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Self driving cars as a public health solution
The science fiction idea of all traffic consisting of autonomous vehicles lowering traffic accidents, is nearing a reality. Waymo released intro of data documenting nearly 100,000,000 miles of cars driven, and the numbers show significant safety outcomes.
The self-driving car company Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles in four American cities through June 2025, the biggest trove of information released so far about safety. I spent weeks analyzing the data. The results were impressive. When compared with human drivers on the same roads, Waymo’s self-driving cars were involved in 91 percent fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and 80 percent fewer crashes causing any injury. It showed a 96 percent lower rate of injury-causing crashes at intersections, which are some of the deadliest I encounter in the trauma bay.
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AI animation acceleration
Disney is giving animators an AI tool to accelerate character animation.
To maintain the “creator-first approach” that centers human artists — a hallmark of last century’s Walt and Roy Disney partnership — Min says that Disney looked into “pretty much all of the AI companies.”
“We looked at thousands of companies, all big and small, and what Animaj does well is that the artist is really driving the process,” he says, adding that you don’t really see this in video-generating AI apps like Sora and Veo, which read your text prompts and spit out (usually nonsensical) videos. “This is the artist drawing the key frames from A to Z, and then allowing things to be filled in in between. That’s why we selected Animaj.”
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TV creative trees
In sports, coaching trees are when assistants of preeminent coaches become good coaches, or well-known as well. What if we applied similar thinking to TV show runners and writers? The Ringer drafts a lists of shows whose writers or producers went onto create other successful shows.
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When your car becomes a brick
One of the frustrating things about modern life is when a device that requires software to work properly suddenly does not mean working properly, you essentially have a very expensive brick. Vehicles, that require gears, pistons, and all sorts of other mechanical bits and bobs–are also becoming very expensive bricks due to all of the software required.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old.
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The history of tarot
Playing cards have been around for nearly 500 years, but their form as tarot cards has only been around since the mid 18th century.
Whether or not we believe that the cards of the tarot have supernatural powers, we all think of them primarily as tools for divination. It might seem as if they’ve played that cultural role since time immemorial, but in fact, that particular use only goes back to the eighteenth century. They were, at first, playing cards, used for a game known as tarocchi in Renaissance Italy. That was the original purpose of the oldest tarot cards in possession of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which you can see unboxed by curator Ruth Hibbard in the video above.
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How to colonize space according to archeologists
Humanity traveled the world throughout its history, creating colonies and cities–for better or worse. If we are to travel through space to other planets, we might need to consider lessons from our past.
Their paper, which is published in Acta Astronautica, uses island archaeology to outline eight different lessons that can impact the success of ongoing space colonization efforts. Considerations for space colonization go beyond just the technical abilities to live on the surface of another world—they have to consider resource availability, genetics, and cultural ties as well.
The authors split the eight lessons into two main categories—physiological factors and biocultural factors. Their first lesson is that distance is important—no surprise there really. Colonization of other islands is most successful when they are close to their source population. This allows help to arrive faster if needed, but also allows the colony‘s population to be part of a “metapopulation” with the source population.
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Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication
Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication
With dexterous childlike hands and cheeky “masks,” raccoons are North America’s ubiquitous backyard bandits. The critters are so comfortable in human environments, in fact, that a new study finds that raccoons living in urban areas are physically changing in response to life around humans—an early step in domestication.
The study lays out the case that the domestication process is often wrongly thought of as initiated by humans—with people capturing and selectively breeding wild animals. But the study authors claim that the process begins much earlier, when animals become habituated to human environments.
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Dataguessr
Dataguessr is a clever, little web game where are you need to put a set of facts in the correct order. Mostly, the topics tend to relate to populations in certain countries. What makes it challenging is the margins between items are slim, like splitting hairs
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The value of AI art
Josh Collinsworth delves into the value of AI art.
The public reaction to AI-generated art, of every kind, might have been awe or joy at first. But the longer time goes on, and the more of this newly cheap material floods the figurative market, the more the reaction becomes decidedly negative.
The output of generative AI is novel, to be sure, and it can even be enjoyable at times. But what it isn’t any longer is: valuable.
