Arvind's Newsletter

1.California just opened the floodgates for driverless cars.

“After several hours of public testimony, the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday granted permits to allow both Cruise and Waymo to charge for rides around the clock in San Francisco."

“Thursday’s vote stripped most limitations on operating and charging for rides, essentially creating more ride-hailing services like Uber or Lyft — just without the drivers. It’s a pivotal moment for the autonomous transportation industry, expanding one of the biggest test cases for a world in which many companies envision not needing drivers at all.”

But , emergency responders in the State are not happy .San Francisco's police and fire departments have urged the CPUC to oppose the expansion – they say they've tallied 55 incidents where self-driving cars have got in the way of rescue operations in just the last six months. The incidents include running through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways and refusing to move for first responders

2.By now most of the readers of this newsletter may have seen Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer.If you haven’t yet I would strongly recommend you see it. Whether you have seen movie or not you should also read one or both of the following books the first, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin ( Nolan’s movie is significantly based on this book) and second, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes (which won the Pulitzer Prize).

If you know more about the key characters in this story you should listen to this podcast in which Derek Thompson, journalist and staff writer with The Atlantic magazine, chats with above mentioned author Richard Rhodes and discusses the life of Oppenheimer, the Manhattan project, and Nolan’s movie. It is worth listening even if you haven’t seen the movie.

3.While there was disappointing news on LK 99 and room temperature superconductivity which was reported earlier, US scientists repeat fusion power breakthrough reported the Financial Times.

US government scientists have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time, a result that is set to fuel optimism that progress is being made towards the dream of limitless, zero-carbon power.

Researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December.

Fusion is achieved by heating two hydrogen isotopes — usually deuterium and tritium — to such extreme temperatures that the atomic nuclei fuse, releasing helium and vast amounts of energy in the form of neutrons. Although many scientists believe fusion power stations are still decades away, the technology’s potential is hard to ignore. Fusion reactions emit no carbon, produce no long-lived radioactive waste and a small cup of hydrogen fuel could theoretically power a house for hundreds of years.

4.U.S. to Fund a $1.2 Billion Effort to Vacuum Greenhouse Gases From the Sky, reports MIT’s Technology Review

The US Department of Energy announced today that it’s providing $1.2 billion to develop regional hubs that can draw down and store away at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year as a means of combating climate change. The move represents a major step forward in the effort to establish a market for removing the planet-warming greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, using what are known as direct air capture (DAC) machines.

Occidental Petroleum will build one of the plants in Kleberg County, Texas, and Battelle, a nonprofit research organisation, will build the other in Calcasieu Parish on the Louisiana coast. The federal government and the companies will equally split the cost of building the facilities.

5.BMI alone will no longer be treated as the go-to measure for weight management – an obesity medicine physician explains the seismic shift taking place

Amid the buzz around weight loss drugs and rising rates of obesity worldwide, many health care professionals are questioning one of the key measures that has long been used to define obesity. On June 14, 2023, the American Medical Association adopted a new policy, calling on doctors to de-emphasize the role of body mass index, or BMI, in clinical practice.

The statement by the AMA, the nation’s largest association representing physicians, signals a significant shift in how clinicians regard BMI as a measure of general health. With over 40% of Americans having obesity as defined by BMI, a movement away from BMI could have broad implications for patient care.