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Good morning and welcome to Wednesday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.24 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.47 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"One of the most difficult things is not to change society – but to change yourself."
–Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)
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❌Correction
For transparency's sake, we've started to place corrections front-and-center instead of within the section where we messed up.
Yesterday, we forgot a hyperlink in our "Calling From the Future" story about a robot that can administer needle-free vaccines. So if you want to learn more about “Cobi,” just click here.
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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👋 Adios to Algorithms ?
 Image: Phil Roeder/Getty
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🎁 A bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers introduced bills in the House and Senate yesterday that would require online platforms to let users opt-out of content algorithms.
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📝 Details, details… If passed, the Filter Bubble Transparency Act would require internet platforms to let people use a version of their services where content doesn’t come from "opaque algorithms" driven by personal data.
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The bill would exempt companies with fewer than 500 employees, those with annual gross receipts lower than $50,000,000 in the last three-year period, and those gathering data on fewer than one million users annually.
🏛️ Zoom out: Leaked internal documents from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen – who testified before Congress last month – show CEO Mark Zuckerberg resisted rolling back changes to the company’s algorithm in 2018 for fear of losing engagement, despite warnings from staffers that it was promoting outrage and sensationalism.
👁️ Looking ahead… The Filter Bubble Transparency Act will have the opportunity to be considered after Democrats finish negotiations over the ~$1.75 trillion budget reconciliation bill (which are expected to last at least through 2021).
From the Left: Business Insider
From the Right: Washington Examiner
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🌱 The Power of Plants (No, Not the Industry Kind...)
 Image: Giphy
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🎁 Leaves from the Psychotria insularum plant could be as effective as ibuprofen in lowering inflammation and could even be used to treat illnesses such as Parkinson’s and cancer, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday.
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📖 Behind the find… The Psychotria insularum plant can be found “in back yards across Samoa,” and has been used for centuries to treat inflammation associated with fever, body aches, swellings, elephantiasis, and respiratory infections.
Traditional healers in Samoa would chop up the leaves of the plant – known as “matalafi” – and squeeze the juice out to make a drink for patients. Sometimes, they’d rub the leaves over people exhibiting the symptoms above – or even rub it on a wound.
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“I was skeptical at first, when researching,” Samoan native Seeseei Molimau-Samasoni, the study’s author and the manager of the plants and postharvest technologies division at the Scientific Research Organisation of Samoa, told The Guardian.
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“There was a lot of superstition around this plant particularly, even in traditional medicine, but I was keen to find out if I could provide scientific merit to the traditional medicines of the Samoan people.”
📝 Bottom line: Nature holds a treasure trove of plants with powerful medicinal properties, which Indigenous peoples have used for millennia. Aspirin, artemisinin (treats malaria), and metformin (for diabetes) all came from *surprise!* nature.
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Over the past four decades, 64% of all approved drugs have been extracted, derived from, or based on chemicals found in plants and other natural products.
Maybe the “witch doctors” know a thing or two after all...
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… “The Museum’s findings, based on publicly available information, demonstrate that China is failing to uphold its responsibility to protect its citizens from genocide and crimes against humanity.” –An excerpt from a report published yesterday by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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Under international law, once a government has made a legal determination of genocide, they have an obligation take action and punish those responsible.
🔢 Stat of the Day: Supplies of food and household items were 4-11% lower than normal at the end of October, according to data from market-research firm IRI.
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Note: Turkeys were 60% out of stock, which is “very low” compared with previous years.
📖 Worth a Read… Digital scarcity and how the world might change
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🎓 Introducing...
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 Image: UATX
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🎁 A group of public figures and educators are creating a new institute of higher learning called the University of Austin (UATX) – not to be confused with UT Austin – to combat what they say is a culture of censorship at most colleges and universities.
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The school’s founding members are a collection of academics, journalists, and entrepreneurs: Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and Pano Kanelos. They were eventually joined by many others, including several former university presidents.
🤿 A deeper dive… In a Substack post heralding the launch, the founders cited a host of statistics to support their decision to create a university focused on “an education rooted in the pursuit of truth.” According to the right-leaning Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology:
- Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences.
- Over a third of conservative academics and Ph.D. students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views.
- Four out of five American Ph.D. students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars.
Additionally, the non-partisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports at least 491 campaigns to disinvite speakers on college campuses since 2000, with roughly half being successful (though ~⅓ of the politically-motivated campaigns came from the Right).
👁️ Looking ahead… The new University of Austin will not accept public money. Instead, the school’s founders say they’ve raised enough seed money to get started and are in the process of raising an additional $250 million.
- Since publicly launching Monday morning, the uni’s head, Pano Kanelos, told The Texas Tribune that he’s received more than 1,000 requests from professors to participate in the university.
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
 Image: Aubrey Gemignani/AP
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☝️ Four astronauts returned to Earth from the International Space Station onboard a SpaceX capsule late Monday after spending 200 days in space; their four replacements will be launched as soon as tonight.
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🦑 The creator of 'Squid Game' confirmed a second season is in the works.
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✈️🏥⚡ General Electric is splitting into three public companies focused on aviation, healthcare, and energy.
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Facebook Meta will no longer allow advertisers to micro-target users based on politics, race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation starting January 19.
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💉 Pfizer & BioNTech asked the FDA to approve its booster shots for all adults.
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🐦 Twitter Blue is now live in the U.S.; features include the ability to undo tweets before they send and view ad-free articles on participating websites.
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🏛️ The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued its sixth batch of subpoenas to ten individuals yesterday, including former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany and adviser Stephen Miller. (From the Left | From the Right)
+For the next cookout: Heinz is selling ketchup made from tomatoes grown “under Mars soil conditions.”
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📣🗣💬 This Week's Poll Question
Background: Last week, we covered the Pentagon’s annual China military power report, which found Beijing has accelerated its stockpile of nuclear weapons and is strengthening its ability to "win wars" against a “strong enemy" (which the report calls “a likely euphemism” for the U.S.).
Our question: Do you think the U.S. will be in a physical war with China at any point over the next 50 years ?
Yes
No
Unsure/Other
+Note: Results and the most thoughtful responses will be featured in tomorrow’s newsletter.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🔬 The Conception Concept
 Image: Nicholas Ortega
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🎁 A Silicon Valley startup named Conception has hatched a plan to turn human blood into fertile eggs – a process that, if successful, could upend human reproduction as we know it.
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The company, founded by former Y-Combinator employee Matt Krisiloff, is pursuing what’s known as in-vitro gametogenesis, where adult cells are turned into sperm and egg cells using a Nobel Prize-winning method called reprogramming.
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Conception raised $20 million last month from a group of well-known tech figures – including Open AI CEO Sam Altman & Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn – making it the largest such commercial venture.
🧠 Imagine the possibilities… The company says its technology could eventually be used to:
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Remove all age restrictions on reproduction.
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Allow women without ovaries to have biologically related children.
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Theoretically, turn a cell from a man into an egg or a cell from a woman into sperm, allowing same-sex couples to have biologically related children (though the process for women is far more difficult due to lack of a Y chromosome).
✋ Yes, but… Some experts are concerned ambitious doctors may rush to test the technology too soon, resulting in ethical and legal dilemmas similar to when researchers created the first gene-edited babies in China in 2018.
👁️ Looking ahead: Scientists and researchers say human egg-making technology is ~15 years away from widespread adoption, though it could be much longer.
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🤗 Dose of Positive
📱 Jayline’s Quick Thinking
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 Image: CNN
A powerful storm swept through nine-year-old Jayline Barbosa Brandão’s Massachusetts town last month, causing her family's home to lose power for three days.
Thankfully, Jayline’s parents were able to borrow a generator to get things back up and running. But there was just one problem – they accidentally set it up too close to their home.
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It wasn't long before both of Jayline’s parents were rendered unconscious by the invisible carbon monoxide snaking through the air.
🔓 Quick thinking power-up, engaged… Upon finding her parents, Jayline quickly grabbed her dad’s phone and unlocked it using his FaceID.
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The brave youngster immediately called 911 and exited the home safely along with her little sister. "That was very scary,” said Jayline’s mom. “If it wasn't [for] her call right away I don't know what would have happened."
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🤔 Three Truths and a Lie
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In 1810 England, which of these "offenses" was NOT punishable by death ?
A) Being in the company of “Gypsies” for one month
B) Strong evidence of malice in a child 7–14 years of age
C) Pouring milk or an “unclean liquid” into the street
D) Blacking the face or using a disguise while committing a crime
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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Simply:
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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C) Pouring milk or an “unclean liquid” into the street
Up until the 1820s, options A, B, and D were all punishable by death under what was known as the "Bloody Code."
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Per Sir Samuel Romilly, speaking to the House of Commons on capital punishment in 1810, "[There is] no country on the face of the earth in which there [have] been so many different offences according to law to be punished with death as in England."
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