Hello gorgeous friends. This week I’m thinking about ducks. That’s not autocorrect.
🤝 What a City-Sized Sharing Economy Looks Like: How Canadian cities and First Nations territories discovered the catalytic power of collaboration.
🍬 The economics of vending machines: The pandemic has boosted interest in vending machine ownership. But how lucrative are they? The Hustle spoke to 20+ operators to find out.
♻️ New super-enzyme eats plastic bottles six times faster: Breakthrough that builds on plastic-eating bugs first discovered by Japan in 2016 promises to enable full recycling.
💌 Peak Newsletter? That Was 80 Years Ago: In the 1940s, journalists fled traditional news outlets to write directly for subscribers. What happened next may be a warning.
🎭 Me, Myself and My Multiple Avatars: A clever short story about a future where we’re all hiding behind avatars.
🔌 USB-C Was Supposed to Simplify Our Lives. Instead, It’s a Total Mess: A mix of hidden standards make the ubiquitous cable a pain to deal with.
👟 Nike Vaporfly shoes are so fast, runners with other sponsors wear them secretly: At first this sounds like an advert but the science behind Nike’s ZoomX Vaporfly Next elite marathon shoes is interesting: it stabilises the ankle joint and reduces the load on the calves, while also helping to keep runners’ toes straight, allowing them to preserve energy.
🐈 GPS Tracking Reveals the Secret Lives of Outdoor Cats: A study into where outdoor cats go is important for keeping them and native wildlife safe.
✊ Living With Depression: “It’s OK Not To Be OK”: This film was made for an initiative dedicated to helping men lead happier lives.
Ducks are great. That’s the email
In nearly every river, lake, pond, and even ocean everywhere other than Antarctica, there are ducks. They’re so familiar and widespread that most of us barely think of them. They walk, they swim, they fly… is there a more versatile creature than a duck?
Ducks are also an unlikely ally, since they’re an impressive pest-killer. If you’re facing a swarm of locusts, probably the best thing you could do is send in an army of ducks since each one could devour 200 locusts a day. It sounds vaguely optimistic until you see what ducks can do to a bowl of peas. (More on r/duckeatingpeas and praise be to the internet.)
I’ve not eaten eggs for a few years so I can’t claim they’re my specialist subject. But while farmed chickens are separated by gender so their eggs aren’t fertilised, the market for duck eggs is very much smaller. So there’s better odds the duck eggs in the supermarket are ducks-in-waiting, subject to incubation.
To pass time in lockdown, this woman successfully hatched three ducks from supermarket-bought eggs. My brilliant friends tried the same thing and, last week, these two adorable little ducklings joined the world. So what have I done this past week? Pretty much watched ducklings on webcam. How are you?
