International

Japan becomes the fifth nation in history to land on the moon

On Friday, Japan landed its lunar robot explorer, better known as the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM) on the moon’s surface. That makes Japan the fifth nation to touch down there after the US, the Soviet Union (now Russia), China, and India.

SLIM, part of Japan's "Moon Sniper" mission, launched last September and was designed to test the capabilities of a new technology that allows for precision landing and greater control than previous moon landings.

The “Moon Sniper” name isn’t for no reason…

While most previous moon visitors have had six-mile-wide (around 10 kilometers) landing zones, Moon Sniper was trying to hit a spot within just 330 feet (100 meters).

Officials were still waiting to confirm whether the spacecraft, roughly the size of a passenger car, had hit its target but confirmed it had landed near the Shioli crater on the moon's near side.

Tokyo, we have a problem

While the craft did land on the moon, reports from Japan’s space agency said the landers solar power system wasn’t functioning properly. It is suspected the battery ran out within hours of the landing.

Officials said they believe the built-in power generation system was not properly facing the sun and could start to work once sunlight conditions change. So, there is hope yet that the unmanned craft can continue to function and start gathering data for the fifth nation to land on the moon.

Trade routes are blocked and it’s threatening the world economy

Recent events are creating “chokepoints” in global shipping, so much so, global GDP is at risk. Oceanic trade routes are increasingly getting caught in the crossfire of war, geopolitical schemes, and other disruptive factors.

What are these “chokepoints”, and why should I care? Usually narrow canals and straits, these oceanic epicenters take in huge amounts of shipping traffic each day. The Malacca Strait (which connects the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean) the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, and even the South China Sea are crucial waterways that could uproot the global shipping industry if blocked (or choked).

The chokepoint under the most tension lately is the Red Sea (one we’ve all heard about recently), which feeds into the Suez Canal, an area that accounts for $1 trillion in global trade every year. Since November, Houthis have fired missiles at passing commercial ships in the region. The attacks have forced vessels to go all the way around South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, which can add 10–14 days to the trip, according to Reuters.

Why target shipping lanes?

Using these chokepoints as targets is an easy decision for malefactors, since they are geographically small as well as valuable targets:

• Every day the Suez Canal was shut down in 2021 cost the global trade industry nearly $10 billion.

• The Suez Canal Authority told Reuters last week that revenue fell 40% in the first 11 days of January because of unrest in the region.

The US and UK have made it clear that they will take military action to protect ships and global supply chains. On Thursday, the US launched another strike against Houthi anti-ship missiles.

As the Houthis continue to attack shipping freights (and now US-owned ships) tensions will only raise in the region, prompting further escalation from the US and its allies. Many fear the actions by the Houthis and the West’s responses will spark a broader conflict in the Middle East.

China needs its citizens to start having babies

Much like your older relatives, the Chinese government wants to see more baby showers. China’s overall population dropped in 2023 for the second year in a row, partly due to a yearly decline in babies being born (which marks seven straight), the country announced yesterday.

China’s population fell by 2.1 million to 1.4 billion last year, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. The decrease was partially due to a Covid surge that pushed the death rate up 6.6% to 11.1 million people last year, outpacing the birthrate, which dipped 5.7%, to just over 9 million.

The country is rapidly aging as fewer people have children and the average lifespan increases. Births have fallen despite Beijing’s efforts in the last decade to start to unwind restrictions on one child per household.

China is pretty worried

Since removing its 35-year-long one-child policy in 2016, the country completely reversed its messaging. Even President Xi Jinping has encouraged young women to have kids. However, the repercussions of the policy have started showing:

• Young people cite rising housing and education costs as reasons they’re still child-free.

• Many women, specifically, are opting out of marriage and motherhood, saying the legal system isn’t set up to protect their property, financial freedom, or personal safety.

President Xi Jinping said in 2023 that women should tell "good family tradition stories," continuing that it is necessary to "actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing," which he correlated to the nation’s growth.

In the last year, youth unemployment in China reached a record 20% amid slowing economic growth and a disparity between available jobs and skills.

As financial stress is cited as a main reason for young people in China to not have children, the country may need to get its monetary situation in order before it expects to see its population demographic turn around.

Law

This important Supreme Court ruling might limit regulators power

The US Supreme Court could have lasting implications on some of the country’s most important agencies. The Supreme Court heard a pair of cases last week that could weaken the power of federal agencies to regulate any industry, from crypto to pharmaceuticals. But you probably wouldn’t assume the hearings were about… fishing.

Fishing you say?

You heard me right. Lawyers for Atlantic herring fishermen in the Northeast argued against a regulation that made fishing boats which are carrying government-mandated conservation observers cover a $700 per day fee.

While that might sound pretty cut and dry, the program is now expired and the fishermen were already reimbursed for whatever they had paid, meaning the herrings may be… a red herring (ha, get it).

The fishermen’s lawyers have asked the Supreme Court to overturn the 40-year-old precedent that made the fishing boat fee possible in the first place, which was a 1984 pro-regulation decision in the case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The case has become a foundation of American law and is cited in over 15,000 court cases, per Bloomberg.

What’s the deal with the Chevron case? When a federal law is unclear, the Chevron doctrine says that judges should defer to how a federal agency with expertise in that area interprets it, as long as it’s reasonable, which gives the SEC, EPA, and essentially any other department the power to determine what laws in their areas mean.

So, what happens if the Chevron case is overturned?

It could shift the way the federal government is able to regulate almost everything. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar warned the court that reversing Chevron would deal a “convulsive shock to the legal system.” Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh have all publicly criticized Chevron for giving what Gorsuch called “huge amounts” of power to bureaucrats.

If the court rules in favor of the fishermen, then the hundreds of federal agencies that set rules for public health, workplace safety, consumer protections, and more would be severely limited in their ability to decide what Congress means when it writes a law.

This could become a problem for emerging industries. New tech sectors like AI and crypto could become ever more complex as finance and trade regulators have to work off of old laws (that were written at a time where these technologies didn’t exist) which is where the regulators ability to interpret is crucial. Without the Chevron doctrine, the courts would have to settle the meanings themselves, which takes a good portion of money and time.

Georgia residents protest $400 million monkey breeding facility

One of the stranger headlines this week covers a nearly half a billion dollar monkey breeding facility. Southern residents in Georgia and Texas are going bananas over a plan to put monkeys in their backyards.

Citizens in southern Georgia filled a city council meeting to the brim last week, demanding that state officials block the company Safer Human Medicine from constructing a $396 million monkey breeding center in their community. The proposed center would hold up to 30,000 long-tailed macaques to be sold to medical research groups.

Monkey business

Some of the executives who run Safer Human Medicine previously worked at biomedical company Charles River Laboratories, which was under the spotlight last year for allegedly labeling smuggled wild monkeys as lab-bred. Charles River also recently tried to build a macaque facility in Texas, but local uproar and a PETA campaign delayed its project.

What are some of the citizens concerns? Particularly, the noise levels, the risk of escape, the spread of disease, the disposal of each facility’s waste (which PETA said could almost fill an Olympic sized pool every day), and how they might affect property values.

Why build a monkey breeding facility? The breeding facilities would be a domestic source of research monkeys for clinical drug testing amid a tight global supply of the test animals.

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Tech

Scientists created an AI death clock… Hooray?

I lied about the monkey breeding facility being the weirdest headline. Scientists are putting their time to good use, creating a death clock powered by AI that can predict your death. Cant wait.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Northeastern University developed life2vec, an AI model trained on the health, education, employment, income, and other data of Danish citizens collected between 2016-2020, per USA Today.

How does this thing work?

The model received the data in sentences, which was provided by the Danish government. From there, the AI predicted the life trajectories of 100 thousand people ages 35-65. When asked to predict who would live for at least four years past Jan. 1, 2016, it was correct 79% of the time, per Financial Times.

• Participants of the study were not told of the model’s predictions, which study author Sune Lehmann said would be “very irresponsible.”

Disregarding unforeseeable accidents, those predicted by life2vec to have shorter life spans were:

• Male

• Diagnosed with a mental illness

• Working in a skilled profession

• Lower income

Some of these are common knowledge, but potential uses for this research could help to identify other factors that impact health. What researchers don’t want is for corporations, such as insurance companies, to use the model on individuals. I guess we’ll find out soon if Minority Report becomes reality.

This robot can do your chores for you

Great news for me and everyone else who hates doing dishes. Toyota is developing robots to help with housework at its Cambridge research lab, per Wired.

The robots use a machine-learning system similar to those of AI image generators, which is called diffusion policy, to handle less structured tasks like sweeping a home or doing dishes.

Rather than being programmed to repeat the same action (as we’ve seen before), Toyota’s goal is for these robots to eventually learn by watching videos, allowing them to make real-time decisions and adjustments in your home.

These could be pretty applicable

Toyota’s goal is to use these robots to help older people with menial tasks. In addition to cleaning, Toyota’s robots are learning to:

• Peel vegetables

• Use hand mixers

• Prepare snacks

• Flip pancakes

If successful, these bots could help support America’s 65 and over population, which is expected to reach 82 million by 2050. And we’re already seeing other robots help those in eldercare, like the ElliQ robot companion to combat loneliness and nursing home robot assistants.

Fast Facts

Double Indictment: Alec Baldwin was indicted for manslaughter… again.

Fun Factory: Take a look inside a gummy bear factory. Its unbearable.

Plane Problems… again: A Boeing 747 cargo plane had to make an emergency landing in Miami after flames were seen shooting out of it. Initial findings showed a “softball-sized hole” above one of its engines.

Diabolical Diet: Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly raising Angus and wagyu cattle on a diet of home-brewed beer and macadamia nuts at his $270m ranch in Hawaii.

Hasty Hackers: Microsoft said state-backed Russian hackers breached its email systems and entered accounts of executives and legal and cybersecurity staff.

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