https://liamzebedee.com/biology/ Recent content in Biology on Liam Zebedee Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Wed, 27 May 2026 21:08:00 +1000 https://liamzebedee.com/biology/articles/understanding-hormones-and-data-transfer/ Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://liamzebedee.com/biology/articles/understanding-hormones-and-data-transfer/ Cells can do distributed computation via hormone diffusion, in which the concentration of a hormone at a cell is a proxy for distance in 3D space from a source emitting it Every cell is basically a 3D shape with these 3D binding sites. A molecule that has a particular 3D structure can fit into this site like lego. We call the molecules that do this hormones. They are signalling molecules - meaning their structure is their only function - they are not little machines like enzymes/proteins that build things. https://liamzebedee.com/biology/articles/is-alphafold-a-scientific-theory/ Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://liamzebedee.com/biology/articles/is-alphafold-a-scientific-theory/ Dwarkesh Patel asks: A deeper question about AlphaFold: in what sense is it even a scientific explanation at all? It’s not going to have some crazy unforeseen predictive power outside of protein folding, such as say, relativity had on Mercury’s precession. There’s a couple of ways you can interpret this: it’s not an explanation at all, it contains little explanations you can extract through interpretability (Magnus Carlsen appears to have changed his game after AlphaZero forensics were published), or it’s a genuinely new type of scientific object we don’t have the verbs for yet.