“Two of your favorite tequila brands are in hot water. A class action lawsuit alleges that Casamigos and Don Julio tequilas "consist of significant concentrations of cane or other types of alcohol rather than pure tequila." ~ learn more
“With a slender sheet of lab-grown bismuth and an architecture unlike anything inside today’s silicon chips, they’ve built what they call the world’s fastest and most efficient transistor. Not only does it outperform the best processors made by Intel and TSMC, but it also uses less energy doing so. And most important of all, there’s no trace of silicon involved.” ~ learn more
“People who are given a vaccine for shingles have a 23% lower risk of cardiovascular events, including stroke, heart failure, and coronary heart disease, according to a study of more than a million people published in the European Heart Journal.” ~ learn more
Thankfully there’s a video, since this is hard to imagine. “We've shown that mechanical systems can be designed to behave in ways that seem almost paradoxical," says Bas Overvelde, principal investigator of the Soft Robotic Matter Group.” ~ learn more
The Economist wrote it was ~2%. Seems high? “The article doesn’t explain how they arrived at 1.8%. And since the Economist speaks in the voice of God (without bylines), I can’t corner and harass the actual journalist.” So, this blogger cracked his knuckles and began to dig in… ~ learn more
“Over the course of 18 years, a truck mechanic from Wisconsin injected himself with snake venom hundreds of times. His actions were considered stunts by some over those years, but his blood has just helped lead the way toward a universal antivenom.” ~ learn more
“Will we be an ancestor to our children…or a ghost? Will we support and guide? Will we haunt and plague? Will our presence fill them with joy and comfort…or fear and pain?” ~ learn more
“A title has two goals. First, think of all the people in the world who, if they clicked on your thing, would finish it and love it. Ideally, those people would click. … Other people will hate your thing. It’s fine, some people hate everything. But if they click on your thing, they’ll be annoyed and tell everyone you are dumb and bad. You don’t want that.” ~ learn more
Matt Levine covers a new startup offering that allows savers to leverage their retirement accounts 4:1. “There are no margin calls or mark-to-market triggers. If the market falls below a certain level, you aren’t forced to liquidate. The financing is structured more like a mortgage: It’s a loan to a separate entity (an LLC) that holds the assets. There’s no personal recourse beyond your initial contributions; you cannot owe more…
“GPT-4.1 is trained to follow instructions more closely and more literally than its predecessors, which tended to more liberally infer intent from user and system prompts. This also means, however, that GPT-4.1 is highly steerable and responsive to well-specified prompts - if model behavior is different from what you expect, a single sentence firmly and unequivocally clarifying your desired behavior is almost always sufficient to steer the model on course.”…