to your health
How respiratory viruses evolve to become milder.
By Matt Ridley: “If mutation can make a disease more dangerous, why have rhinoviruses never turned into killers?” | learn more
better doing
A horse’s ass designed the space shuttle.
A valuable lesson on path dependency. Or why “we’ll just change it later” is a strategy with risks. | learn more
tech, startups, internet
Reddit is currently the most popular search engine.
“The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries.” | learn […]
tech, startups, internet
The future of Candor Ventures.
Congratulations Noah, Peter & Raul on this big step! “We are working together to build the “Y Combinator” for fintech companies through a fund and studio model. To accomplish this we’ve created a $125M fund structure with $90+M committed.“ | learn more
fun facts
Cunningham’s law.
“The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” | learn more (but not much more)
fun facts
This city does not exist.
Imagine a webpage that uses AI to invent an entirely new satellite map every time you hit refresh. Reminiscent of this word does not exist from late 2021. | learn more
fun facts
Some kind of loophole.
“Its tiny train slowly bumps back and forth, going approximately nowhere. And it’s now at the center of a massive court battle between its operators and the U.S. federal government.” | learn more
on the blockchain
Reporter can finally buy crypto after leaving NYT.
A thread by Nathaniel Popper: “One fringe benefit of leaving the NYT is that I have been able to play around w/ owning and trading crypto for the first time. I’ve still got plenty of unanswered questions, but the big […]
big ideas
The urine revolution: how recycling pee could help to save the world.
“Separating urine from the rest of sewage could mitigate some difficult environmental problems, but there are big obstacles to radically re-engineering one of the most basic aspects of life.” | learn more
thoughts of food
China’s approval of gene-edited crops energizes researchers.
There are a lot of people to feed in China, so it’s probably a good thing that their new rules are less strict than the EU’s policy of Just Say No to GMOs. “Scientists say newly published guidelines will spur […]