Mr. Beast is a 24-year-old normal guy from Kansas.
A University dropout.
His YouTube channel reached 112 million subscribers on November 17, 2022, making it the fourth-most-subscribed on the platform, and the highest as a non-corporate identity.
Aside from his philanthropy, everyone studies his simple but effective VIDEO storytelling.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Cable news and social media bring too much attention to extremists — ignoring the vast majority.
For example, FOX wants Marjorie Taylor Greene on air because her wrong and stupid statements get ratings.
In reality …
📊 One chart worth sharing: As polarized as America seems, Independents — who are somewhere in the middle — would be the biggest party.
Messenger RNA is like magic.
The first mRNA-based vaccines received restricted authorization and were rolled out across the world during the COVID-19 pandemic by Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and Moderna, for example. …
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Have you heard of CRISPR?
(clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions in the development of a method for genome editing.
It’s called the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors.
Based on how bacteria fights off virus attackers, in future CRISPR will be used to fight coronavirus variations.
Click PLAY or see how it works on YouTube.
Most people my age know about Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. But I certainly couldn’t explain anything about CRISPR before reading this book.
Once again, Walter Isaacson made a complex story entertaining with this 2021 biography:
The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.
The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code. …
After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is a thrilling detective tale that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.
simon and schuster
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
The first half of the book is the story. Very entertaining.
Then it gets better.
A detailed look at the drama over WHO wins the awards. WHO gets the patents.
Of course there are many other scientists who could have and should be lauded for breakthroughs in this field. They are covered in the biography, as well.
Most worthy — perhaps — is Feng Zhang. But he and his boss Eric Lander come off as BAD GUYS in this book, unethical in their collaborations.
ONE bit of good news. When COVID-19 was announced early 2020, both Zhang’s and Doudna’s companies changed research priorities towards developing CRISPR-based coronavirus tests. Both were successful and both hope to make simple at-home tests ready for market in 2021: Sherlock and Mammoth.
The most entertaining of the CRISPR giants is geneticist George Church. When the movie is made, he’ll be the fan favourite.
Emmanuelle Charpentier is an intriguing personality, as well. I’d read her biography.
If you’re celebrating seeing Donald Trump and the worst of his deplorable followers driven off social media, thank Stacey Abrams.
She devoted years to building the Democratic Party in Georgia. Wrote a book about voter suppression and co-produced an Amazon Prime documentary, “All In: the Fight for Democracy.”
People in the know credit Stacey Abrams for flipping the 2 Senate seats from Republican to Democrat.
NOW the Biden team has control of all 3 branches of government for 2 years.
NOW the Biden team can enthusiastically regulate BIG TECH.
NOW Twitter, Facebook and pretty much every other major platform is banning Trumpy hate speech.
Thanks Stacey.
Hundreds of Christians, Jews and Muslims came together at the Tower of David in Jerusalem to sing Bob Marley’s “One Love” in Hebrew, English and Arabic.
1,000 Strangers – Christians, Jews, And Muslims – Sing ‘One Love’ By Bob Marley
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. (2018)
Great decision in an era where dictators and toddler-dictator-wannabes call all criticism FAKE NEWS.
Time magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year title goes to the “guardians and the war on truth.”
The honour has been given to four journalists and a newspaper that Time says “are representatives of a broader fight by countless others around the world. …
The “guardians” are:
- Jamal Khashoggi, the prominent Saudi journalist who was killed in that country’s consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.
- The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., where five people were shot and killed at the newspaper’s offices in June.
- Maria Ressa, a detained Philippine journalist who is head of independent news website Rappler.
- Reuters journalists Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, who have been jailed in Myanmar for nearly a year.
CBC – Time names killed, jailed journalists as 2018 Person of the Year
With so many hateful, intolerant so-called Christians in the news … on this day we should be reminded of the real message of Christ.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. #LIGHTtheWORLD
Give back and light the world this Christmas season. #LightTheWorld
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. Wonderful idea.
What will the most popular news sources of the future look like?
I’m hopeful for the soon to be launched Wikitribune.
People today mostly get their news from TV (not bad) and social media (terrible).
My favourite news source right now is Axios, just 6 months old.
Axios covers 7 areas: politics, tech, media trends, health, science, energy, and future of work (AI, robotics, etc.).
They want to deliver the cleanest, smartest, most efficient and trust-worthy experience for readers and advertisers alike.
It was founded by Mike Allen, former chief political reporter for Politico. I like Politico too, founded in 2007. And Jim VandeHei.
John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei left The Washington Post to become The Politico‘s editor-in-chief and executive editor, respectively.
So … Washington Post begat Politico begat Axios.
If interested, start by signing up for any of the Axios email newsletters.
Rick McCharles 