🦆 7 things I learned this week
Hey folks! From Pompeii’s second act to Britain’s rivers full of sewage, here’s what caught my attention this week:
There are an estimated 96 million birders in the United States, who together spent more than $107 billion in 2022 on binoculars, feeders, cameras, trips, plants, subscriptions, field guides, and campers.
In twenty years, SUVs in English cities jumped from 3% to 30% of all cars. In London, they take up as much space as Kensington and Chelsea. Nationwide, they’d cover Manchester.
After Vesuvius buried Pompeii, some residents soon returned. For centuries, outsiders and underdogs lived among the ruins, in the upper floors of buildings that rose above the ash.
The world’s largest capitals now face 25% more extremely hot days than in the 1990s. In Rome and Beijing, the number of days with temperatures above 35°C has doubled; in Manila, it has tripled. Even in cooler cities like London, days above 30°C have doubled.
One of the Holocaust’s most haunting photos shows a Nazi soldier aiming his pistol at a kneeling man beside a pit of corpses in Ukraine. Using AI and help from Bellingcat volunteers, a historian traced the scene to Berdychiv and identified the soldier.
In the UK, rivers inside national parks are hit by sewage twice as often as those outside. In 2024, 464 overflow sites spilled for an average of 549 hours each, adding up to more than 254,000 hours of pollution.
Just 12% of Americans consume half of all the beef in the country.
What I’ve been reading (AI edition):
What exactly are AI companies trying to build?: “Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI plan to spend at least $325 billion by the end of the year in pursuit of AI”
8 Google employees invented modern AI. Here’s the inside story: “Eight names are listed as authors on ‘Attention Is All You Need,’ a scientific paper written in the spring of 2017. They were all Google researchers, though by then one had left the company. The ‘Attention’ paper has attained legendary status. The authors started with a thriving and improving technology. They made it into something else: a digital system so powerful that its output can feel like the product of an alien intelligence.”
Time 100 AI 2025: “Meet the innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.”
In case you’ve missed it:
And that’s it for today! Thanks for reading! If you enjoy the newsletter, share it with a friend. And if you really enjoyed it, consider upgrading to a paid subscription: it helps support my work and means a lot.
Elia Kabanov is a science writer covering the past, present and future of technology (@metkere)
Cover art: Elia Kabanov feat. DALL-E.