Does Not Being Able to Picture Something in Your Mind Affect Your Creativity?
Researchers who study aphantasia, or the inability to visualize something in your “mind’s eye,” are starting to get a sense of how to accurately measure the condition and what it may mean for those who have it. If I asked you to visualize, say, Harry Potter, you’d probably have no problem picturing him in your mind: a teenage wizard with black hair, glasses, a thunderbolt-shaped scar on his forehead and a wand in his hand. It would almost be as if you were pulling up a photograph in your head. Continued here |
The Dream of Mini Nuclear Plants Hangs in the Balance
Jordan Garcia, a deputy utilities manager in Los Alamos, New Mexico, is facing an energy crunch that is typical in the American West. For decades, the county-run utility relied on a cheap and steady mix of coal and hydroelectric power. But the region’s dams are aging and drought-parched, and its coal plants are slated to retire. The county is aiming to fully decarbonize its grid by 2040, and the city has been tapping more solar lately, but batteries are arriving slowly, and Garcia worries about heat waves that strain the grid after the sun goes down. Wind power? He’d take more of it. But there aren’t enough wires stretching from the state’s windy eastern plains to the mesa-top community. “For us it’s pretty dire,” he says. Continued here |
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How humans evolved to be intelligent
“Only a handful of genes separate us from the chimps, and yet we live twice as long and we have thousands of words in our vocabulary.” Dr. Michio Kaku, the co-creator of string field theory, says that intelligence is not necessary for survival — after all, Earth did just fine during the first 4.5 billion years before humans existed. Why aren’t there more intelligent creatures on Earth? And what propelled humans, above all other primates, to become intelligent creatures? We can thank opposable thumbs, predator eyesight, and language. Continued here |
Sci-Fi Publishers Are Bracing for an AI Battle
It began with a tweet of a bar graph depicting a sharp rise in the month of February: Neil Clarke, the publisher and editor in chief of the science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld, had plotted out the publication’s past few years of plagiarized and spammy submissions. Until late 2022, the bars are barely visible, but in the past few months—and especially this month—the numbers climb dramatically, mostly due to AI-generated content. Clarke wrote a post laying out the situation entitled “A Concerning Trend.” Five days and a massive amount of online chatter later, Clarkesworld announced it’s closing submissions for now. Clarke says they’ve seen this problem growing for a while, but they took the time to analyze the data before talking about it publicly. “The reason we’re getting these is a lot of the side-hustle community,” he says. “‘Make money using ChatGPT.’ They’re not science fiction writers—they’re not even writers, for the most part. They’re just people who are trying to make some money on some of these things, and they’re following people who make it sound like they know what they’re doing.” He adds that having seen some of the how-to videos in question, “There’s no way what they’re hawking is going to work.” Continued here |
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Your Brain Could Be Controlling How Sick You Get - And How You Recover
Scientists are deciphering how the brain choreographs immune responses, hoping to find treatments for a range of diseases Hundreds of scientists around the world are looking for ways to treat heart attacks. But few started where Hedva Haykin has: in the brain. Continued here |
A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job
I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week. Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week. Continued here |
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U.S. Lawsuit Threatens Access to Abortion Drug: The Science behind the Case
A judge’s decision could ban mifepristone across the country and weaken the Food and Drug Administration’s authority A lawsuit in Texas not only has the potential to further restrict abortion access in the United States — but it could also set a dangerous precedent by overturning the approval of a medication by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Continued here |
The city with gold in its sewage lines
"He burned the sari and from it, handed us a thin slice of pure silver," said my mother, describing a moment that had taken place 30 years ago at her home in the city of Firozabad. The man in her story was no magician, but an extractor. Like many similar artisans in my mother's hometown, he'd go door to door collecting old saris to mine them for their precious metals. Until the 1990s, saris were often threaded with pure silver and gold, and I remember digging into my mother's wardrobe, searching for her glittery outfits like treasure. But as she told me, the extractors were looking for something even more valuable than clothing – they were looking for trash, and a kind of trash specific to this city. Continued here |
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A look back at JWST's predecessor: NASA's Spitzer
Joining Hubble, Compton, and Chandra, Spitzer was the final of NASA’s original Great Observatories. Spitzer reigned as humanity’s greatest mid-infrared observatory until JWST’s operations began. Continued here |
4 Steps to Beating Burnout
Three symptoms characterize burnout: exhaustion; cynicism, or distancing oneself from work; and inefficacy, or feelings of incompetence and lack of achievement. Research has linked burnout to many health problems, including hypertension, sleep disturbances, depression, and substance abuse. Moreover, it can ruin relationships and jeopardize career prospects. Continued here |
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How we discovered a personality profile linked to war crimes
Former US Private First Class Stephen Green was found guilty of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl and murdering her family in Mahmudiyah, Iraq in 2006. Four years later, US Corporal Jeremy Morlock was convicted of ambushing, murdering and maiming Afghan civilians in 2010. Investigations revealed that Green had a pre-existing antisocial personality disorder. This effectively made him indifferent to the suffering of others. Morlock, too, had a personal history of anti-social behaviour. Continued here |
Keke Palmer Is OK With Being Left Out of the Group Chat
Let’s clear this up once and for all. Keke Palmer is not the moment. After watching her on my screen for 20 years, here is what I can tell you with absolute certainty: She is, and continues to be, a ubiquitous talent—a daughter, sister, actress, singer, producer, podcaster, CEO, and millennial diva. So to say Palmer is one of these things more than the other would be incorrect. She’s a canny, once-in-a-generation artist who makes the kind of work that resists containment. So, no—she is not one moment, one performance, one anything. Gaze into the window of any of her roles and notice the way she builds them line by line, making a home for us to find comfort in. Palmer’s investment becomes ours. A turbine of emotion and a natural scene stealer, she has pulled off an audacious high-wire act of feeling, from Akeelah and the Bee in 2006, her breakout role as a champion speller, to her turn in Nope as Emerald Haywood, the electric heart of Jordan Peele’s awe-stirring sci-fi Western. I have always considered Palmer my generation’s Angela Bassett. She is an actor who puts in the work—lots and lots of work—even when no one is looking. Through it all Palmer has remained unequivocally herself. Through it all she has never given in to the expectation of others. Continued here |
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How to Pick the Right Backpack Size for You
If you own as many backpacks as we do, you might have noticed that they're categorized by liters rather than their inch-by-inch dimensions. The volume, or bag capacity, is a critical factor to keep in mind when purchasing a backpack. For example, a 15-liter backpack is fine for day-to-day activities, but it's probably not going to be big enough for an overnight trip. It's surprisingly difficult to convey a bag's volume given its dimensions. Let's compare two of my favorite bags: The Rains Mini measures 15.7 inches by 11.4 by 3.9, and the Herschel Heritage measures 18 inches by 12.25 by 5.5. Given a side-by-side visual comparison, they look pretty comparable, but the Rains holds nine liters, while the Herschel holds 21.5. Continued here |
How eccentric religions were born in 19th-century America
Excerpted from An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder, written by Susan Wels and published by Pegasus Books. Newspapers were a thriving business in the 1830s. There were twice as many of them in America as there had been in 1810. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who traveled the young country in 1831, was amazed at the number of periodicals. Every village, he reported, had a newspaper, and the power of the press was impressive. John Humphrey Noyes — God’s self-anointed messenger — planned to launch a religious newspaper that would serve as the pulpit of the world. Continued here |
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New Color-Changing Coating Could Both Heat and Cool Buildings
A thin film can switch from releasing heat to trapping it, and wrapping the coating around buildings could make them more energy-efficient Keeping indoor spaces comfortable takes a lot of power. About half the energy Americans use in their homes goes toward heating and cooling, accounting for a sizable chunk of both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions. Although many buildings have walls packed with insulation to maintain an ideal temperature, others—especially old buildings—are shockingly energy inefficient. Continued here |
No One Knows If Decades-Old Nukes Would Actually Work
Flattened cities, millions of people burnt to death, and yet more tortured by radioactive fallout. That harrowing future may seem outlandish to some, but only because no nation has detonated a nuclear weapon in conflict since 1945. Countries including the US, Russia, and China wield hefty nuclear arsenals and regularly squabble over how to manage them—only last week, Russia suspended participation in its nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US. Thankfully, nuclear warheads mostly just sit there, motionless and silent, cozy in their silos and underground storage caverns. If someone actually tried to use one, though, would it definitely go off as intended? “Nobody really knows,” says Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear weapons historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology. The 20th century witnessed more than 2,000 nuclear tests—the vast majority carried out by the US and the Soviet Union. And while these did prove the countries’ nuclear capabilities, they don’t guarantee that a warhead strapped to a missile or some other delivery system would work today. Continued here |
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People on TikTok are paying elderly women to sit in stagnant mud for hours and cry In a series of recently viral livestreams on Indonesian TikTok, the premise is always the same: Women in their 50s and 60s sit in a stagnant pool of water and mud, often shivering. The women’s clothes are soaked to the skin, and they periodically throw a pail of water over themselves, looking directly at the camera. At times, they wipe away tears, appearing distressed. In doing so, the women — or the TikTok creators directing them, at least — can earn money. Over hours, sympathetic viewers send “coins” and gifts that can be exchanged for cash, amounting to several hundred dollars per stream, says Sultan Akhyar, the man credited with inventing the trend. Emojis of gifts, roses, and well-wishes float up gently from the bottom of the live feed. Continued here |
Stop Demonizing Stock Buybacks
If progressives think they’ve found a good stick to beat corporate America with, they’re wrong. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address earlier this month featured a hefty dose of good old-fashioned economic populism. Biden called out the rich for cheating on taxes, and big companies for not paying any taxes at all. He attacked Big Pharma for jacking up drug prices. And he took aim at one of progressives’ bêtes noires: stock buybacks. Continued here |
4 Simple Ways to Show Employee Appreciation Year Round Employee Appreciation Day is a good opportunity for leaders to reflect on improving their employee retention. Continued here |
Cat Owners Are More Cautious Consumers Than Dog Owners
Xiaojing Yang of the University of South Carolina and two coresearchers gave pet owners basic definitions of stocks and mutual funds, highlighting the increased risk associated with the former, and asked them which type of financial instrument they’d rather buy and how much they’d invest. Dog owners were more likely than cat owners to opt for stocks, and they allocated more money to them than the relatively few cat owners who made that choice did. Additional experiments revealed that cat owners also preferred products that prevented problems, while dog owners were drawn to products that promised gains. The conclusion: Cat owners are more cautious consumers than dog owners. Continued here |
Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons: Ancient Pompeii's hidden messages, preserved in graffiti
Take a graffiti tour through ancient Pompeii with Roman archaeologist Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons and discover what 2,000-year-old scribblings from antiquity can teach us about life in modern times. A fascinating reminder of what we leave behind for future generations. Continued here |
Mexico's 1,500-year-old unknown pyramids
From a distance, the grey volcanic rock pyramids and their encircling stonewalls looked like something that Mother Nature had wrought herself. Located in Cañada de La Virgen (The Valley of the Virgin), an area about 30 miles outside the city of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico's central highlands, the stone formations blended into the arid, desiccated landscape like a diminutive mountain range. But as I got closer to the largest of the three structures, there was no doubt it was man-made. A staircase of identical steps, etched into the hard, dark rock, had clearly required a skilled mason's hand. The other two pyramids, smaller and less well-preserved, bore a similarly unmistakable human touch. The timeworn edifices were erected by a civilisation long gone. Continued here |
The Case for a Primary Challenge to Joe Biden
He will most likely make this official in the next couple of months, and with the support of nearly every elected Democrat in range of a microphone. That is how things are typically done in Washington: The White House shall make you primary-proof. The gods of groupthink have decreed as much. In private, of course, many elected Democrats say Biden is too old to run again and that they wish he’d step away—which aligns with what large majorities of Democrats and independents have been telling pollsters for months. The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision. Continued here |
Sardinia's mysterious beehive towers
Expecting not to find much more than a pile of big stones, I followed the sign off the motorway into a little car park and there it was, rising from a flat, green landscape covered in little white flowers, with a few donkeys dotted around: Nuraghe Losa. From a distance, it looked like a big sandcastle with its top crumbling away, but as I walked towards it, I began to realise the colossal size of the monument in front of me. Nuraghi (the plural of nuraghe) are massive conical stone towers that pepper the landscape of the Italian island of Sardinia. Built between 1600 and 1200BCE, these mysterious Bronze Age bastions were constructed by carefully placing huge, roughly worked stones, weighing several tons each, on top of each other in a truncated formation. Continued here |
Always Feeling Exhausted? Embrace the Military's Sleep Discipline Rule to Get the Perfect Night's Sleep A lot of science, and a time-tested method for being more productive, focused, engaged, and energized. Continued here |
Six Memoirs That Go Beyond Memories
Sometimes you hear that taunt in your head late at night as you try and fail to sleep. Maybe it’s the voice of an old acquaintance whose respect you once craved. Or worse, perhaps this voice sounds like your own, the most insecure and anxious version of you. The truth is, it’s never not a little embarrassing when someone hears that you’re writing a book and asks you what it’s about. If and when you venture down this particular writing path, you’ll quickly discover that memoirs are not diaries. The best don’t work solely from the author’s biased, Hollywood-style recollections, where every character is either “good” or “bad.” Lives, and memories, are more complicated than that. Continued here |
The ancient remains of Great Zimbabwe
Walking up to the towering walls of Great Zimbabwe was a humbling experience. The closer I got, the more they dwarfed me – and yet, there was something inviting about the archaeological site. It didn't feel like an abandoned fortress or castle that one might see in Europe: Great Zimbabwe was a place where people lived and worked, a place where they came to worship – and still do. It felt alive. Great Zimbabwe is the name of the extensive stone remains of an ancient city built between 1100 and 1450 CE near modern-day Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Believed to be the work of the Shona (who today make up the majority of Zimbabwe's population) and possibly other societies that were migrating back and forth across the area, the city was large and powerful, housing a population comparable to London at that time – somewhere around 20,000 people during its peak. Great Zimbabwe was part of a sophisticated trade network (Arab, Indian and Chinese trade goods were all found at the site), and its architectural design was astounding: made of enormous, mortarless stone walls and towers, most of which are still standing. Continued here |
Judy Blume Goes All the Way
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. Like tens of thousands of young women before me, I wrote to Judy Blume because something strange was happening to my body. Continued here |
Scientists Are Trying to Pull Carbon Out of the Ocean to Combat Climate Change
Instead of sucking planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, some scientists are looking to capture it from the oceans CLIMATEWIRE | There's a growing consensus among climate scientists that in order to avoid the worst effects of global warming, humanity has to find a way to sequester carbon dioxide — and most efforts to date have focused on removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Continued here |
How to Manage Interruptions in Meetings
Imagine you’re in your first job, sharing a brilliant idea in a meeting. Then, out of nowhere, one of your peers, who is also new, interrupts you. Before you know it, you’re competing with the interrupter to speak – but it’s too late. Your colleague has sidetracked the entire conversation. The meeting ends. Continued here |
The mysterious Viking runes found in a landlocked US state
"[Farley] spent the majority of her adult life researching the stone," said Amanda Garcia, Heavener Runestone Park manager. "She travelled all around the US, went to Egypt and went to different places looking at different markings." Faith Rogers, an environmental-science intern and volunteer at the Heavener Runestone Park, led me down a cobblestone path toward one of the 55-acre woodland's biggest attractions – which is also one of the US' biggest historical mysteries. We were deep in the rolling, scrub-forest foothills of the Ouachita Mountains in far eastern Oklahoma, and we were on our way to view a slab of ancient sandstone that still has experts scratching their heads and debating about the eight symbols engraved on its face. Continued here |
The AI Disaster Scenario
Is it right to freak out? Is it wrong? Will AI end the human race? But also: Aren’t these tools awe-inspiring? This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Continued here |
A Refresher on Price Elasticity
Setting the right price for your product or service is hard. In fact, determining price is one of the toughest things a marketer has to do, in large part because it has such a big impact on the company’s bottom line. One of the critical elements of pricing is understanding what economists call price elasticity. Continued here
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