Arvind's Newsletter

1. The one bright spot in India's cricket firmament over the last year has been Suryakumar Yadav (SKY). On form, he is probably the best T20 batter in cricket at the moment. He is in many ways the next Mr 360 after A B De Villiers. In this article in the Indian Express, Sandeep Dwivedi, opines on what Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma can learn from SKY

2. Apple Inc. is poised to become one of India’s top smartphone sellers for the first time, led by strong sales of its pricey iPhone 13 model in a declining smartphone market.The model’s sales accounted for 4% of all smartphones sold in October, according to data from market researcher Counterpoint Research. Launched about 15 months ago, iPhone 13 has been one of the top sellers for Apple as well as in the overall smartphone market, analysts and retailers said.

iPhone 13 was the only premium-segment smartphone to figure in the top five devices sold in October—all other smartphones were priced below ₹15,000. Premium smartphones are those that are priced above ₹30,000. The sales ranking follows iPhone 13 topping smartphone shipments in the September quarter, according to Counterpoint.

3.Harvests that form a vital element of the diets of 4.5 billion people are being devastated by global heating. Now research has found a key to create a heat-resistant variety.

Wheat now provides 20% of the calories consumed by humans every day, but its production is under threat. Thanks to human-induced global heating, our planet faces a future of increasingly severe heat waves, droughts and wildfires that could devastate harvests in future, triggering widespread famine in their wake.

But the crisis could be averted thanks to remarkable research now being undertaken by researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. They are working on a project to make wheat more resistant to heat and drought. Such efforts have proved to be extremely tricky but are set to be the subject of a new set of trials in a few weeks as part of a project in which varieties of wheat – created, in part, by gene-editing technology – will be planted in field trials in Spain.

4. Many readers buy books with every intention of reading them only to let them linger on the shelf. Investor and Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes surrounding ourselves with unread books enriches our lives as they remind us of all we don't know. He refers to the unread books (physical or digital) as an anti-library. The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits. It is a practice I am no longer guilty of.

5. A study published this week in Nature magazine found that science has actually been getting…less innovative since the 1950s. Reviewing data from 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six decades across all major fields of science, researchers found that newer discoveries are less likely to be disruptive and push science and technology in a new direction. No one’s exactly sure why, but one theory is that scientists have already found all the “low-hanging fruit.” Another is that they’re working in bigger teams and pushed to publish more frequently, leading to more incremental advancements.