💡 Warp News #296
🚭 Number of tobacco users has dropped. 🚗 Battery-electric cars gain market share. 🦠 AI creates viruses that kill E. coli bacteria.
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Free newsletter with fact-based optimistic news about technology, science, and human progress with the angry optimist, Mathias Sundin. If you are not a subscriber, become one here.
☂️ Greeting from Seattle
I’m back in Seattle for the second time this year.
In the spring, I came partly as part of a delegation from the Prince Couple’s Foundation and partly to do research for my book. This time, completely unrelated to that, I’m here to give a talk at the Nordic Innovation Summit.
While in Seattle on Monday, I had coffee with Babak Parviz. He’s best known for having created Google Glass back in the day (well ahead of its time, as it turned out). After that, he became a Vice President at Amazon, where he led their Grand Challenges division — tasked with developing “what’s next” for the company.
He’s now the founder of a fascinating company that couldn’t have existed just three years ago: NewDays.
Dementia and cognitive decline are growing problems in an aging population. There are scientifically documented treatments that can slow the progression, but the problem is that they rely on human therapists — ideally every day.
Training and hiring millions of practitioners to perform these daily exercises with dementia patients would cost astronomical sums.
This is a task perfectly suited for generative AI — and until now, it simply wasn’t possible. That’s exactly what Babak and NewDays are developing. It’s not as simple as just letting ChatGPT handle it; it requires specialized solutions, which is what they’re building.
I’ll be writing a piece about this next week.
🎉 Di Digital’s Ida Hansson Brusewitz joins the book release
Recently named one of Europe’s most powerful women in tech, Ida Hansson Brusewitz — news editor at Di Digital and host of Mitt i bruset — will be a guest on stage at the release of my book, The Fifth Acceleration.
If you’re in Stockholm on November 5, you’re warmly welcome!
Register here.
You can buy the book there, but it is also available for pre-order (in Swedish)
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
🔋 Ukraine uses large battery parks to keep power supply running
Ukraine has installed six large battery parks with a total capacity of 200 megawatts that can deliver electricity to approximately 600,000 homes for two hours. The battery parks connect to the power grid and deliver power if another source goes offline, helping to avoid blackouts.
🦠 AI creates viruses that kill E. coli bacteria
AI models have designed 16 working viruses that can attack E. coli bacteria in the laboratory. The development of the technology could lead to new treatments against antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.
🖥️ Light-powered chip makes AI one hundred times more efficient
Researchers at the University of Florida have developed a chip that uses light to perform calculations in AI systems. The chip drastically reduces energy consumption while maintaining 98 percent accuracy.
⛰️ New technology can extract lithium with a tenth of the water consumption
The first commercial facility will produce 5,000 tons of lithium per year from 2027, which doubles US annual production.
🚗 Battery-electric cars gain market share in the EU
Battery-electric cars increased their market share to 15.8 percent during the first eight months of 2025, compared to 12.6 percent in the same period the previous year.
🚭 Number of tobacco users has dropped by 180 million since 2000
This represents a decrease of 27 percent in relative terms.
💉 Gavi's vaccines saved 1.7 million lives in 2024
Over 1.2 billion unique children have been vaccinated against a range of deadly diseases through routine vaccination since 2000.
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