October 2024

Hope the mail finds you well.

In this edition of Inflexion Point, we look at the how your brain shapes as you age, Malcolm Gladwell's new take on the Tipping Point, how AI comes to the Nobel Prizes, 15 most innovative climate tech companies, and insights from the world's longest running study on happiness (75 years and counting).

How your brain changes as you age

Your brain starts to form in about two weeks after conception. At birth, the brain contains about 100 billion neurons, more than an adult. But there are not many synapses, the connection between neurons, that change their behavior. The number of synapses per neuron increase from 2,500 to 15,000 over the first few years of growth. Though, from age 3 to 10, the brain removes connections it no longer needs. The rational and emotional parts of the brain develop at different rates during adulthood, explaining risky behavior and addiction. The brain is fully developed by age 30 and the white matter by age 40, but neuroplasticity enables the brain to continue adapting. During later years, the cerebral cortex thins, and fewer chemicals are released, resulting in slower cognitive processing. And just before death, the brain records important life events, and it doesn't stop working even after death. (Source: The Economist) 

Malcolm Gladwell’s New Take on Tipping Points

Gladwell's 2000 book, Tipping Point, described how sometimes little things, small, incremental actions can make a huge difference moving an emerging behavior or trend into becoming a viral, full-fledged social phenomenon. In a conversation with HBR's Editor in Chief, Adi Ignatius, Gladwell takes the instance of the opioid epidemic to explain how fine grained data could trigger new social trends. It's the monocultures most prone to the onset of epidemics, which means that to avoid ill-effects of such social spreads we should strive for diversity. Sometimes, the effects of the tipping points aren't all that desirable and that's what Gladwell points out in his new book Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. (Source: HBR)

AI Comes to the Nobels: Double Win Sparks Debate about Scientific Fields

This year's Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. The advent of AI in Nobel has mixed reactions, as many think that it's nothing to do with physics, but is about computation. A strong argument in favour is that their research is interdisciplinary, bringing together physics, math, computer science and neuroscience, and that the Nobel committee might not be theoretical physics in the purest sense, it is rooted in techniques and concepts from physics, such as energy. What's your take? (Source: Scientific American)

15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch

LanzaJet (alcohol based jet fuels); Pano AI (helping communities spot fires faster); Solugen (chemicals produced by sugar derived from corn); Ceibo (helps recover more than 70% of the copper from mines); Rondo Energy (using bricks and iron wire to provide a steady supply of hot air); Rumin8 (methane reducing supplements for cows); BYD (world’s biggest producer of electric vehicles); First Solar (cadmium and tellurium based thin films); Electric Hydrogen (10x capacity electrolyzers); Pivot Bio (microbes to deliver nitrogen to crop roots); Kairos (molten-salt-cooled reactor); Form Energy (long term energy storage adopting iron-air batteries); Gogoro (battery swapping tech); Sublime Systems (electrochemical process to produce cement); and Sun King (solar based cooking for the poor). (Source: MIT Tech Review)

What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness

As the fourth director of a 75-year-old Harvard Study on Adult Development, Robert Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. Of the initial 724 men, 60 still survive and continue to participate in the study for over 75 years, and the secret of a good life seems to be: "good, close relationships keep us happier and healthier". And it's not the number, but the quality of those close relationships that matters. Good relationships protect our bodies and brains, and it's never too late to have one. (Source: TED)