This genetically engineered houseplant does the work of 30 typical plants
For those of us with seasonal depression or anxiety, houseplants can offer immense comfort. In fact, adding loads of leafy things to your home has been shown to boost mood and relieve anxiety — in short, they help us (metaphorically) breathe a bit easier. But now, a specially designed plant can literally clear the air.
A Paris-based startup called Neoplants aims to harness the natural air-filtering properties of plants and turn them up to 11. By genetically engineering both a pothos (Epipremnum aureum) plant and its associated root microbiome, the team behind Neoplants created an organism they claim is capable of doing the work of up to 30 air purifiers. The company’s first high-tech houseplant, called Neo P1, recently hit the market.
Continued here  S3Why Did We All Have the Same Childhood?
You might not think of typing “BOOBS” on a calculator as cultural heritage, but it is. The custom has been shared, preserved, and passed down through generations of children sniggering in math class. This sacred communal knowledge, along with other ephemera of youth—the blueprints for a cootie catcher, the words to a jump-rope rhyme, the rhythm of a clapping game—is central to the experience of being a kid.
When children are together, they develop their own rituals, traditions, games, and legends—essentially, their own folklore, or, as researchers call it, “childlore.” That lore can be widespread and long-lasting—the mind boggles to think how many generations of children have played tag, for instance. Even seemingly more modern inventions, such as the “cool S”—a blocky, graffiti-ish S that has been etched into countless spiral-bound notebooks—are a shared touchstone for many people who grew up in different times and places in the U.S. How is it that so many children across time and space come to know the exact same things?
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| � |  | S6Seoul Halloween crush: understanding the science of crowds could help prevent disasters – here's how
Proper planning is absolutely key to public safety. Authorities need to anticipate potential risks, not just for specific events, but wherever large numbers of people are likely to gather. Calculating the safe capacity of spaces, anticipating crowd flows, dynamically assessing the size of crowds and ensuring that safe capacities aren’t exceeded on the ground are the bare minimum that should be done.
We need to understand groups of people as complex, dynamical systems made up of human “parts” interacting with one another and with their environment, and move beyond the tired narratives of “mob”, “stampede” and “panic” that unfortunately still dominate discussions of crowds. This will require further support for an inter-disciplinary approach that draws on physics, computer science, social psychology, sociology, criminology, policing and politics.
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S7How "Wordle editor" became a real job at The New York Times
To start, Bennett clarified that "Wordle editor" is not a full-time job in and of itself. Bennet has been an associate puzzles editor at the Times since 2020, and that role continues to fill most of her professional time. Editing Wordle currently takes up an average of 30 minutes to an hour a day, Bennett said, a "startup rate" that will help "build a [word] list for the year going forward into the future."
Working from Josh Wardle's original list of about 2,300 five-letter words (which were previously assigned randomly to different days), Bennett said she starts by just "looking at the list and seeing things pop out... I'm still choosing words in a kind of arbitrary way, but also in a well-informed way. ... I would call it intuitive, but it's really based on years of experience working with words from other puzzles."
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| � | | S8The inconvenient truth of global warming in the 21st century
Despite sounding the alarm, the past three decades have led to a far more dire situation. As identified in 2021’s 6th IPCC report, carbon dioxide concentrations now sit at 412 ppm, Earth’s average temperature is a full 1.3 °C (2.3 °F) above pre-industrial levels, and our global carbon emissions have increased to a new all-time high: nearing 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, up from 22 billion in 1990. The best time to act was long ago, but the second best time to act is now. Here are the truths of the matter that everyone who’s vested in following what the science shows should know.
The Earth, at present, is indisputably a warmer planet today than at any point in all of recorded human history. This isn’t because of the Sun; it isn’t because of Milankovitch cycles; it isn’t because of volcanic activity. It’s directly due to the human-caused emission of greenhouse gases, with the concentration of carbon dioxide being the dominant driving factor in increasing the Earth’s temperature.
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S9Is There a Cure for Information Disorder? - JSTOR Daily
It’s difficult to separate the vitality of democracy from the vibrancy of the information that fuels it. In their landmark work on political knowledge in America, the scholars Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter made the case that good information is “the currency of citizenship,” a necessary precondition for meaningful political participation. Their concern, articulated in the 1990s, was that despite the normative assumption that information is critical to democracy, most Americans have always been poorly informed. Like financial capital, factual understanding is disproportionately distributed among the population. More recently, this interest in the inequities of information has transformed into a more acute worry about the quality of information—from specious (and strategic) claims of “fake news” to the widespread fear that misinformation is undermining democratic foundations.
To grapple with information necessarily is to consider the medium of its representation. Our assumptions about the democratic role of information were forged in the era of the press, when the circulation of printed documents was the means of public information and newspapers were the central technology of citizenship. This modernist logic would reach its zenith in the mid-twentieth century, a moment of presumed consensus that the function of print-based journalism was to provide an objective accounting of public life that could serve as a resource for individual citizens’ rational decision making. The duty of the citizen was to “follow the news,” while the press was trusted to serve as gatekeeper, managing the representational space. Consider, for example, the longstanding claim of The New York Times that it provides “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” While the institutional effort to determine what information is “fit” to print has always been an exercise in privilege and exclusion, it also regulated the information environment, ostensibly to facilitate the functioning of democracy.
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| � | | S10Inside the Oscars of the watch world
For the 22nd time, the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG) - held in "the G-spot of the watch world" - brought together the weird and wonderful watchmaking fraternity. There was a buzzing red carpet with the Ryan Seacrest of horology seeking out all the biggest fits of the night. Among talk of who's gyrotourbillons were more bonkers, which complications were more complicated, and who had the most bling sapphire-set bezels, the glam squad were out and about with tuxedos here and khaki desert jackets there, and among the non-descript black derby shoes, some Gucci loafers, Adidas Stan Smiths and black patent Louie-Bs stood out for those looking out.
Inside Geneva's answer to LA's Dolby Theatre, the auditorium was a vision of red, black and gold. There were spotlights, there was a voiceover announcing nominations backed by suspense-building ambience music. There was drama, there were surprise winners, and at the heart of it all, Switzerland's answer to Ricky Gervais Edouard Baer cracking watch jokes and interrupting any overly-arduous speeches.
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S11Can Glowing 'Ray Cats' Save Humanity?
Olkiluoto is a pine-covered island jutting out into the Baltic Sea, just off the western coast of Finland. Beneath the surface, there’s 2-billion-year-old bedrock made mostly of gneiss, hard as steel. It’s here that engineers are digging a facility known as Onkalo, Finnish for “cavity” or “pit.” They’re constructing a tomb, a quarter of a mile underground, to store spent uranium rods from nuclear power plants for the next 100,000 years. And depending on who you ask, future generations might be warned away from sites like it by glowing cats.
Onkalo, which when it begins operations around 2025 will be the world’s first permanent nuclear waste repository, is the product of decades of thinking around the fact that nuclear waste’s potential for harm won’t just outlive everyone alive today—it may outlive entire languages and civilizations. How do you protect people who will live further in the future than humans have even existed?
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S12The Health Gap
A special series about how men and women experience the medical system – and their own health – in starkly different ways.
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S13Sustainable and inclusive growth: A weekly briefing
More workers will be needed to accelerate efforts to produce renewable energy. But the Great Attrition, coupled with industry-specific challenges, has hollowed out the renewables workforce. This week, McKinsey research reveals strategies the sector can use to restock its talent pools. A separate McKinsey piece details the infrastructure that Europe will need to construct to keep the continent’s future electric vehicles (EVs) charged. Meanwhile, an article about reducing emissions that stem from the “built environment”—a term that encapsulates the life cycles of residential and commercial buildings—looks at business opportunities that could develop as buildings attempt to get greener.
The fast-growing renewable-energy sector could require a quadrupling of its global workforce by 2030 (exhibit). Many of these jobs will demand specific technical expertise. Senior partner Jan Krause and coauthors suggest several ways for the industry to fill employment gaps. Among them: offer clearer career development paths, boost long-term incentives, and acquire qualified talent by buying related companies.
Continued here |
S181 in 3 people cheat. Here’s what to do if you’re the 1.
About one-third of people have committed infidelity at some point in their lives. If you’re one of them, should you confess it to your romantic partner?
One way to answer the question is to consider whether you would want to know if your partner had cheated on you. Surveys show that 77% of people would want to know, but that still leaves about a quarter of us who would prefer ignorance. It’s also worth questioning your own motives: Maybe you only want to get the secret off your chest to make yourself feel better.
It’s a difficult dilemma with no one-size-fits-all solution. But fortunately, as psychologist Michael Slepian explained to Big Think, recent research has revealed insights into the nature of secrets, what happens when we harbor them, and how and when we should consider revealing them.
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S22A Massive LinkedIn Study Reveals Who Actually Helps You Get That Job
If you want a new job, don’t just rely on friends or family. According to one of the most influential theories in social science, you’re more likely to nab a new position through your “weak ties,” loose acquaintances with whom you have few mutual connections. Sociologist Mark Granovetter first laid out this idea in a 1973 paper that has garnered more than 65,000 citations. But the theory, dubbed “the strength of weak ties,” after the title of Granovetter’s study, lacked causal evidence for decades. Now a sweeping study that looked at more than 20 million people on the professional social networking site LinkedIn over a five-year period finally shows that forging weak ties does indeed help people get new jobs. And it reveals which types of connections are most important for job hunters.
The strength of weak ties “is really a cornerstone of social science,” says Dashun Wang, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the new study. For the original 1973 research, Granovetter interviewed people late in their career and asked them about their experiences with job changes. Before his groundbreaking paper, many had assumed that new positions came from sources such as close personal friends who would put in a good word, headhunters who would seek out strong candidates or public advertisements. But Granovetter’s analysis showed that people actually got new jobs most frequently through friends of friends—often someone the job seeker had not known before they started looking for a new position. “That really shook people up because assumptions about how people find the best jobs in life doesn’t look to be true—it looks like actually strangers might be the best contacts for you,” says Brian Uzzi, also a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, who was not involved in the new study.
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S23How to Encourage Your Team to Give You Honest Feedback
Far too often, team members expect to be given downward feedback, but unless they’re explicitly invited to offer upward feedback, they won’t know that it’s even an option. As a manager, it’s your job to ask your employees for feedback on your own performance. How else will you know what you should keep doing and what you should be doing differently? Nevertheless, you might find that your direct reports are reluctant to give you the feedback you need to improve, or even sustain, what’s working. This article addresses five common barriers that managers face in getting helpful feedback from direct reports, and how to address them so that you can gain the insights you need.
If you’re a manager, it’s not enough to be giving feedback to your direct reports. It’s part of your job to solicit feedback from your direct reports as well. As much as you might believe that you know your strengths and weaknesses well, without external self-awareness — an understanding of how what you say and do impacts others — you’re unlikely to improve the habits, behaviors, and practices that may be holding you (or others) back.
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S24Your Career Needs an Elevator Pitch
Now that you’ve crafted a compelling definition of who you are and what you do, make sure to rehearse your speech. Don’t memorize it word for word, or else all anyone will remember is that you sounded like a nervous robot. The bottom line is that there’s no excuse for having nothing prepared when given the opportunity to pitch yourself. Give the people something to remember so that when an exciting opportunity comes along, they’ll be sure to “think of you.”
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S25S26S27Why More and More Girls Are Hitting Puberty Early
Megan Gray was eight years old when she got her first period. She was playing hide-and-seek with her older sister and a friend at their friend’s house in suburban Sacramento. She was wearing pink jeans, which she had saved up for a long time to buy. She tied a sweatshirt around her waist to hide the bloodstain, and, later, threw the ruined pink jeans away; when her mother asked where they’d gone, she threw a tantrum to deflect the question. Gray had a close relationship with her mom, but she was so young that they’d had no conversations about puberty; her older sister had not yet gotten her period. “There was nothing, no context for understanding,” Gray told me. “I knew what a period was—I didn’t think I was dying or anything. But still, I didn’t tell anyone for months. I just used wadded-up toilet paper. It felt so awkward and shameful.” She did eventually talk with her mom about it. But this was the nineteen-eighties. “It wasn’t some big informational session. It was very Gen X—you just dealt with things by yourself and got on with it.”
Gray was taller than her peers and wore layers of tops to conceal her developing breasts. She estimates that she was a C-cup by fifth grade. “There were assumptions about me because I had boobs. And I had never even kissed anyone. I was lucky, because nothing traumatic occurred. Yet I do think that there is a trauma in being sexualized.”
Maritza Gualy got her first period when she was eight going on nine, at the end of the eighties. Her mom showed her how to use a thick Kotex pad. Eventually, her older sister introduced her to o.b. tampons—the ones with no applicator; they were small and easier to hide. The sisters, whose parents were Colombian immigrants, attended a majority-white Catholic school in Nashville. Her school uniform had no pockets, so whenever Gualy had her period, she had to hide tampons in her bra or in the waistband of her skirt. One day, an o.b. fell out of her skirt when she and her classmates were sitting on the rug together. Later, when they were back at their desks for a spelling test, Gualy recalled, “the teacher went around from kid to kid with the tampon. ‘Is this yours?’ ‘Is this yours?’ Except she was only asking the more well-developed girls! I knew I wasn’t going to admit to it.”
Continued here |
S28What’s the likelihood of Ukraine and Russia entering peace talks?
Talks are a distant prospect, experts warn, as the battlefield reality and winter will dictate both sides’ strategic calculus.
This past week, Ukrainian and Russian officials have made several public statements in an apparent willingness to re-engage in dialogue, blaming one another for stalling a possible negotiated solution after nearly nine months of fighting.
But experts have said the prospect of meaningful talks remains distant. Ukraine, they say, will seek to achieve more battlefield gains before heading to the negotiating table, while Russia hopes the impact of winter on Ukraine’s allies will fracture international support for Kyiv and weaken its resolve.
Continued here |
S29Wild chimpanzees and gorillas can form long friendly associations that last decades – new research
Chris Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
To survive, animals compete for resources, be it food, mating partners or territory. But a ground breaking recent study shows chimpanzees and gorillas form friendships, some lasting at least 20 years. They play, eat and socialise together.
It is the first study of its kind to see such long-term, peaceful associations between apes. A team of scientists led by Crickette Sanz from Washington University, US, made this discovery using over 20 years of data from the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.
Continued here |
S30Why is Everyone Fighting Over the Skull of 'Brigand Villella'?
“On a dark, cold morning of December 1870, while analyzing brigand Villella’s skull, I had a sudden realization … and solved the problem of the delinquency’s nature.” With these words, Cesare Lombroso, a prominent Italian scientist from the late 19th century, described the moment many consider the symbolic beginning of criminal anthropology: the discovery of a physical trait in the human skull which Lombroso held accountable for all deviant behavior.
The scientist is now long dead and his theories have been discredited, but the skull of this mysterious, controversial brigand—or outlaw—survives and is currently at a center of a passionate dispute between those who want to give Giuseppe Villella a proper burial and those who believe that the importance of this remain transcends its biological dimension and want to continue to display it as a cultural asset.
Born in 1835, Cesare Lombroso lived in an age in which established religious truths were being challenged and replaced. He believed that the scientific method would offer a solution to all human queries. The scientist was particularly concerned with the problem of criminality; crime was ravaging the recently formed Italian nation and threatening its stability. Inspired by the evolutioary theories of Darwin, Lombroso was convinced that there was a genetic predisposition to savagery and that he would be able to identify criminal individuals by using physiognomy—a pseudoscience that held that the shape of the human head was an indicator of the individual’s personality.
Continued here |
S31What Thailand's Push for Marriage Equality Means for One Family
Gina Milintanapa and Lee Battia are proud parents. Their oldest boy, Chene, 8, is a budding actor who regularly appears in television commercials. His 6-year-old brother, Charlie, is ranked number two in swimming for his age cohort in Thailand and recently recorded a time of 21.3 seconds for 25 meters. (Most adults, for comparison, would be happy with anything less than 20).
The two boys—adopted at birth in Thailand from separate biological mothers—are also learning piano and enjoy tearing up the soccer pitch. Little wonder the family home in Bangkok is festooned with many of the photographs of the boys that Milintanapa has amassed on her hard drives—three terabytes worth. “My mother says from now on she will only accept five-by-seven photos,” laughs Battia, 63, originally from Farmington Hills, Michigan. “There’s a lot of grandkids and great-grandkids and so she doesn’t have the wall space.”
But this loving, tight-knit family is not a family at all in the eyes of the Thai government.
Continued here |
S32Why there's more to being smart than intelligence
In the late 1920s, a young working-class boy nicknamed Ritty spent most of his time tinkering in his "laboratory" at his parents' home in Rockaway, New York.
His lab was an old wooden packing box, equipped with shelves that contained a storage battery and an electric circuit of light bulbs, switches and resistors. One of his proudest inventions was a homemade burglar alarm that alerted him whenever his parents entered his room. He used a microscope to study the natural world and he would sometimes take his chemistry set into the street to perform tricks for other children.
Ritty's early academic record was unremarkable. He struggled with literature and foreign languages, while, in an IQ test taken as a child, he reportedly scored around 125, which is above average but by no means genius territory. As an adolescent, however, he showed a flair for mathematics and started teaching himself from elementary textbooks. By the end of high school, Ritty reached the top place in a state-wide annual maths competition.
Continued here |
S33Forward Thinking on progress in science funding, immigration, and biosecurity with Alec Stapp
In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, co-host Michael Chui talks with Alec Stapp, co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, a Washington, DC, think tank he co-founded in January 2022. Progress is a policy choice, its founders say, and they have chosen to focus initially on three topics—meta-science, high-skill immigration, and biosecurity. Why those three? Their view is that each one is important, neglected by other researchers, and potentially tractable politically.
An edited transcript of this episode follows. Subscribe to the series on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Continued here |
S34Overcoming the fear factor in hiring tech talent
A hiring manager with a regional bank has been searching fruitlessly for a software developer to create a better digital customer experience. Yet no one among the hundreds of applicants checks off more than a few of the items on the long list of required technical skills, including knowledge of the obscure programming language the bank uses. A hospital system needs to build a network that will seamlessly link patient records across its locations. When its human resources department finally identifies a seasoned engineer who has done similar work, he turns the offer down and takes a more senior position with a cloud-services firm.
With every company needing to harness the full power of technology to remain competitive, there is now a perpetual stampede to hire tech talent. Demand is growing exponentially for skills such as software engineering, data management, platform design, analytics-based automation, customer experience design, and cybersecurity. Eighty-seven percent of global senior executives surveyed by McKinsey said their companies were unprepared to address the gap in digital skills—and that was before the pandemic caused dramatic shifts toward remote work and e-commerce. The pressure is particularly acute for employers outside the tech sector.
Continued here |
S35Securing Europe's competitiveness: Addressing its technology gap
This report builds on an MGI article from May 2022, “Securing Europe’s future beyond energy: Addressing its corporate and technology gap.”
Europe as it is today has been forged in times of crisis. The European Union (EU) was created in response to the ravages of World War II. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the start of a period of economic catching up by economies in Central and Eastern Europe. The 2008 financial crisis and the eurozone crisis that followed led to more financial cooperation among European countries. The COVID-19 pandemic then triggered a higher level of fiscal coordination through the NextGeneration EU fund.
Continued here |
S36Elon Musk Introduces Twitter Mayhem Mode
The United States took to the polls this week to vote in a high-stakes midterm election. With public trust in election systems at an all-time low, the secret ballot is more important now than ever before. We also took a look at a flawed app built by prominent right-wing provocateurs that has been used to challenge hundreds of thousands of voter registrations.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice announced that a Georgia man has pleaded guilty to wire fraud nine years after stealing more than 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road, the legendary dark-web market. You may have heard that things are chaotic over at Twitter, with a wave of corporate impersonations plaguing the platform hours after the rollout of a service that allows anyone who pays $8 a month to get a blue check mark showing they are “verified.” It’s a gift for scammers and grifters of all shades.
New analysis shows that two large ships, with their trackers off, were detected near the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the days before the gas leaks were detected. Officials suspect sabotage, and NATO is investigating. Plus, Russian military hackers are pivoting to a new strategy that favors faster attacks with more immediate results.
Continued here |
S37Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research
Studies have been linking red meat consumption to health problems like heart disease, stroke, and cancer for years. But nestled in the recesses of those published papers are notable limitations.
Nearly all the research is observational, unable to tease out causation convincingly. Most are plagued by confounding variables. For example, perhaps meat eaters simply eat fewer vegetables, or tend to smoke more, or exercise less? Moreover, many are based on self-reported consumption. The simple fact is that people can’t remember what they eat with any accuracy. And lastly, the reported effect sizes in these scientific papers are often small. Is a supposed 15% greater risk of cancer really worth worrying about?
In a new, unprecedented effort, scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) scrutinized decades of research on red meat consumption and its links to various health outcomes, formulating a new rating system to communicate health risks in the process. Their findings mostly dispel any concerns about eating red meat.
Continued here |
S38What is brown noise? Can this latest TikTok trend really help you sleep?
The latest TikTok trend has us listening to brown noise. According to TikTok, this has multiple benefits including helping you relax and quickly fall into a deep asleep.
Getting insufficient sleep, and insomnia are common. So it’s no wonder many people are looking for ways to improve their sleep.
Brown noise, the better-known white noise, and even pink noise are examples of sonic hues. These are “constant” noises with minimal sound variation – highs, lows and changing speeds – compared with sounds such as music or someone reading aloud.
Continued here |
S39NASA detects 50+ methane "super-emitters" from space
A new instrument aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has been used to identify more than 50 “super-emitters” of methane — a major step toward slashing global warming.
The challenge: To combat global warming, we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide accounts for the majority of those emissions, and transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy will significantly reduce those.
Methane is a much less common greenhouse gas than CO2, but it’s far more potent, with each ton emitted causing 80 times as much warming in the 20 years after its release.
Continued here |
S29Wild chimpanzees and gorillas can form long friendly associations that last decades – new research
Chris Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
To survive, animals compete for resources, be it food, mating partners or territory. But a ground breaking recent study shows chimpanzees and gorillas form friendships, some lasting at least 20 years. They play, eat and socialise together.
It is the first study of its kind to see such long-term, peaceful associations between apes. A team of scientists led by Crickette Sanz from Washington University, US, made this discovery using over 20 years of data from the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.
Continued here |
S30Why is Everyone Fighting Over the Skull of 'Brigand Villella'?
“On a dark, cold morning of December 1870, while analyzing brigand Villella’s skull, I had a sudden realization … and solved the problem of the delinquency’s nature.” With these words, Cesare Lombroso, a prominent Italian scientist from the late 19th century, described the moment many consider the symbolic beginning of criminal anthropology: the discovery of a physical trait in the human skull which Lombroso held accountable for all deviant behavior.
The scientist is now long dead and his theories have been discredited, but the skull of this mysterious, controversial brigand—or outlaw—survives and is currently at a center of a passionate dispute between those who want to give Giuseppe Villella a proper burial and those who believe that the importance of this remain transcends its biological dimension and want to continue to display it as a cultural asset.
Born in 1835, Cesare Lombroso lived in an age in which established religious truths were being challenged and replaced. He believed that the scientific method would offer a solution to all human queries. The scientist was particularly concerned with the problem of criminality; crime was ravaging the recently formed Italian nation and threatening its stability. Inspired by the evolutioary theories of Darwin, Lombroso was convinced that there was a genetic predisposition to savagery and that he would be able to identify criminal individuals by using physiognomy—a pseudoscience that held that the shape of the human head was an indicator of the individual’s personality.
Continued here |
S31What Thailand's Push for Marriage Equality Means for One Family
Gina Milintanapa and Lee Battia are proud parents. Their oldest boy, Chene, 8, is a budding actor who regularly appears in television commercials. His 6-year-old brother, Charlie, is ranked number two in swimming for his age cohort in Thailand and recently recorded a time of 21.3 seconds for 25 meters. (Most adults, for comparison, would be happy with anything less than 20).
The two boys—adopted at birth in Thailand from separate biological mothers—are also learning piano and enjoy tearing up the soccer pitch. Little wonder the family home in Bangkok is festooned with many of the photographs of the boys that Milintanapa has amassed on her hard drives—three terabytes worth. “My mother says from now on she will only accept five-by-seven photos,” laughs Battia, 63, originally from Farmington Hills, Michigan. “There’s a lot of grandkids and great-grandkids and so she doesn’t have the wall space.”
But this loving, tight-knit family is not a family at all in the eyes of the Thai government.
Continued here |
S32Why there's more to being smart than intelligence
In the late 1920s, a young working-class boy nicknamed Ritty spent most of his time tinkering in his "laboratory" at his parents' home in Rockaway, New York.
His lab was an old wooden packing box, equipped with shelves that contained a storage battery and an electric circuit of light bulbs, switches and resistors. One of his proudest inventions was a homemade burglar alarm that alerted him whenever his parents entered his room. He used a microscope to study the natural world and he would sometimes take his chemistry set into the street to perform tricks for other children.
Ritty's early academic record was unremarkable. He struggled with literature and foreign languages, while, in an IQ test taken as a child, he reportedly scored around 125, which is above average but by no means genius territory. As an adolescent, however, he showed a flair for mathematics and started teaching himself from elementary textbooks. By the end of high school, Ritty reached the top place in a state-wide annual maths competition.
Continued here |
S33Forward Thinking on progress in science funding, immigration, and biosecurity with Alec Stapp
In this episode of the McKinsey Global Institute’s Forward Thinking podcast, co-host Michael Chui talks with Alec Stapp, co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, a Washington, DC, think tank he co-founded in January 2022. Progress is a policy choice, its founders say, and they have chosen to focus initially on three topics—meta-science, high-skill immigration, and biosecurity. Why those three? Their view is that each one is important, neglected by other researchers, and potentially tractable politically.
An edited transcript of this episode follows. Subscribe to the series on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Continued here |
S34Overcoming the fear factor in hiring tech talent
A hiring manager with a regional bank has been searching fruitlessly for a software developer to create a better digital customer experience. Yet no one among the hundreds of applicants checks off more than a few of the items on the long list of required technical skills, including knowledge of the obscure programming language the bank uses. A hospital system needs to build a network that will seamlessly link patient records across its locations. When its human resources department finally identifies a seasoned engineer who has done similar work, he turns the offer down and takes a more senior position with a cloud-services firm.
With every company needing to harness the full power of technology to remain competitive, there is now a perpetual stampede to hire tech talent. Demand is growing exponentially for skills such as software engineering, data management, platform design, analytics-based automation, customer experience design, and cybersecurity. Eighty-seven percent of global senior executives surveyed by McKinsey said their companies were unprepared to address the gap in digital skills—and that was before the pandemic caused dramatic shifts toward remote work and e-commerce. The pressure is particularly acute for employers outside the tech sector.
Continued here |
S35Securing Europe's competitiveness: Addressing its technology gap
This report builds on an MGI article from May 2022, “Securing Europe’s future beyond energy: Addressing its corporate and technology gap.”
Europe as it is today has been forged in times of crisis. The European Union (EU) was created in response to the ravages of World War II. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the start of a period of economic catching up by economies in Central and Eastern Europe. The 2008 financial crisis and the eurozone crisis that followed led to more financial cooperation among European countries. The COVID-19 pandemic then triggered a higher level of fiscal coordination through the NextGeneration EU fund.
Continued here |
S36Elon Musk Introduces Twitter Mayhem Mode
The United States took to the polls this week to vote in a high-stakes midterm election. With public trust in election systems at an all-time low, the secret ballot is more important now than ever before. We also took a look at a flawed app built by prominent right-wing provocateurs that has been used to challenge hundreds of thousands of voter registrations.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice announced that a Georgia man has pleaded guilty to wire fraud nine years after stealing more than 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road, the legendary dark-web market. You may have heard that things are chaotic over at Twitter, with a wave of corporate impersonations plaguing the platform hours after the rollout of a service that allows anyone who pays $8 a month to get a blue check mark showing they are “verified.” It’s a gift for scammers and grifters of all shades.
New analysis shows that two large ships, with their trackers off, were detected near the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the days before the gas leaks were detected. Officials suspect sabotage, and NATO is investigating. Plus, Russian military hackers are pivoting to a new strategy that favors faster attacks with more immediate results.
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S37Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research
Studies have been linking red meat consumption to health problems like heart disease, stroke, and cancer for years. But nestled in the recesses of those published papers are notable limitations.
Nearly all the research is observational, unable to tease out causation convincingly. Most are plagued by confounding variables. For example, perhaps meat eaters simply eat fewer vegetables, or tend to smoke more, or exercise less? Moreover, many are based on self-reported consumption. The simple fact is that people can’t remember what they eat with any accuracy. And lastly, the reported effect sizes in these scientific papers are often small. Is a supposed 15% greater risk of cancer really worth worrying about?
In a new, unprecedented effort, scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) scrutinized decades of research on red meat consumption and its links to various health outcomes, formulating a new rating system to communicate health risks in the process. Their findings mostly dispel any concerns about eating red meat.
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S38What is brown noise? Can this latest TikTok trend really help you sleep?
The latest TikTok trend has us listening to brown noise. According to TikTok, this has multiple benefits including helping you relax and quickly fall into a deep asleep.
Getting insufficient sleep, and insomnia are common. So it’s no wonder many people are looking for ways to improve their sleep.
Brown noise, the better-known white noise, and even pink noise are examples of sonic hues. These are “constant” noises with minimal sound variation – highs, lows and changing speeds – compared with sounds such as music or someone reading aloud.
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