Author: Crop Protection
Nearly nobody on Wall Street would have placed a wager against Novo Nordisk a year ago. The Danish pharmaceutical company had discreetly transformed a substance known as semaglutide into something more akin to cultural furniture than a prescription. In taxis, you heard the jingle. You saw the advertisements on stadium boards in New Jersey and at bus shelters in Toronto. Oprah brought it up. Elon Musk made a joke about it. Ozempic ceased to be medicine and turned into a verb somewhere between an Oscar joke and a conversation in a Costco parking lot. Then came the hangover. Novo Nordisk…
The American energy story took an unexpected turn somewhere between the cooling towers of central Pennsylvania and the pumpkin patches of Wisconsin. Microsoft continued to make purchases after paying $76 million for a 407-acre pumpkin farm in Mount Pleasant, which was valued at about $600,000. Now the pumpkins are gone. A two-square-mile data center campus, part of a five-site network called Stargate, is rising in their place. If it is ever constructed, it could consume as much electricity as five nuclear reactors operating at full capacity. The quiet side of the AI narrative is that scale. The headlines go to…
Anyone who has been in close proximity to an octopus will frequently describe the moment when the creature turns to face you and something happens. Not precisely recognition. Akin to an appraisal. It was written about by Sy Montgomery. Years ago, Eric Dorfman, who kept one in a tank, observed that his octopus appeared to divide people into two groups: the human who brought dinner and everyone else. It seems endearing until you consider the implications. A social model of the humans standing outside its glass was being silently run by a creature that was built on an entirely different…
A boy, no older than twelve, is crouched in a pit he helped dig himself somewhere in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, close to Kolwezi. He is surrounded by loose walls. The tools he is holding are hardly tools at all; they may be a chipped hammer or a bent piece of rebar. The sky above him is the same carefree blue you’d see over a Californian beach, where someone is most likely plugging in a brand-new electric sedan and quietly feeling good about the world right now. There seems to be no connection between the…
The way passwords are vanishing has an almost anticlimactic quality. No dramatic farewell, no countdown, no large press conference. When your phone asks you if you’d like to “save a passkey for this site,” most people answer “yes” without fully comprehending what they’ve agreed to. In fact, this is how the largest shift in online security in 20 years is taking place. Silently. behind the scenes. while the debate over AI continues. Passwords, however, were never truly technological. They represented a middle ground. A shaky social contract between a weary human and a website that required identity verification. Rules such…
Not too long ago, a clear night outside a small town had significance. The sky would silently astound you if you took a few steps away from the porch light and tilted your head back. Most people haven’t fully realized how quickly that experience is disappearing. A stargazer who used to see 250 stars overhead now only sees roughly 100, according to a 2023 study. Not in a hundred years. 18 years from now. It would be too simple to assign blame to just one of the many factors. A significant portion should go to urban LEDs. However, the more…
A company that most people outside of cryptocurrency circles couldn’t identify from a lineup suddenly appears in Basel, Beijing, and Washington policy papers, and there’s something subtly peculiar about that. For the better part of ten years, Tether, the issuer of USDT, has been written off as an oddity, a footnote, and occasionally a scandal. The framing is no longer appropriate. It appears that regulators have only recently realized that the company now has a balance sheet big enough to compete with a mid-sized sovereign wealth fund. A portion of the story is revealed by the numbers. The majority of…
It is surprisingly easy to wonder if the trees around you are conscious of anything at all when you spend enough time in a forest in the kind of profound silence where you can actually hear the wind blowing through the canopy. Whether they sense the drought, the axe, or the insect methodically biting through a leaf. Most people quickly brush this kind of thought aside, usually with a chuckle. However, despite everything, a version of that question has been the subject of debate among plant biologists for more than 50 years, and the debate remains unresolved. The current debate…
If you walk through the hallways of any major asset management company in New York or London right now, you’ll notice a certain confident energy that, if you look closely enough, has a slightly manic edge. Screens that track Nvidia, Microsoft, and the larger Magnificent Seven glow with valuations based on optimism that is either dangerously detached from reality or entirely rational, depending on who you ask. It is anticipated that Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta alone will spend about $650 billion on global AI infrastructure. That figure is frequently cited. What occurs on the opposite side of the ledger…
Every significant technological advancement has a point in its history when it transitions from theoretical to deadly. That moment seems to have arrived for artificial intelligence in the early hours of February 28, 2026, somewhere over Iranian airspace. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed when the United States and Israel attacked over 900 targets before dawn, sparking an ongoing conflict. Something more subdued and possibly more significant was operating behind the missiles and the headlines: an algorithm. The Maven Smart System, developed by Palantir and evolving from a Pentagon program started back in 2017, is the system handling…