Meatless Meat, Megastructure, and a 25-Year-Old Bet: Lux Recommends #264
Welcome to Lux Recommends #264, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).
Articles
A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? “In 1995, a WIRED cofounder challenged a Luddite-loving doomsayer to a prescient wager on tech and civilization’s fate. Now their judge weighs in.” — Sam
How, Why and When Clean Agriculture Will Take Over the World — Deena
Ordering the Heavens: Hevelius’s Revolutionary 17th-Century Star Catalog and the First Moon Map: “How a visionary manuscript, completed by the first female astronomer of the Western world, survived three fires to become a beacon of scientific dedication.” — Cameron
Meatless meat is going mainstream. Now Big Food wants in: “Companies are pledging to sell you more plant-based meat and dairy to fight climate change (and cash in on a growing trend).” — Deena
Dinosaur Unearthed in Argentina Could Be Largest Land Animal Ever: “The skeleton is still far from complete but paleontologists say what they’ve found suggests the dinosaur may be more than 120 feet long” — Sam
Backslide or forward progress? Virtual care at U.S. healthcare systems beyond the COVID-19 pandemic — Deena
Roaring Kitty Wanted to Break a 4-Minute Mile. He Broke Wall Street Instead: “Before he became the Reddit user behind the GameStop surge, Keith Gill was a college track star. When injuries blocked him from his dreams, he traded running for investing.” — Lux friend Jeff Weinstein
How Predicting the Future Became a Literary Genre: “Since the release of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock 50 years ago, the allure of speculative nonfiction has remained the same: We all want to know what’s coming next.” — Sam
What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell? “The virus’s strangest symptom has opened new doors to understanding our most neglected sense.” — Adam K
Artificial intelligence for COVID-19: saviour or saboteur? — Deena
A New Way to Trace the History of Sci-Fi’s Made-Up Words: “The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction turns a century of neologisms (and neosemes!) into a redefinition of the genre.” — Cameron
The ‘megascale’ structures that humans could one day build — Sam
Television
Blown Away: “A reality show featuring glass blowers from around the world competing to be the best. One artist is dismissed after each episode/challenge.” — Adam K
Videos
Slow motion demonstration of inertia — Adam K
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