Art of Academia

Journal Club: The Simplest Way to Lengthen Telomeres?

Lengthening telomeres with a simple supplement sounds almost too good to be true. Yet, two recent papers suggest that supplying cells with thymidine, a basic DNA building block, is enough to do just that. Join us as we explore the unexpected discovery, why it's a big deal for telomere biology, and the big question that remains: how does it actually work? (00:00) Intro (07:20) Why do we even need telomeres (14:30) The approach: CRISPR screen for telomere regulators (16:30) The core finding: More thymidine, longer telomeres (21:40) What makes these papers cool pt 1 (25:00) The missing piece: What's the mechanism? (29:50) What makes these papers cool pt 2 (33:30) Outro The papers: 1. Mannherz, W., Agarwal, S. Thymidine nucleotide metabolism controls human telomere length. Nat Genet 55, 568–580 (2023). 2. Mannherz, W., Crompton, A., Lampl, N. et al. Metabolic constraint of human telomere length by nucleotide salvage efficiency. Nat Commun 16, 3000 (2025).

Most cited papers of the 21st Century

We discuss the news feature from Nature covering the most cited papers of the 21st Century (00:00) Intro (grant writing, going to AACR) (11:45) Most cited papers of the 21st century [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01125-9] (overview) (15:20) 2ddct method (17:45) Thematic analysis in psychology (23:15) The DSM-5 (25:15) Random Forests Classifier  (27:40) Attention is all you need (31:45) Sequences and Consequences [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2009.0221] (34:30) Publish houses of brick, not mansions of straw [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28541345/] (35:30) Outro (Potential AI projects)

Diffusion of scientific ideas

We discuss a paper on scientific diffusion—a metric for how widely an idea is spread—and how it can tell you if you are in a bubble. (00:00) Intro: Komal's trip to Langkawi (04:30) Setting goals for the new year (14:00) Million dollar weekend [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145624504-million-dollar-weekend] (22:10) Diffusion paper [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02041-0] (24:20) Knowledge lab [https://knowledgelab.org/] (25:10) What is diffusion (of research papers) (26:45) Two case studies of low and high diffusion papers (30:20) Low diffusion correlates with bubble bursting (34:30) What this means for your own research (39:00) Final thoughts on the paper (40:30) Outro: Building a social task manager app for my friends

r/spillthetae — A new subreddit for researchers

Checkout r/spillthetae [https://www.reddit.com/r/spillthetae/] a place to share your insights, hacks, and fuck-ups with other researchers. (00:00) Intro (11:45) Why we started a subreddit (15:30) Spill the TAE (17:00) DMSO freezes at 20*C (19:30) Curios case of the missing mutation (22:20) how miniprep kits separate plasmids from genomic DNA (27:45) which research ideas to follow up on (34:15) don't read papers in PDF format (40:00) Xist RNA might be up to something! (43:00) non-smokers can develop multiple tumors in the lung (48:05) Plans for the subreddit

How to win a nobel prize

We discuss this Nature blog post [https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-024-02897-2/index.html] analyzing the characteristics of previous nobel prize winners. (00:00) Intro (18:20) Alfred Nobel and the story behind the prize (22:20) How to win a noble prize (38:00) should you aim to win the prize? (43:45) the utility of ambitious goals (45:45) specific goals vs general direction [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uwmFSaDMprsFkpWet/explore-more-a-bag-of-tricks-to-keep-your-life-on-the-rails]