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The International Space Station is the most expensive structure humans have ever built consisting of $150 billion of metal, wiring, and ingenuity. Yet its true value isn’t the price tag, but rather what it represents as a permanently inhabited outpost where more than a dozen nations work side by side. By all logic this environment shouldn’t make cooperation possible. Traveling at 28,000 km/h, the ISS circles Earth every 90 minutes, giving astronauts 16 sunrises a day. It was assembled in orbit, piece by piece, requiring more than 1,000 hours of spacewalks. Humanity had never created anything like it, and even today, no other space-borne structure approaches its size or complexity.

Inside, the station feels like a cross between a laboratory and a maze. With no gravity, every surface is a potential floor as astronauts anchor themselves with their toes so they don’t drift into someone else’s experiment. The station hosts more than 3,000 investigations that can’t be replicated on Earth: medicines that crystallize perfectly in microgravity, plants grown to understand how roots behave without weight, and bone-density studies revealing how the human body slowly deconstructs itself when gravity disappears. Cooperation is built into the architecture with Japanese experiment racks wired into American power systems and European freezers bolted next to Russian modules.

The ISS’s most remarkable achievement is political, not scientific. Built during the turbulent years after the Cold War, it forced former rivals NASA and Roscosmos to share oxygen, food, and engineering plans. Japan, Europe, and Canada joined in, creating a partnership that has outlasted several governments, budget crises, and geopolitical flare-ups. The ISS will one day be guided into the Pacific to burn up quietly, but in a century shaped by division, the ISS stands as proof that cooperation at the highest stakes is still possible.

DeepMind is the London research lab behind some of the most important breakthroughs in modern science. But before it became the world’s leading engine for artificial intelligence, its story began with a boy in North London who could barely see over a chessboard. Demis Hassabis was a child prodigy. As a teenager, during a grueling ten-hour chess match against a thirty-year-old grandmaster, he threw away a winning position after coming to a realization. A mind capable of strategy, imagination, and invention was meant for more than endless chess matches - the board was too small.

At sixteen, he was accepted to Cambridge, but the university insisted he was too young to enroll. Demis spent a year designing a theme-park simulation game, coding the kind of mischievous AI behavior that quietly predicted his future. When he finally entered Cambridge, he chose neuroscience. If he wanted to build artificial general intelligence, he reasoned, he first needed to understand the real thing. He ignored advice to skip his PhD when he received a $1 million Thiel Fellowship, calling it absurd to abandon a lifelong ambition for a check. In 1997, after watching a chess game where IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, he realized the future belonged to systems that could think flexibly. With that conviction, he founded DeepMind in 2010 with Mustafa Suleyman and Shane Legg, refusing Silicon Valley’s demands to relocate. He hired mathematicians and neuroscientists from Oxford, UCL, and Cambridge, building a lab in London designed for fundamental breakthroughs.

In the years that followed, DeepMind’s projects justified every bet placed on it. AlphaZero, for example, learned chess, shogi, and Go from scratch, surpassing centuries of human strategy in hours. With researcher John Jumper, Hassabis pushed into biology. This culminated in AlphaFold’s achievement, a discovery so significant that DeepMind immediately decided to predict every protein known to science and release the data freely. Today DeepMind’s models optimize Google’s energy use, model weather with unprecedented accuracy, accelerate material science, and assist medical research on diseases from cancer to antibiotic resistance. The boy who walked away from a chess match now leads one of the most important scientific projects on Earth.

The numbers on nutrition labels tell the truth, but only if you know which questions to ask. The first shortcut health experts recommend is to go straight to the serving size. That tiny line controls every number beneath it and it’s almost always unrealistic. A “120 calorie” cereal becomes nearly 500 calories when you pour a normal bowl. Food companies know this, which is why serving sizes are often engineered to make the rest of the label look better. The second shortcut most people miss is to scan the servings per container. If a “healthy” drink lists 2.5 servings, you can multiply every number by 2.5 before you even take a sip.

Once you've decoded the serving size, the real battlefield is the section with fats, sugars, and sodium. Ignore the marketing halo of "organic," "natural," or "high-protein" and look instead for the numbers that actually change your health: added sugars, saturated fat, and total sodium. Added sugars are the silent saboteur. The World Health Organization recommends no more than 25 grams per day and many "healthy" yogurts burn through half that in a single cup. Saturated fat and sodium tell you how hard the food will hit your cardiovascular system. The daily sodium limit is 2,300 mg, yet a single frozen meal can pack 800 to 1,200 mg. The percentages on the right (% Daily Value based on a standard 2,000-calorie diet) are your compass. Aim for 5% or less in nutrients you want to limit (like sodium and saturated fat) and 20% or more in those you want to increase (like fiber and Vitamin D).

The final shortcut is to use the ingredients list like an intelligence briefing. Ingredients are listed from most to least, so if sugar, corn syrup, or any of their biochemical cousins appear in the first three spots, it's likely a dessert disguised as a snack. Long ingredient lists, especially ones packed with stabilizers and words ending in "ate" or "ite," usually signal ultra-processed foods. These three shortcuts cut through the marketing and reveal what's actually in your food. Once you know what to look for, every trip to the grocery store becomes easier.

We hope you enjoyed today’s edition. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and helping A Little Wiser reach new people every week. We value every reader so please reply and tell us a lesson you’d love to see soon!

Until next time…. - A Little Wiser Team

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