3 Productivity Tips You Can Start Using Today

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3 Productivity Tips You Can Start Using Today When a major product is about to launch or your team is scheduled to make an important presentation, it’s easy to ride the wave of deadline-induced adrenaline spikes and push yourself to work every waking moment. But of course that’s not sustainable, and we inevitably crash. So how can you make productivity habitual and lasting? Continued here

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Panafricanisme : 4 questions cl L’Union africaine (UA) – composée de 55 pays membres – a fait des progrès considérables pour intégrer les pays du continent et leur donner une voix dans la politique mondiale. Au cours des deux dernières décennies, elle a élaboré des politiques significatives en matière de paix et sécurité et de commerce, comme la Zone de libre-échange continentale africaine. La Commission de l'Union africaine contribue à définir l'agenda et à représenter les intérêts africains dans les forums mondiaux aux côtés de partenaires importants comme les Nations unies et l'Union européenne. Continued here

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Fences: August Wilson's play powerfully affirms the value and struggles of black life University of the Witwatersrand provides support as a hosting partner of The Conversation AFRICA. Fences, a creative examination of a black family’s experience, is one of the most frequently performed plays in the US. It was first developed in 1983 by celebrated African American dramatist August Wilson, becoming a successful Broadway production in 1987. Continued here

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Amazon's CEO Just Did the 1 Thing No Leader Should Ever Do Andy Jassy sent an email to employees ordering them back to the office starting May 1. Continued here

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The Soul of a Start-Up But all too often, companies lose their souls as they mature. Firms add new systems and structures and bring in experienced professionals—and in the process somehow crush their original energizing spirit. In research into more than a dozen fast-growth ventures and 200-plus interviews with founders and executives, the author has discovered how firms can overcome this problem. His work shows that there are three crucial dimensions to a start-up’s soul: business intent, or a loftier reason for being; unusually close customer connections; and an employee experience characterized by autonomy and creativity—by “voice” and “choice.” All three provide meaning to stakeholders. Continued here

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Want to use your project before dark? These 5 options offer bright images in broad daylight You don’t need to sit in total darkness in order to view films (or any other form of media) on a projector. High-quality projectors can deliver crystal clear images in brightly lit settings, including the outdoors. The best projectors for daylight viewing have enough lumens to hold up on a bright day and deliver an image quality that meets your standards, whether that’s 4K resolution or a high-contrast picture. Brightness is the single most important factor when shopping for good projectors for daylight use. This is typically measured in either lumens or a more accurate and standardized value known as American National Standards Institute (ANSI) lumens. If you’re using a projector before sunset, you’ll ideally want to look for a minimum of 3,000 lumens or 1,000 ANSI lumens to ensure that images won’t be dull or washed out by the sun. However, projectors with this much brightness tend to be cost-prohibitive. If budget is a factor, you may want to opt for a budget projector with fewer lumens and make adjustments to your environment for optimal viewing (e.g., draw the shades, or if you’re outside, set the screen up in a shady area). You can also sift through customer reviews to see how the projector performs in brighter conditions. Last, it’s also important to keep in mind that the larger the screen size, the more lumens are required for premium image quality. Essentially, the best projector screen for daylight use will be on the smaller end of the spectrum, but you can also set expectations for large-screen viewing accordingly. Continued here

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Neuromarketing: What You Need to Know The field of neuromarketing, sometimes known as consumer neuroscience, studies the brain to predict and potentially even manipulate consumer behavior and decision making. Over the past five years several groundbreaking studies have demonstrated its potential to create value for marketers. But those interested in using its tools must still determine whether that’s worth the investment and how to do it well. Continued here

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Paul Mashatile is set to become South Africa's deputy president: what he brings to the table Keith Gottschalk is an ANC member, but writes this article in his professional capacity as a political scientist. University of Western Cape provides support as a hosting partner of The Conversation AFRICA. Continued here

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Yes, Lab-Grown Meat Is Vegan I wish I came to veganism through an epiphany about the right to personhood of animals, or recognition of the environmental harm that animal farming causes. But I didn’t. What turned me vegan was a night of vomiting brought on by undercooked ostrich. It was Glastonbury Festival, 2019. Being 21, hungover, and hungry, I thought I’d get a snack from the only vendor at the festival without a queue. Later, while crouched in a portaloo batting away hallucinations of ostrich slaughter, I vowed never to eat meat again. Today, I eat the same diet as many vegans. My diet is defined by wanting to avoid animal suffering and damage to the environment but, unlike some vegans, I don’t dislike meat. I know that if I tasted salmon again my tastebuds would explode with pleasure, but I abstain because I don’t think my right to life trumps that of another animal. Believe me, I want to eat meat again. But I won’t. Continued here

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Amazon Keeps Selling Out Of These Weird & Fascinating Products With Near-Perfect Reviews The word “weird” gets a bad rap, but some of the weirdest products are actually low-key gems that can solve a variety of issues or satisfy a craving you didn’t even know you had. If you’ve ever wondered: Why can’t there be more crispy corners when you bake brownies? Keep scrolling to find the strangest, coolest brownie pan designed with three times as many corners. Maybe you’re frustrated with constantly dropping crumbs in between appliances; say hello to a stove gap cover you can cut to size. Prepare to see “weird” in a whole new light. These are among the weirdest, most fascinating products with near-perfect reviews that Amazon can’t keep in stock. Continued here

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Amazon keeps selling out of these 40 clever home improvement products with near-perfect reviews If you like your home goods to be practical, efficient, and well-reviewed, then today is your lucky day. This list of clever home improvement products is not only chock full of high ratings from happy buyers, but they’re all sold on Amazon, too — so with just a few clicks of your mouse or taps of your screen, they could be all yours. And, if you’re someone for whom household maintenance and chores doesn’t come naturally (ahem, like me), then you’ll especially appreciate the guidance and confidence you can glean from the reviews, too. So, take a look around your home — if there’s an area that needs your attention or a project you’ve been putting off, then chances are good you’ll find a solution in this list. Continued here

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10 Ways to Boost Customer Satisfaction Customer satisfaction is at its lowest point in the past two decades. Companies must focus on 10 areas of the customer experience to improve satisfaction without sacrificing revenue. The authors base their findings on research at the ACSI — analyzing millions of customer data points — and research that we conducted for The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction. For three decades, the ACSI has been a leading satisfaction index (cause-and-effect metric) connected to the quality of brands sold by companies with significant market share in the United States. Continued here

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Tech Talent Is Flooding the Job Market Unlike other economic downturns, when employers cut roles no longer critical to business operations, laid-off workers from the tech sector offer a wide range of highly sought-after skills, including artificial intelligence, automation, data science, and more. By recruiting and hiring from the former ranks of the world’s leading digital companies, traditional companies can gain access to new talent who can help turn their stagnant business models into digitally agile models to prepare for increasingly turbulent business environments. In this article, the authors identify the reasons for these layoffs and explain how non-tech companies can benefit from the sudden influx of tech talent. Continued here

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This is what a decade of dating apps has done to your brain From studies pointing to increased levels of low self-esteem to an overstimulated reward system, what has a decade of dating apps done to our brains? Journalist Olivia Petter dives into the research. It felt like shopping for love. That’s the best way I can describe my first experience on a dating app. I downloaded Tinder in 2014 when I was in my second year at university. Having been almost entirely single up until that point – and having had far too many experiences of unrequited love with boys at school – I found the ability to swipe from one single man to another thrilling. Continued here

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Germany raises red flags about Palantir's big data dragnet Britta Eder’s list of phone contacts is full of people the German state considers to be criminals. As a defense lawyer in Hamburg, her client list includes anti-fascists, people who campaign against nuclear power, and members of the PKK, a banned militant Kurdish nationalist organization. Continued here

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The Power of Talk: Who Gets Heard and Why The head of a large division of a multinational corporation was running a meeting devoted to performance assessment. Each senior manager stood up, reviewed the individuals in his group, and evaluated them for promotion. Although there were women in every group, not one of them made the cut. One after another, each manager declared, in effect, that every woman in his group didn’t have the self-confidence needed to be promoted. The division head began to doubt his ears. How could it be that all the talented women in the division suffered from a lack of self-confidence? Continued here

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'Last of Us' Episode 6 Trailer Reveals the Return of a Major Episode 1 Character After one emotional tale of brothers last week, we move onto another in Episode 6 of The Last of Us, as Joel finds Tommy at long last. Following the early release of the previous installment, The Last of Us returns to its normal weekly spot on Sunday night this week. Even though Episode 6 features the reuniting of family, things might not be all that warm and fuzzy as Joel and Ellie traverse new territory. Now that they’ve reached their destination, what’s next? Who will bring Ellie to the Fireflies facility out west? Continued here

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Give Your Back a Break With Our Favorite Office Chairs 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 You've probably given more thought to the mattress you sleep on than the chair you sit on. That’s fine! Sleep is extremely important. But if you spend several hours—more than eight, if you’re like me—at your desk, it’s a good idea to give the humble chair more attention. Finding the best office chair is not just about finding a comfortable seat. The right materials can whisk away body heat, and adjustability options can tailor the chair to your body. We’ve spent the past two years sitting on 40 office chairs, and these are our favorites. Continued here

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Here's What Scientists Are Learning about Women's Health from Other Female Animals Projected on the massive screen behind me onstage, a herd of giraffes rushes across a sweep of savanna. With the video set to loop, the giraffes gallop endlessly, giving me time to slowly lean across the podium and ask my audience: “Did you spot the pregnant giraffes?” I am delivering a plenary lecture at the 2019 Nobel Conference in Stockholm. The theme of that year's conference was bioinspired medicine—finding solutions in nature to human health problems—and I wanted to call attention to the connections between women and other female animals. As a cardiologist and evolutionary biologist, I'd been posing this question about the giraffes to medical students in my courses at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, for years, so I could tell it had landed as planned. I watched the crowd scan the troop of giraffes for evidence of pregnancy—a baby bump, a lagging mother-to-be. I suspected that few, if any, of the assembled scientists and physicians had considered this question when first taking in the scene. That was precisely my point. Given the importance of female health challenges such as pregnancy to the survival of a species—including our own—shouldn't the realities of female life in the wild be more than an afterthought for doctors and biomedical researchers? Continued here

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Why Fox News Lied to Its Viewers The network’s hosts and leaders knew that Trump had lost the election, but feared the consequences of telling their audience the truth. Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact. Continued here

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DMT therapy appears effective for depression in phase 2 clinical trial London-based biotech Small Pharma has released top-line data for its DMT-assisted therapy for major depressive disorder (MDD) — and the results are promising. The phase 2a trial, which administered their DMT candidate SPL026 intravenously, found a “statistically significant and clinically relevant” reduction in depressive symptoms, at least over the short term. Continued here

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The Competitive Advantage of Nations “National prosperity is created not inherited,” writes Michael E. Porter. The Competitive Advantage of Nations reports on Porter’s four-year, ten-nation study of the patterns of competitive success in leading trading countries. Porter concludes that companies achieve competitive advantage through acts of innovation. And their capacity and push to innovate is affected by four broad attributes of a nation, attributes that constitute the “diamond” of national advantage: Continued here

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30 Years Ago, an Amazing Time-Travel Movie Cemented an Unkillable Franchise How do you top one of the best zombie movies of all time? By turning its sequel into a time-traveling epic through Arthurian legend, of course. That’s the approach director Sam Raimi took in Army of Darkness, his follow-up to the cult classic Evil Dead II and the final entry in his genre-redefining trilogy. But thanks in part to the subversive brilliance of Army of Darkness, the Evil Dead franchise remains as unkillable as the Deadites that relentlessly pursued Bruce Campbell’s cocksure hero Ash across space and time. Continued here

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The Physics Principle That Inspired Modern AI Art Ask DALL·E 2, an image generation system created by OpenAI, to paint a picture of “goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach,” and it will spit out surreal images of exactly that. The program would have encountered images of beaches, goldfish, and Coca-Cola during training, but it’s highly unlikely it would have seen one in which all three came together. Yet DALL·E 2 can assemble the concepts into something that might have made Dalí proud. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop­ments and trends in mathe­matics and the physical and life sciences. Continued here

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Man beats machine at Go in human victory over AI A human player has comprehensively defeated a top-ranked AI system at the board game Go, in a surprise reversal of the 2016 computer victory that was seen as a milestone in the rise of artificial intelligence. Continued here

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'Hello Tomorrow!' Makes Optimism Look Oppressive In AppleTV+’s new dramedy Hello Tomorrow!, set in a retro-futuristic society, everything shiny is useless. A few months ago, I nearly ran over one of Uber Eats’s delivery robots with my car. The little guy was trundling along a crosswalk when I made a left turn. As if startled by my presence, it stopped abruptly in the middle of the street, and its “eyes,” two rings of lights, blinked. Even though its position now meant that I couldn’t complete my turn and was stuck blocking oncoming traffic, I instinctively apologized. How could I not? It had a name emblazoned on its side: Harold, if I remember correctly. Sorry, Harry. Continued here

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Why psychopaths rise to power Brian Klaas, a political scientist and associate professor at University College London, argues that while the popular phrase “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” is true to a certain extent, the real problem lies in broken systems that attract and promote the wrong kind of people. In his research, Klaas has found that people who crave power are more likely to self-select into positions of power, resulting in a slate of leaders who are not representative of the general population. He believes that the solution is to design systems that attract better people. Continued here

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How to Unlock Your iPhone With a Security Key Apple continues to tighten iOS security, and iOS 16.3 (and iPadOS 16.3, and macOS Ventura 13.2) includes support for physical security keys. In other words, a physical device can verify your Apple ID login in place of a passcode. It’s a great way to boost your security, and here’s how it works. These keys work in tandem with two-factor authentication (2FA), so you still need your password. If you already have 2FA set up on your account, you’re familiar with logging into a new Apple device using your email address and password and then having a six-digit code sent via SMS or to another device (like an iPhone or a Mac) that you're already logged in on. The security key replaces that second step, the passcode. Continued here

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The weird reasons there still isn't a male contraceptive pill In 1968, a young man visited his psychiatrist with an awkward observation. He had been taking the drug thioridazine to treat schizophrenia, when he noticed something unusual: his orgasms had become "dry". Nearly three decades later, the story became the inspiration for a sensational new idea – could a similar drug form the basis of a male contraceptive pill? Eventually researchers discovered another drug with the same ejaculation-suppressing effect, the blood pressure mediation phenoxybenzamine. Neither drug would be safe enough to give to healthy men on its own, but the idea was to find out how they worked – then recreate this mechanism using something else.   Continued here

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Feel first, think second: Is our brain really cut out for the modern world? Do you ever feel like your brain isn’t meant for modern times, like it’s a relic of a bygone era? After all, we’re afraid of snakes and spiders, even though we rarely encounter them in the developed world. We wolf down energy-packed fatty foods like our next meal isn’t a sure thing, even though the bulk of us have access to many more calories than we need. And we’re afraid of the dark in our own homes. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to deal with immediate risks, like hunger and danger, but the vast majority of humans today are neither starving nor in danger of being hunted by a predator or bitten by a poisonous creature. Instead the risks we face — obesity, climate change, pollution, nuclear suicide — are creeping and complex. And they’ve materialized in an evolutionary blink of an eye, leaving our brain’s threat and thinking systems maladapted to deal with them. Continued here

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Astronomers Design a Futuristic Telescope Concept To Find Far-Off Earths There has long been a limiting factor in the development of space-based telescopes — launch fairings. These capsules essentially limit the overall size of the mirrors we are able to launch into space, thereby limiting the sensitivity of many of those instruments. Despite those limitations, some of the most successful telescopes ever have been space-based. But even with all the advantages of being in space, they have so far failed to find an exoplanet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. Enter a new project called the Diffractive Interfero Coronagraph Exoplanet Resolver (DICER), which recently received funding from NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). Continued here

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What Are Your Personal Values? Early this year, I attended a three-week long workshop to help me improve my productivity and wellbeing. Walking into my first session, everything seemed normal. I met 19 other people from across the globe, we introduced ourselves, and then, we were asked to complete a self-reflection exercise. We were each handed a sheet of paper with a circle printed at its center. The circle was divided into eight equal segments: Career. Romance. Health. Family. Relationships. Spirituality. Fun. Finances. Continued here

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In 3 Shocking Moves, M&M's Gave Tucker Carlson a Masterclass in Brand Strategy. And Broke the Internet. Never has candy been so controversial. Continued here

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Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Review: You’ve Seen This Before There's a new 200-megapixel camera and a boxier frame, but otherwise, Samsung's biggest non-folding phone is eerily similar to the S22 Ultra. One thing is true about consumer electronics in 2023: if you’re in the market for a smartphone, the reasons to upgrade year after year have slowed to a crawl. Continued here

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Why Does Chocolate Taste So Good? A Scientist Unwraps the Volatile Chemistry Whether it is enjoyed as creamy milk chocolate truffles, baked in a devilishly dark chocolate cake, or even poured as hot cocoa, Americans, on average, consume almost 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of chocolate in a year. People have been enjoying chocolate for at least 4,000 years, starting with Mesoamericans, who brewed a drink from the seeds of cacao trees. In the 16th and 17th centuries, both the trees and the beverage spread across the world, and chocolate today is a trillion-dollar global industry. As a food scientist, I’ve conducted research on the volatile molecules that make chocolate taste good. I also developed and taught a very popular college course on the science of chocolate. Here are the answers to six of the most frequent questions I hear about this unique and complex food. Continued here

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Hope and doubt collide in an eventful episode 6 of The Last of Us New episodes of The Last of Us are premiering on HBO every Sunday night, and Ars' Kyle Orland (who has played the games) and Andrew Cunningham (who hasn't) will be talking about them here right after the episodes air. While these recaps don't delve into every single plot point of the episodes, there are obviously heavy spoilers contained within, so go watch the episode first if you want to go in fresh. Continued here

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A Year of Putin’s Wartime Lies On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, ordered the invasion of Ukraine, unleashing the full force of his military on an unthreatening neighbor, and the full force of his propagandists on his own population. He had little doubt about his prospects. For years, he had been regarded in the world press as a singularly cunning strategist; at the same time, he methodically crushed civil society in his country and sidelined any dissenting voices in the Kremlin. So who was going to stop him on the road to Kyiv? Hadn't Donald Trump, during his Presidency, exposed and deepened the fissures in the NATO alliance? Under Joe Biden, the United States seemed finished with foreign adventures—humiliated by its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and distracted by its internal divisions. And what of Ukraine itself? It was a pseudo-nation, hopelessly corrupt and led by Volodymyr Zelensky, a former sitcom actor with an approval rating south of thirty per cent. Putin's serene presumption was that, within a week, his forces would overrun Kyiv, arrest Zelensky and his advisers, and install a cast of collaborators. Putin was counting on historians to celebrate his rightful restoration of Imperial Russia. Continued here

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Warren Buffett Says 1 Follow this Buffett life lesson as your new measure for success. Continued here

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3 Mistakes First-Time Marketers and Product Designers Make A common mistake among first-time marketers who are increasingly involved not just in promoting a new product, but also contributing to the design and testing of it is assuming that the customer is just like them. Whether designing a product, marketing a brand experience, or selecting a present for a loved one, it comes down to giving others the gift of understanding. It’s the singular way to become a more thoughtful gift giver and and more customer-centric with the power to surprise and delight others. Here are three common gift-giving errors to avoid. Continued here

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Marvel's Inability to Explore the Blip Is Phase Four's Biggest Failure In a now infamous 1997 episode of The Simpsons, “The Itchy & Scratchie & Poochie Show,” Homer Simpson — who has inexplicably become the voice of the ill-received “Poochie” cartoon character — tries to save his job by pitching to a room of writers ways to elevate Poochie’s importance. Instructs Homer: “Whenever Poochie’s not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, ‘Where’s Poochie?’” Continued here

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Why the Tesla Recall Matters “We have never been in a more dangerous place in automotive-safety history, except for maybe right when cars were invented and we hadn’t figured out brake lights and headlights yet.” More than 350,000 Tesla vehicles are being recalled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration because of concerns about their self-driving-assistance software—but this isn’t your typical recall. The fix will be shipped “over the air” (meaning the software will be updated remotely, and the hardware does not need to be addressed). Continued here

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The Most Underrated Sci-Fi Movie on HBO Max Reveals a Controversial Branch of Pseudoscience Weathering with You features a way to make the rain disappear — and it has a message for our warming planet. Since time immemorial, humans have prayed to the gods to change the weather — usually in the form of dances to summon rain to Earth. But in the Japanese animated sci-fi movie, Weathering with You, director Makoto Shinkai flips that idea on its head, featuring a so-called “Sunshine Girl” who can pray away the rain and make the sun appear again. Continued here

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You Need to Watch the Most Disturbing Psychological Thriller on HBO Max ASAP The events of March 30, 1981, will live on forever in a frustrating and stubborn kind of infamy. While President Ronald Reagan was leaving the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., an aggressively unremarkable 26-year-old named John Hinckley Jr. fired at him six times with a .22 caliber revolver. Reagan would survive the attack, and Hinckley Jr. would be tried and declared not guilty by reason of insanity. But perhaps more crushing to the would-be assassin was the utterly deserved rejection he received from actress Jodie Foster, for whom he believed himself to be committing the act for. Foster, of course, had been seen in a certain 1976 New Hollywood classic, a controversial effort from director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader. In a chilling case of life imitating art, the film that influenced Hinckley Jr. follows a disturbed young man who plots to assassinate a presidential candidate after being romantically rejected by a campaign aide. Although the connection is undeniable, the truth is a bit more nuanced. Continued here

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How High Achievers Overcome Their Anxiety A surprising number of extremely successful people are often wracked by anxiety, the author writes. They suffer from what psychologists call thought traps and others might refer to as cognitive distortion or thinking errors: negatively biased and untrue patterns of thought that arrive automatically and often ensnare us, preventing us from seeing clearly, communicating effectively, or making good reality-based decisions. To combat thought traps, some anxious achievers turn to overwork, others to coping mechanisms such as substance use, avoidance, or passive-aggressiveness. Aarons-Mele explains the 11 most common thought traps—all-or-nothing thinking, labeling, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, filtering, discounting the positive, “should” statements, social comparison, personalization and blaming, ruminating, and emotional reasoning—and recommends strategies for overcoming all of them. Continued here

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Chinese balloon saga is part of a long history of U.S.-China tensions It’s not surprising the recent Chinese “weather balloon” incident has set off alarm bells. Concerns inevitably mounted as the massive sphere slowly and very visibly sailed from Montana to its destruction by a Sidewinder missile off the South Carolina coast. Continued here

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The ’90s Blockbuster That’s Also a Symphony Megan Garber’s entertainment picks include the “full-throttle camp” of Face/Off, a forthcoming translation of The Iliad, and the cringe-comedy series The Rehearsal. 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

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Saying the Ineffable: Poetry and the Language of Silence Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of feeling and time. When the vessel becomes too small to hold what we pour into it, language spills into poetry. In this respect, poetry serves the same function as prayer: to give shape and voice to our unspoken and often unspeakable hopes, fears, and inner tremblings — the tenderest substance of our lives, to be held between the palms and passed from hand to compassionate hand. Poetry thus becomes an instrument of self-transcendence — an instrument that, in Adrienne Rich’s abiding words, “can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.” That function of poetry as the language of the unsaid is what the Canadian poet and Native American culture scholar Robert Bringhurst explores in the final pages of his altogether fascinating book The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology (public library). Continued here

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New Zealand’s Plan to Tax Cow Burps Misses a Crucial Point New Zealand, where agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change, is proposing a tax on cow burps. The reason seems simple enough: Cows release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and New Zealand has a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by the mid-century. Right now, the country’s effects on climate change come roughly equally from carbon dioxide and methane. Worldwide, 150 governments have committed to cutting methane emissions, both from agriculture and by cracking down on the largest source — fugitive leaks from natural gas pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Continued here

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A Coolant Leak Stranded Three Astronauts in Space — and a New One has Appeared Two months ago, a coolant leak left three spacefarers stranded aboard the orbiting laboratory. Members of the spaceflight community are puzzled by Russia’s second case of coolant leak at the International Space Station in two months. Continued here

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You Need to Play the Best Arthurian Epic on Xbox Game Pass ASAP Plans suck. Sure they’re useful, but often plans don't work. It's why we have adages like "man plans, god laughs" and "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." This intersection of planning and punching is where we set our stories and live our lessons. What do you do when a plan falls apart? Do you have what it takes to adapt? This is just one of many questions at the core of Mount and Blade: Bannerlord 2 from TaleWorlds Entertainment. It is a genre unto itself, a massive medieval warfare game that cares about everything from the number of archers in your retinue to the price of olives in the marketplace. Deep, meticulous, and oddly compelling, Bannerlord 2 is everything you want in an Arthurian fantasy (and maybe too much). Continued here

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Turkish President Erdogan's grip on power threatened by devastating earthquake The earthquake that struck Turkey on Feb. 6, 2023, is first and foremost a human tragedy, one that has taken the lives of at least 45,000 people to date. The disaster also has major implications for the country’s economy – the financial loss from the damage is estimated to be US$84 billion – and its politics. Continued here

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Is Data Scientist Still the Sexiest Job of the 21st Century? Ten years ago, the authors posited that being a data scientist was the “sexiest job of the 21st century.” A decade later, does the claim stand up? The job has grown in popularity and is generally well-paid, and the field is projected to experience more growth than almost any other by 2029. But the job has changed, in both large and small ways. It’s become better institutionalized, the scope of the job has been redefined, the technology it relies on has made huge strides, and the importance of non-technical expertise, such as ethics and change management, has grown. How it operates in companies — and how executives need to think about managing data science efforts — has changed, too, as businesses now need to create and oversee diverse data science teams rather than searching for data scientist unicorns. Finally, companies need to think about what comes next, and how they can begin to think about democratizing data science. Continued here

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Here's How to Create the Perfect Morning Routine for You, According to a Time Management Coach Instead of following Tim Cook's morning routine, how about one designed just for you? Continued here

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Are Eggs Healthy for You? A Chicken Expert Weights In Like caviar and bubbly, eggs are now for fancy people. A bad case of avian flu has egg production way down and prices way up, as many have remarked. Some have even resorted to building their own private flock on the hypothesis that it’s cheaper to raise chickens than buy supermarket eggs. While eggs typically join milk, bread, and butter as shopping list staples, this egg inflation creates an appropriate moment to pause and meditate on how good eggs really are for us. Sure, they’re versatile and offer protein, but what else is going on behind that shell? Continued here

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Razer BlackWidow V4 Pro review: More than enough buttons, too much software If you've ever wished your keyboard had more buttons, Razer's BlackWidow V4 Pro may be for you. It expands the full-size keyboard layout to include a column of macro keys and three non-mechanical buttons on the keyboard's left edge. The keyboard also has a volume roller and a so-called Command Dial, which lets you twist your inputs to control zoom, scroll through a long spreadsheet, or tweak the size of a Photoshop brush. Continued here

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5 Things You Need to Know About Rihanna's Inspiring $1.4 Billion Business Empire You don't have to be a Grammy-winning singer to make these lessons work. Continued here

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'Quantumania' Proves Marvel Still Isn’t Over 'Avengers: Endgame' — And That’s a Good Thing Four years later, Marvel still isn’t over the events of Avengers: Endgame. But maybe that’s a good thing. After all, half of the people (and aliens) living in this cinematic universe were unceremoniously snapped out of existence, only to reappear five years later in a world that was just starting to move on. So it’s no huge surprise that Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania opens with a reference to the damage done by Thanos even as this movie introduces us to an entirely new Avengers enemy. Quantumania sneaks several small but impactful references to Avengers: Endgame into its opening scenes. Scott Lang’s (Paul Rudd) new book about his adventures as Ant-Man includes a brief nod to the challenges everyone has faced in recent years. But the bigger moment comes from Scott’s daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who winds up in jail after using some Pym Particles to shrink a cop car. Continued here

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How you can tap into the power of giving (and not get taken advantage of) Like Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s Fairy Tales before it, Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree is as a dark tale that serves as a warning for children. The story centers on the relationship between a Boy and a Tree. The Tree desires nothing more than to make the Boy happy, and so she gives him whatever he wants. At various stages of his life, she offers him her fruit to sell, her branches to build a home, her trunk to carve a boat, and, when she is nothing more than a stump, herself as a place for him to rest. The moral of the story is clear: Giving is a sucker’s game. Better to be the taker and get what you want. It’s a lesson many seem to carry into adulthood. Consider the qualities commonly perceived to drive success. Are they kindness, generosity, and compassion? Nope. Successful people are viewed as savvy, ambitious, results-driven, and on a mission to own all the apples. And there’s some truth to that. Continued here

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You Need to Play the Most Underrated Final Fantasy Before It Leaves Xbox Game Pass Final Fantasy XIII stands out as a black sheep in Square Enix’s long-running franchise. For many, it is seen as the breaking point of the franchise, where it deviated too far from the norm. Part of this is due to the original intention of making the world of FF13 its own franchise of sorts — the Fabula Nova Crystallis — which included turning the numbered entry into a trilogy. None of these ideas would go to plan due to the less-than-stellar response of the original Final Fantasy XIII. While time has been kind to FF13, and critics are starting to come around to its charms and important contributions to the franchise, the final chapter in this period of Square Enix’s history continues to be derided. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is an even further departure from what would be considered normal for Final Fantasy but acts as a poignant finale for the Fabula Nova Crystallis, and you only have till February 28th to play it before it leaves Xbox Game Pass. Continued here

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The 61-year-long search for artificial hearts Nothing shows more clearly the perfect engineering of the heart than our own failed attempts to imitate it. This history of the total artificial heart is punctuated with both brilliant innovation and continual clinical failure. In 1962, John F. Kennedy challenged the scientific community to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade. In 1964, cardiovascular surgeon Michael DeBakey persuaded President Lyndon B. Johnson to fund a programme to develop the first functional self-contained artificial heart, launching a race to successfully make one before the moon landing. In 1969 both aims were apparently achieved, with the Texas Heart Institute implanting the first total artificial heart just three months before the launch of Apollo 11. However, while the moon landings have led to the Space Shuttle, Mars Rover, and International Space Station, and (despite a long lull) the newest aims to develop a moon base to bring us to Mars, a reliable off-the-shelf total artificial heart is still just out of reach. Continued here

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These Are the 13 Android Phones Worth Buying 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 The best Android phone means something different to everyone—it's hard to find one that'll cater to your every need. But chances are, there's a smartphone that comes close to what you're looking for. From the bottomless pit of phone choices, these are our favorite Android handsets, including the Google Pixel 6A, our top pick. All the phones we've selected here have their own advantages, and we've laid them out as best we can based on our extensive testing. Continued here

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The Age of AI Hacking Is Closer Than You Think If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Its feasibility depends on the specific system being modeled and hacked. For an AI to even begin optimizing a solution, let alone develop a completely novel one, all of the rules of the environment must be formalized in a way the computer can understand. Goals—​known in AI as objective functions—​need to be established. The AI needs some sort of feedback on how well it is doing so that it can improve its performance. Continued here

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Encyclopedias: Pliny the Elder’s radical idea to catalog knowledge Among the achievements of the ancient Roman Empire still acclaimed today, historians list things like aqueducts, roads, legal theory, exceptional architecture and the spread of Latin as the language of intellect (along with the Latin alphabet, memorialized nowadays in many popular typefaces). Rome was not known, though, for substantially advancing basic science. But in the realm of articulating and preserving current knowledge about nature, one Roman surpassed all others. He was the polymath Gaius Plinius Secundus, aka Pliny the Elder, the original compiler of scientific knowledge by reviewing previously published works. Continued here

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The Floods, the Farms, and the River That Roared Back This story originally appeared on High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On the surface, the Salinas River, which courses through the agricultural heart of California’s Central Coast, seems more like an ex-river. Even after major winter storms, it is rarely more than a creek. In Paso Robles, California, an old Spanish outpost that has since become a wine-growing mecca, the mostly dry riverbed cuts through an unprepossessing stretch of land surrounded by heaps of garbage and makeshift structures built by the city’s growing unhoused population. Continued here

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Scientists have discovered how to make almost any vaccine more potent Northwestern University researchers have found that they can supercharge cancer vaccines simply by structuring their ingredients in a precise way — and if the discovery translates from mice to people, it could forever change how we design vaccines. “The collective importance of this work is that it lays the foundation for developing the most effective forms of vaccine for almost any type of cancer,” said study author Michelle Teplensky. “It is about redefining how we develop vaccines across the board, including ones for infectious diseases.” Continued here

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How Jazz Can Unlock Your Team’s Next Breakthrough “Generative conversations,” in which multiple perspectives are integrated to kindle new solutions, are a powerful way to address the complex challenges facing organizations. Experts from Wharton and SEB explain the neuroscience behind why they work. As a society, and as organizations, we are struggling with complex challenges with no easy solutions. So called “generative conversations,” in which multiple perspectives are integrated to kindle new solutions, are a powerful way to address these challenges. The Swedish bank SEB reported breakthroughs and new opportunities after implementing structured generative conversations to make progress on complex business problems. In this article, Wharton scientists Vera Ludwig and Elizabeth Johnson, Wharton professor Michael Platt, and SEB’s Per Hugander describe neuroscientific insights that may explain how generative conversations enhance creative idea generation and lead to novel, impactful solutions. They also explain how Hugander introduced a surprising element — jazz — to facilitate these conversations.   Continued here

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Twitter's Two-Factor Authentication Change 'Doesn't Make Sense' Twitter announced yesterday that as of March 20, it will only allow its users to secure their accounts with SMS-based two-factor authentication if they pay for a Twitter Blue subscription. Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, requires users to log in with a username and password and then an additional "factor" such as a numeric code. Security experts have long advised that people use a generator app to get these codes. But receiving them in SMS text messages is a popular alternative, so removing that option for unpaid users has left security experts scratching their heads. Twitter's two-factor move is the latest in a series of controversial policy changes since Elon Musk acquired the company last year. The paid service Twitter Blue—the only way to get a blue verified checkmark on Twitter accounts now—costs $11 per month on Android and iOS and less for a desktop-only subscription. Users being booted off of SMS-based two-factor authentication will have the option to switch to an authenticator app or a physical security key. Continued here

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Zillow Rate Your Neighbors? A Designer Reimagines Apps Back in 2015, the music streaming company launched Wrapped, a year-end recap for each user that offered insights into their music listening habits and the year’s most popular artists. Other brands began borrowing the idea, a shameless if entertaining ploy to ratchet up engagement. This December, Iverson, a digital designer, wondered what Wrapped would look like when applied to our most basic apps.  Using the interface design tool Figma, Iverson mocked up a Wrapped for Google Maps, Robinhood, and Starbucks and shared the images to Twitter. The tweets received a modest amount of attention, garnering hundreds of likes each, but Iverson was just getting started. Nearly every day since, he has imagined clever new features that add unexpected touches to our most well-worn apps. There’s ChatGPT, but in Apple Messages. Instagram, but with the option to pay a fee to undo “deep likes.” Lyft-style reviews, but for Tinder (“Looked Like Pics!”). And, the ones that went certifiably viral: Beat Minesweeper to cancel your subscription, and iOS alarms, but for the whole household, so the alarm is only disabled once everyone is up.  Continued here