P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #386
Back to Austin by Bus, Plane and Car
my story 🚀
🏫 I’m writing from the road, heading back to Austin just in time for the next school year. While this summer trip has been a blast, I’m excited to get back to some of my regular patterns including diet and exercise. If you’re looking for a prompt to step back into one of your desired habits, consider this it!
fun facts 🙌
What is a superior mirage? I saw the above picture on a social media post with a simple explanation of the phenomenon. Comments called it a fake. I read up on this wild phenomenon on the American Meteorological Society website. Now you can too! ~ learn more
The Toledo War. Michigan and Ohio nearly went to war over a small strip of land containing the modern day city of Toledo in 1835. ~ learn more
The secret, magical life of lithium. “One of the oldest, scarcest elements in the universe has given us treatments for mental illness, ovenproof casserole dishes and electric cars. But how much do we really know about lithium?” ~ learn more
Why do we stick out our tongues when we’re concentrating? “What we've found is what people mean is they [stick out their tongue] when they are doing something delicate that requires fine motor activation of their hands… One theory for why this happens is called motor overflow.” ~ learn more
tech, startups, internet ⚡
You can only take so much drinking water on a space walk. Don’t worry, a new technology could allow the recycling of urine into drikable water. “The prototype, modelled on the “stillsuits” in the sci-fi classic Dune, collects urine, purifies it and can return it to the astronaut through a drinking tube within five minutes.” ~ learn more
Would you use an outside AI program to automate a core competency? “If you outsource your core competencies to someone else, particularly a 3rd party AI company, then that tool is getting better and regardless of what it does or doesn’t do with your data, it may enable more people to compete with you. So the question is - when a company comes to you with an AI product that can help automate something you consider core, do you buy it?” ~ learn more
The AI boyfriend business is booming. “These female AI users, flipping the stereotype of under-socialized men chatting with AI girlfriends in their parents' basement, are challenging assumptions about the nature of human intimacy.” ~ learn more
better doing 🎯
Even the powerful are powerless. “Mark Twain was once invited to give a toast to a gathering of the great Civil War heroes in New York. He could have chosen any topic, but Twain, always looking for the unexpected and the humorous, chose babies. When it comes to our children, “we stand on common ground,” he said, facing Sherman and Grant and hundreds of other officers who had all bravely served under fire.” ~ learn more
to your health ⚕
Dermatology’s disastrous war against the sun. This is anonymously published by “a midwestern doctor” so who knows just how much of this is bs. Informed readers, please write to me! “Skin cancers are by far the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, so to prevent them, the public is constantly told to avoid the sun. However, while the relatively benign skin cancers are caused by sun exposure, the ones responsible for most skin cancer deaths are due to a lack of sunlight.” ~ learn more
under the microscope 🔬
Inside the laboratory for extraordinary microbes. “Cultivarium builds tools to grow, transform, and engineer “extraordinary” microbes: the salt lovers, heat tolerators, and geyser growers that have long been inaccessible to scientists. Studying such organisms might lead to better gene-editing tools or medicines. And regardless of whether Cultivarium’s engineering efforts succeed or fail, they give all their knowledge away for free, in the expectation that the next biological breakthrough will come from these overlooked microbes.” ~ learn more
World’s first anode-free sodium solid-state battery. “Sodium solid-state batteries are usually seen as a far-off-in-the-future technology, but we hope that this paper can invigorate more push into the sodium area by demonstrating that it can indeed work well, even better than the lithium version in some cases,” [first author] Deysher said. ~ learn more