November 18, 2022 - Why Scientists Got the Fast Pace of Arctic Warming Wrong

S15

Why Scientists Got the Fast Pace of Arctic Warming Wrong Climate scientists have a surprising habit: They often underplay the climate threat. In 2007 a team led by Stefan Rahmstorf compared actual observations with projections made by theoretical models for three key climate variables: atmospheric carbon dioxide, global average temperature and sea-level rise. While the projections got CO2 levels right, they were low for real temperature and sea-level rise. In 2008 Roger Pielke, Jr., found that sea-level rise was greater than forecast in two of three prior Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. In 2009 a review of hundreds of papers on climate change identified several areas where scientists had lowballed event predictions but none in which they had overestimated them. In 2013 researcher Keynyn Brysse, then at the University of California, San Diego, along with other colleagues and me, pointed out that these underestimates represent a kind of bias. Scientists tended toward lower projections because they did not want to be accused of making dramatic and exaggerated claims. The articles reporting the underestimates have been widely cited, so one might think that by now scientists would have taken corrective steps. Continued here

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Why Scientists Got the Fast Pace of Arctic Warming Wrong Climate scientists have a surprising habit: They often underplay the climate threat. In 2007 a team led by Stefan Rahmstorf compared actual observations with projections made by theoretical models for three key climate variables: atmospheric carbon dioxide, global average temperature and sea-level rise. While the projections got CO2 levels right, they were low for real temperature and sea-level rise. In 2008 Roger Pielke, Jr., found that sea-level rise was greater than forecast in two of three prior Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. In 2009 a review of hundreds of papers on climate change identified several areas where scientists had lowballed event predictions but none in which they had overestimated them. In 2013 researcher Keynyn Brysse, then at the University of California, San Diego, along with other colleagues and me, pointed out that these underestimates represent a kind of bias. Scientists tended toward lower projections because they did not want to be accused of making dramatic and exaggerated claims. The articles reporting the underestimates have been widely cited, so one might think that by now scientists would have taken corrective steps. Continued here

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How Can the World Prepare for the Next Pandemic? The COVID pandemic is not over, but countries must start to prepare for the next one to avoid a similar or even worse outcome The COVID-19 pandemic is not over, and already its cost is staggering. The disease could have contributed to around 17 million deaths. And, by 2024, the hit to the global economy could reach US$12.5 trillion. Everyone has experienced an extraordinary few years that few people would want to repeat. If the world is to avoid a similar or worse event in the future, countries must ensure that they are better prepared to deal with pandemics. Continued here

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James Webb Captures a Protostar in a Fiery Hourglass Looking at the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest showstopping image of a faraway protostar is like peering back to a time when the sun and planets of our solar system were just beginning to form. The dazzling new photo, which NASA shared Wednesday, shows the fiery hourglass shape made by a star in its infancy. Webb snapped the portrait using its near-infrared camera (NIRCam), which can capture scenes in the wavelength range of 0.6 to 5 microns—beyond what’s detectable in the visible spectrum. Continued here

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NASA's Artemis is humanity's first step toward space colonization In the early morning hours of Wednesday, November 16, NASA successfully launched the first test of its Artemis I space launch system. Because the launch was postponed a number of times by technical problems or bad weather, there was fear that some misfortune hung over the mission. Along with the $4.1 billion price tag attached to this launch alone, the setbacks had commentators asking what exactly the point was of all this effort.  But while there are valid criticisms — for example about NASA not including reusable launch technologies — the naysayers miss a broader, vital point. The Artemis program is about a lot more than this one launch. It’s about the long-term future of humanity. Continued here

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Political Leaders Must Act Now to Thwart the Next Pandemic To make sure that COVID is the last pandemic of such devastation, political leaders must change their mindset and take these actions In the past two decades, the time between deadly international disease outbreaks has shortened, and the human and economic cost of these outbreaks has grown. In 2002, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) led to 800 deaths and US$40 billion in economic losses. The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa caused more than 11,000 deaths and $53 billion in economic and social losses. In early 2020, COVID-19 spread rapidly worldwide, and is estimated to have contributed to more than 17 million deaths, with economic losses estimated to reach $12.5 trillion by 2024. Delays in alerting the world to these threats led to wider spread and more loss of life. Continued here

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Why the Emoji Skin Tone You Choose Matters “I'm a white person, and despite there being a range of skin tones available for emoji these days, I still just choose the original Simpsons-esque yellow. Is this insensitive to people of color?” I don't think it's possible to determine what any group of people, categorically, might find insensitive—and I won't venture to speak, as a white person myself, on behalf of people of color. But your trepidation about which emoji skin tone to use has evidently weighed on many white people's minds since 2015, when the Unicode Consortium—the mysterious organization that sets standards for character encoding in software systems around the world—introduced the modifiers. A 2018 University of Edinburgh study of Twitter data confirmed that the palest skin tones are used least often, and most white people opt, as you do, for the original yellow. Continued here

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How Maersk Designed a More Resilient Supply Chain Maersk, the global shipping giant, created an innovation center in 2021 to help it contend not only with the supply disruptions caused by the pandemic but also long-term challenges such the need to decarbonize and further digitize its operations, deploy and leverage AI capabilities, and address endemic staffing and retention issues. In doing so, Maersk adhered to three principles, which other companies can employ to address supply chain problems as well as others. Continued here

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S39

How to handle an overload of grief When I was 27, my mother told me she was dying of ALS, a fatal neurodegenerative disease with no cure. She died the following summer, and not long after, my father was diagnosed with cancer. He successfully completed treatment, but when the cancer returned, he didn’t survive. From the moment my mother shared her diagnosis and leading up to my father’s funeral, it felt like my head was being held under water. I could only surface for enough air to survive, but not long enough to understand the enormity of what had occurred. Before I could come to terms with one loss, I was experiencing another. Continued here

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As the world goes cashless, how are our spending habits changing? In 1949, a businessman named Frank McNamara was dining at a New York City restaurant when he realized he had forgotten his wallet at home. The bill came. His wife covered for him. Embarrassed and resolved never to let it happen again, McNamara helped start the Diners Club — the world’s first payment card that became widely accepted by mainstream merchants. The Diners Club was the first step on the journey to a world where an estimated 2.8 billion credit cards are currently in use, roughly one-third of which are in the U.S. Since 2016, global non-cash payments have increased by more than 60 percent. It’s estimated that a quarter of the world’s retail transactions will be conducted online by 2025, with very little physical money changing hands at all. We’re using contactless payments, mobile banking apps, and backstage direct debits for more and more things. Continued here

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Why This Universe? New Calculation Suggests Our Cosmos Is Typical. | Quanta Magazine The properties of our universe — smooth, flat, just a pinch of dark energy — are what we should expect to see, according to a new calculation. Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it's also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naïve calculations suggest that — coming out of the Big Bang — space should have become crumpled up by gravity and blasted apart by repulsive dark energy. Continued here

S35

Are AirPods the Hearing Aids of the Future? New research suggests that personal sound amplification products like earbuds may help some people hear better in certain scenarios Though millions of Americans could benefit from wearing hearing aids, very few of those people actually use them. This is because hearing aids can be expensive, require time-consuming visits to an audiologist and are socially stigmatized. Continued here

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Digital twins: Flying high, flexing fast After discussing the fundamentals of digital twins and the opportunities they offer, we’re expanding our exploration by taking a look at how digital methods help transform product development. Join McKinsey partner Kimberly Borden and senior adviser Dr. Will Roper in a conversation about the value of digital technologies in production applications. Their discussion, which examines the use of digital approaches to design and development in Formula One racing and in aerospace and defense, shows how a software development style can have a big impact on the production of hardware. This episode, recorded at Farnborough International Airshow and introduced by Christian Johnson, the managing editor of McKinsey’s Operations Practice, explores the digital imperative in the design and development of products. It also considers the need for a pragmatic delivery approach to ensure that big ideas can be executed. The conversation has been edited for clarity. Continued here

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Parasites Revealed to Be 'Unseen Influencers' of All Ecosystems Parasites: The Inside Storyby Scott L. Gardner Judy Diamond and Gabor RáczIllustrated by Brenda LeePrinceton University Press, 2022 ($29.95) Growing up on a farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Scott L. Gardner would comb the rolling hills for carcasses of mice, pheasants and other expired wildlife. It was not those larger animals that intrigued the young naturalist, though, but the smaller life-forms nestled inside their organs and flesh. Gardner was after their parasites. Continued here

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Your Competitors Aren't Always Who You Think They Are When it comes to strategy, one way to meet radically new expectations in your industry is to draw from the impressive and surprising strategies that are being used in other industries. Why can’t interacting with an insurance company be as responsive and transparent as interacting with Uber? Why can’t checking into a hospital be as seamless as checking into a hotel? These are the sorts of questions that more and more customers are asking, and the questions that a winning business strategy must answer. You won’t find those answers if you limit your strategic vision to what other companies in your field are doing. Remember, your competitors aren’t always who you think they are. Continued here

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This Summer, You Can Visit Yosemite Without a Reservation For the last three summers, visitors who wanted to explore the famous waterfalls and cliffs of Yosemite had to make a reservation to enter the popular national park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Park leaders first implemented the reservation system in 2020 to help limit crowds during the pandemic, then maintained it while making infrastructure repairs. Now, the park is doing away with reservations. Next summer, travelers to the national park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains can show up at an entrance station, pay the fee or show a park pass, and drive right in. Continued here

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'We can invent new biology': Molly Gibson on the power of AI Some diseases have confounded researchers for decades. But the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to medicine promises to drastically accelerate the discovery of new drugs to treat them. Tackling hard-to-crack challenges and reaching more patients excites Molly Gibson, cofounder and chief strategy and innovation officer at Generate Biomedicines. Based in the Boston area, Generate is a therapeutics company launched in 2018. Earned PhD in computational and systems biology from Washington University in St. Louis in the Center for Genome Sciences & Systems Biology; received BS in computer science from Truman State University Continued here

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What's the real reason you can't go faster than the speed of light? Albert Einstein is frequently regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all times, with brilliant insights about the laws of nature. However, his work has one very disappointing consequence, especially for science buffs who hope one day to travel to distant stars. His theory demonstrated that there is a fastest speed in the Universe: the speed of light. That means the shortest possible round-trip to the nearest star will take nearly a decade. But just how does that work? Even the most informed science enthusiasts often have a wrong, or at least incomplete, understanding of why you can’t go faster than light. Continued here

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LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky: Skills, Not Degrees, Matter Most in Hiring Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, thinks the site should be a place where its members’ billions of years of collective work experience should be freed to upskill anyone, anywhere, any time. Skills, more than degrees or pedigrees, are the true measure of what makes a great new hire, he argues, especially as the workforce evolves in fast and dramatic ways. Continued here

S29

Should a murderer be allowed to publish scientific papers? Between 1996 and 2021, Valery Fabrikant has published nearly 60 scientific papers across more than a dozen journals, and he’s done it all from a prison cell. On August 24, 1992, the now former associate professor of mechanical engineering at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec shot and killed four of his colleagues and wounded another. Prior to the massacre, Fabrikant’s dozen-year employment at the university had been antagonistic, to say the least. The irascible, albeit brilliant, scientist quarreled with peers and irked students. Angered at being repeatedly denied tenure, he blamed everyone around him. His anger eventually boiled over into mass murder. Continued here

S12

Why Did Flu Season Start So Early This Year? Reduced population immunity resulting from COVID precautions, and a phenomenon called viral interference, may have influenced this flu season’s early start The U.S. influenza season has arrived much earlier than usual. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first detected the early increases of flu activity in mid-October. The agency noted that the phenomenon was happening in most of the country, but more intensely in the Southeast and in south-central regions. A month later, levels of the virus continue to rise steeply. According to the latest CDC flu report, 25 states or jurisdictions now experience high or very high levels of outpatient visits for influenza-like illness, which is characterized by fever plus cough or sore throat. Continued here

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Even Weak Hurricanes Are Getting Stronger as the Climate Warms Data collected by thousands of scientific instruments scattered across the world’s oceans show that weak tropical cyclones are intensifying, not just stronger ones Hurricanes are expected to grow stronger as the climate warms, with more of them spinning up into major storms. But it’s not just the biggest cyclones that are worsening. New research finds that weak tropical cyclones, including tropical storms and low-category hurricanes, are intensifying over time. Continued here

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'It's important to bring the spirit of emergencies to the long term' Business leaders may feel that they have been dealing with a never-ending series of crises since the COVID-19 pandemic began nearly three years ago. A health emergency ushered in a supply chain disruption that yielded an inflation predicament; add in higher energy prices and other upheavals, and the demands on leaders’ crisis management skills are at an all-time high. For perspective on how to thrive during emergencies, we turned to José Andrés, a Spanish-born chef whose company encompasses nearly 40 restaurants globally. Most chefs can offer some wisdom in dealing with pressure, given the relentless atmosphere of restaurant kitchens. But Andrés’s expertise is unique: in 2010, he founded World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit whose mission is to deliver fresh meals to people in need during emergencies including tornados, hurricanes, pandemics, and wars. This year, the nonprofit estimates that it raised and spent $420 million, including on more than 170 million meals distributed to Ukrainians since the invasion of Ukraine. Continued here

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The next evolution of digital money? It's happening now In October 2020, the Bahamas released a new kind of digital currency: “sand dollars.” These digital tokens are issued by the country’s central bank and are legal tender, with the same legal status as their old-fashioned money — paper notes and coins. The sand dollar is cash; it just doesn’t have a physical form. Residents of the Bahamas can now download an e-wallet onto their phones, load it with sand dollars, and spend away with a simple tap. For now, only two countries have officially launched such central bank digital currencies (CBDCs): the Bahamas and Nigeria. But many more are actively running CBDC trials, including China and the countries of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union. More than 100 countries are exploring the idea. In the US, the Federal Reserve this January issued a discussion paper on CBDCs, considering all the risks and opportunities. Continued here

S37

What to Know About Pakistan's Controversial Transgender Romance Film The Pakistani government is reversing its ban on the film Joyland, which is the country’s entry for the Academy Awards.  “The decision is a simple yet powerful message that the government stands by freedom of speech and safeguards it, and cannot allow mere smear campaigns or disinformation to be used as choking creative freedom,” Salman Sufi, an aide to Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, tells the Associated Press.  Continued here

S20

The danger and devotion of fighting for women in Afghanistan The women of Afghanistan are being persecuted under Taliban rule, but they're not standing down. Filmmaker Tamana Ayazi chronicles the harrowing reality of one women's rights advocate -- Zarifa Ghafari, Afghanistan's youngest female mayor -- in her documentary "In Her Hands." In conversation with human rights lawyer Kat Craig, Ayazi discusses the making of her film, her experience interviewing the Taliban leaders she opposes and her hopes for the future of her beloved country. Continued here

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How AI could revolutionize drug discovery Human bodies are incredibly complex. It takes many years to discover even just one new medicine to successfully treat a disease. Could artificial intelligence help speed up that process? McKinsey experts believe so. (The following transcript has been edited for clarity.) Lydia The: What excites me about AI and drug discovery is the convergence between technology, drug development, and biology, which is going to lead to better drugs being developed faster—using all of the capabilities that Silicon Valley and the tech ecosystem have developed—to help us have even greater impact on patients. Continued here

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The Twitter Bubble Let Democrats Defy Political Gravity As political theater goes, Republican congressional candidate Joe Kent’s Election Day Twitter thread listing all the evils that his Democratic opponent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez would bring to Washington’s third District was standard fare. It prominently featured a photoshopped image of Perez driving a light-rail train surrounded by pastiched images of rioting and homelessness in neighboring Portland, Oregon—suggesting with all the subtlety of a tactical nuke that her support for a TriMet light-rail extension into Vancouver would bring Armageddon. Among the most heinous passengers on Gluesenkamp-Perez’s train from hell? “Puberty blockers and ‘trans’ surgery for minors without parental consent” and “biological men competing in girl’s sports and accessing women-only spaces.” Kent lost this formerly safe seat in one of the biggest upsets of the 2022 election. And he is far from the only Republican with a weird fixation on trans kids and their genitalia to lose an otherwise winnable race. Democrats won Michigan in a sweep, keeping the governor’s mansion, attorney general and secretary of state’s offices, a majority of the state’s Congressional seats, and majorities in the State House and Senate. The latter was a feat that had eluded Michigan Democrats for nearly 40 years. Afterward, Michigan Republican Party Chief of Staff Paul Cordes released a memo blaming his party’s dismal performance in what was supposed to be a “red wave” election on its excessive focus on “red meat” culture war politics. On trans politics he was blunt: “There were more ads on transgender sports than inflation, gas prices and bread and butter issues that could have swayed independent voters. We did not have a turnout problem—middle of the road voters simply didn’t like what [GOP gubernatorial candidate] Tudor [Dixon] was selling.” Continued here

S5

How Colombia plans to keep its oil and coal in the ground In February 2020, the lifeblood that kept the tiny town of La Jagua de Ibirico in northern Colombia going stopped flowing. As the Covid-19 pandemic sunk coal prices internationally, the multinational giant Glencore, through its local affiliate Prodeco, closed the two coal mines in the area. Continued here

S23

When to Use an Air Purifier, a Humidifier, or a Dehumidifier Our homes are our sanctuaries, but your indoor air might be dirtier than you think. That could be making it uncomfortable at home, and potentially even make you sick. If you're struggling with your indoor air quality, there are a few things you can do to help and devices you can buy, like an air purifier, a dehumidifier, and a humidifier. But they aren't cheap. While their names are self-explanatory, it's not as easy to figure out when you might need each one. We talked to experts, read research reports, and tested some products to give you the best advice. Continued here

S21

Kate Fagan: Why people love watching sports Sure, sports are about athleticism -- but what actually keeps fans invested? Journalist Kate Fagan takes a fascinating deep-dive into lesser-known moments in women's sports history and its media coverage, revealing why stakes and storylines are at the heart of what makes sports riveting. Continued here

S25

The Director of 'Pentiment' Wants You to Know How His Characters Ate Obsidian Entertainment’s latest game, Pentiment, takes its title from the term pentimento, a change made by an artist while painting. Its origin is the Italian word pentirsi, which means to change one’s mind or repent. Pentiment’s aim is to show how history, like oil on a canvas, can be covered, then rediscovered or forgotten. The game, which has been getting rave reviews, is set in 16th-century Bavaria in the Holy Roman Empire, an area that’s now part of Germany. The player takes control of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist with a university education, embroiled over 25 years in a series of murders and scandals that take place in the fictional locations of Kiersau Abbey and Tassing. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the game tries, as Eco’s novel did, to capture the texture of history, the traces of font and ink, of manuscripts and print wood cuts. Continued here

S17

COVID Communication Often Failed: How Health Policy Makers Can Do Better Health policy makers need to cultivate social trust and plan effective communication strategies well before the next pandemic When Robb Willer looks back on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—when leaders still had a chance to stop the virus from bringing the world to a halt—there’s a fateful moment that stands out. In February 2020, global health authorities spoke in one voice, advising the public not to wear masks to prevent infection. Continued here

S26

Will physics prevent SpinLaunch from succeeding? It’s long been the dream of humanity to escape the bonds of Earth’s gravitational pull, paving the way for us to explore the vast reaches of space that lie beyond our world. Beginning in the 20th century, we started to achieve this dream by leveraging the power of rocket technology, where we’d burn fuel to provide a large and constant acceleration to a payload, eventually taking it above Earth’s atmosphere and either into orbit around our planet or — more ambitiously — to escape from our planet’s gravity entirely. However, rocket launches, even when the launch vehicle is salvageable and reusable, are tremendously resource-intensive, expensive, and environmentally unfriendly. Since the mid-20th century, numerous alternative technologies have been proposed to send objects to space, but none have yet achieved that goal as of 2022. One company aims to change that in the coming few years: SpinLaunch. Ideally, they’ll build a full-scale version of their modestly-sized working prototype to spin objects up to speeds of 5,000 miles-per-hour (8,100 kph) and launch them upward, where a small booster will take them all the way into space. It’s an ambitious goal, but the laws of physics might be standing in the way. Here’s why. Continued here

S16

The Feminist Test We Keep Failing: Lost Women of Science Podcast, Season 3 Bonus Episode There's a test that we at Lost Women of Science seem to fail again and again: the Finkbeiner Test.  There's a test that we at Lost Women of Science seem to fail again and again: the Finkbeiner Test. Named for the science writer, Ann Finkbeiner, the Finkbeiner Test is a checklist  for writing profiles of female scientists without being sexist. It includes rules like not mentioning her husband’s job, or her childcare arrangements, or how she was the “first woman to…”—all rules we break regularly on this show. In this episode, Katie Hafner talks to Christie Aschwanden, the science writer who created the test, and Ann Finkbeiner, who inspired it, to find out how they came up with these rules, and to see if there might be hope yet for our series. She reports her findings to Carol Sutton Lewis, who has a whole other set of rules for telling these stories. Continued here

S32

Known as Warhol's Muse, Edie Sedgwick Was an Artist Herself Edie Sedgwick was the “It Girl” of the mid-1960s. Known primarily as pop artist Andy Warhol’s muse, she starred in many of his movies, including Poor Little Rich Girl, Vinyl and Chelsea Girls. Her fame was a bright flash in the pan, spanning just a few short years until her death in 1971, at age 28. But in that time, her celebrity reached mythic proportions and propelled Warhol’s career to the next level. Several Bob Dylan songs, including Like a Rolling Stone and Just Like A Woman, are rumored to be about Sedgwick; so is the Velvet Underground’s Femme Fatale.  Continued here

S7

Inside a boot camp for Chinese TikTok sellers bringing live e-commerce to the U.S. Jacqueline Zhuang made her debut as a TikTok live-shopping host from a studio in Guangzhou, promoting the sequined red dress she was wearing, in front of a rack of glittery clothes. “If you wear it to your bestie’s wedding, I’m sure the men stare at you, and the girls envy you,” Zhuang declared passionately in English. Encouraging voices cheered her on from off camera. “For the friends who pick it, I will have an extra surprise for you,” she added. Only a week earlier, 30-year-old Zhuang had quit her decade-long career as a newspaper journalist and television anchor for what she believes is a career of the future — hosting live streams on TikTok to sell things to shoppers in the West. To set herself up for success, Zhuang joined a bootcamp, a two-day crash course in sales tactics and English-language internet slang to entice Western shoppers. Promoters of the course promised to show Zhuang and the other attendees — factory owners, teachers and a former flight attendant — everything they needed to know to sell Chinese products to English-speaking consumers on the world’s most popular social media platform. Continued here

S1

The Costs and Benefits of Brand Consolidation Brand consolidation is as important a challenge for small to medium sized companies as it is for big ones. One medical practice takes over or merges with another, one manufacturer acquires another producer, or an accounting firm wants to rebrand itself for a fresh start.  This article reviews the pros and cons of consolidating brands in terms of market presence, cost savings, and brand image, and describes how a professional service firm that has successfully handled serial consolidations of locally branded businesses goes about the process. Continued here S33 Researchers Find Living Clam Thought to Have Gone Extinct Thousands of Years Ago While looking for sea slugs in California, a marine ecologist came across the tiny, ten-millimeter mollusks Marine ecologist Jeff Goddard was searching for sea slugs in the tide pools of a California beach near Santa Barbara when something strange caught his eye: two tiny translucent white clams. Goddard was surprised—he had studied California’s intertidal habitats for decades, but had never seen anything like these delicate little mollusks, per a statement. Continued here S6 The floating solar panels that track the Sun On a lake in the Netherlands, a shiny circular island floats, covered in dozens of shimmering solar panels. But this is no normal solar array, nor even simply one of the many new floating solar farms being installed in lakes, reservoirs and coastal areas across the world. That's because its panels are doing something none of these other floating solar farms can do: meticulously tracking and following the Sun as it moves across the sky, to catch as many rays as possible. Continued here S34 This Summer, You Can Visit Yosemite Without a Reservation For the last three summers, visitors who wanted to explore the famous waterfalls and cliffs of Yosemite had to make a reservation to enter the popular national park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Park leaders first implemented the reservation system in 2020 to help limit crowds during the pandemic, then maintained it while making infrastructure repairs. Now, the park is doing away with reservations. Next summer, travelers to the national park in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains can show up at an entrance station, pay the fee or show a park pass, and drive right in. Continued here S35 Are AirPods the Hearing Aids of the Future? New research suggests that personal sound amplification products like earbuds may help some people hear better in certain scenarios Though millions of Americans could benefit from wearing hearing aids, very few of those people actually use them. This is because hearing aids can be expensive, require time-consuming visits to an audiologist and are socially stigmatized. Continued here S36 James Webb Captures a Protostar in a Fiery Hourglass Looking at the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest showstopping image of a faraway protostar is like peering back to a time when the sun and planets of our solar system were just beginning to form. The dazzling new photo, which NASA shared Wednesday, shows the fiery hourglass shape made by a star in its infancy. Webb snapped the portrait using its near-infrared camera (NIRCam), which can capture scenes in the wavelength range of 0.6 to 5 microns—beyond what’s detectable in the visible spectrum. Continued here S37 What to Know About Pakistan's Controversial Transgender Romance Film The Pakistani government is reversing its ban on the film Joyland, which is the country’s entry for the Academy Awards.  “The decision is a simple yet powerful message that the government stands by freedom of speech and safeguards it, and cannot allow mere smear campaigns or disinformation to be used as choking creative freedom,” Salman Sufi, an aide to Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, tells the Associated Press.  Continued here S38 Why This Universe? New Calculation Suggests Our Cosmos Is Typical. | Quanta Magazine The properties of our universe — smooth, flat, just a pinch of dark energy — are what we should expect to see, according to a new calculation. Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it's also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naïve calculations suggest that — coming out of the Big Bang — space should have become crumpled up by gravity and blasted apart by repulsive dark energy. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2024 (35) ►  May (1) ►  April (4) ►  March (2) ►  February (10) ►  January (18) ►  2023 (834) ►  December (20) ►  November (54) ►  October (44) ►  September (108) ►  August (91) ►  July (29) ►  June (68) ►  May (104) ►  April (33) ►  March (30) ►  February (99) ►  January (154) ▼  2022 (208) ►  December (117) ▼  November (6) November 28, 2022 - What Makes Us Vote the Way We ... November 21, 2022 - This Google-Backed Nonprofit P... November 18, 2022 - How to Make Your Matrix Orga... November 18, 2022 - Why Scientists Got the Fast Pa... 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