Giant Green Walls, Giant Drugmaker, and Giant Airports

1st of May 2024

Hello,

Here's what I have published on the blog: 

• Summary of The Charisma Myth Summary by Olivia Fox Cabane

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Here's the best of what I have published on Medium (free to access from this email): 

• After 4 Years as a Content Creator, It’s Time to Move on

• Use This Proven Content Strategy to Get Backlinks in 2024

• Giving Away +100 Article Ideas For Free

• Every Catholic Holiday and Their Pagan Origins

• Coming to Terms With Turning 30

• How Two Friends Built a $100 Million Socks Company in Less Than 10 Years

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Here's the cool stuff I have learned:

• The founding myth of Rome says that Romulus and Remus were abandoned as babies and nourished by a “she-wolf”, lupa in Latin. But lupa was in fact the nickname of Acca Larencia, the wife of Faustulus, the shepherd who saved and raised the twins.

• Carnivals are probably a heritage of the Athenian festivals which happened for up to 120 days a year in Ancient Greece.

• Ancient Roman and Greek statues weren’t white; they were painted.

• Insect tea is tea made from leaves that have been bitten by insects, triggering terpenes in the plant and giving the tea a honey-like taste.

• The Voynich manuscript is a book written in an unknown language in the 15th century that nobody ever managed to decipher.

• A German teenager named Mathias Rust landed a plane in Moscow in 1987 as a call for peace.

• Saudi Arabia opened a new subway in Riyadh, an incredible feat of engineering due to the location (desert) and the extreme temperature it goes through during the day.

• Global warming is going to increase the amount of rain in Saudi Arabia.

• For some reason, Dubai decided to abandon its 87 million passenger airport to increase the size of its 1 million (probably less) yearly passenger airport to…260 million passengers. Prediction: this won’t happen, simply because there aren’t enough people on the planet to fly to Dubai.

• Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder talks about the crumbling state of academia.

• The Koide formula is a surprising equation that relates the masses of the electron, muon, and tau particles in a way that equals approximately two-thirds, but scientists don't yet understand why this is the case.

• Archaeogenetics is the study of exploration of ancient DNA (aDNA), that is, DNIA older than 70 years old.

• Social platforms replacing the following-based feed with an algorithm-based one is signing the death of the follower, ushering content creation in a new era.

• Danish company Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk is now bigger than the Danish economy (Bloomberg link). Please go to Denmark if you get the chance. It’s a country like no other.

• The Great Green Wall Initiative is a 2007 African Union-led tree-planting program aiming at humidifying and stopping the Sahara, restoring 100 million hectares of degraded land and capturing 250 million tonnes of CO2. Pic 1, pic 2.

  

Take care.

Aure :)