Nightmares Can Be Silenced With a Single Piano Chord, Scientists Discover

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Nightmares Can Be Silenced With a Single Piano Chord, Scientists Discover Using non-invasive techniques to manipulate our emotions, it might be possible to curtail the screaming horrors that plague our sleep. Continued here

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Was Jack Welch the Greatest C.E.O. of His Day - or the Worst? In late April of 1995, Jack Welch suffered a crippling heart attack. He was then in full stride in his spectacular run as the C.E.O. of General Electric. He had turned the company from a sleepy conglomerate into a lean and disciplined profit machine. Wall Street loved him. The public adored him. He was called the greatest C.E.O. of the modern age. He was a plainspoken, homespun dynamo—a pugnacious gnome with a large bald head and piercing eyes that made him as instantly recognizable as Elon Musk is today.But, that spring, his fabled energy seemed to flag. He found himself taking naps in his office. He went out to dinner one night with some friends at Spazzi, in Fairfield, Connecticut, for wine and pizza. Then, when he got home and was brushing his teeth, it happened. Boom. His wife rushed him to the hospital at 1 a.m., running a red light along the way. When they arrived, Welch jumped out of his car and onto a gurney, shouting, "I'm dying, I'm dying!" An artery was reopened, but then it closed again. A priest wanted to give him last rites. His doctor operated a second time. "Don't give up!" Welch shouted. "Keep trying!"The great C.E.O.s have an instinct for where to turn in a crisis, and Welch knew whom to call. There was Henry Kissinger, who had survived a triple bypass in the nineteen-eighties, and was always willing to lend counsel to the powerful. And, crucially, the head of Disney, Michael Eisner, one of the few C.E.O.s on Welch's level. Just a year earlier, Eisner had survived an iconic C.E.O. cardiac event: a bout of upper-arm pain and shortness of breath that began at Herb Allen's business conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, and ended with Eisner staring God in the face from his bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. The first chapter of Eisner's marvellous autobiography, "Work in Progress" (1998), is devoted to the story of his ordeal, complete with references to Clint Eastwood, Michael Ovitz, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, Sid Bass, Barry Diller, John Malone, Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Geffen, "my friend" Dustin Hoffman, Tom Brokaw, Robert Redford, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Spielberg, and at least three prominent cardiologists. In one moment of raw vulnerability, he called his wife over to ask about the doctor who was slated to do his surgery: "Where was this guy trained?" he asked. He explains, "She knew I was hoping to hear Harvard or Yale." No such luck. " 'Tijuana,' she replied, with a straight face."The point is that when a corporate legend has a blocked artery, expectations are high. So after Welch published his own memoirs, the enormous best-seller "Jack: Straight from the Gut" (2001), one of the first questions that interviewers on his book tour wanted to ask was what he had learned from his brush with death. Continued here

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Friends are good for us | so why do so many men have none at all? Best pals in 1920s rural Ireland fall out spectacularly in the acclaimed film The Banshees of Inisherin. A century on, surely the attitudes of the modern male have moved on?Love is blind, goes the old saying, whereas friendship closes its eyes. The problem with closing our eyes, however, is that at some point we open them, and what happens when we take in the full and, perhaps, less than flattering picture of our dearest friends?That's the premise of Martin McDonagh's bleak comedy, The Banshees of Inisherin, which has wowed critics and set audiences wondering. One day, during the Irish civil war on the beautiful, though grindingly uneventful island of Inisherin, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) goes to pick up his best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) for their daily pint in the local pub.But Colm doesn't want to go with Pádraic. In a crude early-20th century version of "airing" or "ghosting", Colm speaks to him only to say that he no longer wants to speak to him. What follows is a rather desolate if amusing study of male friendship, its habits, limits and lack of mutual understanding or emotional intimacy. Continued here

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Inside the World's Largest Digital Camera Next year the LSST Camera will start a decade-long project to map the entire sky, and help answer some of the universe's biggest questions.Andy Altman is a producer covering all things science and tech. He led production on CNET's award-winning limited documentary series "Hacking the Apocalypse". He also created and co-hosts our video series "What the Future". Before joining CNET in 2014 Andy spent ten years as a TV news producer, earning a local Emmy award and multiple Emmy nominations.Scientists in Northern California are putting finishing touches on the world's largest digital camera. They recently took off the lens cap and invited CNET to take a rare look inside.Engineers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have spent the last seven years building the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, or LSST, camera. The camera is the size of a small car and weighs about three tons, and at five feet across, the lens holds a Guinness World Record. Watch the embedded video to see our visit inside the clean room with the camera. Continued here

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What ADHD Feels Like (Or: How Do I Apologise To Everyone I Know?) You are reading this article towards the end of ADHD Awareness Month because I failed to file it mid-month, like I was asked to. When we discussed the piece in our team meeting, a manager made a joke to that effect, and mentally, I promised myself it wouldn’t happen. I would prove myself. But here I am, again.It’s hard to explain to people what has gone on when I let them down in some way. I’m late, again. I didn’t get back to them for weeks, or months, or forgot to get back at all. My copy is late. Why don’t you wake up earlier? Start earlier? Reply straight away? Why can’t you learn from your mistakes?ADHD tends to elicit eye rolls when you bring it up. There’s a bootstraps mentality – everyone has been late before, no one likes doing work, everyone loses things… so just get your shit together. It’s part of the frustration: how silly it looks, how simple it should be, how personal a failure it feels. It is a disorder that you pay for tenfold: not only with the bitterness of not achieving your goals, but also the shame of letting others down. You suffer the punishment you’re handed in the moment, as well as potentially missing out in the long-term – on a promotion, on a relationship, on your dreams, on time.An example: in college, before I had any explanation for it, I didn’t get my Education Maintenance Allowance pay most weeks because I’d be late too many times. A teacher would keep me waiting outside of her morning class while she taught out of earshot, and I’d feel the humiliation of my classmates’ eyes on my back, and of being made an example of. Finally, she’d come out and yell at me – once with tears in her eyes – for not taking her class seriously. I was missing out on money, her lessons, my time, anxious each day about coming in, shamed, and then would feel even worse that I’d hurt her. But try as I might, I couldn’t consistently change. Continued here

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What causes armies to lose the will to fight? Here's what history tells us -- and what Putin may soon find out | CNN It was one of the strangest episodes in military history, an event so unusual that it was first treated as a myth. At 8:30 pm on Christmas Eve of 1914 in the dank and muddy battlefields of northern Europe during World War I, a British soldier dispatched a report to headquarters: German soldiers have illuminated their trenches and are singing carols while wishing British soldiers a merry Christmas. British officers ordered their men to be silent, but it was too late. A British soldier responded with his own chorus of "The First Noel." A German soldier called out across No Man's Land - the barbed wire-strewn, deadly middle ground separating the armies - "Come out, English soldier; come out there to us." The soldiers climbed out of their trenches and met in the middle. So did others, gathering to exchange chocolate, wine and souvenirs. They even organized a soccer game, which the Germans won 3-2. Continued here

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Aastha Arora: Where is India's billionth baby now? The BBC revisits Aastha Arora - "the special baby" whose birth in 2000 made global headlines. Continued here

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When Will We Stop Reducing Women's Body Types To Trends? Many have hypothesised the return as part of a backlash to the body positivity movement, as well as the prominence of the Brazilian butt lift (BBL) in popular culture and beauty, popularised most famously by Kim Kardashian and her siblings. And now the Kardashians, canaries in the coal mine for modern day beauty standards, have seemingly had their procedures undone, proving the era's end in the minds of many. Lorry Hill, a vlogger who frankly discusses plastic surgery trends on her channel, uploaded a now viral video dissecting Kim and Khloe's shrinking frames. She speculated that they had their BBLs revised and reduced, in what is referred to as a "country club BBL". "The Reign of the Slim-Thick Influencer is OVER", the title declared.The end of that reign has been met with a sigh of relief for some women who aren't naturally built like Nicki Minaj or unwilling to undergo the notoriously dangerous surgical procedures in order to be. The dangers of the BBL are well documented. A medical report in 2017 stated that it has a mortality rate of 1 in 3,000 patients, making it one of the most deadly cosmetic surgery procedures in the world. Still, understandably, some women are frustrated to see backs turn on the aesthetic, feeling it was more inclusive than the previously held standard of thinness. Continued here

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How Genes Can Leap From Snakes to Frogs | Quanta Magazine Perched on a leaf in the rainforest, the tiny golden mantella frog harbors a secret. It shares that secret with the fork-tongued frog, the reed frog and myriad other frogs in the hills and forests of the island nation of Madagascar, as well as with the boas and other snakes that prey on them. On this island, many of whose animal species occur nowhere else, geneticists recently made a surprising discovery: Sprinkled through the genomes of the frogs is a gene, BovB, that seemingly came from snakes.After poring over genomes from frog and snake species around the world, the scientists reported in April in a paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution that this gene has somehow traveled from snakes to frogs at least 50 times all over the planet. But in Madagascar it has inserted itself into frogs with startling promiscuity: 91% of the frog species sampled there have it. Something seems to make Madagascar an exceptionally conducive place for the gene to get mobile. Continued here

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Why Mathematicians Study Knots | Quanta Magazine Knot theory began as an attempt to understand the fundamental makeup of the universe. In 1867, when scientists were eagerly trying to figure out what could possibly account for all the different kinds of matter, the Scottish mathematician and physicist Peter Guthrie Tait showed his friend and compatriot Sir William Thomson his device for generating smoke rings. Thomson — later to become Lord Kelvin (namesake of the temperature scale) — was captivated by the rings' beguiling shapes, their stability and their interactions. His inspiration led him in a surprising direction: Perhaps, he thought, just as the smoke rings were vortices in the air, atoms were knotted vortex rings in the luminiferous ether, an invisible medium through which, physicists believed, light propagated.Vortex theory gained traction in the scientific community and inspired Tait to begin tabulating all knots, creating what he hoped would be equivalent to a table of elements. Of course, atoms are not knots, and there is no ether. By the late 1880s Thomson was gradually abandoning his vortex theory, but by then Tait was captivated by the mathematical elegance of his knots, and he continued his tabulation project. In the process, he established the mathematical field of knot theory. Continued here

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In Math and Life, Svetlana Jitomirskaya Stares Down Complexity | Quanta Magazine She would only start pursuing a career in mathematics as a result of politics and circumstance. In the Soviet Union, any humanities education would inevitably be too enmeshed with Communist ideology. (Even biology and agricultural science were subject to this corruption, with tragic results.) Mathematics seemed blissfully free of that. And so, at age 16, she headed to the prestigious Moscow State University, where she finally fell in love with the subject and obtained both her undergraduate and graduate degrees.Throughout her career, she has been widely recognized for her work on problems in analysis, mathematical physics and dynamical systems, and earlier this year she was awarded the inaugural Olga Alexandrovna Ladyzhenskaya Prize. The prize, announced during the International Congress of Mathematicians around the same time as the Fields Medals, honors groundbreaking work in mathematical physics and related fields. [Editor's note: The 2022 prize was funded by the Simons Foundation, which also funds this editorially independent magazine. Simons Foundation funding decisions have no influence on our coverage.] Much of Jitomirskaya's research involves understanding so-called quasi-periodic operators, which model the behavior of electrons in certain environments and are relevant to various phenomena in quantum physics. Continued here

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Ocean Bacteria Reveal an Unexpected Multicellular Form | Quanta Magazine The problem with this image, says the microbiologist Julia Schwartzman, is that it doesn't reflect how most bacteria are likely to live. Often, bacteria use sticky molecules to anchor themselves to a surface, growing in large, stable collectives called biofilms. The plaque on your teeth is a biofilm; so too are infections on catheters, the slimy green of pond scum and the gunk clogging your bathtub drain.In the open ocean, often the only energy source for marine microbes is a gelatinous carbohydrate called alginate. Unlike glucose, fructose and other simple sugars that can readily cross a cell membrane, alginate is made up of long, coiled strands that are often larger than the bacteria dining on them. Schwartzman wanted to know more about how the bacteria feast efficiently, since the digestive enzymes they secrete to break down the alginate could easily be diluted and swept away in the open ocean waters. Continued here

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A Dream of Discovering Alien Life Finds New Hope One of the many times Lisa Kaltenegger's dream jolted a little closer toward reality was on a cold April morning a decade ago at an astronomy conference. She was clutching what she recalls was a terrible, just awful cup of coffee, not because she was going to drink any more of it but because she had waited in line and it was warm in her hands. Then Bill Borucki veered in her direction.She readied herself to tell him to avoid the coffee. But Borucki, head of NASA's Kepler mission, a space telescope designed to hunt for planets orbiting other stars (or "exoplanets"), had something else to discuss. Kepler had glimpsed its first two Earth-size exoplanets with a decent chance of having liquid water on their surfaces. These were the sort of strange new worlds that everyone at the conference — and possibly most of the human race — had imagined at least once. Would Kaltenegger confirm that the planets might be habitable? Continued here

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Debunking one of the Metaverse’s biggest myths MATTHEW BALL: It's common to hear the criticism that the Metaverse is an inherently dystopic ideal. And the challenge, of course, with that is while many people are familiar with the term, there is disagreement over whether or not this is just some conquest to techno-feudalism, which is to say if big tech owns the atoms of the places that we work and, in some regard, own potentially the cryptocurrencies we're paid in, that we find ourselves in a form of 'virtual indentured servitude.' The fact that the Metaverse is being ushered in- or seems to be by big tech corporations, and that the term itself is originated from the dystopian science fiction novel, and all of its antecedents were largely dystopic in tone seem to reaffirm that hypothesis. I'm not convinced and, in fact, I would argue that the etymology, or the history of the term is the easiest one to disabuse. So you'll find that the essence of most fiction is drama, and human drama tends to be the most satisfying. There's a reason why you don't see many fictional novels set in utopias. They're not much fun; there's not much human exploration there. And so yes, when you take a look at "Snow Crash," "Ready Player One," "The Matrix," most examples like that are dystopic. But counterbalancing that are the actual experiences designed to realize the Metaverse. Not just "Roblox" today, or "Second Life" in the 2000s, but the experiences that actually date back into the 70s, what we called, 'Multi-user shared hallucinations'- text-based virtual worlds. They were designed for totally different ideals. And that was fun, experimentation, exploration, communication- why? Because, of course, no one's going to sign up, least of all stay in a virtual space that is dystopic. And so, I would argue that no matter how scary the term's origination is, the soon-to-be hundreds of billions of hours that have been spent in metaverse-like experiences spanning four generations of human history have had a totally different tone. Real-time-rendered virtual worlds and 3D simulations are largely limited to consumer leisure, a tiny portion of it at that.  Continued here

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Russia's war crimes are proof that morality is objective For the better part of a year, the world has watched in horror as war rages in Ukraine. Innocent civilians are dying by the thousands while an already impoverished nation is increasingly reduced to rubble. Food and energy shortages exacerbated by Russia’s invasion have extended the suffering to millions more people around the world. The EU was so enraged by these developments that its lawmakers have declared Russia a “terrorist state.” Put simply, you have a right to do things that nature requires of you. To use some very basic examples, you have a right to acquire food, seek shelter, and form relationships with other people because you could not survive otherwise. Anybody who frustrated your attempts to fulfill these essential needs — by taking your life, for example — would therefore violate the natural law. As Feser puts it: Continued here

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Our ancestors ate a Paleo diet. It had carbs. The diet is named after the Paleolithic era, a period dating from about 2.5 million to 10,000 years ago when early humans were hunting and gathering, rather than farming. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and author of Burn, a book about the science of metabolism, says it’s a myth that everyone of this time subsisted on meat-heavy diets. Studies show that rather than a single diet, prehistoric people’s eating habits were remarkably variable and were influenced by a number of factors, such as climate, location and season.In the 2021 Annual Review of Nutrition, Pontzer and his colleague Brian Wood, of the University of California, Los Angeles, describe what we can learn about the eating habits of our ancestors by studying modern hunter-gatherer populations like the Hadza in northern Tanzania and the Aché in Paraguay. In an interview with Knowable Magazine, Pontzer explains what makes the Hadza’s surprisingly seasonal, diverse diets so different from popular notions of ancient meals. Continued here

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Space ads could earn $2 million a day Nobody has ever created a space ad, but the technology already exists. And a space ad could pay for itself after one month. Continued here

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How close is the nearest black hole to Earth? The ESA's Gaia mission just broke the record for closest black hole by over 1,000 light-years. Is there an even closer one out there? Continued here

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Tiger Sharks Carry Cameras to Help Scientists Map Seagrass “This discovery should give us hope for the future of our oceans. It demonstrates how everything is connected,” lead author Austin Gallagher, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Beneath the Waves, tells Nick Kilvert of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). “The sharks led us to the seagrass ecosystem in the Bahamas, which we now know is likely the most significant blue carbon sink on the planet.”To make their discovery, researchers attached cameras to the sharks with biodegradable cables and swivel connectors that were designed to corrode in seawater after 24 hours. Between 2016 and 2020, they affixed six sharks with front-facing cameras. A seventh shark toted the “first-ever deployment of a 360-degree camera borne by a marine animal,” write the authors. They also attached satellite tags to eight other sharks to record data on water temperature and swimming depth.  Continued here

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Why Scientists Are Sending Radio Signals to the Moon and Jupiter Researchers in Alaska have blasted a beam of radio signals some 374 million miles into space—all the way to Jupiter. Though the experiment sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, it’s just a way for scientists to test whether Earth-based radio transmitters can study electrically charged particles in the atmospheres of other planets, which they believe are brimming with useful information.The Jupiter study is one of 13 far-out experiments that scientists recently completed at a remote, sprawling antenna field in southern Alaska. The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) facility, run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), consists of 180 high-frequency, 72-foot-tall antennas spread across 33 acres in Gakona, Alaska, roughly 200 miles northeast of Anchorage. Continued here

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Invasive Mosquito Tied to Malaria Outbreak in Ethiopia Most African mosquitoes lay eggs in rainy-season puddles, writes Science. But the invasive species “prefers to breed in water storage containers that are typically common in rapidly expanding urban settings,” bringing the insect vectors closer to city residents, Tadesse tells Science News. The researchers found that households with wet habitats nearby were 3.4 times as likely to have a resident test positive for malaria than households without a nearby water source.Since A. stephensi feed on cattle, one strategy could be treating livestock with insecticides, Martin Donnelly, an evolutionary geneticist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) in England, tells Science. Tadesse tells NPR that covering necessary water storage containers and removing unneeded ones could also help. And last year, the WHO recommended a malaria vaccine for children in countries with high transmission rates. Continued here

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This Record-Breaking Passenger Train Is Over a Mile Long The Swiss locomotive cinched the world record last weekend Continued here

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The First Female Crash Dummy Has Arrived Now, Swedish researchers have created a crash dummy that better represents the female body, writes BBC News' Shiona McCallum. Their dummy is 5-foot-3 and weighs about 137 pounds, per the publication. The team put emphasis on its chest shape and gave the female-modeled dummy a lower joint stiffness than its male counterpart. It's equipped with sensors and transducers to measure the force exerted on each part of the body during a car crash.Specifically, the team tests low severity rear impact collisions. In this kind of crash, women have a higher risk of whiplash than men do, engineer Astrid Linder, director of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute and leader of the research, tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly. Linder's team monitors the dummy's head and torso alignment, and they record factors such as the impact velocity, crushing force, braking rate and torque experienced by the body.  Continued here

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Rare Emerald Discovered in 300-Year-Old Shipwreck Could Sell for $70,000 In the 1960s, treasure hunter Mel Fisher discovered the Santa Margarita near Florida’s coast. Finally, in 1985, Fisher and his team of treasure hunters uncovered the main hull of the Atocha—and with it, a trove of valuables. In addition to 70 pounds of Colombian emeralds, the ship contained 180,000 silver coins, 24 tons of Bolivian silver, 125 gold bars and a collection of Venezuelan pearls.One of the expedition’s funders was Frank Perdue, the late CEO of Perdue Farms. He received a cut of the Atocha’s treasures, which were worth over $1 billion in total. Perdue donated the majority of his share to the Smithsonian Institution and Delaware Technical Community College, but he kept one item—an emerald—which he fashioned into an engagement ring. He used it to propose to the woman who became his wife, Mitzi Perdue, in 1988. Continued here

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Deer-Car Collisions Rise When Daylight Saving Time Ends New research, published this week in the journal Current Biology, finds the November switch from daylight saving to standard time corresponds with a 16 percent increase in deer-vehicle crashes in the week after the clocks change. Scientists estimate that maintaining daylight saving time year-round would prevent 33 human deaths, 2,054 human injuries and 36,550 deer deaths, while also saving $1.19 billion in collision costs per year.Lawmakers, citizens, scientists and other experts have fiercely debated the twice-a-year shift between daylight saving and standard time, which this year takes place on November 6. In the United states, the practice officially started in some capacity in 1918, with the rationale that aligning darkness with a later clock time would save electricity to go toward the war effort. Now, some have argued for doing away with the time change altogether and replacing it with either permanent standard or daylight time. Continued here

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NASA Successfully Crashed a Spacecraft Into Its Asteroid Target “People assume it’s a solid rock, we have a solid spacecraft, and we’re essentially playing a giant game of billiards in space… and you can basically just solve that out as a simple physics equation,” Cristina Thomas, a planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University who leads the observation team for the DART mission told Science’s Zack Savitsky before the impact. “But there’s so much else that’s happening that makes that not true.” Continued here

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Apple’s copyright claims ripped down a fan’s archival WWDC YouTube channel After Apple issued several copyright claims, YouTube took down an archival channel containing hundreds of decades-old videos from past Apple Worldwide Developer Conferences (WWDC). Brendan Shanks, the owner of the Apple WWDC Videos channel, says his account’s been permanently disabled after receiving well over three copyright strikes — the maximum number of violations you can incur before YouTube removes your account.This isn’t the first time Apple has gone after archival content. When YouTube removed the EveryAppleVideo channel over copyright issues in 2016, product designer Sam Henri Gold made it his mission to preserve its videos. After first attempting to store them in an 80GB torrent file, and later trying to host the content on Google Drive, Gold eventually went on to create the unofficial Apple Archive in 2020. Continued here

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The iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max will come with ‘longer wait times’ due to factory lockdown In October, a report from Reuters revealed that iPhone production could slump by at least 30 percent due to the strict covid restrictions affecting Foxconn, the China-based factory Apple uses to build its new iPhones. As noted by The New York Times, Foxconn’s 200,000 workers have recently been forced to stay inside the building during an outbreak with limited food and supplies for several days, leading workers to flee the facility in droves. Continued here

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Elon Musk’s response to fake verified Elon Twitter accounts: a new permanent ban policy for impersonation Elon Musk’s Twitter has a new rule for everyone with an account on Twitter to follow, as he announced from his own account: “any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.” In a follow-up tweet, Musk said “Previously, we issued a warning before suspension, but now that we are rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning.”Ever since Musk promised his Twitter would bring “power to the people” by offering verification to anyone willing to pay $8 for a subscription, some owners of already verified accounts have been renaming themselves Elon Musk, highlighting the issue of a verification system that doesn’t actually check who controls an account. Comedians Kathy Griffin and Sarah Silverman are among the accounts already known to be locked or suspended as a result. Continued here

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Confronting Xenophobia Through Food--and Comics Before I left India for the U.K., my mother stuffed bubble-wrapped jars of spices into my bags—a secret concoction of dried and toasted cumin, coriander, dried coconut, curry leaves, and red chiles. She also insisted on packing assorted homemade snacks to be delivered to a cousin in London, despite my protests that I would have no space for my clothes. Continued here

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The Great Pandemic Hand-Washing Blooper Way back in the early, whirlwind days of the pandemic, surfaces were the thing to worry about. The prevailing scientific wisdom was that the coronavirus spread mainly via large droplets, which fell onto surfaces, which we then touched with our hands, with which we then touched our faces. (Masks, back then, were said by public health authorities to be unnecessary for the general public.) So we washed our hands until they were raw. We contorted ourselves to avoid touching doorknobs. We went through industrial quantities of hand sanitizer, and pressed elevator buttons with keys and pens, and disinfected our groceries and takeout orders and mail.And then we learned we’d had it all backwards. The virus didn’t spread much via surfaces; it spread through the air. We came to understand the danger of indoor spaces, the importance of ventilation, and the difference between a cloth mask and an N95. Meanwhile, we mostly stopped talking about hand-washing. The days when you could hear people humming “Happy Birthday” in public restrooms quickly disappeared. And wiping down packages and ostentatious workplace-disinfection protocols became a matter of lingering hygiene theater. Continued here

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AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community Just days afterward, a former French game developer, known online as 5you, fed Jung Gi’s work into an AI model. He shared the model on Twitter as an homage to the artist, allowing any user to create Jung Gi-style art with a simple text prompt. The artworks showed dystopian battlefields and bustling food markets — eerily accurate in style, and, apart from some telltale warping, as detailed as Jung Gi’s own creations.The response was pure disdain. “Kim Jung Gi left us less than [a week ago] and AI bros are already ‘replicating’ his style and demanding credit. Vultures and spineless, untalented losers,” read one viral post from the comic-book writer Dave Scheidt on Twitter. “Artists are not just a ‘style.’ They’re not a product. They’re a breathing, experiencing person,” read another from cartoonist Kori Michele Handwerker.  Continued here

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Meet Indonesia’s Joe Rogan — part YouTube star, part magician, all controversy “If anyone compared me to Joe Rogan, I’d be flattered,” Deddy Corbuzier, one of Indonesia’s biggest YouTubers, told Rest of World with a smile. Corbuzier was in the studio, wearing his signature tight black T-shirt — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson-style — and tinted glasses, slowly smoking an e-cigarette, as he often does on his show. I sat on the chair where his guests usually sit — only this time, I was the one asking questions.On June 23, singer Widy Soediro Nichlany had sat in the same chair, revealing a traumatic experience: She’d been kidnapped and nearly raped by unknown men while walking home. Nichlany was accompanied on the show by actress Cinta Laura, known for campaigning to raise awareness about sexual violence. Though Corbuzier was attempting to highlight the issue, it was equally clear that he lacked the expertise and sensitivity to bring it home; some of his more intrusive questions prompted Nichlany to break into tears, and Laura begged to stop filming for five minutes. When Laura told Corbuzier he “liked to make people feel pressured,” he brushed it off. “I’m just asking,” he said. Continued here

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What it’s like to be a woman in tech in India India’s tech sector employs significantly more women than any other private sector in the country: Around 36% of the five million employees in the tech industry are women, according to the latest available figures from Nasscom, the industry’s trade association. Yet, gender-based discrimination remains rife. According to a 2021 report, women are increasingly entering tech roles. However, while many women are employed in the sector as a whole, they are less represented in senior roles: Only 7% of them hold executive-level positions, according to a 2022 report. Sometimes, this inequality can be measured, as with unequal pay or the “glass ceiling” that occurs as women fail to progress into leadership roles. But it also manifests in the everyday culture of work life, with women reporting that they are treated differently in the office. “Such everyday sexism is often invisible; therefore, it often is ignored by those who can take action against it,” Cheshta Arora, a researcher at the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, told Rest of World. However, she added, it creates an adverse impact on women’s careers and well-being.  Continued here

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India’s new telecomms bill is messed up The bill proposes that all these platforms “need to get licenses from the government to operate in India,” Anushka Jain, policy counsel at the Internet Freedom Foundation, told Rest of World. The bill doesn’t state the requirements to get licensing for communications platforms. “Everybody who’s engaging with the bill right now is engaging with their eyes half-closed, because we don’t know what the licenses will require service providers to do,” Jain said.In certain cases, the new bill has reproduced provisions from the 1885 bill without any consideration for privacy, transparency, and accountability. Digital rights organizations are calling for a withdrawal of the draft telecomms bill. Even Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecomms network owned by Mukesh Ambani, has criticized the bill. The only hope is that given the monumental pushback, the government might reconsider its stance. Continued here

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Ethiopia’s ride-hailing startups face their toughest opponents: each other Feres is a giant in Ethiopia’s ride-hailing sector. Ibsa and other drivers told Rest of World that as soon as they installed the driver app for SunPick and registered, their Feres driver app stopped working, with “Duplicate Access ID” popping up on their phone screens. Drivers say they had found consistent work on Feres with its large customer base and none wanted to replace it with SunPick. A number of drivers told Rest of World that after they uninstalled SunPick, their Feres app started working again.According to one media report, SunPick accused Feres of unfair business practices. In the same report, Feres denied having anything to do with the issue and accused SunPick of having stolen confidential data, drivers’ contact lists, and source code from Feres when it hired a former Feres employee. The SunPick app doesn’t currently work. SunPick declined to respond to Rest of World’s questions about its app and current operations.  Continued here

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With Apple and Microsoft moving in, Vietnam bets on tech migration from China The coastal port of Haiphong, Vietnam, used to be famous for aromatic noodle dishes and organized crime. Nowadays, it’s better known as a burgeoning industrial region, where electronics makers set up shop to escape the crowded south. Optimism abounds in a place like this. “We don’t just sell land, we sell the future,” Hoang Vinh Tuan, a manager at real estate developer Deep C Industrial Zones, told Rest of World.It’s part of a boom in industrial infrastructure deep in Vietnam’s north, designed to lure tech manufacturers out of China and into the country. When Rest of World visited in October, Deep C staffers walked groups of visitors through their Haiphong site, displaying ready-built workshops and warehouses, an irrigation system designed to collect rainwater, even a wind turbine — which, the guides proudly informed, was the first one installed in northern Vietnam.  Continued here

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Facebook and Instagram ran ads violating Kenyan election law, new report reveals Kenyan law states political candidates cannot campaign in the 48 hours before an election day. Candidates for both major political parties did just that, with paid promotions on Facebook and Instagram, which are both owned by Meta. Meta itself requires advertisers to abide by these blackout periods. Some ads from the opposition Azimio la Umoja party reached as many as 50,000 impressions and one gubernatorial candidate alone ran some 17 violating ads.The finding is one of several from the Mozilla Foundation’s new report on moderation failures in the days preceding and following Kenya’s August presidential election. The porousness of moderation filters during this time contributed to what Madung calls a “post-election twilight zone,” the report said. Despite public commitments to ramp up moderation resources before Kenyans headed to the polls, Meta, Twitter, and Tiktok all saw breaches in their moderation systems, according to the report. In the days after the polls closed on August 9, election rumors on social media were exacerbated by the release of 43,000 polling station results publicly by the country’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC). Political parties and media companies released their own tallies of these votes, leading to conflicting declarations of the winner. Breaches included the circulation of misleading electoral tallies by opposing political parties and conspiracy theories about election fraud. Continued here

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On Election Day, Vote for Candidates with Science-Based Policies, Not Politicians Who Ignore Evidence “Elections have consequences,” said President Barack Obama in 2009, as he started to press for policies such as affordable health care against Republican opposition. Recently Republican leaders themselves have begun to echo his phrase as red state legislatures ban abortion, prevent the country from taking actions to combat the climate crisis, permit easier access to firearms, and oppose a vigorous public health response to the pandemic. All of that makes the consequences of this fall's vote exceptionally profound.What these issues have in common is overwhelming scientific support for pursuing one policy direction over another. They share something else, too: a choice between candidates who either follow that scientific evidence or act as if it does not exist. On your Election Day ballot you'll see local and federal candidates who endorse policies based on tested scientific evidence and others who take positions based on unsupported assumptions and biases. The scientific method has brought us vaccines, the Internet, cleaner air and water, and entire new sectors of the economy. Office seekers who use research-based evidence to inform decisions are the ones who will help our country prosper. Those who reject this evidence will increase suffering. The following survey of urgent policy issues highlights the differences: Continued here