Welcome to the week.
Just a heads up that I will be OOO next week, so there won’t be a newsletter!
And forgive me for another plug of our new podcast, It’s Called Reality. Go deeper with us into the culture, the psychology, and what reality shows are actually telling us about the world. Listen here.
Okay, news time!
This Week
And more.
Have a great week,
— Willow
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⚡️ Climate change:
🌏 Pakistan just completed the fastest distributed-solar rollout in the world, but the unplanned boom is now triggering a “utility death spiral” that’s pushing costs onto the people who can’t afford to leave the grid. (Bright Spots)
The world has never actually pulled off a real energy transition before, and current renewable plans aren’t nearly ambitious enough. It’s time to go bigger. (Bloomberg)
🌎 Europe is bracing for extreme heat this week, with warning across the continent and temperatures that could hit records for this time of year. (The New York Times)
FERC passed major bipartisan reforms requiring grid operators to prevent data centers from shifting infrastructure costs onto regular ratepayers, and pushing the wider use of grid-enhancing tech instead of just building more transmission lines. (HEATMAP)
🦠 Health & Bio:
A landmark study identified a 14-protein blood test that can predict lung cancer more than five years before diagnosis. (Ground Truths)
Scientists are finding that viral infections, including COVID, may reawaken dormant cancer cells in survivors, based on mouse studies and healthcare database analysis. (Los Angeles Times)
The COVID vaccine cut major cardiovascular events by about 40% with the benefit persisting for years. (The Washington Post)
Residents living near data centers are suing over relentless low-frequency noise that’s disrupting their sleep and health. (The New York Times)
🍃 Food & Water & Ecosystems:
Researchers are vaccinating wild animals to protect both human health and endangered species (Works in Progress)
Scientists mapped Earth’s underground fungal networks at global scale for the first time, finding they store four to six times as much carbon as all humans combined, and grasslands are the densest hotspots. (The New York Times)
US tomato prices rose about 40% between January and April, driven by a Florida freeze and weather disruptions in Mexico. (Bloomberg)
📣 What You Can Do:
🌍 Support the Against Malaria Foundation, where every donation directly funds bed nets (a reminder that the same kind of low-cost, high-impact prevention tools used in wild animal vaccination programs save human lives too) (go).
🌍 Use Climate Trace to see exactly where greenhouse gas emissions are coming from in your area (food prices are downstream of exactly this) (go).
🌎 The UK has launched a sweeping social media ban for under-16s, going further than Australia by including gaming and livestreaming platforms. (Reuters)
AI “nudify” apps have made deepfake abuse a widespread new form of bullying among teens, and laws meant to address it are lagging badly behind the technology. (The Wall Street Journal)
AI tools built to predict human behavior risk shaping the very behavior they’re forecasting, raising deep questions about free will and algorithmic feedback loops. (NPR)
An experiment testing “AI councils” found that when multiple AI models deliberate together, consensus processes drop about three-quarters of genuinely good ideas raised by only one model, which is the same groupthink problem that plagues human committees. (Exponential View)
📈 Last week’s most popular Action Step was using the air quality sensors from Purple Air to monitor air quality in your community.
👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.
🌎 = Global news/action steps
Today we're gonna talk about Texas.
For a decade, maybe 100 years, we've heard over and over, this is the year we flip Texas. Sometimes we get closer, sometimes we get much further away.
But as much as I'm excited about a candidate like James Talarico, I am always more interested in the people standing up to run in their communities at the state and local level.
So today, I'm going to introduce you to Junior Ezeonu.
You all have asked for more examples of people fighting for progress you can actually see and touch and feel. And in this batch of conversations, another one in partnership with our best friends at Run For Something, we're giving you exactly what you asked for.
And my friends, that's exactly who Junior is. I can't wait for you to hear more about him.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
The biology of thinking differently
This week in Life Finds A Way, writer Kavin Senapathy explores how we think about neurodiversity when we take a step back and consider cognitive diversity in other species.
While the neurodiversity paradigm emerged in the 1900s as a human-centered concept rooted in social justice, the biological reality it describes isn’t uniquely human at all. From crows to bees, cognitive diversity is standard in social species.
At a time when deficit-based thinking about autism and neurodivergence is the norm, and where systems are designed for the neurotypical, understanding neurodiversity as a part of biodiversity reframes the entire conversation.
▶ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.
An exclusive interview with Star Trek science advisor Erin MacDonald
Season 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds goes boldly in many new directions for the series. But its most audacious moment isn't when Illyrian civil rights attorney Neera Ketoul calls out Starfleet's hypocrisy for discriminating against genetically modified people, or even when two lower deckers from the USS Cerritos stumble into the live-action universe of Strange New Worlds. It's when Uhura broadcasts a song into a fold of subspace, accidentally generating an "improbability field" that traps the ship in an alternative reality where everyone is forced to express themselves through music.
That is the surprisingly thought-out explanation for Subspace Rhapsody, Star Trek's very first musical episode, in which the crew of the USS Enterprise must figure out how to close the improbability field before disaster ensues. As Spock and Uhura attempt to analyze the phenomenon, they and other members of the crew begin spontaneously breaking into song, leading to embarrassing and character-revealing moments as the rules of the musical universe force them to divulge their innermost feelings. It could have gone off the rails quickly. But the episode manages to tell an entertaining, and very Trek-y, story about a crew trying to regain control of their ship after encountering an unexplained space anomaly. And the musical performances are pretty damn impressive, too.
The fact that this episode didn't feel like a gimmick is largely thanks to the input of Erin MacDonald, Star Trek's resident science advisor, who consults on every series currently in the works.
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