Protests against displacement in Jharkhand: November 17, 2022

Who Is Dying from COVID Now, and Why

Nearly three years into the pandemic, COVID’s mortality burden is growing in certain groups of people

Today in the U.S., about 335 people will die from COVID—a disease for which there are highly effective vaccines, treatments and precautions. Who is still dying, and why?

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"Polar Preet" Sets Out to Become the First Woman to Cross Antarctica Solo and Unsupported

After setting a record as the first woman of color to reach the South Pole unsupported last year, Preet Chandi is now tackling a 1,100-mile challenge

This week, a woman from the United Kingdom set out on an expedition across Antarctica in an attempt to become the first female explorer to cross the continent solo and unsupported.Â

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Early Humans May Have Cooked Fish 780,000 Years Ago

Cooking with fire marked an important turning point in human evolution. But based on available evidence, determining exactly when early humans learned to cook is challenging. While researchers have discovered the remains of charred animals and root vegetables, that doesn’t necessarily mean people were grilling up steaks for dinner; they may have simply tossed a dead animal into the fire for disposal.

Now, researchers in Israel say they’ve come up with a clever solution to this problem—and, in the process, they’ve found evidence that early humans may have cooked fish some 780,000 years ago. They described their findings in a new paper published this week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

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Climate Aid Is Lacking for Poor Countries That Burn Few Fossil Fuels

New funding programs announced at COP27 are helping poor countries transition away from fossil fuels, but the money isn’t going to places without energy

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt—New climate aid is finally beginning to flow to poorer nations that burn fossil fuels. Left on the sidelines are countries that use some of the smallest amounts of energy in the world.

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Doctors Treated a Child for a Genetic Disease Before She Was Born

For the first time, doctors treated a fetus for a severe form of a rare genetic disease. To combat the condition, which, untreated, usually causes death before age two, the medical team piped an enzyme through the umbilical cord to the fetus in the womb.

Today, the child, named Ayla, is 16 months old and developing normally, STAT News’ Andrew Joseph reports. Every week, she receives medication with an enzyme that her body doesn’t produce itself.

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Invisible Numbers Are the Most Beautiful Part of Every 'Space' Image

We are drawn to breathtaking images of the heavens, but there is beauty in the numbers those images hold

Each year, millions of people visit the Louvre in Paris to gaze upon arguably the most iconic work of art in history: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Most visitors are drawn to the painting’s aura of mystery. But some behold a deeper beauty there, too—the Mona Lisa’s hazy landscape and beguiling expression alike arise from Leonardo’s use of sfumato, a complex technique in which soft outlines emerge from many delicate layers of paint, like figures from a fog. Some of the Mona Lisa’s layers, scientists showed in 2010, are 10 times thinner than a typical human hair.

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What's the deal with Formula 1 and sustainable fuels?

When Formula 1 cars take to the track for the first time in 2026, they'll do so powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fuels, part of the sport's "net zero by 2030" plan. It's a laudable goal, but, I confess, one I've sometimes questioned. After all, most of the carbon emitted during the course of an F1 weekend comes from the same sources as any other popular sport—the teams and fans traveling to and from the event. But after speaking with Pat Symonds, Formula 1's chief technical officer, I may have been missing the forest for the trees.

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Netflix gives account holders the ability to kick freeloaders

Netflix has introduced a new account management page called "Manage Access and Devices" that gives users the ability to remove access privileges from specific devices. The feature is available on the web and in the streaming service's Android and iOS apps.

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5 Lessons from Automakers on Navigating Supply Chain Disruptions

Realizing that their supply chains cannot be made totally immune to disruptions, a number of automakers have adopted a number of strategies to protect their businesses. They include: delivering a “good enough” product to consumers, developing better systems for monitoring the supply chain nodes that matter most, resisting the urge to centralize decision-making for supply chain issues, identifying pragmatic ways to ensure supplies of crucial resources, and turning scarcity into a virtue by turning the inventory problem into a business opportunity.

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Global Insurance Report 2023: Reimagining life insurance

Over the past decade, our publications have chronicled the increased instability the life insurance and retirement industry has experienced. They’ve also reckoned with the trends that have been causing industry players to rethink their operating models, such as digital transformations; the rise of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns; and the shifting economic environment. More important, they’ve worked to inspire insurers to consider new avenues for value creation.

This life insurance chapter of the Global Insurance Report 2023 is a collaborative effort by Vivek Agrawal, Ramnath Balasubramanian, Pierre-Ignace Bernard, Kristin Cummings Cook, Henri de Combles de Nayves, Alex Gestal, and Bernhard Kotanko, representing views from McKinsey’s Insurance Practice.

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Artemis I: A giant rocket to set new space records

After an absence of 50 years, Nasa is returning to the Moon. This time the programme is named after Artemis, the Greek goddess of the Moon and twin sister of Sun god Apollo. Not only is it a better fit in terms of name and destination, Artemis will ensure something Apollo neglected to do: it will put the first woman on the Moon.

Appropriately, Nasa's first female launch director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, will oversee the countdown and lift-off of the first mission. But Artemis I is far more than a feminist moment. During its 37-day journey in an extended retrograde orbit around the Moon – travelling in the opposite direction to the Moon orbiting the Earth – it will achieve a number of other important firsts.

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Cows That Ate Hemp Produced Milk With THC and CBD

Dairy cows that chowed down on industrial hemp produced milk that contained the psychoactive compound THC, as well as CBD and other cannabinoids, according to new research published Monday in the journal Nature Food. The animals’ behavior changed, too: They yawned, salivated, appeared unsteady on their feet and even had red eyes, the researchers observed.

The findings raise further questions about the future viability of feeding industrial hemp to livestock, a practice that is currently outlawed in the United States because of concerns about cannabinoids making their way into the nation’s food supply chain. But hemp is nutritious, cheap and widely available, which is why farmers and ranchers are curious about any potential effects of feeding it to their animals.

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Earth is where matter meets purpose. Are humans serving a good purpose?

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP27 well underway, and Thanksgiving right around the corner, now is a great time to spend a few moments connecting with our collective cosmic progenitors. We would not be here without them, any more than we would without our flesh-and-blood parents. We don’t think often enough about this, but we are all sons and daughters of planet Earth, a product of its very specific history and of its connection with the Cosmos.

And we are an unruly and disrespectful bunch; the kind of kids that only call when they need money or to borrow the car. We do not nurture, we do not give back, and we do not show our love. We are in fact the worst kind of kids. We abuse, disrespect, and treat our collective progenitors with complete neglect. We spit on the ground we walk, even though the words human and humus share the same Latin root for soil.

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Welcome to COP27. Thank You for Not Protesting

Inés Yábar, a 26-year-old climate activist from Peru, was not sure if she wanted to go to COP27. In prior years, she had been excited for the UN climate meeting—to have two weeks to talk about the health of the planet, and only the health of the planet, with the most powerful people in the world. Three years ago, she first attended the conference as part of the Peruvian delegation, sitting in closed-door meetings where she was often the only person under 30. At the next, as part of the group Restless Development, she chased down delegates and gave them personalized letters from young people who, for reasons of money or visas or credentials, could not attend. Then she would join the hundreds of thousands of people taking part in rollicking weekend protests outside the conference venue in Glasgow, Scotland. Badge-wearing activists from within the conference mingled with anarchists and instigators on the outside, hoping to grab the attention of the cameras—and, hopefully, the negotiators. “It was a reminder to everyone on the inside—myself included—that we had to do more,” she says.

But Yábar was no longer entirely sure she believed in the concept of COP. There was the hypocrisy, the greenwashing, the inaction—a lot of, as Greta Thunberg put it, “blah, blah, blah.” And there was the decision to hold it in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, a city hemmed in by the gleaming, coral-filled Red Sea on one side and a concrete barrier on the other. A city in a police state that frequently imprisons protesters, where no one was expecting many activists to show up. A city where protesting has to take place in a designated zone. “Do not protest here,” Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, warned his fellow Egyptians at a Human Rights Watch event held at COP last week. It simply wouldn’t be worth the risk of surveillance and reprisal. And for many activists from outside the country, especially young people, holding COP here has meant it has been too difficult and costly to attend. Some funders that would send young activists to the conference have pulled out, citing human rights conditions.

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Fehinti Balogun: How to find your voice for climate action

Actor and activist Fehinti Balogun pieces together multiple complex issues -- climate change, colonialism, systemic racism -- in a talk that's part spoken-word poem, part diagnosis of entrenched global problems. Seeing the connections is a way to unlock collective solutions, he says -- and you have the power to reimagine what you think is possible.

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Nvidia and Microsoft team up to build massive AI cloud computer

On Wednesday, Nvidia announced a collaboration with Microsoft to build a "massive" cloud computer focused on AI. It will reportedly use tens of thousands of high-end Nvidia GPUs for applications like deep learning and large language models. The companies aim to make it one of the most powerful AI supercomputers in the world.

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Are Gas Stoves Bad for Our Health?

I love my gas stove. There’s nothing quite like cooking over that beautiful blue flame, so quickly adjusted with a flick of a dial and so suited to its purpose that when things are going well in life, we say we are “cooking with gas.” But in recent years environmentalists have been warning that gas stoves are bad for the climate and not so great for our health, either. Two new studies out this year have heightened health worries about noxious fumes in our kitchens. Is the evidence sufficient to alter our cooking habits? For me, the answer is yes—in some modest ways; others will want to judge for themselves.

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of concerning emissions related to gas stoves. First, there is the unburned natural gas that can escape before the flame ignites or leak from a gas hook-up. This gas is more than 90 percent methane. Second, there are the pollutants created by combustion when a burner is on, most notably nitrogen oxides, which can irritate the lungs.

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Forward Thinking on the fragility of the world's food systems and how to fix them with Jessica Fanzo

In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, Janet Bush talks with Jessica Fanzo. Fanzo is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. From 2017 to 2019, Fanzo served as the co-chair of the Global Nutrition Report and the UN High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition. She was the first laureate of the Carasso Foundation’s Premio Daniel Carasso prize in 2012 for her research on sustainable food and diets for long-term human health.

An edited transcript of this episode follows. Subscribe to the series on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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A fired Twitter contractor on their fears for the platform under Musk

Melissa Ingle was a senior data scientist at Twitter, working on civic integrity and political misinformation. As a contract employee, she wrote algorithms that moderated harmful content on Twitter ahead of the U.S. and Brazil elections. Earlier this month, Ingle was one of the 4,400 contract staff who lost access to Twitter’s internal systems without being notified. Many expect the cuts to the moderation team to have a crippling effect on the health of Twitter. Ingle talked to Rest of World on her fears about the porous future of Twitter moderation.

I was a senior data scientist, working in civic integrity and political misinformation. I wrote and monitored the algorithms which scanned Twitter for political misinformation. We continuously trained and updated our models. We also sent a subsection of the tweets we flagged for human review. The core content moderation operation staff was a team of 30 total; they checked for all kinds of content: hate speech, harassment, pornography, child abuse or trafficking, etc. We were mostly data scientists and interfaced with many other groups at Twitter.

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Global flows: The ties that bind in an interconnected world

Ours is an interdependent world, connected by global flows of goods, services, capital, people, data, and ideas. Global value chains have been built on these flows, creating a more prosperous world. However, in light of the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and years of rising tensions between the United States and China, some have speculated that the world is already deglobalizing. New MGI analysis finds a more nuanced reality. The world remains deeply interconnected, and flows have proved remarkably resilient during the most recent turbulence. Furthermore, no region is self-sufficient. The challenge therefore is to harness the benefits of interconnection while managing the risks and downsides of dependency—particularly where products are concentrated in their places of origin.

This new research paper offers a view of the flows driving global integration and an assessment of interdependency and concentration risks and the important role of multinational corporations. The research is based on a comprehensive assessment of trade (30 global value chains spanning resources, manufactured goods, and services), capital, people, and intangibles flows as well as an analysis of about 6,000 globally traded products.

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How to Get Started on Mastodon

Let’s be honest: Twitter was a hell site long before Elon Musk bought it. It has tremendous power to elevate voices, but it also plays on some of our worst social tendencies. We can talk a lot about why that is, but I think it comes down to design choices. Twitter, like most social media, is built to drive as much engagement as possible.

This is what makes Mastodon, and the ActivityPub protocol that powers it, so liberating. This isn't another startup. It’s not a company at all. It’s a community. There are no ads, no tracking, and no monetization whatsoever. This is a place shaped—at the cultural, design, and code level—by members of marginalized communities who wanted to escape the rage-driven onslaught of trolls and doomscrolling that define social media. A place built around connection and conversation instead of engagement.

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How to go vegetarian or vegan | Psyche Guides

Quitting animal foods needn’t be a hardship. Relish your new diet and make it stick with this nutritionist’s approach

is a nutrition advisor for the Vegetarian Resource Group and a regular columnist and nutrition editor for Vegan Journal. Her books include The Dietitian’s Guide to Vegetarian Diets (4th edition, 2022), co-authored with Virginia Messina and Mark Messina, Simply Vegan (5th edition, 2013), co-authored with Debra Wasserman, and Your Complete Vegan Pregnancy (2019).

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A devilish duality: How CEOs can square resilience with net-zero promises

What a difference a year makes. In November 2021, business leaders showed up in force in Glasgow at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), pledging to take on the challenge of reaching net-zero greenhouse-gas-emission goals by 2050. While no one believed that the path to net zero would suddenly become easy, commitments made to target nearly 90 percent of CO2 emissions for reduction signaled that the private sector was truly engaged. Then major new headwinds began swirling: surging inflation, war in Europe, energy insecurity, and a potential global recession. Still, governments pressed ahead, passing major climate legislation packages in Europe and the United States. More than 3,000 companies have made commitments on net-zero pathways.

At the time of COP26, McKinsey released a perspective on the requirements needed to secure a net-zero carbon emission transition. 1 1. “Solving the net-zero equation: Nine requirements for a more orderly transition,” McKinsey, October 27, 2021. It was clear, given the challenges to deploying capital at scale, managing economic dislocations, and scaling up supply chains and infrastructure, that the path would not be linear and would include slowdowns and backstepping. Ultimately, sustainable systems are more value creating than traditional ones. But countries and companies must balance trade-offs among net-zero commitments, affordability for citizens, and security of energy and materials supply.

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20 Viral TikTok Gifts That Are Actually Worth It

You've probably heard someone say that over the past few years. Maybe you said it yourself. The popular app started out as a platform for creative dance routines, quick skits, and memes, but it's quickly turned into a catalog of shopping recommendations. But can you trust a viral TikTok product rave? Or will it turn out to be one of those shoddy products from as-seen-on-TV ads? Don't worry, the WIRED Gear team has you covered! We found some of the most popular TikTok gadgets and put them to the test, to find out if they're both viral- and gift-worthy.

Updated November 2022: We've added more items, like the AirPods Max, Shark FlexStyle Drying & Styling System, Windmill AC, and Stanley Tumbler.

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What a Mature CSR Team Looks Like

As climate change, social inequities, and other critical issues grow ever more urgent, many companies have built dedicated departments focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR). But while this is an important first step, the authors’ new research suggests that organizations with the most mature CSR programs are often actually those with the smallest CSR departments. Based on an in-depth analysis of several Swiss firms as well as a review of prior research on CSR implementation, they identify a three-phase process through which many companies progress as their CSR operations advance from high-level vision to on-the-ground impact: A nascent stage in which the CSR department centralizes and coalesces, an intermediate stage in which it decentralizes and orchestrates, and a final stage in which it retreats and consults. Through this process, resources shift from the central CSR team out into functional units, meaning that the size and budget of the CSR department is often a poor indicator of the maturity of its CSR execution. To paint an accurate picture of a company’s performance — and to identify opportunities for improvement — the authors ultimately suggest that it’s essential to recognize these nuances and calibrate expectations and evaluations accordingly.

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Governments can deliver exceptional customer experiences--here's how

In January 2023, the clock starts ticking for 36 new or second-term US governors, their cabinets, and agency heads. The first one hundred days of a new term in office represents the traditional window of expectations for delivering impactful changes for the public while laying the groundwork for broader, sustainable improvements. Many pressing problems will be vying for attention and resources, but new McKinsey research suggests there is one area where state leaders could start delivering significant results for the constituents they serve: customer experience.

Customer experience is a function of expectations compared with a lived experience. Our research finds when a customer’s experience (as a constituent, business, or another government agency) utilizing state services meets or exceeds expectations, it can boost trust in government, improve morale among the civil services, diminish negative media coverage, and lower costs for government agencies.

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No, there isn't a hole in the Universe

Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you read, there’s a hole in the Universe. There’s a region of space so large and empty, a billion light-years across, that there’s nothing in it at all. There’s no matter of any type, normal or dark, and no stars, galaxies, plasma, gas, dust, black holes, or anything else. There’s no radiation in there at all, either. It’s an example of truly empty space, and its existence has been visually captured by our greatest telescopes.

At least, that’s what some people are saying, in a photographic meme that’s been spreading around the internet for years and refuses to die. Scientifically, though, there’s nothing true about these assertions at all. There is no hole in the Universe; the closest we have are the underdense regions known as cosmic voids, which still contain matter. Moreover, this image isn’t a void or hole at all, but a cloud of gas. Let’s do the detective work to show you what’s really going on.

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Festina lente: A Roman emperor's guide to getting stuff done

Like all historical legacies, the one of Octavian Caesar Augustus is open to interpretation. On the one hand, he steered Rome through tumultuous times and ushered in a centuries-long period of order and stability known as Pax Romana. On the other, he delivered the killing blow to the Roman Republic and established a position so powerful that it gave subsequent emperors such as Caligula and Nero carte blanche to indulge their every whim and notorious excess.

Whatever your take on Caesar Augustus, you’ve got to give him this: The man knew how to get stuff done.

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How to Respond When an Employee Shares a Mental Health Challenge

What should you do if your employee comes to you with a mental health challenge? While you will have to have a conversation that may feel intimate and discomfiting, it’s also not your job to be the office therapist, and you don’t need to have all the solutions when a team member is struggling. First, make sure you’ve prepared for such conversations in advance, including knowing where to point people for resources within your company. Second, set boundaries to ensure people can get help without depleting you or the team. Finally, remember that the most important thing you can do is show up and make the conversation about them — not you.

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We could do some amazing science with a human base on the Moon

At a recent meeting held in Edinburgh, Scotland to consider ”Forming and Exploring Habitable Worlds,” Ian Crawford of Birkbeck College (UK) made a case for an ambitious project that may, at first glance, seem outside the purview of planetary science. We need, Crawford says, a human base on the Moon. Not only would such an outpost provide research infrastructure comparable to what we have in Antarctica, it would be a sensible intermediary step for extending human activities to Mars.

One major focus of a lab on the Moon would be to study lunar geology and to take inventory of whatever resources the Moon may offer. The most valuable of these might be helium-3, which could serve as a future fuel for (relatively) safe nuclear fusion energy, since it is not radioactive itself and doesn’t cause the material around it to become radioactive. Helium-3 has been implanted by the solar wind into the lunar soil over billions of years, and even recently has been returned to Earth in a lunar mineral sample collected by the Chinese Chang’e 5 mission.

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I made professor before Ritalin. Now I can't work without it | Psyche Ideas

is emeritus professor of philosophy and director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. His most recent book is The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age (2018). He lives in Northfield, Minnesota.

In his song Just like Tom Thumb’s Blues (1965), Bob Dylan whines: ‘I started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff. Everybody said they’d stand behind me when the game got rough. But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to call my bluff…’ Replace ‘Burgundy’ with ‘Ritalin’ and ‘everybody’ with ‘the mental health community’, and you have my predicament with my iatrogenic, or medically induced, dependency on stimulants.

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Jen Gunter: 5 things you should know about back pain

Back pain is as common as it is complicated, and easy fixes are hard to find. Shedding light on this universal ailment, Dr. Jen Gunter shares five things we should all know about back pain, including possible causes, over-hyped treatments to avoid as well as research-backed therapies to talk to your doctor about in order to find some relief. For more on how your body works, tune in weekly to her podcast Body Stuff with Dr. Jen Gunter, from the TED Audio Collective.

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A different space race: Raising capital and accelerating growth

In recent years, money has been pouring into the space sector. Take 2021, when public and private markets put $10 billion of fresh capital to work in space companies. These investments are fueling a new wave of dynamism and innovation throughout the space ecosystem, with downstream impacts on the competitive landscape that could increase challenges for some companies.

The growing dynamism of the space industry is driving shifts in customer behavior. Major civilian and military customers are seeking to move more quickly and shift more risk to industry partners than they did in the past. They also increasingly favor commercial-like models in which partners invest up front to develop and own intellectual property (IP). For example, the US Department of Defense’s Space Development Agency is trying to leverage existing commercial IP to field a large constellation of communications and missile-tracking satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). 1 1. Sandra Erwin, “New head of Space Force acquisitions looks to get back to basics,” SpaceNews, June 24, 2022.

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Forward Thinking on the fragility of the world's food systems and how to fix them with Jessica Fanzo

How to create engaging training videos for employees

Recent research found that over 80% of people prefer video content over text and audio. This is just one of the reasons many organizations invest in training videos for employees. Video-based learning is engaging and promotes learner autonomy. Employees have the freedom to pause and repeat parts of a video if needed, which enhances comprehension.

The versatility of video makes it a popular delivery method among learning and development teams, as well. There are several different types of training videos that can be produced, depending on a team’s resources and needs, for example:

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Netflix gives account holders the ability to kick freeloaders

What's the deal with Formula 1 and sustainable fuels?

Nvidia and Microsoft team up to build massive AI cloud computer

Record number of parents miss work as respiratory illnesses spike in kids

How to go vegetarian or vegan | Psyche Guides

I made professor before Ritalin. Now I can't work without it | Psyche Ideas

Cows That Ate Hemp Produced Milk With THC and CBD

Doctors Treated a Child for a Genetic Disease Before She Was Born

Early Humans May Have Cooked Fish 780,000 Years Ago

Harvard Museum Pledges to Return Hair Samples of 700 Native American Children