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Special announcement! I have returned to producing a blog. It is aptly named The Sundry Letter, over at sundryletter.com. This newsletter will be a relay of what I post on the blog. Thank you for reading!

Audi vehicles to talk to U.S. traffic signals in first for industry

Audi’s system allows the vehicle to display a countdown before a red light turns to green. Knowing how much time one has before the light changes to green will relieve much of the anxiety of waiting, Malhotra said.

The countdown will also appear on the dashboard if the vehicle determines it will not be able to make an approaching light before it turns red, to allow the driver to begin to brake.

While waiting for a red light to turn green, the display will disappear a few seconds before the light turns green, forcing drivers to pay attention to the intersection and determine when it is safe to proceed, said Malhotra.

The future is now. Here’s the link for the article on Reuters. 

What Germany and Belarus give to Olympics gold medalists

According to Fox Sports Australia, Croatia, Great Britain, Norway and Sweden are among nations that pay no financial incentive for winning gold, while other countries offer alternative bait — like military exemptions (South Korea), a lifetime supply of beer (Germany) and unlimited sausages (Belarus).

So, the four German gold medalists in Rio so far can wash down their $20,000 bonuses with a metric ton of Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbiers while making friends with potential Belarusian sausage kings.

Here’s the article on Yahoo! Sports. 

Don’t pee on your jellyfish sting and other venom tips Dr. Christie Wilcox for Quartz:

I’ve watched tentacles from box jellies and Portuguese man o’ war react to urine. And more often than not, the solution causes their venomous stinging cells to fire. Though the intensity of the reaction varies along with the urine itself, at best, urine is inert, at which point you might as well use seawater instead. And at worst, pee causes so much stinging that the jelly would almost certainly inject more venom into you.

Douse the sting with vinegar!

So here’s what you should do: keep your pants zipped and stash a bottle of vinegar in the car instead. Treating the wound with vinegar causes the jellyfish’s stinging cells to become fixed and unable to fire.

And snakes?

Venomous snakes are some of the most dangerous venomous animals, capable of delivering large amounts of potentially lethal toxins with a single bite. Because snake venom can be so dangerous, I can see why people began to think that removing the venom before it spread through the body could save victims’ lives. But why we then settled on the idea that the best way to solve the problem is to suck on the wound to draw the venom into our own mouth is beyond me.

Unfortunately, a lot of proposed ways of removing venom, from suction devices to cutting around a bite (“lancing”), don’t work. Once snake venom is injected in the body, it immediately goes to work, hitchhiking in the blood to get around. It only takes 60 seconds for your blood to travel all the way around your body—so you’re never going to get to all of the venom before it’s spread.

i.e just go get help!

The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber There is a guy named Alex Honnold, he free solo climbs mountains and his brain is not wired like ours. J.B. MacKinnon for Nautilus:

Honnold is history’s greatest ever climber in the free solo style, meaning he ascends without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. Above about 50 feet, any fall would likely be lethal, which means that, on epic days of soloing, he might spend 12 or more hours in the Death Zone. On the hardest parts of some climbing routes, his fingers will have no more contact with the rock than most people have with the touchscreens of their phones, while his toes press down on edges as thin as sticks of gum. Just watching a video of Honnold climbing will trigger some degree of vertigo, heart palpitations, or nausea in most people, and that’s if they can watch them at all. Even Honnold has said that his palms sweat when he watches himself on film.

So obviously, they put his brain through an fMRI and: 

‘Maybe his amygdala is not firing—he’s having no internal reactions to these stimuli,’ says Joseph. ‘But it could be the case that he has such a well-honed regulatory system that he can say, ‘OK, I’m feeling all this stuff, my amygdala is going off,’ but his frontal cortex is just so powerful that it can calm him down.’

The article is interesting throughout. 

*Thanks and have a nice week, 

Ulysse*