1 . The last few months had brought to my attention an important incompatibility between us — one that I’d never noticed before. Despite being a pair of lifelong travelers, Felipe and I seldom travel in a similar way. The reality about Felipe is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume that the man is not fit to be a traveler at all. But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that makes him peerless. He can create a familiar habitat of boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint. This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the year he has folded himself into societies from South America to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere totally new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local.

While Felipe can find a corner anywhere in the world and settle down for good, I can’t. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with minor disasters, which makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is I just can’t live anywhere on the planet. I’d realized this only a few weeks earlier, back in northern Laos, when Felipe had woken up one lovely morning in Luang Prabang and said, “Darling, let’s stay here.”

“Sure,” I’d said. “We can stay here for a few more days if you want.”

“No, I mean let’s move here. Let’s forget about me immigrating to America. It’s too much trouble. This is a wonderful town. I like the feeling of it. It reminds me of Brazil thirty years ago. It wouldn’t take much money or effort for us to run a little hotel or shop here, rent an apartment, settle in ….” He was serious. He would just do that. But I can’t.

2 . A Neurologist’s Tips to Protect Your Memory

As we age, our memory declines. This is a fixed ___________ for many of us; however, according to neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and clinical professor, decline is not ___________.

Ultimately, “we are what we can remember,” he said. Here are some of Dr. Restak’s tips for developing and ___________ a healthy memory.

Some memory lapses are actually attention problems, not memory problems. ___________, if you’ve forgotten the name of someone you met at a cocktail party, it could be because you were talking with several people at the time.

One way to pay attention when you learn new information is to ___________ the word. Having a picture associated with the word, Restak said, can improve ___________.

There are many memory exercises that you can ___________ into everyday life. Dr. Restak suggested composing a grocery list and memorizing it. When you get to the store, don’t ___________ pull out your list (or your phone) — instead, pick up everything according to your memory.

Once in a while, get in the car without turning on your GPS, and try to ___________ through the streets from memory. A small 2020 study suggested that people who used GPS more frequently over time showed a steeper cognitive ____________ in spatial memory three years later.

Dr. Restak’s “favorite working memory game” is 20 Questions — in which a group thinks of a person, place or object, and the other person, the questioner, asks 20 questions with a yes-or-no answer. Because to succeed, he said, the questioner must hold all of the ____________ answers in memory in order to guess the correct answer.

The point is to ____________ your working memory, “maintaining information and moving it around in your mind,” Restak wrote.

One early indicator of memory issues, according to Dr. Restak, is ____________ fiction. “People, when they begin to have memory difficulties, tend to switch to reading nonfiction,” he said. Fiction requires active engagement with the text, starting at the beginning and working through to the end.

Storing everything on your phone means that “you don’t know it,” Dr. Restak said, which can ____________ our own mental abilities. The second way our relationship with technology is harmful to memory is because it often takes our focus away from the task at hand.

A man deliberately got 217 Covid shots. Here’s what happened

One German man has redefined “man on a mission.” A 62-year-old from Magdeburg deliberately got 217 Covid-19 vaccine shots in the     1     of 29 months, according to a new study, going against national vaccine recommendations. That’s an average of one jab every four days. In the process, he became a(n)     2     experiment for what happens to the immune system when it is vaccinated against the same pathogen (病原体) repeatedly. A correspondence published Monday in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases     3     his case and concluded that while his “hypervaccination” did not result in any adverse health effects, it also did not significantly improve or worsen his immune response.

The man, who is not named in the correspondence in compliance with German privacy rules, reported receiving 217 Covid shots between June 2021 and November 2023. Of those, 134 were     4     by a prosecutor and through vaccination center documentation; the remaining 83 were self-reported, according to the study.

“This is a really unusual case of someone receiving that many Covid vaccines,     5     not following any type of guidelines,” said Dr. Emily Happy Miller, an assistant professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine who did not participate in the research.

The man did not report any vaccine-related side effects and has not had a Covid infection to date, as     6     by repeated antigen (抗原) and PCR testing between May 2022 and November 2023. The researchers     7     that it’s not clear that his Covid status is directly because of his hypervaccination regimen.

“Perhaps he didn’t get Covid because he was     8     in the first three doses of the vaccine,” Miller said. “We also don’t know anything about his behaviors.” Dr. Kilian Schober, senior author of the new study and a researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, said it is important to remember that this is an individual case study, and the results are not     9    .

The researchers also say they do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance immunity. “The benefit is not much bigger if you get vaccinated three times or 200 times,” Schober said.

The public prosecutor in Magdeburg opened an investigation into the man for the unauthorized issuing of vaccination cards and forgery of documents but did not end up filing criminal     10    , according to the study.

OpenAI publishes Elon Musk’s emails. ‘We’re sad that it’s come to this’

OpenAI fired back at Elon Musk, who sued the ChatGPT company last week for chasing profit and     1     (diverge) from its original, nonprofit mission. Tuesday night, OpenAI published several of Musk’s emails from the early days of the company that appear to show Musk acknowledging OpenAI needed to make a ton of money to fund the incredible computing resources needed to power     2     AI ambitions.

In the emails, parts of     3     have been redacted (修订), Musk argues that the company stood virtually no chance of building a successful generative AI platform by raising cash alone, and the company needed to find alternate sources of revenue to survive.

In a November 22, 2015, email to CEO Sam Altman, Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, said the company needed to raise much more than $100 million to “avoid sounding hopeless.” Musk suggested a $1 billion funding commitment and promised that he would cover     4     did not get raised.

OpenAI in a blog post Tuesday night said Musk never followed through on his promise,     5     (commit) $45 million in funding for OpenAI,     6     other donors raised $90 million. Lawyers for Musk declined to comment on OpenAI’s claims.

Musk, in a February 1, 2018, email, told company executives that the only path forward for OpenAI was for Tesla, his electric car company, to buy it. The company refused, and Musk left OpenAI later that year.

In December 2018, Musk emailed Altman and other executives that OpenAI would not be relevant “    7     a dramatic change in execution and resources.”

“This needs billions per year immediately or forget it,” Musk emailed. “I really hope I’m wrong.”

OpenAI executives agreed. In 2019, they formed OpenAI LP, a for-profit entity that exists within the larger company’s structure. That for-profit company took OpenAI from effectively worthless to a valuation of $90 billion in just a few years — and Altman     8     (credit) as the mastermind of that plan and the key to the company’s success.

Microsoft has since committed $13 billion in a close partnership with OpenAI.

Musk’s complaint,     9     (file) last week in California state court, said that company and its partnership with Microsoft violated OpenAI’s founding charter, representing a breach of contract. Musk is asking for a jury trial and for the company     10     (pay) back the profit they received from the business.

7 . Animal products could produce electricity, one British power company warns — and to give consumers a choice, it's offering what it calls the world’s first vegan electricity.

Ecotricity, a renewable energy provider in the U.K., announced its electricity and gas would be certified vegan after it claimed half of British homes are powered by electricity made from animal byproducts. Company founder Dale Vince accused companies that consider themselves “ethical” or “green” of keeping consumers in the dark about their “secret ingredient.” “We need clear labeling of energy sourcing so that people can make informed choices,” he said in a statement.

The company offers “vegan energy” in wind and solar power, and it’s developing “sea power” produced by wave oscillation and marine currents. None of Ecotricity’s electrical sources contains animal byproducts that the company knew of before it made the announcement, but it registered with the Vegan Society to certify its green status.

Though not widely disclosed, it’s fairly common for power companies to derive electricity from animals through anaerobic digestion (厌氧消化). Animal waste is generally considered a clean, renewable energy source. Turning manure into fuel eliminates a sizeable chunk of carbon pollution and lessens power companies’ reliance on “dirtier” fossil fuels like coal and oil. Plus, animals provide a limitless supply of waste, while Earth’s natural gas stores are finite, so crackers wouldn’t need to drill into rock to extract it.

Cows are pictured at a Wagyu cattle breeding center in June in Petit-Mars, France. A U.K. energy company announced the first “vegan electricity” after warning consumers about animal byproducts in energy production.

After anaerobic digestion, farmers can use the liquid remains of the manure as fertilizer and make chips for animal bedding from the solid leftovers, chemical engineer David Simakov told Popular Science.

“We are talking about producing the amount of renewable natural gas enough to heat thousands of homes from just a single large landfill site,” he said. “We need to stop pumping carbon from underground into the atmosphere and start caring about introducing more and more renewable energy to make our lives more sustainable.”

Renewable energy only accounts for 11 percent of energy consumption in the U.S., according to the Energy Information Administration. Fossil fuels and nuclear energy generate more than 80 percent of the country’s electricity, and that’s unlikely to change: like other clean energy sources, anaerobic digestion is still more expensive than traditional sources of energy.