Lengthening telomeres with a simple supplement sounds almost too good to be true. Yet, two recent papers suggest that supplying cells with thymidine, a basic DNA building block, is enough to do just that. Join us as we explore the unexpected discovery, why it's a big deal for telomere biology, and the big question that remains: how does it actually work?

(00:00) Intro

(07:20) Why do we even need telomeres

(14:30) The approach: CRISPR screen for telomere regulators

(16:30) The core finding: More thymidine, longer telomeres

(21:40) What makes these papers cool pt 1

(25:00) The missing piece: What's the mechanism?

(29:50) What makes these papers cool pt 2

(33:30) Outro

The papers:

1. Mannherz, W., Agarwal, S. Thymidine nucleotide metabolism controls human telomere length. Nat Genet 55, 568–580 (2023).

2. Mannherz, W., Crompton, A., Lampl, N. et al. Metabolic constraint of human telomere length by nucleotide salvage efficiency. Nat Commun 16, 3000 (2025).

We discuss the news feature from Nature covering the most cited papers of the 21st Century

(00:00) Intro (grant writing, going to AACR)

(11:45) Most cited papers of the 21st century (overview)

(15:20) 2ddct method

(17:45) Thematic analysis in psychology

(23:15) The DSM-5

(25:15) Random Forests Classifier 

(27:40) Attention is all you need

(31:45) Sequences and Consequences

(34:30) Publish houses of brick, not mansions of straw

(35:30) Outro (Potential AI projects)

We discuss a paper on scientific diffusion—a metric for how widely an idea is spread—and how it can tell you if you are in a bubble.

(00:00) Intro: Komal's trip to Langkawi
(04:30) Setting goals for the new year
(14:00) Million dollar weekend
(22:10) Diffusion paper
(24:20) Knowledge lab
(25:10) What is diffusion (of research papers)
(26:45) Two case studies of low and high diffusion papers
(30:20) Low diffusion correlates with bubble bursting
(34:30) What this means for your own research
(39:00) Final thoughts on the paper
(40:30) Outro: Building a social task manager app for my friends

Checkout r/spillthetae a place to share your insights, hacks, and fuck-ups with other researchers.

(00:00) Intro
(11:45) Why we started a subreddit
(15:30) Spill the TAE
(17:00) DMSO freezes at 20*C
(19:30) Curios case of the missing mutation
(22:20) how miniprep kits separate plasmids from genomic DNA
(27:45) which research ideas to follow up on
(34:15) don't read papers in PDF format
(40:00) Xist RNA might be up to something!
(43:00) non-smokers can develop multiple tumors in the lung
(48:05) Plans for the subreddit

We discuss this Nature blog post analyzing the characteristics of previous nobel prize winners.

(00:00) Intro
(18:20) Alfred Nobel and the story behind the prize
(22:20) How to win a noble prize
(38:00) should you aim to win the prize?
(43:45) the utility of ambitious goals
(45:45) specific goals vs general direction

(00:00) Intro and catch up
(16:30) Feedback loops in biology research are slow
(32:40) How to shorten feedback loops in research: cloning tricks and bacteria as a model system
(59:10) Outro: Thoughts on Gene Machine

Links:

We break down the article "Problem choice and decision trees in science and engineering" by Michael A. Fischbach

We talk about how your expectations from life take an immense amount of effort to manifest and how to manage them

We discuss vgr's blog post The Resourceful Life

We talk about the nature of rest, what it means to rest well, and meditation as one form of rest.