l'oaf
Brent Visser
https://measuredthinking.nl/about/
How do bacteria know which way the food is?
For E. coli, the trick is chemosensing: it swims in straight runs, occasionally tumbles around, and biases that run-tumble pattern so it slowly gets closer to a food source. It does this by trying to increase the amount of gradient it senses, ie. following the attractant gradient. There's
simulations
Learning how to play a game from AI
Teaching an AI to play L'oaf and seeing what a human can learn from it.
science-news
Genmab’s DuoBody platform
I was interested in learning about the scientific core of Genmab’s business model. Looking for this, I found two key papers: the 2013 controlled Fab-arm exchange paper and the 2013 scale-up and manufacturing paper. The conceptual origin sits a bit earlier, in the IgG4 literature, where Fab-arm exchange shows
model
Evolutionary origins of aging
If you ask why we age, you can easily end up in the weeds of mitochondria, telomeres, senescent cells, cancer suppression, and a dozen other mechanisms that sound like the culprit. Biology offers many proximate causes of decline, and it is tempting to treat them as competing explanations. The risk
veganism
Other Minds
I read Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith because it sits right at the intersection of my interests: sentience, evolutionary biology, and good popular science. I also think a lot about animal welfare. As a vegan, I care about where experience might show up across animals, and what the evidence can
skeptic
The charm of one-sentence biological explanations
A friend recently explained their excess of empathy by confidently talking about their mirror neurons, and my internal skepticism alarm went off in my mind. So I thought I'd write a little article about this topic to figure out why it irked me so much. A single word
antibody
Turning antibody sequences into live-cell tools
I have a soft spot for methods that turn messy cell biology into something that is more quantifiable. When a tool works, it helps bring true progress into our understanding of fundamental biology. When it fails, you can lose weeks to cloning, expression quirks, or reagents that behave differently every
Battery
(EV) Batteries in 2026
Source: IEA – Electric vehicle battery sales share by chemistry and region, 2022–2024
News
New blog...
This is MeasuredThinking, my blog where I'll be posting about science, programming, books I've recently read, or other topics I find interesting.