A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
The Noble Rhubarb: Himalayan Marvel of Nature’s Ingenuity
At almost two meters tall, the Noble Rhubarb (also known as Sikkim Rhubarb) stands out – just a little - in its Himalayan habitat. While nature has designed its neighboring herbs and shrubs to grow short and stumpy, this species of rhubarb has other ideas. It towers above the other local plant life and is often visible from miles away. How does this strange, ethereal plant survive – let alone thrive – in this inhospitable environment? Its secret is simple but ingenious: it is its own greenhouse.
‘We’ve Got a F--king Spy in This Place’: Inside America’s Greatest Espionage Mystery
Two hours after he’d left the embassy, Sellers changed into a third disguise — a wig and mustache — then arrived at the pre-arranged meeting site: the parking entrance to an apartment building in Moscow’s tree-lined Lenin Hills district. But when he spotted COWL, Sellers sensed something was wrong. The once strong and confident man had lost weight and was cowering like a beaten dog. COWL had clearly been arrested and tortured. Sellers knew exactly what was coming next: a half-dozen vehicles descended. A group of KGB officers burst out of them, grabbed Sellers, threw him into a van and sped off towards Lubyanka, the KGB’s neo-baroque headquarters.
A Short History of Web Bots and Bot Detection Techniques
While some bots might be very useful for the internet (like search engine crawlers or archivers), a lot of times it’s not the case. Site owners were fighting bots from the very beginning of the internet, and techniques to detect them evolved as bots became more sophisticated. Today we’ll cover the evolution of both bots and their detection techniques and see how this cat-and-mouse game unfold.
I Deleted My Second Brain
Two nights ago, I deleted everything.
Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever borrowed, broken, or bastardized. Gone. Erased in seconds.
What followed: Relief.
And a comforting silence where the noise used to be.
Scientists Genetically Engineer Tobacco Plants to Pump Out a Popular Cancer Drug
They’re anything but. The Pacific yew naturally synthesizes paclitaxel—commonly known as Taxol, a chemotherapy drug widely used to fight multiple types of aggressive cancer. In the late 1990s, it was FDA-approved for breast, ovarian, and lung cancer and, since then, has been used off-label for roughly a dozen other malignancies. It’s a modern success story showing how we can translate plant biology into therapeutic drugs.
But because Taxol is produced in the tree’s bark, harvesting the life-saving chemical kills its host. Yew trees are slow-growing with very long lives, making them an unsustainable resource. If scientists can unravel the genetic recipe for Taxol, they can recreate the steps in other plants—or even in yeast or bacteria—to synthesize the molecule at scale without harming the trees.
There’s a Race to Power the Future and China Is Pulling Away
In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.
At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.
