Rijo Stephen Cletus: Can we feed ourselves without devouring the planet?

Can we feed ourselves without devouring the planet?

Farming is the worst thing humanity has ever done to the planet, says journalist George Monbiot. What's more: the global food system could be heading toward collapse. Detailing the technological solutions we need to radically reshape food production -- from lab-grown, protein-rich foods to crops that don't require plowing -- Monbiot shares a future-focused vision of how humanity could feed itself without destroying the planet.

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The Coming GOP Inquisition

Biden’s classified documents, the “weaponization of the federal government,” and other new targets for House investigations

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Arthur Duncan, Talented Tap Dancer Who Broke Barriers, Dies at 97

In 1954, a spirited tap dancer named Arthur Duncan appeared on several episodes of “The Betty White Show,” a daytime talk series hosted by the future Golden Girl. Duncan’s skilled footwork delighted many viewers, but some were rankled by his inclusion in the show’s cast. Duncan was Black—and at a time when racial segregation was institutionalized in the United States, he shared the stage with white performers.

“[A]ll through the South, there was this whole ruckus,” White recalled in the 2018 documentary Betty White: First Lady of Television. “They were going to take our show off the air if we didn’t get rid of Arthur, because he was Black.”

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The photography of Acacia Johnson | Psyche Films

Somewhere in the Arctic Circle, Acacia Johnson waits for a photograph. It’s not always something she can plan, or articulate, but she knows it when she sees it. Her favourite images are the ones that make you question what you have seen, snapping you from the complacency of knowing – the way you stop when you think you’ve witnessed something supernatural. ‘The polar regions are full of phenomena that classify as otherworldly,’ says Johnson. The landscapes are ‘unreal – in the best way’.

Growing up in Alaska, in a family for whom flying in small planes over glaciers was a regular activity, and later working as a guide in Antarctica, Johnson’s relationship with polar landscapes is personal. But as that landscape shifts and changes under the effects of the climate crisis, and the human cultures that depend on it adjust, it is inherently political too. In this film, which honours her work as winner of the 2022 International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Documentary Practice and Photojournalism, she explains how she is compelled to record life in polar landscapes, and show ‘why it matters, why it is worth protecting. Or why it’s just beautiful.’

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The Film That Accurately Captures Teen Grief

In many West African cultures, griots are the keepers of memory, their oral traditions simultaneously positioning them as fabulists, historians, genealogists, entertainers, and messengers. To serve as a voice for a people is a heavy burden—colonization has dispossessed many Indigenous communities of the cultural artifacts that hold their history, and the triangular slave trade decimated the landscapes and kingdoms of various ethnic groups. But griots remind people that we truly die only when we are forgotten, not when we are separated from our earthly bodies or environments.

Hawa, the second feature film from the director Maïmouna Doucouré, serves as an apt, fantastical canvas to explore this dynamic between legacy and memory. Streaming on Amazon Prime, the coming-of-age story follows its titular character (played by Sania Halifa), a young Malian girl in Paris who is struggling to accept the impending death of her griotte grandmother. Maminata, compellingly rendered by Oumou Sangaré, the legendary Wassoulou musician, is not only Hawa’s last remaining relative, but also her anchor to Malian culture. She teaches Hawa the Bambara language and tries to impress upon her the importance of griots’ musical stylings and magical storytelling conventions.

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YouTube is bringing viral fame to one of Delhi's oldest markets

That’s how Mohammad Ali, who owns a store in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk market, describes the impact of a viral YouTube video made about his business. In the video, which now has over 400,000 views, Delhi-based YouTuber Aman Khurana introduces Ali’s shop and showcases some of his products, such as sherwanis (knee-length coats often worn as wedding attire by men), turbans, and beaded necklaces. Several times during the 18-minute-and-33-second clip, Ali claims, “Chaar hazaar mein doolha banaa ke denge” (We’ll make you a groom in 4,000 rupees, or $49).

Ali’s shop is among thousands of similar stores in the narrow bylanes of one of India’s biggest markets, Chandni Chowk. He opened this store in 2019 and struggled to find customers for the first couple of months. Then, in October 2019, he invited Khurana to shoot a video in the hope of attracting customers. Within days, the crowds at the shop were unmanageable, Ali told Rest of World.

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Apple Tries Again With a Second-Gen $299 HomePod

Five years after the original HomePod, Apple has finally deemed it time to release a successor. The second-generation HomePod breathes new life into the company’s smart home aspirations, boasting a new processor and improved sound quality, along with a temperature and humidity sensor, simpler smart home automation, and support for Matter—the standard that aims to make all smart home devices interoperable.

However, this smart speaker is nearly as expensive as the original. Sure, it’s $50 less, but it still costs $299. At least there’s still the HomePod Mini for $99. If the price doesn’t deter you, the second-generation HomePod is available for preorder and officially hits shelves on February 3.

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The Marvel Movies From Worst to Bestâ€”and Where to Stream Them

In May 2008, the recently formed Marvel Studios released its first filmâ€”and changed the face of modern cinema. Iron Man wasn't even the highest-grossing superhero film of the year (Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight took that crown), but it was a kernel that has exploded into an all-consuming entertainment juggernaut. Nearly 15 years later, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a sprawling, interconnected web of character-based movies and crossovers that has pulled in billions at the box office.

But which films are the best, and worst, of the bunch? Is Iron Man 3 better than Iron Man 2? How bad was The Incredible Hulk? How did the latest Thor entry hold up against its predecessors? We've spent hours arguing about the relative merits of Doctor Strange and Black Widow, and at the end of it, we've got some irreparably damaged working relationships and the definitive ranking of every movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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What It Takes to Build a Game in a War Zone

The offices of GSC Game World smelled like a gas station. The Kyiv-based studio, responsible for the cult-classic immersive sim S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl and its hotly anticipated direct sequel S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, had stockpiled thousands of liters of fuel—alongside first aid kits and other survival supplies—in its corridors during the nervy winter of 2022. Who could blame them? Everyone in Ukraine was preparing for the worst.

International headlines in January and February of 2022 warned that a massive Russian invasion of the country was imminent. The conflict, if it came to pass, would represent the most destabilizing military engagement on the European continent since the end of the Cold War. GSC Game World has furnished a legacy of taut gunplay, eerie atmospheres, and perfectly twisted side quests, but now the studio was forced to contend with a much more pressing reality—one that transcended the rigors of game development.

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What will China's population drop mean for the world?

At midnight on 1 July 1982, China began a mammoth undertaking. The goal: to find out how many people there were in the country at that exact moment in time. No one had checked since 1964, so it was anyone's guess what they would find. After years of preparations, armed with 29 computers purchased for the task – including at least 21 imported from the US under a special exemption – and five million trained personnel, they would spend the coming months diligently counting the members of every household in the country.

By October that same year, the results were in: the New York Times ran the headline "CHINA, POP. 1,008,175,288: ONE-FOURTH OF THE WORLD". Decades of growth had raised the country's population to the staggering new threshold of a billion people. A baby was born there every two seconds.

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Don't Fear the Handshake

The gesture has survived plenty of outbreaks before COVID, and it will almost certainly outlast more to come.

Mark Sklansky, a pediatric cardiologist at UCLA, has not shaken a hand in several years. The last time he did so, it was only “because I knew I was going to go to the bathroom right afterwards,” he told me. “I think it’s a really bad practice.” From where he’s standing, probably a safe distance away, our palms and fingers are just not sanitary. “They’re wet; they’re warm; they’re what we use to touch everything we touch,” he said. “It’s not rocket science: The hand is a very good medium to transmit disease.”

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It's Getting Too Hot to Make Snow

For dozens of Alpine ski resorts, this past Christmas and New Year season has been a literal washout. Very little snow fell in December. Then rain arrived, wiping many slopes back to green and brown turf. Frustrated skiers Googled the forecasts, glimpsed snowless mountainsides on live videofeeds, and canceled their bookings. Dozens of pistes, andÂ even some entire resorts, remained closed as 2023 dawned.

Among those that soldiered on was Laax in the Swiss Alps, about 60 kilometers from the Italian border. The resort, with roughly 200 kilometers of ski runs, has been planning for snow shortages like this for some time. An arsenal of snow guns came to the rescue.

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Superfan Buys House From 'The Goonies'

Behman Zakeri has seen the film more than 100 timesâ€”and wants to restore the home to its on-screen glory

In the summer of 1985, 8-year-old Behman Zakeri went to the movies with his family in Kansas, excited "mostly because of the popcorn," writes theÂ Washington Post's Kyle Melnick. On the screen wasÂ The Goonies, which follows a group of kids as they try to save their homes from foreclosure, leading them to a treasure map that kicks off a zany adventure.

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Spy Cams Reveal the Grim Reality of Slaughterhouse Gas Chambers

At 4 am one morning in October of last year, animal rights activist Raven Deerbrook sat on a bed in a cheap hotel in East Los Angeles, looking at a live video feed on her phone. She’d barely slept that night, waking every hour or two to check that the feed was transmitting from three pinhole infrared cameras she’d hidden in the Farmer John meatpacking plant 20 miles away. The facility, located in the LA suburb of Vernon, is owned by Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world. She waited, both anticipating and dreading what her cameras were about to reveal.

A day earlier, Deerbrook had snuck into the slaughterhouse with a fake uniform and badge and climbed 26 feet underground into a “stunning chamber”—essentially a three-story-deep elevator shaft designed to be filled with carbon dioxide. Here, pigs in cages are lowered into the shaft’s invisible swimming pool of suffocating, heavier-than-air CO2, where the animals asphyxiate over a matter of minutes before being dumped out of the chamber onto a conveyor belt, hung up, drained of blood, and butchered.

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How Recruiters Can Make the Most of a Hiring Slowdown

The early months of 2022 were a boon for hiring managers. It was the hottest job markets in decades, with month after month of record numbers of job openings and resignations. Now, as we launch into 2023, companies are tightening their belts in a way not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, with one high profile layoff after another.

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When Good Pain Turns Into Bad Pain

Lauren Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Girl, recalls her life as a runner—and the culture she says the sport needs to change.

When I was a high-school runner in the late 1990s, slogans such as Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body decorated the T-shirts sold at our championship races. Once, on the bus to the Connecticut state meet, my coach, who was legendary for the decades of New England titles he’d won, told us the story of an athlete collapsing on the course and crawling across the finish line. The coach visited him in the hospital afterward, he assured us; he had “a policy” to do so. That enough athletes needed medical attention for my coach to have a personal creed about it didn’t strike me as dark. I was caught up in the story’s message about determination and sacrifice—and inspired to run hard enough that I myself might end up in the hospital.

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What Happens When AI Has Read Everything?

The dream of an artificial mind may never become a reality if AI runs out of quality prose to ingest—and there isn’t much left.

Artificial intelligence has in recent years proved itself to be a quick study, although it is being educated in a manner that would shame the most brutal headmaster. Locked into airtight Borgesian libraries for months with no bathroom breaks or sleep, AIs are told not to emerge until they’ve finished a self-paced speed course in human culture. On the syllabus: a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced.

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The plan to save Italy's dying olive trees with dogs

On a sunny winter morning, the dog trainer Mario Fortebraccio slowly bends toward a line of potted olive trees and indicates it with his hand. Waiting for that signal, Paco, a three-year-old white Labrador, rushes through the row of plants with his head tilted, sniffing each pot at the root, the rhythm of his inhaling echoing through the greenhouse. The dog is carefully scouting for something humans can't sense.

"They don't do anything if there is no reward," Fortebraccio tells me with a smile. After a few seconds, having completed his task, Paco returned to the trainer, lifted his leg to urinate on a nearby plant, wagged his tail, and claimed a little crunchy treat.

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Helping Gen Z Employees Find Their Place at Work

Gen Z is struggling with engagement at work. Many began their careers only to become furloughed or fired, and the Covid-19 pandemic worsened already growing income inequality. They’ve been influential in social justice movements against racism, climate change, and more, and are already shaping and influencing society in numerous ways. Their disillusionment with capitalism and the establishment is growing. Thus, Gen Z garnered a reputation for mistrust of the status quo, disconnection and impatience, demanding immediate action. To earn the engagement of this group, the authors suggest seven strategies managers can leverage to create a team dynamic of collaboration, commitment, and sustained motivation: 1) Increase information-sharing to alleviate fears of uncertainty, 2) show them paths to career progression to incentivize them, 3) explain how their individual contributions matter, 4) give them room for autonomy to keep them motivated, 5) provide specific, constructive feedback to demonstrate that you are invested in their success, 6) harness community and connection to engage and empower them, and 7) prioritize wellness and mental health to show you care.

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Malacca Strait: How one volcano could trigger world chaos

Every year, approximately 90,000 ships pass through the narrow sea lane of the Malacca Strait, which links the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. Their cargo – grain, crude oil, and every other commodity under the Sun – comprises an estimated 40% of global trade. Above these ships is one of the busiest air routes in the world, and below them, running along the seabed, is a dense array of submarine internet cables that keep the world online.

Together, these factors make the Malacca Strait one of the most vital arteries of the global economy. It has been classified as a trade choke point in reports by the World Trade Organization, the US Energy Information Administration and Chatham House, the London-based foreign affairs think-tank.

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The Greatest Nuclear Threat We Face Is a Russian Victory

On the morning of December 5, 2022, a large explosion occurred at Engels Air Base, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. The airfield is one of the two principal bases in Russia that host long-range strategic bombers. TU-160 Blackjacks have been taking off from Engels for the past 10 months, carrying cruise missiles and firing them at cities in Ukraine. The explosion was caused by a Ukrainian drone, and it reportedly damaged two TU-95 Bears, enormous turbo-prop bombers that have been a symbol of the Kremlin’s airpower since the early 1950s. Most of the reporting on the drone attack focused on the boldness of it, the failure of Russian air defenses, and the impact on Russian morale. But the attack had a broader significance that went largely unnoticed.

About four miles from the runway at Engels where the explosion occurred, a pair of underground bunkers is likely to contain nuclear warheads, with a capacity to store hundreds of them. Blackjacks and Bears were designed during the Cold War for nuclear strikes on NATO countries, and they still play that role in Russian war plans. The drone attack on Engels was a milestone in military history: the world’s first aerial assault on a nuclear base. There was little chance of a nuclear detonation, even from a direct hit on the heavily fortified bunkers. Nevertheless, the presence of nuclear warheads at a base routinely used by Russian bombers for attacks on Ukraine is a reminder of how dangerous this war remains. On December 26, Engels was struck by another Ukrainian drone, which killed three servicemen.

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Do Rewards Really Create Loyalty?

Customer rewards have been reviled in the business press as cheap promotional devices, short-term fads, giving something for nothing. Yet they’ve been around for more than a decade, and more companies, not fewer, are jumping on the bandwagon. From airlines offering frequent flier deals to telecommunications companies lowering their fees to get more volume, organizations are spending millions of dollars developing and implementing rewards programs.

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More Than 350 New UFO Sightings Added to U.S. Government Records

The United States government has logged more than 350 new reports of UFOs—or, as officials call them, “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAP)—since March 2021, according to a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released last week.

Of the 366 new UAP records, more than half were listed as having “unremarkable characteristics,” with 163 characterized as “balloon or balloon-like entities.” The other “unremarkable” sightings were characterized as drones or drone-like objects or attributed to clutter like airborne plastic bags, weather events or birds.

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Take Detransitioners Seriously

When Kristin Beck, a decorated Navy SEAL veteran, came out as a transgender woman in 2013, she became a high-profile advocate for the trans community—a role that earned her glowing coverage in left-wing and mainstream center-left media. But unless you’ve been reading right-wing websites in recent months, you might never know that Beck has since detransitioned and gone back to the name Chris Beck. Last month, Beck declared that he had “lived in hell for the past 10 years.” Most of the outlets that reported with enthusiasm on Beck’s initial transition have yet to cover the latest chapter in his life story.

Both of us are trans academics. One of us studies the history of trans activism; the other recently studied detransitioners’ experiences in depth. We strongly oppose efforts, in state legislatures and elsewhere, to target trans children and their families and pass laws restricting treatment options for gender dysphoria, a condition that the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual defines as impairment or distress over an incongruence between a person’s gender identity and their gender assigned at birth. But trans-rights advocates and mainstream-media outlets should stop downplaying the reality of detransition, lest readers and viewers conclude that it’s a negligible issue. It’s not.

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Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change

These are scary times for managers in big companies. Even before the Internet and globalization, their track record for dealing with major, disruptive change was not good. Out of hundreds of department stores, for example, only one—Dayton Hudson—became a leader in discount retailing. Not one of the minicomputer companies succeeded in the personal computer business. Medical and business schools are struggling—and failing—to change their curricula fast enough to train the types of doctors and managers their markets need. The list could go on.

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The Value of Keeping the Right Customers

Depending on which study you believe, and what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. It makes sense: you don’t have to spend time and resources going out and finding a new client — you just have to keep the one you have happy. If you’re not convinced that retaining customers is so valuable, consider research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) that shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

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Is it Kosher? Understanding Kosher Chemicals

There are many uses for chemicals certified as kosher

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Let Your Customers Guide Your Business Strategy

The best companies have always done the simplest of things: Listen to their customers.

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Time(s) for a change: State Department picks a new official typeface

Official correspondence from America's diplomats is getting a bit of a spruce-up next month. From February 6, the US Department of State will adopt Microsoft's sans serif Calibri in 14-point size "for all paper submitted to the Executive Secretariat," according to The Washington Post's diplomacy reporter John Hudson.

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Market Share--a Key to Profitability

The March–April 1974 issue of HBR carried an article that reported on Phases I and II of a project sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the Harvard Business School. The basic purpose of the project is to determine the profit impact of market strategies (PIMS). The earlier article established a link between strategic planning and profit performance; here, with additional data, the authors come up with a positive correlation between market share and ROI. The authors discuss why market share is profitable, listing economies of scale, market power, and quality of management as possible explanations; then, using the PIMS data base, they show how market share is related to ROI. Specifically, as market share increases, a business is likely to have a higher profit margin, a declining purchases-to-sales ratio, a decline in marketing costs as a percentage of sales, higher quality, and higher priced products. Data also indicate that the advantages of large market share are greatest for businesses selling products that are purchased infrequently by a fragmented customer group. The authors also analyze the strategic implications of the market-share/ROI relationship. They conclude by advising companies to analyze their own positions in order to achieve the best balance of costs and benefits of the different strategies.

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Carnivorous oyster mushrooms can kill roundworms with "nerve gas in a lollipop"

Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) are a staple of many kinds of cuisine, prized for its mild flavors and a scent vaguely hinting at anise. These cream-colored mushrooms are also one of several types of carnivorous fungi that prey on nematodes (roundworms) in particular. The mushrooms have evolved a novel mechanism for paralyzing and killing its nematode prey: a toxin contained within lollipop-like structures called toxocysts that, when emitted, causes widespread cell death in roundworms within minutes. Scientists have now identified the specific volatile organic compound responsible for this effect, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances.

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Whoâ€™s Afraid of a Portrait of Muhammad?

When Hamline University cut ties with a professor who showed a painting of Muhammad, it sided with the most intolerant element of the American Muslim spectrum.

A mosque in Kandahar houses a relic of the Prophet Muhammad: a cloak preserved, splendid and unpilled, almost 1,400 years after its owner’s death. The mosque’s caretaker claims that the cloak has extraordinary qualities, such as a color that transcends the visual spectrum. The color can be seen, but it has no name. I asked the caretaker whether I could take a look. He said no; unbelievers may not see it. And even if I did, God would delete the memory from my mind immediately afterward, like Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black. So I went home without seeing it—to the best of my recollection.

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5 Great Sex Tech Deals From Lelo's Anniversary Sale

If you peruse our Best Sex Toys guide, you'll come across several products from Lelo, but let's be honestâ€”they can be pretty expensive. That's why Lelo's 20th-anniversary sale caught my eye. There aren't a ton of huge discounts, but there are a couple of standouts, including some of our favorites and some always-in-demand intimate accessories every bedroom should have.

Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-Year Subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com and our print magazine (if you'd like). Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day.

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What's the Point of a Personal Brand?

We often confuse our reputation as our personal brand. But that’s not true. Everyone has a reputation. The first impressions you make, the relationships you form with managers and peers, and how you communicate — all of these things impact how others see you. Your personal brand, on the other hand, is much more intentional. It is how you want people to see you.

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Small Business Applicants Smash Another Record in 2022 as More Americans Turn to Entrepreneurship

Whether out of desire or necessity, the past two years have been a boon for entrepreneurship in America.

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Scientific Fraud Is Slippery to Catchâ€”but Easier to Combat

Like much of the internet,Â PubPeer is the sort of place where you might want to be anonymous. There, under randomly assigned taxonomic names likeÂ Actinopolyspora biskrensisÂ (a bacterium) andÂ Hoya camphorifolia (a flowering plant), "sleuths" meticulously document mistakes in the scientific literature. Though they write about all sorts of errors, from bungled statistics to nonsensical methodology, their collective expertise is in manipulated images: clouds of protein that show suspiciously crisp edges, or identical arrangements of cells in two supposedly distinct experiments. Sometimes, these irregularities mean nothing more than that a researcher tried to beautify a figure before submitting it to a journal. But they nevertheless raise red flags.Â

PubPeer's rarefied community of scientific detectives has produced an unlikely celebrity: Elisabeth Bik, who uses her uncanny acuity toÂ spot image duplications that would be invisible to practically any other observer. Such duplications can allow scientists to conjure results out of thin air by Frankensteining parts of many images together or to claim that one image represents two separate experimentsÂ thatÂ produced similar results. But even Bik's preternatural eye has limitations: It's possible to fake experiments without actually using the same image twice. "If there's a little overlap between the two photos, I can nail you," she says. "But if you move the sample a little farther, there's no overlap for me to find." When the world's most visible expert can't always identify fraud, combating itâ€”or even studying itâ€”might seem an impossibility.Â

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Archaeologists Unearth 3,000-Year-Old Wishing Well in Germany

The Bronze Age well was full of decorative ceramics, jewelry and other items likely used for ritual purposes

Archaeologists in Germany have discovered a 3,000-year-old wishing well brimming with finely crafted ceramics, jewelry and other items they think the area’s Bronze Age inhabitants lowered into the ground for ritual purposes.

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A Damning US Report Lays Bare Amazon's Worker Injury Crisis

Amazon was hit with an unusually forcefulÂ safety citation by federal investigators in the US today. The findings appear to back up what some workers at the company have long alleged: that the online retail giant's warehouse and fulfillment facilities are designed for speed over safety, causing lower-back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders at high rates.

TheÂ citation released by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration today concluded that Amazon was "failing to keep workers safe." The company did not properly protect them from hazards likely to cause "serious physical harm," the agency claims. Despite years of allegations from workers and state-level investigations into Amazon's injury rates, today's action brought the first federal fines imposed on Amazon for worker musculoskeletal injuries.

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Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the November–December 1974 issue of HBR and has been one of the publication’s two best-selling reprints ever. For its reissue as a Classic, HBR asked Stephen R. Covey to provide a commentary (see the sidebar “Making Time for Gorillas”).

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How Much Do You Need to Know to Be an Ally?

Well-meaning allies often get stuck at one of two extremes. At one extreme, people barrel into situations without enough knowledge. At the opposite extreme, people get so overwhelmed by their lack of knowledge that they opt out of allyship altogether. To help you find a middle path between these extremes, reflect on three aspects of knowledge: learning, asking, and scaling.

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What It Means to Truly "Think Outside the Box"

How often have you questioned the separation and labeling of “men’s” and “women’s” clothing in retails stores? It’s a standard that was established years ago, when most people were less conscious of (or simply didn’t care about) the harm this practice has on gender non-conforming people — or anyone who challenges the binary. Still, big retailers continue to replicate and rely on this model. It’s now become so engrained in practice that many of us don’t question it, unless it impacts us personally.

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Quantum mystery: Do things only exist once we interact with them?

Perhaps the weirdest thing about the quantum world is that the notion of an object falls apart. Outside the world of molecules, atoms, and elementary particles, we have a very clear picture of an object as a thing we can behold. This applies to a door, a car, a planet, and a grain of sand. Moving to smaller things, the concept still holds for a cell, a virus, and a large biomolecule like DNA. But it is here, at the level of molecules and of distances shorter than a billionth of a meter or so, that the problems begin. If we keep moving to smaller and smaller distances, and continue to ask what are the objects that exist, quantum physics kicks in. “Things” become fuzzy, their shapes unclear and their boundaries uncertain. Objects evaporate into clouds, as elusive in their contours as words are to describe them. We can still think of crystals as being made of atoms arranged in certain patterns — like our familiar kitchen salt, which is made of cubic lattices of sodium and chlorine atoms.

But dive into the atoms themselves, and simple pictures evaporate in a puff of puzzlement.

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Authorities dismantle crypto exchange Bitzlato, allege it was cybercrime "haven"

Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested the founder of Bitzlato, a cryptocurrency exchange they said has been a financial haven for Russia-aligned criminals engaged in ransomware and illicit drug sales on the dark web.

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Quantum entanglement just got a whole lot weirder

In the quantum Universe, things behave very differently than our common experience would suggest. In the macroscopic world we’re familiar with, any object we can measure appears to have intrinsic properties that are independent of whether we observe it or not. We can measure things like mass, position, motion, duration, etc., without worrying about whether that object is affected by our measurements; reality exists completely independently of the observer. But in the quantum world, that’s demonstrably not true. The act of measuring a system fundamentally changes its properties in an irrevocable way.

One of the weirdest quantum properties of all is entanglement: where multiple quanta have inherent properties that are both indeterminate, but the properties of each one aren’t independent of the other. We’ve seen this demonstrated for photons, electrons, and all sorts of identical particles before, enabling us to test and probe the fundamental and surprising nature of reality. In fact, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded precisely for investigations into this phenomenon.

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Freelancers, speaker managers, and speakers bureaus

Freelancers, speaker managers, and speakers bureaus--how to decide which to use and how to use them.

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3 Shipping Strategies to Try in 2023

Labor shortages, rising inflation, and market volatility aren't likely to make shipping any easier this upcoming year. These strategies may help.

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The Voice America's Small Businesses Don't Need

The House's steering committee this week recommended Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) to serve on the House Small Business Committee. Why the embattled congressman is the wrong choice for the job.

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How to double your brain power

Tiago Forte, Founder of Forte Labs and author of Building a Second Brain, discusses the problem of information overload and how it can hinder creativity.

He proposes a solution in the form of a Commonplace book, a central repository for all meaningful information and content. Forte’s method for managing this information, called C.O.D.E. (capture, organize, distill, and express), allows individuals to access and use this information in order to facilitate creative thinking.

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Logitech announces $70 webcams with USB-C, built-in shutters

Logitech today released a new series of webcams for users and IT managers seeking something below the $100 mark that still incorporates handy home office features, like a physical shutter and noise-canceling microphone.

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How to Accelerate Your Success as a Female Founder

Sharing your plans is hard but necessary in starting and growing your business.

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How This Cybersecurity Technology Could Replace Passwords

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are already using biometric data such as fingerprint and face scans instead of passwords.

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Why does touching an aching body part make it feel better?

When we press our temples to soothe an aching head or rub an elbow after an unexpected blow, it often brings some relief. It is believed that pain-responsive cells in the brain quiet down when these neurons also receive touch inputs, say scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, who for the first time have watched this phenomenon play out in the brains of mice.

The team’s discovery, reported Nov. 6 in the journal Science Advances, offers researchers a deeper understanding of the complicated relationship between pain and touch and could offer some insights into chronic pain in humans. “We’re interested in this because it’s a common human experience,” says McGovern investigator Fan Wang. “When some part of your body hurts, you rub it, right? We know touch can alleviate pain in this way.” But, she says, the phenomenon has been very difficult for neuroscientists to study.

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Jeff Bezos used metaphors, an ancient communication tool, to explain complex ideas.

Metaphors are mental shortcuts to explain complex ideas.

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Ask an Expert: I'm Jealous of My Friends' Successes. How Do I Cope?

I see two different issues here — responding to your own feelings about being waitlisted or rejected and responding to your friends’ successes. But at the core of both is the emotional pain associated with being left out. That emotional pain often shows up as envy. At its core, envy is just the recognition that you want something that you lack or that others have.

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Musk lawyer argues false tweets were just "technical wordsmith inaccuracies"

The jury trial in Tesla investors' class-action lawsuit against Elon Musk proceeded today with opening statements in a San Francisco federal courtroom. Plaintiff's attorney Nicholas Porritt told the jury the case was brought "because Elon Musk, Tesla's chairman and chief executive officer, who is not in court today but you will see him sitting right there in the witness box, lied. And his lies caused regular people like Glen Littleton to lose millions and millions of dollars."

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This Is the Band Thatâ€™s Supposedly Saving Rock and Roll?

Early December, a tchotchke shop in Brooklyn—an employee advises me about which novelty socks to pair with which comical greeting card for a friend. Then her voice, previously curious and chatty, gains a sudden seriousness. She tells me about a concert she went to the night before. The band was Italian, it was saving rock and roll, and it’d play in the city again, that night. I suddenly understood the difference between a salesperson and an evangelist. The woman gave me an order: You must go see Måneskin.

I didn’t go, but I did know who Måneskin was. I first became aware of the group while attending a watch party for the 2021 Eurovision Song Competition. No one at the party could understand why a bar band in burgundy leather, playing what sounded like a Rage Against the Machine song edited for a Chevy ad, ran away with the top prize. Eurovision is known for ABBA-style spectacle, silly and bright. Måneskin is all about scowling, and guitars that sound like carburetors. But clearly, the band had sparked passion somewhere—the kind of passion that, it turns out, converts listeners into proselytizers.

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How California could save its rain instead of letting it drain into the ocean

California has seen so much rain recently that farm fields are inundated and normally dry creeks and drainage ditches have become torrents of water racing toward the ocean. Yet, most of the state remains in drought.

All that runoff in the middle of a drought begs the question — why can’t more rainwater be collected and stored for the long, dry spring and summer when it’s needed?

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7 Strategies for Keeping Your Business Processes Ahead of the Game

Updating your business processes doesn't have to be a drag

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How "Gibson's law" makes it hard to trust experts

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,And drinking largely sobers us again.

It’s one of the most famous lines in poetry, and with it, Alexander Pope hits the nail on the head. We all know that one person who sees themselves as some world authority based on a single article they’ve read. They’re the keyboard preachers and cocksure dilettantes who have spent an afternoon researching a topic, and they’ll tell you exactly how it is. They’re drunk, indeed, on a little learning, and will shout at everyone to let them know.

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Samsung and iFixit now have parts for the Galaxy S22, Galaxy laptops

Samsung and iFixit launched an official repair program last August, and it's now getting support for a few more devices. Samsung says its self-repair program now includes the Galaxy S22 family and some laptops: the Galaxy Book Pro 15 and Galaxy Book Pro 360 15.

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RSV vaccine for older adults is 84% effective, Moderna says

Moderna's mRNA-based vaccine against RSV (respiratory syncytial (sin-SISH-uhl) virus) was effective at preventing disease in older adults, according to preliminary, top-line results of an ongoing phase III clinical trial the company announced Tuesday. Moderna said it will now seek regulatory approval for the vaccine in the first half of this year.

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Apple's full-size HomePod is back with new features

As previously rumored, Apple today announced the release of a new second-generation, $299 HomePod smart speaker in a similar design to the first-generation HomePod from 2018.

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The planning fallacy: Why your plans go awry and 5 steps to get back on track

Here was my Monday plan: Wake up at six, and exercise first thing. Then help my son get ready for school. Once he’s out the door, I shower and enjoy breakfast and coffee as I respond to emails. Next, I write an article between mandatory team meetings. The afternoon is set aside for emails and research. After work, cook dinner, help my son with his homework, and maybe crack open that novel I’ve been meaning to start.

In short, I aimed to crush it. I’m sure you’ll agree that sounds like a fabulous plan. I’m also sure you know how well it actually went.

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D&D maker promises to get player feedback for coming "open" license update

In a post on the D&D Beyond forums today, WotC Executive Producer Kyle Brink writes that "new proposed OGL documentation" will be shared publicly on or before Friday, January 20. At that point, community members will have at least two weeks to offer feedback via a survey that will include specific questions and open-response fields.

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Very fat tires, a battery, front and rear springs and... a hinge?

Cyrusher offers a wide range of e-bikes, from basic around-town frames to rugged all-terrain bikes, with the unifying theme being very, very fat tires. I'd seen a number of people cruising around on extra-fat tires (as in, much fatter than a mountain bike's) and was curious about them. Just how much did the huge surface area of these tires slow down your ride? And is the traction they offer worth paying that cost in performance?

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Thursday, January 19, 2023

Can we feed ourselves without devouring the planet?

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