Why we think that some extinct giant flying reptiles cared for their young

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Why we think that some extinct giant flying reptiles cared for their young     But how do we do this for extinct animals? In a recent scientific paper,palaeontologist Zixiao Yang and colleagues compared the growth of small and giant pterosaurs. These were flying reptiles that were alive between about 228 million years ago and 66 million years ago – sharing the Earth with dinosaurs. Yang and colleagues wanted to understand what, if anything, was different about how the giant animals got so big. Continued here

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A Very Silly Movie About Some Very Good Dogs     The raunchy talking-animals comedy Strays contains a warm core about the unconditional love of pets. Who can be mad about that?Early on in the raunchy talking-animals comedy Strays, a montage plays of four dogs humping inanimate lawn ornaments, guzzling beer leaking from trash bags, and bonding over a plan to bite off a man’s genitals. It’s an inartfully staged sequence, packed with sophomoric jokes and enough f-bombs to rival a Quentin Tarantino film. On the other hand: Will you look at those sweet, scruffy faces! Those little paws! Sure, their CGI-ed mouths appear a bit strange and the canines do not seem to be making direct eye contact with one another, but they each deserve belly rubs and every single treat ever. How can anyone dislike a scene in which the goodest dogs are having the best time? Indeed, halfway through my screening, I glanced at my notes and realized that I’d drawn a series of smiley faces. Continued here

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Company loyalty is out - touting yourself is in     For years, a hallmark of neighbourhoods like London’s Canary Wharf or Manhattan’s Financial District was workers wearing fleece vests emblazoned with their company logos. It wasn’t just a sign of a less formal dress codes in the corporate world – it was a badge of pride in the company one worked for.Yet that kind of overt employee loyalty may be waning. In a changed work world, where technology is rapidly developing and workers’ priorities have shifted, experts say people are less likely to be company-first when thinking and talking about their careers. Continued here

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How Ukraine's savvy official social media rallied the world and raised the bar for national propaganda     Just days after the Russian military launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, stories of Ukrainian resistance were already circulating with a ferocity all their own. On March 7, 2022, for example, the government posted a video on Twitter, the platform now known as X, showing clips of Ukrainian farmers using John Deere tractors to tow away disabled Russian tanks and equipment. The image came with a simple message, complemented by a tractor icon: “Don’t mess with Ukrainian farmers.” Continued here

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Identifying fire victims through DNA analysis can be challenging - a geneticist explains what forensics is learning from archaeology     Fire devastates communities and families, and it makes identification of victims challenging. In the aftermath of the wildfire that swept through Lahaina, Hawaii, officials are collecting DNA samples from relatives of missing persons in the hope that this can aid in identifying those who died in the fire. But how well does DNA hold up under such extreme conditions, and what is the best way to recover DNA from fire victims? Continued here

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Is Luna 25 alive? Russia says an "emergency situation" has occurred     In a terse update posted on the social media network Telegram Saturday, the Russian space corporation Roscosmos said that an "emergency situation" had occurred on board its Luna 25 spacecraft. Continued here

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Does Your Company Have a Culture of Quiet Retaliation?     Quiet forms of retaliation are incredibly common and can be contagious in the workplace. The organizations that accept this form of retaliation as a standard practice have difficulty hiring and retaining great people. Retaliation — in all its forms — not only harms current team members, but a culture that tolerates retaliation results in harm to the mission and the organization’s ability to deliver to its customers and stakeholders. To create cultures where psychological safety is the norm, innovation thrives, and team effectiveness is high, it’s critical to address the retaliation that happens in the shadows. Continued here

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Pricing and the Psychology of Consumption     Why should you care if your customers actually use your products? Isn’t it enough that they buy them? Not if you want repeat business. Consider this counterintuitive impact of price on customer loyalty: When your customers are aware of your product’s cost, they’ll likely use the product—to feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth. And the more they use it, the more likely they’ll buy it again. Continued here

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Five bizarre historic leisure activities to try with friends - from gurning to stereoscopy     Leisure activities flourished in 19th-century Britain, as legislation was passed limiting the length of the working day and working week, giving people more free time. If you’re struggling to know how to spend your own free time this summer, take a leaf out of the Victorians’ book with these strangely fun leisure pursuits. Put you hand above your right ear. Do you feel a bump? Then you are clearly selfish! Partly in response to the growth of new cities packed full of strangers, and partly out of a desire to better understand themselves, the Victorians embraced the idea that character could be read from one’s outward appearance, especially one’s skull shape. Continued here

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Europe's wild bird species are on the brink - but there are ways to bring them back     Almost two out of every five species of wild bird are of conservation concern across Europe, according to an updated and comprehensive assessment of their population status. That means these species are declining and becoming more scarce across the continent. Among the birds of conservation concern are some familiar species, including dunnock, goldcrest and meadow pipit.Since the first assessment, which was carried out in 1994, the number of European bird species that are of global conservation concern has trebled. Snowy owl, northern lapwing, Eurasian curlew, steppe eagle and bearded vulture have all been unlucky enough to make this list. Continued here

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Climate change is making debt more expensive - new study     Earth is overheating due to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. This is “the biggest market failure the world has seen” according to economist Nicholas Stern. The rational behaviour of companies that pollute by making profitable commodities, and consequences of most people’s desire to drive everywhere are creating irrational outcomes for everyone: an increase in the average global temperature which threatens to make the planet uninhabitable. We found that by 2030, 59 countries will see a deterioration in their ability to pay back their debts and an increased cost of borrowing as a result of climate change. Our predictions to 2100 entail the number of countries rising to 81. Continued here

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Maui's Fire Risk Was Glowing Red     When the wildfire came ripping down into the town of Lahaina, Maui’s state-of-the-art emergency sirens did not sound. That much is sure.In the immediate aftermath of the fire, officially the deadliest in modern U.S. history, the decision not to sound these alarms has been one of the more baffling ones. Sirens are supposed to warn people, and shouldn’t more people have been warned by any means necessary? The official in charge of making the call, Herman Andaya, resigned Thursday, citing health reasons. And yet, under pressure, officials have also defended their decision not to sound the island’s sirens. Continued here

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ChatGPT and other language AIs are nothing without humans - a sociologist explains how countless hidden people make the magic     The media frenzy surrounding ChatGPT and other large language model artificial intelligence systems spans a range of themes, from the prosaic – large language models could replace conventional web search – to the concerning – AI will eliminate many jobs – and the overwrought – AI poses an extinction-level threat to humanity. All of these themes have a common denominator: large language models herald artificial intelligence that will supersede humanity.But large language models, for all their complexity, are actually really dumb. And despite the name “artificial intelligence,” they’re completely dependent on human knowledge and labor. They can’t reliably generate new knowledge, of course, but there’s more to it than that. Continued here

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How genetically modifying mosquitoes could strengthen the world's war on malaria     It’s been 126 years since British medical doctor Sir Ronald Ross discovered that mosquitoes in the Anopheles family are primarily responsible for transmitting malaria parasites between vertebrate hosts. Since his discovery, mosquitoes have been found to carry and transmit many other diseases that pose a major threat to public health. Among them are yellow fever, dengue and Zika. Continued here

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Montana Youth Win a Historic Climate Case     A state judge in Montana gave climate activists a decisive win on Monday when she ruled that the state’s support of fossil fuels violates their constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment.District Court judge Kathy Seeley struck down as unconstitutional a state policy barring consideration of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions in fossil fuel permitting. Her ruling establishes legal protection against broad harms caused by climate change and enshrines a state right to a world free from those harms, creating a potential foundation for future lawsuits across the country. Continued here

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Teamwork is not always the best way of working - new study     Throughout the 21st century, teamwork has come to define the modern work environment. Driven by advances in communication technology, working collaboratively is, as management experts will tell you, how you harness the “collective intelligence”.Collective intelligence is often seen as greater than the sum of its parts: superior to the cumulative individual intelligence of the group’s members. Capitalising on it is said to improve task accuracy (finding better and more correct answers), and enhance task efficiency (finding good answers faster). This in turn leads to quicker and higher quality completion. In other words, when we work together, our performance improves. This has been one of the major factors shaping our modern societies. Continued here

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Cake Yazdi: Iranian yoghurt cake     In the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, masterful yoghurt-makers balance sweet and tart in a creamily decadent fermented yoghurt, and preserve and its byproduct of whey. Iranian author, business owner and yoghurt expert, Homa Dashtaki, lies at the heart of the operation, sealing jars of this timeless kitchen staple with a label embellished with an illustration of a white moustache.In her recent cookbook, Yogurt and Whey: Recipes of an Iranian Immigrant Life, Dashtaki uses her lifelong relationship with yoghurt and whey to tell the story of her culture, faith and relationship with food through her recipes. She emphasises sustainable food production and a battle against wastefulness, instilling these ideals into her 12-year-old yoghurt and whey business, The White Mustache, named for the facial hair of Dashtaki's earliest kitchen companion: her father. Continued here

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3 methods make up almost all cases of suicide in the U.S.     Suicides in the U.S. hit an all-time high in 2022, according to data recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 49,449 Americans took their own lives last year.These numbers aren’t merely mirroring population growth either. Since the turn of the century, the suicide rate in the U.S. has risen roughly 30%. Among Americans aged 10 to 24, suicide is now the second-leading cause of premature death. Continued here

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Yellowknife fires: Evacuees will need culturally specific support services     On the evening of Aug. 16, due to rapidly moving wildfires, an evacuation order was issued for the entire city of Yellowknife. Thousands of residents faced a long, stressful drive on the only road out of the city. The goal was for as many people as possible to flee one of the largest cities in Canada’s North before the deadline for safe exit of Aug. 18 at noon Mountain Daylight Time.In May 2016, a large fast-moving wildfire jumped from the surrounding rural areas and into the city of Fort McMurray, Alta., causing approximately 88,000 people to flee. Canadians were shocked and saddened by the televised images of slow-moving lines of cars passing in close proximity to massive walls of flames. Continued here

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Security News This Week: US Energy Firm Targeted With Malicious QR Codes in Mass Phishing Attack     At the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas last weekend, thousands of hackers competed in a red-team challenge to find flaws in generative AI chat platforms and help better secure these emerging systems. Meanwhile, researchers presented findings across the conference, including new discoveries about strategies to bypass a recent addition to Apple’s macOS that is supposed to flag potentially malicious software on your computer. Kids are facing a massive online scam campaign that targets them with fake offers and promotions related to the popular video games Fortnite and Roblox. And the racket all traces back to one rogue digital marketing company. The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has been filing lawsuits and pursuing a strategic legal offensive to oppose researchers who study hate speech and online harassment using data from the social network. Continued here

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Uses of the Erotic: Audre Lorde on the Relationship Between Eros, Creativity, and Power     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.To be a complete human being, to fully inhabit your own vitality, is to live undivided within your own nature. No part of us is more habitually exiled, caged, and crushed under the weight of millennia of cultural baggage than Eros — the part that includes sexuality but transcends it to also include our capacity for spontaneity and playfulness, our tolerance for uncertainty, our unselfconscious creative energy. W.H. Auden understood the centrality of Eros when he looked up at the stars that made us and realized how we too are “composed like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair.” Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) understood it with singular clarity of vision in a paper she delivered at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Mount Holyoke College on August 25, 1978, titled “Uses of the Erotic,” later adapted as an essay in the altogether indispensable Lorde collection Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (public library). Continued here

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The Race to Save Yellowknife From Raging Wildfires     When Jay Bulckaert answered his phone, he was standing in a fire break clearing brush in Kam Lake, just outside of Yellowknife, the capital city of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Just miles away, a massive wildfire is stalking the city and threatening to move closer as the winds shift. Thousands of people have left Yellowknife since an evacuation order was announced Wednesday evening. Not Bulckaert, though, nor the other volunteers who showed up Friday morning to do whatever they could to stop the fire from razing the city of 20,000. “It’s all hands on deck,” he says.They divvied up tasks as soon as they met up Friday. Doing admin work, driving buses and tractors, operating chain saws, feeding the crew—everyone brings something to the table. “Right now we’re clearing brush. Probably next we’ll be moving sprinklers. We’re just a rag-tag crew of locals that showed up here and volunteered to help the effort. We’re going to do whatever they ask us to do,” says Bulckaert, who normally works as a filmmaker. Continued here

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Making Sense of Donald Trump's 91 Felony Charges     Former President Donald Trump is facing what could be his most consequential legal challenge yet, after having been indicted in Fulton County, Georgia this week for his alleged efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. It’s Trump’s fourth indictment in as many months. As things stand now, reporters will spend much of 2024 running between campaign rallies and court appearances by the man who, as of today, is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Trump has until next Friday, two days after the first Republican presidential primary debate, to turn himself in.He is being charged along with 18 co-conspirators including his former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, whose indictment marks the latest development in the fall from grace of the man once referred to as “America’s Mayor.” Continued here

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How Indian perfumers capture the smell of rain     The alluring, musky fragrance of marigolds floats from a Hindu shrine, as a group of men laugh over ginger-infused milk teas served in clay cups called kulhads. In a nearby perfume distillery, a man turns his head towards the laughter as he crushes a batch of discarded kulhads. Here in Kannauj, a town in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, generations of perfumers have used kulhads and other clay materials to capture an enticing scent known as mitti attar.“It’s the smell of the baked, parched earth when the first rains arrive after a long drought,” says Rajat Mehrotra, co-owner of the family-run Meena Perfumery. Perfumers like Mehrotra, who runs the company with his brother, have been bottling the enigmatic fragrance for centuries. Continued here

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NASA's mission to a $10-quintillion asteroid is two months from launch     This article is an installment of Future Explored, a weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Thursday morning by subscribing here.NASA hopes to get a glimpse at the metal core hidden deep within Earth — by sending a spacecraft to an asteroid 280 million miles away. Continued here

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The Best Travel Bags for Wherever You're Headed     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 WIREDWe've all been tempted to skimp on our luggage purchases. Especially if travel is an occasional event, it's hard to justify spending good money for something that'll sit in your closet for most of the year. Think of it this way: Buying a dependable bag is buying peace of mind. A few yards of zippers and either hard plastic or nylon are the only barriers between your bag and the belly of an airliner, the conveyor belt of a baggage claim, and the trunk of a car. Make one thing easy on yourself and bring good luggage that's lightweight, rolls easily or fits comfortably on your back, and won't split open on the way to your destination. Continued here

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Tipping etiquette and norms are in flux - here's how you can avoid feeling flustered or ripped off     The ever-growing list of situations in which you might be invited to tip includes buying a smoothie, paying an electrician, getting a beer from a flight attendant and making a political donation. Should you always tip when someone suggests it? If yes, how do you calculate the right amount? And if you don’t, are you being stingy? Continued here

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The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again     As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president.This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies. Continued here

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As BRICS cooperation accelerates, is it time for the US to develop a BRICS policy?     When leaders of the BRICS group of large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – meet in Johannesburg for two days beginning on Aug. 22, 2023, foreign policymakers in Washington will no doubt be listening carefully.The BRICS group has been challenging some key tenets of U.S. global leadership in recent years. On the diplomatic front, it has undermined the White House’s strategy on Ukraine by countering the Western use of sanctions on Russia. Economically, it has sought to chip away at U.S. dominance by weakening the dollar’s role as the world’s default currency. Continued here

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Memes about animal resistance are everywhere -- here's why you shouldn't laugh off rebellious orcas and sea otters too quickly     Memes galore centered on the “orca revolution” have inundated the online realm. They gleefully depict orcas launching attacks on boats in the Strait of Gibraltar and off the Shetland coast.One particularly ingenious image showcases an orca posed as a sickle crossed with a hammer. The cheeky caption reads, “Eat the rich,” a nod to the orcas’ penchant for sinking lavish yachts. Continued here