By Walt Hickey

Coffee

The cost of coffee beans in international markets is at record highs, with the cost of robusta coffee futures peaking on London’s exchange at $3,497 per tonne on March 7 and remaining at $3,421 as of Tuesday of this week. Arabica futures in New York, which are the better beans used for more premium coffee, are trading at 181.85 cents per pound, up 24 percent compared to September. Forecasts for coffee are bad — Indonesia is projected to be down 20 percent, Vietnam down 12 percent — but consumption is up, with global consumption up 20 percent globally in the 2023-24 season compared to 2013-14. Asia in particular is seeing double-digit and even triple-digit growth in desire for beans.

Wataru Hamano, Nikkei Asia

DIY

E-bikes are a massive business in Indonesia, and there’s rising demand for custom, hand-soldered battery packs that can deliver more charge at cheaper prices than the name brands. Obviously, this means flirting with explosive disaster; homemade battery packs are considerably riskier than the factory-created packs, which go through testing and quality assurance and whatnot. Electric two-wheelers accounted for 62,000 e-bikes as of September 2023, and the government has not actually regulated batteries. The e-bike crowd can get more distance for cheaper by selling off their standard battery in exchange for a custom. Someone might sell an original battery for 17 million rupiah ($1,081) and then buy a custom pack from lithium polymer cells for 13 million rupiah ($827) that extends the range by 50 kilometers per charge.

Michelle Anindya, Rest of World

Pharma

An early consideration for AI was pharmaceuticals, as the inventive nature of the tech could be useful in designing drugs with similar or more significant effects compared to existing drugs. There’s a lot of interest in the space; companies involved in using AI to come up with new potential drugs have raised $18 billion from 2021 to 2022, which makes sense, as a drug company will spend $6 billion on R&D for every new drug that actually manages to enter the market. There’s enough early success to keep everyone motivated, with one company in 2022 selling a promising compound designed with computational assistance for $4 billion to a Japanese pharmaceutical company. I, for one, detect a double standard: when these guys use advanced robotics to discern the future of the pharmaceutical business, they get millions of dollars, but when I do it, I’m asked to take my pot vending machine off the beach.

Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review

Direct File

The U.S. government invested millions of dollars into Direct File, a new IRS program that will allow people with fairly straightforward tax returns to simply and directly file their taxes at no cost. This saves your standard vanilla tax return from having to tithe $200 to TurboTax, and by all accounts the program is excellent. It’s only in a trial phase in 12 states, but so far it’s an example of government-created software going swell. While healthcare.gov was the result of 60 contracts and 33 vendors, Direct File is the result of the government’s own in-house team. In the past week, according to the government’s analytics page, Direct File has gotten 450,000 clicks.

Saahil Desai, The Atlantic

Temu

The parent company of Temu, the app for cheap stuff, has reported revenue of 88.88 billion yuan ($12.5 billion) in the last quarter of 2023, a peculiarly specific number that nevertheless is up 123 percent year over year. The original forecast came in at 79.2 billion yuan, and following the beat shares were up 17 percent. In the whole year, PDD made 247.64 billion yuan, up 90 percent year over year, and online marketing services were responsible for 153.54 billion yuan of that. Temu is not exactly a store: It doesn’t own any stores, and rather just uses third-party delivery services to connect vendors to customers, regardless of where the vendor, delivery service or customer might be.

Marrian Zhou, Nikkei Asia

Merrily

Merrily We Roll Along, the Stephen Sondheim musical revival on Broadway, has managed to recoup its $12 million capitalization, with the Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff and Lindsey Mendez show making it into the black with weeks to go until its final show in July. The original production was a bit of a notorious flop, and closed after 16 performances and 44 previews. This revival will have played 312 performances and 20 previews by the time it closes on July 7.

Brent Lang, Variety

Brains

Archaeologists are more often than not deprived of anything that isn’t a bone, but when they do get actual remains of human tissue, the last thing they expect to have evidence of is brain tissue, which is soft and tends to decay rather quickly upon death. That said, there has been increasing evidence of preserved brain tissue under some specific circumstances: In 1982, construction workers discovered 8,000-year-old skeletons in a pond in Florida with intact brain tissue in 91 skulls present. A new study looked into preserved brains across all of archaeological literature and found over 4,400 cases of brains preserved long after death, including a 12,000-year old-human brain found in Russia.

Andrew Curry, Science

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