P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #331
I still love Chicago
my story 🚀
🎆 Kim and I had a wonderful staycation the city last weekend that included tons of time outdoors and a spectacular fireworks show viewed from the Chicago River!
fun facts 🙌
When did people stop being drunk all the time? “When estimating consumption from the amount of beer provided to soldiers, convicts, and workers or reconstructing consumption from tax revenues on beer we see that the average person consumed about a liter of beer a day, this is around four times as much as consumption in modern beer-drinking countries.” ~ learn more
Drone footage of an erupting volcano. “Drone pilot Sigurður Þór Helgason took astonishing video of the crater collapse at the eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula.” ~ learn more
Gen Z might be leading the societal change on tipping. “Just 35% of Gen Zers told Bankrate they always tip their server at a sit-down restaurant. At the other end of the spectrum, 83% of baby boomers said they always tip.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
Translating vision and language into robotic actions. At some point we’ll certainly want to tell robots what we want done in the real world. Google’s AI researchers are now one big step closer. “Unlike chatbots, robots need “grounding” in the real world and their abilities. Their training isn’t just about, say, learning everything there is to know about an apple: how it grows, its physical properties, or even that one purportedly landed on Sir Isaac Newton’s head. A robot needs to be able to recognize an apple in context, distinguish it from a red ball, understand what it looks like, and most importantly, know how to pick it up.” ~ learn more
Superconductive drama. Researchers in Korea recently published a preprint paper claiming they made superconducting material at room temperature and pressure. This would be a huge deal if it replicates (let’s remain skeptical), because existing superconductors require extreme cold to work. The dramatic bit is that two versions of the paper were published within 2.5 hours by overlapping but different sets of authors. Why? ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
That hit song you love was a total fluke. “Participants were randomly assigned to different virtual rooms. In some rooms, people saw only a list of songs, while in others they could see how many times a song had been downloaded. Altogether the researchers created eight rooms — parallel worlds, really — which allowed them to study not just the role of popularity, but also the role of chance, in the creation of hits.” ~ learn more
What it means to want it badly enough. A motivational post by Chicago native Peter Piekarczyk. I was inspired! ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Real talk about nicotine. “How CDC propaganda leads to bad medicine and kills people”. Don’t believe anyone who says nicotine has no benefits. Don’t believe anyone who says it has no harms, either. ~ learn more
I just learned ‘Why We Sleep’ is riddled with errors. I read this book by Matthew Walker a couple years ago and it influenced me to care more about my sleep quality. I now learn (belatedly) that there are many deep flaws contained within. Unlike when Daniel Kahneman retracted an entire chapter of Thinking Fast and Slow, Walker seems to have taken a different path. Did he actually post this inadequate reply on a disposable wordpress blog? ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
The prospects of molecular manufacturing. Imagine a world where we could make machines at nanometer scale, the width of a single DNA strand. “With the introduction of artificial intelligence technologies capable of designing and anticipating protein structures, the near-term prospect for synthesized molecules in industry is immense indeed.” This article led me down an exciting rabbit hole watching recordings of the 2022 Foresight Designing Molecular Machines Workshop. ~ learn more
Nanowarming breakthrough for cryopreservation of organs. Freezing organs is relatively easy, but thawing them is a challenge. “We show that vitrified kidneys can be cryogenically stored (up to 100 days) and successfully recovered by nanowarming to allow transplantation and restore life-sustaining full renal function in nephrectomized recipients in a male rat model.” ~ learn more
This company plans to transplant gene-edited pig hearts into babies next year. “The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a technique that uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to make around 70 edits to a pig’s genome. These edits should allow the organs to be successfully transplanted into people, the team says. As soon as next year, eGenesis hopes to transplant pig hearts into babies with serious heart defects. The goal is to buy them more time to wait for a human heart.” ~ learn more
thoughts of food 🍔
European Commission proposes loosening rules for gene-edited plants. “GMOs have historically faced stiff opposition in Europe. The draft law would enable the release of new crop varieties, such as disease-resistant potatoes that would require far less fungicide, says Matin Qaim, an agricultural economist at the University of Bonn. Gene editing allows researchers to make targeted changes to DNA and modify a plant much more quickly than with conventional breeding.” ~ learn more
big ideas 📚
“We need to take CO2 out of the sky.” I like this post because of the detailed descriptions of the various technologies for direct carbon capture. I don’t think I agree with the premise that it’s imperative to achieve a specific international target for average warming. ~ learn more
What happened when Oregon decriminalized hard drugs. “Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved.” ~ learn more
staying thirsty 🚰
Portable sun-powered water harvester could combat water scarcity. “University of California Berkeley researchers have designed an extreme-weather proven, hand-held device that can extract and convert water molecules from the air into drinkable water using only ambient sunlight as its energy source, a study published in Nature Water shows.” ~ learn more