Welcome to the latest installment of my bi-weekly newsletter, covering some of my favorite new developments in the fields of biotech, data science, engineering, and more. If this is your first issue, it's great to have you! For everyone else, thanks for coming back!
If you like this email, forward it to a friend (I can't encourage this enough) and if you're seeing it for the first time, subscribe here to get it regularly. As always, if you come across something cool you'd like to share, send me a note.
Notes
Happy Friday, everyone, and for those of you in the NYC tri-state, it looks like it’s gonna be a great one. Every once in a while I find I’ve queued up an edition of M&D that is particularly interesting and “iconic” and I think this one (issue #90, to be specific) is one of those issues. So, I hope you enjoy every single one of the links I’ve shared!
Also, this edition’s font, which is also from Erik Demaine and Martin Demaine, is called Sudoku.
Hardware, Prototyping, and Fabrication
🚽💩⚡💴 Poop turns into power and currency with this South Korean university toilet.
🌞🔋⚡ Not only is it cool to have a solar-powered backup battery charger, it's a fun thing to have - especially when you've made it yourself, as Becky Stern's tutorial shows.
🍞 Right now this e-ink display system is just for monitoring the status of your sourdough starter, but I give it like 2 months before someone turns it into a Tamagotchi-style "pet" for you to take care of.
Software and Programming
✅ The Impossible Checkbox is the software equivalent of the Useless Box and I will 100% be finding a way to implement it on my website.
📜 The objective of this game is to never agree to any of the Terms and Conditions.
🪑 Chair Simulator. That is all.
🌐 This website will take you to another random website (so click with caution, I suppose).
🦠 Do you have what it takes to lead the Czech Republic's coronavirus response?
Science, Engineering, and Biomedicine
🥤 We may have finally found a (consistent) cure for the hiccups. (And the product is already on the market)
🕔 We've also figured out the perfect number of hours to work in a day. It's five.
👽🛸🚄 Here's your reminder that most Unidentified "Flying" Objects can actually be identified if you take a step back and consider all the data available. (In many cases they aren't even flying!)
☀🌡🏙🥵 If there's anything to be learned from this list of the top 5 heat island cities in the US, it's that a city's density has less impact than a city's amount of greenspace.
Mapping, History, and Data Science
💧 River Runner shows you where every drop of water ends up in the contiguous United States.
📊 How do you compare to what other people think of themselves?
💰🛣 A perennial discussion that was reinvigorated last year in the midst of the pandemic summer is around the other potential uses for roads or, more broadly, the spaces currently occupied by roads. This map from UCLA brings a bit of quantitative analysis to that debate by looking at how much potential value might be trapped underneath all that asphalt.
Events and Opportunities
Tuesday, 7/27 Secret Science Club: In Hot Water. At the next Secret Science Club, marine ecologist and zoologist Christopher Harley probes the depths of climate change’s impact on our coastlines. He'll also be discussing the fascinating lives of the multitudes of marine animals—sea stars, mussels, hermit crabs, and tiny sea cucumbers—that make their homes along the shore.
Tuesday, 7/27 Building Hardware in a Digital World: The Future of Connected Hardware. Join URBAN-X and Newlab for the second panel in their series "Building Hardware in a Digital World." Following a year of remote work, panelists from throughout the worlds of prototyping, IoT, and manufacturing will explore a future of distributed prototyping and best practices around using both digital and physical tools to create new hardware solutions. With many prototyping techniques having matured significantly in the past few years, this event will also gauge how far prototype parts can go - from concepting, to bench testing, to consumer sales.
Tuesday, 7/27 Westchester County Biotech Accelerator Info Session. The Westchester County Biotech Accelerator (WCBA) is beginning outreach and recruitment for their 2021-2022 accelerator program, bringing together biotech entrepreneurs and mentors from across the county and beyond. This info session will provide an overview of the upcoming accelerator programming, a chance to meet the WCBA team and mentors, and answer questions about applications and the program structure.
Thursday, 7/29 NYC Defense Innovation Meetup. Shared by longtime M&D reader Dan, join local defense innovators and those passionate about defense technology for the first in-person meetup of the NYC Defense Innovation community since late 2019. Capacity will be limited, so anyone interested should register ASAP.
Tuesday, 8/10 Bio Pharma Networking Group Meeting w/ Speaking that Connects. The New Jersey arm of the Bio Pharma networking group hosts the next virtual BPNG meeting, featuring Eileen N. Sinett from Speaking that Connects. As coach and facilitator, Eileen helps professionals communicate at their best, by sharing tips and feedback on presentations, networking speeches, interviews, keynotes, and speaking style.
Map of the Month
🌐 This isn't technically a map, but it's definitely map-adjacent: The Confluence Project is on a mission to photograph the intersections of all the globe's latitude and longitude lines.
Odds & Ends
🎲🃏 If you've ever wanted to play a secret Freemason board game, this is your chance.