Ronan Lordan- Reflections from the 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

 

I had the privilege to work for few years with Ronan. He is my first PhD student in Ireland. He is just a unique scientist, full of ideas and the ways to apply them in Science. I am so happy for Ronan that he goes from summit to summit on his way to his Ithaca.

Yannis

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My name is Ronan Lordan, and I am a circadian biologist. I’m a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher and NeuroAdapt Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the FutureNeuro Research Centre for Translational Brain Science, the Tissue Engineering Research Group, and the School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences. My research focuses on the role of circadian rhythms in neuroimmunology, particularly in bipolar disorder.

Our internal biological clocks regulate nearly every aspect of physiology, from sleep and hormone secretion to metabolism and mood. When these rhythms become disrupted, they can contribute to the development and progression of psychiatric disorders. My research aims to better understand how circadian dysfunction influences bipolar disorder and how restoring healthy biological rhythms through chronotherapeutic approaches may improve treatment outcomes.

What drives me...

it continues here

About ideas

 

                        At my favourite cafe on campus at UL : Scholars : best coffee on campus :)

Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

 

                                                                                Photo: Roger Pic © Public Domain

To what writer, besides Ayn Rand, do the business-minded techies and tech-minded businessmen of 21st-century Silicon Valley look for their inspiration?

 The name of Samuel Beckett may not, at first, strike you as an obvious answer — unless, of course, you know the origin of the phrase “Fail better.” 

It appears five times in Beckett’s 1983 story “Worstward Ho,” the first of which goes like this: 

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” 

The sentiment seems to resonate naturally with the mentality demanded in the world of tech startups, where nearly every venture ends in failure but failure which may well contain the seeds of future success.

Source

L-amino acids but D-sugars : this can't be a fluke

 

                                

                                                                        image from here

Abstract

Previous work by us, and others, has shown that the formation of amino acids on prebiotic earth with the geometric arrangement called the L configuration can be understood. Some meteorites of the carbonaceous chondritic type deliver unusual amino acids, with alpha-methyl groups, which have an excess of the L isomers. We previously showed that in decarboxylative transamination reactions under credible prebiotic conditions they produce normal amino acids that also have a preference for the L isomer, as is found in our proteins. We, and others, showed that as little as a 1% excess of the L isomers could be amplified up to a 95/5 ratio of L over D on simple evaporation of a solution, so life could start with such a solution in which the dominant L isomers would be selectively chosen. We now find that the geometry of sugars referred to D, as in D-ribose or D-glucose, is not an independent mystery. D-glyceraldehyde, the simplest sugar with a D center, is the basic unit on which other sugars are built. We find that the synthesis of glyceraldehyde by reaction of formaldehyde with glycolaldehyde is catalyzed under prebiotic conditions to D/L ratios greater than 1, to as much as 60/40, by a representative group of L-amino acids (with the exception of L-proline). The D/L glyceraldehyde ratio in water solution is amplified to 92/8 using simple selective solubilities of the D and the DL forms. This D center would then be carried into the prebiotic syntheses of larger sugars.

Just that

Free Palestine! 

Stop playing with teams representing a genocide state!

Radiology and the reading room consult

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Radiology used to have something that was almost invisible because it was so routine:

The reading room consult. Rounding teams came down. Surgeons pulled up their cases. Internists brought the scan that didn't quite fit the clinical picture. Sometimes the radiologist solved the problem. Sometimes the clinician supplied one piece of history that completely changed how the images were interpreted. And usually everyone simply walked away a little sharper. But something else was happening during all of those conversations. We were learning each other. As a radiologist, I learned what individual physicians cared about. I knew which findings mattered to a particular surgeon. Which measurements an oncologist was following. Which details a specialist wanted emphasized. What questions they were really asking, even when the order just said "pain." And they learned me. They knew who was reading their study. They knew they could walk in, point at something, challenge an interpretation, or ask, "What do you think?" That relationship created context. It created feedback. It created trust. And over years, it created a kind of institutional knowledge that never appears in the medical record. When radiology becomes a report produced by someone hundreds or thousands of miles away, we don't just lose proximity. We risk losing that entire feedback loop. The report may still be technically excellent. But the radiologist knows less about the physician. The physician knows less about the radiologist. The radiologist sees less of what happened after the report. And both sides lose opportunities to make each other better. The reading room was never just a room. It was where imaging became part of the clinical conversation. We should think very carefully before designing that conversation out of medicine. Inspired by a conversation yesterday with

@PaleoOnc

. Also

@909One

and

@brianchiong

.

Carl Sagan sat in front of the United States Senate

 In 1985, Carl Sagan sat in front of the United States Senate and described the weather of 2026.

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Not as prediction. As physics. Sitting across from him was a junior senator named Al Gore — who would later win the Nobel Prize, the Oscar, and build a climate investment fund worth over $36 billion repeating almost word for word what Sagan said that afternoon. Sagan opened with Venus. 470°C surface temperature. 900°F. Hot enough to melt lead. "Not because it's closer to the sun," he told the senators. "Venus actually reflects more light than Earth. It should be cooler." The reason it wasn't: carbon dioxide. A runaway greenhouse effect that turned a planet nearly identical to Earth into a furnace. Then he looked at the committee and said: we're running the same experiment here. The senators nodded politely. Then they went back to approving fossil fuel subsidies. What Sagan told Congress in 1985: Global average temperature will rise several degrees by mid-to-late next century. Local climates will redistribute. Glaciers will melt. Sea levels will rise. And the problem cannot be solved by any single nation — not even if the US and Soviet Union agreed on everything — without China. China, he said, had the world's largest coal reserves and was about to industrialize. Every sentence was correct. He also said something that got almost no coverage at the time: "The initial stages of global temperature increase — one region might benefit while another suffers." That is the sentence that explains the last 20 years of geopolitics. Canada's growing season expanding while Pakistan floods. Russia opening Arctic shipping lanes while Bangladesh disappears. The politics of climate was never going to be clean because the physics wasn't distributed evenly. Sagan mapped all of it from first principles, in a Senate hearing room, 41 years ago. The part nobody quotes: He didn't say stop burning fossil fuels immediately. He said: "That has such severe economic consequences that no one will take it seriously." So he proposed something else — remove government subsidies from fossil fuels, accelerate solar, develop safe nuclear fission, and begin building international frameworks before the crisis made them impossible. That's not an environmentalist's speech. That's an economist's. Carl Sagan wrote 20 books. Cosmos was watched by 500 million people across 60 countries. He won the Pulitzer. The ideas in this testimony became the scientific foundation for a carbon market now valued at over $800 billion annually. He said one line at the end that nobody remembers. "We are all in this greenhouse together." In 1985, that was poetic. Now it's a weather report. The full testimony is free on YouTube. 17 minutes. Almost nobody outside of climate policy circles has watched it as a complete predictive model — laid out in plain language before any of it happened.