23. Weather forecasts are becoming more accurate. No, seriously. “In 1972, the service’s high-temperature forecast missed by an average of six degrees when made three days in advance. Now it’s down to three degrees… Just 25 years ago, when the National Hurricane Center tried to predict where a hurricane would hit three days in advance of landfall, it missed by an average of 350 miles… Now the average miss is only about 100 miles.” Better forecasting means fewer cancelled trips and plans and wasted time and money, and – more importantly – fewer injuries and deaths from sudden storms (the chance of an American being killed by lightning is apparently down over 95% since 1940). The National Weather Service has always been one of my favorite parts of the federal government, and as technology improves along with their own experience, they’re more accurate and more useful than ever.
24. An innovative treatment for millions of malnourished children around the world is expanding. Simply adding these Sprinkles to a child’s food gives him or her over a dozen vitamins and minerals. The linked piece partially mourns the fact that this simple solution has been slowly adopted despite being around since 1997, but there are encouraging signs that its use is continuing to expand, especially as we learn how to overcome cultural resistance and as the evidence of the nutritional Sprinkles spreads through various communities.
25. An Ingestible Sensor That Sends Health Information to Your Phone (h/t Carpe Diem). “This new ingestible sensor from California-based Proteus Digital Health is about the size of a grain of sand and can be integrated into an inert pill or medicine. Once in the stomach, it is powered solely by contact with stomach fluid and communicates a unique signal that identifies the timing of ingestion. This information is transferred through the user’s body tissue to a battery-operated patch worn on the skin that detects the signal along with physiological and behavioral metrics such as heart rate, body position and activity. That data, in turn, gets relayed by the patch to a mobile application.” SO COOL!
26. With 3D printing technology, you can now print customized tunes on plastic records that play on the Fisher Price toy record player. Apparently, you can also print race cars that reach 88mph.
27. More possible hints of reform in North Korea.
28. Mars One is acquiring sponsors for its far-fetched reality-TV plan to send humans on a one-way trip to Mars. I don’t actually expect this to work, but so far everything is proceeding according to plan…
29. Honduras is letting a development firm experiment with charter cities that will have their own independent legal systems in an attempt to turn around a country with the world’s highest murder rate and millions of people in poverty. Will the zones become libertarian utopias of strong property rights, business-friendly regulations, and economic prosperity? Or are they destined to devolve into corporate and government corruption in the very region that inspired the phrase “banana republic”? Maybe they will at least follow the relatively successful paths of Singapore and Hong Kong; maybe not. But no matter what, these cities likely won’t be worse than Honduras already is, and there’s a chance that they will be much better.