💡 Warp News #338
🍷 Americans' drinking remains at the lowest level since 1939. 🧠 Meningitis deaths among young children have fallen by two thirds since 1990. 📉 Suicides in the EU have fallen by almost 15 percent in ten years.
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🔋 If you make it there, you make it anywhere
No other publication has followed the project for so long, so closely.
What Jonas Birgersson is building in Lund is called EnergyNet, which is part of the Energy Society. A new power grid built on the same logic as the internet. That is, many small grids connected into one large one, with batteries as the lubricant.
Long-time readers of Warp News have been able to follow the project from the start.
I have written about it several times, and all the articles are here.
That is why it is so much fun that another, slightly larger, publication has noticed the energy transformation smoldering in southern Sweden. In fact, it is the world's biggest daily newspaper, The New York Times, that is writing (free guest link) about it:
"This week, Mr. Birgersson spoke about the project at Climate Week in New York. But experts around the world have already taken notice. Kingsmill Bond, a director of Ember, a global energy think tank in London, called Mr. Birgersson's project 'an idea whose time has come.'"
I wasn't in New York last week, but I was in Lund. There I spoke with two of the people working on the project, Jonas Bohlin and Staffan Ekholm. Staffan worked with Birgersson, or Birger as they call him, back in the 90s. Back then, on the rise of the internet. They showed me how EnergyNet is already starting to become a network like the internet, where different players can build things.
A report will follow in a couple of weeks or so.
No PS article
Since I'm in the middle of switching platforms for Warp News, I haven't written a Premium Supporter article this week. But the news is below as usual.
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
💡 Fact-based optimistic news of the week
🍷 Americans' drinking remains at the lowest level since 1939
54 percent of Americans say they drink alcohol, matching last year's low and the lowest figure since measurements began in 1939. The share who say they sometimes drink too much has fallen to 13 percent, compared with 35 percent in 1989.
🧠 Meningitis deaths among young children have fallen by two thirds since 1990
Since 2015 alone, the meningitis mortality rate has dropped by 25.4 percent, and it is falling in every age group. Vaccines against the bacteria that cause the disease account for a large part of the decline.
📉 Suicides in the EU have fallen by almost 15 percent in ten years
The suicide rate in the EU fell from 12.2 to 10.4 per 100,000 residents between 2013 and 2023. The rate continued to decline between 2022 and 2023, from 10.6 to 10.4 per 100,000. The EU is investing more than €1.2 billion in mental health.
🛩️ Self-flying plane crosses the US without the pilot needing to step in
An aircraft equipped with Joby Aviation's autonomy technology flew more than 3,100 miles across the United States without the pilot on board needing to intervene at any point. The aircraft handled taxiing, takeoff, navigation and landing on its own throughout the journey.
💥 Driverless cars crash 68 percent less than human drivers
Waymo's driverless robotaxis were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes and 81 percent fewer injury crashes than human drivers, an independent study from IIHS shows. Automatic emergency braking that recognizes pedestrians cuts pedestrian crashes by 27 percent and rear-end crashes by 50 percent.
🧒 Children developed better as air got cleaner, 20-year study shows
Children in New York scored higher on tests of memory, problem-solving and language as air pollution declined. Levels of fine particles and nitrogen dioxide in the city halved between 1998 and 2016.
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