A list with interesting links I came across in the past weeks. Enjoy!
- Diamonds Are Bullshit – Priceonomics (link)
The economics of buying diamond rings. Turns out, diamonds are a terrible investment and really marketing campaigns have tricked us into buying diamond engagement rings.
- Club-goers take first bites of lab-made chicken – Nature (link)
Slaughter-free meat grown in bioreactors reaches select diners in Singapore in the form of chicken nuggets. Singapore regulators in December approved in vitro cultured chicken, giving the world’s lab-developed meat industry its official commercial start.
- How the US can solve the global vaccine shortfall – Agglomerations (link)
This article made me a lot more convinced hat patent buyouts would be a good idea, freeing up latent vaccine production capacity while preserving incentives to develop vaccines against future variants.
- Oxford malaria vaccine proves highly effective in Burkina Faso trial – The Guardian (link)
This is excellent news!
- Solving the Aging Problem: An Interview with Aubrey de Grey – Neurohacker (link)
Some claims are pretty bold, but some thoughts are really interesting. For me, it was a revelation to think of solving aging as ‘damage repair’ – a problem that is actually tractable. There are only a limited number of ways (seven) in which something in the body can be broken. We don’t know how and why it broke, we just need to fix it. To treat, for example, heavy metal poisoning you don’t need to know how lead damages your body. You just have to get rid of it.
- I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? – Crystal Prison Zone (link)
Spoilers: not great. Who would have guessed? But the details are really quite interesting. A guy used the same tables in different publications. When told that some values don’t meet any significance thresholds he just added or subtracted integer numbers from it. Shockingly, but not surprisingly, journals were slow to respond.
- Why it makes sense to bike without a helmet – Howie Chong (link)
I was expecting some kind of superficial “oh well people just feel safer and drive more carelessly” argument and was positively surprised at how many interesting thoughts there are in this piece. Per hour spend on the road, your head is safer on a bike than it is as a pedestrian or even inside a car. But people think in categories and ‘pedestrian = helmet’ is simply not one, even if it is irrational. A rise in how frequently helmets are worn on skis and snowboards didn’t decrease fatal accidents and mandating helmets just makes people use the bike less – increasing risks for all other cyclists.
- 2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI And Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm – Intelligent Living (link)
Somewhat buzzwordy, but the progress really seems astounding