March 17, 2023

🌎 Welcome to the Unknown Unknowns

This week:

What we know — and more importantly, what we don’t — about what AI is capable of, and how much change we’re capable of absorbing.

Plus: the Willow Project, H-1B visas, blueberries, honeybee vaccines, climate disclosure rules, next-gen bed nets, and health insurance in North Carolina

Here's What You Can Do:

⚡️ Just a few bucks buys some life-saving bed nets with Against Malaria, maybe the most effective NGO on the planet
⚡️ The only thing dumber than cancer is rare cancers. Good news: you can help fund research against them (and work up a sweat at the same time) with our friends at Cycle for Survival
⚡️ This is the best electric vehicle you can buy
⚡️ Get educated and follow the Black Maternal Health Caucus on Twitter
⚡️ Understand your home’s exposure to flooding, fires, heat and wind with Risk Factor

News Roundup

Health & Medicine

What’s second-hand stress?
Next-gen bed nets are coming and could save so many lives
Medicaid expansion might finally be coming to North Carolina

Climate

Joe Biden approved the Willow Project in Alaska and it sucks, but on the other hand, the US is on track for a major clean energy milestone
The world’s first honeybee vaccine is like “magic”
Use this tool to see how early spring came to your neighborhood
In the future, it might still cost $1 trillion per ppm of CO2 removed, we should pay for it
The SEC’s climate disclosure rules are coming. 85% of business execs said they’re not ready.
Why did insurers slash Hurricane Ian payouts?

Food & Water

The EPA proposed their strongest ever standards for keeping coal plant pollution out of your water (right after they went after forever chemicals)
Blueberries are packed with pesticides?
A Supreme Court case could reshape Indigenous water rights in the (parched) southwest

Beep Boop

Some additional AI reading: Azeem Azhar on “Everything, everywhere, all at once”; Are LLM’s the new CPU’s?
Amid mass tech layoffs, workers on H-1B visas have 60 days to find a job, or leave the country, and we’re really just doing this all wrong

COVID

COVID made maternal health outcomes much worse (and especially among Black people)
There doesn’t seem to be an association between Paxlovid and a COVID rebound, which is great