NYTimes: “Historically, migration to places like Dubai has been highly stratified: lots of migrants from poor countries doing difficult and sometimes dangerous construction and service work, alongside a handful of Western expats engaged in the classic arbitrage of living income-tax-free in a relatively inexpensive place where their education, skills and complexion command a premium. But governments in the Persian Gulf region have been liberalizing their migration policies, opening up opportunities for ambitious and talented people from across the globe by offering longer-term residency to skilled workers without a sponsor. In a bid to diversify and grow its economies, the region is throwing open its doors to entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, chefs, teachers, medical workers and educators, encouraging them not simply to work there for a few years and go home but to consider building their lives there long term.”
WaPo: “Caffeine works mainly by blocking receptors for adenosine, a compound that builds up in our brains during the day. “We think that adenosine serves as an important signaling molecule to let us know we need to rest. It’s sleep-inducing,” said Shawn Arent, a professor and chair of the department of exercise science at the University of South Carolina, who has studied caffeine and performance. When caffeine binds to the receptors, “adenosine can’t as readily induce that fatigue state because caffeine is taking up that receptor,” Arent said. “From an alertness standpoint, caffeine is acting on that adenosine receptor to really prevent adenosine from doing its job. We’re trying to prevent fatigue, we’re trying to delay sleepiness or overcome fatigue if we’re, for example, sleep-deprived.””
ET: “[Beyond AI], there’s a simpler, cheaper and more immediate opportunity that India is overlooking, one that could change the world just as dramatically, if not more: CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). CRISPR is not just a breakthrough, but it also allows us to rewrite the very code of life. With a few chemicals and a basic lab, scientists can edit DNA with precision unimaginable a decade ago. This is as monumental as the transistor or sequencing the human genome.”
DeepSeek founder [Zhen Fund’s Dai]: “We are at the early stage of a revolution where the technology improvement curve is steep…Companies should focus on breakthroughs instead of monetisation because a high school student can’t make much money, while if you train him to become PhD, he can make a lot more.”
FT asks if humans have passed peak brain power: “There has been remarkably little consistent long-running research on human attention or mental capacity. But there is a rare exception: every year since the 1980s, the Monitoring the Future study has been asking 18-year-olds whether they have difficulty thinking, concentrating or learning new things. The share of final year high school students who report difficulties was stable throughout the 1990s and 2000s, but began a rapid upward climb in the mid-2010s. This inflection point is noteworthy not only for being similar to performance on tests of intelligence and reasoning but because it coincides with another broader development: our changing relationship with information, available constantly online. Part of what we’re looking at here is likely a result of the ongoing transition away from text and towards visual media — the shift towards a “post-literate” society spent obsessively on our screens.”
