Six Science posts #92

The efficiency of bikes, LLM discovery in cancer research, the logic of Halloween and more

Author

Harshal Chhaya
October 22, 2025

Thank you for your patience for this delayed issue.

I was traveling (in planes, trains and automobiles!) and didn’t have access to all the information I needed to publish this issue on the regular schedule.

My family and I recently celebrated the Hindu festival of Diwali recently where we light lamps to banish darkness. The light represents good, knowledge and hope that removes the darkness of despair, evil and ignorance.

May this newsletter serve as a light to spread knowledge and curiousity.

Happy Diwali, y’all!

Love,

Harshal

#1 🤯 

The graph is from Scientific American

The article at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-human-on-a-bicycle-is-among-the-most-efficient-forms-of-travel-in-the/ says:

Travel involves two main expenditures of energy: fighting gravity and propelling yourself forward. Most terrestrial animals must expend energy first to stand up, then to take each step forward. (Longer-legged land creatures tend to be more efficient because they get more distance out of each step, which explains why mice are so inefficient.) Flying animals, though, can move forward cheaply by gliding through the air, carried more by currents than by their own power. Swimming animals can similarly glide through water while letting their natural buoyancy minimize the need to fight gravity.

Bikes allow us terrestrial folk to be more like fish. Wheels, a simple machine, let us coast without putting in power by pedaling, and the rigid frame supports the sitting rider against gravity.

#2 🤯 

I was lucky enough to see the April 2024 total solar eclipse in person.

This is a handy chart for the next several centuries :-O

#3 🤯 

This is an impressive and encouraging result where an LLM generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior.

More details:

The model that generated this prediction is a 27B-parameter LLM based on the Google Gemma open source models, and trained on a corpus comprising >1B tokens of transcriptomic data, biological text, and metadata. Quite remarkable that a small (just 27B) LLM trained on specialized data is able to make novel scientific discoveries.

"Teams at Yale are now exploring the mechanism uncovered here and testing additional AI-generated predictions in other immune contexts. With further preclinical and clinical validation, such hypotheses may be able to ultimately accelerate the path to new therapies."

#4 🤯 

Trains are brilliant examples of effective and impactful engineering.

Here’s to more trains!

(I had the joy of riding in a 250 kmph (150 mph) long-distance train last week. It was SO much fun!)

#5 🤯 

Logic and candy are the best part of Halloween

#6 🤯 

I love the absolute function - the mathematical function that returns the magnitude of the value - because it looks like it is cheering. \o/

This is issue #92. Let’s see what makes 92 an interesting number:

  • 92 is palindromic in other bases, where it is represented as 2326, 1617, 4422, and 2245.

  • There are 92 numbers n such that 2n does not contain all digits in base ten (the largest such number is 168, where 68 is the smallest number with such a representation containing all digits)

  • 92 is the international calling code for Pakistan

  • Uranium is a chemical element; it has symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. Uranium radioactively decays, usually by emitting an alpha particle. The half-life of this decay varies between 159,200 and 4.5 billion years for different isotopes, making them useful for dating the age of the Earth.

    • The 1789 discovery of uranium in the mineral pitchblende is credited to Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who named the new element after planet Uranus which had been discovered eight years earlier by William Herschel (my guy!)

    • A uranium-based device (codenamed "Little Boy") became the first nuclear weapon used in war when it was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945.

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)

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

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