Record-High Temperatures across Europe Ease Energy Crisis Imposed by Russia's War

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Record-High Temperatures across Europe Ease Energy Crisis Imposed by Russia's War Europeans have feared for months about freezing this winter because of an energy crisis stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine. They were not expecting a heat wave. On the first day of the year, weather stations across Europe saw their highest January temperatures of all time. Continued here

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You Are Not Your Anxiety Anxiety is something I’ve lived with my entire life — from worrying about homework assignments in grade school to overthinking my college major to catastrophizing my decision to quit my first job. I didn’t always know the name for what I was experiencing, which made it even more difficult to address. Continued here

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There's more than one way to mummify a dinosaur, study finds Under specific conditions, dinosaur fossils can include exceptionally well-preserved skin—an occurrence long thought to be rare. But the authors of an October paper published in the journal PLoS ONE suggested that these dinosaur "mummies" might be more common than previously believed, based on their analysis of a mummified duck-billed hadrosaur with well-preserved skin that showed unusual telltale signs of scavenging in the form of bite marks. Continued here

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I blame Jupiter for the extinction of the dinosaurs One of the greatest existential threats to life on Earth is a giant cosmic impact. Whether from an asteroid, comet, or interstellar interloper, an energetic-enough collision with Earth — typical of objects a few kilometers or larger in size — could easily cause a mass extinction event, and could possibly completely sterilize a living world, bringing an end to a multi-billion year chain of life. These events have happened all across the Universe and even our Solar System for many billions of years. Most famously, 65 million years ago, a large asteroid impacted Earth, causing the 5th great mass extinction since the Cambrian explosion, and wiping out 70% of all terrestrial species, including all non-avian dinosaurs. The conventional wisdom has long been that our Solar System is well-suited for life because we possess a cosmic shield against these objects impacting Earth: Jupiter. Our Solar System’s most massive planet experiences these collisions more than 10,000 times as frequently as Earth, serving as our great protector. Only, that line of thinking is all wrong. Jupiter’s presence actually makes these collisions far more likely on Earth, and there’s more than a 70% chance that the K-Pg extinction wouldn’t have occurred without Jupiter at all. Here’s why it’s right to blame Jupiter for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Continued here

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The Best Movies You Missed in 2022—and Where to Watch Them Even if James Cameron had not popped up in the final two weeks of the year to drop another $1.4 billion into global box office coffers with Avatar: The Way of Water, 2022 still would have gone down as a great year for film—both in terms of critical hits and bona fide blockbusters.  While you've probably already watched Top Gun: Maverick, Glass Onion, Nope, and The Banshees of Inisherin, there are plenty of excellent movies that might have slipped right past you. Here are some of them. Continued here

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Why Some Western Snow Is Turning Pink High in the mountains of the western United States, patches of gleaming white snow are streaked with bright pink. It looks as though someone squirted the powder with watermelon-flavored syrup. Some say it even has a faintly fruity smell. But the rosy-hued snow—also called watermelon snow or glacier blood—isn’t artificial. It’s a phenomenon caused by blooming green algae called Chlamydomonas nivalis.  C. nivalis can be found in mountain ranges across the world, and it has been studied for more than 100 years. But in the drought-stricken American West, which relies heavily on snowmelt for its water supply, scientists say this algal growth could be cause for concern.  Continued here

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Banning TikTok Hurts Higher Education Over the winter holidays, 16 US states—including Georgia and Texas—banned the popular short-form video app TikTok in work contexts, specifically on any device one has been provided by their employer. Governors from Texas to New Hampshire issued total prohibitions on the app on “state IT infrastructure.” In South Dakota and Georgia, governing bodies of higher education ordered compliance with their governors’ orders on all college and university devices. Other states have gone so far as to ban TikTok use when connected to campus Wi-Fi. JESSICA MADDOX is an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama. Continued here

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Do the Words "Performance Review" Scare You? Why are performance reviews so intimidating? While we all know that they’re important for our career — they help us see if we met our goals, what skills we need to work on, or what we excel in — the process is pretty anxiety-inducing. “Will I get a promotion?” “Did I make the cut for the bonus this year?” “Am I going to be shown the door?” It’s these unknowns that make these conversations frightening, especially if you’re new to the workforce and have never experienced an evaluation (or if your first review or two didn’t go according to plan). Continued here

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No, the COVID vaccine did not cause Damar Hamlin's cardiac arrest The hit didn’t look all that bad – it appeared that Damar Hamlin made a pretty standard tackle. The 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety quickly rose to his feet, and then unexpectedly fell backward to the ground. Prior to the COVID era, this likely would have been interpreted as a textbook case of the rare condition known as commotio cordis. In brief, this rare cause of cardiac arrest occurs when an external impact to the chest causes the heart to experience a deadly arrythmia, known as ventricular fibrillation (VF). There are also many other causes of sudden cardiac death in seemingly healthy athletes (such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, congenital coronary artery anomalies, and long QT syndrome). While experts attribute Hamlin’s cardiac arrest to commotio cordis, considerable social media commentary has blamed this unfortunate medical event on the COVID vaccine.  Continued here

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The 5 Biases Pushing Women Out of STEM By now, we’ve all heard about the low numbers of American women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Some argue it’s a pipeline issue – that if we can interest more young girls in STEM subjects, the issue will resolve itself over time. But that’s not convincing. After all, the percentage of women in computer science has actually decreased since 1991. Continued here � S53 Razer's $400 soundbar has a creepy camera to help emit surround sound Razer is using CES 2023 to expand its soundbar lineup with a top-tier model with its own subwoofer. Specs include a frequency response of 40-20,000 Hz and a max sound pressure level of 98 dB. But for those who prefer being extremely cautious with their gadgets when it comes to privacy and security, the Razer Leviathan V2 Pro's integrated camera is disappointing to see. Continued here S4 Christine vs. Work: Does Virtual Presence Still Matter at Work? Not long after I filmed that time capsule, we started production on the very first episode of Christine Vs. Work. That was when we were shooting this on my phone, and the WiFi is — I don’t know. Everything looks really — I look weird. My hair’s so short. And in that episode, I talked to Rachel Cossar. She’s a former Boston Ballet dancer turned professional presence coach. And I’m like, well, what are the tips? How am I supposed to carry myself on these video calls? Continued here � S11 How to Have Tough Conversations With Employees Ensure that conflict is dealt with and leads to better performance and a more productive workforce. Continued here S69 Abortion Pill Can Be Sold at Pharmacies, FDA Says Certified retail pharmacies may now fill prescriptions for the abortion pill mifepristone, after a rule change finalized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday. In the past, patients could only get mifepristone through a certified health care provider. During the Covid-19 pandemic, though, the FDA lifted the requirement that people pick up the drug in person. Continued here � S46 Why stars never collide and galaxies always do Science fiction loves space collisions. Across decades of books, movies, TV shows, and video games, we have been treated to a lot of space stuff slamming into other space stuff. Think of all those starship chases through dense asteroid fields — The Empire Strikes Back comes to mind. The heroes must avoid enemy fighters while navigating through giant space rocks that are crashing together.  In reality, though, how likely is it that things collide in the vast blackness of space? To answer that question, we are going to focus on two familiar forms of celestial bodies: stars and galaxies. Continued here S39 WhatsApp Launches Tool to Fight Internet Censorship When repressive governments want to control their populations, citizens’ access to the internet is often one of the first things to go. Since 2016, 74 countries around the world have shut down the internet for tens of millions of people more than 900 times. In recent years, Iran shut down the internet to hide brutality against protesters. Russia rapidly increased its censorship after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And internet curfews in Myanmar left people in information blackouts.  Internet shutdowns, at their worst, can involve connections being completely shut, while censorship measures can block access to specific websites or apps. Disrupting the internet is widely considered a tactic to undermine people’s human rights. There are multiple ways people can try to dodge censorship and internet shutdowns—although, there’s no one simple way to restore connectivity for millions of people at once. Continued here � S57 NYC schools block ChatGPT, fearing negative impact on learning New York City Public Schools have blocked access to OpenAI's ChatGPT AI model on its network and devices, reports educational news site Chalkbeat. The move comes amid fears from educators that students will use ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, accidentally introduce inaccuracies in their work, or write essays in a way that will keep them from learning the material. Continued here S36 Nature's Soundtrack Reveals the Secrets of Degradation Digital listening is becoming the most powerful new scientific tool for observing and preserving our natural environment. From the Arctic to the Amazon, scientists are covering the globe with networks of digital microphones. Citizen scientists are using open source, DIY devices like the AudioMoth—a handheld device not much larger than a credit card—to listen in on nature's sounds. These devices detect sounds inaudible to humans: from low-frequency infrasounds made by elephants and whales to high-frequency ultrasounds made by mice, bats, and even plants.  In 2023, our newfound listening powers will allow us to exponentially accelerate environmental monitoring, measure the health of ecosystems, track the sonic signatures of climate change, reveal the existence of entirely new species, and even rediscover species once thought to be extinct.  Continued here S21 Bridging Generational Divides in Your Workplace Due largely to early retirements and a caustic mix of ageism and cost-cutting measures, businesses let too many older workers go during the pandemic — and when they left, so did a lot of institutional memory, expertise, and loyalty. With fewer younger workers entering the labor market for at least a generation, employers that don’t think beyond today’s working-age population will likely struggle to build a reliable workforce that can maintain operational efficiency and effectiveness. They must reconsider their DEI strategies to meet the demands of a new era if they want to drive operational effectiveness, increase competitiveness, widen their appeal to consumers of all ages and abilities, and build long-term resilience. The authors describe how leaders can account for the changes — and benefits — that come with an aging workforce to power productivity into the future. Continued here S65 Nothing Is Working for Kevin McCarthy The deadline for the Republican leader to cut a deal or quit the speaker’s race is fast approaching. At this point in the unending search for a House speaker, Donald Trump’s candidacy is making as much progress as Kevin McCarthy’s. Continued here S6 Stop Asking for Feedback Many years ago, I applied for a role I had considered my dream job. I made it to the last round of the interview process where I had to give a presentation at the company. When I was done, I asked them for feedback. “How did it go?” I said and received some damning and utterly unactionable comments. I left the room with a deflated sense of self. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. Continued here S66 In Politics, Is Older Better? 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. Congressman Kevin McCarthy’s failure this week to win the vote to succeed Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House has only driven home the immense sway she held in the position. As our staff writer Franklin Foer writes, her stepping down from the role marks the twilight of the Democrats’ “ruling troika” of elders, which also includes Senator Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden. Although critics deride this so-called gerontocracy in government, Frank predicts we’ll soon miss it. I called him to find out more. Continued here S35 Paul Catchlove: How a habit of self-reflection could help improve your career Paul Catchlove believes strongly in the power of reflection. Through every career he's held -- from priest to opera singer to senior management consultant -- he's benefitted from a habit of considering and analyzing his goals, needs and performance. Learn more about how a regular practice of reflection can improve your decision-making, career and relationships. Continued here S59 How We Learned to Be Lonely In the early days of the pandemic, many of us got used to solitude. It’s a habit we need to break. “How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. Continued here S20 CES 2023: BMW Unveils a Talking Electric Car, Mercedes-Benz Doubles Down on Charging The BMW i Vision Dee is an electric concept car that will use A.I. and voice recognition technology to talk to drivers. Continued here S68 Archaeologists Recover 275 Artifacts From Mysterious Arctic Shipwreck Explorer John Franklin and his 128 crew members disappeared while searching for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s In May 1845, two ships under the command of Sir John Franklin set sail from England in search of the elusive Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. At some point during their treacherous quest, Franklin and his crew of 128 men mysteriously disappeared, never to be heard from again. Then, in 2014, Canadian archaeologists discovered the remains of one of the vessels, the H.M.S. Erebus, in the icy waters near King Williams Island in Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory. They located the wreck of the other ship, the H.M.S. Terror, nearby in 2016. Continued here S14 Ken Block Was an Entrepreneur and Pro Rally Driver, But His Legacy Transcends Business and Sports Block recently passed away in a snowmobile accident, but as Rob Dyrdek explains, he did much more than build companies and win races. Continued here S51 FTC intends to ban noncompete clauses that bind 30 million US workers The Federal Trade Commission today proposed a rule that would prohibit employers from imposing noncompete clauses on workers, arguing that "noncompetes constitute an unfair method of competition and therefore violate Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act." Continued here S48 Lost wallets are more likely to be returned if they hold cash This article was first published on Big Think in June 2019. It was updated in January 2023. Would you be more likely to return a wallet you found on the street if it contained cash? A new study suggests you would — not necessarily because you’re altruistic, but because you don’t want to feel like a thief. Continued here S60 The Case for Public Child Care The U.S. child-care sector is in crisis. Workers are fleeing the field for higher wages at Target, McDonald’s, and Amazon warehouses. Short-staffed day-care centers are closing even as families clamor for spots. And in a sad state of business as usual, the care that’s available is frequently unaffordable, of uncertain quality, inconveniently located, exploitative of its teachers, or some combination thereof. Child care in the U.S., Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said in 2021, is “a textbook example of a broken market.” Yet most proposed government solutions involve building on top of this flawed system: offering more vouchers to purchase private child care, helping parents become savvier at picking care options, and tossing retention bonuses to caregivers. These fixes, importantly, can make child care more affordable for parents and offer life rafts to centers hemorrhaging workers. But they do little to address the structural needs: improved quality for kids, better wages and working conditions for workers, and more choices in the low-income neighborhoods that many child-care businesses avoid. Continued here S22 Allocating Capital When Interest Rates Are High During a decade of low interest rates and abundant capital, companies greenlit many projects that make less sense now that the economic environment has changed. To prevent experiencing these regrets in the future, companies should add more value-oriented thinkers to the groups who decide which project to pursue. Although value-oriented thinkers are sometimes disparaged as worrywarts who lack imagination, in fact their cautious, rational approach to analysis can be an important counterbalance to the reckless optimism that’s become prevalent in recent years. Continued here S27 ??????? ???? ?? ???????? "???????????" ????? दिसम्बर 2021 में, भारत के रोहतक में रहने वाले 30 वर्षीय राहुल नाम के युवक को फेसबुक पर एक मैसेज आया। मैसेज एक महिला का था, जिन्होंने राहुल को अपना नाम पायल बताया। राहुल, जिनका नाम इस रिपोर्ट में गुप्त रखा गया है, उन्हें पायल की बातचीत, लहजे व प्रोफाइल पिक्चर देख लगा कि पायल एक ऐसी लड़की थी जो आसानी से सेक्स, जो आज भी भारत में निषेध है, उसके लिए राज़ी हो जाएंगी। शुरुआती तौर पर राहुल ने पायल से कुछ बातचीत की और दोनों के बीच एक सुखद वार्ता का आदान-प्रदान शुरू हुआ। पायल ने राहुल से कुछ निजी सवाल भी किए, जैसे उनका पता, व्यवसाय व उनकी वैवाहिक स्थिति। Continued here S47 Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes – and they bragged about it In ancient Athens, only the very wealthiest people paid direct taxes, and these went to fund the city-state’s most important national expenses – the navy and honors for the gods. While today it might sound astonishing, most of these top taxpayers not only paid happily, but boasted about how much they paid. Money was just as important to the ancient Athenians as it is to most people today, so what accounts for this enthusiastic reaction to a large tax bill? The Athenian financial elite felt this way because they earned an invaluable payback: public respect from the other citizens of their democracy. Continued here S54 Ram shows off its first fully electric pickup truck at CES, due 2024 On Thursday Ram revealed a concept of its first fully electric pickup truck at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Ram is the last of the Detroit Three to show off a full-size EV pickup—Ford's F-150 Lightning went on sale in 2022, and Chevrolet displayed the Silverado EV at CES last year. But the production Chevy EV is only due in 2024, the same year that the Ram 1500 BEV goes on sale. Continued here S42 The Slow Death of Surveillance Capitalism Has Begun Surveillance capitalism just got a kicking. In an ultimatum, the European Union has demanded that Meta reform its approach to personalized advertising—a seemingly unremarkable regulatory ruling that could have profound consequences for a company that has grown impressively rich by, as Mark Zuckerberg once put it, running ads. The ruling, which comes with a €390 million ($414 million) fine attached, is targeted specifically at Facebook and Instagram, but it’s a huge blow to Big Tech as a whole. It’s also a sign that GDPR, Europe’s landmark privacy law that was introduced in 2018, actually has teeth. More than 1,400 fines have been introduced since it took effect, but this time the bloc’s regulators have shown they are willing to take on the very business model that makes surveillance capitalism, a term coined by American scholar Shoshana Zuboff, tick. “It is the beginning of the end of the data free-for-all,” says Johnny Ryan, a privacy activist and senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.  Continued here S61 Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats. But Biden also touched on another theme that will likely become an even more central component of his economic and political strategy over the next two years: He repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree. Continued here S45 The surprising business model of Costco On September 15, 1983, Jim Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman opened the first Costco location in Seattle. The concept, a membership-only store that sells goods at a discount, was borrowed from retailer Sol Price and his son, who ran a similar business called Price Club. Sinegal had worked with the Prices, who operated Price Club out of a series of airplane hangars in San Diego.  Price Club was different from other retail stores in that it catered to small businesses rather than individual consumers. For an annual fee of $25 (about $130 in today’s dollars), customers could purchase discounted products in bulk. The concept was a success; within a few years, Price Club was collecting fees from over a million members and opening new locations in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.  Continued here S13 4 Must-Dos to Make Your Venture Self-Sustaining in 2023 Change your business strategy, extend your cash runway by cutting costs, and invest in profitable growth. Continued here S55 Android one-ups Apple's satellite SOS with general-purpose satellite SMS Hey, Android users! Are you jealous of the iPhone 14's ability to connect to satellites? Well, it's been a few months, and Qualcomm is already getting a similar feature up and running on Android. Meet "Snapdragon Satellite" a way to send satellite messages from a normal-sized Android phone. Unlike on the iPhone, this is real, two-way, SMS-style texting that you'll supposedly be able to use for more casual conversations instead of the iPhone's highly compressed, emergency-only, one-way questionnaire system that discourages composing a message. Continued here S29 Volcanic Activity on Mars Upends Red Planet Assumptions A mass of moving material on Mars called a mantle plume may be causing marsquakes and volcanism Geologically, that is. Smaller than Earth, the planet would have cooled faster than ours after it formed. It was, for a time, quite volcanically active. However, as the thinking goes, when the interior temperature gradually dropped, so too did the planet’s ability to generate large-scale geologic activity—such as huge volcanoes and marsquakes. Continued here S18 According to ServiceTitan's Founder, Measuring Success for B2B Companies Comes Down to Two Metrics Ara Mahdessian says these are the two most important metrics of B2B success. Continued here S17 How to Rethink Your Annual Planning and Business Strategy Exploring new ideas about old ways of thinking can reinvigorate your sense of purpose and focus. Continued here S16 The Federal Trade Commission Wants to Ban Noncompete Clauses for All Workers The agency says noncompetes are often used to suppress wages for workers who don't even have access to trade secrets. Why their absence may be somewhat complicated for companies. Continued here S62 No Tears for Kevin McCarthy The defeat of Kevin McCarthy in his bid for the speakership of the House would be good for Congress. The defeat of Kevin McCarthy would be good for the United States. It might even be good for his own Republican Party. Because the people attempting to inflict that defeat upon McCarthy include some of the most nihilistic and destructive characters in U.S. politics, McCarthy is collecting misplaced sympathy from people who want a more responsible Congress. But the House will function better under another speaker than it would under McCarthy—even if that other speaker is much more of an ideological extremist than McCarthy himself. Continued here S37 Can't Decide What to Do About Twitter? Here Are Some Options As 2023 arrives, it's time to take action. Consider it a deadline for those of us who've been dithering: Twitter is in crisis, and each user must decide their own course of action. It's not just that Twitter has been a toxic dumping ground for hate, harassment, and abuse. That's been the case for at least half a dozen years, and users stuck around. But 2022 left longtime Twitter users shell-shocked. Billionaire Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, which once seemed like an unlikely stunt, came to pass, and the results have been disastrous. With an exodus of employees, increase in hateful language, bannings of journalists, the paid verification mess, concerns about Twitter's overall security, accessibility and stability, and a strong sense that the party is winding down to an ugly conclusion, it's time (perhaps past time) for a user exit strategy. Consider all of this and more the Case Against Staying on Twitter. Continued here S19 Delta Air Lines Is Rolling Out Free Wi-Fi Starting Next Month. It Isn't Just About Connecting to the Internet The airline is elevating the onboard experience, and it's all about getting you connected ... to Delta. Continued here S15 5 Ways A.I. Can Help You Raise Capital for Your Startup Generative A.I. products like ChatGPT are free and easy to use. Here's how your company should be deploying them. Continued here S12 5 Keys to Learning From Business Setbacks and Achieving Long-Term Success Most business professionals experience failure and iterative learning before long-term success. How to improve the process. Continued here S67 Toni Morrison's Rarely Seen Papers Will Go on View at Princeton One of Princeton University’s most famous professors will be the subject of a campus-wide program of events and exhibitions next month: Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and author of powerful novels about the Black experience. The writer, who died in 2019, taught at Princeton from 1989 to 2006.  Morrison’s debut novel was The Bluest Eye (1970), and Song of Solomon (1977) cemented her fame soon after. Her most famous novel, Beloved (1987), is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her young daughter to spare her from slavery. Continued here S26 How the war in Ukraine is killing marine mammals Every morning at dawn, Ivan Rusev walks along the shoreline of the Black Sea in south-western Ukraine. In the autumn, he was watching as millions of migratory birds set off for the south. The last of the pelicans departed at the end of September and they won't return until March. While these migrations continue in their established patterns, other wildlife in this region have been greatly disturbed. In the months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, Rusev noticed a new and troubling phenomenon: dolphins and porpoises were washing up dead on the beach in unusually high numbers. When he'd found dead animals here in previous years, many had marks on their bodies that suggested they had got caught up in fishing gear. These latest marine mammals had none. Continued here S31 This Spiritual Tradition Could Be the Most Poetic Bereavement Therapy Ever Documented A mourning ritual of dialogues with the dead speaks to the fragility of theological diversity At the core of religious wonder lies the mystery of life and death, and the world contains more understandings of this mystery than we can ever know. When I first stayed with the Sora Indigenous (or Adivasi) people in the highlands of Odisha, eastern India, as a graduate student in the 1970s, they engaged daily in conversations with their dead, who spoke through the mouths of shamans who were in a trance. Surrounded by shouting, drinking, and laughing dancers and musicians, living and dead Sora would gossip, cry and argue together for hours on end. Continued here S23 Research: Where Managers and Employees Disagree About Remote Work Survey research suggests that managers and employees see remote work very differently. Managers are more likely to say it harms productivity, while employees are more likely to say it helps. The difference may be commuting: Employees consider hours not spent commuting in their productivity calculations, while managers don’t. The answer is clearer communication and policies, and for many companies the best policy will be managed hybrid with two to three mandatory days in office. Continued here S32 All the Gold in the Universe Was (Likely) Created This Way For a long time, no one knew how “heavy metals” formed—or showed up on Earth. Now some new evidence finally points the way to an answer. That ring on your finger made of platinum or gold contains a secret that has been at the center of a cosmic mystery.  Continued here S64 How Worried Should We Be About XBB.1.5? After months and months of SARS-CoV-2 subvariant soup, one ingredient has emerged in the United States with a flavor pungent enough to overwhelm the rest: XBB.1.5, an Omicron offshoot that now accounts for an estimated 75 percent of cases in the Northeast. A crafty dodger of antibodies that is able to grip extra tightly onto the surface of our cells, XBB.1.5 is now officially the country’s fastest-spreading coronavirus subvariant. In the last week of December alone, it zoomed from 20 percent of estimated infections nationwide to 40 percent; soon, it’s expected to be all that’s left, or at least very close. “That’s the big thing everybody looks for—how quickly it takes over from existing variants,” says Shaun Truelove, an infectious-disease modeler at Johns Hopkins University. “And that’s a really quick rise.” All of this raises familiar worries: more illness, more long COVID, more hospitalizations, more health-care system strain. With holiday cheer and chilly temperatures crowding people indoors, and the uptake of bivalent vaccines at an abysmal low, a winter wave was already brewing in the U.S. The impending dominance of an especially speedy, immune-evasive variant, Truelove told me, could ratchet up that swell. Continued here S49 After $414M fine, Meta tries to avoid seeking user consent for personalized ads For four years, Meta has been battling European Union regulators over how its apps, Facebook and Instagram, collect user data to personalize ads. The key question for regulators was whether Meta's so-called contract legal basis—which lumps the user consent agreement into its apps’ terms of services—forced its users to choose between consenting to data collection or losing all access to the social platforms. Continued here S33 What Rice-Farming Cultures Can Teach Us about Pandemic Preparedness Societies that farm rice over wheat tend to be more tight-knit and interdependent, which could protect them from pandemic viruses like the one behind COVID Rice farming is hard. It’s complicated. Traditional rice farming takes twice the amount of labor as crops like wheat, corn and potatoes. Paddy rice was built on irrigation networks that forced farmers to cooperate with each other. Rain falls on the fields of both rogue and cooperative wheat farmers, but irrigation networks flood paddy fields only if farmers work together to build them and manage to keep them working. In short, rice required a lot more social coordination compared with crops such as wheat, which the West was built on. Continued here S24 U.S. Soccer's Gregg Berhalter on Rebuilding Trust in the Wake of Controversy In the past couple weeks, Gregg Berhalter, who coached the US Men’s National Soccer Team through the 2022 World Cup, has been in the spotlight for different reasons. His decision to limit the playing time of one of his young players prompted the player’s parents to threaten to expose an incident from more than three decades ago in which Berhalter and a woman got into a fight. Berhalter took the initiative, and with that woman—who became his wife—issued a statement acknowledging that he had kicked her in that incident when he was 18, but that they’d gotten past it, have been married for 25 years, and have raised four kids together. He says he’s saddened that his public life has affected his family, and offers insights on how he plans to rebuild trust after the controversy. Continued here S52 WhatsApp just made it harder to censor citizens with Internet shutdowns To ring in the new year, WhatsApp introduced a new feature to help people circumvent government-imposed Internet shutdowns that the United Nations said last summer work to undermine human rights. Continued here S28 An online black market for Covid-19 drugs is exploding in China Chinese people are buying and selling painkillers and Covid-19 antiviral drugs through a thriving online black market, as hundreds of thousands of Omicron infections trigger a demand for antiviral and fever-reducing medicines.  In early December, the Chinese government abruptly lifted its zero-Covid restrictions, leaving citizens scrambling to prepare for the country’s worst Covid-19 outbreak. With an under-vaccinated elderly population, and Covid-19 therapies in short supply, scalpers and residents with spare medicines have been selling the products online at a premium.  Continued here S41 Notorious Russian Spies Piggybacked on Other Hackers' USB Infections The Russian cyberespionage group known as Turla became infamous in 2008 as the hackers behind agent.btz, a virulent piece of malware that spread through US Department of Defense systems, gaining widespread access via infected USB drives plugged in by unsuspecting Pentagon staffers. Now, 15 years later, the same group appears to be trying a new twist on that trick: hijacking the USB infections of other hackers to piggyback on their infections and stealthily choose their spying targets. Today, cybersecurity firm Mandiant revealed that it has found an incident in which, it says, Turla's hackers—widely believed to work in the service of Russia’s FSB intelligence agency—gained access to victim networks by registering the expired domains of nearly decade-old cybercriminal malware that spread via infected USB drives. As a result, Turla was able to take over the command-and-control servers for that malware, hermit-crab style, and sift through its victims to find ones worthy of espionage targeting. Continued here S63 A Civil War Over Semicolons The biographer Robert Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, have been arguing with each other for 50 years. The partnership of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is beautifully anachronistic. As writer and editor, respectively, they have together produced 4,888 pages over the course of 50 years, including the multivolume, still unfinished saga that is Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. A lasting collaboration of this sort is impossible to imagine in today’s publishing world of constant churn. Then there’s their method: Caro puts on a dark suit every day, writes his drafts out in longhand, and copies them onto carbon paper using his Smith Corona typewriter, after which Gottlieb marks them up with a pencil—like a couple of cobblers still making shoes with an awl. Whatever deal Caro got from Gottlieb and Knopf in the 1970s, it has allowed him to work monastically on this biography project seemingly without any other source of income. As Caro’s longtime agent, Lynn Nesbit, says of the arrangement in Turn Every Page, a new documentary about Caro and Gottlieb, “I doubt that it could ever happen again.” Continued here S25 The childhood diseases making a post-lockdown comeback As child after child gasping for air was admitted to the hospital, Rabia Agha gritted her teeth. In her role as director of the paediatric infectious diseases division at Maimonides Children's Hospital in New York, she had seen this before. An outbreak of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) – a winter virus that can feel like a common cold in adults, but which can be dangerous for some young children. There was a wave last autumn – and an unexpected one in spring this year. Now, in the early autumn months of 2022, it was back again. Continued here S56 First LastPass, now Slack and CircleCI. The hacks go on (and will likely worsen) In the past 24 hours, the world has learned of serious breaches hitting chat service Slack and software testing and delivery company CircleCI, though giving the companies' opaque wording—“security issue” and “security incident,” respectively—you'd be forgiven for thinking these events were minor. Continued here S30 Audio Astronomy Unlocks a Universe of Sound Turning astronomical data into sound rather than images can inspire blind and visually impaired people—and maybe lead to some discoveries, too Ever since she was a kid, Sarah Kane has wanted to study space. And she’s well on her way. Now a senior undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Kane has spent the past two years analyzing the cosmos using machine learning. There’s one small problem: astronomy is a highly visual field, and Kane is legally blind. Continued here S50 AMD's new RDNA 3 GPUs will compete with Nvidia for mid-range gaming laptops AMD announced at CES this week several new laptop GPU models to go along with updates to the company's desktop and laptop CPU lineups. Although not as wide-ranging as Nvidia's laptop GPU announcements earlier in the week, all of these graphics chips target low-end-to-mid-range gaming laptops and mobile workstations, which data suggests is what most people are buying when they shop for those kinds of PCs. Continued here Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Followers Blog Archive ►  2025 (2) ►  January (2) ►  2024 (4) ►  December (4) ▼  2023 (542) ►  December (2) ►  November (33) ►  October (27) ►  September (37) ►  August (45) ►  July (30) ►  June (73) ►  May (3) ►  April (33) ►  March (17) ►  February (84) ▼  January (158) A Physical Theory For When the Brain Performs Best... January 31, 2023 - Strike action over Macron’s p... 'Tomb Raider' is Becoming a TV Series -- 'The Last... 9 Strategies to Improve Business Team Collaboratio... January 31, 2023 - Australia and France agree arms... Does the Best Workout Exist? Exercise Scientists A... 25 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Explained: This Is the 'M... 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