Shruti (@heyshrutimishra)

While Europe is responding to heat waves by buying more air conditioners, China is deploying infrastructure that cools public space at a fraction of the energy cost. Rooftops across Shanxi province are fitted with mist nozzles that spray droplets fine enough to evaporate before they hit the ground. They switch on automatically at 35°C and drop surrounding air temperature by 5 to 8°C within minutes. The same system now runs at bus stops in Chongqing, public squares in Beijing and Wuhan. The technology is not new. Evaporative cooling is textbook thermodynamics. What is new is that a government decided to fund the rollout at city scale before anyone wrote a policy paper about it.

Elon Musk started SpaceX because Neil Armstrong inspired him. Years later, his hero went to Congress and testified against him. Three rockets exploded. SpaceX was running out of money. He bet everything on a fourth launch in 2008, and it worked, making SpaceX the first private company to reach orbit. In 2010, the two men who made Elon dream about space in the first place, Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, told the US government that commercial spaceflight was a mistake. Watch his face in this interview. He's not angry. He's hurt. His voice breaks when he says "those guys are heroes of mine." He didn't quit. SpaceX now launches more rockets than any country on Earth. The same program Armstrong said would fail is the only American way to get astronauts to the ISS today. Your heroes won't always cheer for you. Sometimes they're the reason you need to keep going anyway.