December 14, 2022 - The mysterious song of the dinosaurs

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The mysterious song of the dinosaurs You'd feel it more than hear it – a deep, visceral throb, emerging from somewhere beyond the thick foliage. Like the rumble of a foghorn, it would thrum in your ribcage and bristle the hairs on your neck. In the dense forests of the Cretaceous period, it would have been terrifying. We have few clues for what noises dinosaurs might have made while they ruled the Earth before being killed off 66 million years ago. The remarkable stony remains uncovered by palaeontologists offer evidence of the physical prowess of these creatures, but not a great deal about how they interacted and communicated. Sound doesn't fossilise, of course. Continued here

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How Metabolism, Heavy Elements and Quantum Entanglement Really Work Gravitational waves, the evolution of human metabolism, theodiversity and quantum entanglement in this month’s issue of Scientific American A lot of people have made a lot of money spreading myths and misinformation about metabolism. Nutritional supplement ads, diet books and pseudoscientific health websites claim they can help you boost your metabolism. Sometimes part of the pitch is that metabolism, which is just how your body uses energy, slows down in middle age or that women have a slower metabolism than men. The myths are persistent in part because the diet and supplement industries are so profitable and so poorly regulated. But misinformation also sneaks in because metabolism is really hard to study. Now, as evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer writes in our cover story, scientists have figured out that much of what people think they know about metabolism isn’t true. It doesn’t slow down in middle age, for starters, and there aren’t sex differences. He and his colleagues have also traced the evolution of human metabolism—we use a good deal more energy than other great apes—and provide even more evidence that what makes humans human is cooperation. Continued here

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Why Some Start-Ups Fail to Scale Managing rapid growth is a huge challenge for young businesses. Even start-ups with glowing reviews and skyrocketing sales can fail. That’s because new ventures and corporate initiatives alike have to sustain profitability at scale, according to Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jeffrey Rayport. He has researched some of the biggest stumbling blocks to long-lasting success and explains how to make the tricky transition out of the start-up phase successfully. With professors Davide Sola and Martin Kupp of ESCP Business School, Rayport cowrote the HBR article “The Overlooked Key to a Successful Scale-Up.” Continued here

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Urbanista’s Phoenix Earphones Are Powered by the Sun If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED How exciting it must be to confidently declare your company’s latest product to be a “world’s first.” How enticing for your prospective customers, the promise of “endless playtime.” Let’s face it: If you can’t pique a bit of interest this way, well, consumers must be even more jaded than everyone suspected. But though you may think you’ve seen it all before, be assured that you haven’t … or, at least, you haven’t seen this particular variation on a theme.  Continued here

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New Arctic Report Warns of Disturbances for People, Plants and Animals Across the Arctic, rain is replacing snow, melting sea ice is leading to coastal erosion, and increased ship traffic is putting fragile ecosystems at risk The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Continued here

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Krave Mart wants to build a sustainable quick-commerce business in Pakistan Instant grocery delivery was all the rage in 2021. But critics of the model were quick to point out that quick commerce was broken from the start, and the cost of the fast service could never be recovered merely from the fees paid by consumers. As the global economic downturn began and funding dried up, Pakistani quick-commerce company Airlift, which was primed to be the country’s first unicorn, shut down after burning through $85 million in 11 months. Now, as sobriety returns with founders and venture capitalists professing virtues of sustainable growth, Krave Mart is trying to rebuild from the rubble of Airlift. Continued here

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Nuclear Fusion Lab Achieves 'Ignition': What Does It Mean? Fusion researchers at the U.S. National Ignition Facility created a reaction that made more energy than they put in Scientists at the world’s largest nuclear-fusion facility have achieved the phenomenon known as ignition—creating a nuclear reaction that generates more energy than it consumes. Results of the breakthrough at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF), conducted on 5 December and announced today by US President Joe Biden’s administration, has excited the global fusion-research community. That research aims to harness nuclear fusion—the phenomenon that powers the Sun—to provide a source of near-limitless clean energy on Earth. Continued here

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Every company is a software company: Six 'must dos' to succeed Marc Andreessen’s observation from more than ten years ago that “software is eating the world”1Marc Andreessen, “Why software is eating the world,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. needs an update: software is the world. The software industry continues to grow at a massive clip. More and more traditional companies are realizing that to compete and grow in a digital world, they must look, think, and act like software companies themselves. Per McKinsey research from June 2022, nearly 70 percent of the top economic performers, compared with just half of their peers, are using their own software to differentiate themselves from their competitors.2“Three new mandates for capturing a digital transformation’s full value,” McKinsey, June 15, 2022. Fully one-third of those top performers monetize software directly. Continued here

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9 Science Stories That Restore Our Faith in Humanity A river’s “gut” revived, snake-saving social media, an intragalactic donut, and more success stories of the year The science news of 2022 has been strange, dramatic, intriguing and more than occasionally alarming—but the year also saw awe-inspiring breakthroughs and heartwarming successes. Here we’ve pulled together some of the most interesting positive stories of the year, plus a couple that are just plain cool. As Scientific American’s editors wrote in an August editorial, “Exploration is science in its most basic form—asking questions of the natural world and, we hope, using the answers for the betterment of everything on Earth.” Continued here

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Apple’s Freeform Is a Digital Whiteboard for Total Focus If you've been using iOS 16, iPadOS 16, or macOS Ventura, you've probably noticed that Apple wants you to collaborate on everything with your friends and family. You can now have multiple people looking at the same exact tab as you on Safari, share photo albums via iCloud, as well as projects in productivity apps like Keynote and Numbers. Adding to the growing list of collaboration tools is Freeform, Apple's brand-new digital whiteboard app. You can access this virtual whiteboard on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. What starts as a blank canvas can quickly turn into a storyboard for a film project, an inspiration board for a wedding, an itinerary for an upcoming vacation, or an interior design board for a new home. You can draw sketches, add objects, and import files or web links; keep it all to yourself or share them with fellow Apple users. It's stored in iCloud, so any changes you make sync across all your devices in real time. Continued here

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What Elon Musk Can Learn from Steve Jobs's Return to Apple Changing the strategic direction of an existing company is among the hardest management challenges out there. Most attempts fail. In trying to remake Twitter, Elon Musk has a daunting task ahead of him. There’s precedent, however, for dramatically reimagining a major tech company: Steve Jobs’ transformation of Apple after he returned to the company in 1997. And it may have important lessons for how Musk — and other leaders — can navigate the period of painful misalignment that comes with strategic change. Namely, how this period requires managers to commit to tough decisions in three areas: product, organization, and stakeholders. Continued here

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New Human Metabolism Research Upends Conventional Wisdom about How We Burn Calories Metabolism studies reveal surprising insights into how we burn calories—and how cooperative food production helped Homo sapiens flourish It was my daughter Clara’s seventh birthday party, a scene at once familiar and bizarre. The celebration was an American take on a classic script: a shared meal of pizza and picnic food, a few close COVID-compliant friends and family, a beaming kid blowing out candles on a heavily iced cake. With roughly 380,000 boys and girls around the world turning seven each day, it was a ritual no doubt repeated by many, the world’s most prolific primate singing “Happy Birthday” in an unbroken global chorus. Continued here

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How Transparency at Banks Changes Deposit Flows Higher bank disclosures bring volatility to uninsured deposits, and also hurt bank funding costs and profitability, according to a paper co-authored by Wharton’s Itay Goldstein. Many bank depositors may not know if their bank is financially healthy or weak, or whether it has made too many risky loans that threaten its future. But contrary to popular perceptions, depositors do care about their bank’s financial health, and about whether federal deposit insurance will protect their savings. How transparent banks are about their finances will help depositors decide on where they want to park their savings, according to a recent paper by experts at Wharton and elsewhere. Continued here

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Ransomware Gang Abused Microsoft Certificates to Sign Malware Less than two weeks ago, the United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency and FBI released a joint advisory about the threat of ransomware attacks from a gang that calls itself “Cuba.” The group, which researchers believe is, in fact, based in Russia, has been on a rampage over the past year targeting an increasing number of businesses and other institutions in the US and abroad. New research released today indicates that Cuba has been using pieces of malware in its attacks that were certified, or given a seal of approval, by Microsoft. Cuba used these cryptographically signed “drivers” after compromising a target's systems as part of efforts to disable security scanning tools and change settings. The activity was meant to fly under the radar, but it was flagged by monitoring tools from the security firm Sophos. Researchers from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 previously observed Cuba signing a privileged piece of software known as a “kernel driver” with an NVIDIA certificate that was leaked earlier this year by the Lapsus$ hacking group. And Sophos says it has also seen the group use the strategy with compromised certificates from at least one other Chinese tech company, which security firm Mandiant identified as Zhuhai Liancheng Technology Co.  Continued here

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How CEOs Manage Time In 2006, Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria launched a study tracking how large companies’ CEOs spent their time, 24/7, for 13 weeks: where they were, with whom, what they did, and what they were focusing on. To date Porter and Nohria have gathered 60,000 hours’ worth of data on 27 executives, interviewing them—and hundreds of other CEOs—about their schedules. This article presents the findings, offering insights not only into best time-management practices but into the CEO’s role itself. CEOs need to learn to simultaneously manage the seemingly contradictory dualities of the job: integrating direct decision making with indirect levers like strategy and culture, balancing internal and external constituencies, proactively pursuing an agenda while reacting to unfolding events, exercising leverage while being mindful of constraints, focusing on the tangible impact of actions while recognizing their symbolic significance, and combining formal power with legitimacy. Continued here S13 How the Fastest-Growing Brands of 2022 Scored Among Increasingly Cautious Consumers Roku and Grand Theft Auto take the top spots with Gen Z. Zelle showed growth among Gen X and Baby Boomers. Continued here S17 What Covid Policies Should You Keep Long-Term? As another Covid winter approaches, many business owners wonder whether to keep safety policies in place or ditch them all together. Here's what to consider. Continued here S51 Why scientists can't give up the hunt for alien life Despite all we’ve learned about ourselves and the physical reality that we all inhabit, the giant question of whether we’re alone in the Universe remains unanswered. We’ve explored the surfaces and atmospheres of many worlds in our own Solar System, but only Earth shows definitive signs of life: past or present. We’ve discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets over the past 30 years, identifying many Earth-sized, potentially inhabited worlds among them. Still, none of them have revealed themselves as actually inhabited, although the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life in the near future are tantalizing. And finally, we’ve begun searching directly for any signals from space that might indicate the presence of an intelligent, technologically advanced civilization, through endeavors such as SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and Breakthrough Listen. All of these searches have returned only null results so far, despite memorably loud claims to the contrary. However, the fact that we haven’t met with success just yet should in no way discourage us from continuing to search for life on all three fronts, to the limits of our scientific capabilities. After all, when it comes to the biggest existential question of all, we have no right to expect that the lowest-hanging branches on the cosmic tree of life should bear fruit so easily. Continued here S22 Entrepreneurs, Is a Venture Studio Right for You? Startup founders often look to incubators and accelerators to help them find product/market fit and raise initial capital. But there’s another option for entrepreneurial founders who want to go out on their own but maybe lack the right idea or team. Venture studios don’t fund an existing idea — they incubate their own ideas, build a minimum viable product, find product/market fit and early customers, and then recruit entrepreneurial founders to run and scale the business. Examples of companies that have emerged from venture studios include Overture, Twilio, Taboola, Bitly, Aircall, and the most famous alum, Moderna. However, in exchange for de-risking much of the early-stage startup process, venture studios take anywhere from 30% to 80% of a startup’s equity. The author explains how venture studios work, why they might be an attractive option for some entrepreneurs, and what questions to ask if you’re considering joining one. Continued here S39 Why Jeremy Siegel Is Cautiously Optimistic About 2023 The worst of inflation is over, the Federal Reserve may begin to pare the funds rate, and equities are undervalued, says the Wharton professor emeritus of finance. Wharton’s Jeremy Siegel speaks with Wharton Business Daily on Sirius XM about his predictions for 2023. Continued here S9 Resolved: I'm Going to Do More by Doing Less Instead of those typical New Year's stretch goals, for me the plan is to be more strategic with my time, attention and commitments. Continued here S27 Three things from 3 Minutes With South Asian tech leaders The end of the year is a great time to reflect on what went down and gather learnings for a new year. So, I thought I should dedicate this week’s newsletter to sharing three of my favorite learnings about the South Asian tech industry that came up during Rest of World’s weekly brief conversations called “3 Minutes With.” In these interviews, founders, investors, and experts from the region told us about their strategies, challenges, and opportunities. I hope these give you some food for thought as you plan for 2023: Continued here S5 What Does Self-Compassion Really Mean? I quickly pulled the report together and sent it over, expressing how sorry I was for my mistake. My client couldn’t have been nicer about it. Despite their kindness, my internal voice couldn’t stop berating me: “How could you have made this mistake? What’s wrong with you? I knew you weren’t cut out for this job.” Continued here S19 6 Ways Companies Fail to Help Workers Grow The authors recently studied Fortune 250 companies and ranked them based on the lived experience of three million of their U.S. workers. One of their key findings was that even top-ranked firms fail to deliver consistently on worker advancement. To understand why this is happening, the authors then grouped underperforming companies based on measures of opportunity creation and were able to identify six archetypes of underperformance. In this article, they describe each of those six archetypes in detail and then recommend three main areas that underperforming companies should focus on to improve the upward mobility of their workers: consistently measuring outcomes, investing more in training, and letting go of archaic business models. Continued here S40 How Do Customers Feel About Algorithms? Many managers worry that algorithms alienate those who would rather deal with a real person than a robot. New research from Wharton’s Stefano Puntoni looks at how the attitudes of customers are influenced by algorithmic versus human decision-making. Wharton’s Stefano Puntoni speaks with Wharton Business Daily on Sirius XM about his research on customers’ attitudes toward algorithms. Continued here S52 We want to date "hot" people — but who you actually date is based on how hot you are Physical attractiveness heavily shapes human culture, affecting everything from social standing, to employment prospects, to who we partner with. So it’s no wonder that social scientists are enamored with it. Over decades of research, they’ve explored what makes men and women attractive. Muscularity, facial symmetry, facial hair, jaw shape, height, and youthfulness all factor in to male attractiveness, while breast fullness, facial symmetry, youthfulness, waist-to-hip ratio, a rounded butt, hair length, and eye size can make women more attractive. Continued here S66 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse trailer wows with 6 distinct animation styles Four years after Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales is back and saving the multiverse with all the other incarnations of the superhero in the hotly anticipated sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.  The first trailer just dropped, and it looks like another trippy, universe-hopping fun ride—hopefully a worthy successor to one of the best films of 2018. Continued here S70 Here's What Really Happens When You Flush a Toilet Using lasers and cameras, scientists visualized the plume of tiny, aerosolized particles ejected from commercial toilets during flushing With the press of a handle and a powerful whoosh of water, toilets send waste far away from humans and down into the sewer system. But new research shows—in surprising detail—just how much waste they also spew into the air, potentially spreading contagious diseases in the process. Continued here S15 3 Ways To Help You Say No In Business When you're a new entrepreneur, business owner, or sales rep, you'll do everything possible to get a new client and a signed contract. Continued here S16 Apple Just Rolled Out iPadOS 16.2 with the New Freeform App. Here Are 3 Reasons It’s a Productivity Super App It's a new way to organize your ideas and collaborate with others. Continued here S12 Sign Up Now: Meet 23andMe's Anne Wojcicki in This Exclusive Inc. Livestream at 12 p.m. ET Today Join Inc. in conversation with this innovative entrepreneur and learn new ways to think differently about how you lead and grow your business. Continued here S30 Implementing inflation response strategies at defense companies This article, the third in our series about inflation challenges within the defense industry, discusses how companies can implement measures to control inflation. Inflation in the United States continues to be well above the historic average for the past two decades, with the consumer price index at 7.7 percent and the producer price index reaching 8.0 percent (10.5 percent for goods and 6.3 percent for services) in September 2022. Many companies, including defense organizations, are now under extreme cost pressures as the prices for raw materials and other goods increase. Continued here S29 Inflation-weary Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the economy High prices and low expectations: The job market still may be strong, but lingering economic conditions are taking a toll on the outlook of American households. Americans are feeling opportunity slipping away. After a summer of rising gas and food prices, many feel economic conditions are tough and likely to become worse as the war in Ukraine continues to tighten supply chains and a strong job market starts showing signs of deceleration—creating an environment that is taking a toll on the budgets of those with lower incomes. Continued here S24 How national border walls are splitting ecosystems apart Pity the tiny band of lynx in the Polish half of Europe's most ancient forest. In June, their home, the Białowieża Forest, was cut in half when the Polish government completed construction of a wall on its border with Belarus. The aim was to repel refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere being channelled to the border by the Belarus government. But the 115-mile wall (185km) – which towers 18ft (5.5m) above the forest floor, stretching almost into the canopy above – has imprisoned migrating wildlife too. The dozen or so lynx holed up on the Polish side of the barrier will no longer be able to hunt, feed, or breed with their more numerous fellows across the border. The wall dividing the 1,200 square-mile (3,100-sq-km) forest is expected to increase hunger among the lynx, and by limiting options for mates, decrease their already low genetic diversity. Continued here S44 Just Got a Meta Quest 2? These Are Our Favorite Games If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED VR has come a long way in the past few years, especially now that you don’t need a high-end PC to run your headset. The affordability of the Quest 2 really helped push this generation of VR into more peoples’ homes than ever before (even though it’s not as affordable as it used to be, as Meta bumped the price up to $399 from $299.) Despite the price hike, it’s still one of our favorite VR headsets and the one we’d recommend for most people. If you’re looking for the highest-end Quest headset, however, and have an extra $1,000 to burn, you should check out the Quest Pro. Continued here S61 Doc raked in $3.3M in wild spinal surgery scam, gets 5 years in prison A federal judge in California has sentenced a neurosurgeon to five years in prison for his part in a multimillion-dollar, 15-year-long fraud scheme that used bribes and kickbacks to funnel thousands of patients to a now-defunct hospital where they were overcharged for invasive spinal surgeries. Continued here S67 Young women were the true originators of the Grimms’ Tales | Psyche Ideas is a novelist and researcher at the University of Manchester, UK. She has recently published a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (2022) and is working on a book on remembering women in Europe and North America. She writes fiction under the pen names C E Bernard and C K Williams. The lights are still on at Marktgasse 17. Here, a young woman lives in a cramped flat on the second floor with her five brothers. Their father died when they were very young. Only three years ago, their mother followed him. Since then, it has fallen to the young woman to run the household in Kassel. What a struggle! Even late at night, when the lamps have been lit in the alley outside, and the pharmacy across the street has long closed its doors, she is still sitting at the table grinding coffee beans, while her older brothers entertain young women in the crowded parlour. Continued here S7 Do You Have What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation? Many presenters fail to make an impact, not because of what they’re presenting, but because of how they’re presenting it. Even subject matter experts can give a forgettable presentation if they don’t know how to engage their listeners, or more specifically, if they aren’t compelling speakers. Continued here S46 The Real Fusion Energy Breakthrough Is Still Decades Away Last week, inside a gold-plated drum in a Northern California lab, a group of scientists briefly recreated the physics that power the sun. Their late-night experiment involved firing 192 lasers into the capsule, which contained a peppercorn-sized pellet filled with hydrogen atoms. Some of those atoms, which ordinarily repel, were smushed together and fused, a process that produces energy. By standards of Earth-bound fusion reactions, it was a lot of energy. For years, scientists have done this type of experiment only to see it fall short of the energy used to cook the fuel. This time, at long last, they exceeded it. That feat, known as ignition, is a huge win for those who study fusion. Scientists have only had to gaze up at the stars to know that such a power source is possible—that combining two hydrogen atoms to produce one helium atom entails a loss of mass, and therefore, according to E = mc2, a release of energy. But it’s been a slow road since the 1970s, when scientists first defined the goal of ignition, also sometimes known as “breakeven.” Last year, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s National Ignition Facility came close, generating about 70 percent of the laser energy they fired into the experiment. They pressed on with the experiments. Then, on December 5, just after 1 am, they finally took the perfect shot. Two megajoules in; 3 megajoules out. A 50 percent gain of energy. “This shows that it can be done,” said Jennifer Granholm, US Secretary of Energy, at a press conference earlier this morning. Continued here S10 Should You Lay Someone Off Right Before Christmas? And three other tricky workplace dilemmas. Continued here S68 One of New York City's Oldest Gay Bars Is Now a Historic Landmark In New York City’s West Village, Julius’ Bar is tucked into the first floor of an unassuming beige stucco building. Passersby may notice the rainbow flags in the window—but they may not realize they’re walking past a new historic landmark. The bar is the site where three activists staged a simple act of protest in 1966: openly announcing they were gay, then ordering a drink. They called it a “sip-in,” and the three men, members of the Mattachine Society, an early gay-rights group, were hoping to challenge the New York State Liquor Authority’s ban on serving LGBTQ patrons. A bar could be raided, and its liquor license rescinded, for serving gay customers, who were considered “disorderly” under the rule. Continued here S35 Water Wells Go Dry as California Feels Warming Impacts Officials say climate change is driving an increase in dry wells in drought-stricken California A record number of water wells in California have gone dry as climate change amplifies heat and drought in the parched state. Continued here S54 How a parasite can determine the fate of a whole pack of wolves When your house cat saunters to the litter box for its post-Fancy Feast pause, it may leave behind more than just some undigested pâté. Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that can only sexually reproduce inside a feline host, and the feline will excrete T. gondii eggs in its feces. Other warm-blooded animals such as mice and humans can become infected with the eggs if they drink contaminated water or interact with the cat’s feces in some other way. (For this reason, the CDC recommends that pregnant women avoid changing the litter.) When carried by an intermediate host — any warm-blooded animal that is not a feline — T. gondii causes toxoplasmosis, a condition that affects several hormonal pathways, but especially those regulating dopamine and testosterone. Continued here S3 Don't Pause Your Job Search Just Because It's the Holidays Christmas, Diwali, Hanukkah, Lunar New Year, and New Year’s Eve are holidays where people tend to gather. This means that it’s a great time to reconnect with people and catch up — say your alumni network, past recruiters, or ex-colleagues. Use the holidays as an “in” to update people on how you’re doing, ask about their lives, and share your goals, including career changes you want to make. Continued here S23 The Risks of Empowering "Citizen Data Scientists" New tools are enabling organizations to invite and leverage non-data scientists — say, domain data experts, team members very familiar with the business processes, or heads of various business units — to propel their AI efforts. There are advantages to empowering these internal “citizen data scientists,” but also risks. Organizations considering implementing these tools should take five steps: 1) provide ongoing education, 2) provide visibility into similar use cases throughout the organization, 3) create an expert mentor program, 4) have all projects verified by AI experts, and 5) provide resources for inspiration outside your organization. Continued here S42 For Black Folks, Digital Migration Is Nothing New Among Black folks, on the occasion of being invited to an event, a common question is, "Who gone be there?" In other words, the essential question for determining whether to attend a gathering is knowing who else will be in attendance. If the answer is that there will be no other (or too few) Black folks, or if other people in attendance are hostile to our existence, the answer about our presence is often a resounding "no." In some significant ways, this is how we might frame questions over whether to remain on Twitter or abandon the platform. Over the past several weeks, there have been several notable Black folks providing their rationale for leaving or staying. Jelani Cobb explained in The New Yorker why he quit Twitter, and Karen Attiah in The Washington Post explained her reasons for staying. There's a wide discrepancy among Black folks about whether to stay or go, as shown by the fact that we are two Black academics who have made different choices.  The day Elon Musk's Twitter purchase became official, I (Chris) tweeted a gif from The Expanse of Amos Burton saying "see you later then," locked my account, and have tweeted only once since-a reply telling people where to find me on Mastodon. I've been a fairly prolific tweeter for the past eight years, averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 tweets daily. But early returns seem to indicate that predictions claiming the takeover would arrive with a deluge of toxicity and hate were correct.  Continued here S48 Sam Bankman-Fried’s House of Cards Is Falling Down Sam Bankman-Fried is behind bars. The controversial founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX was taken into custody in the Bahamas yesterday after criminal charges were filed against him by the United States Department of Justice.  In a press conference today, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York said that Bankman-Fried is facing a total of eight criminal charges, including defrauding FTX customers, FTX investors, and lenders to sister company Alameda Research. Continued here S57 Marvel’s Midnight Suns gets a big boost on PC when 2K’s launcher is removed Publisher-made game launchers are usually just a minor annoyance, a speed bump for those who just want to play the game they bought. 2K's launcher, popping up by default when you launch Firaxis' newest XCOM-meets-superhero-friendship Marvel's Midnight Suns, does something worse, hindering performance significantly for some players. Continued here S11 Fast Shipping Isn't the Key to Customer Satisfaction--This Is When it comes to shipping, consumers care about three things: convenience, control, and cost. Continued here S55 Just 5 senses? Architects manipulate 7 of your senses Have you ever wondered why you feel cozy in some places while you feel stunned in others? Think about the last international airport you landed in, or a local coffee shop in your neighbourhood.  How we perceive these places is multifaceted. We often hear that we perceive our environments through five senses: sight, smell, touch, sound and taste. But what if there are more senses involved in our perception?  Continued here S53 There is no "breakthrough": NIF fusion power still consumes 130 times more energy than it creates Here we go again. In 2021, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced a scientific breakthrough in its pursuit of fusion power technology. One year later, they’re making another announcement, heralded as “game-changing,” “transformative,” and “a moment of history.” But this is not a meaningful breakthrough for practical, commercial fusion power: NIF still drains at least 130 times more energy from the power grid than it produces. Last year’s big news was that NIF dramatically increased the fusion output of its experiments. At the time, I wrote about NIF and the scientific background of its accomplishment. They earned most of their hype. Here’s a quick recap: Continued here S20 Metaverse Seoul: How One City Used Citizen Input to Pilot a Government-Run Metaverse In May 2022, the Seoul Metropolitan Government in Seoul, South Korea, launched the pilot of Metaverse Seoul, a virtual version of Seoul’s mayor’s office. As they worked towards building a broad, immersive, online government platform, they hoped to gain insights from citizens about everything from popular local tourist sites that could be experienced virtually to government services that could be delivered in the metaverse. But to do that, the team had to figure out how to solicit ideas from citizens and then determine which ideas to put to use. Continued here S41 Can the metaverse bring us closer to wildlife? Technologist and TED Fellow Gautam Shah invites us to imagine how the metaverse could redefine the relationships between humans and other species. By giving individual wild animals a personal identity (such as Fio, a young orangutan in Borneo, or Mweituria, an elephant living in Kenya) and sharing data on their migration, milestones and habitats, Shah thinks we could empathize with wildlife in a whole new way. Learn more about how emerging technology could bring us closer to the natural world -- and what the connections we build there could mean for the future of the planet. Continued here S62 Report: Apple plans to support sideloading and third-party app stores by 2024 Employees across Apple are working on changes to iOS that would open the iPhone to apps outside Apple's App Store, a report in Bloomberg claims. Citing people familiar with the efforts, the article claims that Apple is attempting to take action by 2024, in response to regulations from the European Union, such as the Digital Markets Act. In fact, the changes could go wide as soon as the release of iOS 17 late next year. Continued here S14 With Empathy and Compassion, Your Company Can Help Save the Earth Leaders should incorporate duty, direction, and diligence to make the planet better. Continued here S43 Hackers Planted Files to Frame Indian Priest Who Died in Custody The case of the Bhima Koregaon 16, in which hackers planted fake evidence on the computers of two Indian human rights activists that led to their arrest along with more than a dozen colleagues, has already become notorious worldwide. Now the tragedy and injustice of that case is coming further into focus: A forensics firm has found signs that the same hackers also planted evidence on the hard drive of another high-profile defendant in the case who later died in jail—as well as fresh clues that the hackers who fabricated that evidence were collaborating with the Pune City Police investigating him. On Tuesday, Boston-based forensics firm Arsenal Consulting, which has been working on behalf of the defendants in the Bhima Koregaon case, released a new report revealing their analysis of the hard drive of Stan Swamy, perhaps the most famous of the 16 activists arrested in the case, all of whom have advocated for rights for Dalits—the Indian group once known as “untouchables"—as well as for Indian Muslims and indigenous people. Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest who suffered from Parkinson's disease, died in a hospital last year after being arrested in 2019 and contracting Covid-19 in jail. Arsenal has now found that evidence found on Swamy's computer was fabricated by the same hackers whom Arsenal found planting evidence on two other defendants in the case, Surendra Gadling and Rona Wilson. Continued here S56 Lies of omission: Your history teacher skipped over these most important dates Most of us recognize the following dates and years: 4th July 1776, 14th July 1789, 1914, 1933, 1917, 1215, 1815, and 1066. But I imagine most readers will fail to identify what’s special about this second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. Or indeed this third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960. Continued here S8 What to Do When Your Hard Work Is Being Overlooked The shift many companies have made from in-person to hybrid and remote work models has its benefits. But a major downside is the lack of visibility for remote employees. When working from home, you don’t get to see much of what others are doing, nor do they get a sense of what your day-to-day looks like. Continued here S63 Only iPhones that can’t run iOS 16 are getting new iOS 15 updates As part of the barrage of operating system updates released earlier today, Apple published new iOS and iPadOS 15.7.2 updates that bring most of the iOS 16.2 security patches to the previous version of the operating system. Continued here S65 Lensa AI app causes a stir with sexy “Magic Avatar” images no one wanted Over the past week, the smartphone app Lensa AI has become a popular topic on social media because it can generate stylized AI avatars based on selfie headshots that users upload. It's arguably the first time personalized latent diffusion avatar generation has reached a mass audience. Continued here S69 Fusion Breakthrough Raises Hopes for Clean Energy For more than a decade, scientists have been pursuing fusion—the energy-producing nuclear reaction that powers the sun and other stars—as a source of clean energy. But for equally as long, they’ve faced a problem: Creating any fusion reaction has used more energy than it produces. On Tuesday, however, researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California announced that they have finally achieved the opposite result; they conducted the first experiment yielding more energy from a fusion reaction than the amount of energy put in. Continued here S50 A New Lawsuit Accuses Meta of Inflaming Civil War in Ethiopia On November 3, 2021, Meareg Amare, a professor of chemistry at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia, was gunned down outside his home. Amare, who was ethnically Tigrayan, had been targeted in a series of Facebook posts the month before, alleging that he had stolen equipment from the university, sold it, and used the proceeds to buy property. In the comments, people called for his death. Amare’s son, researcher Abrham Amare, appealed to Facebook to have the posts removed but heard nothing back for weeks. Eight days after his father’s murder, Abrham received a response from Facebook: One of the posts targeting his father, shared by a page with more than 50,000 followers, had been removed. Today, Abrham, as well as fellow researchers and Amnesty International legal adviser Fisseha Tekle, filed a lawsuit against Meta in Kenya, alleging that the company has allowed hate speech to run rampant on the platform, causing widespread violence. The suit calls for the company to deprioritize hateful content in the platform’s algorithm and to add to its content moderation staff. Continued here S60 Microsoft digital certificates have once again been abused to sign malware Microsoft has once again been caught allowing its legitimate digital certificates to sign malware in the wild, a lapse that allows the malicious files to pass strict security checks designed to prevent them from running on the Windows operating system. Continued here S64 TikTok would be banned from US “for good” under bipartisan bill In September, President Joe Biden announced that TikTok would remain accessible in the US once a deal could be worked out to assuage national security concerns. At that time, Biden said it would take months for his administration to weigh all the potential risks involved in inking the deal. Among detractors of the brewing deal, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI) emerged, alleging in a Washington Post op-ed that any deal that Biden arranged with the Chinese-owned social media platform “would dangerously compromise national security.” Continued here S58 Google’s Black Friday deals are back, including that $299 Pixel 6a deal Black Friday might have come and gone, but Google's Black Friday deals are still trucking. Google reimplemented many of the deals this week, which were the first and/or best discounts we've seen for many of Google's new products. The highlight of the group is definitely the Pixel 6a, but you get decent deals on the Pixel 7, Pixel Watch, Chromecasts, and Google's smart speakers, too. Continued here S59 iOS 16.2, macOS 13.1 released with new collaboration features and other updates Apple has released the final versions of macOS 13.1, iOS 16.2, and iPadOS 16.2 to the public after a few weeks of beta testing. In addition to the standard bug fixes and security patches, these updates include the collaborative Freeform app that was announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, increased use of end-to-end encryption for iCloud data, and (for iPhones) the vocal-reducing, karaoke-friendly Apple Music Sing feature. 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