Melatonin

Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chronobiotic drug with hypnotic properties”. Using it as a pure hypnotic – a sleeping pill – is like using an AK-47 as a club to bash your enemies’ heads in. It might work, but you’re failing to appreciate the full power and subtlety available to you.

the correct dose is 0.3 mg:

Most drugstore melatonin supplements are 10x or more the recommended dose. the FDA chose to label it a dietary supplement, which does not require FDA regulation. Clearly, this was wrong because melatonin is a hormone, not a dietary supplement. Quickly, supplement manufacturers saw the huge potential in selling melatonin to promote good sleep. After all, millions of Americans struggled to get to sleep and stay asleep, and were desperate for safe alternatives to anti-anxiety medicines and sleeping pills that rarely worked well and came with plenty of side effects. Also, manufacturers must have realized that they could avoid paying royalties to MIT for melatonin doses over the 1 mg measure. So, they produced doses of 3 mg, 5 mg, 10 mg and more! Their thinking–like so much else in our American society–was likely, “bigger is better!” But, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Cheetah Robot

MIT’s Cheetah 3 robot — an upgrade to the Cheetah 2, can now leap and gallop across rough terrain, climb a staircase littered with debris, and quickly recover its balance when suddenly yanked or shoved — all while essentially blind. The 40 kg robot is intentionally designed to do all this without relying on cameras or any external environmental sensors. The idea is to allow it to “feel” its way through its surroundings via “blind locomotion,” (like making your way across a pitch-black room), eliminating visual distractions, which would slow the robot down.

25K trafficked artifacts

This is the culmination of 4 years of investigation into a major smuggling ring that began with the discovery of a looted archaeological site in the small town of Riesi in the Caltanissetta area of central Sicily. Before the coordinated raids, Italian authorities confiscated 3K artifacts, 1200 forgeries and 1500 tools of the looting trade including metal detectors.

4x Wealth from Global City

There were time and motion studies in the early 20th century which found that if a city could have 2x the population then productivity would increase and per person income would increase by 7%. Currently the world is 56% urbanized. Only 10% are in megacities with population over 10m. 100% urbanization would 2x world GDP with increased productivity. Another 30% boost in productivity would come from having everyone in megacities.

Dissolving The Fermi Paradox

relying on the Drake Equation is the same kind of error. We’re not interested in the average number of alien civilizations, we’re interested in the distribution of probability over number of alien civilizations. In particular, what is the probability of few-to-none?

SDO solve this with a “synthetic point estimate” model, where they choose random points from the distribution of possible estimates suggested by the research community, run the simulation a bunch of times, and see how often it returns different values.

A standard Drake Equation multiplying our best estimates for every parameter together yields a probability of less than 1 in a million billion billion billion that we’re alone in our galaxy – making such an observation pretty paradoxical. SDO’s own method, taking account parameter uncertainty into account, yields a probability of 33%.

C Is Not Low-level

For a language to be “close to the metal,” it must provide an abstract machine that maps easily to the abstractions exposed by the target platform. It’s easy to argue that C was a low-level language for the PDP-11. it is possible to make C code run quickly but only by spending 1000s of person-years building a sufficiently smart compiler—and even then, only if you violate some of the language rules. Compiler writers let C programmers pretend that they are writing code that is “close to the metal” but must then generate machine code that has very different behavior if they want C programmers to keep believing that they are using a fast language.”

East of Edenworks

The Edenworks fish and greens ecosystem farm in Brooklyn uses broad-spectrum LED lighting for continuous production indoors, all year long. The microgreens are in floating aquaponic containers, fertilized by the microbially-digested fish waste from below, and they thrive on this nutrient stream. Results: the greens and fish are quite yummy and popular at the local Whole Foods.

  • 90% of American seafood is imported and 40% is mislabeled (!)
  • Fish are 40x more efficient than cows at converting feed to body mass
  • Over 50% of all fish meals come from aquaculture ($160B globally)
  • Edenworks’ aquaponic microbiome improves conversion of nitrogen to plant yield by 18x over indoor hydroponics

Salvation

Salvation is a terrific series about what could happen if the world learned an extinction-event sized asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. It does a great job researching how governments, the public, and hacktivist groups might respond to such news. (For instance, one government might try to send up something that would cause the asteroid to change course just enough to make it crash into a spot on the other side of the planet in order to minimize the damage in their country. This could cause world powers to consider nuclear warfare to stop that from happening.)

Sexism and Racism Never Diminish

Many organizations and institutions are dedicated to identifying and reducing the prevalence of social problems, from unethical research to unwarranted aggressions. But our studies suggest that even well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their own efforts, simply because they view each new instance in the decreasingly problematic context that they themselves have brought about. Although modern societies have made extraordinary progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infant mortality, the majority of people believe that the world is getting worse. The fact that concepts grow larger when their instances grow smaller may be 1 source of that pessimism.