Sailing Alone.

Welcome Matt Murray.

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Local News! We’re (very) pleased to announce that Matt Murray, former executive editor of The Wall Street Journal, has joined News Items as a contributing editor. Matt will be doing a regular Friday feature, in the News Items format, that aggregates the most interesting and/or important stories of the week from the world of business and finance. Subscribers will receive the first edition of Matt’s newsletter today, at noon.

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1. Cole Brauer is sailing around the world in the Global Solo Challenge race. She has rounded Cape Horn, Chile and is now just days away from reaching the finish line in A Coruña, Spain. You can follow her on Instagram. You’d be joining more than 400,000 others who do. Hers is a remarkable story and worth reading in full. (Source: nytimes.com, instagram.com/colebraueroceanracing)

Ms. Brauer heading toward the finish line in A Coruña, Spain. (Photo credit: Sam Hodges, The New York Times)

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2. Scientists have successfully created one of life’s complex ingredients, pantetheine, critical for metabolism in all living cells, from scratch. This lab experiment brings us one step closer to learning how lifeless molecules produced living and breathing organisms, from single-celled algae (shown here) to people. People have long scratched their heads trying to understand how life ever got going after the formation of Earth billions of years ago. Now, chemists have partly unlocked the recipe by creating a complex compound essential to all life — in a lab. Like making the ingredients of a cake, researchers have successfully created a compound critical for metabolism in all living cells, which is essential for energy production and regulation. The pathway, which has evaded scientists for decades, involved relatively simple molecules probably present on early Earth that combined at room temperature over months. The discovery provides support to the idea that many key components for life could have simultaneously formed early on and combined to make living cells. “Why do we have life? Why do the rules of chemistry mean life here looks the way it does?” said Matthew Powner, senior author of the research paper. These are “just the most fantastic questions we could possibly answer.” (Source: washingtonpost.com, italics mine)

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3. More than one billion people around the world are now suffering from obesity with the number having more than quadrupled since 1990, according to a study released by the Lancet medical journal. The "epidemic" is particularly hitting poorer countries and the rate is growing among children and adolescents faster than adults, according to the study carried out with the World Health Organization. The study, released ahead of World Obesity Day on March 4, estimated that there were about 226 million obese adults, adolescents and children in the world in 1990. The figure had risen to 1,038 million in 2022. Francesco Branca, director of nutrition for health at the WHO, said the rise past one billion people has come "much earlier than we have anticipated". While doctors knew obesity numbers were rising fast, the symbolic figure had previously been expected in 2030. (Sources: sciencealert.com, thelancet.com)

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