#6 - YouTube Spam, Spying, Satoshi Nakamoto, energy crisis, and more!

A frozen microscopic worm found in Siberian permafrost has woken up after being thawed in a lab. It was perfectly fine and able to reproduce after all these years.

Why is this important? These creatures are very resistant to radiation and can withstand very harsh conditions (drying, starvation, and low oxygen). Understanding how they do this can help us with deep-space travel, cryo-preservation of cells and organs, and much more.

Also, it makes me think: how many other (unknown) organisms are frozen in the Arctic and waiting to be revived by global warming?

Can we live forever? And if not, why not? Is there a definite limit on how long we can live? It turns out there is a limit on many times our cells can divide, called the Hayflick limit. This limits our lifespan to around 120 years. But maybe we can re-engineer our cells to extend the Hayflick limit?

It also reminded me of a great Vsauce video: “Should I Die?”

During their Developer Conference, Apple announced “Mail Privacy Protection.” This feature will block invisible tracking pixels that keep track of how many times you open an email.

Why is this a big topic? Apple’s Mail app is used by millions of people on macOS and iOS devices. This has a massive impact on newsletters that rely on these statistics for sponsorships.

As for this newsletter: I don’t care too much about opening rates. My mail provider (Revue) does keep track of this, but I don’t look at these metrics. This newsletter is tiny, and the goal is not to make money but to share my excitement and curiosity with others.

Code stylometry tries to train a computer to recognize the coding style of an individual. I came across this during Lex Fridman’s interview with Charles Hoskinson. Charles suggested using code stylometry to identify Satoshi Nakamoto. Take the original Bitcoin code, and compare the coding style to public GitHub repositories.

Interesting piece about how meetings are conducted at Amazon. Most meetings start with participants reading a short document containing an idea or a problem to be solved (including numbers, charts, …)

Not only has this many positive effects on the meeting itself, but it also creates a written track record of ideas, decisions, and problems.

Electric cars seem to be the way forward. As a result, many governments are pushing the adoption. But how eco-friendly is an electric car anyway?

Polestar has published a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in which they look at the lifetime carbon footprint of their car.

In a nutshell: when only using clean energy, you need to drive 50,000km to offset the carbon footprint of the car (production costs, transportation, batteries, etc.) After this mileage, you’re saving the environment. It’s not a small amount, but it’s doable.

Governments have taken a lot of (unpopular) measures to stop the pandemic. Could you do any better?

This “Corona Game” is a simulator that puts you in the driving seat. You’re in charge of the Czech Republic, and you can take any action you’d like to prevent COVID19 from spreading. For example, close schools, close the border, limit events, mandate masks, etc. 

Try to limit infections and deaths, limit government debt, and keep your population happy at the same time.

At the end of the game, you can see how well you did compared to other players and compared to the actual Czech government. There’s also a page explaining the models and methodology behind this simulation.

This article shines a light on how coronaviruses are being studied. To my surprise, laboratories routinely create new viruses, called “chimeras.” Researchers take certain parts of one virus (such as the Spike protein), fuse it together with another virus, and see if it could replicate in human cells.

This type of research aims to find out how likely it is that a virus could jump species and to create a universal vaccine against the family of coronaviruses.

We still don’t know where COVID19 originated, but it’s fascinating to see the kinds of research we’re doing to try to predict and prevent pandemics.