Six Science Posts - #73

Personalized gene editing, Purdubik, AI gaffes and more

Author

Harshal Chhaya
May 18, 2025

Six STEM Tweets

Six tweets that celebrate engineering and all things STEM.

I scroll so you don’t have to.

#1 🤯 

What a fantastic story of the power of science!

More details https://www.wired.com/story/a-baby-received-a-custom-crispr-treatment-in-record-time/

#2 🤯 

#3 🤯 

I love these connections and wrote a quick Python program to confirm.

for num in range(0,100):

fifth = num**5

ones_digit = fifth % 10

print(num, fifth, ones_digit)

The last lines of the output:

97 8587340257 7 

98 9039207968 8 

99 9509900499 9

#4 🤯 

How many such phrases that are part of our daily life are only a few years old? One I can think of is “I am getting my steps in” - folks from even 20 years back wouldn’t know what the reference was.

Any others?

#5 🤯 

😂 

#6 🤯 

Some sentiments are timeless. I love the pep talk - “what one fool can do, another can”

Let’s go!

About

This newsletter is my way of sharing interesting science-related news with my curious friends. I enjoy finding science and math connections in our world.

Please share this newsletter with others. Let’s encourage curiosity.

- Harshal (@hschhaya on X/Twitter)

This is issue #73. Is 73 interesting? Let’s see…

  • Tantalum is a chemical element with symbol Ta and atomic number 73. It is named after Tantalus, a figure in Greek mythology. It is blue-gray,  dense, ductile, very hard, easily fabricated, and highly conductive of heat and electricity.

    • It’s naming story is a perfect example of why scientists and engineers need to study the humanities incl. mythology.

    • The name tantalum was derived from the name of the mythological Tantalus, the father of Niobe in Greek mythology. In the story, he had been punished after death by being condemned to stand knee-deep in water with perfect fruit growing above his head, both of which eternally tantalized him. (If he bent to drink the water, it drained below the level he could reach, and if he reached for the fruit, the branches moved out of his grasp.)

    • Anders Ekeberg who first identified the element wrote "This metal I call tantalum ... partly in allusion to its incapacity, when immersed in acid, to absorb any and be saturated."

  • 73 is the smallest natural number with twelve letters in its spelled out name.

  • 73 is a prime number, also an “emirp” because 37 is also a prime

  • In octal (base 8) arithmetic, 73 is written as 1118 (82 - 64 + 81 - 8 + 80 - 1) - which makes it a ‘repunit’ - a repeated set of 1s

  • 73 is Sheldon Cooper's favorite number in the television series The Big Bang Theory. He first expresses his love for it in episode 73, "The Alien Parasite Hypothesis"

  • 73 is a Sheldon prime - named after the TV character Sheldon Cooper (from the “Big Bang Theory”) - because 73 is the 21st prime and it’s mirror 37 is the 12th prime and 12 and 21 are also a mirror pair

    • Also, the product of the digits - 7 × 3 = 21 - 73’s index in the sequence of primes

  • Amateur radio operators and other morse code users commonly use the number 73 as a "92 Code" abbreviation for "best regards"

  • There’s no country with 73 as the international calling code. ‘7’ is for Russia and ‘7 3’ is a regional combination.

That’s it for this issue.

Hit ‘reply’ to tell me what you think.

And hit ‘forward’ to share with your friends and family.

Let’s all celebrate science and engineering and curiosity.

Best wishes,

Harshal