Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this super-episode spans four wildly different frontiers: bioengineers hijacking bacterial evolution to mass-produce octopus camouflage pigment; orcas developing cultural hunting strategies against great white sharks; the bizarre chemistry behind civet-processed luxury coffee; and a UCLA breakthrough that pushes telescope resolution beyond the classical diffraction limit.SummaryUCSD’s biosynthesis breakthrough — how researchers engineered a growth-coupled, plug-and-play metabolic pathway to mass-produce xanthomatin, the cephalopod pigment behind octopus camouflage.Orca vs. shark culture wars — first-ever documentation of coordinated predation on juvenile great whites in Mexican waters, plus how whales transmit learned behavior socially.The paradox of civet coffee — wild civet gut chemistry, medium-chain esters, and how microbial fermentation creates the world’s most expensive “biologically processed” coffee.UCLA’s telescope hack — a mode-sorting instrument that extracts phase information from starlight, enabling sub-diffraction-limited imaging and revealing asymmetric hydrogen disks around distant stars.Show NotesUCSD — Nature Biotechnology (xanthomatin biosynthesis)Orca Predation Study — Frontiers in Marine ScienceCivet Coffee Chemistry — Nature Scientific ReportsUCLA Sub-Diffraction Telescope Method — ApJ Letters
AI, Eyes, and the Sky — From Synthetic Genomes to Restored Vision and Cosmic MysteriesHosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode of From First Principles explores three cutting-edge breakthroughs connecting medicine, technology, and astronomy.Summary• AI for Oncology, Minus the Privacy Risk: University of Toronto researchers develop OncoGAN—a generative model that creates realistic synthetic cancer genomes to accelerate precision oncology while protecting patient data.• Restoring Sight: The PRIMA (PRIMAvera) trial in NEJM demonstrates how a wireless sub-retinal photovoltaic implant can restore central vision in people with advanced macular degeneration.• Revisiting Cosmic Transients: New analyses of Palomar’s POSS-I plates re-examine the “multi-point transients” with fresh alignment statistics and an innovative Earth’s-shadow control test.Show Notes• University of Toronto — OncoGAN / Synthetic Cancer Genomes (Cell Genomics)• NEJM — PRIMA (PRIMAvera) Wireless Sub-Retinal Implant Trial for Geographic Atrophy• Palomar POSS-I Plates — Multi-Point Transient Analysis (IOP PASP Paper)• Palomar Alignment vs Earth’s Shadow Control (Nature Scientific Reports 2025)
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FFP EP. 14 | Chen Ning Yang — The Man Who Unlocked Symmetry
Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode tells the story of Nobel laureate Chen Ning Yang and how his ideas on symmetry and gauge theory transformed modern physics.Summary• Early Years & Mentorship: From China to Chicago — learning under Fermi and Chandrasekhar.• Parity Violation: How Yang & Lee overturned the mirror-symmetry assumption and changed physics forever.• Gauge Symmetry & Yang-Mills Fields: The foundation of the Standard Model of particle physics.• Legacy & Philosophy: Why Yang saw beauty as nature’s signature and symmetry as its language.Show Notes• Nobel Prize in Physics 1957 — Chen Ning Yang & Tsung-Dao Lee• Original Yang–Mills Paper (1954, Physical Review)• Madame Wu’s Parity Violation Experiment (1957)• Biography of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (University of Chicago)
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FFP EP. 13 | Portable Muon Beams, Sodium Batteries, and the Secret to Long Life
Aloha internet — Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary return with three extraordinary research stories: portable muon beams, sodium-ion batteries, and the secret to long life.Summary• Lawrence Berkeley’s compact muon beam technology and its applications in archaeology, volcanology, and security.• UC San Diego + U Chicago’s solid-state sodium battery that rivals lithium in power but not in cost.• Tongji University’s naked mole rat DNA study uncovering a genetic pathway for longer, healthier life.Show NotesPortable Muon BeamNature News CoveragePhysical Review Accelerators and Beams PaperSodium Ion BatteriesScience Daily CoverageJoule Paper (2025)Naked Mole Rats & LongevityBBC CoverageScience Journal Paper
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FFP EP. 12 | From Princeton to the Nobel Prizes — How FFP Started + 2025 Nobel Recap
After a packed week of Nobel Prize coverage, Lester and Krishna look back on how From First Principles began and why they built it as an “ESPN for Science.” They revisit 2025’s Medicine, Physics and Chemistry winners and discuss why fundamental research and immigration policy are core to America’s scientific edge.Quick note: this week’s episode is in vertical format because of a technical hiccup during recording — back to widescreen next week!SummaryOrigin Story — Two Princeton friends from different continents unite around a shared love of science and storytelling.The Mission — Creating an “ESPN for Science” that celebrates research and the people behind it.Nobel Follow-ups — Medicine (Tregs and non-immune roles), Physics (macroscopic quantum tunneling and quantum supremacy), Chemistry (MOFs and industrial scaling).Funding + Immigration — Why public research grants and curating global talent are vital to scientific leadership.Show NotesNobel Prize Press Release (2025 Medicine)Nobel Prize Press Release (2025 Physics)Nobel Prize Press Release (2025 Chemistry)Nature Genetics (2001) — FOXP3 Mutation Causes DysregulationNature (1999) — MOF-5 Discovery (Omar Yaghi et al.)Google Quantum AI Lab — Quantum Supremacy (Nature, 2019)
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