July 13th 2025
We are back people! I hope everyone has had a smashing week and is enjoying their Sunday. If you enjoy these weekly letters, I would be eternally thankful for you to share it with likeminded people :) Now let’s get straight into this.
Let’s go
01. Hungary’s Medieval Library Versus Beetle Biblioclasm
Hungary is now at war with bugs. Pannonhalma Archabbey library is about a thousand years old and packed with some of Europe’s rarest medieval books, and now it’s under siege by tiny drugstore beetles. During a routine clean, conservators discovered these starch-loving critters have tunneled into the glue of roughly one hundred thousand volumes, leaving holes in priceless pre-print manuscripts.
Now the team is boxing up each treasure in oxygen free chambers for six weeks to starve out the invaders, then inspecting and restoring every volume by hand. Some experts warn that rising temperatures from climate change could make these beetles breed even faster and turn the archive into a real micro war zone. If all goes well the library should swing its doors back open to visitors by early 2026. I find it so wild that such insects could cause such mayhem in this modern day, just shows nature rules!
02. Florida Cat’s Backyard Hunt Yields Brand-New Virus
The Mighty Pepper, the intrepid house cat of UF virologist John Lednicky, stalked and snagged an unsuspecting Everglades short-tailed shrew in his own backyard, hauling it into the lab and unwittingly leading researchers to sequence a completely novel orthoreovirus now dubbed “Gainesville shrew mammalian orthoreovirus type 3 strain UF-1”.
This ten-segment genome deposit not only underscores how far-flung hunters (feline or otherwise) can reshape our understanding of viral diversity but also rings alarm bells about the zoonotic threats silently evolving just beyond our doors.
03. Mars Firesale
Imagine owning a piece of Mars. I am not kidding. This rock weighs about 54 pounds (roughly 25 kilos) and is the most significant chunk of Mars ever found on Earth. It goes by the name of NWA 16788. Sotheby’s is putting it up for auction in New York on July 16, 2025 as part of their Geek Week sale, with an estimated price tag of 2 to 4 million dollars.
Scientists say this shard, likely blasted off Mars by an asteroid impact and traveling some 140 million miles before crashing in the Sahara, still wears its glassy fusion crust, a fiery souvenir of its epic journey
Quizzz
Q1: What mammal has the longest lifespan?
A1: Bowhead Whale
Q2: What is the hottest planet in our solar system?
A2: Venus
Q3: Who was the first emperor of Rome?
A3: Augustus
Q4: What is the highest selling video game of all time?
A4: Minecraft
04. Japan Shatters The Internet
Yep you heard that right, Japan just blasted past every record, clocking a mind blowing 1.02 petabits per second over ordinary 19 core optical fiber. That is roughly 3.5 million times faster than the average US household connection. This is reality is absolutely insane.
Now this is how they did it. The team looped the signal 21 times through precision amplifiers along 1,808 kilometres of fiber, then squeezed 180 separate light wavelengths. Each modulated with high-density data across the network’s C and L bands. It was a collaboration led by Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology with help from Sumitomo Electric and research groups in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands
Currently, it remains a lab proof of concept, but imagine downloading everything on Netflix in under a second or powering AI farms at this speed. The future of the internet has just become a whole lot more exciting.
05. Nvidia breaks the 4 trillion dollar barrier
On July 9, 2025, its shares briefly pushed its market cap to that mind-blowing figure. It’s wild to realize one chipmaker now outweighs the combined value of the Canadian and Mexican stock markets and even tops the total market cap of every publicly traded company in the United Kingdom (it tripled its valuation in about a year, faster than Apple and Microsoft). Like, how absolutely crazy is this?
What made this possible? Nvidia’s GPUs have become the beating heart of the AI revolution, powering everything from generative chatbots to massive data-crunching farms. The company also locked in multibillion-dollar deals in the Middle East and poured huge investments into AI-focused data centers. In May, it reported 44.1 billion dollars in first-quarter revenue, a 69 percent jump year-over-year.
Fire Facts
1. Your Eyes Blink Over 10 Million Times A Year.
2. Earwax Is Actually A Type Of Sweat.
3. You Produce About 40,000 Litres Of Spit In Your Lifetime.
4. If You Walked For 12 Hours A Day, It Would Take The Average Person 690 Days To Walk Around The World.
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Thank you, everyone for reading.