💡 Warp News #270
👩💻 AI at work triples efficiency. 📱 90% of world's population lives within 4G coverage. 📜 AI reveals text in 2000-year-old charred scroll.
Share this story!
Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.
🌾 A grain of good news
This newsletter contains two rice news stories.
In different parts of the world, new varieties of rice have been developed. One reduces methane emissions (a greenhouse gas) by 70%, while the other requires only half as much water to grow.
This is why so much in the world keeps improving, despite all the bad things happening at the same time. Millions of people work every day on different challenges, occasionally making small or big breakthroughs.
Together, these steps create a powerful force, leading to significant improvements over time.
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
💡 Premium Supporter content
Open and freely available to everyone, thanks to the support from our paying members, Premium Supporters.
💡 Musings of the Angry Optimist: AI development has entered phase two
AI development has now entered Phase Two, where we create new things based on what we learned in Phase One. It may seem obvious, yet surprisingly many people focus only on today’s shortcomings and completely misjudge the future.
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
🦠 Scientists recreate life's most important microbial interaction
Scientists have for the first time managed to observe how a bacterium begins living inside a fungal cell. The results provide new understanding of how complex life has evolved.
📱 90% of world's population lives within 4G coverage
The global share of people living within 4G coverage has increased from 44 percent to 90 percent between 2015 and 2023. Sub-Saharan Africa has improved its coverage from 11 percent to 63 percent. Asia has made significant progress from 40 percent to 94 percent coverage in eight years.
👩💻 New study: One in three use AI at work - triples efficiency
30.1 percent of Americans over 18 use generative AI at work, shows new comprehensive survey of over 4000 respondents. A task that normally takes 90 minutes to complete can be done in 30 minutes with the help of AI.
📜 AI reveals text in 2000-year-old charred scroll from Herculaneum
X-ray technology and artificial intelligence have for the first time made it possible to read the contents of a charred scroll from Herculaneum without physically opening it. The text in the scroll contains Greek text and is believed to be a philosophical work.
🌾 New rice variety emits 70 percent less methane
Scientists have developed a new rice variety that emits 70 percent less methane compared to regular rice. The new rice variety has been developed through traditional plant breeding and yields large harvests.
🌾 New rice variety manages with half the water
Scientists in Chile have developed a rice variety that only requires 12,000 cubic meters of water per hectare, compared to traditional 23,000 cubic meters per season. The new rice variety can be grown in both dry and flooded conditions, making it resistant to different weather conditions.
✉️ Get a dose of fact-based, free, optimism once a week
Every week, we send out a free newsletter with fact-based, optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress.
If you're not a subscriber yet, you are welcome to become one!
If you like this newsletter, please forward it to a friend and ask them to subscribe. It's free and arrives once a week.
🎤 Talk on AI
Let me help your organization level up on AI.
Read more at mathiassundin.org.
By becoming a premium supporter, you help in the creation and sharing of fact-based optimistic news all over the world.