TLDR 2021-07-07

BookTok is a community of users on TikTok who post videos reviewing and recommending books. It grew in popularity through the pandemic as people looked for ways to satisfy their need for emotional connection. BookTok has had a notable impact on the book industry and retailers have taken advantage of its popularity. It has introduced younger audiences to reading and helped new authors find an audience.

Amazon has open-sourced its Lumberyard game engine and renamed it the Open 3D Engine. The Linux Foundation will oversee the project. Developers will be able to do anything they want with the code under its permissive Apache 2.0 license. The engine is capable of high-end rendering quality. Using a common game engine might mean better compatibility between games and platforms, bringing us closer to the possibility of an open metaverse. Screenshots of scenes rendered in the Open 3D Engine are available in the article.

Psilocybin, a drug that is found naturally in some mushrooms, has shown signs of increasing durable connections between neurons in mouse brains. In a study on the effects of the drug in mice, scientists tracked the growth of dendritic spines in living mice and found that the compound increased the density of dendritic spines, enhancing the pathway for information transmission between brain cells. The study suggests that psilocybin may be able to reverse the damage caused by depression and chronic stress.

A grocery packing warehouse in the southeast of London is completely run by machines. The facility was custom-built to make the system as efficient as possible. It is the size of seven football fields and houses thousands of machines all controlled by a central artificial intelligence system. The robots move at a top speed of around 14 kilometers an hour, passing within 5 millimeters of each other when they move around. Watch the video to see how each part of the warehouse operates.

blackbird is a color theme. It is available for VSCode, VIM, terminal, and websites. An example is available on the website.

Miniflare is a simulator for developing and testing Cloudflare Workers. It allows Workers to be tested locally without an internet connection. Miniflare has support for most Workers features.

A child prodigy from Belgium has obtained his bachelor's degree in physics at the age of 11. It only took Laurent Simons a year to complete the three-year degree. Simons wants to replace as many of his own body parts as possible with mechanical parts in a quest for immortality. He has already mapped out a path to his goal. Simons will now obtain his master's degree in physics while working on his Ph.D. at the same time.

Some spiders occasionally eat snakes. They have been documented eating a variety of animals, including worms, insects, fish, reptiles, and small mammals. 30 species of spiders have been observed to eat snakes in the wild, with 11 more demonstrating the ability in captivity or staged field experiments. Widow spiders, tarantulas, and large orb-weaving spiders account for 80 percent of all reported instances to date. Pictures of spiders eating snakes are available in the article.