Strengthen Your Ability to Influence People

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Strengthen Your Ability to Influence People Influence can be defined as the ability to affect the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, and it requires developing a strong emotional connection with yourself and others. Those who master the art of influence are often skilled at tapping into the emotions that drive people’s actions. This explains why influence is synonymous with leadership. Behind every great leader is an army of followers acting in support of their mission or cause. In fact, when Time magazine ranks the 100 most influential people globally, their largest group isn’t comprised of sports stars, musical icons, or philanthropists, but leaders such as Michelle Obama, Xi Jinping, Jacinda Ardern, and Bob Iger. Continued here

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Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work—their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better. Continued here

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Crowdfunding and the IRS: What Business Owners Need to Know Proper tax planning and bookkeeping can help make your next crowdfunding campaign a success. Continued here

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Christine vs. Work: What Difficult Emotions Are Trying to Tell You How to Make Virtual Meetings Feel More RealDoes Virtual Presence Still Matter at Work?How to Answer the Question, “Tell Me About Yourself”How to Be Less Lonely at WorkHow to Say No at WorkHow to Make a Presentation Deck That Doesn’t StinkWhat Does ‘Just Be Yourself’ Really Look Like at Work?You Need Tough Feedback—Here’s How to Get ItHow to Speak Up in Meetings Continued here

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Ben Affleck's Air Jordan Movie Breaks Down the Genius Business Strategy That Made Nike Billions 'Air' breathes new life into the story of Nike and Michael Jordan partnering to create one of the most successful products of all time. Continued here

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3 Ways E-commerce Brands Can Save Money on Shipping in 2023 A little bit of trial and error can shed light on the most profitable strategy for your business. Continued here

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How Our Careers Affect Our Children What working parent hasn’t felt guilty about missing soccer games and piano recitals? Almost two decades ago, though, researchers surveyed nearly 900 professionals about their relationships with their work and their children, and found that parents’ working, even for long hours, did not hurt children. What they did find was that parents who were distracted by, or obsessed with, their work, did see an impact on their children. This is likely only more problematic today when digital devices are omnipresent. The lesson: don’t worry about whether you attend every soccer game. But when you do show up, put your phone down and be there for your kid. Continued here

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theSkimm's co-Founders Know Supporting Women Isn't Just Good For Women…It's Good For Business The latest State of Women report from theSkimm shows a clear need, and the path forward. Continued here

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New Report: Over Half of Americans Think Their Workplace Has a Gender Pay Gap Problem Companies can build trust with their workers by adjusting pay for female employees, among other solutions. Continued here

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Getting a Clearer View of Your Company's Carbon Footprint E-liability accounting is a new technique that will help customers factor in a product’s environmental footprint into their purchasing decisions and will help create a competition dynamic that leads to reduced carbon outputs.  This article describes two pilot studies — by an Asian tire manufacturer and a German cement producer — that illustrate how the E-liability approach can do that. Continued here

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Meet the Founder: Equitea Co.'s Quentin Vennie Equitea co-founder and CEO Quentin Vennie on his personal struggles with mental health, the pride he takes in helping others combat similar issues, and the funding challenges facing Black entrepreneurs. Continued here

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Why Warren Buffett Doesn't Believe in the FIRE Movement, and Neither Should You Unless you define "retire early" as starting a business you'll never want to leave. Continued here

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My Employee Is Refusing Assignments Because of Her Politics How do I talk to her about this? Continued here

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4 Entrepreneurship Lessons from a Nigerian Founder Frontier markets — developing countries that are more developed than the least developing countries, but are too small, risky, or illiquid to be considered emerging markets — are high-risk, high-reward opportunities for today’s young tech entrepreneurs. Among such frontiers, global analysts have proclaimed time and again that Africa is the future. Dynamics in economic growth, demographics, and connectivity make this obvious — and Nigeria sits at the intersection of all three trends. Nigeria has been an innovation hub for sub-Saharan Africa and a hotbed of entrepreneurship and young talent. Continued here

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Drone-on-Drone Combat in Ukraine Marks a New Era of Aerial Warfare Antidrone technology is combatting “flying IEDs” in the air over Ukraine—with implications beyond the war with RussiaThese aerial duels don’t involve bullets, missiles or bombs. In some, hobby-type camera quadcopters that are used to spy on enemy positions simply ram each other in a crude aerial demolition derby. In other encounters, highly sophisticated craft use advanced radar—backed by artificial intelligence and the latest aerospace engineering technology—to precision fire nets that snag other drones. Continued here

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The surprising ways cellphones have changed our lives The year was 1973. Joel Engel, an American engineer who had worked on Nasa's Apollo programme, was leading an effort to create the world's first handheld mobile phone. Research at Bell Labs, where Engel worked, had several decades earlier contributed to the development of clunky, car-phones that allowed calls to be made on the move. His team were now trying to take the technology a step further – a device that could be carried around everywhere."Hi, Joel," said the voice at the other end of the line. It was Martin 'Marty' Cooper, the leader of a rival research group at a radio and electronics company called Motorola.  Continued here

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Global TikTok creators depend on U.S. viewers. A TikTok ban would be devastating On March 22, dozens of popular TikTok creators gathered on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington to rally against the potential ban on the social media platform. This demonstration took place the day before the company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified before a congressional committee. The creators called the ban a threat to their livelihoods, and an act of censorship. TikTok covered travel expenses for those in attendance, but not all the creators who would be impacted by such a ban were represented.Gilmher Croes, for one, tuned in to the hearing from his home in Aruba, a Caribbean nation located just miles from the coast of Venezuela. A full-time creator, his broad comedy and mix of pratfalls and thirst traps have gained him over 35 million followers on TikTok, placing him among the top 60 most-followed accounts in the world. Continued here

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Mexico's $100-billion auto parts industry is reinventing itself for the EV era Tecnoformas, a small Mexican company that makes steel pipes used in car auto parts like lubrication, gas tank, and cooling systems, has been rolling with the punches for 28 years. Its founders started the company after they lost their jobs during Mexico’s 1994 economic crisis. Tecnoformas went on to survive the U.S. auto industry’s near collapse of 2008. Most recently, it weathered the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, Tecnoformas and many of Mexico’s auto parts suppliers have to contend with Mexico’s transition to electric vehicles. “As our clients move to electric motors, we see a reduction in our production of parts that go into the internal combustion engine,” José Trinidad, a co-founder at Tecnoformas, told Rest of World. “We don’t know what those changes will look like but we have to be ready and with the right attitude to face them.”  Continued here

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Tor Project's New Privacy-Focused Browser Lets You Layer a VPN The easiest way to use the digital anonymity service Tor is through the Tor Browser. You download and use it like a regular browser, and it covers your digital footprints as you go, making it very difficult for anyone to track your online activity. On top of that, the Tor Browser is designed with countersurveillance measures that block trackers and stymie device fingerprinting methods. But you might not want to use the Tor Browser all the time, because it has relatively slow page load times and can be a bit cumbersome. But launching today, a new browser developed by the Tor Project's user experience and applications teams offers the same privacy focus built with different infrastructure to incorporate VPN support instead of Tor.Known as the Mullvad Browser, the tool comes out of a collaboration between the Tor Project and the VPN maker Mullvad. The free, open source browser is available now for download. The VPN space is crowded and has some problematic players, but Mullvad has consistently been a well-regarded and trusted VPN because it's open source, doesn't monetize user data, and provides independent third-party audits of its systems and infrastructure. Nonetheless, the Mullvad Browser can be used with any VPN you trust or can be used without a VPN as simply a privacy-focused browser. Continued here

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Geoengineering Is Not a Quick Fix for the Climate Crisis, New Analysis Shows A new study debunks the idea that solar geoengineering is a temporary measure to reduce warming and meet climate targetsCLIMATEWIRE | A controversial idea for cooling the earth’s climate through artificial means would likely require a much longer global commitment than policymakers and the public understand, according to a recent study that raises new questions about the potential for using solar geoengineering. Continued here

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How To Leverage Your Time To Scale Your Business What every entrepreneur should know about efficiently growing the company. Continued here

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How mobile phones have changed our brains Like many of us, I spend too much time on my phone. And, like many of us, I am acutely aware of – and often feel guilty about – this fact.Sometimes, I'll leave it at the other end of the house, or turn it off, to use it less. But, sooner than I'd like to admit, I'll wind up walking down the hallway for something I need to do that I can only – or can do more efficiently – by phone. Paying a bill? Phone. Arranging a coffee date with a friend? Phone. Messaging family who live far away? Phone. Checking the weather, jotting down a story idea, taking a picture or video, creating a photo book, listening to a podcast, loading up driving directions, making a quick calculation, even turning on a torch? Phone, phone, phone. Continued here

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Building a Great Customer Experience in the Metaverse The metaverse presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reinvent the consumer experience, by incorporating greater elements of interactivity, personalization, and adventure in your company’s interactions with customers. The metaverse can help put consumers in the driver’s seat in at least three major ways: 1) by creating new ways to discover and explore products; 2) by helping to fuse physical and virtual product experiences in more meaningful ways; and 3) by reestablishing connections between people and brands through “digital humans” — AI-powered bots that can interact with users in virtual environments. Being able to parlay insights from the virtual to the physical world, and vice versa, will become key to understanding consumer behavior and experiences for marketers, product designers, store planners, and CX professionals across industries. Continued here

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How and when Facebook decides to break its own moderation rules As a financial crisis continues to ripple through the Sri Lankan economy, in the last year, Munza Mushtaq has turned to Facebook and Twitter for support. A journalist and former news editor, Mushtaq regularly asks for donations on social media — most recently, she used Twitter in early March to raise 150,000 Sri Lankan rupees ($439) for twin sisters in need of medication for a rare skin disease.Since early 2022, the country has been pummeled by ballooning inflation, daily energy blackouts, and shortages of essential imported goods, sometimes leaving medical providers with no other option than to crowdsource. Continued here

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Massive 3CX Supply-Chain Hack Targeted Cryptocurrency Firms Software supply-chain attacks, in which hackers corrupt widely used applications to push their own code to thousands or even millions of machines, have become a scourge, both insidious and potentially huge in the breadth of their impact. But the latest major software supply-chain attack, in which hackers who appear to be working on behalf of the North Korean government hid their code in the installer for a common VoIP application known as 3CX, seems so far to have had a prosaic goal: breaking into a handful of cryptocurrency companies.Researchers at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky today revealed that they identified a small number of cryptocurrency-focused firms as at least some of the victims of the 3CX software supply-chain attack that's unfolded over the past week. Kaspersky declined to name any of those victim companies, but it notes that they're based in “western Asia.”  Continued here

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Your First Lab-Grown Burger Won't Contain Much Beef The future of meat poses a philosophical conundrum. Some things we can unequivocally call a beef burger. A 100 percent beef patty, for example. Take out some of that ground mince and add in a little water, onion, some salt and pepper. Now you've a burger that's 82 percent beef. Is it still a beef burger?Most people would say so. But what if we push things even further? Say we dialed the animal component way down and chucked some other stuff in there—soy or pea protein, for example. Is a beef burger with 50 percent animal cells still a beef burger? How about a burger that is just 5 percent cow but packs in so much umami beefiness that it's closer to the real thing than any plant-based burger out there? Is that a beef burger, or just a beef-flavored burger? Continued here

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NASA Announces the Astronaut Crew for Artemis II Lunar Flyby The four astronauts will fly around the moon in preparation for the first human landings there since 1972HOUSTON — NASA has named its first astronaut crew bound for the moon in more than 50 years. Continued here

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In the War on Bacteria, It's Time to Call in the Phages Ella Balasa was 26 when she realized the routine medical treatments that sustained her were no longer working. The slender lab assistant had lived since childhood with the side effects of cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that turns mucus in the lungs and other organs into a thick, sticky goo that gives pathogens a place to grow. To keep infections under control, she followed a regimen of swallowing and inhaling antibiotics—but by the beginning of 2019, an antibiotic-resistant bacterium lodged in her lungs was making her sicker than she had ever been. Balasa's lung function was down to 18 percent. She was feverish and too feeble to lift her arms over her head. Even weeks of intravenous colistin, a brutal last-resort antibiotic, made no dent. With nothing to lose, she asked a lab at Yale University whether she could volunteer to receive the organisms they were researching: viruses that attack bacteria, known as bacteriophages. Continued here

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Canadian statistics professor games Tim Hortons contest for 80-98% win rates All you had to do, if you really wanted some free coffee and doughnuts, was wake up around 3 am each day and click on some virtual Tim Hortons coffee cups. Continued here

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Artificial Wombs Will Change Abortion Rights Forever One day, human wombs may no longer be necessary for bearing children. In 2016, a research team in Cambridge, England, grew human embryos in ectogenesis—the process of human or animal gestation in an artificial environment—for up to 13 days after fertilization. A further breakthrough came the next year, when researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced that they had developed a basic artificial uterus named the Biobag. The Biobag sustained lamb fetuses, equivalent in size and development to a human fetus at roughly 22 weeks gestation, to full term successfully. Then, in August of 2022, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel created the world’s first synthetic embryos from mice stem cells. In the same month, scientists at the University of Cambridge used stem cells to create a synthetic embryo with a brain and a beating heart.Ectogenesis has the potential to transform reproductive labor and reduce risks associated with reproduction. It could enable people with wombs to reproduce as easily as cisgender men do: without risks to their physical health, their economic safety, or their bodily autonomy. By removing natural gestation from the process of having children, ectogenesis could offer an equal starting point for people of all sexes and genders, particularly for queer people who wish to have children without having to rely on the morally ambiguous option of surrogacy.  Continued here

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Open Offices Aren't Working, so How Do We Design an Office That Does? Insights from Deaf and autistic communities could finally make office spaces better for everyone. COVID changed how we use office spaces, and now many employers are starting to rethink their design.  Continued here

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Buildings Crumble High in the Alps as Permafrost Thaws Safe access to the world’s tallest peaks could disappear as temperatures rise in the AlpsMountaineers have visited Rifugio Casati, a four-story building 10,725 feet above sea level in the Italian Alps, for nearly a century. In 2016 Renato Alberti, who had overseen the structure for 35 years, noticed a vertical crack in one of the outer walls. Alberti, now age 67, filled the gap with repair foam, but the crack reopened after only a few days. Alberti thought something unusual must be happening. Perhaps the mountain was becoming unstable. Continued here

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Coming Soon: Season 5 Each episode takes you behind the closed doors of real leadership coaching sessions with executives, entrepreneurs, and managers, as they work through their hardest career challenges. Muriel helps them discover unexpected insights about themselves and actionable steps they can take to move forward. Continued here

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Sonos's Astounding Era 300 Speaker Delivers Spatial Sorcery 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 WIREDNo, of course you don’t buy a speaker to look at it. But should your gaze fall upon your speaker while you’re enjoying its sound, ideally the sight of it shouldn’t make you wince. So it’s just as well that Era 300, the latest Sonos wireless speaker and the company’s first foray into spatial audio (except for its Dolby Atmos–enabled soundbars, of course), is such an impressive and accomplished performer—its physical appearance is easy to overlook. Unless you somehow find it in your field of vision unexpectedly, anyhow, in which case it never ceases to be startling. Continued here

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How Fulcrum BioEnergy Is Fronting a Growing Wave of Sustainable Aviation Fuel Interest Investment in sustainable aviation fuel is building, and this clean energy company has a plan to reduce both emissions and waste. Continued here

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Deciding Whether to Respond to Breaking News (or Not) As leaders, there is no way to anticipate and be ready with a public response for every scenario. In this excerpt from her new book, Pfizer Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Sally Susman provides a five-point framework of questions to help leaders figure out whether and how to weigh-in: Does the issue relate to our purpose? How does it impact our stakeholders? What are our choices for engagement? What’s the price of our silence? How does the issue relate to our values? Continued here

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Dinosaurs were doomed even before the asteroid. Here's why. There’s a standard paleontological story we tell, and it goes like this: When animals first emerged from their watery genesis to walk on land, they found a world of lush, edible vegetation. Over the course of a few hundred million years (and lots of eating), these animals grew larger and larger until they reached their terrible apex — the dinosaur. These gigantic beasts then dominated the globe.Flying pterodactyls, sometimes up to ten meters in wingspan, swept up whatever they wanted. Stomping tyrannosaurs would gulp down human-sized prey as an appetizer. A single herbivorous Diplodocus might strip a tree clean in a day. Needless to say, a world swarming with terrible lizards left little room for mammals, especially Homo sapiens, to come about. Continued here

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New Monument in London Will Honor Victims of Transatlantic Slave Trade A new monument honoring the victims of the transatlantic slave trade is coming to London, officials announced last month. It will be located at West India Quay in the city’s Docklands, an area that has a long, fraught history with the trade. “It is a city whose wealth was built on the backs, the lives, the experiences of those who were enslaved,” says Debbie Weekes-Bernard, London’s deputy mayor for communities and social justice, to the Guardian’s Esther Addley. “We see it in our institutions, we see it in our buildings, we see it in our public realm.” Continued here

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The 8 wonders of life — and how they can transform yours What do you think of when you imagine something awe-inspiring? Is it a chance encounter with the aurora borealis or a rare comet? Is it being there in person when your favorite band gives their last performance? Or maybe accomplishing something that other people told you was impossible? If your answer was along those lines, guess what: You’re spot on! Those momentous events are awe-inspiring. Life-affirming even. They leave us gobsmacked, raise the hairs on the backs of our necks, and render us incapable of expressing ourselves beyond a Keanu Reeves-worthy, “Whoa!” But as stunning as such moments are, they represent only part of life’s awe equation. Continued here

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Musk loses in court, has to delete tweet threatening Tesla workers who join union Tesla CEO Elon Musk violated US labor law by threatening to take stock options away from employees who join a union, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The appeals court said the US National Labor Relations Board can enforce its order that requires Musk to delete the tweet. Continued here

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A Brief History of the Mug Shot Police have been using the snapshots in criminal investigations since the advent of commercial photographyIn the spring of 1841, just after finishing his inauguration speech, William Henry Harrison became the first United States president to be photographed. The portrait was a daguerreotype, created with a newly invented process that produced a photograph in minutes rather than hours. Continued here

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Emotional distress is rising worldwide. Why? Starting in the early 21st century, analytics firm Gallup has been prompting millions of people from 165 countries with this statement:“Please think about yesterday, from the morning until the end of the day. Think about where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, and how you felt.” Continued here

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Saliva: The next frontier in cancer detection In the late 1950s, dentist and US Navy Capt. Kirk C. Hoerman, then a young man in his 30s, attempted to answer a bold question: Might the saliva of prostate cancer patients have different characteristics from that of healthy people? Could it contain traces of a disease that’s so far away from the mouth?Without wasting more of their own saliva on elaborate discussion, Hoerman and his colleagues from the department of dental research at the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, got down to work. They analyzed samples from more than 200 patients and healthy controls, and found that the saliva of patients with untreated prostate cancer showed a significant increase in the levels of enzymes called acid phosphatases. Continued here

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Proton's mass radius is apparently shorter than its charge radius If you ask how much an object like a bicycle weighs, there's a simple answer. But if you ask where the mass of a bicycle is, things get more complex. The bike has a lot of parts—some of which move—that all have different volumes, shapes, and densities, so its mass is distributed irregularly around its form. Continued here

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Users fume after My Cloud network breach locks them out of their data Users of the Western Digital My Cloud service are fuming after a network breach has locked them out of their data for more than 24 hours and has put company-handled information into the hands of currently unknown hackers. Continued here

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Where will I get the best views of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse? Locations farther southwest and closer to the eclipse’s center-line provide the best visual shows.In 2017, air temperatures dropped by ~20 °F (12 °C) during totality; expect similar drops in 2024. Continued here

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New Research Rewrites the History of American Horses Native Americans spread the animals across the West before Europeans arrived in the region, archaeological evidence and Indigenous knowledge showThe narrative about horses in North America told in several written histories is due for an update, according to a study published last week in the journal Science. After examining archaeological remains of horses, researchers suggest Indigenous peoples had spread the animals through the American West by the first half of the 1600s—before they encountered Europeans. Continued here

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The neuroscience of spiritual experiences Patrick McNamara, an experimental neuroscientist, argues that the function of religion is not just to quell existential anxiety or stave off the fear of death, but to disrupt current models of the self and to update those models in relation to the world around us. Religious experiences promote imaginative simulation of other possible worlds, giving us space to update those models.One core facet of the spiritual experience is what McNamara calls “de-centering” — a powerful technique that promotes self-transformation and makes us incredibly vulnerable when triggered. When held in the context of a ritual, like many religious practices, we can achieve massive personal growth and transcendence. But de-centering isn’t only effective within the context of religion: Secular people can re-discover or create their own rich traditions to support the de-centering experience. Continued here

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Blue Beetle trailer promises a classic superhero origin story Is there anything better than a good superhero origin story? There's something about watching an ordinary person, struggling with self-doubt, discover their unique hidden strengths and own their power that never fails to capture our imaginations. It's the bread-and-butter of the superhero genre, and we're getting yet another origin story this August, when Warner Bros. releases Blue Beetle, focused on the latest incarnation of the classic comic book character. The first trailer just dropped, and it looks like a fun, family-centric summer film. Continued here

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Judge slams Fox News for false election claims as Dominion wins key ruling Dominion Voting Systems won a significant ruling against Fox News Network on Friday, with a judge finding that Fox News aired false statements about Dominion related to the 2020 presidential election and must face a jury trial in the defamation lawsuit. Continued here

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Rare Gold Coin Celebrating Julius Caesar's Death Returned to Greece Minted in 42 B.C.E., the looted coin broke auction records in 2020 when it sold for $4.2 millionIn 2020, a rare gold coin sold for a record-breaking $4.2 million at auction. Now, over two years later, officials have returned it to Greece.  Continued here

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Russia Escalates Its War on Reporters The arrest on spying charges of the American journalist Evan Gershkovich is a grave—and cynical—new stage in Vladimir Putin’s repressions.I found it hard to get to sleep on Thursday night after seeing news that a Moscow court had charged the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich with espionage. The images from outside the court shocked many of us. The Moscow press pack is a tight-knit community, and Gershkovich’s colleagues from the BBC, the Financial Times, Politico, and other publications posted “Journalism is not a crime” on their social media. As a journalist who has covered Russia for most of my career and worked closely with many foreign reporters, I count myself among Evan’s friends. The spying charges—a ludicrous pretext for what is, in effect, hostage-taking by the Russian state—threaten the 31-year-old reporter with a possible sentence of 20 years in prison. Continued here

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The therapeutic power in learning to make a film together | Psyche Ideas is a filmmaker based in Bangalore, India. Apart from filmmaking, his practice currently focuses on designing film and sound pedagogies. He recently created the animated film Appa and his Invisible Mundu.A sanitation worker dreams of becoming a lawyer to fight for workers’ rights. A mother imagines sharing her secrets with her child. A woman practises for a difficult conversation. This is the story of Kathi, Kathi, Kaarana, a yet-to-be-released short film narrated and produced by workers from the city of Bangalore and their families. But I’d like to share the story behind this story: one about four working-class families who dreamed of making films and attended a film school to collectively learn, create, and take care of each other. Continued here

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When Did People Start Brushing Dogs’ Teeth? The finger-fitted dog toothbrush, if you aren’t aware, is a plastic tube worn over the human index finger, used to, supposedly easily, brush dogs’ teeth. One variation looks like the genitals of a sea creature. Another looks like the plasticky head of a tiny, bristle-faced scuba diver. I recently spotted one such brush (of the scuba variety) on a friend’s kitchen counter and recognized it instantly as the brush you buy right after your veterinarian tells you, for the first time, that you should brush your dog’s teeth—ideally daily. My vet sells them by the register, a small bit of purchasable comfort for the newly periodontally frightened.The supposed ease of the finger brush is an attractive prospect for those facing both a new daily task and a new source of guilt. My friend and I both are dog guardians for the first time in our adult lives, but we agreed that, growing up, we didn’t remember being told to brush our family dogs’ teeth, nor did we remember thinking it was a task we were neglecting. We didn’t even remember ever seeing dog toothbrushes or dog toothpaste for sale. My friend looked into my eyes and asked a question I could tell she’d been mulling for some time. Continued here

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E.U. Agrees to Raise Its Renewable Energy Target The 27 member countries will strive to reach 42.5 percent renewable power by 2030, up from their current goal of 32 percentEuropean Union negotiators agreed to set more ambitious renewable energy goals last week, ramping up efforts to combat climate change. The bloc of 27 nations is now poised to source 42.5 percent of its energy with renewables by 2030, an increase from its current goal of 32 percent. The deal comes as Europe moves away from its reliance on Russian gas and oil following the invasion of Ukraine. Continued here

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All of a sudden, NASA's return to the Moon feels rather real NASA on Monday staged the kind of celebratory event it has wanted to hold for five decades—the naming a new crew to fly to the Moon. Continued here

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Maker of eye drops linked to deadly outbreak flunks FDA inspection The maker of eye drops linked to a deadly outbreak of extensively drug-resistant infections in the US had a slew of manufacturing violations—from brown slime on filling equipment to a lack of basic measures and systems to ensure sterility—according to an inspection report released by the Food and Drug Administration (PDF). Continued here

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Return of the People Machine Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate’s army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F. Kennedy had the People Machine. Using computers that were 250,000 times less powerful than a modern MacBook, Kennedy’s operatives built a simulation of the presidential election, modeling how 480 types of voters would respond to any conceivable twist in the campaign. If JFK made a civil-rights speech in the Deep South, the People Machine could, in the words of its creators, “predict the approximate small fraction of a percent difference that such a speech would make in each state and consequently … pinpoint the state where it could affect the electoral vote.”But you don’t hear Nate Silver talking about the latest People Machine forecast, because it was, in fact, all bogus. The simulation—part hucksterism, part hubris—promised a lot but delivered little, telling the Kennedy campaign nothing it didn’t already know. “The People Machine was hobbled by its time, by the technological limitations of the nineteen-sixties,” the Harvard historian Jill Lepore writes in The New Yorker. “The machine sputtered, sparks flying, smoke rising, and ground to a halt.” Instead, the best way we have to actually predict elections is still the jumbled mess that is polling. Because reaching people has become harder than ever for pollsters, so has the job of figuring out who is going to vote, and for whom. If the polls had been spot-on, Trump would never have been president, and just hearing the phrase election needle wouldn’t make any liberal’s skin crawl. Polling can still sometimes nail an election, but the problems are real: In 2020, presidential polls had their biggest miss in 40 years, and what was predicted to be a quick win for Joe Biden turned into an excruciating four-day squeaker. Continued here

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AI Isn’t Omnipotent. It’s Janky. Scary scenarios about malevolent machines are a distraction from problems that artificial intelligence is creating right now.In the past few months, artificial intelligence has managed to pass the bar exam, create award-winning art, and diagnose sick patients better than most physicians. Soon it might eliminate millions of jobs. Eventually it might usher in a post-work utopia or civilizational apocalypse. Continued here

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Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? 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.      When the 40-something reader in the kippah at my book event in Michigan approached the signing table, I already knew what he was going to say, if not the humiliating specifics. Readers like him always tell me these things. He hovered until most people had dispersed, and then described his supermarket trip that morning. Another shopper had rammed him with a cart, hard. Maybe it had been an accident, except the shopper had shouted, “The kosher bagels are in the next aisle!” He’d considered saying something to the store manager, but to what end? Besides, it wasn’t much worse than the baseball game the day before, when other fans had thrown popcorn at him and his kids. Continued here

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Today's best deals: Apple MacBook Air, Apple Watch, Mac mini, Amazon Kindle Today's best deals feature Amazon's two best entry-level tablets, the Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite, as well as Apple's MacBook Air and Mac Mini, all matching their record-low prices. The second-generation Apple Watch SE is also on sale, matching its lowest tracked price and adding even more value to the best fitness tracker for most people. 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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Not Your Grandfather’s Moon Mission NASA has picked the four astronauts who will fly to the moon next year—and this lineup looks different than the Apollo crews did.If you asked Americans to name a space mission, any space mission, I suspect very few would pick Apollo 8. The 1968 mission, the first to circle the moon, gets overshadowed by Apollo 11 (“One small step for man”; you know the rest) and Apollo 13 (of Tom Hanks fame). The astronauts didn’t venture from their spaceship, nor did they touch the lunar surface. But in its own, quiet way, that mission was an existential milestone. Until that moment, with a few exceptions to low-Earth orbit, human beings carried out their existence on this planet. They inhabited “a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena,” as Carl Sagan would later say, just a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” And then, suddenly, wildly, three of them were headed toward another world. Continued here

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NASA Announces Crew for Artemis 2 Moon Flyby Mission These four astronauts are poised to travel farther than any humans have been from Earth since 1972After much anticipation, NASA has revealed the names of the crew that will fly around the moon as part of the space agency’s historic Artemis 2 mission. Continued here

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Google brings "Nearby Share" to Windows, making it easy to transfer files Google is bringing Android's "Nearby Share" feature to the desktop with a new Windows app. Google says the new program will make sharing between Windows and Android easier, letting you send files over in just a few clicks and taps. Continued here

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Putin Presses the Nuclear Nerve Again 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.Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again trying to manipulate nuclear weapons to compensate for the ongoing Russian military disaster in Ukraine. These new Russian moves are dangerous but not a crisis. Continued here

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Free Speech Is Not Just for Conservatives An administrator at West Texas A&M University canceled a student drag show—a clear violation of the First Amendment.Can an administrator at a public university cancel a performance because he believes that it is degrading to women? That’s the position that Walter Wendler, the president of West Texas A&M University, took in a recent letter explaining why he was prohibiting a student group from going forward with an on-campus event raising money for charity. Continued here

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The Surprising Compatibility of Science and Faith This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he 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 quoted the late astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan on humanity’s place in the cosmos, and asked readers for their thoughts on outer space. Continued here

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Don’t Take Your Eye Off Jack Smith Manhattan, as always, likes to take the glory. But Washington is where the real power resides.Donald Trump knows that—there’s a reason he left New York to go into politics. It’s also a good way to think about the news around Trump this week. The eyes of the world will be on Manhattan, where the former president is expected to be arraigned tomorrow morning. But the clearest threat to Trump is quietly still the one posed by the Justice Department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents. Continued here

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Hiccups Have a Curious Connection to Cancer Colleen Kennedy, a retired medical assistant, was prepared for the annihilation of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for stage-three lung cancer. She hadn’t expected the hiccup fits that started about halfway through her first treatment round. They left her gasping for air and sent pain ricocheting through her already tender body.  At times, they triggered her gag reflex and made her throw up. After they subsided, she felt tired, sore, breathless—as if she’d just finished a tough workout. They were, Kennedy, now 54, told me, “nothing compared to what we would consider normal hiccups at all.” They lasted for nearly a year.Hiccups are one of the most common bodily experiences that humans (and rats, squirrels, rabbits, cats, dogs, and horses) have; even fetuses get them. When we hiccup, the diaphragm involuntarily contracts and the vocal cords snap closed, producing the eponymous “hic” sound. These spasms usually disappear within a few minutes. Compared with cancer’s existential threat and the brutal reality of treating it, hiccups are innocuous, banal, and unserious. But these two experiences are, peculiarly, connected. As many as 40 percent of cancer patients deal with bouts of hiccups during their illness. For a smaller subset—about one in 10—those spells last for more than 48 hours. Continued here