The Scariest Episode Yet - Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project - 10/30/18
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it for DeRisi's fascinating stories about rare pathogens such as brain-eating amoebas.
What it is
An episode of Adam Savage's Still Untitled podcast with molecular biologist Joe DeRisi. They discuss his work, including sequencing to detect rare infections, in a conversation Savage calls possibly the show's scariest.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec NamTaf · 2020-09 · on “Fatal brain-eating microbe found in Lake Jackson, Texas water supply”
Adam Savage's podcast Still Untitled did a really fantastic episode [1] back around Halloween 2018 where they had a molecular biologist come on and talk about his work. The stories he tells are absolutely fascinating and I thoroughly encourage everyone wiht any interest in molecular biology and crazy stories to check it out. I won't go into it because I'll spoil it, but suffice it to say that normal episodes are 20-30 mins, this one went for 70 mins and the first time I listened to it I immediately restarted it to listen to it again. The first half of the episode is a story that gets more and more insane as it unfolds. Afterwards, he goes into a few other shorter stories of his work. Anyway,
Recommends codethief · 2024-12 · on “Fish have a brain microbiome – could humans have one too?”
From what I understand Joe DeRisi's approach[0] comes relatively close to your "blender" idea! [0]: I already mentioned Adam Savage's excellent podcast with him elsewhere in this dicussion but here's a direct link: [this video]
Cites dzhiurgis · 2021-07 · on “Alphafold”
Re step 1 and 2 - here's interesting podcast on how they detect rare infections: [this video] Basically sequence everything what's in your blood and look for what doesn't match your genome === infection. The problem is this is orders of magnitude more compute intense than whole genome sequencing. Basically increased demand for sequencing far outmatches available compute!