## Metadata - Author: [[Bahcall, Safi]] - Full Title: Loonshots - Category: #books ## Highlights - Most drugs work by gently attaching themselves to the overactive proteins inside cells that trigger disease. Those proteins act like an army of hypercharged robots, causing cells to go haywire. The cells may start multiplying out of control, like cancer. Or they may attack the body’s own tissues, like in severe arthritis. By attaching to the overactive proteins, drugs dial down their activity, quieting the cells, restoring order in the body. - In the 1970s, Nokia was an industrial conglomerate famous mostly for its rubber boots and toilet paper. Over the next two decades, it would pioneer the first cellular network, the first car phone, the first all-network analog phone, and the first wildly successful GSM phone. By the early 2000s, it was selling half the smartphones on the planet. It became, briefly, the most valuable company in Europe - In 2004, a handful of excited Nokia engineers created a new kind of phone: internet-ready, with a big color touchscreen display and a high-resolution camera. They proposed another crazy idea to go along with the phone: an online app store. The leadership team—the same widely admired, cover-story leadership team—shot down both projects. Three years later, the engineers saw their crazy ideas materialize on a stage in San Francisco. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Five years later, Nokia was irrelevant. It sold its mobile business in 2013. Between its mobile peak and exit, Nokia’s value dropped by roughly a quarter trillion dollars. - Adding a small amount of carbon to iron creates a much stronger material: steel. Adding nickel to steel creates some of the strongest alloys we know: the steels used inside jet engines and nuclear reactors - Systems snap when the tide turns in a microscopic tug-of-war. Binding forces try to lock water molecules into rigid formation. Entropy, the tendency of systems to become more disordered, encourages those molecules to roam. As temperature decreases, binding forces get stronger and entropy forces get weaker. When the strengths of those two forces cross, the system snaps. Water freezes.