Hey Bizarro Readers!

Welcome to another edition of your favorite monthly tech newsletter. We’ve got the usual mix of interesting stories and stats, useful tools, and more. Our main headliners this month lean towards science, but there’s plenty of tech news in the must-see links section, along with cybercrime, a tutorial, a research piece from yours truly, and some other fun stuff.

Let’s get into it.

• 🧬👵🏼 Research Suggests Humans Age Dramatically When We Hit 44 and 60

• 🐁🩻 Scientists Create See-Through Mice Using Food Dye

• 🍓🏙️ Vertical Farm Revolution: Year-Round Berries in a Fraction of the Space

📰 From the Newsroom

🧬👵🏼 Research Suggests Humans Age Dramatically When We Hit 44 and 60

When we contemplate the science of aging, it’s often thought of as a linear, gradual process. Those of us who are older can look at a photograph of ourselves from one or more decades ago and see a difference from the person we saw in the mirror when we brushed our teeth in the morning. But despite these visible cosmetic changes, it turns out that the more important changes in our bodies happen in two distinct waves.

• Scientists in California tracked 108 volunteers, who submitted blood and stool samples and skin, oral and nasal swabs every few months for between one and nearly seven years.

• The researchers analyzed 135,000 different molecules (RNA, proteins and metabolites) and microbes (the bacteria, viruses and fungi living in the guts and on the skin of the participants). They found that most molecules and microbes did not shift in a gradual, chronological fashion.

• Instead, the analysis revealed substantial dysregulation at approximately 44 years and 60 years of chronological age. The major molecules and functional pathways that were affected at the mid-40s mark were associated with cardiovascular disease, lipid and alcohol metabolism, while the 60-year mark affected immune regulation and carbohydrate metabolism.

This research was certainly fascinating and surprising in many ways. For instance, the mid-40s changes were unexpected and initially assumed to be a result of perimenopausal changes in women skewing results for the whole group. However, upon closer inspection, the data revealed similar shifts were happening to men in their mid-40s as well. I think there should be some kind of follow-up research done on this - ideally on a larger scale. What about you?

🐁🩻 Scientists Create See-Through Mice Using Food Dye

So it turns out that the powder they sprinkle on Doritos is actually a magical fairy dust. Who saw that coming? Not me. Also, don’t ask who came up with the idea or thought that it would even work (the article doesn’t say it), but for some unexplained reason, researchers discovered that when yellow food dye is applied to body cells, it makes them transparent.

• The method uses tartrazine (yellow food dye #5), commonly found in Doritos and other snacks, mixed with water and applied to shaved mouse skin.

• When applied, the dye increases light absorption in body cells, reducing scattering and creating a transparent effect to a depth of about 3 millimeters.

• Researchers successfully tested the technique on both mice and raw chicken breast, demonstrating its potential for various applications.

This innovative discovery opens up exciting possibilities in medicine, from non-invasive tumor diagnosis to improved cosmetic procedures. As the technique is purely topical and uses a food-grade dye, it could potentially be adapted for human use in the future, though further research is needed to expand its capabilities and ensure safety for clinical applications.

🍓🏙️ Vertical Farm Revolution: Year-Round Berries in a Fraction of the Space

After 200 research trials over the past six years, the Plenty Richmond Farm in Richmond, VA, is about to transform food agriculture by producing millions of pounds of strawberries indoors. Their research has allowed them to create the perfect growing conditions for strawberries, so that they can maintain consistent peak-season flavor year-round - all while drastically minimizing environmental impact.

• The farm projects that it will yield over 4 million pounds of strawberries annually using just 40,000 square feet of space, which is about 97% less land that traditional farming would require to yield the same amount.

• Their facility features 30-ft-tall towers and 12 controlled growing rooms, optimizing conditions for pollination and fruit production without using pesticides.

• They also use up to 90% less water than conventional methods and plan to supply the Driscoll's brand with strawberries that will show up on grocery store shelves by early 2025.

This venture, backed by international scientists, represents a significant leap in sustainable agriculture. By combining advanced technology with traditional farming expertise, it paves the way for year-round, local production of high-quality produce. Depending on how it goes and what the consumer response will be, it could potentially revolutionize the global food system by addressing future food security challenges.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Pinata: The easiest File API on the internet. Upload to Pinata today!

• If you’ve used the internet in the past year, then you’ll probably agree that AI advertising has seemingly invaded damn near everything. Despite the AI push, a YouGov poll of consumers across 17 international markets reveals that AI integration has no impact on consumers’ purchase intent.

• In the latest move to replace the human touch in basic email communication, Google has announced a new feature for paid users of select Google products: Gemini-powered Contextual Smart Replies.

• Last Thursday, the U.S. government sanctioned two cryptocurrency exchanges and unsealed an indictment against a Russian national for his alleged involvement in several money laundering services that were offered to cybercriminals.

• OpenAI has released the latest GPT model series - the o1. These models can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math. In short, they’re smarter.

• WeRide, a global autonomous driving tech company, and Uber, the world’s largest mobility and delivery tech platform, announced a partnership that will bring WeRide’s self-driving vehicles onto the Uber platform, beginning in the UAE.

• We use copy and paste while browsing the web every day, but few of us understand how it works. Learn its intricacies and the workarounds employed by major web applications to overcome some of its constraints.

• Want to know how to extract article content from Reddit using the Reddit API and without a Reddit account? Follow this tutorial.

• 📽️🎞️ One man in the Netherlands has combined his love of carpentry with his love of robotics to design walking furniture that follows him around with beer and snacks. The breakdown of his engineering process is here.

• Recently, I tested over 60 WordPress themes in two separate niches - travel and fitness - and I found that both theme categories had numerous problems. I documented my findings and suggestions for improvement in this article.

• Speaking of WordPress, have you been following the public quarrel between WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, and managed WordPress hosting company, WP Engine? It’s definitely the most drama WordPress has seen for quite a while.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by showing how much of your own time you are prepared to give to them."

– Colin Nimick, as quoted by Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of Ogilvy

🧮 The Numbers Game

• $1,026,000,000,000 USD was lost by consumers worldwide last year due to scams. That’s according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, who also notes that only 0.05% of all cybercriminals are prosecuted.

• 378,025,432 is the number of weekly downloads of the top npm package as of the 11th of September. The 5,000th most popular has 446,644 weekly downloads.

• 73 percent of Amazon employees polled are now considering leaving their jobs following CEO Andy Jassy's announcement that all staff will be required to work in the office five days a week starting next year. Additionally, 32 percent reported knowing someone who had already quit due to this requirement.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Speed Brain: This new Cloudflare tool downloads a webpage to a user’s browser before the user navigates to it, thus improving key metrics like Largest Content Paint (LCP), Time to First Byte (TTFB) and overall page load time. The one thing it cannot do is improve page load time for the first page that is visited on a website, but any subsequent pages that a visitor navigates to (on the same site) will load faster.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content/speed-brain/

Jimp: The name stands for JavaScript Image Manipulation Program. It’s a package that makes it easy to load and manipulate images in the browser and Node.js. You can use it to resize, crop, apply filters and more. It supports bmp, gif, jpeg, png, and tiff files.

https://jimp-dev.github.io/jimp/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Yes, that is who you think it is.

No, I’m not posting this here to update you on his new hairstyle or his custom-made aut Zuck aut nihil t-shirt — an ode to the Latin phrase “aut Caesar aut nihil,” meaning “either Emperor or nothing.”

I’m posting it because of the funny-looking eyewear. That funny-looking eyewear has more to it than meets the eye. It’s Zuck’s vision for the future. The glasses are called Orion and they are an augmented reality device that turns your normal field of view into a series of monitors visible only to you.

Using Orion, you can see your email inbox, a WhatsApp chat with a friend, and your work Slack channel all on the same “screen.” The screen is anywhere you happen to find yourself.

Will this eventually replace mobile phones?

Tell me what you think in the comments. If you’re viewing this in your email inbox then head on over to Substack and leave your thoughts. I’ll see you there.

💬 What’s the Word?

"Verschlimmbessern" (German) is the act of making something worse while attempting to improve it. This is something that I think is very relatable to anyone who’s gotten stuck in lines of code, trying to debug a problem, only to make it worse. Now you have a word to describe your frustration.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

The results of last month’s poll about the new AI chip closely mirror how I feel. I do concede that it is too early to tell, but if pressed on what I think will happen, I lean more towards Etched being a market disruptor over them going bankrupt. It seems like they know what they are doing and the preliminary results were certainly impressive. Let’s see how it unravels in the next few years.

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