By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Really exciting news: My book, You Are What You Watch, is now out in audiobook! If you’ve been holding out for the listenable version, want to hear it read back to you as another go, or just have some Audible credits to burn, grab a copy; it’s really good!

Less Than Meets The Eye

Transformers One, an animated reboot that explores why Optimus Prime and Megatron went from best friends to mortal enemies, brought in $25 million over the weekend, putting the movie in a too-close-to-call race with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as we await results from crucial Witwicky County. That result is less than expected for a movie that looked to open between $30 million and $35 million in North America.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Batteries

The Department of Energy is rolling out $3 billion in funding for 25 battery projects across 14 states as a result of the infrastructure bill of 2021. The largest sums will go to two projects, each of which is poised to reap $225 million in funding, to produce lithium from brine. One in Arkansas is projected to produce up to 45,000 metric tons of battery-quality lithium carbonate per year, and another in the Texarkana region is projected to produce 25,000 metric tons of it per year.

Justine Calma, The Verge

Physics

Particle physicists have figured out that a subatomic particle called the W boson — which conveys the weak nuclear force — indeed weighs as much as the standard model of physics projected it would. This follows the result from an experiment at the Collider Detector at Fermilab that found that the W boson might actually be heavier than projected, which would be interesting, because it means we would have to smash a lot more atoms to figure out what the deal was. That said, the new research found that the W has a mass of 80,360.2 million electron volts, which is pretty much on the money in terms of the standard model prediction. All told, this is a slight long-term issue for particle physics as a field: If they’ve got the whole thing wrapped up in a bow, why would governments fund larger atom smashers? In 2026, the Large Hadron Collider will shut down for three years for upgrades that will increase its beam intensity tenfold.

Adrian Cho, Science

Chimayo Red

The Chimayo chile is a highly sought-after pepper grown in the region of one part of New Mexico. While the Hatch chile is by far the most popular chile in New Mexico, the Chimayo peppers are smaller, curvier, richly flavored and grown from heirloom seeds. A pound of Hatch red might go for $7, while the same pound of Chimayo sells for $50. One reason is that there are about 50,000 acres of Hatch cultivated in New Mexico and its neighbors, while there are less than 500 acres of Chimayo peppers planted every year

John Burnett, NPR

In-Q-Tel

The CIA has an investment arm called In-Q-Tel that it uses to make strategic investments in startups whose tech products might eventually be of use to the cloak-and-dagger set. In-Q-Tel has made about 750 investments since 2011, has received $1.2 billion from taxpayers over that period, and typically makes 50 to 60 investments per year in the $1 million to $4 million range. They’ve picked some winners in the past — Palantir and Keyhole (which became Google Earth) are both alumni of the In-Q-Tel venture capital family, and their AI investments have actually been pretty solid all things considered, investing in Databricks as early as 2016. Right now they’ve got investments in 56 companies in the AI space, 46 in the hardware space, 27 in cyber and 23 in enterprise software.

Jon Keegan, Sherwood News

Solar

As of July, there have been 292 gigawatts of solar power generation installed this year, up 29 percent year over year, putting us on track to hit 593 gigawatts of solar power installed this year. These are simply remarkable numbers, as the pace of solar installations outruns even the most ambitious estimates of advocates. For perspective, in 2020 the entire world had just 760 gigawatts of solar power in total. The prices of solar energy installations are down 89 percent compared to 2010, and silicon solar panels have seen their efficiency rate increase all the way to 26 percent.

Umair Irfan, Vox

Cards

In 2021, a gold mine was purchased in Virginia when a buyer snapped up a collection of what is estimated to be 20 million sports trading cards, which would make it far and away the single largest private collection of baseball cards, completely shattering the existing believed record of 2.8 million cards belonging to an Idaho man. The original seller was reclusive and acquired the bona fide warehouse's worth of cards over the course of half a century, often buying up whole collections of other hobbyists. Estimating a total value for the collection is impossible, but it includes at minimum every Topps baseball set produced from 1954 to 2016, with something like 10,000 Michael Jordan cards, 6,000 Kobe Bryant cards and 4,000 LeBron James cards. The owner has opened, at best, 5 to 10 percent of it, and an attempt to inventory everything stopped after about 80,000 cards.

Zach Schonbrun, The New York Times

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