Late March Issue
The first dispatch of Amuse-Bouche comes late - something unsurprising considering its author.
The plan is for this newsletter to be sent out on the last Friday of every month, but as I am just now fully committing to this small and inchoate project of mine, I appreciate your patience. I hope you see something in this compilation that catches your eye.
🏭 Considering the current conversation surrounding gas prices and energy consumption, I’m first going to recommend an older feature by the NYT on the greenwashing of lithium mining and battery-driven solutions: The Lithium Gold Rush. “Electric cars and renewable energy may not be as green as they appear. Production of raw materials like lithium, cobalt and nickel that are essential to these technologies are often ruinous to land, water, wildlife and people.”
🔋 And an article from early March about Ukraine’s role to play: Before Invasion, Ukraine’s Lithium Wealth Was Drawing Global Attention. “Ukrainian researchers have speculated that the country’s eastern region holds close to 500,000 tons of lithium oxide, a source of lithium, which is critical to the production of the batteries that power electric vehicles. That preliminary assessment, if it holds, would make Ukraine’s lithium reserves one of the largest in the world.”
🚚 Positive new environmental policy: the E.P.A. further limits truck emissions. It’s worth noting however that the new truck regulations will cut pollution that harms human health, but they won’t affect emissions that warm the planet.
🐇 This Map Shows Where Biodiversity Is Most at Risk in America. “Across the continental United States, private land makes up almost 70 percent of areas with important concentrations of unprotected imperiled species.”
🌳 One last sad one: those trees you see companies plant, one for every purchase, could be very detrimental if done wrong (and let’s be clear, it’s mostly done wrong): Tree Planting Is Booming.
🌷 How did some Plants Turn Predator long ago and inspire many creatures of myth and my favorite musical? Today there are about 800 known carnivorous species of plants.
💊 This article isn’t announcing a new FDA-approved pain drug. But understanding some of the science behind it and the progress being made is still important. As these "compounds worked exclusively on nociceptors that were sensing painful stimuli, they could squelch pain at the source, [...] when most clinically used analgesics tend to hit diverse targets in the central and peripheral nervous systems. Opioids, for example, act not just on nociceptors, but the brain, spinal cord, and the nervous system in the gut, which can lead to sedation, physical dependence, respiratory depression, and death.”
🔬“Zebrafish are well known as being excellent models for replicating both human physiology, human genetics, and human disease,” so these scientists want pharmaceutical companies to pivot from using mice and other mammals in early testing.
⚙️ Something I sent to my dad because we both love handmade low-budget innovations: citizen seismologists help understand Haiti’s earthquakes with Raspberry Shakes (cause y'know, seismometer made with a RaspberryPi).
⚡️Molecular electronics!! "Instead of taking aim at computing circuitry, Roswell is focusing on integrating single molecules into electronic biosensor circuits, an approach it hopes will soon provide a cheap and convenient way to detect viruses, pick up on environmental toxins, and evaluate the effects of pharmaceuticals in real time."
👀 This MIT Tech Review opinion piece I think is worth at least a look-over: about quantum computing hype. "Quantum computing is indeed one of the most important developments not only in physics, but in all of science. But “entanglement” and “superposition” are not magic wands that we can shake and expect to transform technology in the near future. Quantum mechanics is indeed weird and counterintuitive, but that by itself does not guarantee revenue and profit." (Incognito if needed)
📐Yes, it’s the Erdős-Graham problem: Math’s “Oldest Problem Ever” Gets a New Answer.
🏆 Dennis P. Sullivan of Stony Brook University and the City University Graduate Center won the 2022 Abel Prize “for his groundbreaking contributions to topology in its broadest sense, and in particular its algebraic, geometric and dynamical aspects.”
🪐 Of course, I have to include some astronomy-related articles, and The Atlantic has a piece on “ring rain,” the fact that Saturn's “rings didn’t exist when dinosaurs began roaming the Earth,” and how we should start saying goodbye to them.
🌑 As of March 21, NASA’s official tally of exoplanets is 5,005.
🗻 And for a romantic and endearing article about the committed cartographers who map the Swiss Alps - I absolutely loved this feature: The People Who Draw Rocks.
📚 My book recommendation for this month is Jackie Higgins’ Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. It’s a jam-packed depiction of 12 animals and the way they experience the world. Higgins quotes rigorously, making use of both studies and anecdotes, but never being inexact. Her writing is also dynamic, leaning into sentiments of wonder and curiosity. There’s beautiful imagery throughout and I promise there is no dull moment in this book. A solid read for anyone, regardless of their familiarity with evolutionary biology.
For my interview with Jackie Higgins describing the book - take a listen here.
My favorite two things on Twitter right now: this turtle and this improbable way to die.
Always let me know if there is an article you are interested in that you can’t access from the publications linked above, and I’ll “gift” it to you.
Next issue of this newsletter will be ready in your inbox Friday, April 29th! Thank you for reading!