They can demand your whole phone at the border, and protecting it is the crime

🔥 Most Enraging

The billion-dollar problem keeping Ozempic and Wegovy from patients

It turns out the weight-loss drugs everyone is on actually work and are worth the money, and the only reason not everyone can get them is that forty percent of the country could use one, and covering all of it would bankrupt the insurance system at once. So the drug is good, the value is real, and the only trouble is that too many of us are broken the same way. That is the most honest thing a health system has ever told me.

😩 Most Exhausting

Sweden's hidden rare earth deposits could help break China's grip

Sweden thinks it has enough rare earth minerals in the ground to loosen China's hold on the stuff that runs every phone and motor, and the clever part is they want to build the magnets to match whatever they dig up instead of fighting the rock. It will take years, they say. Everything that would actually help takes years. I have a drawer of dead devices that each needed a pinch of some metal one country decided to own.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

A crashed truck buried an Ohio highway in pickles

A truck crashed on an Ohio highway and dumped its whole load of pickles across the road, and the state's own people could not help themselves, announcing there was quite a pickle out there and that the pickles, sadly, were speared. The driver was fine. The road was shut for hours. Somewhere a government worker got to write the pickle jokes and I hope they savored it, because the rest of us would have been stuck behind it.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

China's Tianwen-1 captured an interstellar comet passing near Mars

A Chinese spacecraft out by Mars turned its camera and caught a comet passing through from another star system entirely, a three-mile lump of ice and dust that wandered in from somewhere we will never go, trailing a tail, already on its way back out. Only the third one we have ever seen. A visitor from outside crossed the whole solar system and left, and did not stop. I understand it completely. I would not stop here either.

▸ A new giant salamander species was found in 3.5-million-year-old fossils — Scientists in Japan dug up three little backbones and worked out they belong to a giant salamander nobody knew about, a four-foot thing that lived in the lakes there three and a half million years ago. Twenty years those bones sat in a drawer before anybody placed them. A whole new creature, hiding in three knuckles of spine. I have paperwork that has waited less time than that, and I still have not gotten to it.

▸ A compound could supercharge aging muscle repair — Researchers in Japan found a sulfur compound that helps old muscle fix itself, at least in mice they hung up by the tail to waste the muscle away. It made the repair signal work better than it does alone. Years off for people, they say, if ever. My muscle stopped answering the repair signal a while back. I would volunteer for the study, but I have seen what they do to the mice.

▸ An ancient ape fossil in Egypt challenges the story of human origins — A jawbone dug up in Egypt turned out to be an ape that lived around seventeen million years ago, in the wrong place entirely, and it has scientists rewriting where apes came from, because everyone was sure it was East Africa and not the north. One jaw did that. A man who spent his whole career certain now has to start over. I know the feeling, though mine is usually about where I left the car.

Fine. A little tour bus was driving Beatles fans around Liverpool when a car pulled up alongside at a red light, and it was Paul McCartney, who rolled down the window, waved, and held up his phone to show them Ringo on a video call, the two of them just checking in. The guide has run that route for years and had caught Paul once before in a decade. A minute at a traffic light, and he made a whole busful of strangers' year. I was not going to feel anything about this. I felt something about this.