Hello, and happy Sunday. I’m having a great summer with lots of reading - hope you are too. :) Here goes the list for this week.
- It’ll Take an Army to Kill the Emperor - Very nice profile of the state of cancer research around the world at the moment.
“The men and women who are trying to bring down cancer are starting to join forces rather than work alone. Together, they are winning a few of the battles against the world’s fiercest disease. For this unprecedented special report, we visited elite cancer research centers around the country to find out where we are in the war.”
- Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element - One of the most interesting pieces you will read in quite some time. Apparently the lead in gasoline can explain crime rates, ADHD, and lower IQs.
- The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of - Follow-up from the previous piece; this is about Clair Patterson, a geochemist who went on to campaign against the addition of tetraethyl-lead to gasoline. His work was instrumental in the ensuing ban on leaded fuel. And how did it start? Because he discovered lead contaminated his work on measuring the age of the universe.
- The World is Running Out of Sand - Yes, it really is. Sand is the world’s second most widely used natural resource, after water.
- Inside the digital heist that terrorized the world—and only made $100k - You all must have heard of WannaCry, the ransomware that infected hundreds of thousands of computers in the last month or so. For an attack of this scale, one would expect a larger amount of money to be made. The perpetrators, however, made some amateur mistakes which limited their income.
- The Mad King of Juice: Inside the Dysfunctional Origins of Juicero - If you haven’t heard of Juicero yet, you should look it up. It is basically a much touted and anticipated (and funded) cold press for fresh juices. It retails for $399. Somewhere in the pipeline something went wrong; what?
- The Officers who Protect Britain’s Nuclear Plants - “Since 2005, every nuclear power station in the UK has had armed protection – the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. But why does such security exist, and what does the job entail?” Well, if you face a terror attack at a nuclear power plant, you better be able to handle it. The Civil Nuclear Constabulary has never been called into action yet, though. The members claim that the practice sessions are fun.
- What Makes a Genius? - Great feature from National Geographic about genius, and what constitutes it. Is it IQ? How about Charles Darwin, then? Does high IQ translate to intellectual success in life?
(46 slices of Albert Einstein’s brain) - They Call It Canaan - About a new city in Haiti, still struggling and floundering. Crude infrastructure hampers its progress, and residents are forced to siphon power off a large house a few miles away that has a connection to the grid.
As crude as its infrastructure seems, Canaan has evolved into more than just a collection of people concentrated in one place. “If you go to a shantytown in Port-au-Prince, it’s all corridors—you could never get a car there. But this is hundreds of kilometers that a car could go through,” says Anna Konotchick, who oversees the American Red Cross’s work in Canaan. “It might look like a shanty to somebody else, but Chinese cities, American cities, they have formal urban processes. Here it’s the same thing.” To make that happen, people who are often described as the poorest in the Western Hemisphere invested more than $90 million of their own money to build some 20,000 houses—no bulldozers or grand architectural planning, just families taking matters into their own hands. - The Survivors Guide to Adulthood - Lovely advice to people who are about to graduate now.
Many of you will leave college as I did, believing that you will change the world, but you will soon discover that the truth is the reverse. The world will change you. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be frightening. You may feel that your liberal ideals are incompatible with your unfulfilling job. You will learn that people will judge you not by the depth of your intellect, but by how well you accomplish the boring tasks set out for you. You may realize that you are becoming more and more like the average adult, someone you swore you would not become.