If you’re training for a marathon, how far can you trust different running apps and wearables? CC-licensed photo by Florent Boutellier on Flickr.
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A selection of 11 links for you. Running on empty. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Ukraine’s no man’s land is the future of war • FT
Eric Schmidt (the former Google CEO and also an investor in defence technology companies):
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Ubiquitous drone coverage — in which almost anything moving on the battlefield, whether soldier or vehicle, is detected and destroyed — means that Russia’s advances remain minimal. It seized less than 1% of Ukrainian territory in 2025. Their slow, grinding assault is carried out in large part by small infiltration units walking or riding motorbikes through forests. The odds of being killed by drones for those who try to advance are about one in three.
Yet Russian forces continue pushing, straining Ukrainian manpower, resources and will, even as Ukrainian officials estimate they are killing or seriously wounding 30,000 to 35,000 Russian soldiers each month. The Russian state’s tolerance for such casualties undermines Ukraine’s reliance on attrition as a viable strategy. There is seemingly no clear breaking point, no threshold at which Russia will finally admit defeat.
The Russians are also adapting to a new era of warfare. Tactics pioneered by the country’s elite Rubicon drone unit are filtering down to the front, particularly the use of fibre-optic drones immune to jamming that can strike soldiers in trenches or tunnels even through forests and rough weather. Russia has begun development of jet-powered Shahed drones that are much faster and harder to intercept, and it intends to increase its use of Shaheds to upwards of 1,000 a day in 2026 to pummel Ukraine into submission.
…Future wars are going to be defined by unmanned weapons. The combination of unblockable satellite communications, cheap spectrum networks and accurate GPS targeting means the only way to fight will be through drone vs drone combat. Drones share data in real time, meaning that many inexpensive platforms can act as a single weapon. They will carry air-to-air missiles to defeat attackers, just like a fighter jet does, but will be cheaper and more abundant.
The winner of those drone battles will then be able to advance with unmanned ground and maritime vehicles, which move slowly but can carry heavier payloads. These air, land and sea formations will absorb the initial fire and expand what is becoming an increasingly robotic kill zone. Only after the first waves of machines have gone in will human soldiers follow.
When the war in Ukraine is eventually settled, the result may be a tense peace that offers as many lessons for western nations as the conflict itself.
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I think everyone has already learnt lessons from this war. The speed at which drones were adopted as dramatically effective front-line weapons should have made any soldier sit up and take notice.
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London measles outbreak: more than 60 children infected • The Times
Shaun Lintern:
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Seven schools and a nursery have reported more than 60 suspected cases of measles in an area of north London, and labs have confirmed 34 cases since January 12. Some children have been treated in hospital.
GPs have told parents that the outbreak in Enfield is spreading because the virus is exploiting low levels of MMR vaccinations in the capital. For every one infected person, measles can spread to up to 18 unvaccinated people.
If measles becomes entrenched it could be a significant public health risk for the whole of Greater London, where vaccination rates are among the lowest in England.
Health officials are racing to stop the outbreak from becoming established.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said modelling of a large measles outbreak in the city suggested between 40,000 and 160,000 people could be infected. This would lead to large numbers of children needing hospital treatment, with some likely to die. Last July, a child died from measles in Liverpool after a small outbreak there.
The World Health Organisation announced last month that the UK had lost its measles elimination status after more than 4,600 infections since 2024, and uptake of the measles vaccine dropping below the 95% level needed for herd immunity.
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According to the map on the story, Hackney is even worse, with a 60% vaccination rate in 2023-4 among under-fives. The capital has comparatively low MMR vaccination rates. It’s a serious problem.
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The “quite tiny” RNA molecule that could answer the question of the origin of life • ZME Science
Tibi Puiu:
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Scientists on their quest to find the origin of life have stared into the primordial soup, trying to answer the ultimate chicken-and-egg question: Which came first, the genetic code or the proteins that build it? In modern biology, this is a distinct division of labor. DNA holds the blueprints, while proteins do the heavy lifting of catalyzing chemical reactions. But in the deep past, roughly 4 billion years ago, some scientists believe the first life spawned in an “RNA World.”
In this hypothetical era, RNA — DNA’s single-stranded molecular cousin — did it all. It stored genetic information and folded itself into complex shapes to act as a catalyst, or “ribozyme.”
The theory is elegant, but it has always suffered from a massive paradox. Until now, the only RNA molecules known to science capable of copying themselves were massive, complex beasts. They were so large that the odds of them appearing spontaneously in a puddle of prebiotic sludge were vanishingly small.
That has just changed.
Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge have discovered a ribozyme that is shockingly small, yet capable of the fundamental steps of self-replication. They call it QT45 — short for “Quite Tiny 45.”
…The ultimate test for any candidate for the “first spark of life” is the ability to replicate itself. This involves two distinct steps: the ribozyme (the positive strand) must use itself as a template to build a complementary negative strand, and then use that negative strand to rebuild the original positive ribozyme. QT45 can do both, apparently.
“This is, for the first time, a piece of RNA that can make itself and its encoding strand, and those are the two constituent reactions of self-replication,” says Holliger.
However, there is a catch. Currently, the team hasn’t managed to get both reactions to happen in the same pot simultaneously. The ribozyme can synthesize its complementary strand from a mix of all 64 possible triplets, but to copy itself back from that strand, it currently requires a specific set of 13 triplets and a “hexamer” (a six-nucleotide chunk) to get the job done.
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Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its smart glasses • The New York Times
Kashmir HillKalley Huang and Mike Isaac:
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Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns.
Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, plans to add the feature to its smart glasses, which it makes with the owner of Ray-Ban and Oakley, as soon as this year, according to four people involved with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential discussions. The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.
Meta’s plans could change. The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. The document, from May, described plans to first release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public.
Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
…Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.
The feature would not [emphasis added – Overspill Ed] give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool, two people familiar with the plans said.
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Though they’ll probably be hacked to do so using Clearview AI – remember that?
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Weight-loss jabs push sugar price to five-year low • FT
Susannah Savage:
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Sugar prices have tumbled to their lowest level in more than five years as weight-loss drugs accelerate a drop in demand by pushing consumers to ditch sweet treats in favour of protein.
Raw cane sugar futures in New York dropped to less than 14 cents a pound on Wednesday, the lowest since October 2020 and less than half the level they hit in late 2023. Traders say the move reflects a sharper than forecast slowdown in consumption in the US and other wealthy economies, while demand in developing countries is growing at a slower pace than expected.
So-called GLP-1 weight-loss injections — which work by activating the glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor hormone that makes people feel fuller — have been a crucial driver of reducing cravings for sweet flavours. GLP-1s are the basis of medications including Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound.
“The drop in consumption, or the speed of it, has taken the [sugar] industry unaware,” said Gurdev Gill at broker Marex, adding that Mexico and the US have been the clearest examples, while demand data in Europe has also been “challenging” for sugar prices.
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The change in consumption is small – 23,000 tonnes less on 12.3m total, or less than 1%, in the US – but might be the tip of the spear.
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Without my fitness tracker I’d never have run so far. Or behaved so weirdly • Tim Harford
Tim Harford is in training to run his first marathon in April:
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Given that the history of fitness trackers begins with someone picking 10,000 steps because it’s a nice-sounding round number, the lack of transparency and independent verification of these apps and devices is not wholly reassuring. They are not being sold as medical devices, so regulators do not get involved. I am often told that older runners need more time to recover between each run, so I asked [running app] Runna’s [chief technology officer Walter] Holohan to reassure me that Runna would take into account the fact that I was 52 years old. Alas, he could not. Age-adaptive plans were still on the drawing board, he told me. So were training plans that reflected the menstrual cycle of female athletes.
Reassurance was no more forthcoming from Garmin. The company wouldn’t make anyone available for an interview, and ducked every question about whether the Garmin training recommendations took into account my age.
Facing a marathon, then, which app should I choose? I respect their behavioural savvy and would expect any of them to tug my strings like an expert puppet master, but I am less confident of the physiological science behind their recommendations, as their methods are secret and their pretensions to rigour largely untested.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful: my inexpensive Garmin watch and the free coaching app that was bundled with it took me from weekly wayward 5k runs to a well-paced half-marathon. But perhaps I have come to expect a little too much from my silicon coach.
Iefore my half-marathon, my Garmin app told me my predicted time was 1hr 54 minutes and 56 seconds. Strava, looking at exactly the same data, told me I could go a full 11 minutes faster. Even over a distance of more than 21km, 11 minutes is a huge difference. This put me in a quandary before the race. Everyone warned me not to go off too fast — but given the yawning gap between the algorithmic forecasts, what did “too fast” even mean?
“If you spoke to two different humans they might do the same thing,” says the digital health expert [Carol] Maher. “It’s easy to believe that technology just has the answer.”
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Amazon’s Ring cancels Flock partnership amid Super Bowl ad backlash • CNBC
Annie Palmer:
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Ring announced on Thursday it is terminating its partnership with police tech provider Flock Safety.
The partnership between Flock and Ring came under scrutiny after the Amazon doorbell company ran an ad during last Sunday’s Super Bowl that touted a “Search Party” feature that uses artificial intelligence to help locate lost pets. When a user initiates the feature, it activates a network of participating Ring cameras, which scan footage for images resembling the missing dog. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called the feature a “surveillance nightmare.”
Flock, meanwhile, operates a network of automated license plate readers, and sells access to that software to customers that include law enforcement agencies.
Ring’s decision to cancel its partnership with Flock comes as tech companies face growing pressure to reexamine their work with federal agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Earlier this week, Salesforce employees pressed CEO Marc Benioff to cancel “ICE opportunities,” CNBC reported. More than 900 Google employees also asked their company to divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Privacy and civil liberties advocates urged Ring to drop its partnership with Flock. A protest calling on the e-commerce company to cut its ties with Flock, ICE and CBP is scheduled for Friday, outside of Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.
“Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated,” Ring wrote in a blog post.
…Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels said in a statement that the Flock partnership was never active, and the companies never announced a date for it to go live.
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This seems surprising. ICE must be incredibly toxic in the American public’s mind if Ring being associated with Flock being associated with ICE is enough to get RIng to cut ties. It’s not as if Amazon is normally that sensitive about these things.
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Is Mars habitable? • Mars for the Rest of Us
Maciej Cegłowski:
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The strongest constraints on Martian habitability turn out to be temperature and a measure of available moisture called water activity.
Water activity is just a fancy name for equilibrium relative humidity. If you put a sample with aw of 0.5 in a jar of dry air, eventually you observe a relative humidity of 50%. The lower the water activity, the less water is available for microorganisms to grow.
Bacteria and molds have a hard time growing at water activities below 0.9 (one reason you can store sweet liquids like honey and condensed milk at room temperature). The terrestrial champion for withstanding dryness is a common fungus called A. penicilloides, best known for leaving dark spots on old books. It has been caught reproducing at water activities as low as 0.585, about the moisture level of dry pasta.
Meanwhile, the lowest temperature at which cellular metabolism has been observed on Earth is -33°C, while the lowest confirmed temperature for cell division is -18°C (interestingly, eukaryotes and yeast cells hold the record over bacteria in this category).
It’s not hard to find places on Mars that are briefly warm enough for life. The Spirit rover once recorded a daytime summer air temperature of 35°C, which is hot even by Earth standards. But the tricky part is finding somewhere where adequate water activity and temperature coincide. The warmest spots on the surface of Mars tend to be absolutely dry, while the most likely wet spots are supercooled brines far below the temperature limits for life. The closest we’ve come to finding a livable spot on the surface is identifying some areas where adequate water activity and temperature may occur at different times in a single Martian day.
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There’s plenty more – perhaps more research than Elon Musk has ever done into the viability of, well, living there.
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The death of Book World at the Washington Post • The New Yorker
Becca Rothfeld once worked on the Post’s book section, aka Book World:
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A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not. Maybe she would prefer to scroll through the day-in-the-life Reels that Instagram offers up to her on the basis of the day-in-the-life Reels that she watched previously, and so much the worse for her. The maximalism and somewhat uncompromising presumption of a newspaper, with its warren of sections and columns and byways, is a quiet reproach to its audience’s most parochial instincts. Its mission is not to indulge existing tastes but to challenge them—to create a certain kind of person and, thereby, a certain kind of public.
It is true, of course, that the public is only a useful fiction. No one has ever seen one in the wild. Some readers refuse to join one, stubbornly persisting in flipping to one section and ignoring the rest. But even if no newspaper can succeed entirely in cultivating the public that it imagines, it can still succeed to a greater or lesser degree—and Book World did succeed.
Philistines are always declaring that no one reads literary criticism, but the record shows that publishers systematically underestimate the popularity of book reviews. When the San Francisco Chronicle axed its stand-alone books section, in 2001, the paper’s editors were overwhelmed by an ensuing crush of vitriolic mail. “The number and passion of complaints we received were beyond anything we got over other changes in the paper,” one senior editor told Salon. If the outlet’s executive editor had “anticipated this kind of reaction to doing away with the stand-alone section, he wouldn’t have done it.”
Book World amassed a dedicated readership, too. Though I took the sanity-preserving step of never learning how to check the data myself, my editor told me that traffic increased in 2023 and 2024, even as the number of visitors to other sections of the paper was stagnating. Our clicks dropped off only after Jeff Bezos’s initial New York Post-ification of the opinion section, when he spiked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris’s Presidential candidacy and thereby caused the paper to lose hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
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Rothfeld is onto something about how newspapers work best when they aren’t algorithm-following devices. I’ve found many wonderful books through review sections. I now occasionally find them through recommendations of people I trust, but they’re fewer and less reliable.
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Is Waymo worth $126bn? • On my Om
Om Malik:
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Published data shows that each [Waymo] vehicle currently does about 25 trips per day. The average trip lasts about 15 minutes. Waymo reported 15 million trips and 3.8 million hours of rider time in 2025.
According to California Public Utilities Commission filings, there is about 18 minutes of idle or repositioning time between trips. Each car is already running roughly 16 hours a day. Since these are electric vehicles, they need time to charge. To hit one million weekly rides with the current 2,500 vehicles, each car would need to complete 57 trips per day. That is over 14 hours of active ride time alone. That does not include charging, maintenance, or repositioning. Physically impossible.
No matter how you slice it, their fleet has to grow big and fast. Even with 3,500 vehicles by year-end, the number would be 41 trips per vehicle per day. The reality is that they need anywhere between 5,500 and 6,000 cars to hit their own target. They need to more than double their fleet in 11 months. Not that it can’t be done. They have $16bn in the bank, and can buy as many cars as they want. But whether they can get as many cars as they want is a whole different story.
Each Jaguar I-PACE costs roughly $175,000 – about $75,000 for the car and $100,000 for the sensor stack and compute hardware, according to co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov. To get from 400,000 weekly trips to one million, assuming current utilization of roughly 23 trips per vehicle per day, they need to add at minimum 3,500 more vehicles. That is over $600m in vehicle costs alone, before you factor in mapping, operations centers, remote support staff, and the regulatory apparatus for each new city.
The next-generation Zeekr RT platform brings the vehicle cost down to maybe $75,000 total. That helps eventually, but these vehicles are still in testing, not deployed at commercial scale.
Waymo wants to expand to twenty cities in 2026, including London and Tokyo. It looks massive on a slide and makes for a great headline, but Waymo’s own history should give us pause. New cities start slow. Austin launched in March 2025. Nine months later, it accounts for about 8% of rides with two hundred vehicles. Atlanta launched in June and accounts for about 4%. Phoenix, the most mature market, took five years to reach its current scale.
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He concludes that Waymo needs to muscle into the longer trips to have any hope of really living up to its valuation – to say nothing of actually turning a profit; it’s part of Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment, which lost $3.6bn in Q4 2025. Everyone can see the benefits of driverless cars, just as they could see the benefits of supersonic planes. But Concorde failed commercially.
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Why I wish I hadn’t bought my Samsung OLED TV • The Verge
Sean Hollister:
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In June 2024, in a dusty TV shop empty of customers save myself, my wife, and my kids, I stared deep into the LG C3 and Samsung S90C. I went back and forth between the two OLED screens for easily 20 minutes, happily paralyzed by the choice in front of me. The Video Only salesperson attempted to explain that there was no wrong decision.
A year and a half later, I disagree: I regret picking the Samsung over the LG. I regret it every time I adjust the volume on my TV, every time I plug in a new device, and especially ever since the Logitech Harmony Amazon Alexa integration shit the bed and I have to fumble a Samsung remote to switch inputs.
Samsung’s QD-OLED panel itself is phenomenal, if nothing special in 2026. The problem is the software. I would pay Samsung $100, right now, for this “smart” TV to be as dumb as the ones I grew up with.
Heck, I’d give Samsung 50 bucks just to let us disable the volume indicator. Failing that, let’s see if shame works.
…both Sony and LG had unobtrusive onscreen volume indicators, just little icons near the edge of the screen. Samsung believes that anyone who ever needs things a little louder or quieter is willing to tolerate this aberration…
This eyesore [the volume up/down onscreen indicator] stretches nearly a third of the way across the screen, vertically and horizontally, obscuring the incredible moving art I’m trying to watch underneath. And if you’re using a receiver, it consumes all this screen space to convey basically zero information. Not the current volume level, unless you’re using the TV’s built-in speakers, not whether I’m getting a stereo or surround or Dolby Atmos signal, nothing of use whatsoever.
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Samsung: never knowingly underUI’d. (Thanks Lloyd W for the link.)
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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. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 