Saturday, 31 October 2026
Dozens of blogs and magazines, read for you every morning — the few worth talking about
MACS 2129-1 Galactic Graveyard: "This chillingly haunted galaxy mysteriously stopped making stars only a few billion years after the Big Bang! It became a cosmic cemetery, illuminated by the red glow of decaying stars. Dare to enter, and you might encounter the frightening corpses of exoplanets or the final death throes of once-mighty stars." NASA Exoplanet Exploration Halloween poster 2020.
NASA-JPL/Caltech · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
A drug molecule can flip into a new crystal form and make the original impossible to reproduce, costing Abbott an estimated $250 million on ritonavir alone.
A nonprofit runs a hotline for people who are mid-trip or coming down and feel things going wrong. Researchers turned six years of calls into a dataset of 25,419 interactions, larger than all published psychedelic clinical trials combined.
The most counterintuitive finding is cannabis: often treated as low-stakes, it had the highest rate of reported bad experiences, 47.2%.
One detail made me pause: whether a caller felt the volunteer was genuine was the strongest predictor of whether the call helped.
The IMF's latest report says China should invest less, consume more and pull back on industrial policy. Zhang Ming, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, read it closely and concludes the diagnosis is largely right but the medicine is wrong.
What he resists most is an implicit premise: that China should end up looking like a mature Western economy. Yet average annual growth of nearly 9 per cent over 40 years is itself a rebuttal to the idea that there is only one correct path to development.
Zhang's answer is Industrial Policy 2.0, not abandoning the tool. That is a firm line, though I would rather know how the evaluation mechanism is supposed to work in practice.
“My takeaway is that the number one thing that predicts whether a support call will not work is the volunteer being perceived as genuine.”
“The IMF has identified many of the problems facing China’s economy, but it may not have prescribed the right remedies.”
