“In a contract worth up to US$843 million, NASA has selected SpaceX to design the "US Deorbit Vehicle." The spacecraft will bring the $150 billion International Space Station out of orbit to safely and burn up in our atmosphere at 3,000 ºF (1,649 ºC).” ~ learn more
“Most people incorrectly prefer aisle seats to window seats. They’re sure to discover their error sooner or later, but in the meantime, use it to your advantage.” ~ learn more
“We began dating in the summer of 2015 and broke up in the spring of 2016.” Teresa Ibarra ran a variety of data analyses on roughly 83,000 messages. ~ learn more
“Data from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) indicates that more than 31,000 people were treated in hospitals for umbrella-related injuries between 2008 and 2017.” ~ learn more
This is a long and well-researched story about water deals between cities. I had never considered these dynamics in the past and find them very interesting. I have always considered Chicago to be water-rich, and this really helps that point hit home. ~ learn more
“The most significant results were observed in the beams with completely separated hexagonal tablets, which are similar to nacre. These beams exhibited 19 times the ductility and 17 times the fracture toughness while retaining nearly the same strength as the solid cement paste beam.” ~ learn more
“The health of an animal reflects the health of its environment. One glance at a starving boar, ribs pressing through the skin, and you understand the boar’s environment lacks the food it needs to be healthy. … Humans are animals too. We’ve evolved to exist in an ancestral environment where health was the default.” ~ learn more
“So the boys missed some school but they read a lot of books. They missed some classes but they made the world their classroom. They were learning to trust their instincts, to follow projects through to conclusion and to lead their own education.” ~ learn more
“Inbal Shani is the chief product officer at GitHub, where she leads core product management, along with product strategy, marketing, open source, and communities, including the development of GitHub Copilot.” Notably Copilot was one of the first big LLM use cases that took off, even before ChatGPT. ~ learn more
This isn’t really about Chicago at all, it’s about Colombia. “The small, relatively poor South American country has received four times more Venezuelans than the United States but offers a path to integration. We went to see it.” ~ learn more