The Care and Feeding of Supreme Court Justices

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The Care and Feeding of Supreme Court Justices     From lavish vacations to fancy dinners, conservative activists have constructed an elaborate infrastructure to reward ideological loyalty on the high court.In addition to going on expensive vacations with wealthy right-wing donors who have interests before the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas has, ProPublica reported last week, secretly participated in fundraising efforts for organizations bankrolled by the Koch network, the right-wing advocacy organization founded by the billionaire brothers Charles and the late David Koch. Thomas was “brought in to speak,” staffers told ProPublica, “in the hopes that such access would encourage donors to continue giving.” Continued here

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Our Special Forces' Capacity to Evolve Despite Failure     The lesson 30 years on from the Battle of Mogadishu is that, with the right response, defeat can be a better tutor than victory.Thirty years ago today, the U.S. military was involved in a brief but brutal battle in Somalia. In a series of firefights over two bloody days, 18 members of America’s most elite Special Forces and hundreds of Somali militiamen were killed. This was the Battle of Mogadishu, which the journalist Mark Bowden (now an Atlantic contributing writer) famously reported for The Philadelphia Inquirer and later adapted as the book and the film Black Hawk Down. Continued here

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Ars takes a close-up look at the first US lunar lander in half a century     NASA has not sent a spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. Since that time, the Soviet Union, China, and India have successfully landed there, but the United States has gone elsewhere. There are various reasons for this, including a sharp focus by NASA on exploration of Mars. But now that is finally about to change. Continued here

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Pretty Soon, Your VR Headset Will Know Exactly What Your Bedroom Looks Like     Imagine a universe where Meta, and every third-party application it does business with, knows the placement and size of your furniture, whether you have a wheelchair or crib in your living room, or the precise layout of your bedroom or bathroom. Analyzing this environment could reveal all sorts of things. Furnishings could indicate whether you are rich or poor, artwork could give away your religion. A captured marijuana plant might suggest an interest in recreational drugs.When critics suggest that the metaverse is a giant data grab, they often focus on the risks of sophisticated sensors that track and analyze body-based data. Far less attention has focused on how our new “mixed reality” future—prominently hyped at last week’s Meta Connect conference—may bring us closer to a “total surveillance state.” Continued here

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OpenCore Legacy Patcher project brings macOS Sonoma support to 16-year-old Macs     When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That's the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Continued here

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The College Backlash Is Going Too Far     Americans are losing their faith in higher education. In a recent Wall Street Journal poll, more than half of respondents said that a bachelor’s degree isn’t worth the cost. Young people were the most skeptical. As a recent New York Times Magazine cover story put it, “For most people, the new economics of higher ed make going to college a risky bet.” The article drew heavily on research from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which found that rising student-loan burdens have lowered the value proposition of a four-year degree.American higher education certainly has its problems. But the bad vibes around college threaten to obscure an important economic reality: Most young people are still far better off with a four-year college degree than without one. Continued here

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The Smartest Man Who Ever Lived     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.If the most dangerous invention to emerge from World War II was the atomic bomb, the computer now seems to be running a close second, thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence. Neither the bomb nor the computer can be credited to, or blamed on, any single scientist. But if you trace the stories of these two inventions back far enough, they turn out to intersect in the figure of John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born polymath sometimes described as the smartest man who ever lived. Though he is less famous today than some of his contemporaries—Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman—many of them regarded him as the most impressive of all. Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, remarked: “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man.” Continued here

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Kevin McCarthy's Brief Speakership Meets Its End     A revolt by right-wing Republicans toppled the leader of the House in an unprecedented vote.Kevin McCarthy began his 269th day as House speaker by recounting all the times he proved his doubters wrong. In January, after a series of humiliating defeats, the California Republican hung on to become speaker of the House. In the months since, he reminisced, he has narrowly averted the twin crises of a national-debt default and, this past weekend, a government shutdown. “I just don’t give up,” McCarthy told reporters after making one more plea to his party to keep him in his post. Continued here

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Is Biden Relying On the Wrong Slogan?     Bidenomics is a clapback at the president’s critics. But it’s also an attempt to attach his legacy to the unwieldy forces of the economy.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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Deepfake celebrities begin shilling products on social media, causing alarm     News of AI deepfakes spread quickly when you're Tom Hanks. On Sunday, the actor posted a warning on Instagram about an unauthorized AI-generated version of himself being used to sell a dental plan. Hanks' warning spread in the media, including The New York Times. The next day, CBS anchor Gayle King warned of a similar scheme using her likeness to sell a weight-loss product. The now widely reported incidents have raised new concerns about the use of AI in digital media. Continued here

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Ram     Fifteen years ago, Uruguay was experiencing an energy crisis brought on by its reliance on fossil fuels; today, the nation produces 98 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (and even exports extra energy to neighboring countries). How did they turn things around so quickly? Uruguay's former secretary of energy, Ramón Méndez Galain, explains how they pulled off this unprecedented shift -- and shares how any other country can do the same. Continued here

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This Year's Physics Nobel Awards Scientists for Slicing Reality into Attoseconds     Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier split the award for their ability to picture nature in a billionth of a billionth of a secondSome processes in physics happen in the blink of an eye while others happen in the blink of a photon. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini of the Ohio State University, Ferenc Krausz of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and Anne L’Huillier of Lund University in Sweden for developing the field of ultraast laser pulses. L’Huillier is only the fifth woman to have ever won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Continued here

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Mars Sample-Return Missions Could Reduce Tensions with China on Earth     The U.S. may not beat China at retrieving Martian rocks first, according to an independent review board’s conclusion. But the U.S. can still lead with an exchange of samples here on EarthIn September NASA’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) independent review board (IRB), led by the agency’s former “Mars czar” Orlando Figueroa, released findings and recommendations about the MSR project, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) that means to return the first samples from the Red Planet. The IRB members did a terrific job analyzing, in their words, the “near zero probability” of its current plans and budget succeeding. Continued here

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A Gory Amalgam of Truth and Spectacle     With the news last month that the Ultimate Fighting Championship (brand: authentic, highly skilled violence) has merged, in a deal worth billions upon billions, with World Wrestling Entertainment (brand: fabulously stylized, highly skilled violence), it appears to be time to reset the reality levels. Again. What new form of narrative, what gory amalgam of truth and spectacle, what double-talking rough beast approaches? In other words: Are you ready to rumble?If you doubt the importance of this bit of business, consider that braided into the corporate histories of both the UFC and WWE, and into their respective anthropologies (we’ll be coming back to this), is the rise of Donald Trump. Trumpism has expressed and explored itself through both of these entities. And as they coalesce, and as Trumpism itself further coalesces, we are surely heading into—as the great New Hampshire metal band Scissorfight once put it—the “high tide of the big grotesque.” Continued here

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It's crunch time for companies building NASA's commercial lunar landers     Within a few months, NASA may celebrate the first successful landing of an American spacecraft on the Moon in more than 50 years. This would be an immense confidence boost for commercial startups with an eye on the nascent market for lunar missions. It would also signal to NASA that it can rely on commercial companies for foundational elements of the agency's Artemis program to return humans to the Moon. Continued here

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The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity     A sallow light rises over the land at the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the most celebrated movies of the 20th century. Stanley Kubrick’s shot pulls in on a band of furry man-apes gathering around a watering hole; no women, no children—or at least none easily discerned. The scene shifts to a young male, who pulls a large bone from a skeleton. He stares at it for a moment before beating the ground, slowly at first, then furiously. He soon runs off and uses it to bludgeon another hominin to death. Prehistoric man has invented the first weapon.This is the story of what I call “tool triumphalism”: Man invented weapons, claimed dominion over his peers and the rest of the animal kingdom, and all of our achievements flow from there. As a culture, we still tell ourselves that this special cleverness is why we’ve succeeded as a species. And maybe that’s true—but not in the way you might think. Among our ancient ancestors, the most prolific tool creators probably weren’t male. And I propose that the most important early invention people came up with probably wasn’t a weapon, fire, agriculture, the wheel, or even penicillin. Humanity’s greatest innovation was gynecology. Continued here

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They've begun: Attacks exploiting vulnerability with maximum 10 severity rating     Ransomware hackers have started exploiting one or more recently fixed vulnerabilities that pose a grave threat to enterprise networks around the world, researchers said. Continued here

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Mercury is still shrinking as it cools     The planet Mercury may be hot, but it appears to be cooling down. That's the conclusion of a new study that looked for the kinds of features on Mercury that can form as the surfaces of planets contract due to cooling. These vertical faults, called "graben," are not only common across the planet's surface but appear to have formed within the last few hundred million years—and possibly much more recently. Continued here

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Probiotic bacterium kills preterm infant; FDA blasts supplement maker     The Food and Drug Administration is warning health care providers not to use probiotics containing live bacteria or yeast in preterm infants after the agency began investigating the July death of a preterm, low-weight infant given such a product in an unnamed hospital. Continued here

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The seed guardians of Peru trying to save the potato     The potatoes that grow in the Andes of South America are far more than a starchy staple of the local diet. They are a rich part of the culture."There's one really wonderfully beautiful potato, it looks almost like a rose. And the name of that one is 'the-one-that-makes-the-daughter-in-law-cry'," says Tammy Stenner, executive assistant at Asociación Andes, a non-profit organisation in Cusco, Peru, that works to protect biodiversity and indigenous rights in the region. "A potential mother-in-law would ask the young woman who wants to marry her son to peel this potato, but she has to peel it with care, so not wasting the flesh, not ruining the shape." Continued here

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Telling the Truth About Taiwan     On a recent visit, a series of conversations brought home to me just how pernicious our falsehoods have been.For some 50 years, American policy toward Taiwan has been based on the assertion that people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits believe that they are part of the same country and merely dispute who should run it and precisely how and when the island and the continent should be reunified. It is a falsehood so widely stated and so often repeated that officials sometimes forget that it is simply untrue. Indeed, they—and other members of the foreign-policy establishment—get anxious if you call it a lie. Continued here

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Jordan Dinwiddie: 10 lessons I learned from being a nerd     Are you super devoted to a sports team, superhero or perhaps "Star Wars"? You're part of a fandom, just like storyteller Jordan Dinwiddie. She shares 10 lessons she's learned nerding out on all kinds of things and unpacks the joy, creativity and community that comes from being a fan. (Note: This talk contains graphic language.) Continued here

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Dealmaster: Early Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sales heat up, Apple deals, and more     The Amazon Prime Big Deal Days event is creeping ever closer. For early shoppers, there are plenty of excellent tech deals available today from Amazon and competing retailers. Our curated Dealmaster comes with savings on Sony's wildly popular WF-1000XM4 noise-canceling earbuds, serious sales on Apple gear (including the AirPods Pro and the still-excellent Apple Watch Series 8), as well as deals on a bevy of home and office gear. Continued here

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How AI Could Help China and Russia Meddle in U.S. Elections     ChatGPT and similar AI programs give propagandists and intelligence agents a powerful new tool for interfering in politics. The clock is ticking on learning to spot this disinformation before the 2024 electionThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Continued here

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A new "time window": Meet the winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics     Electrons move and change energies at such a blistering speed that physicists long believed it would never be possible to capture their dynamics, even with the fastest lasers. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists who used ultrafast pulses of light to do just that with a technique known as attosecond spectroscopy. Per the citation, Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huillier "have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms." Continued here

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Apocalypse philosophy: What science fiction teaches us about existence     The best kind of science fiction is philosophy. Yes, lasers and teleporters are cool, but science fiction asks big questions. It imagines alternate worlds and exaggerated scenarios. It presents you with “What would life be like” thought experiments. The Matrix is about knowledge and truth, and Star Trek asks how we should form a perfect society. Gattaca considers reproductive ethics, and Starship Troopers is about just war theory. Isaac Asimov‘s rules for robots are more important than ever. Science fiction, when it’s done well, stays in your head for a long time.One of the most popular subgenres of science fiction features apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds. The Walking Dead ran for 11 seasons, and The Hunger Games has four movies. World War Z sold 15 million copies worldwide, and Station Eleven has won numerous awards. Here, we examine the deeper, philosophical question behind common apocalyptic ideas. Continued here

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Samsung's New 'Fan Edition' Devices Are a Little More Wallet-Friendly     If you heard the words Fan Edition, chances are you'd expect something extraordinary. Perhaps a limited edition design or a feature that takes a product to a level that only true fans can appreciate. This is not the case with the deluge of hardware Samsung just announced: the Galaxy S23 FE, Galaxy Tab S9 FE, and Galaxy Buds FE.These are all slightly cheaper versions of their top-tier counterparts that Samsung announced throughout the year. They're not attention-grabbing, and they have lesser specs, but they cover the middle ground for buyers who don't want to spend the big bucks on the company's flagship hardware and don't want to settle for the budget devices. Truly, they're for Samsung loyalists—there might be better devices for the money, but there's no way you'd shell out on the competition, right? Continued here

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How Retail Investors Value ESG and Frame Sustainable Investment Strategies     New research co-authored by Wharton’s Christina Zhu finds that retail investors care a lot about firms’ ESG-related activities, but mainly whether they affect the value of their investments.A new paper titled “Retail Investors and ESG News” by experts at Wharton and elsewhere has sharpened the debate on the role of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information in framing sustainable investment strategies. The research finds that retail investors do care a lot about the ESG-related activities of the firms, but mainly if they affect the value of their investments — not necessarily with altruistic motives. Continued here

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Could your workout routine give your brain a boost? This neuroscientist thinks so     Drawing inspiration from animal studies, particularly those involving the growth of hippocampal brain cells in rats, she explores the possible connection between increased exercise and brain expansion. Suzuki also looks into the multifaceted relationship between exercise, sleep, cardiovascular function, and brain health.  Continued here

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Psychedelics could give a mind's eye to those who've never had one | Psyche Ideas     is a staff writer at Psyche. Her science journalism has appeared in Vice, The New York Times and Wired, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.As far back as Anastasia can remember, her mind has been devoid of visual images. She can’t picture friends, objects, places or anything visual in her ‘mind’s eye’. When she was 32, she learned the formal word to describe this lack of internal visual imagery – aphantasia (a condition brought to the public’s attention by the neurologist and Psyche author Adam Zeman, and which is estimated to affect 3 per cent of people). Then one day, Anastasia ate psilocybin or ‘magic’ mushrooms and it altered the contents of her mind profoundly. Continued here

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The Only Sin That Republicans Can't Forgive     Kevin McCarthy’s demise continues a cycle among House Republicans that now traces back nearly half a century.The fall of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy today demonstrated again that the one sin that cannot be forgiven in the modern Republican Party is being seen as failing to fight the Democratic agenda by any means necessary. Continued here

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How Digital Technologies Could Boost Tiny Retailers in Developing Countries     Micro-retailers are vitally important to the economies of developing countries and to consumer packaged goods companies. But their full potential is not being realized. The adoption of digital technologies could help change that. But for that to happen, obstacles must be overcome. Three strategies can address them. Continued here

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Attosecond spectroscopy wins 2023's Nobel Prize in Physics     If you want to understand and measure the world around you, one of the most important tools at your disposal is the ability to image — or take a snapshot — of precisely what’s occurring. In the 19th century, photography meant holding your subject perfectly still while you accumulated large amounts of light: several seconds worth of it. In more modern times, we can perform high-speed photography, using a shorter “pulse” of light to image an individual, brief moment in the life of objects as they naturally occur, including objects in motion. We can do this with visible light for macroscopic objects, but we can do with in a variety of wavelengths on microscopic scales with a special type of technology: high-speed laser pulses.Because individual atoms and molecules are so small, as little as an Angstrom (or ~10-10 meters) across, that means that changes/transitions occurring within them — driven by electrons — can occur in as little as that distance, 10-10 meters, divided by the speed of light, or 3 × 108 m/s. That works out to a few attoseconds, where a single attosecond is just 10-18 seconds. Can we perform imaging that quickly? We can if we can generate short-enough laser pulses, and that’s exactly what the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics is for, awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier. Here’s the science behind this incredible advance. Continued here

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Kevin McCarthy Got What He Deserved     The House speaker surrendered every principle, and in the end, it still wasn’t enough to save him.“The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.” With those words, uttered in the well of the House on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker came to an inglorious end. McCarthy is the first speaker in history to be removed by his own party; eight Republicans voted to dethrone him, along with all 208 Democrats who were present and voting. McCarthy goes down as having served the shortest speakership since the 1870s. Continued here

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Where did the brain come from?     Before our evolutionary ancestors had a brain—before they had any organs—18 different cell types got together to make a sea sponge. Remarkably, some of these cells had many of the genes needed to make a brain, even though the sponge has neither neurons nor a brain.In my neuroscience lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, my colleagues and collaborators discovered this large repository of brain genes in the sponge. Ever since, we have asked ourselves why this ancient, porous blob of cells would contain a set of neural genes in the absence of a nervous system? What was evolution up to? Continued here

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Climate Disruptions Are Especially Dangerous for the Opioid Epidemic     As debates rage over how we can best protect those more directly affected by climate change, one group remains absent from the discussion: people with an opioid addiction.Around three million people in the U.S. have an opioid use disorder or are dependent on heroin. More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses from April 2022 to April 2023, most of which were from illicit fentanyl opioids. Cities with high overdose rates, such as New York City, San Francisco, Calif., and Phoenix, Ariz., are also at the highest risk of extreme heat, drought and flooding, and the opioid epidemic is likely to peak just as climate change’s most brutal effects start to take root. Continued here

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The Employer-Educator Partnership That Can Fill U.S. Jobs     Middle-skills workers — those with less than a four-year college education but more than a high school diploma — make up more than 60% of U.S. workers over the age of 25. These workers are the life force that keeps America’s economic engine humming, but, increasingly, as they enter the workforce they find that they are unemployable, even though companies have a growing number of jobs to fill. Much of the problem, the authors report, stems from inadequate collaboration between employers and community colleges, which represent employers’ largest potential source of talent. The authors offer practical suggestions for improving employer-educator collaboration, and they encourage business to take the lead in doing so, because they know the emerging requirements of work and control the most valuable currency in the labor market — jobs. Continued here

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An Indonesian company's rent-a-solar-panel model aims to reduce emissions     Founded in 2018, Xurya Daya Indonesia started by renting out rooftop solar panels to a mall, a health clinic, and a property business. Today, the company has over a 100 projects across Indonesia as of mid 2023, according to co-founder Edwin Widjonarko. “We produce 130 million [kilowatt hours of] clean energy and generate around 3,000 green jobs,” he told Rest of World. In 2019, Xurya collaborated with the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources on the national program to increase the use of solar panels. Last year, the company raised $33 million in a series A round.Solar panel technology is suitable for Indonesia because it is a tropical archipelagic nation. Around 2018, when we were starting out, Indonesian people were starting to grow aware of renewable energy and energy transition. There was also a rise in investment in the energy sector but no one was willing to enter the solar business. Continued here

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How to Solve Tough Problems Better and Faster     When it comes to solving complicated problems, the default for many organizational leaders is to take their time to work through the issues at hand. Unfortunately, that often leads to patchwork solutions or problems not truly getting resolved. Instead, Anne Morriss offers a different framework: to increase trust and transparency and the speed of execution to truly tackle big problems. Morriss is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and founder of the Leadership Consortium. With Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, she wrote the new book, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems. Continued here

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Viruses Found in Animal Poop May One Day Treat Diabetic Foot Ulcers, Scientists Say     Known as bacteriophages, the specialized viruses could hijack and kill drug-resistant bacteriaFoot ulcers are a common complication of diabetes. And in some cases, the bacteria that infect these open wounds don’t respond to treatment with antibiotics, which can leave doctors with no option but to amputate part of the person’s foot or leg. Continued here