Cole Mathis

Still the ggoat

All the incredible Python tooling written in Rust is a trap to convert Python programmers to Rust.

I've used maturin for a project and found it surprisingly easy compared to anything with C. I just followed the maturin docs and peaked at a few bigger maturin projects (also linked in the docs).

I'm totally rust-pilled at this point. Never going back to C/C++.

Just remember Venus. The team behind the 2020 phosphine biosignatures claim did way more due diligence to rigorously rule out abiotic sources of phosphine than Madhusudhan et al. have done for DMS on K2-18b.

And yet... it wasn't enough. Because planets are complicated.

DMS has also been found in the interstellar medium and lab studies have shown that it can be produced by striking atmospheric gases with light.

Are comets or interstellar material likely sources of DMS on K2-18b? No.

But that's not the point: these findings show that DMS is not unique to life.

What is a presumed sign of life doing on a dead comet? Touted as a “biosignature” on an alien planet, dimethyl sulfide also seems to arise in banal ways

DMS is not unique to life, despite how some media coverage of this finding has been presenting it.

We know it can form in nature in very dead places. Like comets, as I reported last year for @science.org:

www.science.org/content/arti...

Here are some key references in the "no, actually not a Hycean world" camp:

arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05864 - magma ocean, not water ocean

arxiv.org/abs/2401.11082 - gas dwarf mini-Neptune

arxiv.org/abs/2501.18477 - comprehensive re-analysis of the 2023 data disputing several key findings

Is there really alien life on this exoplanet? We asked 10 experts. A team of astronomers claims to have sniffed out a “biosignature” in the atmosphere of a distant planet called K2-18b. But not everyone agrees that it signals life.

It's the 2nd time in 5 years that a stinky gas has us crying alien. In 2020 it was phosphine on Venus. Today it's DMS on K2-18b.

I asked 10 experts about the discovery. Here's what they had to say:

🧪🔭 #exoplanets #planetsci shorturl.at/sjkK4

First and foremost, finding life on an exoplanet on the basis of atmospheric gases is... fraught, to say the least.

To quote @colemathis.bsky.social: a telescope is not a life detector.

More on this in my 2024 story on biosignatures pessimism in @quantamagazine.bsky.social:

shorturl.at/Vul1i

Excited to announce that @preinerin.bsky.social, @colemathis.bsky.social and I were awarded an @hfspo.bsky.social research grant! 🎉

If you are an experimentalist interested in studying protein histories as a graduate student in the Longo Lab ELSI, please get in touch.

Asteroid fragments upend theory of how life on Earth bloomed Samples from Bennu contain the chemical building blocks of life — but with a twist.

Petition to start calling organic molecules the building blocks of space stuff instead of the building blocks of life

Asteroid Bennu contains loads of organic compounds including the 5 nucleobases of DNA/RNA and amino acids: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Friendly reminder that Dutch Books can't be used to define probabilities in practice unless one has access to a handy oracle that is not only rational and coherent but also can elicit an arbitrary number of decisions exactly, instantaneously, and without cost.

One of the strangest aspects of social media is the way it fragments experiences because of algorithmic personalization.

@bsky.app could y'all explore this by generating an option to experience someone else's feed for a period of time?

1. Imagine we land a space probe on one of Jupiters’ moons, take up a sample of material, and find it is full of organic molecules. How can we tell whether those molecules are just randomly assembled goo or the outcome of some evolutionary process taking place there? 🧪

Our Assembly Theory paper is just out in @nature nature.com/articles/s4158…

Search drinks in your camera roll

So exciting to see our teams' work on assembly theory out today in Nature led with @leecronin.bsky.social and in collaboration w/ friends at Santa Fe Institute www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Biking to work is probably one of the best routines in life.

Exoplanet Observation xkcd.com/2828

Manuscript SUBMITTED. I'll likely never do a review at this scale ever again.

Time for a dram.

I think this about eco terrorism frequently.

[FOR THE NATIONAL AGENCIES READING THIS I DONT THINK TERRORISM IS GOOD, I JUST WONDER ABOUT HOW THE WORLD IS]

It's so awesome seeing friends and great scientists get the recognition you know they deserve!

A copy of No One is Talking About This

No One is Talking About This by @tricialockwood.bsky.social is a gift, in part because it is basically impossible to talk about it on social media without owning yourself.

Just read it.

(Also thanks Abby of Walden Pond Books, solid rec)

This doesn't include "Life", "Entropy", "Molecules", "Applied Materials", "International Journal of Molecular Sciences" (how is this different from Molecules?), and "Algorithms" which might make some sense in some situations for my work.

I'm getting invitations to special issues that I have no business contributing to (and which even a generous read of my publication history would not suggest I could contribute).

So far I've been requested as a reviewer or contributor at "Galaxies", "Fermentation", "Fractal Fract", and "Diversity"

Two slices of pepperoni pizza, a tall can of Rainer beer, on a bar counter.

This is nirvana.

The 2024 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (by Andrew Spaeth, me) has 94 tenure-track positions and 4 teaching positions: bit.ly/facultychemjobs2024 facultychemjobs chemjobs

So MDPI is a scam. I can't go back

Very important
https://futureofliff.org/

Few things are better than getting into a flow state with programming.