What Makes Us Lucid Dream?

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What Makes Us Lucid Dream? One question for Péter Simor, a psychologist who directs the Budapest Laboratory of Sleep & Cognition at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. Lucid dreaming is quite peculiar. We become aware that we are dreaming. In normal dreaming, we lack this reflective capacity. Lucid dreamers report that these experiences are extremely vivid, fantastic, and perceptually immersive, like virtual reality. In our new paper, we wanted to explain these differences in a model using the predictive coding framework. The main idea is that the brain is a prediction-generating machine. Say I see someone in a dream. She’s probably my sister. No, she’s my girlfriend. No, she’s my mother. My brain is trying to make the best guesses of these images. And there is no constraint, no bottom-up input coming from the external world to fit or to shape these predictions. So the brain is just jumping from one prediction to the other. What we argue is that, in lucid dreaming, this is different. I see someone that speaks, let’s say, in a language that is different from the language that I know she usually speaks. This creates a prediction error. And I’m not changing the identity of the person. Instead, I realize, “Okay, something is not going on correctly here.” This is a momentum for lucid dreaming, this prediction error, that will trigger the insight that I’m in a dream. We call this a superordinate self model: “I am dreaming. I’m lying in bed. But I’m having a dream and I’m having these ideas.” This will create a top-down model to which everything that is strange and surprising will be easy to accommodate. Lucid dreamers many times observe that they have these extreme experiences, but they are not surprised because they know that they are in a dream. Skilled lucid dreamers can maintain this state, manipulate and monitor their attention. That’s why there’s an important concept called precision weighting, an important part of the theory of predictive coding. Precision weighting reflects the precision I assign to some kind of prediction error. Precision weighting is usually quite low when we are dreaming. We don’t really care if a house is really house-like. Its shapes are sometimes strange. We don’t really have these fine-grain details of the environment because precision is extremely low. In lucid dreaming, it becomes higher. Everything that we experience, let’s say visually, is relevant. We assign strong precision to this information. That’s why we really see the world as if it were quite real.  Continued here

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Why Egypt became one of the biggest chokepoints for Internet cables The Asia-Africa-Europe-1 Internet cable travels 15,500 miles along the seafloor, connecting Hong Kong to Marseille, France. As it snakes through the South China Sea and toward Europe, the cable helps provide Internet connections to more than a dozen countries, from India to Greece. When the cable was cut on June 7, millions of people were plunged offline and faced temporary Internet blackouts. The cable, also known as AAE-1, was severed where it briefly passes across land through Egypt. One other cable was also damaged in the incident, with the cause of the damage unknown. However, the impact was immediate. “It affected about seven countries and a number of over-the-top services,” says Rosalind Thomas, the managing director of SAEx International Management, which plans to create a new undersea cable connecting Africa, Asia, and the US. “The worst was Ethiopia, that lost 90 percent of its connectivity, and Somalia thereafter also 85 percent.” Cloud services belonging to Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were all also disrupted, subsequent analysis revealed. While connectivity was restored in a few hours, the disruption highlights the fragility of the world’s 550-plus subsea Internet cables, plus the outsize role Egypt and the nearby Red Sea have in the Internet’s infrastructure. The global network of underwater cables forms a large part of the Internet’s backbone, carrying the majority of data around the world and eventually linking up to the networks that power cell towers and Wi-Fi connections. Subsea cables connect New York to London and Australia to Los Angeles. Sixteen of these submarine cables—which are often no thicker than a hosepipe and are vulnerable to damage from ships’ anchors and earthquakes—pass 1,200 miles through the Red Sea before they hop over land in Egypt and get to the Mediterranean Sea, connecting Europe to Asia. The last two decades have seen the route emerge as one of the world’s largest Internet chokepoints and, arguably, the Internet’s most vulnerable place on Earth. (The region, which also includes the Suez Canal, is also a global choke point for shipping and the movement of goods. Chaos ensued when the container ship Ever Given got wedged in the canal in 2021.) Continued here

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Sustainable Farming Has an Unlikely Ally: Satellites The race to remove CO2 from our atmosphere is on. In an effort to draw down carbon at a meaningful scale, people are looking to the ground. The top meter of the world’s soil holds over three times the amount of carbon currently in our atmosphere—and if we treat our land better, it could suck up even more. This is good news for farmers. Companies and individuals desperate to offset their emissions by purchasing carbon credits are willing to pay farmers to use sustainable agricultural practices and sequester carbon in their fields. The problem? The process of verifying whether a field has sucked up additional carbon isn’t easy: Physical samples have to be regularly collected across the land and sent to a lab for processing. Enter Perennial, a startup based in Boulder, Colorado, that says it has the answer. While studying at Brown University, chief innovation officer David Schurman met CEO Jack Roswell and president Oleksiy “Alex” Zhuk, passionate engineers from family farms in Michigan and Ukraine, respectively. When they got to Brown, they were surprised to discover that “agriculture as a whole was essentially forgotten” by technologists, says Zhuk. Today, their ambition is to produce “the infrastructure that underpins the full vertical of the soil carbon market,” says Roswell. “No technology is solving a problem unless it’s solving the problem at scale and in a cost-effective manner,” says Roswell. “We’re actively monitoring every field for carbon removal and net emissions, in the US and beyond.” Jim Kellner, a professor at Brown University and Perennial’s chief scientist, explains that the company’s technology relies on multispectral satellite imagery. This means measuring the reflected light from Earth in narrow bands across a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum, capturing information that’s invisible to the human eye. Kellner says analyzing the spectrum of reflected light allows accurate identification of carbon in the soil, even using satellite images with a spatial resolution of only 10 meters. By comparing the amount of light reflected at different wavelengths, “you can learn to identify materials, even without the picture,” he says. Continued here

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When to Consult Your Intuition Should your intuitions come before or after your analyses? Continued here

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Scientists Increasingly Can’t Explain How AI Works What's your favorite ice cream flavor? You might say vanilla or chocolate, and if I asked why, you’d probably say it’s because it tastes good. But why does it taste good, and why do you still want to try other flavors sometimes? Rarely do we ever question the basic decisions we make in our everyday lives, but if we did, we might realize that we can’t pinpoint the exact reasons for our preferences, emotions, and desires at any given moment.  There's a similar problem in artificial intelligence: The people who develop AI are increasingly having problems explaining how it works and determining why it has the outputs it has. Deep neural networks (DNN)—made up of layers and layers of processing systems trained on human-created data to mimic the neural networks of our brains—often seem to mirror not just human intelligence but also human inexplicability.   Most AI systems are black box models, which are systems that are viewed only in terms of their inputs and outputs. Scientists do not attempt to decipher the “black box,” or the opaque processes that the system undertakes, as long as they receive the outputs they are looking for. For example, if I gave a black box AI model data about every single ice cream flavor, and demographic data about economic, social, and lifestyle factors for millions of people, it could probably guess what your favorite ice cream flavor is or where your favorite ice cream store is, even if it wasn’t programmed with that intention.   These types of AI systems notoriously have issues because the data they are trained on are often inherently biased, mimicking the racial and gender biases that exist within our society. The haphazard deployment of them leads to situations where, to use just one example, Black people are disproportionately misidentified by facial recognition technology. It becomes difficult to fix these systems in part because their developers often cannot fully explain how they work, which makes accountability difficult. As AI systems become more complex and humans become less able to understand them, AI experts and researchers are warning developers to take a step back and focus more on how and why a system produces certain results than the fact that the system can accurately and rapidly produce them.  Continued here

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Here’s why we’re not prepared for the next wave of biotech innovation The first time I remember hearing the words “biology’s century,” it was a sales pitch. I was standing by the Long Island Sound in Sachem’s Head, Conn., in the shadow of an 11-foot-tall granite Stonehenge replica built by Jonathan Rothberg, a biotech entrepreneur, as he talked up his newest gadget, a tabletop DNA sequencer. It was 2010. Near his monument to the ancient past, Rothberg was conjuring a vision of the future, one based on harnessing the power of biology and technology to transform the world. The phrase he uttered wasn’t new, having been in circulation since the Human Genome Project in the 1990s, and I’d been covering biotech for a decade. But that was the moment the phrase sunk in. I added it to my Twitter bio, where it has remained. Over the next decade, I’d see even more amazing things. Genetically altered white blood cells that can cure cancer. A gene therapy that gave sight to blind children. Pills that wrench decades of life from a cancer death sentence or ease the breathing of patients with cystic fibrosis. And, of course, not one but several effective Covid-19 vaccines created only a year into a once-in-a-century pandemic. Continued here

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When You're Overwhelmed, Simplify - zen habits The feeling of being overwhelmed is extremely common in the people I talk to, and it’s becoming more and more clear to me that this is the default state for most of us. We’re overwhelmed by it all: all the things we have on our plates, all the interruptions and messages and emails, all the things online and on social media, all the news and chaos of the world, all the things going on in our relationships. The problem isn’t the abundance, but our fear and anxiety about all of it. Actually, for most of us, the fear is that we’ll let people down. We’ll drop one of the many balls we have in the air and let people down … or worse yet, we’ll drop them all and we’ll be exposed as inadequate! And as you practice with simplicity, you might recite a kind of mantra: When you’re overwhelmed, simplify. Continued here

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Are You Being Quiet Fired? As companies face tightening budgets, many may be considering trimming their workforce. But of course, outright layoffs are expensive and risky. That’s why some have turned to a subtler strategy: quiet firing, or intentionally creating a hostile work environment that encourages people to leave “voluntarily.” The authors’ new research sheds light on how employees can tell if they’re being quietly fired, including changes to work responsibilities, compensation, and communication, and offers ten tactical steps workers can take before throwing in the towel. Continued here

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How American Eagle Reinvented Its Fulfillment Strategy Faced with pandemic-related disruptions and increasing competition from Amazon, American Eagle decided it needed to take control of its e-commerce delivery. That led to two acquisitions and a new strategic question: Should the delivery companies it acquired still serve other customers, including if they were American Eagle competitors? Ultimately, the company decided that it should, opting in effect to share its supply chain with other retailers in a bid to compete with Amazon. Continued here

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The U.S. Labor Market Is Less Tight Than It Appears The Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates to fight inflation, and looking at measures of the labor market to see how it’s doing. When the labor market has very little slack—when there aren’t many workers looking for jobs—inflation tends to rise. But conventional measures of labor market slack aren’t perfect, and a new measure from LinkedIn researchers paints a much different picture: it suggests the labor market is much looser, which means inflation might not be as high in the future as traditional metrics would indicate. Continued here

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Research Roundup: How Technology Is Transforming Work Digital technologies promise to bring new levels of productivity and efficiency in a wide variety of applications and organizations. But how are they transforming the experience of the employees who actually interact with them every day? In this research roundup, we share highlights from several recent studies that explore the nuanced ways in which technology is influencing today’s workplace and workforce — including both its undeniable benefits and substantial risks. Continued here

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When Your Partner Isn't Giving You the Support You Need Before you got engaged, or had a child, or moved across the country for your partner’s job, did you sit down and ask each other questions like, What makes for a good life? and How much work is too much? Yeah, neither did we. These are the sorts of conversations that researcher Jennifer Petriglieri says lay the foundation for couples, especially working parents, to have a mutually supportive relationship and satisfying, if demanding, careers. Continued here

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Renewable-energy development in a net-zero world: Overcoming talent gaps Across economies, the Great Attrition is making it difficult for companies to find and retain employees. Since April 2021, 20 million to 25 million US workers have quit their jobs, and 40 percent of employees globally say they are at least somewhat likely to leave their current position in the next three to six months. 1 1. Aaron De Smet, Bonnie Dowling, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi, and Bill Schaninger, “‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours,” McKinsey Quarterly, September 8, 2021; Aaron De Smet, Bonnie Dowling, Bryan Hancock, and Bill Schaninger, “The Great Attrition is making hiring harder. Are you searching the right talent pools?,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 13, 2022; Table 4. Quits levels and rates by industry and region, seasonally adjusted, US Bureau of Labor Statistics, October 4, 2022. Companies have yet to get a handle on this problem. Many do not understand why their employees are leaving or know where they are going. Furthermore, 65 percent of these employees will not return to the same industry, complicating matters for companies. 2 2. “The Great Attrition is making hiring harder,” July 13, 2022. Continued here

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Author Talks: In defense of big data In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Orly Lobel, a tech policy scholar and distinguished law professor at the University of San Diego, about her new book, The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future (PublicAffairs, October 2022). Instead of trying to curb technological development—which Lobel says is not stopping any time soon—we can steer it toward a more equitable future. An edited version of the conversation follows. Continued here

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Beyond the numbers: Creating a more diverse future for health Pooja Kumar: Anne, in 1997 you were the first woman from Mass General’s Department of Medicine to earn the rank of full professor at Harvard. You had a respected career as a clinical researcher, then in 2019 you became the first female chief executive of Partners HealthCare [now Mass General Brigham], the state’s largest private employer, and you were named one of the top 25 women leaders in healthcare. You are a trailblazer, indeed. In 2019, you were quoted as saying, “It’s important to create a future state where no one will say, ‘Here is the first woman in any role.’” How would you describe the progress we’ve made in this area over the past few years? What still needs to happen to make this a reality? Continued here

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The Titanium Economy: Capturing opportunities in the energy transition In our previous article, we touched on how the Titanium Economy could shape the future of US manufacturing while creating jobs and economic opportunities in American communities. In this article, we look at how some Titanium Economy companies are pursuing sustainability as an opportunity for growth—one of the most significant in the business world today. Continued here

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5 lessons on building an emissions-free city Confronting climate change makes for better cities and a better quality of life, says Heidi Sørensen, director of the climate agency for the city of Oslo, Norway. From construction sites without noise pollution to fully electric transportation, she details the exciting green transition happening in her city. The Norwegian capital's ambitious goal of reducing 95 percent of its carbon emissions by 2030 is driven by a unique policy approach: a world-first carbon budget, which works side by side with the financial budget and clearly states what needs to be done, by whom and when for the city to reach its climate goals. She shares five crucial lessons Oslo has learned along the way to creating a better city for everyone -- and what it could mean for the rest of the world. Continued here

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Clearview Stole My Face and the EU Can't Do Anything About It Marx wanted to know if the company had any photos of his face in its database, so he emailed Clearview to ask. A month later, he received a reply with two screenshots attached. The pictures were around a decade old but both showed Marx, looking fresh faced in a blue T-shirt, taking part in a Google competition for engineers. Marx knew the pictures existed. But unlike Clearview, he did not know a photographer was selling them on stock photo website Alamy without his permission. Marx says Clearview’s revelation was a wake-up call. “I’m no longer in control of what people do with my data,” he says. To him, it was obvious that Clearview was violating Europe’s privacy law, the GDPR, by using his face, or biometric data, without his knowledge or permission. So in February 2020 he filed a complaint with his local privacy regulator in Hamburg. That complaint was the first filed against Clearview in Europe, but it’s still unclear whether the case has been resolved. A spokesperson for the regulator told WIRED that the case had been closed, but Marx says he has not been notified of the outcome. “It’s almost been two and a half years since I complained about ClearView AI, and the case is still open,” says Marx, who works as a security researcher at the IT security company Security Research Labs. “That is too slow, even if you take into account that it’s the first case of its kind.” Continued here

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IRS Seizes Another Silk Road Hacker's $3.36 Billion Bitcoin Stash On Monday, the US Department of Justice announced that a Georgia man named James Zhong has pleaded guilty to wire fraud nine years after stealing more than 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road. As part of his plea agreement, Zhong has forfeited that massive stash of bitcoins to the DOJ—a sum that, at the time of the coins' seizure in late 2021, would have been the biggest-ever Justice Department seizure not only of cryptocurrency but of currency of any kind. The bitcoins were ultimately found stored on what's described in court records as a "single-board computer" hidden in a popcorn can, along with more than $600,000 in cash and precious metals, all held in a safe under the floorboards of a bathroom closet in Zhong's home. The newly revealed case represents yet another notch in the belt for IRS Criminal Investigations, or IRS-CI, which over the past several years has used—very often in partnership with blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis—cryptocurrency tracing techniques that have led to record-breaking troves of ill-gotten bitcoins and to the alleged hackers and money launderers who amassed them. In fact, Zhong is the second Silk Road hacker to turn over a billion-dollar cache of coins to the IRS-CI, after another unnamed individual agreed the previous year to forfeit nearly 70,000 bitcoins he'd stolen from the drug market—a record-breaking, even larger collection of coins that was worth $1 billion at Bitcoin's lower exchange rate at the time. Both those records were again broken earlier this year by IRS-CI's case against two alleged money launderers in New York accused of pocketing $4.5 billion in cryptocurrency stolen from the Bitfinex exchange. Continued here

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The Secret Ballot Is US Democracy's Last Line of Defense Though foreign Disinformation campaigns have targeted the 2022 United States midterm elections to a degree, most of the pressure on US voting infrastructure has come from inside the house. Violent domestic threats against election officials have soared around the country in the past couple of years, endangering workers and, increasingly, driving them from the profession altogether. And as early voting began around the US in recent days, scattered incidents at ballot drop boxes and polling places have put voters on edge. Last week, a federal judge in Arizona notably ordered armed members of a group called Clean Elections USA to stop visibly carrying guns and wearing body armor within 250 feet of ballot drop boxes. Officials and researchers say that casting a ballot will be safe and uneventful for the vast majority of US voters. They also emphasize, as was the case in 2020, that US elections are in fact the most secure and rigorous they've ever been thanks to a number of initiatives, including efforts to phase out voting machines that do not produce a paper backup and the expanded use of postelection audits, including gold standard "risk-limiting" audits. Yet erosion of public trust in any election system is as big a threat to the democracy it underpins as real-world meddling. With so much at stake, the 2022 US midterms are highlighting the criticality of one core US voting protection: the secret ballot. Continued here

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How to 'Quiet Quit' Twitter Twitter has broken our brains, yet we cling to these shards and believe each new tweet may be the one that mends our gray matter. No one is more emblematic of broken brain syndrome than the Chief Twit himself, Elon Musk, who in 12 days of owning Twitter has dissolved the board, laid off half its employees, suggested inviting some back, flip-flopped on monetization plans, spread disinformation, and railed against his own advertisers, making decisions about Twitter’s future with the impulsiveness of tweets themselves. We don’t have to be here, in Tiny Talk Town. We all know it. There are other places online that are a decent hang. But Twitter is unique, and its most fervent users are unlikely to leave en masse. And most of the knee-jerk “I’m outta here” reactions to Musk’s takeover aren’t that compelling, unless you’re a writer assigned to collate celebrity tweets. The smarter move might be a slow burn instead of a pyrotechnic exit—a thoughtful, considered approach to quitting Twitter without quitting Twitter. Think of it as quiet quitting, but for social media. Continued here

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How the crusades spawned the world’s first financial services company Even with this route secured, such visits were filled with danger. If all went well, the journey from Italy to Jerusalem took about two months to complete: about as long as it took for English migrants to reach New York during the colonial era. Usually, though, pilgrimages took longer than two months because pilgrims were routinely slowed down by war, sickness, and robbers — threats that only grew bigger as they ventured farther from home. For most European pilgrims, getting robbed was simply a risk they had to take if they wanted to reach the place where Jesus Christ was believed to have been crucified and resurrected. British travelers, however, had a way to minimize that risk. In London, there was an organization known as the Temple Church, where pilgrims could deposit a portion of their savings. In return they were given a letter of credit that they could use to withdraw their savings once they reached Jerusalem. Continued here

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Oxytocin improves memory in mice with Alzheimer's-like symptoms Oxytocin is often called the “love hormone” because of its role in pair bonding, but it also serves many other functions in the brain. Continued here

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Fruit flies have bodily awareness. Does that mean they also possess consciousness? The new science of self-consciousness certainly will allow humans to merge with machines in increasingly sophisticated ways. It is, for example, already driving the development of next-generation artificial limbs that can integrate into the user’s body image, and of fully immersive virtual reality interfaces that transfer sensations to the user, among other things. At least for the more levelheaded practitioners of this science, however, it is highly unlikely that mind uploading will ever be anything more than a fantasy. Eventually, it probably will be possible to upload the neural architecture of the mind to a supercomputer—but whether the upload can reconstitute an individual’s consciousness is another matter altogether. Crucially, the uploaded “mind” would lack a body and therefore would be unable perceive the world, act upon it, or gain self-awareness. For this same reason, it is highly unlikely that lab-grown “minibrains” could ever become conscious either.  On the other hand, this new understanding of self-consciousness is forcing us to redefine what it means to be conscious, and which organisms possess consciousness. For untold ages, religious thinkers, philosophers, and naturalists alike placed humans at the pinnacle of life on Earth and denied other animals the possibility of consciousness. In recent years, however, this view has begun to change in light of growing evidence that cognitive capabilities once thought to be unique to humans are in fact present in an ever-wider variety of other animals. For example, scrub jays store food in various locations as winter approaches, but their food stores can be pilfered by other jays. They have a strategy to prevent this, however: when one jay sees that another is watching it cache its food, it waits until the potential thief has left and then recaches the food in a different location. Scrub jays can also plan for the future: in the lab, they preferentially store food in locations where they have learned they will be hungry the following morning. Similarly, on the Southwest Pacific island of New Caledonia, the native crows can keep in mind the function and location of three different tools, then use them to perform complex sequences of actions by planning several moves ahead. Dolphins, whales, elephants, and various species of monkeys can recognize themselves in a mirror—a yardstick for self-awareness—and the list of animal species that can pass this mirror-self-recognition test continues to grow.  Continued here

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Japan's "waste not, want not" philosophy, from meditation to Marie Kondo Warnings against waste run especially deep in Japanese culture. Many Americans are familiar with the famous decluttering technique of organization guru Marie Kondo, who wrote “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” Travelers to Japan may hear the classic expression “mottainai,” which means “don’t be wasteful” or “what a waste.” There are even gods, spirits and monsters, or “yokai,” associated with waste, cleanliness and respect for material goods. As a scholar of Asian philosophy and religions, I believe the popularity of “mottainai” expresses an ideal more than a reality. Japan is not always known for being environmentally conscious, but its anti-waste values are deeply held. These traditions have been shaped by centuries-old Buddhist and Shinto teachings about inanimate objects’ interconnectedness with humans that continue to influence culture today. Continued here

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Everything you need to know about the math of Powerball Playing the lottery is the ultimate low-risk, high-reward scenario. If you lose, you’re only out a few dollars: the cost of your bet. But if you win, even though the odds are stacked against you, the payoff is potentially life-changing, promising a lifetime of easy, luxurious living. You could not only realize all of your dreams that are reliant on financial fortunes, but those of your friends and relatives as well. And here in November of 2022, the Powerball jackpot has hit a whopping new record of $1.9 billion, a new record not just in terms of Powerball, but among all lottery games worldwide. The idea of “worth it” is a subjective one to most people, but from a scientific/mathematical standpoint, it has a very particular meaning. It means that the amount you can expect to win, given an average outcome for the ticket, is greater than the amount you have to bet in order to play. If a Powerball lottery ticket costs $2, for example, buying a ticket would be above the “worth it” line if: Continued here

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The 7 most famous mythical places Unlike many stories whose origins have been lost to the historical record, we know exactly when and who invented the story of Atlantis. The story was first told by Plato around 330 BCE, in two of his dialogues “Timaeus” and “Critias.” It’s been established that there was no record of Atlantis before these texts and that Plato created this place as a plot device in his stories.   Despite this story’s origin in pure fiction, many people over the millennia have sought out this mythical place. A lot of the speculations were inspired by a book written by a Minnesota politician, Ignatius L. Donnelly, in 1882. He believed that Plato considered Atlantis a real place. He went on to explain its histories and supposed rule over large swathes of the world, his theory being that all ancient civilizations descended from this one land. Continued here

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Voting in person brings democracy to momentous life | Psyche Ideas My earliest memory of going to the polls on Election Day is from long before I was eligible to vote. My mom picked me up from school and we headed to the city auditorium, her precinct polling place. I had been there before to watch a friend’s dance recital, but the room had been transformed. Instead of rows of folding chairs on the hardwood floor, there were now several blue-curtained voting booths, a few people sitting behind folding tables, and two lines of people in front of them. I remember being impressed as the poll worker flipped through the pages of a heavy, overfull binder, then turned it around to show my mom her name and get her signature. I remember asking my mom if I could mark her ballot. When she said no, I remember thinking that I could not wait until I was old enough to vote. This experience is becoming less typical in the United States, where I live. In 2020, around two-thirds of votes were cast prior to Election Day, most via mail-in voting. The widespread uptake of mail-in voting that year accelerated an existing trend. Over the past few decades, fewer and fewer ballots have been cast at precinct polling places on Election Day, more and more via mail, early voting, or other methods of convenience voting. The US is something of an outlier, but other democracies have also seen increased interest in postal voting, and it has been common in Switzerland for decades. Continued here

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Scientists Find Plaster Copies of Fossil Destroyed by Nazis The three-foot-long skeleton was placed in a London collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, where it remained for more than a century. Then, in May 1941, Nazis bombed the city during World War II, and the specimen was destroyed. With no written records documenting any casts made from the fossil, scientists assumed the ichthyosaur was lost forever—that only the scientific illustration remained. The Berlin cast was in better shape and more detailed than the Yale one, suggesting the Yale cast was created earlier or was a cast of a cast. However, both differed from the drawing, which, among other discrepancies, shows four or five extra bones on the forefin that connects to the animal’s humerus, per the Times. These extra bones had been painted on the Berlin cast to match the drawing more closely.  Continued here

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Totoro Finds New Neighbors at London's West End For the uninitiated, the original My Neighbor Totoro takes place in 1950s Japan and follows two young sisters, Mei and Satsuki, as they move to the countryside with their father in order to be closer to their mother, who has fallen ill. As the sisters adjust to their new surroundings, they discover a fantastical world only they can see. The original film was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary storyteller behind classics like Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. On the London stage, Mei Mac and Ami Okumura Jones take the lead as Mei and Satsuki, respectively. Continued here

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One-Third of Iconic World Heritage Glaciers Will Melt by 2050, Study Finds As for the other two-thirds of glaciers, many are on track to dry up by 2100. But there's still time to save them by limiting global temperature rise to the Paris Agreement goal of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, the researchers say. But as it stands now, things aren’t looking good on that front: One estimate predicts there’s a 50-50 chance global average temperatures will cross that threshold within the next four years. Since 2000, these iconic glaciers—which span more than 25,000 square miles—have been retreating at a faster pace because of greenhouse gas emissions, which are causing global temperatures to rise. They’re losing about 58 billion tons of ice every year, and that water is flowing into the world’s oceans. Per the report, melting World Heritage glaciers are responsible for nearly five percent of sea-level rise across the globe. Continued here

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These A.I.-Generated Images Hang in a Gallery -- but Are They Art? From robots that make their own art to image-generation tools that mimick history's greatest painters, A.I. is quickly permeating creative spaces—and generating lots of questions. Is it a medium or a method, a tool or a technique? And does an artist fully own their art if they didn't design the technology themselves? As the quality of A.I. art rapidly improves, these conversations have never been more timely. Dan Gentile, culture editor at SF Gate, is far more skeptical. "Given the questionable ethical behavior of many tech companies, being a technological optimist is hard these days. This type of art show doesn't make it any easier," he writes. "A.I. has boundless possibilities; in this use case, it has the power to democratize the creation of art, breaking the limits of craft and essentially serving as an imagination translator. Or it can just be a bulls—t generator." Continued here

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Psychedelic Mushroom Chemical May Help Treat Depression A new study found the drug temporarily relieved symptoms for some patients, but it needs to be tested in larger and longer trials, experts say Continued here

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Maurice Sendak Imagined More Than Wild Things You may know Maurice Sendak for his beloved children’s books like Where the Wild Things Are, but many don’t know that the renowned illustrator tried his hand at countless other artistic pursuits. Now, the Columbus Museum of Art, working with the Maurice Sendak Foundation, is aiming to expand the public’s understanding of the prolific artist. A new exhibition, “Wild Things Are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak,” showcases a wide range of his work. It is the first such exhibition since the artist’s death in 2012, and the largest and most comprehensive retrospective of his work to date, according to the museum. Born in 1928 to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Sendak grew up in the United States. But his childhood was marked by the Holocaust, to which he lost several family members, and poor health; he was often confined to bed, unable to truly join in with those outside his home. Sendak firmly believed that children could handle darkness and difficult emotions—to an extent far greater than adults gave them credit for. Continued here

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This 'Crude Imitation' of Rembrandt Is Actually the Real Deal For almost 50 years, an oil sketch depicting Jesus on the cross was thought to be, in the words of art historian Horst Gerson, a “crude imitation” of the work of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, the 17th-century Dutch master. Once displayed at the Museum Bredius in the Netherlands, the work was taken off display and placed in a “forgotten corner” of the museum, per the Agence France-Presse (AFP). Continued here

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Don't Lick This Toad, National Park Service Says Sonoran desert toads—also called Colorado River toads—are found primarily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and Mexico, though their range extends into New Mexico and California. With lengths reaching to nearly eight inches, they are among the largest toads in North America—but their sound is a weak "toot." They also live remarkably long lives; their life span could be at least 10 years and possibly as many as 20. While the animals are listed as "Least Concern" on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List, they are considered threatened in New Mexico because of habitat loss, roadway mortality and overcollection for drug use.  "There's a psychedelic renaissance that's happening," Robert Villa, president of the Tucson Herpetological Society and a researcher with the University of Arizona's Desert Laboratory, told Jessica Kutz of High Country News (HCN) in 2021. "And there's a whole sect of this community that is devoted to the Sonoran desert toad, extracting [it] for psychedelic use."  Continued here

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The Enduring Mystery of the Dragonfly 44 Galaxy | Quanta Magazine Dragonfly 44 and its ilk are known as ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs). While they can be as large as the largest ordinary galaxies, UDGs are exceptionally dim — so dim that, in telescope surveys of the sky, "it's a task to filter out the noise without accidentally filtering out these galaxies," said Paul Bennet, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The bright star-forming gas that's abundant in other galaxies seems to have vanished in UDGs, leaving only a skeleton of elderly stars. There's just one problem. As galaxies rotate, they should come apart. They don't appear to have enough mass — and thus gravity — to stick together. The concept of dark matter was invented to provide the missing gravity. In this picture, a galaxy sits inside a larger conglomeration of nonluminous particles. This dark matter "halo" holds the spinning galaxy together. Continued here

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Why 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. The rest is history. You might know Ritty as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, whose new theory of quantum electrodynamics revolutionised the study of subatomic particles. Continued here

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The blind skateboarder challenging misconceptions about sight and sport | CNN Dan Mancina is a skateboarder whose jaw-dropping videos rack up hundreds of thousands of views. He has a loyal following on Instagram, all eager to see him landing jumps and all sorts of skillful tricks. Mancina also happens to be blind - and videos of him using his white cane as he boards inspires curiosity and admiration from fans around the world. "I've lost my vision slowly throughout my life," he told CNN Sport, explaining that it wasn't until his mid-20s that his condition - a neurodegenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa - started to affect his dayto-day life, stopping him from driving and biking. Continued here