What we’re reading (10/21)
“Gold, Silver Tumble In Biggest Daily Drop In Years As Stunning Precious Metals Rally Comes To A Halt” (Yahoo! Finance). “Gold futures prices tumbled in their biggest daily drop in over a decade as a stunning rally in precious metals came to a halt. Spot gold dropped as much as 6%, to hover around $4,105 per troy ounce, its largest one-day drop since 2013. Silver also tumbled more than 8% to mark their largest daily drop since 2021.”
“I Test Drove a Flying Car. Get Ready, They’re Here.” (Wall Street Journal). “Welcome, and congratulations. You’ve lived long enough to see the age of flying cars—privately owned, solo-piloted aircraft, free to operate in unrestricted airspace, much as automobiles can take to the open road. And they’re all electric. I knew you’d be thrilled.”
“Breakthrough Blood Test Could Spot Dozens Of Cancers Before Symptoms Appear” (Fox News). A new type of blood test could help detect multiple cancers early. A team of researchers in California studied a new multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test called Galleri, which can reportedly detect more than 50 types of disease. The study analyzed about 23,161 participants 50 years of age and older across the U.S. and Canada who did not have any symptoms…Out of the more than 23,000 people sampled, the Galleri test detected a cancer signal in 216 of them, 133 of whom were confirmed to have the disease.”
“US Army Turns To Private Equity For Infrastructure Funding” (Semafor). “The army secretary told the Financial Times that he wanted $150 billion in capital expenditure over the next decade, but only had a budget of $15 billion, so needed outside investment. Military spending is growing across the West, and private firms are benefiting. The EU spent a record $402 billion on defense last year, up 19% year-on-year, and the figure is expected to rise, Defense News reported. One military-focused index has seen its value double in the last 12 months.”
“The Internet Is Going To Break Again” (The Atlantic). “Everything is in “the cloud” now, except the cloud is a real place, and it’s in Northern Virginia. Rows and rows of servers stacked in Amazon-owned warehouses across Ashburn, Haymarket, McNair, Manassas, and Sterling make up a chunk of the infrastructure for the modern internet—equipment as crucial as railway tracks and the electric grid. When a technical issue disrupted operations at those facilities yesterday, it was enough to temporarily crash the internet for users around the world. The incident marked at least the third time in the past five years that Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia facilities contributed to a widespread internet outage.”
