Hi everyone!
I hope you got to slow down a bit over the holidays, recharge, and spend some quality time with friends and family.
Now that the new year is well underway, it's time for our monthly dose of nerdy, and cool news.
Hope you enjoy,
Xavier
🤓 Cool Stuff I Found on the Internet
The Amazon Hack: Make Mailing Great Again
Want to send someone a letter but think postal stamps are too expensive? Just use your Amazon Prime subscription instead! You can send friends a can of tomato sauce or a single screw and add a gift note.
Parenthood is disgusting
Neuroscientists discovered that parenthood alters your brain’s disgust response. They found that long-term exposure to dirty diapers and other types of body fluids significantly reduces how grossed out parents feel. I kind of knew this instinctively, but now it has been confirmed by science!
Claude Biodome
Developer Martin DeVido gave Claude control over a living tomato plant. Every half hour, Claude checks the sensor measurements and can decide to actuate LED growing lights, a heat mat, a fan or a water pump. So far, Claude has kept the plant alive for 60 days!
Walking speed in cities
Here’s a fun fact: people walk faster in big cities. This pattern was first discovered in 1976 and links city population size to pedestrian speed. The explanation? One theory suggests that busy cities lead to sensory overload, pushing people to move quickly to reduce social interference. Another theory suggests it’s about money: larger cities have higher wages and living costs, increasing the value of time and encouraging faster movement.
⏳ On this day...
1848 - James W. Marshall discovers gold flakes at Sutter's Mill, sparking a massive global migration that accelerated the settlement of the American West and forever changed its landscape.
1935 - The Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company sells the first canned beer, a major innovation in food technology that revolutionized how beverages are packaged, shipped, and consumed.
1984 - Apple releases the Macintosh, defining the future of personal computing by becoming the first mass-market computer to successfully utilize a graphical user interface and a mouse.
1986 - NASA's Voyager 2 probe makes its closest approach to Uranus, capturing the only close-up data we have of the ice giant and discovering several new moons and rings.
đź‘˝ Space
Back to the Moon!
For the first time in over 50 years, NASA is sending astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon. The Artemis ll mission will be a critical test and a stepping stone for the third mission, which aims to land humans on the moon again. I just wonder why very few people seem excited about this?
First medical evacuation
For the first time, astronauts have been evacuated from the International Space Station for a medical reason. The Crew-11 mission was cut short because a crew member experienced a health issue that could not be diagnosed or treated in orbit. NASA explained this was mainly precautionary and that the situation was never a crisis.
Remember Blockchain?
Ethereum’s underlying blockchain hit a record: it processed 2.5 million transactions per day with an average fee of less than $0.20. That’s amazing for a technology that had a hard time scaling for many years. The surge is due to increased demand for stablecoins such as USDC and USDT.
⚡️ Energy & Environment
In pictures: China's green energy boom
Last year, China installed more than half of all new wind and solar power in the entire world. To grasp the speed: in May alone, China added enough renewable energy to power Poland. That's a rate of roughly 100 new solar panels installed every single second. Photographer Weimin Chu is capturing this historic shift. Using drones, he photographs these vast power plants from above, revealing their scale and their relationship with the landscape.
Concrete battery
MIT researchers have developed a new type of concrete (ec3) that functions as a structural material and a supercapacitor. It’s a special mix of cement, carbon, and electrolytes. It could turn walls, roads or building foundations into giant batteries. A volume the size of a typical basement wall could store enough electricity to meet an average home’s daily needs.
🧠🤖 Artificial intelligence
Replacing developers, again...
Will AI replace developers? It certainly looks that way. But this article argues we’ve been trying to replace developers since the 1970s and have always failed. The author argues it’s because AI can’t replace human judgement or deep thinking. Software development, he argues, isn’t about writing code. It’s about managing complexity. An interesting point of view!
Ads in ChatGPT
OpenAI will start showing ads in ChatGPT for people using a free account or the new low-cost "Go" plan. The ads will be clearly labeled, and OpenAI promises to never sell user data to advertisers. Let's see how that will turn out...
Electricity use of coding agents
We already know that systems like ChatGPT consume a huge amount of power. But AI coding agents take that up a notch. Simon Couch calculated that a typical day of programming consumes about 1,3kWh of electricity, the equivalent of running a dishwasher.
Shortage of power AND people
AI models need a lot of computational power, which means the demand for new AI data centers and electricity is booming. Many companies are already struggling with securing enough electricity to power their servers, and now there's a new shortage: skilled workers. Companies are struggling to hire electrical engineers, construction managers, and HVAC specialists.