By Walt Hickey

Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

An anarchist collective called Four Thieves Vinegar makes it its mission to teach people how to make do-it-yourself pharmaceuticals to drastically cut the cost of drugs at the expense of, essentially, home brew, bootleg drugs, arguing effectively for a right to repair but for your body. For instance, the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi costs $1,000 per pill, taken once per day for 12 weeks, an $84,000 treatment that works reliably. Initially, the chemists working there thought a DIY version synthesized from available precursors would cost $300 for the entire course, or $3.57 per pill, but they actually got it to $70 for the course, or 83 cents per pill. Kalydeco, a cystic fibrosis treatment, costs $311,000 per patient per year, but with the right equipment the two precursors needed to make it cost $1 per gram and $28 per gram, good for $10 per day in raw materials. Seems like Walter White took that chemistry knowledge in the wrong direction.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media

Contained

In news that at first seems cool until you realize exactly what had to happen to make it so, the containership NewNew Star has become the largest-ever non-ice-class box ship to travel the Arctic Ocean, with the 3,534 TEU vessel, weighing 35,975 tonnes and 231 meters long, departing from Nansha in China, passing through the Bering Strait, and entering the Northern Sea Route over Russia on September 4. It’s en route to St. Petersburg. The Arctic route has long been impossible to traverse for most ships given the ice buildup even during the summer, but temperatures are rising and it’s now on the table for an increasingly large window every year. Indeed, NewNew Star may soon be beaten for the record by Flying Fish 1. Docked in St. Petersburg with an Arctic permit in hand, it could become the first Panamax-sized vessel to sail the Arctic.

Malte Humpert, gCaptain

Nuclear Clock

A new study published in Nature described the efforts to produce a nuclear clock, which is the hypothetical next step beyond atomic clocks used in ultra-precise timekeeping. Atomic clocks work by tracking the energy transitions of an atom’s cloud of electrons, which provide the ticks of the clock down to billionths or trillionths of a second. A nuclear clock would be more stable and allow time to be measured much more finely: Thorium has a low-energy transition, and in order to make the right kind of laser for a thorium clock, researchers had to figure out what the “excitation energy” of thorium-229 was. Last year, CERN figured out it was about 8.4 electron volts. Earlier this year, scientists got it down to a more precise 8.35574 electron volts. This study’s progress really nailed the number down, getting it a million times more precise than even that, which makes such timekeeping increasingly viable.

Jay Bennett, Science

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi in planes is one of those small miracles that barely gets any notice anymore, despite the technical achievement that is successfully transmitting the internet to a metallic tube hurtling through the atmosphere. We’re on the cusp of a new generation of plane Wi-Fi, thanks to Starlink and its peers. First, there was 3G Cellular, where planes connected with cell towers down on Earth, usually through Gogo. There are still 1,380 such planes in the air, using Intelsat’s since-acquired Gogo. Nowadays, however, plane Wi-Fi is mostly from geostationary satellites from the likes of Intelsat, Viasat and Panasonic, which require sending a signal 20,000 miles into space to reach the internet but can still pull off 22 megabits per second. Next up, though, are low-earth orbit satellites, which will enable video calls and streaming on planes, though honestly I don’t really know if I like a plane trip with video calls.

Joanna Stern, The Wall Street Journal

Fetch

A shocking new scientific exposé reveals that cats do, indeed, fetch, an allegation that has shocked the very core of feline behavior. The study surveyed 74,000 dog owners and found that 78 percent responded that their dog would always or frequently fetch a stick, ball or other object. The same survey — of over 8,000 cat owners — found that 41 percent reported their cat retrieving a toy or object thrown by a person, significantly exceeding existing estimates.

Public Library of Science

Chew On It

Sales of gum fell calamitously during the pandemic, with 2020 seeing sales of chewing gum fall by 22 percent to $2.5 billion. Sales popped 15 percent in 2022 and 2023, and currently are hanging around $3.4 billion. The increase is in spite of a decline in the gum-chewing population: In 2011, 178 million Americans chewed gum, while in 2024, that’s down to 157 million.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Hail

Hailstorms are a disproportionate contributor to property damage given the extent to which they’re studied, at least compared to hurricanes, tornadoes and the like. Hailstorms cost the U.S. $46 billion in 2023, which was 60 percent to 80 percent of all losses due to hail, tornadoes, wind and lightning. With that in mind, the meteorologists and scientists who study hail feel a bit underfunded compared to their tornado-chasing, hurricane-following peers, and believe that there’s ample room for funding in the space. In August, the NSF approved $11 million to fund ICECHIP, or the In-situ Collaborative Experiment for the Collection of Hail in the Plains.

Hannah Richter, Science

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