Aeon in Motion
It has been a while since our last newsletter, a fact that arose mainly due to an otherwise busy schedule for the Project Aeon team. Some highlights:
- We published a new piece of thought leadership on Substack: Surface Areas in Technoscience (Part 1).
- We hosted a dinner in Philadelphia to discuss the question: How can we design filters to better identify scientists with paradigm-shifting potential?
- We have begun the process of forming our corporate entities so we can receive financial contributions through CataCap, a new platform facilitating funding for social impact organizations.
As a programming note, we intend to make our new Substack account the primary location for thoughts and essays concerning metascience and innovation, and our longstanding Discourse community the primary location for discussing these ideas.
This newsletter will continue to highlight upcoming events, important Project Aeon progress notes, and media that we’ve found relevant and interesting to our shared work of reimagining science funding systems for a more flourishing future.
If that means you’d like to unsubscribe (hopefully because one of our other communities fits your interests better), we won’t take it personally, and you can find the link at the bottom of this newsletter.
Finally, we’d greatly appreciate if you would take two minutes to answer this six-question survey. We want to make sure our communication with the community is compelling, relevant and at an appropriate frequency, so we would value your feedback.
The Idea Garden
Preprint Paper - The Decline in the Transmission of Scientific Ideas
Scientific ideas appear to be traveling less widely than they once did. This new paper argues that rising complexity and increasingly specialized language are narrowing the transmission of ideas across fields—reducing the chances that discoveries will find unexpected applications elsewhere.
Are Memories Transferable — or Edible? | Quanta Magazine
Can memories survive the loss of a brain—or even pass from one organism to another? Quanta revisits a strange, largely forgotten chapter of neuroscience in which researchers trained planarian worms, cut them apart, and even fed them to other worms in search of where memory resides. The experiments remain unresolved, but they offer a revealing case study in how unconventional scientific questions can move from fascination to ridicule—and sometimes back again.
The Impact of Research Grant Funding on Scientific Productivity
Does winning a major research grant actually make scientists much more productive? This study of NIH R01 awards finds only modest gains in publications and citations for marginal recipients—suggesting that strong researchers often find alternative support, and that conventional grantmaking may do less than assumed to change what ultimately gets produced.
Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential
Dario Amodei argues that artificial intelligence is advancing far faster than the institutions responsible for governing it. His wide-ranging policy agenda addresses not only AI safety and job displacement, but also a less-discussed bottleneck: whether regulatory systems can adapt quickly enough to absorb an AI-driven acceleration in science, medicine, and technology.
Ending respiratory infections
Intercept is launching a $500 million effort to make respiratory infections dramatically less common. Its strategy combines broad-spectrum preventatives with cleaner indoor air—an example of what becomes possible when a funder treats a familiar burden not as inevitable, but as a tractable scientific and institutional design problem.