty

You can now comment on our articles. We’re hosting a Stripe Press pop-up coffee shop and bookstore on Saturday, June 28, in Washington, DC. RSVP here if you can make it. In many ways, this horse is normal: it stands roughly 14 hands high, has dark eyes hooded by thick lashes, and makes a contented neighing sound when its coat is stroked. But its blood pulses with venom.
The Most Abundant Protein

Feb 11, 2025 | blog.asimov.com | Niko McCarty

One reason David Goodsell’s paintings attract biologists, I think, is because they are unapologetically realistic. His paintings depict seas of macromolecules splayed out in pastel shades. A Goodsell painting looks nothing like the spacious diagrams one finds in high school biology textbooks, and that’s exactly why they linger in the mind: they show, visually, how crowded cells really are. But crowded with what, exactly? Well, an E.
The Cell is a Bag of Molecules

Jan 28, 2025 | blog.asimov.com | Niko McCarty

A cell is a vibrating ball of energy — a chaotic sack of molecules. These molecules float around and collide with one another constantly. Every protein in a cell, for instance, collides with about 10 billion water molecules each second. Cells “work” despite this chaos. Most events within a cell only happen if the right things collide at the right time, and at sufficient frequencies. A DNA polymerase enzyme, for example, can only copy a genome if it first collides with the right part of DNA.
Antivenom Renaissance

Jan 22, 2025 | blog.asimov.com | Niko McCarty

There are two new “venom AI” papers out, and both are interesting for different reasons. The first paper, published in Nature and already covered by Derek Lowe in his blog, uses RFdiffusion — a computational protein design tool — to make proteins capable of neutralizing a wide range of lethal snake toxins.
On Bacterial Nanotubes

Jan 15, 2025 | blog.asimov.com | Niko McCarty

Microbes may be even more interconnected than once believed. New evidence suggests oceanic microorganisms, especially photosynthetic Prochlorococcus, build physical bridgesor “nanotubes” between members of their own species and others, according to recent reporting in Quanta magazine. And because Prochlorococcus cells make something like 10 to 20 percent of Earth’s oxygen, any discovery about its behavior has some serious implications.