Ordinary Chaos

Tag: adding

  • Bluesky continues to soar, adding 2M more new users in a matter of days

    Bluesky continues to soar, adding 2M more new users in a matter of days

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    Social networking startup Bluesky continues to benefit from X’s shutdown in Brazil having now added over 2 million new users over the past four days, up from just half a million as of Friday. This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were “Not Enough Resources” to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups.

    As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta’s X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky’s total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.

    In terms of absolute downloads, countries that saw the most installs outside Brazil included the U.S., Portugal, the U.K., Canada and Spain. Those with the most download growth, however, were Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Romania. Most of the latter group jumped from single-digit growth to growth in the thousands.

    Bluesky’s newcomers have actively engaged on the platform, too, driving up other key metrics.

    As one Bluesky engineer remarked, the number of likes on the social network grew to 104.6 million over the past four-day period, up from just 13 million when compared with a similar period just a week ago. Follows also grew from 1.4 million to 100.8 million while reposts grew from 1.3 million to 11 million.

    As of Monday, Bluesky said it had added 2.11 million users during the past four days, up from 26,000 users it had added in the week-ago period. In addition, the company noted it had seen “significantly more than a 100% [daily active users] increase.”

    Bluesky’s appeal to those forced to leave X may have to do with how closely the user experience resembles that of the now Elon Musk-owned app, formerly known as Twitter. Once incubated within Twitter, Bluesky spun out as a separate company and raised its own funding, but still retains much of Twitter’s look and feel.

    Like X, Bluesky offers features like likes, reposts, quote posts, lists, direct messages, search tools and user profiles, but it also improves on X’s capabilities in other ways. As a decentralized social network, users can set up their own instances (servers that run Bluesky and connect to others over the AT Protocol), customize their feeds, subscribe to third-party moderation services, and create and share “starter packs” that link to curated sets of recommended users to follow. In a coming update, Bluesky also plans to add support for video, the company says.

    Another factor to consider here is how Bluesky’s approach to content and moderation differs from Threads.

    Even when it was Twitter, X has long been known as a hotbed for breaking news and political debates, Threads has taken the opposite approach, saying it would not default to recommending political content on its platform. Instead, Threads wants to make itself palatable to brands and influencers, similar to Instagram, as it intends to eventually monetize via ads.

    Given that X’s ban in Brazil is tied to politics — the country wanted control over what could be said on the platform — it’s likely that some Brazilians opting for Bluesky wanted to join a network that was not centralized and as easily controlled. On platforms like X, moderation decisions are left up to the site’s owners, but on decentralized networks, the users are in charge.

    That flexibility combined with Bluesky’s ease of use could make the network a bigger draw than others.

    For instance, though Mastodon offers its own decentralized network, the recent user growth driven by Brazil was on a much smaller scale. On Saturday, Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko said the service had seen 4,200 signups from Brazil, up from 152 signups on August 28, for instance. That could speak to the fact that Brazilians want more than decentralization: They also want a place that more closely resembles Twitter/X.

    Meta has not yet commented on how large an increase it’s seen on Threads driven by Brazilians leaving X, but as a network that already has over 200 million monthly active users, even the addition of thousands or millions more would not be as noticeable a gain, compared with the much smaller Bluesky. Still, it’s also possible that Brazilians wanted to move to a place that was separate from friends, family and creators — one that defaulted to public postings and felt more like Twitter once did. Bluesky’s culture, which tends toward s***posting and memes, has the sort of chaotic energy of an early Twitter.

    X is said to have had north of 20 million users in Brazil, which means there’s plenty of growth to be captured all around.

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  • The US Grid Is Adding Batteries at a Much Faster Rate Than Natural Gas

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    While solar power is growing at an extremely rapid clip, in absolute terms, the use of natural gas for electricity production has continued to outpace renewables. But that looks set to change in 2024, as the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) has run the numbers on the first half of the year and found that wind, solar, and batteries were each installed at a pace that dwarfs new natural gas generators. And the gap is expected to get dramatically larger before the year is over.

    Solar, Batteries Booming

    According to the EIA’s numbers, about 20 gigawatts of new capacity was added in the first half of this year, and solar accounts for 60 percent of it. Over a third of the solar additions occurred in just two states, Texas and Florida. There were two projects that went live that were rated at over 600 megawatts of capacity, one in Texas, the other in Nevada.

    Next up is batteries: The US saw 4.2 additional gigawatts of battery capacity during this period, meaning over 20 percent of the total new capacity. (Batteries are treated as the equivalent of a generating source by the EIA since they can dispatch electricity to the grid on demand, even if they can’t do so continuously.) Texas and California alone accounted for over 60 percent of these additions; throw in Arizona and Nevada, and you’re at 93 percent of the installed capacity.

    The clear pattern here is that batteries are going where the solar is, allowing the power generated during the peak of the day to be used to meet demand after the sun sets. This will help existing solar plants avoid curtailing power production during the lower-demand periods in the spring and fall. In turn, this will improve the economic case for installing additional solar in states where its production can already regularly exceed demand.

    Wind power, by contrast, is running at a more sedate pace, with only 2.5 GW of new capacity during the first six months of 2024. And for likely the last time this decade, additional nuclear power was placed on the grid, at the fourth 1.1-GW reactor (and second recent build) at the Vogtle site in Georgia. The only other additions came from natural-gas-powered facilities, but these totaled just 400 MW, or just 2 percent of total new capacity.

    The EIA has also projected capacity additions out to the end of 2024 based on what’s in the works, and the overall shape of things doesn’t change much. However, the pace of installation goes up as developers rush to get their project operational within the current tax year. The EIA expects a bit over 60 GW of new capacity to be installed by the end of the year, with 37 GW of that coming in the form of solar power. Battery growth continues at a torrid pace, with 15 GW expected, or roughly a quarter of the total capacity additions for the year.

    Wind will account for 7.1 GW of new capacity, and natural gas 2.6 GW. Throw in the contribution from nuclear, and 96 percent of the capacity additions of 2024 are expected to operate without any carbon emissions. Even if you choose to ignore the battery additions, the fraction of carbon-emitting capacity added remains extremely small, at only 6 percent.

    Gradual Shifts on the Grid

    Obviously, these numbers represent the peak production of these sources. Over a year, solar produces at about 25 percent of its rated capacity in the US, and wind at about 35 percent. The former number will likely decrease over time as solar becomes inexpensive enough to make economic sense in places that don’t receive as much sunshine. By contrast, wind’s capacity factor may increase as more offshore wind farms get completed. For natural gas, many of the newer plants are being designed to operate erratically so that they can provide power when renewables are underproducing.

    A clearer sense of what’s happening comes from looking at the generating sources that are being retired. The US saw 5.1 GW of capacity drop off the grid in the first half of 2024, and aside from 0.2 GW of “other,” all of it was fossil-fuel-powered, including 2.1 GW of coal capacity and 2.7 GW of natural gas. The latter includes a large 1.4-GW natural gas plant in Massachusetts.

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  • How adding honey to your yogurt improves gut health

    How adding honey to your yogurt improves gut health

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    Evidence has been building about the health benefits of probiotics. Now, new research has found that putting a tablespoon of honey on your yogurt helps the probiotics it contains to survive in the gut. It’s a win-win combination that’s both healthy and delicious.

    Humans love to ferment food and drinks – think kimchi, kombucha and beer – and we’ve been doing it for tens of thousands of years. Yogurt is a fermented favorite. Conventional yogurts are produced by fermenting milk using a standard ‘starter culture’ of Lactobacillus and Streptococcus bacterial species; probiotic yogurts supplement the starter culture with probiotic strains such as Bifidobacterium animalis.

    There’s growing evidence that consuming probiotics positively affects mood and gut health. Given that honey is commonly added to yogurt, a source of probiotics, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign examined the effect that adding honey to yogurt had on the gut microbiome across two studies.

    “We were interested in the culinary pairing of yogurt and honey, which is common in the Mediterranean diet, and how it impacts the gastrointestinal microbiome,” said Hannah Holscher, associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, part of the College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois, and the corresponding author of both studies.

    In the first study, the researchers examined whether adding one of four varieties of honey – alfalfa, buckwheat, clover, and orange blossom – to a commercial yogurt (Activia) containing B. animalis affected the survivability of probiotics in the yogurt during digestion. They added 42 g (two tablespoons) of honey to 170 g (two-thirds of a cup) of yogurt and exposed the mixture to solutions in the lab that mimicked digestion in the mouth, stomach, and intestines.

    “The enzymes in our mouth, stomach, and intestines help with digestion and facilitate nutrient absorption, but they also reduce the viability of microbes,” Holscher said. “That’s great when it’s pathogens but not necessarily when it comes to beneficial bacteria. We wanted to see if honey could help probiotic bacteria survive in the gut.”

    For the mouth and stomach solutions, the researchers observed no difference in B. animalis survival between the different honey varieties and control versions (yogurt mixed with sugar or water). However, yogurt with honey – particularly clover honey – helped probiotic survival in the intestinal phase of digestion.

    Then, the researchers tested their findings from the first study in a clinical study. Sixty-six healthy adults were randomly assigned to two groups: the control group ate 170 g of commercial pasteurized yogurt with B. animalis twice daily for two weeks, and the treatment group ate the same amount of the same yogurt plus 21 g of clover honey for the same amount of time. After two weeks, and following a four-week washout period, the treatment and control groups swapped. Participants were asked not to consume supplemental or dietary probiotics, fermented dairy products and fermented foods. They provided fecal samples and information about their bowel movements, as well as completed questionnaires to evaluate their mood, cognition, and overall well-being.

    “Our findings showed that pairing honey with yogurt supported the survival of the yogurt’s probiotic bacteria in the gut, so the lab study results did translate to real-world application in humans,” Holscher said.

    However, the researchers found that adding clover honey to yogurt did not affect how long food took to travel through the gut, frequency of bowel movements, mood, or cognition. Holscher attributes this to the participants being healthy to start with.

    A small follow-up study was conducted wherein 36 participants consumed yogurt with sugar. Comparing the results of all three study conditions, the researchers found that combining yogurt and honey preserved the most probiotics, but there was no effect on the other health factors measured.

    “We found that one tablespoon of honey in a serving of yogurt helps support probiotic survival,” said Holscher. “However, we have to keep in mind that honey is an added sugar, and most Americans need to be cognizant of the amount of sugar in their diet to maintain a healthy body weight. But adding a little bit of honey to unsweetened yogurt is a nice culinary pairing to incorporate into your menu rotation.”

    Both the first and second studies were published in The Journal of Nutrition. The research was supported by the National Honey Board.

    Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign



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