This Overlooked Scientist Helped Save Washington, D.C.'s Cherry Trees
Mycologist Flora Patterson helped make the USDA fungus collection into the world’s largest. She also made a mean mushroom “catsup” In 1909 the mayor of Tokyo sent a gift of 2,000 prized cherry trees to Washington, D.C. But the iconic blossoms that are now enjoyed each spring along the city’s Tidal Basin are not from those trees. That’s because Flora Patterson, who was the mycologist in charge of mycological and pathological collections at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, recognized the original saplings were infected, and the shipment was burned on the National Mall. Continued here |
Competing on Analytics
Companies questing for killer apps generally focus all their firepower on the one area that promises to create the greatest competitive advantage. But a new breed of organization has upped the stakes: Amazon, Harrah’s, Capital One, and the Boston Red Sox have all dominated their fields by deploying industrial-strength analytics across a wide variety of activities. Continued here |
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25 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Explained: This Is the 'Most Important' Statistic to Identify Truly Great Leaders "And when you have great people, the most important thing to do is to not lose them." Continued here |
ChatGPT could help students cheat -- but it could also revolutionize education
ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI that has the ability to generate human-like text, making it capable of engaging in natural language conversations. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with computers, and it has already begun to be integrated into various industries. However, the implementation of ChatGPT in the field of higher education in the U.K. poses a number of challenges that must be carefully considered. If ChatGPT is used to grade assignments or exams, there is the possibility that it could be biased against certain groups of students. Continued here |
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Auckland floods: even stormwater reform won't be enough - we need a 'sponge city' to avoid future disasters
We’ve built our cities to be vulnerable to – and exacerbate – major weather events such as the one we saw in Auckland on Friday. While almost no city in the world could fully escape the effects of four months’ worth of rain in 24 hours, there are many things that could have been done to avoid some of the worst impacts. Buildings, streets and car parks are all impermeable surfaces. When it rains, the water rushes off these surfaces and into gutters. From the gutters, the water drains into a stormwater catch basin, through the stormwater network, and into streams and the sea. Continued here |
Three years ago, a fake April Fool's Day joke transformed Sega's best series
The Yakuza series has a reputation for being full of hijinks in addition to its melodramatic story of gangsters. This image reached its height in what was originally thought to be an April Fool's joke announcing a turn-based RPG entry in the series. But instead of a joke, Yakuza: Lika a Dragon was a groundbreaking soft reboot for the franchise that leans hard into the humor of the series, earning it newfound appreciation in the west. Setting up the joke — In 2016, developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio seemingly ended the story of longtime series protagonist Kazuma Kiryu with Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (although Kiryu will be coming out of retirement soon). When it came time to work on the next entry in the franchise, the studio wanted to branch off in a new direction that changed the protagonist and mechanics of the franchise. This game would become Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Continued here |
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The secrets inside your saliva
At first glance, saliva seems like pretty boring stuff, merely a convenient way to moisten our food. But the reality is quite different, as scientists are beginning to understand. The fluid interacts with everything that enters the mouth, and even though it is 99% water, it has a profound influence on the flavours – and our enjoyment – of what we eat and drink. "It is a liquid, but it's not just a liquid," says oral biologist Guy Carpenter of King's College London. Continued here |
Chairing ASEAN: what does it mean for Indonesia in 2023?
Despite many obstacles and challenges, including the Russia-Ukraine war and global recession, host nation Indonesia managed to ensure that the high-level conference held in Bali on November 15-16 2022 produced a joint declaration, known as the G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration. It shows how Indonesia, under President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, has tried to be a unifying force in the midst of global uncertainty. Now Indonesia has shifted focus and attention to its next significant challenge: chairing ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in 2023. Continued here |
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Emotionally Intelligent People Use 2 Simple Words to Build Confidence and Work Better (and Get Others to Work Better, Too) These two words will not only change the way you see yourself and others, they'll turn you into 'self-fulfilling prophecies'--and inspire you to do great work. Continued here |
A nuclear-powered X-ray "flashlight" could probe the Moon for water
Not all flashlights are created equal. Some are stronger, consume more power, or have features such as blinking or strobes. Some aren’t even meant for humans, such as a new project that recently received funding from a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I award. Designed by the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC), this flashlight doesn’t emit visible light, but it does emit X-rays and gamma rays, and the researchers on the project think it could be useful for finding resources on the Moon. Continued here |
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The Auckland floods are a sign of things to come - the city needs stormwater systems fit for climate change
The extraordinary flood event Auckland experienced on the night of January 27, the eve of the city’s anniversary weekend, was caused by rainfall that was literally off the chart. Over 24 hours, 249mm of rain fell – well above the previous record of 161.8mm. A state of emergency was declared late in the evening. Continued here |
How does the placebo effect take hold? A doctor explains 2 influential factors
In this book excerpt, Kathryn Hall, an expert on placebos, considers the ways that expectations and learning affect our response to them. It was time for Dr. Musavi to convey the sad news. With her health rapidly declining, his patient, Mrs. Ozra, had less than two weeks to live. Summoning the family together, he encouraged them to make arrangements. Continued here |
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You need to watch the most experimental dinosaur movie on HBO Max ASAP
With director Joe Johnston replacing Steven Spielberg, the beloved franchise upped the ante on monsters... and little else. Nothing can touch Jurassic Park. Even Steven Spielberg swung and missed with his 1997 sequel The Lost World, fumbling the rare blessing of Jeff Goldblum in the lead role. There was no way a third film, sans Spielberg, could dazzle audiences like the first time they saw a roaming brontosaurus. But an attempt was made, and the result is as fascinating as it is baffling. Continued here |
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 |
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Nadhim Zahawi sacked: today's Tory scandals are similar to 1990s sleaze stories in more than one way
The 1990s are everywhere right now. From the fashion trends making a comeback in 2023 (I’m told), to the hotly anticipated return of the flashback mystery-box thriller Yellowjackets, it’s starting to feel like the millennium never happened. And where pop culture leads, politics inevitably follows. Events swirling around prime minister Rishi Sunak are more than a little reminiscent of the sleaze that dogged John Major’s Conservative government for most of his tenure between 1992 and 1997. So much so that I was recently reminded of a passage written by political scientist Tim Bale: Continued here |
How Antidepressants Help Bacteria Resist Antibiotics
A laboratory study unravels ways antidepressants and other nonantibiotic drugs can contribute to drug resistance The emergence of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics is often attributed to the overuse of antibiotics in people and livestock. But researchers have homed in on another potential driver of resistance: antidepressants. By studying bacteria grown in the laboratory, a team has now tracked how antidepressants can trigger drug resistance. Continued here |
How the U.S. Lost Years of Life
Many countries saw drops in life expectancy during the pandemic, but some populations have suffered more than others Over the past century people have been living longer lives around the globe. Then COVID hit. Now, nearly three years into the pandemic, with highly effective vaccines widely available, life expectancy in many middle- and high-income countries has started to bounce back. But in the U.S., it is still dropping. A study last year found that life expectancy in most Western European countries recovered in 2021—most likely the result of high vaccination rates that reduced mortality, particularly among the elderly. But the U.S. has continued to see declines, in part because of lower vaccination rates as well as a devastating opioid epidemic. Continued here |
The Cryptic Crossword: Sunday, January 29, 2023
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The Good-Better-Best Approach to Pricing
Companies often crimp profits by using discounts to attract price-sensitive customers and by failing to give high-end customers reasons to spend more. A multitiered offering can use a stripped-down product (the “Good” option) to attract new customers, the existing product (“Better”) to keep current customers happy, and a feature-laden premium version (“Best”) to increase spending by customers who want more. Continued here |
You need to play the best Bond game ever made on Switch and Game Pass ASAP
Sean Bean dies a lot — not in real life, obviously, but on screen. From Game of Thrones to The Lord of the Rings and Equilibrium, the man rarely makes it. The most spectacular Beanslaughter of them all is his fatal freefall off the Arecibo Observatory in 1995’s GoldenEye. But sometimes quantity tops quality, and if you want to kill Sean Bean more than once, now’s your chance. Because that James Bond film’s iconic video game adaptation is now playable on Xbox Game Pass and Nintendo Switch Online. GoldenEye 007 was an FPS sensation for the Nintendo 64, allowing players to kill Bean’s 006 alongside the rest of the cast in its legendary multiplayer mode. There’s a true-to-movie campaign too, and both have been revamped for re-release on Nintendo Switch and Xbox. Naturally, the nostalgia will hit harder for some than others. Continued here |
Israel’s Anti-Democratic Practices Against Palestinians Are Infecting Its Political System
Early Thursday morning, Israeli soldiers and police conducted a raid against what they said were Islamic Jihad militants that left nine Palestinians, including a sixty-year-old woman, dead. The operation, in the city of Jenin, also wounded dozens, according to Palestinian officials. The Israeli Army contended that most of the dead were militants who had shot at or hurled Molotov cocktails at security forces. The death toll was one of the highest single-day tallies in the West Bank in years. On Friday night, a Palestinian gunman killed seven Israelis and wounded three others in an attack near a synagogue in East Jerusalem. Among the dead were three elderly, two women and a man. Three others were injured. On Saturday, a thirteen-year-old Palestinian boy, police said, shot and wounded two people near Jerusalem's Old City. Continued here |
100 million Nigerians are at risk of neglected tropical diseases: what the country is doing about it
Neglected tropical diseases are a group of communicable diseases found in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. They are classified as “neglected” because they have received little or no attention in terms of prevention and control for several decades. The World Health Organization guides the way they are identified and managed. These 20 conditions mostly affect impoverished communities, women and children. Most people affected by them live in rural areas where houses are overcrowded, and basic infrastructure such as water and toilet facilities are lacking. More than one billion people are estimated to be affected globally. Continued here |
How Plants' Plumbing Let Them Conquer the World
To protect from deadly drought and make it on land, plants developed complicated inner plumbing Towering redwoods and lanky jungle vines hoist water from the soil to their lofty leaves through a tubelike tissue called the xylem. In early plants, which reached just a few centimeters and lived only in wet environments, the xylem worked like a simple cylindrical bundle of drinking straws running up the stem; our modern biosphere exists because that infrastructure somehow got much more sophisticated. Continued here |
Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User's Guide to Humor at Work
A few years ago, we conducted a research study in which we asked people to help us create an ad campaign for a travel service called VisitSwitzerland.ch (which we’d made up). We put the participants into small groups and showed them a photo—a Swiss landscape of a lake, a mountain, and the country’s distinctive flag with its white plus sign against a red background—accompanied by the question: “What made you fall in love with Switzerland?” We gave participants three minutes to come up with a memorable answer and then had them share their ideas with their groups. Continued here |
Innovating in Uncertain Times: Lessons from 2022
Too many leaders succumb to fear of missing out (FOMO) when new tech trends emerge and demand that something — anything — using the new tech be implemented immediately. This leads to wasted investment, missed opportunity and disillusionment about the new landscape. Emerging technologies are critical and demand attention and investment, but managers must exercise patience and avoid falling victim to the hype. Responsible exploration is key. Continued here |
With these mini projectors, you can stream shows & so much more -- all from your iPhone
Whether you want to dive into your favorite series from a random location or host an impromptu movie night with friends, a phone projector makes quick work of sharing content on a big screen. Weighing as little as 1 pound, the best mini projectors for iPhones are easy to travel with and offer excellent image quality relative to their price tags. The best iPhone projectors effortlessly display content from your device using the screen mirroring function, but some require a Lightning-to-HDMI connector, which you’ll have to supply yourself. If you’re planning to project a work presentation or your own photo or video collection, display setup is quick and easy. However, if you want to project copyrighted material from streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, a separate media device (such as an Amazon Fire TV Stick or Roku) will be required for viewing. Continued here |
Why some people can't tell left from right
Preventable medical mistakes frequently involve wrong-sided surgery: an injection to the wrong eye, for example, or a biopsy from the wrong breast. These "never events" – serious and largely preventable patient safety accidents – highlight that, while most of us learn as children how to tell left from right, not everyone gets it right. While for some people, telling left from right is as easy as telling up from down, a significant minority – around one in six people, according to a recent study – struggle with the distinction. Even for those who believe they have no issues, distractions such as ambient noise, or having to answer unrelated questions, can get in the way of making the right choice. Continued here |
The Right Words Are Crucial to Solving Climate Change
Climate change is already disrupting the lives of billions of people. What was once considered a problem for the future is raging all around us right now. This reality has helped convince a majority of the public that we must act to limit the suffering. In an August 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, 71 percent of Americans said they had experienced at least one heat wave, flood, drought or wildfire in the past year. Among those people, more than 80 percent said climate change had contributed. In another 2022 poll, 77 percent of Americans who said they had been affected by extreme weather in the past five years saw climate change as a crisis or major problem. Yet the response is not meeting the urgency of the crisis. A transition to clean energy is underway, but it is happening too slowly to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The U.S. government finally took long-delayed action by passing the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, but much more progress is needed, and it is hampered by entrenched politics. The partisan divide largely stems from conservatives’ perception that climate change solutions will involve big government controlling people’s choices and imposing sacrifices. Research shows that Republicans’ skepticism about climate change is largely attributable to a conflict between ideological values and often discussed solutions, particularly government regulations. A 2019 study in Climatic Change found that political and ideological polarization on climate change is particularly acute in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries. Continued here |
What Makes a Great Resume?
Begin by writing an unedited list detailing your complete work history. And we mean, everything. Include your job waiting tables or walking your neighbor’s dog to get some extra pocket money in college, and even the summer you spent delivering newspapers or mowing lawns as a teenager. Include the job you quit after six months and the job where you got fired. Continued here |
'Persona 3 Portable' requests guide: How to complete every Velvet Room errand
One of the most time-consuming activities players can pursue in Persona 3 Portable are the requests given to the protagonist by the Velvet Room attendant, either Elizabeth or Theodore. While players will already spend plenty of time trying to romance side characters and get the highest grade in class, these requests are essential to maxing out your relationship with the Velvet Room attendant. Still, they aren’t always clear about how you can fulfill the myriad of requests. Here is a complete guide on all of the 80 requests from Elizabeth and Theodore in Persona 3 Portable. Defeat the Reaper enemy who appears by remaining on any one floor of Tartarus for too long. Continued here |
65 dank things on Amazon that are so freaking cheap
It’s always a little bit surprising when you find something that you actually love and it didn’t cost you a fortune. However, Amazon has made that a more frequent occurrence. It’s actually made it a little too easy to find cheap things that you want to keep forever and that’s why I’ve compiled these 65 ingenious products. There’s everything from skincare to tools to kitchen utensils. And instead of expecting your choice to break after a week of having it or another charge to pop up on your credit card, just add to your cart and enjoy them for all their affordable and high-quality glory. Continued here |
14 Great Deals on TVs, Wireless Earbuds, and Soundbars
If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it's a pretty dark and cool time of year, which makes it a good time to consider your indoor tech essentials. From TVs to wireless earbuds, this weekend's list of deals is sure to keep you occupied inside. Be sure to check out our deals roundup from earlier in the week, where you’ll still find discounts on work-from-home gear and more headphones. Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com and our print magazine (if you'd like). Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day. Continued here |
Physicists demo a sci-fi-inspired laser that mimics a classic UFO trick
Tractor beams make intuitive sense. Matter and energy interact with each other in countless ways throughout the Universe. Magnetism and gravity are both natural forces that can draw objects together, so there’s sort of a precedent. A tractor beam is a device that can move an object from a distance. The idea comes from a 1931 sci-fi story called Spacehounds of IPC: Continued here |
The Police Folklore That Helped Kill Tyre Nichols
Thirty-four years ago, near the crest of the crack-cocaine-fuelled crime surge of the early nineteen-nineties, two F.B.I agents began a novel investigation of threats to police. One agent was a former police lieutenant in Washington, D.C. The other was also a Catholic priest with a doctorate in psychology. Together, they plunged into the prison system, interviewing fifty convicted cop killers. Most criminologists today call such research pseudoscience. A sample size of fifty was almost anecdotal, and why should anyone trust a cop killer, anyway? The agents also had no benchmark—no comparable interviews with criminals who had complied. Yet the sweeping conclusions of their study, “Killed in the Line of Duty,” made the front page of the Times, and, through decades of promotion by the Department of Justice, became ingrained in the culture of American law enforcement. At the top of an inventory of “behavioral descriptors” linked to officers who ended up dead, the study listed traits that some citizens might prize: “friendly,” “well-liked by community and department,” “tends to use less force than other officers felt they would use in similar circumstances,” and “used force only as last resort.” The cop killers, the agents concluded from their prison conversations, had attacked officers with a “good-natured demeanor.” An officer’s failure to dominate—to immediately enforce full control over the suspect—proved fatal. “A miscue in assessing the need for control in particular situations can have grave consequences,” the authors warned. Continued here |
What happens when regular porn watchers abstain for a week?
A team of psychologists based out of Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom and HELP University in Malaysia explored whether regular pornography users experience withdrawal symptoms when asked to abstain for one week. Their paper detailing this effort was recently published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. The researchers recruited 176 psychology undergraduates in Malaysia, about two-thirds female, to take part in the research. They received class credit and $7.00 for fully participating. All were regular porn consumers, viewing sexual content at least three times per week. One-half of subjects were randomized to an abstinence group — that is, they were asked to refrain from viewing pornography for seven days. The other half was assigned to a control group and told to continue their habits as usual. Continued here |
Viruses can speed up unhealthy brain aging -- vaccines may offer peace of mind
There is currently no cure for dementia, but getting vaccinated for common viral illnesses may reduce your risk. One in 9 Americans ages 65 and older had Alzheimer’s disease in 2022, and countless others were indirectly affected as caregivers, health care providers, and taxpayers. There is currently no cure — available treatments primarily focus on prevention by encouraging protective factors, such as exercise and a healthy diet, and reducing aggravating factors, such as diabetes and high blood pressure. Continued here |
Inhumanity in Memphis
The police officers who fatally beat Tyre Nichols must have known their actions were being recorded, but that hardly seemed to deter them. Even before the city of Memphis released video Friday evening of the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols, it seemed the footage would be horrifying. Defense attorneys compared it to the Rodney King beating in 1991, a comparison that now rings true, but the Memphis police chief and the head of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation similarly said they were appalled by what they’d seen. Cops often remind critics that their job necessarily entails violence, so when seasoned law-enforcement officers react this way, it’s telling. Continued here |
5 Sentences the Best Leaders Never Say, According to Career Experts
Employees may think you're out of touch, lack empathy, are setting a bad example, or all three.Continued here
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