Hey folks! From Pompeiiās second act to Britainās rivers full of sewage, hereās 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, theyād 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 worldās largest capitals now face 25% more extremely hot days than in the 1990s. In Rome and Beijing, the number of days with temperatures above 35Ā°C has doubled; in Manila, it has tripled. Even in cooler cities like London, days above 30Ā°C have doubled.
One of the Holocaustās 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 Iāve been reading (AI edition):
What exactly are AI companies trying to build?: āAmazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI plan to spend at least $325 billion by the end of the year in pursuit of AIā
8 Google employees invented modern AI. Hereās the inside story: āEight names are listed as authors on āAttention Is All You Need,ā a scientific paper written in the spring of 2017. They were all Google researchers, though by then one had left the company. The āAttentionā 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.ā
Time 100 AI 2025: āMeet the innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.ā
In case youāve missed it:
My interview with Marcus Ferrar on his reporting for Reuters from East Berlin in the 1970s.
My take on Carlos Morenoās lecture about 15-minute cities.
And thatās 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.