The case for global optimism continues to grow in 2023

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The case for global optimism continues to grow in 2023 As we move further into 2023, you would be forgiven for feeling civilization backslid considerably in the previous year. From the pandemic to supply chain issues and global inflation, and considering above all Russia’s vicious invasion of Ukraine, the headlines in 2022 felt especially grim.  The drumbeat of impending apocalypse left little room on front pages for many of that year’s great stories of progress. Yet 2022 held a surprising abundance of good news. It was a year of mitigated losses, steady progress, and spectacular breakthroughs. Continued here

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The Milky Way's next supernova could reveal dark matter In all the Universe, there are few mysteries that loom as large as dark matter. We know, from the gravitational effects we observe — at all times and on scales of an individual galaxy and upward — that the normal matter in our Universe, along with the laws of gravity that we know, can’t account for what exists. And yet, all of the evidence from dark matter comes indirectly: from astrophysical measurements that don’t add up without that one key missing ingredient. Although that one addition of dark matter solves a wide variety of problems and puzzles, all of our direct detection efforts have come up empty. There’s a reason for that: all of the direct detection methods we’ve tried rely on the specific assumption that dark matter particles couple to and interact with some type of normal matter in some way. This isn’t a bad assumption; it’s the type of interaction we can constrain and test at this moment in time. Still, there are plenty of physical circumstances that occur out there in the Universe that we simply can’t recreate in the lab just yet, and if dark matter interacts with normal matter under those conditions, it will be the laboratory of the Universe — not an experiment on Earth — that reveals dark matter’s particle nature to us. Here’s why the Milky Way’s next supernova might just be the perfect candidate for doing so. Continued here

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The Daily Habits of Happiness Experts If anyone knows the secret to happiness, it’s surely the people who have dedicated their careers to studying it. The first thing they’ll tell you? Being happy all the time isn’t a feasible—or even desirable—goal. “It’s not a yellow smiley face,” says positive psychology expert Stella Grizont, founder and CEO of Woopaah, which focuses on workplace wellbeing. “It’s being true to yourself and all the emotions that come up.” Instead of trying to force that frown upside down, true happiness stems from surrounding yourself with lots of love, being of service, and having a good time, she says. Continued here

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The Case for Running Slowly At some point last fall, as I prepared to run a marathon, the algorithm sent me to Kim Clark. She has cute outfits, and a ponytail that reaches her waist. Her hair bounces behind her as she runs. She posts many videos of herself running on her Instagram, where she goes by the handle @trackclubbabe. Clark is also fast, which she brags about: Her Boston Marathon qualifying time is right there in her bio, where she also advertises a series of training plans titled Fast Fall, Fast Marathon, and so on. And like many fitness and running influencers, Clark posts splits from her own training runs. Continued here

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Inside the metaverse meetups that let people share on death, grief, and pain Welcome to “Death Q&A,” a space with a unique combination of anonymity and togetherness, where avatars discuss what weighs on them most heavily. Days after learning that her husband, Ted, had only months to live, Claire Matte found herself telling strangers about it in VR. Continued here

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Arguing with a sibling? Here’s how to approach the situation in a helpful way Getting into an argument with a sibling can be pretty intense - here's how to handle the situation. If you grew up in a family with one or more siblings, you probably spent your childhood honing the art of a good old-fashioned argument. Continued here

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Do dogs really see in just black and white? Dogs definitely see the world differently than people do, but it’s a myth that their view is just black, white and grim shades of gray.  While most people see a full spectrum of colors from red to violet, dogs lack some of the light receptors in their eyes that allow human beings to see certain colors, particularly in the red and green range. But canines can still see yellow and blue. Continued here

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Oceans Break Record for Highest Temperatures Four Years in a Row In 2022, the world’s oceans hit their warmest temperature on record for the fourth year in a row, new research suggests. The findings, published last week in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, are a striking indication of the long-term pattern of human-caused climate change. Sea surface temperatures have a major impact on the world’s weather, with warmer oceans linked to more extreme hurricanes, heat waves, droughts and heavy rain, writes Andrew Freedman of Axios. Continued here

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"Virivores" discovered: Microbes that survive on a virus-only diet Viruses are misunderstood. In the shadow of the COVID pandemic, few look kindly on these protein-wrapped jumbles of genetic material, which straddle the murky nexus between the living and non-living. Though viruses share some common features with living organisms — like possessing a genome and having an ability to replicate — they are not self-sustaining. In other words, to reproduce, viruses depend on infecting host cells. Viruses don’t feed on these cells — indeed, viruses have no metabolism — they simply hijack and reprogram host cells to become miniature factories that produce more virus particles. In the process, they often cause damage or death to the host. Continued here

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Can Science Finally Create a Decent Cup of Decaf? Who cares about decaf coffee? I do. I’m a slow caffeine metabolizer, like many millions of others. We folks with a particular type of CYP1A2 gene may adore a perfectly pressed single-origin Arabica but cannot drink a fully caffeinated cup without the caffeine accumulating too quickly, making our hearts beat like bass drums and our brains feel momentarily vaporized. At parties, we leave half cups of cold coffee to be tossed into the sink. At coffee shops, we pronounce, “half-caff or decaf” like our day depends on it (because it does). Baristas wince at the thought of heavily stripped decaf grounds grazing their precious portafilter. Many of us give up and drink tea. Pregnant women know our pain. But now there’s a chance for us, the metabolically mismatched. A whole new kind of coffee may be on the horizon. At the 2022 World Barista Championships in Melbourne, Morgan Eckroth of Onyx Coffee guided a tower of coffee grinds out from under the mammoth grinder as she prepared to pull a shot of espresso. She added a collar around the grinds, fluffed them with something that looks like a mini scalp tickler, and pressed them down with a tiny plunger. The judges watched. Continued here

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Managing Your Emotions After Being Laid Off It is easy to feel embarrassed, guilty, frustrated, or angry when you’ve suffered a job loss. But if you recognize that many layoffs aren’t the slightest bit personal, it can help you stay focused on the future, not the past. Surround yourself with positive people, think of the obstacles you’ve overcome, and remember all you’ve already achieved. Instead of blaming yourself, build your confidence, and potential employers will notice. Continued here

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The Collapse of the UK's Electric Vehicle Champion Britishvolt was meant to be the UK's answer to Tesla. By 2024, it was supposed to be producing hundreds of thousands of lithium-ion batteries a year for the British automotive sector, and driving an industrial renaissance for the economically deprived northeast of the country.  Since its launch in 2019, the company had amassed nearly $2.5 billion in funding promises, including £100 million ($123 million) from the UK government, and preliminary deals to supply batteries to Aston Martin and Lotus. Continued here

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Money, Flexibility, Development? Figuring Out What Employees Really Value Even in a slowing economy, the battle to attract and retain talent persists. But employers need to look beyond what people are currently demanding — whether it’s higher salaries, more stock options or the flexibility to work from home. Studies show that, over the long term, employees also find value in aspects of work that they overlook in the short term, such as community and opportunities for growth. Professor Amy Edmondson and INSEAD associate professor Mark Mortensen offer up strategies for a holistic talent acquisition and retention strategy that incorporates more lasting benefits, even if workers aren’t asking for them right now. Edmondson and Mortensen are the authors of the HBR article “Rethink Your Employee Value Proposition.” Continued here

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The Frick Adds Its First Renaissance Portrait of a Woman to Permanent Collection The Frick Collection in New York has long touted a rich assortment of old master paintings, including Renaissance portraits of powerful figures. None of those portraits, however, depicted a lone woman—until now. Portrait of a Woman, painted by Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Battista Moroni circa 1575, is joining the Frick’s permanent collection, the museum announced in a statement last week, adding that the piece is “the most significant Italian Renaissance painting the museum has acquired in more than half a century.” Continued here

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U.S. tech firms are replacing workers with cheaper talent in Latin America For Andrea Campos, founder of the Mexico-based mental health app Yana, finding developer talent nowadays reminds her of the dating scene growing up in Cancún.  “If you wanted a boyfriend, you had to accept the hard reality that the guy you chose had already dated at least one of your friends before,” Campos told Rest of World. Much like potential dating partners in a small city, these days senior developers with experience and skills are a scarce commodity in Latin America, forcing her to flirt with other startups’ talent, she said. “There is just no option but to poach from other startups.” Continued here

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The Tragic Miracle of Consciousness: John Steinbeck on the True Meaning and Purpose of Hope We hope, we despair, and then we hope again — that is how we stay afloat in the cosmos of uncertainty that is any given life. Just as the universe exists because, by some accident of chance we are yet to fathom, there is more matter than antimatter in it, we exist — and go on existing — because there is more hope than despair in us. “Hope,” the great Czech dissident playwright turned president Václav Havel wrote, “is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” Hope, I have long believed, is the antidote to cynicism — that most cowardly and self-defeating of existential orientations. Hope, Rebecca Solnit reminds us, “is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.” For it is a power indeed — the power to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps from even the darkest and most dispiriting of circumstances, so that we may go on reaching for the light. In this capacity, hope might be our greatest evolutionary adaptation — the mitochondria of our spiritual metabolism, the opposable thumb of our grip on life. That function of hope is what John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) explores from an uncommonly illuminating perspective in a portion of The Log from the Sea of Cortez (public library) — his forgotten masterpiece about how to think, wrested from a marine biology expedition into the Gulf of California at the outbreak of a World War. Continued here

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What an Endless Conversation with Werner Herzog Can Teach Us about AI An AI-generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek is definitely entertaining, but it also illustrates the crisis of misinformation beginning to befall us On the website Infinite Conversation, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek are having a public chat about anything and everything. Their discussion is compelling, in part, because these intellectuals have distinctive accents when speaking English, not to mention a tendency toward eccentric word choices. But they have something else in common: both voices are deepfakes, and the text they speak in those distinctive accents is being generated by artificial intelligence. Continued here

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Why Your Brain Dwells on Unfinished Tasks A few months ago, a friend recommended I watch Crash Landing on You (CLOY) — a South Korean drama that has been praised around the world. I’m not a huge fan of soaps. They drag too long, force you to invest a ton of time (and emotion), and I, for one, can’t wait to find out what the end is going to be. I much prefer curling up with your traditional two-hour movie or an evening of truth with an observational documentary. Continued here

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How to Answer When a Job Candidate Asks, 'How Did I Do?' And three other tricky workplace dilemmas. Continued here

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This Software Engineer Traded His Paycheck for a Mission to Aid Underrepresented Communities Christian Joseph of fintech startup Grain explains how he builds a credit firm that dedicated to underrepresented community. Continued here

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A Professor Made a Sexist Remark. Here's How This Student Responded. When Ally Orr, a 22-year-old senior marketing student from Boise State University in Idaho, heard a faculty member make sexist remarks about female students, especially in technical fields, choosing their careers over their families, she was furious. That pushed her to start a GoFundMe page to set up a scholarship for women in STEM. Continued here

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Big Tech's Layoffs Highlight How the US Fails Immigrant Workers Tens of thousands of people have been laid off at Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and other once-voracious tech employers in recent months. But one group of workers has been particularly shortchanged: US immigrants holding H-1B visas for workers with specialist skills. Those much-sought visas are awarded to immigrants sponsored by an employer to come to the US, and the limited supply is used heavily by large tech companies. But if a worker is laid off, they have to secure sponsorship from another company within 60 days or leave the country. Continued here

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Mobile Genes From the Mother Shape the Baby's Microbiome | Quanta Magazine Through transfers of bacteria and genes that continue for many months after birth, a mother may nurture the healthy development of an infant. These simple cells, which journey from mother to baby at birth and in the months of intimate contact that follow, form the first seeds of the child's microbiome — the evolving community of symbiotic microorganisms tied to the body's healthy functioning. Researchers at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University recently conducted the first large-scale survey of how the microbiomes of a mother and her infant coevolve during the first year of life. Their new study, published in Cell in December found that these maternal contributions aren't limited to complete cells. Small snippets of DNA called mobile genetic elements hop from the mother's bacteria to the baby's bacteria, even months after birth. Continued here

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Indian startups need to lower their valuations to have successful IPOs in 2023 Over the past decade, Indians have celebrated the success of local startups with multi-billion dollar valuations. In 2022, India overtook China in terms of the number of unicorns that the two countries churned out. But lately, the steep valuations of Indian startups are becoming a cause for concern — particularly as they look to raise funds from local stock exchanges. In November 2021, Indian fintech’s poster child Paytm was listed on local exchanges at a valuation of $20 billion, in what is still the country’s biggest initial public offering (IPO) to date. But over 2022, Paytm’s shares saw a bloodbath, making it the decade’s worst performance for a large IPO in its first year. Continued here

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Dealing with Change: Our Favorite Reads Over the last few years, we’ve all had to get more comfortable with change, uncertainty, and ambiguity. We’ve all found our own ways of coping with it. Personally, I’ve tried to get better at giving myself space to worry when I’m worried. I’ve worked on listening to my anxiety without letting it run me. I’ve learned to lean on gratitude and optimism even when it feels like everything is falling apart. Continued here

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Build a Relationship with a Senior Leader You Admire Years ago, one of my students asked me to be his mentor. I was teaching a graduate leadership course in Seattle, and about a week after the class had ended, he asked. It was clear that the question was difficult for him. Throughout the course, he appeared disinterested in my teaching, aloof, and often scoffed at the materials I presented. I’d assumed that he didn’t like the course — or me. Continued here

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Lasers Are Mapping Scotland's Mysterious Iron Age Passages In February 2022, Graeme Cavers and his team of archaeologists set off in search of a mysterious underground passage called a souterrain. There are around 500 of these Iron Age structures scattered throughout the Scottish Highlands, but nobody knows what they were built for, and no one has ever discovered one intact. "Perhaps they were for storage, such as grain in sealed pots or dairy products like cheese," says Matt Ritchie, resident archaeologist at Forestry and Land Scotland. "Perhaps they were for security, keeping valuables safe, or slaves or hostages secure. Or perhaps they were for ceremonial purposes, for household rituals, like a medieval shrine or private chapel." Continued here

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Adorable Voles, Life as We Don't Know It and Better Cement Love in the brain, how dreams predict disease and better words for climate change in this month’s issue of Scientific American Every once in a while we publish a story that makes the editorial team at Scientific American melt. When we were reviewing illustrations for “The Neurobiology of Love” about pair-bonding in prairie voles, the most common response was, “Aww.” First of all, they’re so stinking cute. Unlike promiscuous species like meadow voles, they pair up for life, raise young together and cuddle for comfort. For about 50 years they’ve been the go-to animal model for studying attachment and relationships and what looks like some rudimentary version of love. Scientists Steven Phelps, Zoe Donaldson and Dev Manoli explain how we’ve learned so much about commitment from prairie voles. Some free advice: date all the meadow voles you like but marry a prairie vole. Continued here

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How the liberal arts can save higher education Excerpted from Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm by Gayle Greene. Copyright 2023. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. One of the shocking things I discovered, writing this book, is how much of what we read and hear about education is simply not true. Mainstream media turn to business leaders, politicians, tech moguls, for “expert” opinions. They’re more likely to accept a press release from a billionaire-funded think tank or foundation than ask an educator, so they perpetuate the narrative of higher education as a “broken fiscal model” that needs to be transformed, to be made more like business. Continued here

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Would You Sell Your Extra Kidney? When we were teenagers, my brother and I received kidney transplants six days apart. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He, two years older, was scheduled to receive my dad’s kidney in April of 1998. Twenty-four hours before the surgery, the transplant team performed its final blood panel and discovered a tissue incompatibility that all the previous testing had somehow missed. My brother was pushed onto “the list,” where he’d wait, who knows how long, for the kidney of somebody who had died and possessed the generous foresight to be a donor after death. I was next in line for my dad’s kidney. We matched, and the date was set for August 28. Then my parents got a call early in the morning on August 22. There had been a car crash. A kidney was available. As with many things in life, my brother went first and I followed. His operation went smoothly. Six days later, it was my turn. I remember visiting the doctor shortly before the transplant, feeling the pinprick and stinging flush of local anesthetic, then a blunted tugging, the nauseating and strange sensation of a dialysis catheter withdrawn from below my collarbone. I remember, later, the tranquil fog of midazolam as I was rolled to the OR.  Continued here

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Mariam Veiszadeh: How to recognize privilege – and uplift those without it Depending on your lot in life, you may see the status quo as a result of unearned privilege or a simple reflection of merit. Backed by statistics and personal stories, lawyer Mariam Veiszadeh offers a much-needed perspective check on the quasi-equality touted in business today, calling for real change in workplace diversity and inclusion that routs out biases rather than replicating them. Continued here

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Connect Your Sustainability Goals to Your Business Performance - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM BEARINGPOINT Sustainability is increasingly taking a core position in framing business strategy. But success requires more than good intentions. Sustainable transformation may call for broad changes to an organization’s business models, operations, financial practices, and partner ecosystems—an undertaking whose complexity reaches beyond the knowledge an organization may keep in-house. Continued here

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8 Questions to Ask Before Selecting a New Board Leader Too many companies don’t apply the same rigor and analysis to selecting a board leader as they would for a new chief executive — and yet in today’s environment, board leadership is more important and urgent than ever. The authors, who have collectively interacted with more than a fifth of the governing boards of the Fortune 1000, suggest eight questions to ask to ensure a more thoughtful and disciplined process for selecting, evaluating, compensating, or removing a board leader. Continued here

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4 Ideas to Beat the New Year Doldrums Studies have found January to be the least-productive month of the year, and this year, the problem is compounded by headline-making layoffs, so-called quiet quitting, and a broader productivity slump. The signs are strong that 2023 won’t be an easy year to navigate, which is all the more reason to shake things up at the start. The author presents four ways to breathe new life into this notoriously dreary time of year. Continued here

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Tesla Has a Bigger Problem Than Elon Musk So does the entire auto industry. The allure of owning a car is fading. Young people would rather ride share, and urban planners are rethinking transportation. Continued here

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Life as a 21st-Century Trucker When Jay LeRette preaches the Word, he transforms from a mild Midwesterner—one who loves country gospel, rides a horse he has trained to roll over and grin, and has, himself, a whinnying laugh—into a human incandescence. Sixty-four, 5' 5", and dressed like a cowboy, he increases in stature; his voice crescendos to cracking. “The devil’s learned to use us and abuse us, to beat the snot out of us,” he says, then uppercuts the air. “Amen, Chuck?” A man in the second row with a great, ZZ Top–like beard croaks amen. “The devil mopped the floor with me,” LeRette continues, and mimes a janitorial sweep. “But God—but God!—” he shrieks, pounding the lectern and leaping, “—had compassion on you and I.” It’s a weeknight in December 2021, getting toward Christmas, and I’m sitting in the trailer of an 18-wheeler that’s been repurposed into LeRette’s chapel. It’s parked, permanently, at the Petro Travel Center, a truck stop off Interstate 39 in northern Illinois. All around it are acres of commercial trucks, stopped for the night and carrying every kind of cargo: cows, weed, pro-wrestling rings, grain, petroleum. One side of LeRette’s trailer reads “Transport for Christ"; beside it, a neon cross gleams in the dark. John 3:16 adorns the back end: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Next to the scripture are two godly hands cradling a truck. Continued here

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A Simple Intervention That Can Reduce Turnover Work can be hard, but it shouldn’t be hard all the time. New research co-authored by Wharton’s Maurice Schweitzer shows that overloading workers with too many difficult tasks in a row makes them more likely to quit. Managers who want to keep employees from quitting should consider reordering their tasks, according to a new paper co-authored by Wharton management professor Maurice Schweitzer. Continued here

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Mental Health Apps Won't Get You Off the Couch "Everyone's so gung ho about therapy these days. I've been curious myself, but I'm not ready to commit to paying for it. A mental health app seems like it could be a decent stepping stone. But are they actually helpful?" The first time you open Headspace, one of the most popular mental wellness apps, you are greeted with the image of a blue sky—a metaphor for the unperturbed mind—and encouraged to take several deep breaths. The instructions that appear across the firmament tell you precisely when to inhale, when to hold, and when to exhale, rhythms that are measured by a white progress bar, as though you're waiting for a download to complete. Some people may find this relaxing, although I'd bet that for every user whose mind floats serenely into the pixelated blue, another is glancing at the clock, eyeing their inbox, or worrying about the future—wondering, perhaps, about the ultimate fate of a species that must be instructed to carry out the most basic and automatic of biological functions. Continued here

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Apple Refreshes the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini With New Chips New year, new MacBooks. With little fanfare, Apple has unveiled updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, now powered by the M2 Pro and M2 Max Apple-made chipsets. That's practically the only major change from the 2021 MacBook Pro predecessors. However, that's not the only new hardware announcement. There's also a more powerful Mac Mini, powered by an M2 chip, with a tantalizingly low price of $599.    The new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro models are the first to introduce Apple's M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, successors to the M1 Pro and M1 Max from 2021. Last year, Apple unveiled the standard M2 chip in the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, but these newer chipsets are more powerful and more efficient.  Continued here

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The physics behind building an enduring soap bubble Blowing soap bubbles, besides being a favorite pastime for children, also happens to be an art form and a subject of interest for physicists. Emmanuelle Rio, François Boulogne, Marina Pasquet, and Frédéric Restagno from the Laboratory of Solid State Physics at the University of Paris-Saclay have been studying bubbles for years, trying to understand the different processes at play in these innocuous-looking structures. Continued here

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How Divestiture Can Create Corporate Value Divestiture is an important strategy for a company seeking healthy financial growth, one that is often overlooked. In her new book, Wharton’s Emilie Feldman explains why sometimes the best way to add value is through subtraction. Wharton’s Emilie Feldman speaks with Wharton Business Daily on Sirius XM about why leaders should change their perspective on divesting. Continued here

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How donkeys changed the course of human history They are best known for their remarkable ability to carry heavy loads and a tenacious – almost stoic – approach to toil. In some parts of the world, the donkey has become associated, perhaps unfairly, with terms of insult or mockery. But in a French village around 174 miles (280km) east of Paris, archaeologists have made a discovery that is helping to rewrite much of what we know about these under-appreciated beasts of burden. At the site of a Roman villa in the village of Boinville-en-Woëvre, a team unearthed the remains of several donkeys that would have dwarfed most of the species we are familiar with today. Continued here

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Why Hybrid Work Will Reign in 2023 Wharton management professor Martine Haas says now that hybrid work has been around for a while, companies need to spend the next year figuring out what works best and refining their policies. That’s the prediction from Wharton management professor Martine Haas, who was asked to share what she thinks will be the biggest workplace trend of 2023. Although the mix of remote and in-person work can be challenging, she said, hybrid has emerged as a legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic. Continued here

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Bad at saving? You can blame your "money personality" There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for how to best manage your money, despite what some personal finance gurus might claim. After all, personal finance is personal. Each of us has unique values, personality traits, and life experiences that shape our relationship with money, meaning that devising an effective personal finance plan is often less about understanding finance and more about understanding yourself. “We all think we need to learn more about money, and we might, but most of us kind of know what to do,” Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, a financial therapist, told Big Think.  Continued here

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Google plans AirTag clone, will track devices with 3 billion Android phones Following in the footsteps of Tile, Apple, and Samsung, it sounds like Google will be the latest Big-Tech company to make a Bluetooth tracker. Android researcher Kuba Wojciechowski has spotted code for a Google first-party Bluetooth tracker codenamed—just in time for The Mandalorian season 3—"Grogu." Continued here

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Tesla staged 2016 self-driving demo, says senior Autopilot engineer Tesla's widely viewed 2016 Autopilot demonstration video showing the system stopping for red lights and moving off again when the light changed to green was faked, according to the director of Autopilot software, Ashok Elluswamy. Elluswamy made the statement under oath during a deposition for a lawsuit brought against Tesla following the fatal crash of Apple engineer Walter Huang in 2018. Continued here

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Puget Sound's Parasites Are Disappearing—but Don’t Be Glad to Say Goodbye The decline, which was correlated with warming waters in a new study, is bad news for ecosystems The waters of Washington's Puget Sound are not a paradise for parasites. According to a study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, fish parasites that require three or more hosts declined dramatically in the estuary over the last century. Their loss was correlated with rising sea surface temperature, suggesting a connection with climate change. Continued here

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What I’ve learned about relationships as an agony uncle | Psyche Ideas I never expected to be an agony uncle. Not because ‘uncles’ are uncommon – although we are uncommon compared with ‘aunts’ – but because I never imagined I had any special knowledge or authority in matters of the heart, or other organs. But then I wrote a book, a history of the Kamasutra. I was struck, researching it, how modern sex manuals seemed relatively limited in scope. They were so unambitious, so – mechanical. So I decided to write my own. It was called The Rough Guide to Sex (2010). (The Rough Guide travel imprint used to be synonymous with a certain irreverent authority, so the title made a jokey kind of sense.) This in turn led to my joining a small team of ‘experts’ at the newly launched sex-advice column of the Metro newspaper in London – a tabloid freesheet you might pick up on your morning commute. Continued here

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Duolingo is probably a better Alzheimer's treatment than the newest breakthrough drug Late last year, a phase 3 clinical trial was published in the New England Journal of Medicine to wide acclaim. The 1,800-person, 18-month-long study centered around patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It showed that a monoclonal antibody called lecanemab slowed declines in memory and thinking by 27%, a modest yet tangibly positive result. Despite lecanemab’s notable side effects, which included brain swelling in 12% of patients and brain bleeding in 17%, experts say it represents the most significant pharmaceutical advance against Alzheimer’s disease in decades. The FDA granted accelerated approval for the drug, now known as Leqembi, earlier this month. Pharmaceutical giants Eisai and Biogen set its price at $26,500 per year soon thereafter. Anywhere from two to five million Americans could be eligible for Leqembi, which is given as an intravenous injection every two weeks. Continued here

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Neutron Imaging Reveals Tiny Bones Inside 800-Year-Old Pendant In 2008, archaeologists in Germany were thrilled to discover a mysterious gold-plated pendant in a medieval trash heap. They suspected it was a rare storage container for religious relics, called a phylactery, that owners often wore around their necks. But without looking inside, they couldn’t know for sure. They spent 500 hours clearing centuries of corrosion and grime from the gilded copper pendant, but the artifact’s advanced age and delicate condition made it difficult to study much further. They feared that if they opened the quatrefoil-shaped pendant, they’d damage it beyond repair in the process. Continued here

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Winemakers from Europe to Australia and China seek best climate change grapes Vintners around the world are planting or reviving little-known, sometimes nearly extinct, grape varieties, which may fare better as the planet heats up. Continued here

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"Talented but crazy": Potential jurors give court their opinions on Elon Musk Jury selection in a class-action lawsuit against Tesla CEO Elon Musk began today in a federal courthouse in San Francisco. Not surprisingly, potential jurors already knew who Musk is, and some expressed strong, negative opinions about him. Continued here

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Game makers stage mass exodus from Dungeons & Dragons' "open" license Enlarge / Amid controversy over WotC's planned OGL changes, publishers are starting to abandon the rules that have underpinned the tabletop community.On Friday, following days of uproar in the tabletop gaming community, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WotC) attempted to walk back the most controversial changes in a leaked draft update of its decades-old Open Gaming License (OGL). That effort might end up being too little too late, though. Continued here

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Why a London Museum Is Removing the Skeleton of an 'Irish Giant' From View Charles Byrne asked for his body to be buried at sea. Instead, an anatomist bought his bones and displayed them to the public When Charles Byrne, a 7-foot-7 man known popularly as the “Irish Giant,” was on his deathbed in June 1783, he made a final request of his friends: that his body be buried at sea to stop surgeons from dissecting his remains. Continued here

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Fire of Love revisits tragedy of French volcanologists who died in 1991 French volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft carved out an illustrious career by daring to go where most of their colleagues feared to tread: right to the edge of an erupting volcano. The photographs and video footage they recorded during the 1970s and 1980s contributed to significant breakthroughs in their chosen field. Alas, the couple's luck ran out on June 3, 1991, when they were killed by a massive pyroclastic flow from the eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan. The striking image above of Katia Krafft in a protective heat suit, dwarfed by a wall of fire, is just one of many powerful moments featured in Fire of Love, a 2022 National Geographic documentary about this extraordinary couple that is now streaming on Disney+. Continued here

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More malicious packages posted to online repository. This time it's PyPI Researchers have uncovered yet another supply chain attack targeting an open source code repository, showing that the technique, which has gained wide use in the past few years, isn’t going away anytime soon. Continued here

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The Literary Legacy of C. Michael Curtis Across six decades as an Atlantic editor and a teacher, C. Michael Curtis discovered and nurtured multiple generations of American writers. A few years ago, the novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of the more sparkling literary careers of recent years: Continued here

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How VCs Can Help Startups Set (and Meet) ESG Goals Being a first mover as an ESG-oriented VC fund can become the source of competitive advantage. It will help attract high-quality portfolio firms that are eager to help address some of the most pressing challenges of today, including the climate emergency. To do this, VCs need to evolve their selecting and screening capabilities, rethink their valuation models and redesign term sheets to incorporate ESG issues. Continued here S54 AI Is Not the New Crypto The torrent of investor money that flowed into crypto is now hitting the AI scene. We’re already seeing the results. This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here S43 70% of drugs advertised on TV are of "low therapeutic value," study finds Some new drugs sell themselves with impressive safety and efficacy data. For others, well, there are television commercials. Continued here S53 19 Reader Views on Lab-Grown Meat “Given the choice between cruelty and kindness, I believe most humans will choose kindness.” This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Continued here S58 Student Creates App to Detect Essays Written by AI In response to the text-generating bot ChatGPT, the new tool measures sentence complexity and variation to predict whether an author was human In November, artificial intelligence company OpenAI released a powerful new bot called ChatGPT, a free tool that can generate text about a variety of topics based on a user’s prompts. The AI quickly captivated users across the internet, who asked it to write anything from song lyrics in the style of a particular artist to programming code. Continued here S52 ‘You Get to See Violence’ The radio host Garrett Bush discusses the country’s tortured relationship with football, and what the NFL could do to treat players better. The day after Damar Hamlin collapsed during what began as a normal game on Monday Night Football, the radio host Garrett Bush was frustrated. Continued here S47 Asymmetrical Conspiracism Is Hurting Democracy In the past decade, conspiratorial thinking has shifted from a worrying factor in Republican politics to a defining feature. As an American living in Britain for the past decade, I’ve had a front-row seat to two dysfunctional democracies hell-bent on embarrassing themselves. President Donald Trump warned that a hurricane was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” Prime Minister Liz Truss failed to outlast a lettuce at Downing Street. These years have not inspired confidence in democracy. Continued here S50 The Calamitous Lies of Adulthood Netflix’s new adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s 2020 novel is a striking, moody show about the contours of deceit. In Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults, the narrator—an adolescent girl named Giovanna—begins her story by recounting the time she heard her father tell her mother “that I was very ugly.” This statement is technically untrue, and an introduction to the novel’s tricky manipulations. What she actually overhears her father say is that she’s “getting the face of Vittoria,” his estranged sister. For Giovanna, who lives like a princess in a rarefied hilltop district of Naples, Italy, Vittoria has long had the dark allure of a fairy-tale villain: She lives in the bowels of the city; her face has been meticulously erased from all family photos; she’s legendarily as ugly as she is spiteful. And, like a witch or a magic mirror, she commands an unsettling power. In a world where everyone elegantly lies by default, Vittoria speaks the brutal, destabilizing truth. Continued here S45 More than 4,400 Sophos firewall servers remain vulnerable to critical exploits More than 4,400 Internet-exposed servers are running versions of the Sophos Firewall that’s vulnerable to a critical exploit that allows hackers to execute malicious code, a researcher has warned. Continued here S44 Reviewer buys 16TB portable SSD for $70, proves it's a sham Amazon won't deny that fraudulent reviews on its platform are a problem. And despite years of reports of fake storage products, listed with falsified reviews to cover up fake specs and performance claims, the scams keep coming. Continued here S49 Western Aid to Ukraine Is Still Not Enough Any result other than a victory for Kyiv will make the world a more dangerous place for all of us. Ukraine’s friends have poured a considerable amount of weaponry into the nation’s fight for survival. The United States alone has provided more than $25 billion of matériel, including 160 modern artillery pieces, 38 medium-range HIMARS rocket systems, hundreds of armored vehicles, and tens of thousands of advanced munitions of all types. Allies such as Poland and the Czech Republic have done even more (in relative, not absolute terms), supplying hundreds of Soviet-model tanks, an array of modern artillery systems, and all kinds of nonlethal support. Even hesitant Germany has sent a score of advanced guns and missile launchers, some antiaircraft systems, and more. In total, the West has sent more than 320 tanks, 2,400 other armored vehicles, 450 artillery pieces, and more than 135 air-defense systems to Ukraine, and more is on the way. Continued here S48 Elon Musk Can’t Solve Twitter’s ‘Shadowbanning’ Problem For several years, social-media users have expressed anxiety about algorithmic suppression. Now they’re getting some unexpected clarity. Since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, he has apparently spent a considerable amount of time “looking into” the personal complaints of individual users who suspect that they are not as visible on the platform as they should be. Continued here S51 People’s Choice: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022 The Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest is inviting the public to vote for their favorite image selected from a group of short-listed entries in this year’s competition. Voting for the People’s Choice Award is open until February 2, 2023. Contest organizers have once again shared a handful of this year’s candidates below—be sure to click through to the competition’s site to see the rest. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum in London. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style. Among the Flowers. Martin Gregus watched this polar-bear cub playing in a mass of fireweed on the coast of Hudson Bay, Canada. Every so often, the cub would take a break from its fun, stand on its hind legs, and poke its head up above the high flowers to look for its mother. # Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2024 (50) ►  October (2) ►  August (2) ►  July (4) ►  June (3) ►  May (5) ►  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) A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best... Feb 1, 2023 - 4 Startup Terms Explained With Analo... January 31, 2023 - Russian offensive "imminent" as... 'Tomb Raider' is Becoming a TV Series -- 'The Last... 9 Strategies to Improve Business Team Collaboratio... Jan 31, 2023 - The Jack Ma test for China"s promis... January 30, 2023 - Russia-Ukraine war live: Zelens... Does the Best Workout Exist? 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