A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
The Cloud Under the Sea
“The repair was now nearly done. All that remained was to rebury the cable on the seafloor, which they were doing using a bulldozer-sized remotely operated submersible named Marcas — and, of course, the paperwork.
Suddenly, the ship began to shudder. Hirai got to his feet, found he could barely stand, and staggered out of his cabin, grasping the handrail as he pulled himself up the narrow stairway to the bridge. “Engine trouble?” Hirai asked the captain, who’d already checked and replied that everything seemed normal. The ship continued to tremble. Looking out from the bridge, the sea appeared to be boiling.”
Behind the New Iron Curtain
“In a land of great rivers, the Volga is the river. They call it matushka, the mother; it flows from the Valdai Hills to the land of the Chuvash, the Tatars, the Cossacks, the Kalmyks, and into the Caspian Sea. It’s where Europe and Asia meet or part, are bridged or blocked, depending on whether the compass of Russian history is pointing east or west. It’s where it all started, after all, where the empire took root: Along the river one finds many of the cities that have established Russian culture and faith—from Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin, to Stalingrad (now called Volgograd), the site of the infamous World War II siege. This is a history that weighs heavily on Russian identity today, as the country continues to look backward, sifting its vaunted past for new myths of grandeur. It seems prepared to resist and to suffer, acts at which Russians have always excelled, and to have resigned itself to a future of isolation, autocracy, and perhaps even self-destruction.”
China Successfully Tests Maglev Trains in Vacuum Tube, Eyeing Future Speeds of 4,000 Kph
“China's new high-speed train doesn't roll along railways, it flies through tubes.
There are hopes it will one day connect cities and villages across the country, running at speeds of up to 4,000 kilometres per hour.
The magnetic-levitation (or maglev) train can clock speeds of 623 kph in tests — almost 200 kph quicker than the fastest train in service.
It is yet to be rolled out, but in February it went even faster, during a test of technology crucial to the train's high speed.
For the first time it travelled stably through the 2-kilometre low-vacuum tube, according to China's state run Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC).
CASIC is yet to reveal the speed it reached, but said it was faster than its previous record of 623 kph. ”
Joseph Priestley Created Revolutionary “Maps” of Time
“It’s a testament to the wide-ranging and unconventional nature of Joseph Priestley’s mind that no one has settled on a term to sum up exactly what he was. The eighteenth-century British polymath has been described as, among other things, a historian, a chemist, an educator, a philosopher, a theologian, and a political radical who became, for a period of time, the most despised person in England. Priestley’s many contradictions—as a rationalist Unitarian millenarian, as a mild-mannered controversialist, as a thinker who was both ahead of his time and behind it—have provided endless fodder for the historians who have debated the precise nature of his legacy and his place among his fellow Enlightenment intellectuals. But his contributions—however they are categorized—have continued to live on in subtle and surprisingly enduring ways, more than two hundred years after his death, at the age of seventy, in rural Pennsylvania.”
How Many More Ozempic-like Drugs Are In the Pipeline?
“Social networks boosted the drug’s fame: In mid-2022, a viral TikTok clip claimed Kim Kardashian had used semaglutide to lose 15 pounds so that she could wear an iconic Marilyn Monroe dress to the Met Gala in New York. In the months that followed, everyone from former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk acknowledged resorting to the medication to tamp down their appetites and slim down. Today, three out of four Americans say they have heard of this type of drug — and of those, more than half consider it a good option for weight loss, according to a Pew Research survey.
Last November, however, the ones with their eyes on the drug were cardiologists. At the opening of the 2023 annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Philadelphia, results of a clinical trial generated tremendous interest: Semaglutide, it appeared, was a new tool to treat heart disease.”
The Tiny Ultrabright Laser That Can Melt Steel
“In 2016, the Japanese government announced a plan for the emergence of a new kind of society. Human civilization, the proposal explained, had begun with hunter-gatherers, passed through the agrarian and industrial stages, and was fast approaching the end of the information age. As then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe put it, “We are now witnessing the opening of the fifth chapter.”
This chapter, called Society 5.0, would see made-on-demand goods and robot caretakers, taxis, and tractors. Many of the innovations that will enable it, like artificial intelligence, might be obvious. But there is one key technology that is easy to overlook: lasers.
The lasers of Society 5.0 will need to meet several criteria. They must be small enough to fit inside everyday devices. They must be low-cost so that the average metalworker or car buyer can afford them—which means they must also be simple to manufacture and use energy efficiently. And because this dawning era will be about mass customization (rather than mass production), they must be highly controllable and adaptive.”
How Perfectly Can Reality Be Simulated?
“Quixel got its start helping artists create the textures for digital models, a practice that historically relied on sleight of hand. (Online, a small subculture has formed around “texture archaeology”: for Super Mario 64, released in 1996, reflective surfaces would have been too inefficient to render, so a metal hat worn by Mario was made with a low-resolution fish-eye photograph of flowers against a blue sky, which created an illusion of shininess.) It soon became clear that the best graphics would be created with high-resolution photographs. In 2011, Quixel began capturing 3-D images of real-world objects and landscapes—what the company calls “megascans.” “We have, to a great extent, mastered our ability to digitize the real world,” Teddy Bergsman Lind, who co-founded Quixel, said. He particularly enjoyed digitizing Iceland. “Vast volcanic landscapes, completely barren, desolate, alienlike, shifting from pitch-black volcanic rock to the most vivid reds I’ve ever seen in an environment to completely moss-covered areas to glaciers,” he said. “There’s just so much to scan.””