Winners of the 2022 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest

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Winners of the 2022 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest Judging for the 11th annual Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest, organized by the Underwater Photography Guide, has wrapped up, and the winning images and photographers have been announced. The photographer Kat Zhou won Best in Show for an image of a mother octopus with a clutch of eggs. The organizers of the contest have shared some of the winners and honorable mentions, shown below, from 14 categories. Captions were written by the individual photographers and have been lightly edited for clarity. Jaws. 2nd Place, Cold Water. A great crested newt, seen from below, swims in a pond in the Department of Gard in southeastern France. # Continued here

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Generative AI Won't Revolutionize Game Development Just Yet Creating a video game demands hard, repetitive work. How could it not? Developers are in the business of building world, so it's easy to understand why the games industry would be excited about generative AI. With computers doing the boring stuff, a small team could whip up a map the size of San Andreas. Crunch becomes a thing of the past; games release in a finished state. A new age beckons. There are, at the very least, two interrelated problems with this narrative. First, there's the logic of the hype itself—reminiscent of the frenzied gold rush over crypto/Web3/the metaverse—that, consciously or not, seems to consider automating artists' jobs a form of progress. Continued here

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The Computer Scientist Who Finds Life Lessons in Board Games | Quanta Magazine Shang-Hua Teng has twice won the Gödel Prize, a top honor in theoretical computer science, but he often explores playful applications, like board games. For Shang-Hua Teng, theoretical computer science has never been purely theoretical. Now 58, Teng is a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California and a two-time winner of the Gödel Prize, an annual award recognizing groundbreaking theoretical work. But he often strives to connect that abstract theory to everyday life in ways both practical and playful. Continued here

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3 Steps to Improve Your Sales Messaging Emotionally connect by being honest. Continued here

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'Poker Face' Has a Sting in Its Tail What I tend to want in a crime drama is to be enveloped in atmosphere from the very first frame, and on that count, Poker Face delivers. The new, impeccably credentialed Peacock series, from the director Rian Johnson (Glass Onion, Knives Out) and the actor and writer Natasha Lyonne (Russian Doll), begins in the hallway of a Las Vegas hotel. The creak of a service trolley and the hallucinatory swirls of a carpet evoke a sense of low-grade panic. Inside the presidential suite, a maid (played by Dascha Polanco) sees something on a guest’s laptop screen and freezes in horror. The score throbs with percussive menace. As an introduction, it has everything: sharp intrigue, familiar stylistic tics, a promised peek into the murk of human iniquity. And this is all before Lyonne arrives playing Charlie Cale, as buoyant as a Labrador—if Labradors smoked and drank and holed up in rusty trailers in the Nevada desert with elderly Elvis impersonators for company. Poker Face has been touted as its creators’ take on procedurals from the 1970s and ’80s such as Columbo and Murder, She Wrote—shows anchored by lovable stars whose disheveled outerwear and argyle knits were as much a selling point for viewers as the weekly mystery. It’s a killer setup. There’s scarcely a person on this Earth as charismatic as Lyonne, as rumpled and chaotic and fun to watch. Continued here

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Trump and Facebook’s Mutual Decay This afternoon, Meta announced that it will soon reinstate Donald Trump’s account after a two-year suspension from Facebook and Instagram. The former president was deplatformed after his posts were deemed to have incited, or at the very least encouraged, the January 6 insurrection. But according to Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, the public-safety risk that triggered the punishment “has sufficiently receded.” The poster in chief can post once again. Any story that involves Facebook, Donald Trump, and the context of a failed coup attempt is, by nature, controversial. Giving Trump this megaphone back for his 2024 campaign is particularly thorny: The former president has offered zero evidence that he changed during his social-media exile. He may still use Facebook and Instagram to lie for reasons big and small, as well as to whip up partisan resentment and even violence, should it suit his needs. If anything, his posts on his own network, Truth Social, seem to suggest a man whose online engagement has become more erratic, angry, and conspiratorial; one report shows that he has amplified QAnon-promoting accounts more than 400 times since launching the platform. Continued here

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The Young Founder Who Fooled JPMorgan Fooled Me Too Reporters on young disruptors should take Skepticism 101. Continued here

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Apple's New Mac Mini Has Broader Appeal 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 it's easy to overlook the Mac Mini: Apple’s small, squarish PC isn’t particularly exciting. It’s not ultra-powerful like the Mac Studio, modular like the Mac Pro, or colorful like the 24-inch iMac. You can't quite tote it around and work anywhere like you can with a MacBook. But it’s Apple’s most utilitarian machine, and that's more evident with the 2023 refresh.  Continued here

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The Cognitive Dissonance of the Monterey Park Shooting News of mass shootings, as frequently as they happen in the U.S., has been shown to produce acute stress and anxiety. But for many Asian Americans, this past week’s deadly attacks in California—first in Monterey Park, then in Half Moon Bay—feel profoundly different. The tragedies occurred around the Lunar New Year, during a time meant for celebration. And not only did they happen in areas that have historically been sanctuaries for Asian residents, but the suspects in both cases are themselves Asian. These events have added fuel to what my colleague Katherine Hu described as “an invisible, pervasive dread” among many Asian Americans, including myself. For days I’ve been struggling to process—and produce fully formed thoughts about—the shootings. How should I respond, as someone of Chinese descent, living mere miles away from Monterey Park? When I was asked to potentially reflect on my personal experience for The Atlantic, I hesitated. After all, I’d gone about my day after reading the news, even putting off calling my folks. Had that been wrong? Continued here

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What decades of research tells us about living the good life Excerpted from The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert Waldinger, M.D., and Marc Schulz, Ph.D. Copyright © 2023 by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. Published by Simon and Schuster. Used with permission. All rights reserved. You might be wondering how we can be so sure that relationships play such a central role in our health and happiness. How is it possible to separate relationships from economic considerations, from good or bad luck, from difficult childhoods, or from any of the other important circumstances that affect how we feel from day to day? Is it really possible to answer the question, What makes a good life? Continued here

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Just How Chilly Is the World's Coldest City? The temperature in Yakutsk, Russia, dropped to a record-breaking minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit this month Wake up and start layering on multiple hats, scarves and mittens. Go outside to check on the car that’s been running all night, because turning it off could cause the engine to freeze. Visibility is poor because the city is shrouded in “ice fog”—a thick mist that forms when the temperature is too cold for hot air to rise. Welcome to winter in Yakutsk, the coldest city in the world. Continued here

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Fewer Remote Work Job Listings Signal New Hiring Strategy for Businesses New data from LinkedIn suggests power in the labor market may be shifting back toward employers. Continued here

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General Motors is investigating small EV "party" trucks After years of insisting that truck buyers are demanding larger and larger vehicles, automakers have seen the light and understand that many people want smaller, more efficient pickups. Maybe. Continued here

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Creativity training: How to develop creative skills in employees For organizations looking to maintain a competitive edge as the pace of change accelerates, the benefits of creativity training should not be overlooked. As automation continues to take over mindless, repetitive tasks, workers are left with new and more complex problems. Creativity training can develop the skills needed to solve these challenges, such as collaboration and divergent thinking. Many companies now include creativity as a core competency for employees across functions. In fact, the World Economic Forum reported that creativity was one of the most in-demand skills last year.  Continued here

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The Problematic Arrival of Anti-Obesity Drugs A new wave of medicines that treat obesity have taken the world by storm and been met with applause, concern, and abuse.These are “breakthrough drugs,” writes Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research and one of the best known practicing scientists in the United States. “While there are many drawbacks, we shouldn’t miss such an extraordinary advance in medicine—the first real, potent, and safe treatment of obesity.”  Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide (also known as Wegovy or Ozempic) was approved as an obesity treatment in adults back in June 2021 in the US and in early 2022 in the United Kingdom and the European Union. At the end of 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration also approved it for treating obesity in children aged 12 and up. On its heels, Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide (or Mounjaro)—approved for treating diabetes—is likely to be authorized for treating obesity in the US later this year. It’s already being prescribed off-label for that purpose.  Continued here

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Wait, Is This Pandemic Winter Going … Okay? Experts say things have gone better than expected with COVID, the flu, and RSV. But the bar set by the past few years is awfully low. For months, the winter forecast in the United States seemed to be nothing but viral storm clouds. A gale of RSV swept in at the start of autumn, sickening infants and children in droves and flooding ICUs. After a multiyear hiatus, flu, too, returned in force, before many Americans received their annual shot. And a new set of fast-spreading SARS-CoV-2 subvariants had begun its creep around the world. Experts braced for impact: “My biggest concern was hospital capacity,” says Katelyn Jetelina, who writes the popular public-health-focused Substack Your Local Epidemiologist. “If flu, RSV, and COVID were all surging at the same time—given how burned out, how understaffed our hospital systems are right now—how would that pan out?” Continued here

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RNC sued Google for filtering spam but never used Gmail tool that bypasses filter Google is ending a pilot program that let political emails bypass the Gmail spam filter, and it says it hasn't decided whether to convert the pilot into a more long-term option for political campaigns. The Republican National Committee (RNC) sued Google in October 2022 over its spam-filtering practices but never participated in the pilot program, Google said Monday in a motion to dismiss the RNC's lawsuit. Continued here

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Hidden connections that transcend borders and defy stereotypes Global consumer strategist Aparna Bharadwaj shares a fascinating glimpse at under-the-radar affinities that transcend cultures and borders -- from the way people snack in China and Saudi Arabia to how people shop for clothes in the US and Russia. "There are patterns where you least expect them," she says -- and paying attention to them just might bring the world a little bit closer. Continued here

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Will the 2016 Election Ever End? New research about the Kremlin’s election interference raises more questions than it answers. The 2016 presidential election will never die—or, at the very least, we appear doomed to discuss it forever. Earlier this month, NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics published a study in Nature Communications that complicates one purported element of Donald Trump’s ascension: the influence of Russian Twitter trolls. The researchers looked at roughly 1.2 billion tweets from the lead-up to the 2016 election. They sought to quantify just how many ordinary U.S. Twitter users were exposed to Russian accounts, and to better understand how that exposure did or did not change users’ political attitudes and voting behavior. Continued here

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The New Science of Customer Emotions When a company connects with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge. Yet building such connections is often more guesswork than science. To remedy that problem, the authors have created a lexicon of nearly 300 “emotional motivators” and, using big data analytics, have linked them to specific profitable behaviors. They describe how firms can identify and leverage the particular motivators that will maximize their competitive advantage and growth. The process can be divided into three phases. First, companies should inventory their existing market research and customer insight data, looking for qualitative descriptions of what motivates their customers—desires for freedom, security, success, and so on. Further research can add to their understanding of those motivators. Second, companies should analyze their best customers to learn which of the motivators just identified are specific or more important to the high-value group. They should then find the two or three of these key motivators that have a strong association with their brand. This provides a guide to the emotions they need to connect with in order to grow their most valuable customer segment. Third, companies need to make the organization’s commitment to emotional connection a key lever for growth—not just in the marketing department but across every function in the firm. Continued here

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Peru Closes Machu Picchu Amid Anti-Government Protests In the wake of escalating political unrest, Peru has officially closed Machu Picchu, as well as the Inca Trail leading up to it, officials announced over the weekend. The country’s Culture Ministry said the move is meant “to protect the safety of tourists and the population in general,” according to Daniel Politi of the Associated Press (AP). Continued here

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Do we really have more than three spatial dimensions? From any point in space, you are free to move in any direction you choose. No matter how you orient yourself, you can travel forwards-or-backwards, up-and-down, or side-to-side: you have three independent dimensions that you can navigate. There is a fourth dimension: time; we move through that just as inevitably as we move through space, and via the rules of Einstein’s relativity, our motion through space and time are inextricable from one another. But could additional motions be possible? Could there be additional spatial dimensions beyond the three that we know? This has been a question that physicists have entertained for about than a century, and that many mathematicians and philosophers have wondered about for significantly longer. There are numerous compelling reasons to consider the possibility, but there’s also the evidence we have from our Universe: both from a mathematical point of view and from a purely physical point of view. Although the physical consequences that would arise from extra spatial dimensions have tight constraints on them, the mathematical possibilities are just as mind-expanding as ever. Continued here

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Einstein's quantum ghost is here to stay Scientists have worldviews. That is not too surprising, given that they are humans, and humans have worldviews. You have a way of thinking about politics, about religion, about science, and about the future, and this way of thinking informs how you move in the world and the choices you make.  It is often said that you know someone’s true colors by seeing how they respond to a threat. That threat can be of many different types, from your house being broken into, to an intellectual threat against your system of beliefs. In the past weeks, we have explored how quantum physics changed the world, looking at its early history and the strange new world of unexpected laws and rules that dictate what happens at the level of molecules and smaller material components. Today, we look at how this new science impacted the worldview of some of its own makers, especially Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger. At stake for these physicists was nothing less than the true nature of reality. Continued here

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How to get to know all (the parts) of you | Psyche Guides An emerging form of psychotherapy offers some surprising ways to think about who you are and work towards self-acceptance is a registered social worker and a certified internal family systems (IFS) therapist and consultant. He is the founder of IFSCA, an organisation dedicated to teaching the IFS model to mental health professionals in Canada and beyond. Continued here

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Is it bad to drink coffee on an empty stomach? We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later. For many people, enjoying a freshly brewed cup of coffee first thing in the morning is a nonnegotiable way to start the day. But the idea that taking a sip without food could harm your gut — or contribute to other ills like bloating, acne, hair loss, anxiety, thyroid issues or painful periods, as some on social media have claimed — has garnered as much popularity as incredulity. Continued here

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Shopping with your nose: How body odors influence your buying behavior Our sense of smell is often considered to be weak and unimportant, but it’s stronger than you might think it is. Smell can influence our mood, evoke emotions, and influence our behavior. And new research shows that body odors can also affect the speed of buying decisions. We’ve known that common odors can influence buying decisions for over 30 years. For example, a 1990 olfaction study placed two identical pairs of Nike sneakers in rooms containing either a floral or a neutral scent, and those in the floral-scented room reported that they were 84% more likely to buy the shoes. Continued here

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The Spin of Earth's Inner Core May Be Changing, Scientists Say A new study finds our planet’s iron center shifts between spinning slightly faster and slightly slower than the surface—but not all experts agree For decades, scientists have studied the behavior of Earth's inner core, a solid iron ball at the heart of our planet that spans about 1,500 miles wide—nearly 70 percent of the moon's size. Some say that deep beneath our feet, this innermost layer is spinning—and at a different speed than the rotation we experience on the surface. Continued here

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A Refresher on Marketing Myopia Every year, a large majority of product launches fail. There’s debate about exactly what percentage—some say it is 75%, others claim it’s closer to 95%. Regardless of which number is right, there is no doubt that a lot of time and energy go into marketing products that will no longer exist in a year. Why is this? Some of the failure is likely attributable to the fact that many company leaders, including executives, have what’s called marketing myopia—a nearsighted focus on selling products and services, rather than seeing the “big picture” of what consumers really want. Continued here

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Please Don’t Call My Cervix Incompetent If you haven’t been pregnant, you’d be forgiven for thinking the language of pregnancy is all baby bumps, bundles of joy, and comparisons to variously sized fruits. But in the doctor’s office, it’s a different story. The medical lexicon for moms-to-be can be downright harsh. Case in point: the phrase geriatric pregnancy, which, until recently, was used to refer to anyone pregnant after their 35th birthday. This unfortunate term is thought to stem from a concept that dates back to the 1970s, when amniocentesis, a procedure to screen for genetic abnormalities, was becoming routine. That year, the National Institutes of Health identified 35 as the age at which the risk that the test would harm the fetus was roughly equal to the chance of a fetus being born with Down’s syndrome. In the four-plus decades since, advancements in screening technology have made that calculation essentially obsolete—and the idea that your 35th birthday is some sort of cliff-of-no-return absurd. Moms, for their part, always hated the phrase: When Jamila Larson, a 49-year-old mother of two in Hyattsville, Maryland, was called “geriatric” by a midwife in 2011, “it felt like a gut punch,” she told me. Continued here

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Why AI surveillance at work leads to perverse outcomes | Psyche Ideas is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, New York. She is the author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance (2023). Across all kinds of jobs and workplaces, companies are swiftly adopting artificial intelligence in the name of efficiency. The typical business rationale behind the adoption of AI-driven technologies is that they help to identify wasteful activities, or allocate resources more effectively, or otherwise streamline work processes in the service of maximised productivity. AI software is used to optimise supply chains, to reduce bottlenecks, to identify and reward workers for behaviours aligned with organisational goals, and to predict outcomes that can drive firms toward desirable practices in their quest for profit. Continued here

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After 10 Years, Amazon Is Shutting Down It's Charity Program That Gave Away $500 Million. The Reason Will Make You Mad Sometimes the impact isn't what you think. Continued here

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Lloyd Morrisett, Co-Creator of Sesame Street, Dies at 93 He used television to help underserved children overcome barriers and succeed in the classroom Lloyd Morrisett, the co-creator of Sesame Street who believed that television could help young children learn, has died at age 93.  Continued here

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Start-Ups Need a Minimum Viable Brand Sometimes it seems like Steve Jobs’ notorious reality distortion field has extended to all of Silicon Valley. Some eager entrepreneurs think their new product is so brilliant and so unlike anything else out there, that they just need to make it available and people will start clamoring over it. Other start-ups develop a core technology that has myriad possible uses and they’re not quite sure which will be most appealing, so they plan to just put it out on the market and let customers decide. Continued here S63 These Ants Were Trained to Sniff Out Cancer In just ten minutes, an ant could learn to identify urine from mice with cancerous tumors, a new study finds In a new study, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, ants could differentiate between the smell of urine from healthy mice and from mice with cancerous tumors. Continued here S48 The Case for Sleepovers They are a chance for children to be silly and a touch subversive, and to get a glimpse of how other families live their lives. Sleepovers were mostly a nightmare for me as a child, and I mean that literally: I had nightmares every single time I slept over at a friend’s house. Too embarrassed to tote my babyish night-light from home, I’d lie awake roiled with terror. Come morning—my Rolodex of anxieties exhausted—I’d immediately begin lobbying my mother on the drive home for the exact same sleepover routine the next weekend. I loved sleepovers. Continued here S54 Public Outrage Hasn’t Improved Policing 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. What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system? Continued here S20 Dennis Hong: 7 new species of robot that jump, dance — and walk on water More than a decade ago, roboticist Dennis Hong debuted a new generation of cutting-edge robots. Now he's back to reveal how his lab at UCLA has eclipsed its own achievements with a fleet of wildly advanced and delightful humanoid robots. Part demo, part time capsule, part glance into the future, Hong brings you into the excitement and potential of the next evolution in robotics engineering. Continued here S11 Box CEO Aaron Levie on Navigating the Shift Created by ChatGPT The tech leader stopped by Inc.'s office to talk about the future of AI, and which skills tech companies need to hire for. Continued here S19 What women-led startups in Latin America lost and gained during the recent tech downturn Andrea Viejo is the country manager of Laika, a Colombian e-commerce platform that offers products and services for pets. There are very few female founders or C-suite executives in the region. In 2021, female founding teams received only $38 million of the $14 billion in funding that was deployed in the region — less than 1%. Much of this problem is because most investors are men. You see this everywhere: from very visible regional VC firms to other more low-profile ones. They usually don’t support diverse teams during the startups’ early stages; there are basically no female mentors or investors that can help the teams so early on. Women show up when the startups start growing and making headlines and suddenly people say they’re a boys’ club. There are large companies today that did have women in their funding teams, like Kavak, but that’s rarely the case.  Continued here S7 How ChatGPT Can Help You Innovate The new chatbot does amazing things, but falls short of solving all your problems. Continued here S14 5 Tips for a More Organized Desktop Organizational tips to depressurize your workspace and feel less stressed and more productive. Continued here S36 Stolen League of Legends source code being ransomed, and Riot Games won't pay Riot Games has confirmed that an attack on its development environment last week included the theft of source code for its League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics games, along with a "legacy anticheat platform." The company has received a ransom demand but states that it will not pay. Continued here S17 How to Work with Your Unionizing Employees For decades, when companies learned their employees were considering unionizing, they followed a familiar playbook: do everything possible to fight and frustrate the unionization effort. Leaders often take a union drive personally, and see unions as a threat, failing to see the legitimacy of workers’ demands. But right now, with a tight labor market and rising worker organizing, companies should reconsider this approach, and opt for ones that lead to better outcomes for both workers and employers. An ugly anti-union effort can hurt morale, reputation, and increase turnover. Conversely, companies that take steps like voluntary recognition, partnering to create the best conditions for a fair campaign, and respecting workers’ decision can preserve a positive relationship with their employees. Continued here S33 COVID, RSV and the flu: A case of viral interference? Three years into the pandemic, Covid-19 is still going strong, causing wave after wave as case numbers soar, subside, then ascend again. But this past autumn saw something new — or rather, something old: the return of the flu. Plus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — a virus that makes few headlines in normal years — ignited in its own surge, creating a “tripledemic.” The surges in these old foes were particularly striking because flu and RSV all but disappeared during the first two winters of the pandemic. Even more surprising, one particular version of the flu may have gone extinct during the early Covid pandemic. The World Health Organization’s surveillance program has not definitively detected the B/Yamagata flu strain since March 2020. “I don’t think anyone is going to stick their neck out and say it’s gone just yet,” says Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. But, he adds, “we hope it got squeezed out.” Such an extinction would be a super rare event, Webby says. Continued here S5 How to Stop Procrastinating Do you keep postponing work you need to do? The problem probably stems from one of three things: your habits and systems (or lack thereof), your desire to avoid negative emotions (like anxiety and boredom), or your own flawed thinking patterns (which can make a task seem harder than it is). Luckily, there are simple strategies for managing each. Continued here S18 How climate change threatens to close ski resorts Anzère is often hailed as Europe's greenest ski resort. But the Swiss village had a difficult start to its 2023 winter season. Like many other Alpine ski resorts, low-lying Anzère was forced to close some of its pistes due to lack of snowfall and rainy conditions in late December and the first few days of January. The Alps experienced record high temperatures over Christmas and New Year, reaching 20.9C (70F) in northwest Switzerland. Continued here S24 You Might Survive a Nuclear Blast—if You Have the Right Shelter In a flash, a nuclear warhead unleashes the destructive power of hundreds of kilotons of TNT. The resulting inferno, and the blast wave that follows, instantly kill people directly in their path. But a new study finds that some people two to seven miles away could survive—if they're lucky enough to find just the right kind of shelter.  Dimitris Drikakis, a fluid dynamics researcher at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus, led the study both to illuminate the ongoing risks of nuclear escalation and to examine how one might have a chance at survival if the unthinkable should come to pass. "People have forgotten the devastating impacts nuclear war can have. But now we're seeing the discussion starting again, and there's a debate about the potential for nuclear war in Ukraine," says Drikakis. "I think this kind of study raises awareness within the wider population that nuclear explosions are not a joke." Continued here S22 The Rebellion Amazon Can No Longer Ignore Last time Amazon employee Darren Westwood was on strike, Amazon didn’t exist. He was working as a train guard and it was the 1980s—the only other time in recent British history when inflation surged past 9 percent.   In the early hours of Wednesday morning, he's on the picket line again outside Amazon’s giant Coventry warehouse, where he gets paid £10.46 ($12.90) per hour to work alongside a fleet of robots. Westwood, a member of the UK’s GMB Union, is here to campaign for higher pay. “When we started this protest, I think inflation was at 6 percent. Now we’re at 10.5 percent and people can't cope,” he says. “It just doesn’t feel fair. We’re doing 40 hours a week, stood up for 10 hours a day. And I'm still struggling to pay my bills.”  Continued here S15 Why Success Doesn't Lead to Satisfaction Many successful professionals struggle to enjoy their accomplishments. Our brains’ reward system, especially the neurotransmitter dopamine, drives us to achieve goals and rewards us with a great sense of pleasure when we do. But that pleasure is short lived, as our brains are hardwired to also seek balance from extreme emotional states. That leaves us with an empty longing to repeat whatever experience brought us that pleasure in the first place. This ostensibly addictive cycle throws our “enoughness” barometers completely out of whack, preventing us from being able to objectively gauge if what we’ve achieved is, in fact, satisfying. That’s why, although most of us intuitively know that happiness isn’t realized from the pursuit of money, status, or fame, we can’t stop ourselves from trying. If you really want lasting satisfaction in life, you’ll need to relearn your approach to finding it. The author presents several strategies. Continued here S55 The GOP Is a Circus, Not a Caucus 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. Kevin McCarthy has begun his job as speaker by servicing the demands of the most extreme—and weirdest—members who supported him, thus handing the People’s House to the Clown Caucus. Continued here S67 Do You Have the Right Influencers? Now that everyone wants to sell via social media, you've got to up your game. Continued here S39 Airborne poop probes: CDC considers testing airline sewage for pathogens The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering blending sewage sampling from airplanes into its wastewater surveillance system, which has proven useful for monitoring the spread and prevalence of a variety of pathogens, particularly SARS-CoV-2. Continued here S12 Will Sick Days Ever Be The Same? Instead of taking time off at home to recuperate from illness, remote workers are still logging on and toughing out their symptoms. Continued here S37 Samsung's new touch tech enables thinner, lighter OLED laptops As plenty of laptop makers proved at CES earlier this month, there will be plenty of OLED laptops to choose from in 2023. The technology's high-contrast, rich image quality has tempted creatives and power users alike. A new year means new ways to entice shoppers, though, so one approach Samsung plans to take with its next series of Galaxy Books concerns the screen's physical build. Continued here S40 Rocket Lab's first US launch: Big for the company and the site Wallops Flight Center, VA -- Off in the southwest, the last colors of sunset lit up the rim of the sky, as a crescent Moon and two planets lined up above. It was a gorgeous scene, but one that everyone was ignoring. Instead, all eyes were focused on a bright patch of artificial light on a barrier island a couple of miles away. The lights there were focused on a small, slender needle—small enough to be hauled to the launch pad by a pickup truck. Continued here S29 Chantix, Trulicity, Xeljanz, and most drugs advertised on TV are of "low therapeutic value" Slightly more than 70% of pharmaceutical drugs advertised on television are of “low therapeutic value,” meaning they offer little benefit over other available therapies, which are often cheaper. That’s the conclusion reached by researchers affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, the Yale School of Medicine, and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, who scrutinized advertised drugs for added benefit, safety, and strength of evidence, as compared with existing therapies. Their assessment was published last week in the journal JAMA Network Open. Continued here S38 DirecTV dumps Newsmax instead of paying new fee, drawing Republican outrage Newsmax is no longer on DirecTV, as the satellite video provider today said it decided not to renew an expiring deal because of Newsmax's money demands. Continued here S6 Apple Made a Humorous Film to Remind You to Take Your Privacy a Lot More Seriously A humorous new film highlights Apple's position on user data. Continued here S9 8 Ways to Cultivate a True Entrepreneurial Mindset Success as an entrepreneur takes more than just a good business idea. Continued here S8 3 Tips to Get Your Green Tech Up and Running When your business is designed to make an environmental impact, you can't let anything hold you back. Continued here S4 How Mindfulness Can Help Engineers Solve Problems Engineering work demands creativity and innovation in order to solve complex, interdisciplinary problems. But creativity and innovation skills are not emphasized in many traditional engineering courses. So engineers enter the workforce with important analysis skills, but may struggle to “think outside the box” when it comes to creative problem-solving. New research shows that by promoting divergent thinking, mindfulness can help engineers strengthen their ability to generate new ideas, leading to new ways of thinking and better solutions. Continued here S10 5 Tactics to Grow Your Business Despite Inflation Qualms Great things can happen when you start seeing inflation as an opportunity. Continued here S16 Women Get "Nicer" Feedback -- and It Holds Them Back When it comes to giving feedback, it’s important not only to balance kindness and candor, but to maintain that balance consistently — no matter who you’re talking to. However, the author’s recent research suggests that all else being equal, people tend to prioritize kindness more when giving feedback to women than when giving the same feedback to men. Why is this? There’s a common stereotype that women are warmer than men, leading people both to be naturally inclined to be kinder to women, and to assume that kinder feedback is more helpful to women. And to be sure, kindness isn’t a bad thing. But giving feedback differently based on the gender of the recipient creates problems for everyone. As such, the authors suggest that managers must make a conscious effort to give feedback that’s both accurate and kind regardless of the gender of the recipient. In addition, leaders can audit written feedback on an organizational level for gendered patterns in the tone and content of feedback, helping root out biases that may be harder for individuals to spot. Ultimately, kindness and candor alike are necessary components of effective feedback. It’s up to all of us to make sure we take an equitable approach to distributing both. Continued here S47 A Hollywood Armorer on the Rust Shooting Charges Who’s responsible for the on-set shooting, and how can the movie industry prevent the next one? When someone is accidentally shot and killed on a film set, who is responsible: the actor holding the gun, the person who handed it to him, or the professional charged with managing the movie’s weaponry? Last week, New Mexico prosecutors proposed an answer: all three. Continued here S42 Drug maker paid for "news" story on CBS's 60 Minutes, doctors' group alleges A 13-minute segment on a recent episode of CBS's 60 Minutes appeared to be a news story on Novo Nordisk's weight-loss drug Wegovy, but was actually a sponsored promotion violating federal regulations, according to the nonprofit public health advocacy organization Physicians Committee. Continued here S44 The People Who Don’t Read Books Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.  It was updated at 2:10 p.m. ET on January 25, 2023.   Continued here S45 Why Are Toy Commercials Still Like This? Plenty of modern parents want their kids to play with whatever they like. But in ad-world, dolls are for girls, and trucks are for boys. Last month, I ran a tiny media experiment in my own home: I recorded all of the toy commercials that my 3-year-old daughter watched in a one-week period, looking for patterns in how she was being advertised to. What I saw in those 28 ads was like something dreamed up in a Mad Men–era boardroom: girls preparing plastic food, boys gripping monster-themed action figures. Researchers told me that such gendered toy marketing shapes how kids play—and what they learn. Continued here S41 Tesla made an annual profit of $12.6 billion in 2022 Tesla published its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2022 on Wednesday afternoon. The company brought in $24.3 billion in revenue, a 37 percent increase on Q4 2021. Automotive revenues accounted for the lion's share—$21.3 billion, a 33 percent increase from Q4 2021. That translated to $3.7 billion in net profit once generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP) were applied—an impressive 59 percent increase from Q4 2021. Continued here S46 Work Past 62? 'Non!' Say the French. If you want to understand why the French overwhelmingly oppose raising their official retirement age from 62 to 64, you could start by looking at last week’s enormous street protest in Paris. Retirement before arthritis read one handwritten sign. Leave us time to live before we die said another. One elderly protester was dressed ironically as “a banker” with a black top hat, bow tie, and cigar—like the Mr. Monopoly mascot of the board game. “It’s the end of the beans!” he exclaimed to the crowd, using a popular expression to mean that pension reform is the last straw. Continued here S43 RSA's demise from quantum attacks is very much exaggerated, expert says Three weeks ago, panic swept across some corners of the security world after researchers discovered a breakthrough that, at long last, put the cracking of the widely used RSA encryption scheme within reach by using quantum computing. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2024 (51) ►  December (1) ►  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... 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