Physicist @DukeRadOnc | #tricities to #Durham | Optimist |
Durham NC
Joined August 2013
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Optimism is the theory that all failures - all evils - are due to insufficient knowledge - per @DavidDeutschOxf
Justus Adamson retweeted
The greatest irony of scientific progress is this: when science succeeds, people stop seeing the problems it solved. Eventually, they begin to believe those problems never existed in the first place.
Justus Adamson retweeted
Just 100 years ago: 1 in 3 children died before reaching their fifth birthday.
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Justus Adamson retweeted
Look at all the 🇺🇸 trade that's now happening without the Jones Act in effect.
And the Jones Act fleet is still fully booked. This is all extra shipping, from Americans to Americans, that's happening just because government got out of the way.
Justus Adamson retweeted
My stance on phone bans in schools is that even if they have absolutely zero measurable effect on outcomes they are still worth doing because we want to habituate students into having real-life conversations and not withdrawing into digital life during lunch periods.
New evidence on phone bans in schools, and in Australia. It's ... underwhelming.
parentdata.org/kids/school-p…
Justus Adamson retweeted
Imagining explaining to the Founding Fathers that the president imposed tariffs without an act of Congress and then removed them at the request of the King of England
Justus Adamson retweeted
The cost of sequencing a human genome dropped from $100M to less than $100 in about 25 years.
That's a million-fold decrease, which outpaces even Moore's Law.
We're about to enter the era of personalized medicine.
Justus Adamson retweeted
La supervivencia al cáncer ya supera el 70% en EE.UU.
Era 63% en los 90.
Esa diferencia = 4,8 millones de personas vivas hoy.
Mieloma: 32% → 62%
Melanoma (metastásico): 16% → 35%
Pulmón (metastásico): 2% → 10%
No es un progreso abstracto.
Son cumpleaños, nietos,
y años de recuerdos.
Claro, aún nos queda camino por recorrer.
Pero esto es lo que hace el apoyo a la ciencia.
Cancer survival just crossed 70% in the U.S.
It was 63% in the 90s.
That gap = 4.8M people alive today.
Myeloma: 32% → 62%
Melanoma (metastatic): 16% → 35%
Lung (metastatic): 2% → 10%
That is not abstract progress.
These are birthdays, grandkids,
& years of memories restored.
Sure, we have ways to go.
But this is what funded science does.
Next time someone asks if cancer research works,
show them this chart.
- - - - -
Source: ACS Cancer Stats. 2026 + SEER (via @Jori_health)
- - - - -
Justus Adamson retweeted
This is legitimately insane.
Banning cell phones in schools might turn out to be the best thing we’ve done for our kids in a generation.
One year into cell phone bans, Dallas schools see 24% increase in library book checkouts.
👏👏👏
"Public school districts in Texas are almost one school year into the first statewide cellphone ban, and a North Texas school district is seeing positive impacts.
Dallas ISD officials said that, district-wide, they have seen a significant increase in library book checkouts, which they largely attribute to students no longer having cellphones with them during the school day.
"I started hearing, 'Oh, I'm so bored. I can't get on my phone after I do my work or during lunchtime,'" Hillcrest High School librarian Nina Canales said. "Once they lock into these stories, they don't seem to care about their phones at all."
From the first day of school to March 31, 2026, the district reported an increase of more than 200,000 additional books checked out compared to the previous year.
A look at the library checkouts for the previous year:
2025-2026 Total Circulation (1st day of school to March 31, 2026) – 1,084,837
2024-2025 Total circulation (1st day of school to March 31, 2025) – 872,430
Total library book checkout increase: 24.35%
At Dallas ISD's Hillcrest High, students are following this trend.
Canales said there were roughly 500 books checked out in the first nine weeks of the 2024-2025 school year. This school year, that number spiked to about 1,800 books.
"That floored me," Canales said. "I had to re-do the report again because I was like, 'What, are you kidding me?'"
Students felt the impact too.
"Now that I'm busy with a bunch of work and college, I don't find myself missing my phone that much, even at home," said Yamilet Jimenez, 9th grader."
By @laceybeasnews.
@JonHaidt @safe_screens
Justus Adamson retweeted
Most people don't understand that the Sun is the hardest place to get to in the Solar System.
Justus Adamson retweeted
Interesting argument that the American Revolution succeeded bc they debated the Constitution behind closed doors and the French Revolution failed bc they did everything in public. Transparency isn’t a virtue in all times and places! See, Congress.
Justus Adamson retweeted
A lot of people are asking why more politicians are not like Ben Sasse.
Because voters will not elect them, that’s why. They may say they care about character, but most don’t vote that way.
Instead they vote party line, ideology, self-interest, or out of pique against a perceived enemy.
How can we expect our leaders to embody higher levels of virtue if a majority of voters don’t make personal character a red line?
It looks like we get the leaders we deserve.
Justus Adamson retweeted
Let me be clear: this SICKENS me. I spent YEARS writing letters to get my interpreters in America because they SAVED OUR LIVES. One of my interpreters was a 15 year old kid. One day, we were working with the Afghan police and he went stone quiet. After we left, I asked him what was wrong. He told me that the Afghan police had just threatened to cut his lips off for helping us. He was FIFTEEN. And he risked EVERYTHING for our soldiers.
Shame on us. I think of the brave Afghans that stood alongside us against the Taliban, especially those I worked with personally during my four years in command of the NATO mission there. It is incomprehensible to me that we would not bring them here to the United States, fulfilling the most fundamental obligations of trust and honor. nytimes.com/2026/04/21/world…
Justus Adamson retweeted
I rang the bell! My middle child Betsy and sweet wife @AprilPonnuru were there to celebrate with me.
Justus Adamson retweeted
This is art
It’s not just one thing — it’s another thing techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/ai…
Justus Adamson retweeted
The amount of self-hate Americans have towards their own history is truly unreal.
They defeated slavery by fighting against their own family.
They shut Europe out of the western hemisphere so that nations wouldn't live under colonization forever.
They had the ability to stay out of world war 1 but they went and died to help Europeans.
They had the ultimate power in the nuclear bomb. They also had access to all of Europe's colonies that were in shambles. But instead they promoted freedom. They rebuilt Japan and Germany after defeating them in war. They stood down the Soviet Union, even as the world jeered them.
They sent soldiers to places like Vietnam and Afghanistan that died TRYING to create a better world (even if you disagree with those wars, the intentions were fairly good)
And they sent more missionaries to the world than maybe any other country in history. Translated more Bibles into indigenous languages than any other country in history. Ran bigger charities than any other country in history. Created more Christian resources than any other country in history.
Whether it was stopping the Dutch from reconquering Indonesia to the Berlin Airlift to giving Cuba its freedom in the Spanish-American war to saving China from the Japanese America has at least ATTEMPTED to do good with its power.
Yes yes, America has problems. People are imperfect. But goodness gracious does the world have a lot to be grateful for in America. And when we could have taken SO much from the world we have often chosen not to. Rome, Britain, Mongols, Assyrians, Soviets, Chinese, no other group has ever shown the restraint America has consistently shown with such vast power at its fingertips.
We didn't even get into the GIGANTIC technological advances, consumer advances, convenient lifestyle changes America has pioneered. From electricity to space to the light bulb to the smart phone to many cures in medicine and agriculture to the airplane the world has been enormously blessed by America.
Justus Adamson retweeted
A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.
It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.
Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.
Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.
The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.
It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.
The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.
When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.
