A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
It’s Me, Hi, I’m the Problem. I’m 33.
“If demographics are destiny, the demographic born in 1990 and 1991 was destined to compete for housing, jobs and other resources. Those two birth years, the people set to turn 33 and 34 in 2024, make up the peak of America’s population.
As the biggest part of the biggest generation, this hyper-specific age group — call us what you will, but I like “peak millennials” — has moved through the economy like a person squeezing into a too-small sweater. At every life stage, it has stretched a system that was often too small to accommodate it, leaving it somewhat flabby and misshapen in its wake. My cohort has an outsized amount of economic power, but that has sometimes made life harder for us.”
Why South Korean Women Aren't Having Babies
“Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, beating its own staggeringly low record year after year.
Figures released on Wednesday show it fell by another 8% in 2023 to 0.72.
This refers to the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. For a population to hold steady, that number should be 2.1.
If this trend continues, Korea's population is estimated to halve by the year 2100.”
Millions of Research Papers At Risk of Disappearing From the Internet
“More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.
“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.””
The Many Uses of Mini-Organs
“Organoids could help speed drug development. By some estimates, 90% of drug candidates fail during human trials. That’s because the preclinical testing happens largely in cells and rodents. Neither is a perfect model. Cells lack complexity. And mice, as we all know, are not humans.
Organoids aren’t humans either, but they come from humans. And they have the advantage of having more complexity than a layer of cells in a dish. That makes them a good model for screening drug candidates. When I wrote about organoids in 2015, one cancer researcher told me that studying cells to understand how an organ functions is like studying a pile of bricks to understand the function of a house. Why not just study the house?”
Panamaximization
“The biggest investment ACP has made is to add a new, larger, set of locks to the canal. This expansion was approved by a referendum in 2006, was completed in 2016, and cost $5.25 billion. This third set of locks expanded the capacity of the canal overall: not only can more ships move through the canal thanks to added capacity, but much larger ships can now cross. The larger locks defined a standard, Neopanamax. During expansion, ACP also deepened the navigation channels and increased Gatun Lake’s level by 45 centimeters.”
Scientists Discover 100 New Marine Species in New Zealand
“A team of 21 scientists set off on an expedition in the largely uncharted waters of Bounty Trough off the coast of the South Island of New Zealand in February hoping to find a trove of new species.
The expedition paid off, they said on Sunday, with the discovery of 100 new species, a number that was likely to grow, said Alex Rogers, a marine biologist who was a leader of the expedition.”
How Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs
“In a 2012 study, titled “The Ideal Self at Play: The Appeal of Video Games That Let You Be All You Can Be,” a team of five psychologists more closely examined the way in which players experiment with “type” in video games. They found that video games that allowed players to play out their “ideal selves” (embodying roles that allow them to be, for example, braver, fairer, more generous, or more glorious) were not only the most intrinsically rewarding, but also had the greatest influence on our emotions. “Humans are drawn to video and computer games because such games provide players with access to ideal aspects of themselves,” the authors concluded. Video games are at their most alluring, in other words, when they allow a person to close the distance between how they are, and how they wish to be.”