'Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse's Coolest Character is Getting a Live-Action Series
If Tom Holland’s youthful MCU Spider-Man and the animated antics of the Spider-Verse aren’t providing enough web-slinging action for you, another brand of spidey-sense will tingle in live-action... though not in a way fans expected. A Spider-Man Noir series is currently being developed at Amazon, with Sony Pictures Television as its production studio. Variety learned that the show will follow an “older, grizzled superhero in 1930s New York City.” It will be the first live-action iteration of the noir Spider-Man variant, who had previously only appeared as an animated character in Ultimate Spider-Man and Into the Spider-Verse. Continued here |
You Need to Watch Michael Bay's Wildest Action Movie on Netflix ASAP
In 1993, the larger-than-life singer Meat Loaf released a nearly eight-minute music video for his epic single “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).” The video has police helicopters chasing motorcycles, motorcycles disappearing into mansions, police shooting up mansions, and so forth. The video, based on a combination of Beauty and the Beast and The Phantom of the Opera, had a cinematic quality. Appropriately, Hollywood took notice. “He had never directed a feature-length film before,” Will Smith noted in his memoir Will. But “on a $50,000 budget, he managed to shoot a plane crash — with no special effects. He just crashed an airplane and shot it. In a pop video. His visual boldness, cinematic ingenuity, and fiscal wizardry” made the music video’s director, Michael Bay, the “unanimous choice” to guide Smith from the world of TV comedy to action star icon in 1995’s Bad Boys. Continued here |
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Henry Kissinger at 100: history will judge the former US secretary of state's southern African interventions to be a failure
Henry Kissinger, who sexed up the art of diplomacy in the eight years between 1969 and 1977, will turn 100 in May this year. Given his age, and his long influence on global affairs, several “anticipatory obituaries” have been written. Some laud Kissinger’s role in the shaping of East-West relations while he was in office as US Secretary of State. And many in their commentary on the decades beyond continue to call him a “statesman”. Continued here |
As the Liberal-National Coalition marks its 100th birthday, will it survive for many more?
This week marks one hundred years of the federal coalition between the Liberal and National parties, the most successful governing partnership in Australian history. The coalition proved to be enduring, holding power federally for about two-thirds of the last century. It has also been a feature of state politics, most importantly in New South Wales. Continued here |
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Microsoft Could Give Up Call of Duty To Keep a Surprising Game
For over a year now, Microsoft has been in the process of finalizing its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Road bumps in the process have come from the fear that this would constitute a monopoly, with competitors like Sony vehemently opposing the deal and government agencies from the United States and abroad taking a close look at the deal and considering if it should be allowed to go through. A new report from one such agency floats the possibility of having Microsoft sell off Call of Duty to make the deal go through. While this sounds absurd, considering the popularity of the franchise, it is actually more likely than you might think. Continued here |
'Warzone 2.0' Season 2 Roadmap Reveals a Terrible New Feature
Activision has laid out specific plans for the upcoming Warzone 2.0 Season 2, which aims to be the most substantial update yet. The company published a lengthy blog post about the seasonal update, and there’s an impressive number of things in the works, though not all are good. Arguably the most exciting addition is the new Resurgence map, Ashika Island, but it comes with a major caveat that suggests Activision is out of touch. Ashika Island marks the first small-scale Resurgence map in the Warzone 2.0 era, which should be enough to bring some players back. Based on the blog post, the new map looks promising. While it’s easy to be optimistic about the new map, one addition could very well ruin the entire experience: AI bots with swords. Continued here |
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ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
In 2013, workers at a German construction company noticed something odd about their Xerox photocopier: when they made a copy of the floor plan of a house, the copy differed from the original in a subtle but significant way. In the original floor plan, each of the house’s three rooms was accompanied by a rectangle specifying its area: the rooms were 14.13, 21.11, and 17.42 square metres, respectively. However, in the photocopy, all three rooms were labelled as being 14.13 square metres in size. The company contacted the computer scientist David Kriesel to investigate this seemingly inconceivable result. They needed a computer scientist because a modern Xerox photocopier doesn’t use the physical xerographic process popularized in the nineteen-sixties. Instead, it scans the document digitally, and then prints the resulting image file. Combine that with the fact that virtually every digital image file is compressed to save space, and a solution to the mystery begins to suggest itself. Compressing a file requires two steps: first, the encoding, during which the file is converted into a more compact format, and then the decoding, whereby the process is reversed. If the restored file is identical to the original, then the compression process is described as lossless: no information has been discarded. By contrast, if the restored file is only an approximation of the original, the compression is described as lossy: some information has been discarded and is now unrecoverable. Lossless compression is what’s typically used for text files and computer programs, because those are domains in which even a single incorrect character has the potential to be disastrous. Lossy compression is often used for photos, audio, and video in situations in which absolute accuracy isn’t essential. Most of the time, we don’t notice if a picture, song, or movie isn’t perfectly reproduced. The loss in fidelity becomes more perceptible only as files are squeezed very tightly. In those cases, we notice what are known as compression artifacts: the fuzziness of the smallest JPEG and MPEG images, or the tinny sound of low-bit-rate MP3s. Continued here |
Wagner Group in Africa: Russia's presence on the continent increasingly relies on mercenaries
Mercenaries have been a fixture in Africa since the second half of the 20th century. They have been used to protect incumbent leaders or install new ones in conflict zones. Their offering – guns for hire – has remained essentially the same for decades. However, they’ve recently undergone an evolution that forces countries to look more closely at their roles – which range from technical advisers to frontline combatants. Continued here |
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Turkey's Earthquake Response Is as Political as the Conditions That Increased The Devastation
When the first earthquake, 7.8 in magnitude, struck just outside Gaziantep on Monday morning, Gürkan Arpaci considered himself lucky. About eighty miles away, in Elbistan, the small Turkish town where Arpaci was born and lives, only three or four buildings had collapsed and there didn't seem to be too many casualties. Almost everyone he knew appeared on the street in the freezing pre-dawn hour, wondering what to do next. Arpaci's family has two cars, one belonging to him and one to his parents, and they piled in as many neighbors as possible, cranked up the heat, and drove to a nearby field, where they could make phone calls, share some food, and get some sleep—away from the falling debris. When his boss at the local power plant, where Arpaci works as a mechanical engineer, asked him to come in for his morning shift, he obliged, taking the company bus along with a handful of his colleagues, most of them silent in fear and exhaustion. At least the rumble of the bus hid the frequent aftershocks, so he didn't have to pretend that they didn't scare him. At 1:30 P.M., Arpaci, who is thirty, was immersed in his work when the second quake—nearly as strong as the first—hit. This time, Elbistan was close to the epicenter. "It was like something huge was knocking on the walls and doors," he told me. Workers raced outside to call their families. "My mother was safe, she hadn't left the car," Arpaci said. His sister, who was staying in a nearby village, was also fine. Again, he felt lucky. Around him, people were in anguish, unable to reach loved ones, or they had reached them after they were trapped under rubble, or worse. "People were screaming 'Elbistan is toppled now,' " he said. " 'There is no more Elbistan.' " Arpaci ran out of the power plant, not waiting for the company bus to take him back to his family. Continued here |
You need to play the most underrated Zelda game on Nintendo Switch ASAP
Bigger isn’t always better. A small package can often hide an amazing experience. That was the case with Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, a handheld system with a catalog of games punching way above its class — some of which are now available on Nintendo Switch as part of the Switch Online Expansion Pack. The standout in the launch lineup is another deceptively small but mighty game, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, whose gorgeous art and inventive twist on the classic Zelda formula hold up immaculately on modern hardware. Every Legend of Zelda game has a new gimmick that defines it. Ocarina of Time had the ocarina, Majora’s Mask had time travel and the titular mask, Link to the Past had a dark and light overworld — the list goes on. 2004’s The Minish Cap has, well, the Minish Cap which in addition to being a talkative companion also gives Link the ability to shrink and grow Alice in Wonderland-style. Continued here |
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'The Last of Us' Episode 2 Star Christine Hakim on that Bombshell of an Opening Scene
The bone-chilling opening scene of the second episode of HBO’s post-apocalyptic zombie show follows the Indonesian mycology researcher as she examines a strange outbreak at the world’s largest flour mill, and makes a shocking proposal: the immediate bombing of the entire capital city. She follows it up by tearfully pleading to be taken home to her family, in a scene that shook viewers and set the stage for the show’s apocalyptic future. The brilliant opener is executed by award-winning Indonesian actress Christine Hakim, whose ominous scene opposite Lt. Gen. Agus Hidayat (played by fellow Indonesian film veteran Yayu A.W. Unru) has turned her into a fan favorite among the show’s global audience. Continued here |
Pigeons and Computers Have One Surprising Thing in Common, Study Reveals
Time and time again, artificial intelligence is heralded for its impressive feats. Computer have beaten humans in dozens of games, crafted essays instantaneously, and even detected cancer with stunning accuracy. The birds’ primary learning strategy is nearly identical to machine learning algorithms on a basic level, according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology. Continued here |
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'Mandalorian' Season 3 Stars Reveal a Major Finale Plot Detail
The Mandalorian Season 3 is promising a lot. There are Salacious Crumb creatures, Babu Frik, and scores of Mandalorians. But ultimately, the next chapter in Mando’s story has to follow up on where we saw him last: ousted from the Children of the Watch by the Armorer and told he needs to atone for the transgression of taking off his helmet so he could say goodbye to his adopted green son. This mission seems almost impossible. He has to bathe in the “living waters of Mandalore,” which is a bit difficult considering Mandalore has suffered a major tragedy, and it’s unclear if the “living waters” even still exist. But a new interview with two of the show’s stars reveals just how much of Season 3 will be dedicated to this mission. Continued here |
Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?
Last year, a Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan noticed that their name was being used with increasing frequency in A.I.-driven image generation. McKernan makes paintings that often feature nymphlike female figures in an acid-colored style that blends Art Nouveau and science fiction. A list published in August, by a Web site called Metaverse Post, suggested “Kelly McKernan” as a term to feed an A.I. generator in order to create “Lord of the Rings”-style art. Hundreds of other artists were similarly listed according to what their works evoked: anime, modernism, “Star Wars.” On the Discord chat that runs an A.I. generator called Midjourney, McKernan discovered that users had included their name more than twelve thousand times in public prompts. The resulting images—of owls, cyborgs, gothic funeral scenes, and alien motorcycles—were distinctly reminiscent of McKernan’s works. “It just got weird at that point. It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y,” they told me. “I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others’ to produce these images.” Last month, McKernan joined a class-action lawsuit with two other artists, Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz, filed by the attorneys Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, against Midjourney and two other A.I. imagery generators, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp. (Other tools, such as DALL-E, run on the same principles.) All three models make use of LAION-5B, a nonprofit, publicly available database that indexes more than five billion images from across the Internet, including the work of many artists. The alleged wrongdoing comes down to what Butterick summarized to me as “the three ‘C’s”: The artists had not consented to have their copyrighted artwork included in the LAION database; they were not compensated for their involvement, even as companies including Midjourney charged for the use of their tools; and their influence was not credited when A.I. images were produced using their work. When producing an image, these generators “present something to you as if it’s copyright free,” Butterick told me, adding that every image a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.” Continued here |
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Genetics might explain why some people have never had COVID - but we shouldn't be too focused on finding out
It’s been over three years since the first known COVID infection. Since then, we’ve seen hundreds of millions of cases around the globe. You’ve probably had it – at least once, if not multiple times – as has nearly everyone you know. As continued waves of infections arrive, fewer and fewer people have never caught COVID. But, even taking into account those who have had it and not realised, there are probably still some people out there who have managed to avoid the virus altogether (so far). Continued here |
Loud Noises on the Western Front
During the First World War, the German Army followed a practice of localized recruiting, whereby conscripts from a particular town or region were kept together when they were sent to the front. The assumption was that geographical bonds strengthened solidarity. Other combatant nations did this to one degree or another, but Germany had a particular devotion to the strategy, whose psychological underside soon became clear. When the incinerated body lying beside you is that of a childhood neighbor or schoolmate, the trauma of loss is intensified. The agony of destroyed friendship is at the heart of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Erich Maria Remarque’s enduring novel about life and death in the trenches. Remarque, who came from a lower-middle-class background in the German city of Osnabrück, was attending an academy for Catholic schoolteachers when, in 1916, at the age of eighteen, he was drafted into the army. Many friends from school served alongside him. When one of them, Theodor Troske, was wounded by a grenade, Remarque carried the young man a considerable distance on his back, only to find that shrapnel had lodged in Troske’s head, resulting in fatal wounds. An equivalent scene appears in the novel. Paul Bäumer, the book’s narrator, lugs his friend Kat to a field hospital. A medical orderly takes one look and says, “You could have spared yourself.” The same chilling words are uttered in Edward Berger’s new film adaptation of “All Quiet”—a German-language production that has been nominated for nine Academy Awards. Continued here |
Can 'Quantumania' Give the MCU the Reset It Desperately Needs?
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has been sold as a game-changing movie Marvel. Can it live up to that promise? Comic book fans are well aware at this point that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is stuck in a bit of a rut. Despite releasing a handful of genuinely entertaining titles over the past few years, the MCU has failed to maintain the cultural importance that it firmly held just a few short years ago. Indeed, in the wake of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the MCU has struggled to deliver the kind of cohesive, cross-platform storytelling that it had previously perfected. Continued here |
Forget spy balloons, the world of surveillance has tried everything from schoolchildren to trained cats
The Chinese “spy balloon” shot down over the United States has brought the seemingly strange methods of surveillance and espionage into news headlines. Balloons have long been used for espionage – and not just for surveillance, as appears to be the case with this one. In the 1950s, Soviet soldiers in East Germany often saw white balloons overhead. Rather than spying, these balloons dropped propaganda leaflets produced by US-backed groups in West Germany. Continued here |
Burt Bacharach’s Distinctive Melodic Voice
Burt Bacharach, who died on Wednesday, wrote in his heyday in the nineteen-sixties so many permanent hits that it's hard to recall what an original songwriter he was. Alec Wilder, in his great book "American Popular Song," though generally disapproving of post-1964 popular music, gave Bacharach credit for the "natural phrase," irregular measures that followed their own logic rather than fitting inside a commercial straitjacket; and, among singers, the originality and difficulty of Bacharach's off rhythms and broken phrases are legend—as was his insistence on getting it right with minimal "interpretation." (He famously worked Cilla Black through some thirty full takes of a single song, "Alfie.") Carole Bayer Sager, his onetime wife and frequent lyricist, in her memoir, recalls how utterly demanding he was about matching words precisely to his unalterable melodies, and how hard it could often be to set words to music so singular, asymmetrical, and perfect. Educated at McGill University, in Montreal—an excellent alma mater for all those trying to carry New York—he was part of that great generation of Brill Building songwriters of the fifties, searching for the single hit. (One of his early songs, "Baby, It's You," made a memorable appearance in John Lennon's mouth on the first Beatles LP.) At a deeper level, in the twenty or so songs from the sixties that are by now as familiar to American ears as Gershwin—whom Bacharach in some ways resembles, for his restless rhythms and his sympathetic dialogue with the great Black musicians of his day—Bacharach carried on a kind of musical conversation with the great Motown producers of the era. Those songs, many recorded by Dionne Warwick to Bacharach's great sour-apple-sounding arrangements, with a thumping electric bass, occupy a unique place between commercial pop and art-song intricacy. The words of Hal David, though often not of Sondheimian polish or literacy, served the music well, and on occasion could even touch the edge of poetry, as in "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" ("L.A. is a great big freeway / put a hundred down and buy a car.") Continued here |
Radio in South Africa turns 100 - and collides with podcasting and streaming
This year marks 100 years since radio was introduced in South Africa, through “the first experimental broadcast at the Railway Headquarters in Johannesburg” on 18 December 1923. A century on, up to 94% of South Africans over the age of 15 confirmed in a recent survey that they owned a radio set in one form or other. Continued here |
Five years after Parkland, school shootings haven't stopped, and kill more people
Ph.D. student in Criminal Justice and Creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, University of Central Florida In the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting on Valentine’s Day 2018, many Americans hoped that, finally, something would be done to address the problem of gun violence in the nation’s schools. Continued here |
Earth has lost one-fifth of its wetlands since 1700 - but most could still be saved
Like so many of the planet’s natural habitats, wetlands have been systematically destroyed over the past 300 years. Bogs, fens, marshes and swamps have disappeared from maps and memory, having been drained, dug up and built on. Being close to a reliable source of water and generally flat, wetlands were always prime targets for building towns and farms. Draining their waterlogged soils has produced some of the most fertile farmland available. Continued here |
The Myth of the Iowa Caucuses Got Busted
There was always something undeniably stirring about the Iowa caucuses, the quadrennial political ritual in which the world’s most maniacally ambitious people tried to win over voters, practically one by one, in small towns on the prairie. Iowa’s rites—the stump speech delivered in the living room, the campaign bus pulling up next to the grain silo, the obligatory admiration of the six-hundred-pound butter cow on display at the state fair—became embedded in America’s political psyche. In 2019, while I was following Democratic Party Presidential aspirants around the state, I drove by two billboards off I-80, outside Mitchellville. The first billboard said “JESUS.” The second said “TULSI.” In Iowa, this kind of thing made sense. This past weekend, the Democratic Party announced a plan for Iowa to no longer be the first official stop in its Presidential-nomination process, likely putting an end to an arrangement that dates back to the nineteen-seventies. This news was a long time coming. For years, there have been arguments that Iowa is too white and too rural to serve such an outsized role in choosing the leader of a party that relies so heavily on nonwhite voters in cities. It didn’t help that Iowa’s Democrats also preferred to vote via a complicated, in-person caucus system that harkened back to frontier days. In the twenty-first century, this quaint tradition consistently kept turnout low. Iowa’s diehards would reply with various arguments of their own: about the importance of rural issues receiving national prominence, about the openings that a small state with cheap media markets make for upstart candidates, about the built-up institutional memory and human political talent that exist in the state. Iowa is also a mythmaking place—where else would the ghosts of disgraced ball players emerge out of cornstalks?—and that led to plenty of paeans about the “seriousness” with which Iowa voters took their duty as first-in-the-nation voters. The myth of Iowa, among Democrats, was strengthened in recent years by the success of Barack Obama, and then Bernie Sanders, in the state. Continued here |
Why taxing cow burps isn't the best climate solution
New Zealand, where agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change, is proposing a tax on cow burps. The reason seems simple enough: Cows release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and New Zealand has a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by midcentury. Right now, the country’s effects on climate change come roughly equally from carbon dioxide and methane. Worldwide, 150 governments have committed to cut methane emissions, both from agriculture and by cracking down on the largest source – fugitive leaks from natural gas pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Continued here |
Women Talking - a radical film that reimagines how cinema can be made
Words matter. They give expression to our experiences, allow us to tell our stories and make sense of our place within the world. With language comes the ability to speak: to speak for, and to speak out. To name injustices and imagine alternative futures. The radical feminist Audre Lorde tells us that our silence will not protect us, that we must turn our silence into words, and those words into action. The director Sarah Polley’s Women Talking follows a group of women as they find the language to talk about their experiences of violence and collectively imagine a future that might bring an end to the harms they have endured at the hands of men. Based on Miriam Toews 2018 novel of the same name, both the film and the book are an imagined response to a series of real-life sexual attacks on a group of women in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. Continued here |
Need a bulk-billing GP? Why throwing more money at Medicare isn't the answer
Last financial year, the Australian government spent almost A$29 billion on Medicare. Most was spent on primary care – a patient’s usual first contact with the health system when sick or injured, such as GP, allied health and diagnostic services. Every year, this spending increases. Yet, many patients are paying more to see their GP, some cannot afford care and emergency departments are overcrowded with patients who could be treated by a GP. Continued here |
Is 13 too young to have a TikTok or Instagram account?
The surgeon general is the “nation’s doctor” in the United States. They are tasked with giving Americans the “best scientific information” about their health. Late last month, the current US surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warned 13 is too young to join social media. He said it poses a risk to young people’s “self-worth and their relationships”, adding: Continued here |
Zanele Muholi: Unflinching images that confront injustice
In 2009, a government minister in Johannesburg walked out of an exhibition in protest after seeing photographs of nude lesbian couples. Despite South Africa being one of the first countries in the world to prohibit discrimination against same-sex partners in 1996, and gay marriage being legalised three years before the incident, the minister's controversial exit was seen by many people as a testament to how far the country still needed to go to reach equality. The show, titled Innovative Women, featured photographs by the non-binary activist Zanele Muholi, now one of the most acclaimed photographers working today. Born in 1972 in Umlazi, a township in South Africa, Muholi, who uses the pronouns they/them, has been documenting the experiences of the black LGBTQIA+ community in South Africa for two decades. Over the past two years, more than 250 of these works have been exhibited in a travelling retrospective across Europe, including at the Tate Modern in London, and in Berlin, Denmark and Reykjavik. It is now showing at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), a centre for contemporary photography in Paris, until May. "Muholi is not just somebody who makes incredible images, but they are also an incredible activist, speaker and advocate," says the director of the MEP Simon Baker. "Paris needs Muholi more than Muholi needs to be in Paris." Continued here |
Health-care worker strikes in the United Kingdom: Are there lessons for Canada's health crisis?
It is a “season of strikes” for health-care workers in the United Kingdom. Nurses and ambulance workers employed within the National Health Service (NHS) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland conducted the largest strike in the organization’s history on Feb. 6, 2023, after initiating strikes in December 2022. Nurses, ambulance workers and physiotherapists will continue their industrial action this week. Junior doctors are set to follow after voting in favour of strike action this month. Continued here |
We found 2.9-million-year-old stone tools used to butcher ancient hippos - but likely not by our ancestors
On the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, a short valley extends south towards the looming Mount Homa. From it have emerged some of the oldest-known stone tools used to butcher large animals, as well as the oldest remains of one of our early cousins, Paranthropus – a genus we think co-existed with our direct ancestors. Similar tool and fossil discoveries had been made before, in different places and at different times. But to find these all together in one place, as old as they are, is truly extraordinary. Continued here |
The 4-Letter Secret to Barnes & Noble's Incredible Turnaround Is Almost Too Simple to Be Believed The story of how the retailer went from dying to expanding holds an essential lesson for entrepreneurs. Continued here |
Why Are Your Competitor's Managers Better Than Yours? It Comes Down to 8 Major Reasons The real difference is a focus on the basics of leadership that will turn any mediocre manager into a good manager. Continued here |
Wharton Psychologist Adam Grant Says the Best Bosses Ask These Questions of Every Employee Unfortunately, most bosses wait until it's too late. Continued here |
Renault-Nissan: why electric vehicles will be key to the future of the embattled auto alliance
When Carlos Ghosn was escorted off his private jet after landing at Tokyo’s Haneda airport in November 2018 and promptly arrested for alleged financial misconduct, simmering tensions between carmakers Renault and Nissan over his plans to create a single, cohesive company became all too public. The two companies, along with Mitsubishi, had forged an alliance in 1999 after Renault rescued Nissan from bankruptcy. This inauspicious start led to an imbalance in the alliance – Renault held 43% of Nissan versus the Japanese company’s 15% stake in its partner. After dealing with the effects on the companies of Ghosn’s arrest, as well as COVID-created supply chain disruption and shifting global demand towards electric vehicles (EVs), a recent realignment of the alliance signals an attempt to reset both companies’ fortunes. Continued here |
This Change Is How You Know Elon Musk's Twitter Experiment Has Already Failed Musk keeps thinking he can make Twitter better by making it worse. Continued here |
Australia's new pay equality law risks failing women - unless we make this simple fix
The Albanese government’s efforts to address the gender pay gap are laudable. Despite all the attention given to the issue over the past decade or so, sectoral pay discrimination is very real and workplace biases persist. But the federal government’s new tool to address the problem, the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment Bill, may not achieve much. Continued here |
Brazil's president visits the White House as he tries to counter rising threats to democracy at home
When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva meets with President Joe Biden on Feb. 10, 2023, climate change, economic development and security will be on the agenda. But if Lula cannot stabilize his country’s democracy, he won’t be able to tackle any of these other goals. Biden and Lula lead vastly different countries. Yet, the violent challenges each faced to their elections have given them similar battles to fight. Continued here |
TikTok 'mascara' trend: young people have used codes to talk about sex for generations
Social media has long been a place for makeup enthusiasts and beauty gurus to discuss trends, but that’s not why TikTok users are currently talking about mascara. Young people are using “mascara” as a code word for talking about sex, relationships and assault. Posts tagged with #mascaratrend generally feature young women using the term “mascara” and associated metaphors to refer to romantic or sexual partners. For example: Continued here |
The fight against antibiotic resistance is growing more urgent, but artificial intelligence can help
Since the discovery of penicillin in the late 1920s, antibiotics have “revolutionized medicine and saved millions of lives.” Unfortunately, the effectiveness of antibiotics is now threatened by the increase of antibiotic-resistant bacteria globally. Antibiotic-resistant infections cause the deaths of up to 1.2 million people annually, making them one of the leading causes of death. Continued here |
Cape Town's 'Day Zero' threat concentrated minds: an activist group used the moment to secure environmental victories
Major cities across the world are being increasingly plagued by severe water shortages. From Bangalore, India to São Paulo, Brazil and even Beijing, China, cities are at risk of drought in the near future. This has been true in South Africa too. Between 2016 and 2018 Cape Town experienced the real possibility of “Day Zero”, the day when the taps would run dry. Continued here |
Lack of diversity in clinical trials is leaving women and patients of color behind and harming the future of medicine
Associate Science Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation Science + Technology Editor & Co-Host of The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation Continued here |
Public school enrollment dropped by 1.2M during the pandemic - an expert discusses where the students went and why it matters
Student learning took a big hit during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just how much is only becoming clear nearly three years after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic and nearly all U.S. public schools pivoted to online instruction for at least several months in March 2020. However, the data guiding the nation’s efforts to help kids catch up does not generally include the students who experienced the most dramatic learning disruptions. Continued here |
'You can love something deep inside your heart and there is nothing wrong with it': why we still love The Room, 20 years on
A jaunty yet dramatic piano-driven soundtrack motif; a view of the Golden Gate Bridge; a series of location shots around San Francisco. The generic title sequence of the 2003 film The Room barely hints at what follows. The Room is a straightforward melodrama centred around a love triangle between Johnny (Tommy Wiseau, who also directs), Lisa (Juliette Danielle) and Mark (Greg Sestero). Described as “the worst movie ever made”, it continues to draw sellout crowds worldwide. Continued here |
Netflix's Plan to Stop You From Sharing Your Password Reveals an Unfortunate Truth The company may have lost sight of what really matters. Continued here |
Millions of satellite images reveal how beaches around the Pacific vanish or replenish in El Ni
If you’ve been visiting the same beach for a few summers, you’ll have seen it change. While beaches look static, they’re actually one of the most dynamic regions on Earth. Winds, waves and tides stir and push sand around constantly. Storms can claw out huge volumes of sand and move it elsewhere. What did we find? The cycle matters a great deal. While the natural ENSO Pacific climate phenomenon affects weather patterns around the world, we haven’t fully understood how it affects beaches. Continued here |
Making the Country Safe from Balloons
Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff. © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices Continued here |
Six reasons to take up yoga during pregnancy
Anjali Raj is a certified prenatal and postnatal yoga instructor, but is not currently teaching. While you may need to modify your exercise routine slightly during pregnancy, physical activity is safe, and in fact recommended, when you’re expecting a baby. Continued here |
China violated international laws and standards with its surveillance balloon
The United States recently shot down a Chinese high-altitude balloon after it apparently travelled from China and flew over Alaska and British Columbia. Its first public sighting was over Montana where it was seen to “hang out for a longer period of time” over military installations where nuclear missiles are located. Continued here |
Turkey-Syria earthquake: the challenge of delivering aid in a disaster zone
Jeff Evans is affiliated with Brecon Mountain Rescue Team, and is a board member of the World Society of Disaster Nursing It’s the middle of the night and you are fast asleep. Suddenly you have ceiling plaster smashing down on you, pictures are falling off the walls and your bedroom is swaying. You wake your partner, grab the kids and make your way down a stairwell in the darkness as you are hurled from side to side. Continued here |
Twitter cutoff in Turkey amid earthquake rescue operations: A social media expert explains the danger of losing the microblogging service in times of disaster
Twitter was blocked in Turkey on Feb. 8, 2023, according to internet monitoring service NetBlocks. The outage came amid the massive rescue operation and humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of the earthquakes in southern Turkey and northern Syria two days earlier. Access to Twitter appeared to be restored about 12 hours after it was first blocked. The Twitter blackout, which was likely the result of governmental action, appeared to have impeded rescue and relief efforts. NetBlocks noted that internet service providers had been blocking traffic to Twitter, and that people could circumvent the blocking by using a virtual private network, or VPN. Continued here |
500-year-old horn container discovered in South Africa sheds light on pre-colonial Khoisan medicines
University of Johannesburg provides support as an endorsing partner of The Conversation AFRICA. In 2020, a chance discovery near the small South African hamlet of Misgund in the Eastern Cape unearthed an unusual parcel – a gift to science. The parcel turned out to be a 500-year-old cow horn, capped with a leather lid and carefully wrapped in grass and the leafy scales of a Bushman poison bulb (Boophane disticha). Inside the horn were the solidified remnants of a once-liquid substance. Continued here |
CBD is not a cure-all - here's what science says about its real health benefits
Over the last five years, an often forgotten piece of U.S. federal legislation – the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018, also known as the 2018 Farm Bill – has ushered in an explosion of interest in the medical potential of cannabis-derived cannabidiol, or CBD. After decades of debate, the bill made it legal for farmers to grow industrial hemp, a plant rich in CBD. Hemp itself has tremendous value as a cash crop; it’s used to produce biofuel, textiles and animal feed. But the CBD extracted from the hemp plant also has numerous medicinal properties, with the potential to benefit millions through the treatment of seizure disorders, pain or anxiety. Continued here |
Can clouds of Moon dust combat climate change?
A group of US scientists this week proposed an unorthodox scheme to combat global warming: creating large clouds of Moon dust in space to reflect sunlight and cool the Earth. In their plan, we would mine dust on the Moon and shoot it out towards the Sun. The dust would stay between the Sun and Earth for around a week, making sunlight around 2% dimmer at Earth’s surface, after which it would disperse and we would shoot out more dust. Continued here |
Friday essay: love in the time of incontinence - why young people don't have the monopoly on love, or even sex
A friend with a close relative in a residential aged care home reports – in a tone of scandalised surprise – on romantic entanglements among the elderly. In one case, a man and woman have become so inseparable that staff have been forced to move his bed into her room so the two can sleep side by side. When the woman’s son made an unexpected visit, he was distressed to find his mother in her nightdress in the arms of a stranger, though eventually he had to accept it was what she wanted. Continued here |
RBA's latest forecasts are grim. Here are 5 reasons why
After lifting interest rates for a record nine times in a row, and flagging more raises still to come, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s latest set of forecasts make for grim reading. The forecasts are part of the central bank’s quarterly Statement on Monetary Policy, its main communication (aside from interest rates) on how it sees the economy faring over coming few years. Continued here |
Dogs and cats can be expensive - five ways to save money on pet care as the cost of living rises
Daniel Allen is founder of Pet Theft Reform and patron of the Stolen and Missing Pets Alliance (Sampa). For anyone with a pet, you’ll know how much happiness they can bring to your life. Pets are part of the family – which is why, as someone who shares their life with a companion animal, it’s been so hard to hear about the thousands of people having to give up their pets due to the cost of living crisis. Continued here |
The NZ pilot held hostage in West Papua is the pawn in a conflict only real international engagement can resolve
“Phil Mehrtens is the nicest guy, he genuinely is – no one ever had anything bad to say about him”, says a colleague of the New Zealand pilot taken hostage this week by members of the West Papuan Liberation Army (TPN-PB) in the mountainous Nduga Regency. How such a nice guy became a pawn in the decades-long conflict between West Papua and the Indonesian government is a tragic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it is also a symbolic and desperate attempt to attract international attention towards the West Papuan crisis. Continued here |
Medication abortion could get harder to obtain - or easier: There's a new wave of post-Dobbs lawsuits on abortion pills
Even though this option has been legally available for more than two decades, two recent events have raised legal questions about it. First, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling overturned the constitutional right to abortion recognized in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. Second, in January 2023, the Food and Drug Administration decided that certified U.S. pharmacies could sell mifepristone by prescription. Some congressional lawmakers seek to protect the right to access the pills through pharmacies and telehealth in states where abortion remains legal. At least three lawsuits are pending, and some states that have banned abortion altogether or have restricted access to it are vowing to block the new federal rules. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, for example, has threatened to prosecute any pharmacist who sells the pills in her state. Continued here |
Is my medicine making me feel hotter this summer? 5 reasons why
If you’re really feeling the heat this summer, it might be down to more than the temperature outside. Some types of medicines can increase your core body temperature or make you feel hotter than you really are. Some can affect your body’s ability to cool down. Continued here |
Happy Valley: the art of Sally Wainwright's perfect TV ending
First hitting screens nine years ago, the final episode of Happy Valley – the BBC crime drama created and written by Sally Wainwright – has aired to an audience of over 7.5 million live viewers. Featuring a much anticipated showdown between Sergeant Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and escaped criminal Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton) – who Cawood holds responsible for her daughter’s rape and subsequent suicide – the final scenes eschewed guns, instead moving carefully toward catharsis. Continued here |
Dinosaurs of the Sky: Consummate 19th-Century Scottish Natural History Illustrations of Birds
Birds populate our metaphors, our poems, and our children’s books, entrance our imagination with their song and their chromatically ecstatic plumage, transport us on their tender wings back to the time of the dinosaurs they evolved from. But birds are a time machine in another way, too — not only evolutionarily but culturally: While the birth of photography revolutionized many sciences, birds remained as elusive as ever, difficult to capture with lens and shutter, so that natural history illustration has remained the most expressive medium for their study and celebration. To my eye, the most consummate drawings of birds in the history of natural history date back to the 1830s, but they are not Audubon’s Birds of America — rather, they appeared on the other side of the Atlantic, in the first volume of The Edinburgh Journal of Natural History and of the Physical Sciences, with the Animal Kingdom of the Baron Cuvier, published in the wake of the pioneering paleontologist Georges Cuvier’s death. Hundreds of different species of birds — some of them now endangered, some on the brink of extinction — populate the lavishly illustrated pages, clustered in kinship groups as living visual lists of dazzling biodiversity. Continued here
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