35 Years Ago, Walmart Made an Unconventional Decision That's Paying Off in a Huge Way in Its Battle With Amazon

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35 Years Ago, Walmart Made an Unconventional Decision That's Paying Off in a Huge Way in Its Battle With Amazon In the fight between retail giants, Walmart has a secret weapon you might not expect. Continued here

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As I Mourn the Passing of My Wife, These Leadership Lessons Stand Out the Most What personal loss taught me about life, business, and leadership. Continued here

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7 Signs That We Have Entered the Age of Empowered Employees Businesses are seeing an unprecedented type of employee rebellion after the pandemic. Continued here

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In Defense of Female 'Power Rankings' Many leaders dislike such lists, but they serve an important purpose. Continued here

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Meet the British Brand Disrupting the Worldwide Interiors Market How Holland & Sherry Interiors uses wool as its sustainable base material. Continued here

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Why do some people 'mirror-write'? As a child, I thought all left-handed people could mirror-write. As a left-hander myself, I occasionally tried it, starting on the right-hand side of the page and letting the letters flow leftwards. It was a nice relief from the messy scrawls I produced when writing in the standard left-to-right direction, contorting my hand to avoid smudging the ink. It also felt special: after all, Leonardo da Vinci wrote that way.Today, I still mirror-write occasionally, and find it relaxing. But as it turns out, the skill is not a left-handed superpower after all. Instead, it's the result of a mix of fascinating factors to do with how our mind and body adapt to writing. Understanding them could give all of us a better grasp of what goes on in our brains when we write – and even make the experience more enjoyable. Continued here

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Should You Let Employees Break the Rules to Make Customers Happy? Some customer service experiences are simple and can be automated. But others, particularly those that involve challenging and complex customer needs, often require creative solutions by frontline employees. In these situations, should employees be empowered to break rules and protocols in order to come to a satisfactory conclusion? Research suggests that certain situations can benefit from this type of employee empowerment, improving not only a brand’s relationship to its customers but also improving frontline workers’ engagement as well. Continued here

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The Best Startup Advice You'll Ever Hear, According to Nike's Phil Knight The real secret behind Nike's astonishing success. Continued here

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Combat Content Fatigue and Remove Friction to Help Your Brand Stand Out How do you get your brand's content noticed when it is competing in an endless feed of content? Continued here

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My Employee Isn't Doing Her Job ... And It Might Be Because Of Her Personal Life How do I navigate this compassionately? Continued here

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Newfound Mathematical 'Einstein' Shape Creates a Never-Repeating Pattern A new shape called an einstein has taken the math world by storm. The craggy, hat-shaped tile can cover an infinite plane with patterns that never repeat.Creatively tiling a bathroom floor isn’t just a stressful task for DIY home renovators. It is also one of the hardest problems in mathematics. For centuries, experts have been studying the special properties of tile shapes that can cover floors, kitchen backsplashes or infinitely large planes without leaving any gaps. Specifically, mathematicians are interested in tile shapes that can cover the whole plane without ever creating a repeating design. In these special cases, called aperiodic tilings, there’s no pattern that you can copy and paste to keep the tiling going. No matter how you chop up the mosaic, each section will be unique. Continued here

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India's plan to export its wildly successful digital payments system At the G20 Summit in February, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi made a case for the global adoption of India’s state-backed digital payments platform: the unified payments interface (UPI). “We would be happy to share our experience with the world and the G20 can be a vehicle for this,” said Modi, about the tech that allows real-time money transfers to bank accounts using smartphones, eliminating the need for wallets.UPI, introduced in 2016, has surpassed the use of credit and debit cards in India. Nearly 260 million Indians use UPI — in January 2023, it recorded about 8 billion transactions worth nearly $200 billion. The transactions can be facilitated using mobile numbers or QR codes, ranging from a few cents to 100,000 rupees ($1,221) a day. In 2019, Google recommended the U.S. Federal Reserve emulate UPI as it develops its own real-time payments system FedNow. Continued here

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How Do I Stay Motivated After Surviving Layoffs? She’s finally found a leadership role that feels aligned with her personal mission. But in the wake of unexpected company-wide layoffs, she’s struggling with how to plan for her team’s future amid the organizational uncertainty. Host Muriel Wilkins coaches her through how she can motivate and lead her team when so much feels out of their control. Continued here

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How a 'Reluctant Entrepreneur' Is Driving a More Sustainable Fashion Industry Stacy Flynn and Evrnu co-founder Christo Stanev have unlocked technology that has the potential to dramatically change the apparel industry. Continued here

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Meet the Magnificent Microbes of the Deep Unknown These two researchers journey toward the center of Earth—via windows to the crust—to find bacteria that can breathe iron, arsenic and other metals that would kill us pretty quickly.Now, we're not sure about all of you, but for us here on the show, some days we just want to explore. The unknown still exists all around us. And we have the super sweet day job of talking to folks who plumb the depths of those mysterious places. Today I'm joined by two explorers, and they literally seek out the deepest unknowns there are on this earth. Continued here

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Weekly Crossword: From study of the past we can make a better future Many of the clues are based on content that you can read on Big Think. Good luck! Continued here

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Baseball Players Are Hitting More Home Runs - And Climate Change Is Helping As atmospheric temperatures rise with climate change, baseballs can travel farther through the air, allowing for more home runsThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Continued here

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What the FDA Ruling about 'Dense Breasts' Means for Cancer Risk and Screening Women with dense breasts are at higher risk of breast cancer and are underdiagnosed, but other factors also play an important roleFor more than a decade, advocates have pushed for women to be notified if they have “dense” breasts—a factor that not only increases cancer risk but also makes tumors harder to detect on a mammogram. Finally, last month, a long-awaited U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruling determined that after giving patients a mammogram, breast imaging centers must inform them about their breast density and its associated risks—and advise them that additional imaging tests may help find cancers the mammogram could have missed. Continued here

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Plants make sounds to express their stress A common arboreally themed thought experiment compels us to challenge our assumptions about perspective and observation. It takes the form of a banal question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”But here is perhaps a more practical inquiry: “When a tomato plant is thirsty, does it make a sound?”According to a groundbreaking study by plant scientists from Tel Aviv University and their colleagues in the United States, the answer to that second inquiry is a resounding yes. The researchers’ work suggests that under stress, plants emit unique noises that can be detected from several meters away. These are not just random sounds — the scientists used machine learning models to identify a plant’s physical ailments, like dehydration and injury, based on the noises made by the plants. In other words, plants use sounds to communicate their stress.Published in the journal Cell, this cutting-edge research challenges the conventional view of plants as silent, uncommunicative beings. Continued here

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Health Care Systems Need to Better Understand Patients as Consumers Conventional measures that health systems use to attract and retain patients are inadequate. For instance, hospital NPS and HCAHPS scores are not reliable indicators of what patients will do in the future. Instead, health care systems need to look at what patients actually do and incorporate that information into strategic planning. With the likes of Amazon and CVS moving into their space, health systems must become more sophisticated in the ways they use data to understand patients’ behavior and what drives their decisions. Continued here

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A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. The “Kaktovik numerals,” named after the Alaskan village where they were created, looked utterly different from decimal system numerals and functioned differently, too. But they were uniquely suited for quick, visual arithmetic using the traditional Inuit oral counting system, and they swiftly spread throughout the region. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, they will soon be available on smartphones and computers—creating a bridge for the Kaktovik numerals to cross into the digital realm.Today’s numerical world is dominated by the Hindu-Arabic decimal system. This system, adopted by almost every society, is what many people think of as “numbers”—values expressed in a written form using the digits 0 through 9. But meaningful alternatives exist, and they are as varied as the cultures they belong to. Continued here

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Most Planets in the Galaxy Orbit Stars You Can't Even See When I was younger, I gazed at the stars at night and wondered how many possessed planets like Earth. Being a Star Trek nerd, I couldn’t help but imagine a universe where stars were fecund and planets were everywhere. But not knowing was agony.Even better, this story also comes with a twist worthy of an eyebrow-raise from Mr. Spock (accompanied by a flatly intoned “Fascinating”): most planets orbiting distant stars—what we call exoplanets—do not circle around ones like the sun. Instead, the vast majority revolve around red dwarfs, diminutive cousins of our own star that are by far the most common stellar denizens of the Milky Way. Continued here

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A Bad Medication Abortion Decision Threatens the Future Availability of Drugs in the U.S. With an April 7 court decision, one judge has harmed women’s health and undermined trust in science-based drug approvals in the U.S.When federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk suspended the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the drug mifepristone on April 7, he significantly jeopardized access to abortion. In addition to dealing an immediate blow to accessing an essential and time-sensitive health care service, this decision also upended a drug approval system that for decades has been based on scientific evidence and expert medical opinions. Kacsmaryk overshadowed a trusted system with the specter of a drug supply shaped by judicial fiat. Continued here

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How Medication Abortion with RU-486/Mifepristone Works Editor’s Note (4/10/23): On Friday a federal judge in Texas ordered a hold on federal approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, which has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for more than 20 years. The ruling is set to take effect within seven days of that order. On the same day a federal judge in Washington State ruled that no changes can be made to the drug’s availability in 17 states where abortion is legal or in Washington, D.C. This article, originally published in May 2022, describes how mifepristone works in concert with another drug, misoprostol, to end a pregnancy. In 2016 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a two-drug combination of Mifeprex (also called RU-486 or mifepristone) and Cytotec (commonly known as misoprostol) to induce abortion without surgery. In 2019 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that approximately 42 percent of all abortions in the U.S. were medication-based. Continued here

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A Two-Minute Burnout Checkup Burnout is the result of chronic stress and, at work, that stress tends accumulate around your experiences of workload, values, reward, control, fairness, and community. If any are lacking or out of sync, you may be headed toward exhaustion, cynicism, and the feeling of being ineffective. When taken regularly, this short assessment can help you gauge whether you’re on the path to burnout, and where you should focus your attention to make beneficial changes. Continued here

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The Best USB Microphones If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDGood content starts at the source. If you want to sound your best for coworkers, fans, or teammates, the mic you have built into your headphones, laptop, tablet, or smartphone likely won't do the job. I've spent close to a decade with various USB microphones for podcasting, gaming, and even music recording, and I have to say up front: We're living in a golden age of easy-to-use options. These days, it's not hard to find a great microphone with simple software for very little money. So we've rounded them up! These are the best USB microphones around. Continued here

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Why do animals play? The answer is more complex than you think. Anyone who has ever chucked a tennis ball in the general vicinity of a border collie knows that some animals take play very seriously. The intense stare, the tremble of anticipation, the apparent joy with every bounce, all in pursuit of inedible prey that tastes like the backyard. Dogs are far from the only animals that devote considerable time and energy to play. Juvenile wasps wrestle with hive mates, otters toss rocks between their paws, and human children around the world go to great lengths to avoid make-believe lava on the living room floor.When a dog chases a ball or a child adjudicates relationship disputes in doll-land, something important and meaningful is clearly happening in their minds, says Laura Schulz, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Play has a lot of peculiar and fascinating properties,” she says. “It’s totally fundamental to learning and human intelligence.” Continued here

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Hope on the Front Lines of the Drug Overdose Crisis It’s hard to find good news about the overdose crisis. The drug supply is poisoned. Year after year, the death rate rises. It’s grim. Yet people like Sam Rivera still believe things can change for the better. Actually, nevermind believe—he’s actively working toward those changes, one hot meal, warm shower, and heartfelt conversation at a time. Rivera runs OnPoint, a New York–based nonprofit focused on helping drug users stay safe. Many of the services it offers resemble what you’d find from more traditional addiction-treatment programs: mental health counseling, acupuncture, free coffee and meals. But OnPoint gained national attention in November 2021 when it opened the first two sanctioned overdose prevention centers (OPCs) in the United States. These spaces permit people to use drugs under supervision; staff monitor the participants to make sure they’re OK, providing oxygen, naloxone, and other support if they show signs of overdose.  Continued here

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In defense of annoying stickers that come on PCs, and why I might get one for my Mac A confession: I like the little processor stickers that come on computers. Not the huge billboard-y ones that yell about a few laptop features and invariably leave a huge, sticky-residue rectangle on the palm rest when you try to peel them off. I'm not that weird. But I like the little sometimes-holographic ones about the CPU (and sometimes the GPU) inside your PC. Continued here

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Uranus is "boring" again, JWST shows. Here's why. The dream is to launch an in situ mission, fully uncovering Uranus’s changing properties.Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words. Talk less; smile more. Continued here

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2 High School Students Prove Pythagorean Theorem. Here's What That Means At an American Mathematical Society meeting, high school students presented a proof of the Pythagorean theorem that used trigonometry—an approach that some once considered impossibleTwo high school students have proved the Pythagorean theorem in a way that one early 20th-century mathematician thought was impossible: using trigonometry. Continued here

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Astronomers Spy a Giant Runaway Black Hole's Starry Wake A candidate “rogue” supermassive black hole may weigh as much as 20 million suns and has sparked a trail of star formation that is 200,000 light-years longWhat’s invisible, weighs 20 million suns and zooms through space at more than 1,500 kilometers per second, leaving a long starry trail in its wake? If you guessed “a supermassive black hole that has escaped its host galaxy,” you’re probably right. At least that’s the conclusion of an international team of researchers who found and studied the candidate runaway using some of the world’s most powerful telescopes. The discovery is detailed in a paper published on April 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Continued here

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Tesla price cuts and a tax credit are driving used EV sales After several years of strong growth in sales of electric vehicles, there is evidence that the supply of used EVs is starting to grow as well. Data gathered by industry analyst Cox Automotive shows a 32 percent increase in sales of used EVs through licensed car dealers to 42,753 cars for the first three months of 2023. Cox says this does not include private party sales and that used EV sales in the first quarter of this year represent twice as many as were sold in Q1 2021. Continued here

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More Google Assistant shutdowns: Third-party smart displays are dead The Google Assistant continues to suffer at the hands of Google's product shutdowns. The latest products to die are third-party Google Assistant smart displays. 9to5Google was the first to spot this quietly posted notice on a Google Duo support page: Continued here

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For the first time, you can now watch every Star Trek movie in 4K HDR For the first time, you can now buy or rent every single Star Trek movie in the latest 4K and HDR standards. That includes all six movies based on the original series cast, all four featuring The Next Generation's cast, and the more recent J.J. Abrams films. Continued here

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I tried to pay my taxes in cash - here's what happened, and why the IRS should make it easier to do so About two-thirds of all U.S. residents who file federal income taxes typically get a refund. Unfortunately, this year I am among the other third who owe the Internal Revenue Service money. So I tried something I’ve never done before and few people do: I wanted to pay my tax bill in cash – that is, with real paper currency. Continued here

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Abortion Opponents’ Next Push A series of recent legal battles has been about abortion pills—but also about the anti-abortion movement’s broader post-Roe strategy.This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here

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Hiking 101: Everything You Need to Head for the Hills Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog meteorologist with an unhealthy fixation on shadows, predicted six more weeks of winter for us, and with a few weird, global-climate-change-related aberrations, he's been depressingly correct. But our sentence is over. Spring is here, and it's a gorgeous time of year to get started in hiking. Flowers will soon be in full bloom, and temperatures will be milder than ever in 2023 for most of us in the northern hemisphere.No matter where you live, there are most likely trails near you. Yet getting started can be daunting. Fear not. It's easier than you might think to stay dry, warm, hydrated, and safe. In this guide, we have recommendations for everything you need to take to the outdoors, whether it's just a peaceful afternoon hike or a roving weekend-long backpacking trip.  Continued here

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The Art Market Is Rebounding—but Only at the Top Last year, many high-profile art sales made headlines: Andy Warhol's iconic Marilyn Monroe portrait, for example, brought in $195 million, becoming the most expensive 20th-century painting ever sold at auction.That momentum, however, existed mainly in the high end of the art market, according to a new report. In the lower tiers, the picture was more complicated. Continued here

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Stem Cell 'Junk Yards' Reveal a New Clue About Aging Robert Signer sees himself as an auto mechanic for human cells. The professor of regenerative medicine at UC San Diego is intrigued by the elusive secrets of the stem cells in our blood. These are a class of rejuvenating entities that replenish supplies of red and white blood cells and platelets. Their job is to help keep our bodies healthy, but as we age their performance dips. When they fail, it can lead to blood cancers, anemia, clotting issues, and immune problems. Signer's job is to understand why, and he thinks the answer has to do with how they handle their garbage.Our cells assemble around 20,000 specific proteins that allow us to do everything from digesting dairy to killing tumors. But the process isn't perfect. When cells mess up, they wind up with what's essentially junk: proteins with missing, extra, or incorrect amino acids in their chains. These can settle into unexpected shapes and malfunction—or worse. "They start to stick together, and they form these aggregates," Signer says. Aggregates gum up the machine. Misfolded proteins can actually be toxic. (Researchers have linked Alzheimer's disease to gummed-up clumps of protein.) Continued here

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How the 1223 Mongol invasion of Europe still impacts us today On April 11, 1241, Hungarian soldiers lined up along the haphazardly fortified banks of the Hernad and Sajo rivers to await the arrival of the Mongols. Although the Hungarians’ numbers were vastly superior, the odds were stacked in favor of their opponent. The “Mongol storm” had been raging through Central Asia and Eastern Europe for roughly two decades at this point, swallowing up the Khwarazmian Empire in modern-day Afghanistan, the principalities of Kievan Rus’, and, most recently, the Kingdom of Poland.Thanks in part to their unrivaled horsemanship and archery skills — Mongolian bows were lighter, faster, and more precise than their European counterparts — the Mongols plowed through armies many times their size, and Hungary proved no exception. The lines at Sajo and Hernad were breached, cities burned to the ground, crops and livestock confiscated, and an estimated 25% of all Hungarians slaughtered. Continued here

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How Shrinking perpetuates Hollywood's most sexist clich Some things never change. When Shrinking, Ted Lasso creator Bill Lawrence's new comedy drama starring Jason Segel, launched on Apple TV+ in January, it was immediately apparent that the show was guilty of one of the most quietly toxic tropes in entertainment: from the off, Segel's therapist character Jimmy was defined by the loss of his wife, beautiful in death and only ever available in flashback form. Tia is deprived of any agency: we know that her narrative purpose is solely to die, and her existence is only important insofar as it affects our brave male protagonist.The temptation to give male characters female relatives or love interests who are either already dead or dying as a plot driver is seemingly irresistible for countless writers, the vast majority of whom are male. Once you are aware of this phenomenon, you realise how pervasive it is. I am currently reading a novel narrated by a man grieving over a woman we never meet before her death; while researching this feature, I saw the new Adam Driver film 65, in which Driver's character crash-lands on Earth 65 million years ago. The reason he is in his spaceship in the first place is, lo and behold, because he has a terminally ill daughter who – spoiler alert – dies during the film. Continued here

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Stars' strange orbits may offer clues on dark matter Observations of celestial bodies occasionally defy scientists’ current understanding of physics, fueling an ongoing debate that a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, which examined small stars closely orbiting much heavier black holes, may help resolve. The crucial question is whether most of the matter in the Universe remains undetectable or whether our grasp of the rules governing gravity and celestial motion is incomplete. These opposing explanations persist, as the scientific community cannot prove with 100% certainty which is true.But between these explanations, there is a clear favorite. According to scientists’ best understanding of the makeup of the cosmos, we live in a very dark Universe in which an unseen form of matter, called dark matter, is five times more prevalent than the matter that makes up all the visible stars and galaxies. Continued here

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How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are the supreme downfall of our consciousness. They are also the inevitable cost of survival, of navigating a vast and complex reality most of which remains forever beyond our control and comprehension. And yet in our effort to parse the world, we sever ourselves from the full range of its beauty, tensing against the tenderness of life.How to love the world more by negotiating our hunger for certainty and our gift for story is what George Saunders explores in some lovely passages from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (public library) — the boundlessly wonderful and layered book in which he reckoned with the key to great storytelling and the way to unbreak our hearts. Continued here

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The Value of Charging Ex-Presidents Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked readers for their thoughts on Donald Trump’s legal troubles in New York. Continued here

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How workers are using their three-day weekends As more companies make the switch to a four-day workweek, thousands of workers are now enjoying an extra day off at the weekend. And they’re doing a lot with their new free time – pursuing side-hustles, spending more time with family and even signing up as volunteers.Three employees spoke to BBC Worklife about how they’re making the most of those extra 24 hours.  Continued here

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Ex-Twitter CEO who was fired by Musk sues company over unpaid legal expenses Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and two other ex-executives sued the company today, saying they haven't been reimbursed for over $1 million in expenses related to federal investigations and other legal matters. The lawsuit said former executives had to respond to investigations launched by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice, and requested "an expedited ruling requiring Defendant to comply with its obligations to advance legal fees and expenses relating to ongoing litigation and investigations." Continued here

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A Biting Satire About the Idealistic Left Eleanor Catton’s new novel, Birnam Wood, pokes at the pieties of those who want to change the world.Ask me how much time and money I have devoted, in my adult life, to conscious efforts to be a good person, and I would struggle to quantify it. Of course, I would also struggle to tell you what “being good” means. My ideas seem to change constantly, which means the target shifts. Besides, the world I inhabit does not make goodness easy, for me or anyone else. I put clothes I no longer wear in giveaway bins run by a profoundly inefficient nonprofit; I assiduously recycle despite reports that my plastic is likely “headed to landfills, or worse”; I sign up for shifts at a food bank, then cancel because I have to work. If I were giving away more money, or more of my time, my efforts would surely be wobblier or more questionable still. Continued here

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How Should Portuguese Americans Be Classified? The question of who Portuguese Americans are—white, Hispanic, minority, nonminority—remains unsettled.My grandfather José was a dark-skinned, thickly accented man who lived in Escondido, California, where 52 percent of the 150,000 inhabitants are Hispanic. But José, born in Portugal, was not Hispanic, at least not according to present-day federal definitions. Throughout the 60 years that my avô lived in the United States, such federal classifications changed constantly. He was once a minority, now not. For a while he was Hispanic, until he was white. The question of who Portuguese Americans are has become an existential debate for members of the community, with profound consequences for their daily lives. Continued here

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How to build a lasting team: friendship, trust, and the art of managing sideways Excerpted from Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, by Claire Hughes Johnson, Copyright 2023 by Stripe Press. All rights reserved.The reason the expressions “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” and “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together” are so often repeated is because they’re true. You need to pace yourself, and you need to have someone to run with.  Continued here

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Photos: A Turkish Town Swallowed by a Rising Reservoir An enormous new dam in northeastern Turkey has begun to fill its reservoir, slowly submerging the town of Yusufeli despite years of protests by locals and environmental groups. The town’s 7,000 residents have been relocated by the government to newly built apartment blocks nearby. The Yusufeli Dam rises 886 feet (270 meters) above the Çoruh River (also referred to as Chorokhi), and its hydroelectric power plant is expected to begin producing electricity in May 2023. The photographer Yasin Akgul visited Yusufeli last week, capturing images of locals looking on as their former town is swallowed up. A photograph taken on April 4, 2023, shows pillars and buildings of the village of Yusufeli in the rising water of a new reservoir on the Çoruh River (also referred to as Chorokhi), in Artvin province in northeastern Turkey. # Continued here

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Who Was the Woman Aboard This Famed 17th-Century Swedish Warship? DNA analysis has revealed that a woman was among the 30 who died when the ‘Vasa’ sank on its maiden voyageScientists are still making new discoveries about the Vasa, the world’s best preserved 17th-century ship. Continued here

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Today's best deals: Microsoft Spring Sale discounts Xbox games, Surface, and more Microsoft's Spring Sale is in bloom, bringing notable discounts to the Surface Pro 9, Surface Laptop 5, Xbox games and controllers, PC games, and some movies. All of these deals are live on Microsoft's website, but Amazon is concurrently matching or exceeding many of them. We also have Apple's AirPods Pro still on sale, matching its lowest prices tracked. As always, we use tracking sites like CamelCamelCamel and Keepa to compare current sale prices to the typical street price to ensure the sales we find are good deals, too. Continued here

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Controversial Yellowstone Hunt Kills More Than 1,100 Bison The hunt is an effort to control the animal’s population and protect cattle outside the parkMore than 1,100 bison were killed in a controversial hunt that took place near Yellowstone National Park throughout the last four months. Continued here

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Dan's Diner: A wild dinner in a roving Tundra Buggy Located on the 58th parallel north, Canada's subarctic town of Churchill, Manitoba, has a population of just 900 permanent residents. But this low population count more than compensates for the 500,000 visitors who travel here throughout the year. They come for the Arctic wilderness, the infamous polar bears, the playful beluga whales, and of course – perhaps the most special of all – the Aurora Borealis.The cuisine of Churchill is just as diverse as its landscape, incorporating tundra fare of wild game like caribou and elk, fish such as trout and burbot, vegetables like leafy greens and potatoes, and Arctic berries. And for a lucky few adventurers who make it this far up north, there's an unforgettable way to experience it all. Continued here

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A therapist shares the 7 biggest parenting mistakes that destroy kids' mental strength You want your kids to grow up knowing that it's possible to achieve what they want — if they work for it. Parents can teach their kids learn self-control by setting clear rules for things like finishing homework before screen time or doing chores to boost allowance (so they can buy things on their own, while knowing they earned it).But just like failure, embracing uncomfortable moments can boost mental strength. Encourage your kids to try new things. Help them get started, because that's the hardest part. But once they take that first step, they might realize that it isn't as difficult as they thought it'd be — and that they might even be good at it! Continued here

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Nan Shepherd delved into a queer erotic kinship with nature | Psyche Ideas is a writer based in southwestern Oregon. Her work has been published in Literary Hub, Mid-American Review and Guernica, among others. She is the author of Tracing the Desire Line (2019).To read Nan Shepherd is to feel as if one has been plunged into the rocky crags of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland – the landscape she wrote about with such adoration in The Living Mountain (1977). For Shepherd, ‘Each of the senses is a way in to what the mountain has to give.’ Through her poetic imagination and lyric innovation, one arrives at a dissolution of boundaries between body and nature. It makes for a thrilling reading experience. Shepherd offers a keen and precise observation of the mountains coupled with a kind of prismatic perception, which gracefully unfolds to provide an intimate portrait of the ecological terrain she called home. Continued here

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SwitchBot's Hub 2 is the first Matter device that really matters The Matter smart home connectivity standard has huge promise and lots of device makers lined up to engage with a theoretically more open, less server-dependent future. And yet, so far, I haven't been compelled to write about any individual products launching with Matter support. Most of them are simply familiar products—light bulbs, turning door locks, wall switches—that now can be set up in a different, cross-platform way (however painfully). Most wouldn't compel anyone who already has a functioning version of them to upgrade or expand their setup. Continued here

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Ancient Europeans Took Hallucinogenic Drugs 3,000 Years Ago Strands of hair dating back 3,000 years have revealed the first direct evidence of drug use in Bronze Age Europe, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.The hair contained psychoactive alkaloids, which are found naturally in some plants and can induce altered states of consciousness. Archaeologists think that ancient humans may have ingested them during ritual ceremonies. Continued here

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Lawsuit: Tesla must be punished for "tasteless" sharing of car-camera images Tesla is facing a class-action complaint after it was revealed that employees used an internal messaging system to share sensitive videos and images of customers taken by car cameras. Continued here

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The Electron Is So Round That It's Ruling Out New Particles | Quanta Magazine If an electron were the size of Earth, the experiment could detect a bump the size of a sugar molecule.Imagine an electron as a spherical cloud of negative charge. If that ball were ever so slightly less round, it could help explain fundamental gaps in our understanding of physics, including why the universe contains something rather than nothing. Continued here

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No drug is safe: Drug developers decry Texas abortion pill ruling A federal judge in Texas issued a ruling Friday to revoke the Food and Drug Administration's nearly 23-year-old approval of the safe and effective abortion and miscarriage medication, mifepristone. Although expected, the ruling throws into question the FDA's authority over all medicines and threatens to weaken the country's premier drug development pipeline, industry leaders and legal experts say. Continued here

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James Webb Telescope Captures Detailed Image of Uranus’ Rings The high-tech observatory also observed two storm clouds on the planet, a polar cap, six moons and distant galaxiesThe James Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of Uranus that showcases 11 of the planet's 13 rings. Continued here

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Apple releases last week's security patches for older iPhones, iPads, and Macs Last week, Apple released iOS and iPadOS 16.4.1 and macOS Ventura 13.3.1 to patch two actively exploited security vulnerabilities and fix other small bugs. Today it’s following those up with iOS and iPadOS 15.7.5, macOS Monterey 12.6.5, and macOS Big Sur 11.7.6 to patch those same vulnerabilities in older devices that are still receiving software updates but aren’t capable of running the newest OSes. Continued here

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How Raising a Child Is Like Writing a Novel Creating art requires a suspension of disbelief, a narrowing of vision to the present moment, an openness to the unexpected. So, too, with caring for a tiny human being.All stories are about transformation, even the ones that aren’t. The passage of time inevitably brings about transformations big and small, obvious and invisible. As a writer, I seek out change in my stories; as a professor, I urge students to pay attention to it. Though I was ambivalent for years about having children, the allure of transformation is what eventually led me to become a mother. Beneath my ambivalence was a quiet hum of curiosity; few things in life, after all, both promise and threaten to be utterly transformative. Continued here

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Quit Your Bucket List Years ago, just after I finished my psychiatry residency, a beloved supervisor called to say she had some bad news. At a routine checkup, she had glanced at her chest X-ray up on the viewing box while waiting for her doctor to come into the room. She was a trauma surgeon before becoming a psychiatrist and had spent years reading chest X-rays, so she knew that the coin-size lesion she saw in her lung was almost certainly cancer, given her long history of smoking.We had dinner soon after. She was still more than two years away from the end of her life and felt physically fine—vital, even. That’s why I was so surprised when she said she had no desire to spend whatever time she had left on exotic travel or other new adventures. She wanted her husband, her friends, her family, dinner parties, and the great outdoors. “Just more Long Island sunsets. I don’t need Bali,” she told me. Continued here

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The Pornography Paradox Reformers fear that ever more outré sites are warping users’ desires. But transgression has always been part of the appeal.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.       Continued here

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The Three Biggest Misconceptions About Israel’s Upheaval For the past three months, Israelis have been protesting across the country against the attempted overhaul of their judicial system by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition. In February, a survey found that nearly one in five Israelis had taken part in a demonstration. This unprecedented activism culminated in a national strike at the end of March that compelled Netanyahu to pause, but not abandon, his efforts to push through the legislation. Today, representatives of the two sides sat down to continue negotiations toward a potential compromise. Yet despite all the coverage these events have rightly received, I’ve noticed a fair number of fallacies circulating about why they came about and what’s driving them.International coverage of the Israeli unrest often casts the controversy in binary terms: Some Israelis support judicial reform; others oppose it. But the story is more complicated. In fact, there is broad consensus that the country’s Supreme Court is overly powerful and should be reined in. At present, the body effectively appoints its own members and exercises authority over politicians and policy that is unique in the democratic world. Back in 2007, the American judge and legal commentator Richard Posner labeled Aharon Barak—the Israeli chief justice most responsible for the expansion of the court’s capabilities—an “enlightened despot.” The leaders of several Israeli opposition parties have themselves sought to correct this imbalance in Israel’s internal affairs. Continued here

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The Problem With Weather Apps Technologically speaking, we live in a time of plenty. Today, I can ask a chatbot to render The Canterbury Tales as if written by Taylor Swift or to help me write a factually inaccurate autobiography. With three swipes, I can summon almost everyone listed in my phone and see their confused faces via an impromptu video chat. My life is a gluttonous smorgasbord of information, and I am on the all-you-can-eat plan. But there is one specific corner where technological advances haven’t kept up: weather apps.Weather forecasts are always a game of prediction and probabilities, but these apps seem to fail more often than they should. At best, they perform about as well as meteorologists, but some of the most popular ones fare much worse. The cult favorite Dark Sky, for example, which shut down earlier this year and was rolled into the Apple Weather app, accurately predicted the high temperature in my zip code only 39 percent of the time, according to ForecastAdvisor, which evaluates online weather providers. The Weather Channel’s app, by comparison, comes in at 83 percent. The Apple app, although not rated by ForecastAdvisor, has a reputation for off-the-mark forecasts and has been consistently criticized for presenting faulty radar screens, mixing up precipitation totals, or, as it did last week, breaking altogether. Dozens of times, the Apple Weather app has lulled me into a false sense of security, leaving me wet and betrayed after a run, bike ride, or round of golf. Continued here