The heart doctors say my coffee is fine, thirty years too late

🔥 Most Enraging

The social media addiction lawsuit against Meta was dropped

A Florida teenager sued Meta for building apps engineered to hook him, and this week, right before the trial, the case against Meta was dropped. The other companies had already settled, but Meta held out and won, and is now out congratulating itself for standing up to baseless lawsuits. Baseless. Everyone I know has watched somebody they love vanish into that scroll. A court could not prove the obvious, and Meta is taking a bow for it.

😩 Most Exhausting

A hidden 'switch-off' signal could predict solar storms seven years early

A physicist at Warwick found a way to tell how bad the sun's storms will get about seven years ahead, by watching for the moment the sunspots drift low enough that the violent weather quits. Seven years of warning about the sun. I cannot get seven minutes of warning about my own knee. Somewhere a computer is bracing for a solar storm in 2033, and I am bracing for the stairs.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

Alberta is begging residents to stop releasing goldfish into the waterways

Alberta has had to beg people to stop dumping their pet goldfish in the lakes. More than a hundred times somebody has driven an unwanted goldfish out to the water and let it go, where it does not die politely but grows huge, breeds, and takes over. The fine runs to seventy thousand dollars. There is a person who will drive a goldfish to a lake to set it free rather than deal with it, and I have met him in every other context there is.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

Scientists identified the rare meteorite that killed the dinosaurs

Scientists finally worked out what kind of rock killed the dinosaurs, a rare one that came from the cold far edge of the solar system, by reading the nickel it smeared across the whole planet on the way down. Sixty-six million years, and they have now got the thing's home address. It took one bad rock from the outer dark to end everything with teeth. I forget where I set my glasses down. They tracked a killer across the solar system by its dust.

▸ Scientists revived a powerful antibiotic that superbugs had defeated — Scientists took an old antibiotic the superbugs had already learned to shrug off, added a small molecule that knocks out the germ's defenses, and the drug started working again. So the fix was not a new weapon, just taking away the bug's shield. They built the thing that saves the old thing. I feel like the old thing. I would take a small molecule that knocked out my defenses too, if it meant I worked again.

▸ Ancient ferns turned Triassic Europe into a wildfire inferno — Scientists found that after the last great volcanic catastrophe, the forests of Europe fell and ferns took over, and the ferns were such good kindling that they burned, grew back, and burned again for something like a couple hundred thousand years. A plant that made the fire that fed the plant. The one thing that thrived was the thing best at catching fire. I know a few people who run their whole lives on that exact plan.

▸ Scientists found mystery bacteria inside pygmy sperm whales — Scientists cut open some rare deep-sea whales that had washed up and found three kinds of bacteria nobody had ever named, curled up in their stomachs, the same family that gives people ulcers. So even the whale two miles down has an upset stomach and something to blame it on. I have the ulcers and none of the mystery. Mine are named, and I know exactly who gave them to me.

Fine. A man named Keith Thomas broke his neck diving into a pool five years ago and lost everything below the chest. Doctors on Long Island ran a wire from his brain past the break and out to his arm, and put sensors in his fingers that send the feeling back up, and now he can pick up a cup, feed himself, and pet his dog. He can tell an egg from a ball with his eyes closed. They gave a man back his own hand and the feel of his dog under it. I am not going to make a joke about that one.