Welcome to the week.
Friendly reminder that we have a podcast! Three podcasts, actually.
As I mentioned last week, our flagship podcast, The Most Important Question is in the middle of another one of our series with Run For Something, where Quinn chats with candidates and alumni from the Run For Something pipeline. This week’s conversation is with May Thach, who’s running in Florida. Check it out, she’s awesome.
Our parenting podcast, Not Right Now, is on summer break but we’re running reruns all summer if you need to catch up! Do it here.
And finally, our newest podcast all about reality TV, It’s Called Reality, just dropped a new episode covering the show Couples Therapy. Listen here!
Okay, housekeeping over! Onto the news.
This Week
And more.
Stay cool out there,
— Willow
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✔ Fact Check
What percentage of the world's fresh water is used by agriculture?
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⚡️ Climate change:
A new study has found that the economic damage from wildfire smoke-related deaths alone outweighs every other estimated climate cost combined. (HEATMAP)
🌎 Global offshore wind costs just crossed a threshold making it cheaper than new coal, and new mega-vessels are about to push costs down even further. (Clean Technica)
🌍 Africa’s on-grid solar capacity additions have already topped last year’s total, driven by falling costs and a wave of new solar-plus-battery deals. (African Energy)
🌎 Solar just became the EU’s top power source, hitting a record 25% of electricity in June. (Canary Media)
🦠 Health & Bio:
Ten of Louisiana’s biggest air polluters have zero public air monitors within five miles, which is the result of industry-backed laws designed to keep residents in the dark. (Floodlight)
🌏 The world’s first new TB vaccine in over 100 years just got a manufacturing partner, and if approved, the WHO estimates it could prevent 76 million cases and save 8.5 million lives. (Reuters)
We finally know how to design an HIV vaccine using mRNA tech, but foreign aid cuts just yanked the funding out from under the trials that were supposed to prove it works. (Vox)
🌍 Millions of women currently wait years for an endometriosis diagnosis, but new saliva- and gut-sensor-based tests just got greenlit that could cut that wait down dramatically. (The Guardian)
💦 Food & Water:
🌎 In one of the driest places on Earth (Chile’s Atacama Desert), locals nicknamed “the crazy cloud people” are literally pulling drinking water out of fog, and researchers now want cities to build it into official water plans. (Mongabay)
California farmers who once hated the idea of solar are now converting thousands of acres of dried-out farmland into massive solar fields because the water just isn’t coming back. (LA Times)
🌍 Global hunger dropped for the third year in a row, but Africa now has more hungry people than Asia in absolute terms, and conflict and El Niño could reverse the progress. (World Food Programme)
👩💻 Beep Boop:
New York just became the first state to hit pause on massive AI data centers, thanks to a grassroots campaign. (Food & Water Watch)
Anthropic’s guardrails against AI-powered cyberattacks are so aggressive that security researchers say the models are now basically unusable for the defensive work they used to help with. (Politico)
Google’s AI search mode is keeping people on Google instead of sending them to the rest of internet, and publishers like Wikipedia say their traffic is cratering. (The New York Times)
Indigenous technologists built AI tools that never leave the community, running locally instead of shipping data off to Big Tech. (Betakit)
🌏 Communities worldwide are banding together into data cooperatives so they can set the terms for how their information gets used instead of just letting AI companies scrape it for free. (Rest of World)
📣 Last week’s most popular Action Step was calling your reps to demand they Reverse the Foreign Aid Freeze.
👉 NEW: Find every action recommended in It’s Called Science. right here.
🌎 = Global news/action steps
Run To Build The Future You Want
Today we're gonna talk about Florida and representation, and how Florida has very little of it, in even the loosest definition of the word.
We're gonna do that by introducing you to my new friend, May Thach. May is a candidate for state representative in Florida, and boy, is she an awesome human being.
Look, you folks across the country, across the world, told us you wanted more very specific, preferably living examples of fight and progress you can see and touch and feel and vote for.
And in the second batch of conversations with our best friends at Run For Something, we are giving you more and more of that, and that's really exactly who May is.
This is a great conversation. I'm really just such a fan. May, like everybody else in the series, is sourced from the Run For Something pipeline and graduating classes. She and all these other folks are the next generation of leaders, if we will have them, if we will support them, and recruit them and vote for them, and then hold their feet to the fire.
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
▶ Or watch the full episode on YouTube.
Animal Intelligence > Artificial Intelligence
What does it mean to really make something?
Not generate it, but create it, with all the friction and uncertainty that entails.
This week, cognitive scientist and science writer, Sheetal Potdar, traces the evolutionary roots of creativity from monkey scams in India to walnut--cracking crows in Japan, and asks what we give up when we let AI do the hard part.
▶ Watch Life Finds A Way on YouTube.
Fake crystals with awesome powers
For thousands of years, people have ascribed supernatural powers to shiny rocks pulled from the earth.
Even today, crystals—a wondrously diverse collection of minerals that take on beautiful, geometrical forms—ignite the human imagination like few other natural materials.
If you need any evidence, just type "properties of quartz" into your Google search bar, and alongside troves of geological information, you'll find sites extolling the gemstone's purifying energy; its ability to amplify creativity; its stabilizing effect in times of emotional turmoil.
It will come as no surprise to readers of this newsletter that the metaphysical properties of crystals are not backed up by science.
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