Track 14. Alzheimer's Breakthroughs, Drone Deliveries, Recycling Food Waste

Bullet Train is your express route to the stories, products & concepts shaping our future. No short-term headlines, no fluff—just the innovations transforming the world and our place in it, curated by the team behind the Meco App.

Hey Bullet Trainers,

Two quick things for you:

First, help us settle a debate — what’s the best daily puzzle out there?

We’ll report back on the results next week.

🚨Secondly: We're excited to announce that Meco, our app for reading newsletters, just got smarter! Now you can get the key takeaways from your newsletters in a daily 5-10 minute personalized AI audio briefing - perfect for on-the-go listening when time’s tight. 🚨

Speaking of short on time, here’s your Bullet Train Express. It’s August 21^st , today’s stops include:

• Is Alzheimer’s research in its breakthrough era? 🧠 

• How soon will we see widespread drone delivery 📦️ 

• Why Japan is fermenting its food waste ♻️ 

And don’t miss our #offtherails segment — not so future-focused, just a bit of fun

Weekly coverage of stories shaping the future — brought to you in streamlined bullet points:

Is Alzheimer’s research in its breakthrough era

• What to know: A new study has found a blood test can accurately diagnose Alzheimer’s 90% of the time — compare that to scans (73% accuracy) and primary care cognitive tests (61% accuracy)

• Why it matters: globally, the rate of Alzheimer’s is predicted to triple by 2050, so the hope is that being able to detect the disease more effectively could lead to earlier intervention

• Not a silver bullet: while exciting, doctors warn that this diagnostic test will not fix the larger problem — which is more about how this disease is treated and how patients and their caregivers are supported

• Other promising findings: recent research has found a protein that might protect against the disease and a pill that can reverse the brain damage associated with Alzheimer’s in mice

• What we’re thinking: this flurry of activity in Alzheimer’s research feels promising, especially as things have moved so slowly for so long — so we’re optimistically watching this space and manifesting that this is a breakthrough era for a devastating disease

Learn more about the new blood test here

How soon will we see widespread drone delivery

• What to know: Walmart has surpassed Amazon in one innovation area, as the retail giant now has the largest drone delivery footprint in the US — so will we soon see our packages flying high in the sky?

• Key infrastructure: to get to this point, Walmart partnered with DaaS (drones-as-a-service) companies — but for drone delivery to work, those companies are highly reliant on accurate and stable 5G and satellite communication companies, so it’s a delicate ecosystem

• Drone deliveries at scale: drone deliveries have only been rolled out in select areas this year, and while it would revolutionize logistics and lead to less congestion and trucks on the road — it also comes with a hefty amount of privacy concerns that raise eyebrows

• Where our minds are going: frankly, it’s hard to imagine widespread drone deliveries in the near term, but with ample airspace to be utilized it seems inevitable — so it will be interesting to see where the line between delivery efficiency and consumer privacy lands

BTW, people in Texas getting drone deliveries aren’t loving it…

A story that diverted us from our day job

Why Japan is fermenting its food waste

• What to know: the Japan Food Ecology Center (founded by Koichi Takahashi) is innovating the food sustainability space in a very cool way — by fermenting food scraps into nutritionally balanced pig feed

• Sounds gross, but: it solves two problems for the country — it reduces the cost of livestock feed and reliance on imports, while also reducing greenhouse gases emitted from the incineration of food waste (plus the pigs seem to like it!)

• Some perspective: food waste is a big problem globally as it’s a major contributor to climate change — and for context, Japan produces 28M tons of food waste per year (the UK produces 9.5M tons per year, and the US 60M tons per year)

• A promising model: Takahashi has developed a compelling food recycling method that is profitable and beneficial for the environment — and best of all he hasn’t patented the technology behind it, so the hope is these techniques could be replicated around the world 👀 

For a deeper dive, which we highly recommend, check out this article

A bit of fun to round out your ride

• Election season keeps getting wilder: one candidate running for mayor in Wyoming vows to let his AI bot “VIC” run the government (if he wins)

• Lego, camera, action — this designer just came up with a way to build a functional camera entirely out of Lego blocks 🤯 

• Sometimes we’re trend yuppies too… we had ChatGPT roast our Instagram feeds and it was sneakily funny and oddly flattering, so thanks for that, OpenAI! Give it a try yourself

• And… Backyard Baseball is gearing up for a re-release and the promo trailer is taking us back to ‘01 in the best way possible 🥲 

Here’s what Bullet Train readers had to say about last week’s conversation starter:

Would you ever make the switch to a dumb phone? 

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes! (47.5%)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ No way (37.5%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Undecided (15%)

Please mind the gap as you get off the train ✌️