New from @bellingcat: We figured out that whole Navalny poisoning thing. An FSB team trailed him since 2017 -- including to Tomsk in 2020 -- that included Novichok, chemical weapons experts.

We worked with investigative partners @CNN (https://t.co/OqHbuglzDQ), @the_ins_ru (https://t.co/LIknsacbkH), and @derspiegel on this investigation. More to come!
Let's meet the crew!

Stanislav Makshakov, who coordinated the whole operation. He reports to General Kirill Vasilyev, director of the FSB Criminalistics Institute.
Oleg Tayakin, cover name Oleg “Tarasov”. A senior member of the FSB squad, typically coordinating other officers and operating primarily out of the central office at Akademika Vargi 2a. He worked as a surgeon before joining the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute.
Alexey Alexandrov, cover name “Alexey Frolov”. Graduated medical school in Moscow in 2006, worked as an emergency & military doctor doctor before joining the FSB in 2013. He was present at both 2020 poisonings, one suspected by Navalny + wife in Kaliningrad and the other in Tomsk
Dr. Ivan Osipov, cover name Ivan “Spiridonov”. Medical doctor by training. His social media presence disappeared in 2012, which is likely when he joined FSB.
Konstantin Kudryavtsev, cover name Konstantin “Sokolov”. Served at a chemical warfare military unit in Shikhany. Graduated Russia’s Military Chemical-Biological Defense Academy before joining the FSB’s Criminalistics Institute.
Alexey Krivoschekov, worked at the Ministry of Defense prior to joining the FSB in or around 2008.
Mikhail Shvets, cover name Mikhail “Stepanov”. His registered address is at 116 Trubetskaya St, Balashikha – the address of FSB’s Center for Special Operations. Telephone metadata shows that he splits his time between working at the special operations base and the Vargi 2a lab.
Vladimir Panyaev, served in FSB’s border service, then co-founded a company selling anti-bacterial lamps. Likely coincidentally, lives in the same apartment building as Navalny. After the Tomsk poisoning, his address registration was changed to that of the FSB HQ, Lubyanka 1.
We detailed our methodology in how we found all these people and conducted the investigation here: https://t.co/KYlVYdFiz5

More from Science

https://t.co/hXlo8qgkD0
Look like that they got a classical case of PCR Cross-Contamination.
They had 2 fabricated samples (SRX9714436 and SRX9714921) on the same PCR run. Alongside with Lung07. They did not perform metagenomic sequencing on the “feces” and they did not get


A positive oral or anal swab from anywhere in their sampling. Feces came from anus and if these were positive the anal swabs must also be positive. Clearly it got there after the NA have been extracted and were from the very low-level degraded RNA which were mutagenized from

The Taq.
https://t.co/yKXCgiT29w to see SRX9714921 and SRX9714436.
Human+Mouse in the positive SRA, human in both of them. Seeing human+mouse in identical proportions across 3 different sequencers (PRJNA573298, A22, SEX9714436) are pretty straight indication that the originals

Were already contaminated with Human and mouse from the very beginning, and that this contamination is due to dishonesty in the sample handling process which prescribe a spiking of samples in ACE2-HEK293T/A549, VERO E6 and Human lung xenograft mouse.

The “lineages” they claimed to have found aren’t mutational lineages at all—all the mutations they see on these sequences were unique to that specific sequence, and are the result of RNA degradation and from the Taq polymerase errors accumulated from the nested PCR process
What are the classics of the "Science of Science" or "Meta Science"? If you were teaching a class on the subject, what would go in the syllabus?

Here's a (very disorganized and incomplete) handful of suggestions, which I may add to. Suggestions welcome, especially if you've dug into relevant literatures.

1. The already classic "Estimating the reproducibility of
psychological science" from the Open Science Collaboration of @BrianNosek et al.
https://t.co/yjGczLZ6Je

(Look at that abstract, wow!)


Many people had pointed out problems with standard statistical methods, going back decades (what are the best refs?). But this paper was a sledgehammer, making it impossible to ignore the question: what, if anything, were we actually learning from all those statistical studies?

2. Dean Keith Simonton's book "Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist". If an essentially scientometric book could be described as a fun romp through science & creativity, this would be it

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.