Most of the human body is made up of water (hydrogen and oxygen atoms). At the centre of each hydrogen atom is an even smaller particle called a proton. Protons are like tiny magnets and are very sensitive to magnetic fields.

When you lie under the powerful scanner magnets, the protons in your body line up in the same direction, in the same way that a magnet can pull the needle of a compass.

Short bursts of radio waves are then sent to certain areas of the body, knocking the protons out of alignment. However, when the radio waves are turned off, the protons realign and send out radio signals, picked up by the MRI receivers. These signals provide information about the exact location of the protons in the body.

They also help to distinguish between the various types of tissue in the body, because the protons in different types of tissue realign at different speeds and produce distinct signals. More here.

I was pretty excited to watch $INTC ‘s Architecture day yesterday – very cool upcoming parts. Intel is definitely coming back…. then I watched $TSLA ‘s AI day… OMG… How will others compete with them on any autonomy use case? 👇Thread

— Pierre Ferragu (@p_ferragu) August 20, 2021

In the course of a long life, Henry Cavendish made a string of significant discoveries —among much else he was the first person to isolate hydrogen and the first to combine hydrogen and oxygen to form water — but almost nothing he did was entirely divorced from strangeness. To the continuing exasperation of his fellow scientists, he often alluded in published work to the results of contingent experiments that he had not told anyone about.

In his secretiveness he didn’t merely resemble Newton, but actively exceeded him. His experiments with electrical conductivity were a century ahead of their time, but unfortunately remained undiscovered until that century had passed. Indeed the greater part of what he did wasn’t known until the late nineteenth century when the Cambridge physicist James Clerk Maxwell took on the task of editing Cavendish’s papers, by which time credit had nearly always been given to others.

By 1971, U.S. debt had simply grown too high. Just $11 billion in gold backed $24 billion in dollars. That August, French President Pompidou sent a battleship to New York City to collect his nation’s gold holdings from the Federal Reserve, and the British asked the U.S. to prepare $3 billion worth of gold held in Fort Knox for withdrawal. In a televised speech on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon told the American people that the U.S. would no longer redeem dollars for gold as part of a plan that included wage and price freezes and an import surcharge in an attempt to save the economy.

When you have portfolio companies that are category creators, category leaders, who are well managed, and growing 50% per year or more and delivering 20-30% pre-tax margins (or more), and who have no existential threats to their market leadership, you might want to hang on to them for a bit. They may be just getting going on the valuation creation thing. More here.

Martin Rees, a British astronomer, maintains that six numbers in particular govern our universe, and that if any of these values were changed even very slightly, things could not be as they are. For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively stately manner—specifically, in a way that converts seven one-thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly—from 0.007 percent to 0.006 percent, say—and no transformation could take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing else. Raise the value very slightly—to 0.008 percent—and bonding would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since have been exhausted. In either case, with the slightest tweaking of the numbers the universe as we know and need it would not be here.