Good morning! Today: Singapore is betting big on vertical farming, and a man caught coronavirus twice—and it was worse the second time. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. | Inside Singapore’s huge bet on vertical farming
From the outside, VertiVegies looked like a handful of grubby shipping containers put side by side and drilled together. But inside, Ankesh Shahra saw potential. Here, mismatched plastic trays sat carefully stacked on industrial metal shelves, stretching all the way from the concrete floor to the corrugated-steel ceiling. In each tray were small green plants of different species and sizes, all with their roots bathed in the same watery solution, their leaves curling up toward the same pink glow of faintly humming LED bar lights above. With VertiVegies, Sekaran was farming vertically: growing vegetables indoors, with towers of crops stacked one on the other instead of in wide, sprawling fields, and in hydroponic solution instead of soil. He was growing food without exposure to weather or seasons, using techniques pioneered by others, in a country that was badly in need of a new way to meet its food needs. Singapore is the third most densely populated country in the world, known for its tightly packed high-rises. But to cram all those gleaming towers and nearly 6 million people into a land mass half the size of Los Angeles, it has sacrificed many things, including food production. Farms make up no more than 1% of its total land (in the United States it’s 40%), forcing the small city-state to shell out around $10 billion each year importing 90% of its food. Here was an example of technology that could change all that. Read the full story. —Megan Tatum
| | A man caught coronavirus twice—and it was worse the second time The news: A man in the US caught covid-19 for a second time in the space of just two months, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. That makes him the fifth person to have officially caught the coronavirus twice, after cases recorded in Hong Kong, Belgium, Ecuador, and the Netherlands (although there will certainly be more cases we don't know about.) However, what’s remarkable about his case is that he had had a worse bout of illness the second time round. There’s only one other recorded instance where this has happened—the case in Ecuador. The significance: Being infected once does not mean you’re protected from being infected again, even if such cases are still vanishingly rare, with just five identified out of nearly 40 million confirmed cases worldwide. That means people who have had covid-19 once already still need to stay vigilant, following the advice on social distancing, wearing face masks, and avoiding crowded, poorly ventilated spaces. Read the full story. | The top ten must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 How to stop the second wave from becoming a tsunami Measures like mass mask-wearing, contact tracing, clear public health communication, and good ventilation would go a long way. ( The Atlantic) + Iran has shattered its single-day record for deaths and infections for the second day in a row. ( AP) + The Chinese city Qingdao is testing all nine million residents for covid-19 (and it’ll take less than a week.) ( BBC) + The UK has a new system of tiered lockdown rules. ( CNBC) + Will targeted lockdowns in New York stop infections from rising? ( Wired $) 2 Facebook has banned Holocaust denial A real “wait, that wasn’t already the policy?!” moment. ( WSJ $) + Misinformation on Facebook is more popular now than it was in 2016. ( NYT $) + Facebook has donated $1.3 million to keep a UK WWII code-breaking center open. ( The Verge) + Militant groups in Michigan just returned with different names after they were booted off Facebook. ( Buzzfeed) + Twitter is labeling false claims by Trump on covid-19, while Facebook does nothing. ( CNN) 3 Facial recognition is being woven into everyday life in Singapore Its government is exempt from data privacy laws which seems… bad. ( NBC) 4 The hunt for a super-antibody against the coronavirus 🔎 If it works, it would not only protect against covid-19 but all coronaviruses. ( NYT $) + Why we should be optimistic for the future. ( NYT $) + Johnson & Johnson had to pause its vaccine study. ( Stat) + China has joined a global vaccine subsidy initiative (the US and Russia still refuse.) ( Axios) 5 AI is being unleashed on battery development 🔋 And that could be promising news for combating climate change. ( Wired $) 6 Governments still want tech companies to build encryption backdoors And it’s still a bad idea. ( ZDNet) 7 China’s digital yuan has arrived Here’s a glimpse at what it’s like. ( Quartz) 8 Clear already conquered US airports by letting you skip the line Now it wants to own your entire digital identity. ( OneZero) 9 Jetpacks are here, finally But what—and who—are they for? ( Wired UK) 10 Russian space Twitter is getting seriously spicy 🍿 Two cosmonauts criticized the country’s space program. Its leader responded by calling them both drunks. ( Ars Technica) | | “It has not yet dawned on hardly anybody the amount of complexity and chaos and confusion that will happen in a few short months.” —Dr Gregory Poland, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic, tells the New York Times that next year people may be able to pick from several vaccines, none of them able to magically end the pandemic. | | | | | |
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