The spread of X-rays from curio to regular diagnostic tool took a long time. Could DNA analysis follow the same pattern? CC-licensed photo by Sue Clark on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Transparently. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
How GLP-1s are breaking life insurance • GLP-1 Digest
Ashwin Sharma, MD:
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Life insurers can predict when you’ll die with about 98% accuracy.
This ruthless precision comes from from decades and decades of mortality data they use to figure out how much to charge you every year, so that the money they earn (from you and by investing your premiums) will easily cover what they’ll need to pay out later.
Of course, not everyone gets the same deal. Underwriting is the dark art that allows an insurer to figure out if you’re a good bet or a risky one. Typically, underwriters- suspiciously sounds like undertakers-rely on a handful of key health metrics like HbA1c, cholesterol, blood pressure, and BMI to calculate your risk of dying earlier than expected (and thus costing them money).
Those eagle-eyed readers among you have probably noticed something interesting already. Those same four metrics are exactly what GLP‑1s improve. Not just a little, but enough to entirely shift someone’s risk profile within at least six months of using them.
Let’s say a 42-year-old applies for life insurance: they self-report a BMI of 25 (healthy), no visible co-morbidities in claims data, no prescription record shows Sema/Tirzepatide, Labs within normal range.
The insurer sees a ‘mirage’ of good health and approves them as low-risk.
But in reality: they were obese a year ago (BMI 32), lost around 14kg using GLP-1s from a D2C provider (no detail on their electronic health record), still have underlying metabolic syndrome.
If we assume about 65% of people who start GLP-1 medications quit by the end of year one, that creates a big problem. When someone stops the medication, they’ll usually regain the weight they lost, and in two years, most of those key health indicators (like BMI, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol) bounce back to their starting point.
This means the underwriter has just locked in a 30-year policy at preferred rates for someone who’ll be high-risk again by year three. Insurers call this type of screw-up “mortality slippage.”
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And that can be very expensive for the underwriter – into seven figures for individuals. Yet another random social effect of semaglutide. Those gila monsters got a strange revenge.
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NotebookLM introduces curated featured notebooks with partners • Google blog
Steven Johnson, editorial director, Google Labs:
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One of the secrets to getting the most out of NotebookLM is assembling high-quality sources to help you explore your interests. Today, we’re rolling out a new feature making that easier than ever. We’re working with respected authors, researchers, publications and nonprofits around the world to create featured notebooks.
The notebooks cover everything from in-depth scientific explorations to practical travel guides to advice from experts. Our initial lineup includes:
• Longevity advice from Eric Topol, bestselling author of “Super Agers”
• Expert analysis and predictions for the year 2025 as shared in The World Ahead annual report by The Economist
• An advice notebook based on bestselling author Arthur C. Brooks’ “How to Build A Life” columns in The Atlantic
• A science fan’s guide to visiting Yellowstone National Park, complete with geological explanations and biodiversity insights
• An overview of long-term trends in human wellbeing published by the University of Oxford-affiliated project, Our World In Data
• Science-backed parenting advice based on psychology professor Jacqueline Nesi’s popular Substack newsletter, Techno Sapiens
• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, for students and scholars to explore
• A notebook tracking the Q1 earnings reports from the top 50 public companies worldwide, for financial analysts and market watchers alike«
This is fascinating. NotebookLMs are basically domain-limited LLMs – so you can feel more confident they won’t hallucinate. Steven Johnson (who has written many famous books including The Ghost Map, about tracking cholera in 1850s London) has been pushing this idea inside Google, describes them as “knowledge bottles” when writing about them on X.
He suggests it could be a future form of book, one you could keep interrogating and which will converse with you. I wouldn’t disagree.
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AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why • John Whiles
John Whiles:
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Metr recently published a paper about the impact AI tools have on open-source developer productivity. They show that when open source developers working in codebases that they are deeply familiar with use AI tools to complete a task, then they take longer to complete that task compared to other tasks where they are barred from using AI tools. Interestingly the developers predict that AI will make them faster, and continue to believe that it did make them faster, even after completing the task slower than they otherwise would!
…the real product when we write software is our mental model of the program we’ve created. This model is what allowed us to build the software, and in future is what allows us to understand the system, diagnose problems within it, and work on it effectively. If you agree with this theory, which I do, then it explains things like why everyone hates legacy code, why small teams can outperform larger ones, why outsourcing generally goes badly, etc.
We know that the programmers in Metr’s study are all people with extremely well developed mental models of the projects they work on. And we also know that the LLMs they used had no real access to those mental models. The developers could provide chunks of that mental model to their AI tools – but doing so is a slow and lossy process that will never truly capture the theory of the program that exists in their minds. By offloading their software development work to an LLM they hampered their unique ability to work on their codebases effectively.
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4.6 billion years on, the sun is having a moment • The New Yorker
Bill McKibben, with a long (it’s the New Yorker) wander through the history of solar power:
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Last summer, Joel Nana, a Capetown-based energy analyst, was struggling, as the Pakistan-watchers had been six months earlier, to understand new data. “In Namibia, we’ve uncovered that people have built about seventy megawatts of distributed generation, mostly rooftop solar—that’s the equivalent of about fifteen% of the country’s peak demand. In Eswatini, which is a very small country, it’s about eleven% of peak demand,” he told me.
In South Africa, the continent’s economic colossus, small-scale solar now provides, by his reckoning, nearly a fifth the capacity of the national grid. “You won’t see these numbers anywhere,” Nana said. In Namibia and Eswatini, “they’re not reported in national plans—no one knows about them. It’s only when you speak to the utilities. And, in fact, the numbers could be much higher, because the smallest systems aren’t reporting to anyone, not even the utilities.”
Here, again, the switch is being driven by the desire for reliable and affordable power. In April, 2024, for instance, Nigeria’s electrical grid had its fifth blackout of the year. Nigerian businesses survive because they have backup diesel generators—in fact, those “backup” generators can supply far more power than the national grid. But it’s expensive to keep pouring diesel into the tank, so “solar has become a no-brainer for most businesses, if not all.
The prices just make sense,” Nana said. “In a lot of places, it’s all the malls, all the mills—any business that has enough roof space.” Many African countries have well-established trade networks with China, so the panels have come flooding in. “You have some utilities, like in Mozambique,” Nana added, that see small-scale solar power as “a threat and are trying to claw it down. But the realization is this is happening anyway, whether you like it or not. If you fight people, they’ll just go clandestine and install it without letting you know.”
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The way that microgeneration is changing less developed countries is one of the most overlooked elements of the solar revolution.
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How did X-Rays gain mass adoption? • Adith Arun
Adith Arun:
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At the University of Würzburg, Wilhelm Röntgen took the first X-Ray (XR) and presented his work “On a New Kind of Rays” in December 1895 which was printed in January 1896. In January 1896, it was reprinted in English in Nature, The Electrician, Lancet, and BMJ. A lot of literature was written about XR’s in the months to follow.
News outlets from across the world picked up on this story writing that “a professor from Wurzburg had successfully used a new type of light to take a photograph of a set of weights without opening the wooden box in which the weights were kept” and able to “take a picture of the human hand showing the bones without the flesh”. Critics were loud. Otto Lummer, Rontgen’s colleague, said Rontgen had “otherwise always been a sensible fellow and it’s not carnival season yet”.
…The public was fascinated by this technology and studios offered the public “views of their bones” and “shoe fitting” images. These developments are expected of any new technology and necessary for its rapid adoption. People need to think about safety and drumming up interest with the public creates demand (although in this case they were likely causing harm to people who visited these studios because of the radiation dose and were condemned by medical societies). Carefree use led to calls for regulation at 1905 german radiology congress and American Ray Society protection committee in 1920.
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It’s an interesting story but Arun’s real question is: why hasn’t DNA analysis taken off in the same way? Or might it do so, and we’re just in the pause period before it does?
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Gen Alpha unfiltered • GWI
GWI:
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Key insights:
They’re curating their calm: From political drama to climate doom, Gen Alpha are learning to tune out what weighs them down. Compared to 2021, fewer kids are keeping up with the news or environmental causes.
IRL is trending: Whether it’s a family hike or a movie with friends, Gen Alpha are leaning into offline moments and rediscovering the joys of real-world fun.
The future looks female: Girls are feeling empowered and aiming high, with more expressing interest in once male-dominated fields like law and medicine.
They’re scrolling more and posting less: Passive behaviors like watching, browsing, and shopping are up – while posting, sharing opinions, and engaging with social causes are down.
Little shoppers have loud opinions: Gen Alpha might not pay the bills, but they’re influencing what goes in the cart. A clear majority of 8-11 year olds have a say – or even the final say – on everything from toys to food.
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There’s also a blogpost about the differences between Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Now you don’t have to try to get an answer out of them about what they think. (Thanks Peter R for the link.)
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A measles surge could be caused by vaccine fears and the start of summer holidays • Daily Telegraph
Jill Foster:
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The death of a child at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital after contracting measles has reignited fears that a surge in cases of the highly infectious disease could be on its way. The child, whose age and sex is unknown, is believed to be the second child in England to die of measles in the past five years. Renae Archer, 10, died in 2023 after complications from having the disease as a baby.
Since June, 17 children have been treated at Alder Hey for measles and the hospital says that the disease is on the rise in young people in the region. It has already seen a surge in “seriously unwell” children being admitted to its wards.
There are fears that poverty might be affecting vaccine uptake in larger cities – Liverpool has a 76.4% uptake and Manchester even lower at 75.8% – and this could lead to severe outbreaks.
“I’m really worried about the potential for measles to take hold in our communities and do significant harm, not only to individuals but to the healthcare system that has to manage the outbreaks,” says Professor Matt Ashton, Liverpool’s Director of Public Health. “Vaccination rates have been dropping nationally for about 10 years and outside of London we have one of the lowest uptakes of the MMR 2 vaccine. Within that, many of our wards have an uptake of less than 50%.” The World Health Organisation wants to have 95% of children to be fully vaccinated by their fifth birthday.
“We will have a bit of a natural firebreak when we break up for schools, but fundamentally we already have measles here,” adds Ashton.
…Already, a number of popular destinations – including France, Spain and Italy – have seen “large” outbreaks, according to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). Analysis by WHO Europe and Unicef reported 127,350 measles cases in the European region for 2024, double the number of cases reported for 2023. It is also the highest number since 1997.
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The suspicion is that misinformation around vaccines during/following Covid has led to children suffering from the mistakes of their parents. So it’s not just the US and RFK Jr messing everything up. Misinformation actually has a real cost in lives and health.
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The coming rare earths war • UnHerd
Helen Thompson:
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On the surface, China’s rare earth leverage seems the result of Beijing’s careful exploitation of geological good fortune. China possesses nearly half of the world’s known rare-earth deposits. As the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once quipped, “the Middle East has oil and China has rare earths”.
But China’s pre-eminence is at least as much the story of an earlier US presumption that Washington could safely avoid environmentally toxic mining at home by importing these metals, often found with uranium, from across the Pacific. Before the early Nineties, most of the world supply of rare earths was extracted by a US company, Molycorp, from Mountain Pass in California. Rare earth magnets unveil a similar story of complacent US outsourcing. In 2002, Magnequench, the last surviving US producer, was sold to a Chinese company and the plant in Indiana was closed four years later. Politically, the vulnerability of this bet on a Chimerican resource trade did not go unnoticed. When Hillary Clinton ran for the Democratic nomination in 2008, she castigated the Bush administration for the fact “we now have to buy magnets for our bombs from China”. But the politicians who rhetorically scored points from offshoring offered no serious plan of action for reshoring production.
…If the damage China can cause as an exporter is now as clear as crystal, the significance of China’s own need for rare earths is still underrated. Back in 2010, most consumption occurred in Japan and the United States. But Made in China 2025 was in this respect, as in so much else, transformative. Almost all the 10 sectors identified in Xi Jinping’s decade-long strategy to make China a high-tech manufacturing superpower relied on rare earths or rare earth magnets. Realising that objective has made China a net importer of rare earths. This change renders China a competitor for the United States in developing new mining as Washington urgently seeks to escape reliance on China.
At the moment, more than half of China’s imports come from Myanmar, which is relatively rich in the heavier rare earths. This dependency embroils China in Myanmar’s political instability, especially since the Kachin Independence Army — the northern armed rebels seeking autonomy — seized control of the country’s main mines in 2024.
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After oil, this is the new geopolitical material conflict. (Thanks Gregory B for the link.)
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Ofcom head says age checks are ‘really big moment’ for children’s online safety • The Guardian
Kirin Stacey:
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The UK’s chief media regulator has promised age verification checks will prove a “really big moment” in the battle to keep children safe online, even as campaigners warn she needs to take tougher action against big technology companies.
Melanie Dawes, the head of Ofcom, said on Sunday that the new checks, which have to be in place later this month, would prove a turning point in regulating the behaviour of the world’s biggest online platforms.
But she is coming under pressure from campaigners – many of them bereaved parents who say social media played a role in their children’s deaths – who say the new rules will still allow young people to access harmful material.
Dawes told the BBC on Sunday: “It is a really big moment, because finally, the laws are coming into force.
“What happens at the end of this month is that we see the wider protections for children come online. And so what we’re expecting to see then is that any company that shows material that shouldn’t be available to under-18s, pornography, suicide and self-harm material – that should be either removed from their service or they’re going to need highly effective age checks to screen out under-18s.”
She added: “It is a very big moment for the industry, a very serious moment.”
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Age verification has been the Zeno’s Arrow of the online world for so long: getting asymptotically closer and closer yet never arriving, but always on the point of arriving.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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