Saloni

🥲 I feel like my perception of time has been totally warped since the pandemic. Everything before it seems like AGES ago and everything since feels like yesterday.

Dragon Ball Z meme: It's over 9000!!!!

When people ask me what my article's word count is

Why we didn't get a malaria vaccine sooner - Works in Progress Magazine Hundreds of thousands of people die from malaria each year, but it took 141 years to develop a vaccine for it. Advance market commitments could speed things up next time.

Of course, I am biased. One of my most widely read pieces was over 9,000 words long.

People still bring it up in conversation 3 years later. I've heard the level of detail was practically useful for advocacy.

A few things I've learnt from writing >4,000 word pieces:

- They tend to be more popular than my short pieces!
- They're more definitive - like reference material, not a hot take.
- Not everyone will reach the end, and that's okay.
- Write so that the people who do find it incredibly satisfying.

People are so unnecessarily rude, I'm sorry. You're one of the best people here!

And I totally agree with the point you made. A lot of people are persuadable and flooded with misinformation.

It's depressing but I also think we can turn things around, and I think you've done a lot on that effort.

Surprisingly that's one I haven't watched! But I listened to a radio show version of it. open.spotify.com/episode/3x5z...

It was well made but I found it very unsettling

Just kidding, it was fun.

I'll make the quiz about screwball comedies, romance and film noir from the 1930s to 1950s, a topic I know very well because I watched over 200 films from that period during my bachelor’s degree.

darth vader is standing in a dark room with the letter n behind him Alt: darth vader is standing in a dark room; the word noooooooo (no with many o's) appears around him.

Me winning the weekly quiz at our office, this time about Miss Marple: Yes.. Hahaha.... YES!!!

Me realising this means I have to design next week's trivia:

Great title if we decide to publish a cookbook in the future!

Holy cow! Our new study showing that H5 mRNA-LNP vaccines are safe and effective in lactating dairy cows is now posted on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social!

We found that our vaccine elicits protective responses in 2,000 pound dairy cows! 1/

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thank you so much! ☺️

Beautiful!! Related:locking up of clinical trial data by NIH&industry is tragic. Individual pt data from 1 large well done randomized trial can be worth all the meta-analyses you want & can be many times better than the largest observational study. Data completeness and quality are tops for RCTs.

Hahha fortunately it hasn't come to that yet

Great post on the emergence of clinical trials!
This section makes me wonder about "professionalization" in science in general. I do feel like many parts of the research process in my field are...surprisingly dilettantish.>

Thank you

😂 That's great

Me: *rereads something I've written*

Me: Huh, not bad. I agree with all of it; that's a nice feeling.

Hearing rumours this is our best episode yet!

Listen to it fast, before your cholesterol builds up!

Thank you!!

Thanks very much to @jamiecummins.bsky.social @ruben.the100.ci @mattsclancy.bsky.social @dylanmatt.bsky.social and others for feedback on drafts of this! ☺️

Here's to a radical future where openly-available IPD is the default!

Clinical trial reforms that once seemed radical How randomized controlled trials, preregistration, and results reporting became standard practice.

New post!

It may seem ambitious to ask for individual patient data from clinical trials to be shared, anonymized, for use by other researchers.

But the history of medicine shows us that clinical trials have already undergone a series of transformations that once seemed equally bold:

😭 I forgot I said that out loud. It's true though 😞

Hearing rumours this is our best episode yet!

Listen to it fast, before your cholesterol builds up!

Thank you!! :)

I listened back to it so many times during editing that I'll randomly remember something funny that @jacobtref.bsky.social said, like "We have a few questions for you, evolution.", and start laughing

Finished listening to this excellent episode. Great exercise in triangulation of different lines of evidence! So should you be taking statins?
Maybe! Might make sense to get your cholersterol levels checked!

White House stalls release of approved US science budgets The US Congress rejected sweeping cuts to science agencies. But the NIH, the NSF and NASA have had their spending slowed.

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers.

The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

😳

Maybe it would be nice to have a trillion heart beats per lifetime though. We'd either be long-lived hummingbirds or live to ~32,000 years old.

Saloni Dattani: Well, I have a question for you on, because you brought up heartbeats. Do you know how many heartbeats a human has in their lifetime on average? Jacob Trefethen: Oh gosh. Okay, so this feels like - so once a second. Oh, what’s the rent song? (he sings) 2,560 mana minutes is how many minutes there are in a year? Unfortunately, I can’t remember that number. So we’re gonna do 60 per minute. We’re gonna do 60 minutes in an hour. So up to 3,600, we’re gonna do times up by 24. That’s a big number already. And then we’re gonna by - we’re gonna times by 80 I think the answer is like loads. I’ll go with a billion. Saloni Dattani: It’s actually no, 10 times 10 to the power eight. Wait, that’s a trillion. That’s a trillion! Jacob Trefethen: Trillion beats. Now imagine if you took all of those beats and put a baseline underneath them.

How many heartbeats do we have on average in a lifetime?

Unfortunately I'm bad at converting numbers in my head and made a silly mistake turning 10x10^8 into a trillion instead of a billion. (And we didn't catch it during editing either.)

Thanks to @julianreif.bsky.social for letting me know.