Rijo Stephen Cletus: This cool new approach to refrigeration could replace harmful chemicals

This cool new approach to refrigeration could replace harmful chemicals

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a novel potential means of alternative refrigeration: ionocaloric cooling. The method involves electrically charged atoms or molecules (ions) changing the melting point of a solid material, much like adding salt to roads before a winter storm changes how ice will form. Their proof-of-principle experiment used salt made with iodine and sodium along with an organic solvent to achieve energy-efficient cooling, according to a recent paper published in the journal Science.

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RIP HDMI Alt Mode, we hardly knew ye

If you're using a USB-C port to connect a computer to a display, you're most likely using DisplayPort Alternate Mode (Alt Mode), and due to non-existent adoption, we can pretty much guarantee you're not using HDMI Alt Mode. According to the HDMI Licensing Administrator (HDMI LA), you never will because the feature is dead.

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Fortinet says hackers exploited critical vulnerability to infect VPN customers

An unknown threat actor abused a critical vulnerability in Fortinet’s FortiOS SSL-VPN to infect government and government-related organizations with advanced custom-made malware, the company said in an autopsy report on Wednesday.

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Apple previews a trio of apps that will finally replace iTunes for Windows

Apple discontinued its iTunes music player for macOS in 2019 when it split the app's functionality between four apps in macOS Catalina. But for Windows users with large local media libraries or who wanted to back up their iDevices or subscribe to Apple Music, iTunes has soldiered on, receiving minor maintenance-mode updates to maintain compatibility with Apple's devices and services.

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Duna de Bolonia: The Spanish sand dune hiding Roman ruins

Near the southern tip of Spain's Cádiz province, where Europe lunges into the Strait of Gibraltar as if reaching out for the North African coast, the Duna de Bolonia is one of the continent's largest sand dunes. Rising more than 30m high and sprawling 200m wide, the white mound spills into the azure sea and appears as if someone has dumped a massive pile of sugar atop the surrounding Estrecho Nature Park's protected green forest.

Like all sand dunes, Bolonia is a constantly moving ecosystem that shifts with the winds. But as climate change has intensified the hurricane-force gusts coming from the east, the dune has increasingly migrated inland towards the ecologically important cork and pine forests and scrubland – revealing remnants of the many past cilivilisations who have passed through here in the process.

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How Brands Can Follow Through on the Values They're Selling

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, companies of all stripes rushed to release statements citing the need for “change” and “solidarity.” A meaningful subset of those companies promised to review internal policies for racial bias, improve hiring practices, or make cash contributions to nonprofits at the forefront of the movement. Nike and Brand Jordan pledged $140 million to support Black communities, Quaker Oats retired Aunt Jemima, and television networks pulled the plug on the shows “Cops” and “Live PD.”

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Why we can't look away from Mexico City's gentrification

Happy 2023! Or is it still 2022? You can’t tell going by the incessant, and near identical, reporting about the gentrification of Mexico City by digital nomads. You might even remember reading my own thoughts in this newsletter about whether tech was a force for gentrification in Latin America — 11 months ago!

Only a few articles have actually moved the story forward, so why are we still talking about this? On the face of it, the gentrification of Mexico City feels like a story that has repeated across many moments in history: class conflict, migration, displacement. And yes, it is fundamentally about those things. More recently, though, I’ve been thinking that this story also reflects something very specific about the time and place we are living in right now.

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Sedimentation threatens to steal capacity from nearly 50,000 dams

Slowly but surely, the world’s reservoirs are getting gunked up with sediment. In an unblocked river, the flowing water carries bits of sediment along—picked up from river banks or swept into the river from rain. However, rivers whose flow has been interrupted by a dam deposit some of that sediment right behind the dam itself, in the reservoir. “Gradually, [over] years and years, it will be accumulating,” Duminda Perera, a researcher with the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment, and Health in Hamilton, Ontario, told Ars.

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A Better Approach to After-Action Reviews

In the decades since the Army created the After Action Review (AAR), businesses have embraced the practice as a way of learning from both failure and success. But all too often the practice gets reduced to nothing more than a pro forma exercise. The authors of this article describe the history and philosophy of the original AAR, debunk three myths about the practice that impede its proper use, and finally suggest three improvements that can help business leaders make the most of it.

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A disturbing 1995 prediction by Carl Sagan accurately describes America today

This article was first published on Big Think in January 2017. It was updated in January 2023.

Astronomer Carl Sagan was a great science communicator, widely known for cowriting and hosting the original Cosmos television series. Also a prolific writer, Sagan in 1995 published the book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, which touches on a variety of topics, from spirituality to debunking alien abductions, but ultimately serves as a passionate argument for science and the scientific method.

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2022 was once again one of the warmest years on record

They say history repeats, but usually they don’t mean it quite this literally. The global average surface temperature in 2021 ended up ranking fifth warmest or sixth warmest, depending on the dataset. We now have the tally for 2022—and it’s the new fifth or sixth warmest, depending on the dataset.

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Leaked Samsung Galaxy S23 pictures show off new camera design

Samsung is gearing up to launch the Galaxy S23 soon, with an event already officially scheduled for February 1. Prepping for launch means there are plenty of opportunities for things to leak, and official S23 pictures have landed at WinFuture.

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Leona Zacharias Helped Solve a Blindness Epidemic among Premature Babies. She Received Little Credit

In the first Lost Women of Science Shorts podcast, host Katie Hafner dives into the life and work of Leona Zacharias—a brilliant researcher who, before reporting this story, Hafner only knew as her grandmother

Scientist Leona Zacharias was a rare woman. She graduated from Barnard College in 1927 with a bachelor’s degree in biology, followed by a Ph.D. from Columbia University. But throughout her career, she labored behind men with loftier titles who got the bulk of the credit. In the 1940s, when premature newborns were going blind after being born with perfectly healthy eyes, Zacharias was part of the team that worked to root out the cause.

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Mexico's subway drivers depend on WhatsApp to keep the trains running

“I find unacceptable that train operators are allowed to drive while on their cellphones,” América Gómora, a Mexico City subway rider, tweeted on January 7. Metro drivers’ conduct has come under particular scrutiny after two trains collided that day, leaving one dead and dozens injured.

Although there’s no evidence so far to suggest conductors using their phones played a role in the crash, many local subway riders took to social media to express concerns that distracted train operators might be putting commuters’ lives at risk. But one former and four current Metro workers told Rest of World that because the system is poorly maintained, drivers depend on their phones to communicate with each other and keep the trains running.

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Why Emotionally Intelligent People Embrace the Power of 'Awkward' Thank-You Notes, Backed by Science

If you feel uncomfortable--or not very good at--expressing gratitude, research shows you're not alone. And that you shouldn't be.

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The Introvert's Guide to Work: Our Favorite Reads

But being an introvert hasn’t always been fun. When I started out in my career, I often second-guessed my decision to become a reporter. I had a hard time sharing my ideas in team meetings. The newsroom drained me, and I envied my gregarious colleagues who appeared to navigate the bustle with ease.

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See the Largest Flower Ever Found Encased in Amber

A rare flower encased in amber is the largest one ever found and dates from around 40 million years ago

The fossilization process is an unrelenting slog of decay, compression and erosion that can take millions of years and favors the preservation of tough material such as bones, teeth and shells. But with a little bit of sticky tree resin and a lot of luck, delicate bits of plants and tiny critters can sometimes last for tens of millions of years. As the resin petrifies and turns into amber, it preserves whatever gets stuck inside of it—including insects, slime molds and even pint-sized dinosaurs—in a gold-tinted time capsule.

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The ancient remains of Great Zimbabwe

Walking up to the towering walls of Great Zimbabwe was a humbling experience. The closer I got, the more they dwarfed me – and yet, there was something inviting about the archaeological site. It didn't feel like an abandoned fortress or castle that one might see in Europe: Great Zimbabwe was a place where people lived and worked, a place where they came to worship – and still do. It felt alive.

Great Zimbabwe is the name of the extensive stone remains of an ancient city built between 1100 and 1450 CE near modern-day Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Believed to be the work of the Shona (who today make up the majority of Zimbabwe's population) and possibly other societies that were migrating back and forth across the area, the city was large and powerful, housing a population comparable to London at that time – somewhere around 20,000 people during its peak. Great Zimbabwe was part of a sophisticated trade network (Arab, Indian and Chinese trade goods were all found at the site), and its architectural design was astounding: made of enormous, mortarless stone walls and towers, most of which are still standing.

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Half of the 250 Kids Expelled from Preschool Each Day Are Black Boys

Racism and overstressed teachers help explain high expulsion rates for Black preschool boys

In early October 2022 Jane Stadnik, a family resource specialist at the Parent Education & Advocacy Leadership (PEAL) Center in Pittsburgh, Pa., got a frantic call from the mother of a three-year-old boy who was about to be expelled from preschool. The school was tiring of his disruptive behavior, which, it claimed, included throwing blocks, not following directions, refusing to sit at “circle time” and periodically running from the classroom. Stadnik says that this would normally be seen as “typical developmental preschool behavior,” especially for a child with a speech impediment.

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How to Ask Someone to Be a Job Reference

A reference check is a standard process most companies follow before they hand you an offer letter. During this time, employers speak with third parties to verify your work experience and speak about your qualifications and character. Although reference checks are usually the final step of the interview process, prospective employers may ask for their contact information up front. Early in your job search you will want to line up a few people who can speak credibly about you and your work.

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No atmosphere found on JWSTâ€™s first Earth-sized exoplanet

For many of us, when we turn our eyes skyward, we imagine much, much more than the stars, galaxies, and the expanse of empty space that separates them. Instead, we turn our thoughts to the worlds that orbit each one of those stars: massive, gas giant planets with their own rich systems of moons, planets with solid surfaces like the Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury, and planets in between those two, like the so-called super-Earths that are almost exclusively more like mini-Neptunes. Each world in the Universe is unique, with its own composition, formation history, and possibilities for what sort of chemical or even biological reactions might occur there.

For the very first time, one of those planets within our Universe was discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): LHS 475 b. This planet happens to be almost identical in size to Earth, with its radius determined to be 99% as large as our home planet’s. Although it’s in a fairly close, tight orbit around its parent star, that star is relatively cool: an old, stable, red dwarf star. As the planet — serendipitously aligned with its parent star from our perspective — transited across the face of its star, JWST got a chance to observe it, using the technique of transit spectroscopy to measure its atmospheric contents. But what it found was instead a disappointment, consistent with there being no atmosphere at all. It’s a remarkable step forward for science, but also, one that suggests that JWST’s “nightmare scenario” for exoplanet discovery might come true.

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Tuscany's mysterious 'cave roads'

Wildflowers grazed my legs as I hiked down from the volcanic-rock hilltop fortress of Pitigliano into the Tuscan valley below. At the base of the hill, I crossed a burbling stream and followed a winding trail as it inclined. All of a sudden, I was walled in.

Huge blocks of tuff, a porous rock made from volcanic ash, rose as high as 25m on either side of the trench I found myself in. I felt spooked – and I'm not the only one who's felt that way in vie cave like this. These subterranean trails have been linked with lore of devils and deities for centuries.

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The city with gold in its sewage lines

"He burned the sari and from it, handed us a thin slice of pure silver," said my mother, describing a moment that had taken place 30 years ago at her home in the city of Firozabad. The man in her story was no magician, but an extractor. Like many similar artisans in my mother's hometown, he'd go door to door collecting old saris to mine them for their precious metals.

Until the 1990s, saris were often threaded with pure silver and gold, and I remember digging into my mother's wardrobe, searching for her glittery outfits like treasure. But as she told me, the extractors were looking for something even more valuable than clothing – they were looking for trash, and a kind of trash specific to this city.

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A Law Firm Finds out the Hard Way that Maternity Leave is Not "Sitting Around on Your Ass"

While you might feel angry that you have to pick up the slack while your co-worker is out on maternity leave, it's a bad idea to tell them.

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Not like Amazon: Why China's Alibaba has stalled after a meteoric rise

The company that would eventually blossom into Alibaba Group Holding Limited was founded on June 28, 1999, by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma in Hangzhou, the capital city of China’s Zhejiang province. The plan was to launch an online marketplace that could capitalize on and improve upon China’s nascent e-commerce market by connecting manufacturers, sellers, and consumers on a single platform.

“Alibaba’s special innovation,” co-founder Ming Zeng wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “was that we were truly building an ecosystem: a community of organisms (businesses and consumers of many types) interacting with one another and the environment (the online platform and the larger off-line physical elements). Our strategic imperative was to make sure that the platform provided all the resources (…) that an online business would need to succeed.”

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Is Santa Claus buried in Ireland?

Amid green hilly pastures dotted with grazing sheep and a cemetery with graves dating back to the 13th Century, the ruins of St Nicholas Church tower over the family home of Maeve and Joe O'Connell. Among those resting eternally here are early inhabitants of the estate, parishioners of the church and – according to local legend – St Nicholas of Myra. Yes, the St Nick who inspired Santa Claus.

Today, the O'Connells are the owners and sole (living) human inhabitants of Jerpoint Park, a 120-acre deserted 12th-Century medieval town located 20km south of the town of Kilkenny, Ireland. Located along the crossing point of the River Nore and Little Arrigle River, the settlement (formerly called Newtown Jerpoint) is thought to have been founded by the Normans, who arrived in Ireland around 1160 CE. According to a conservation plan compiled by Ireland's Heritage Council, the town flourished into the 15th Century, with archaeological evidence revealing homes, a marketplace, a tower, a bridge, streets, a mill, a water management system and nearby Jerpoint Abbey, which still stands today. But by the 17th Century, the town's occupants were gone, likely from a combination of violent attacks and a plague.

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How an Eldercare Experience Made Rosalind Brewer a Better CEO

The head of Walgreens Boots Alliance on finding her deep purpose.

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How we will use the Sun as a telescope to image alien cities

Exoplanets are the hottest topic in astronomy right now. After the discovery of the first planet orbiting a Sun-like star in 1995, the field exploded, revealing that nearly every star in the sky hosts a family of worlds. Powerful advances in technology are just now starting to give us the capacities to detect biological or even technological markers in the atmospheres of these alien worlds.

That is all very exciting, but if we really want to know what is happening on planets many light-years away, we need to image them. High-resolution images of green-pocked continents could reveal the presence of life. High-resolution images of those same continents at night, dotted with the lights of cities, could reveal the presence of civilizations. Unfortunately, we lack the ability to create such images. They have been nothing more than a pipe dream for astronomers. But that is changing now.

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The Gas Stove Culture Wars Have Begun

A new way to show your political affiliation may be emerging, and it’s close to home. So close, you’ll find it in your kitchen.

A debate over gas stoves reignited this week and fell along ideological lines in the US: As researchers, regulators, and Democratic politicians are pointing out the problematic emissions from gas appliances, conservatives are asserting their rights to cook how they choose. Things are, well, heating up quickly, as they do on a gas range: “If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands. COME AND TAKE IT!!” Congressman Ronny Jackson, from Texas, told Twitter. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York clapped back: “Did you know that ongoing exposure to NO2 from gas stoves is linked to reduced cognitive performance[?]”

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Trimurti: Meet the "Holy Trinity" of Hinduism

Hinduism is recognized as the world’s oldest living religion, with ancient scriptures dating back more than four thousand years. There is no single set of beliefs and practices that can be considered “correct” or “true” in Hinduism. Its major concern is that people make the journey in the first place, as the cycle of life provides the necessary lessons.

There are three principal deities to guide people through that cycle. The Hindu trinity is also known as the Trimūrti, Sanskrit for “three forms,” and it includes Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Since these three gods are responsible for the creation, preservation, and destruction of the Universe, respectively, exploring Hinduism through the Trimūrti can be a key to understanding what makes Hinduism so enduring.

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Robert Waldinger: The secret to a happy life -- lessons from 8 decades of research

The happiest and healthiest people are those who have warm connections with others, says psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, who leads the Harvard Study of Adult Development -- one of the longest-running studies of adult life ever conducted. Exploring the crucial link between social bonds and quality of life, he shares wisdom and insights into how to identify and strengthen the relationships that impact your well-being most. When it comes to the people in your inner circle, "Turn toward the voices that make you feel more open and more inclusive," he says. (This conversation, hosted by TED current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was part of an exclusive TED Membership event. Visit ted.com/membership to become a TED Member.)

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So, You Dropped the Ball. How Do You Get Your Credibility Back?

We’ve all made mistakes at work before. If you dropped the ball on an important project, or done something to lose credibility and trust at work, there are steps you can take to build it back. After you’ve done the basics (you apologized, you owned up to your mistakes, and hopefully learned from it), the author suggests taking the following steps:

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The Competitive Advantage of Nations

A nation’s competitiveness depends on the capacity of its industry to innovate and upgrade. Companies gain advantage against the world’s best competitors because of pressure and challenge. They benefit from having strong domestic rivals, aggressive home-based suppliers, and demanding local customers.

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Slutty Vegan Founder Pinky Cole in Legal Spat With Former Employees Over Skimped Tips

Pinky Cole, founder of the vegan fast food chain Slutty Vegan, is facing a lawsuit from former employees who allege that they were withheld pay.

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Managers, Stop Distracting Your Employees

The rise of remote work has made corporate leaders paranoid, thinking they must monitor their employees’ every digital move in order to maintain productivity. But while people often zero in on Facebook, TikTok, or Netflix as potential sources of employee distraction, in truth, we’re often more distracted by the ways in which we work today. The author offers four strategies to help managers get to the root causes of what’s distracting their employees: 1) Open a dialogue about distractions; 2) Schedule-sync with your employees; 3) Don’t hold meetings without an agenda; and 4) Set an example.

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How far can vertical farming go?

When the Pasona Urban Farm opened in the nine-storey office of a Japanese recruitment company in 2010, it promised a future in which food was grown within feet of the people who would eat it.

Tomatoes hung down from meeting-room light fittings, a rice paddy filled a large conference space, and mushrooms grew in drawers hidden discreetly under benches. The office looked more like a museum of farming than a place of work.

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InflationÂ Eased for the 6th Straight Month, Offering Welcome Relief to Uneasy Business Owners

The Consumer Price Index rose by 6.5 percent compared with December 2021.

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What's the #1 Productivity Tool? For Me, It's Timeboxing.

Do you often find yourself carrying forward tasks that should be done today to tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the day after that? To-do lists gave the author, Neha Kirpalani, a sense of real satisfaction, until she was promoted at work and the array of new responsibilities she eagerly wanted to excel at were throwing her (highly) organized schedule off kilter. She experimented with timeboxing and found it came with great additional benefits, including:

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These Four QuestionsÂ the ChatGPT Team Just Shared Are Brilliant. Here's Why Every Company Should Steal Them

OpenAI's survey for the professional version of ChatGPT solves one of many companies' greatest problems: how to price your offerings.

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Could getting rid of old cells turn back the clock on aging?

James Kirkland started his career in 1982 as a geriatrician, treating aging patients. But he found himself dissatisfied with what he could offer them.

“I got tired of prescribing wheelchairs, walkers and incontinence devices,” recalls Kirkland, now at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He knew that aging is considered the biggest risk factor for chronic illness, but he was frustrated by his inability to do anything about it. So Kirkland went back to school to learn the skills he’d need to tackle aging head-on, earning a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Toronto. Today, he and his colleague Tamara Tchkonia, a molecular biologist at the Mayo Clinic, are leaders in a growing movement to halt chronic disease by protecting brains and bodies from the biological fallout of aging.

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Ben Gran: Why nurses are key to medical innovation

Nurses represent the front line of health care -- from first breaths to last moments, and everything in between. But there's a vital place nurses are missing in action, says Ben Gran. He makes a compelling case for integrating their invaluable insights and experience into health tech innovation to help make care (and the process of providing it) better for generations to come.

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5 biotech trends to watch in 2023

2022 saw some incredible scientific and technological breakthroughs, as well as some major medical breakthroughs — and 2023 is poised to follow up with more paradigm-shifting advances in the making. As the Deputy Director of Communications for Leaps by Bayer, I surveyed a brain trust of scientists, investors, and CEOs to learn which areas of biotech they are most eagerly watching this year. Here’s what they said.

Cell and gene therapies encompass a wide range of approaches that attempt to treat disease at the cellular and genetic level. With cell therapy, patients’ cells are extracted, reprogrammed, and then injected back into their bodies, often with the goal of leveraging their own immune system to fight diseases like cancer. Of the approved cell therapies in the U.S., most focus on blood cancers because they have not yet shown success in treating solid tumors. One of the next goals in cell therapy is to improve efficiency by reprogramming patients’ cells in vivo — that is, inside their own bodies.

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Sardinia's mysterious beehive towers

Expecting not to find much more than a pile of big stones, I followed the sign off the motorway into a little car park and there it was, rising from a flat, green landscape covered in little white flowers, with a few donkeys dotted around: Nuraghe Losa. From a distance, it looked like a big sandcastle with its top crumbling away, but as I walked towards it, I began to realise the colossal size of the monument in front of me.

Nuraghi (the plural of nuraghe) are massive conical stone towers that pepper the landscape of the Italian island of Sardinia. Built between 1600 and 1200BCE, these mysterious Bronze Age bastions were constructed by carefully placing huge, roughly worked stones, weighing several tons each, on top of each other in a truncated formation.

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10 Ways to Boost Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is at its lowest point in the past two decades. Companies must focus on 10 areas of the customer experience to improve satisfaction without sacrificing revenue. The authors base their findings on research at the ACSI — analyzing millions of customer data points — and research that we conducted for The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction. For three decades, the ACSI has been a leading satisfaction index (cause-and-effect metric) connected to the quality of brands sold by companies with significant market share in the United States.

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How to Overcome Your Fear of Speaking Up in Meetings

If you find it difficult to speak up during virtual meetings, you’re not alone. You might feel your ideas are still half-baked and won’t be seen as valuable. Or, perhaps, you joined the company remotely and feel reserved around your new teammates or senior colleagues. But you can get better by making certain mindset shifts.

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Would following the USDA Dietary Guidelines actually make us healthy?

For over 40 years now, the U.S. government has published dietary guidelines to help Americans eat right and stay healthy. Since then, rates of obesity and diabetes have skyrocketed. So at least on those fronts, the guidelines seem to have failed.

But why? Some naysayers insist that, for many years, the dietary guidelines have been misleading us, urging diets low in saturated fat and high in carbohydrates, despite accumulating evidence that this combination may not be universally healthful for everyone.

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Mexico's 1,500-year-old unknown pyramids

From a distance, the grey volcanic rock pyramids and their encircling stonewalls looked like something that Mother Nature had wrought herself. Located in Cañada de La Virgen (The Valley of the Virgin), an area about 30 miles outside the city of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico's central highlands, the stone formations blended into the arid, desiccated landscape like a diminutive mountain range.

But as I got closer to the largest of the three structures, there was no doubt it was man-made. A staircase of identical steps, etched into the hard, dark rock, had clearly required a skilled mason's hand. The other two pyramids, smaller and less well-preserved, bore a similarly unmistakable human touch. The timeworn edifices were erected by a civilisation long gone.

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A secret site for the Knights Templar?

In a hole in the ground beneath the Hertfordshire market town of Royston, dimly illuminated by flickering light, I was looking at a gallery of crudely carved figures, blank-faced and bearing instruments of torture. Cave manager Nicky Paton pointed them out to me one by one. "There's Saint Catherine, with her breaking wheel. She was only 18 when she was martyred," Paton said, cheerfully. "And there's Saint Lawrence. He was burnt to death on a griddle."

Amid the grisly Christian scenes were Pagan images: a large carving of a horse, and a fertility symbol known as a sheela na gig, depicting a woman with exaggerated sexual organs. Another portrayed a person holding a skull in their right hand and a candle in their left, theorised to represent an initiation ceremony – a tantalising clue as to the cave's possible purpose. Adding to the carvings' creepiness was their rudimentary, almost childlike, execution.

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10 Tips For Finding, Fighting, and Winning Key Battles in Your Business

Concentrate on finding and winning the right battles, rather than trying to win them all.

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The truth behind 10 of the biggest health beliefs

Should we really be aiming to walk 10,000 steps a day, or drink two litres of water? Time to sift fact from fiction

It's easy to think that science is constantly changing its mind on all things dietary and health-based - if you have never suffered headline whiplash from trying to keep up with whether or not wine is good for you, you probably aren't paying attention. In fact, our collective understanding is getting more nuanced, with ever-emerging longitudinal studies and meta-reviews getting us closer and closer to the truth about what is good for our bodies. Here are some widely held beliefs and what science says now - so you can start making informed health decisions this year.

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Oceans Break Heat Record for Fourth Year in a Row

The world’s oceans hit their warmest levels on record for the fourth consecutive year in 2022, fueling sea-level rise and contributing to climate disasters

Oceans hit their warmest levels on record for the fourth consecutive year in 2022, according to a new report by two dozen scientists. Previous heat records were broken in 2021, 2020 and 2019, and all of the top six hottest levels have occurred in the last six years.

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Schmilka: The progressive German town stuck in the past

The half-timbered houses, the isolated location deep in eastern Germany's forested hinterlands, the eerie rock pinnacles bounding the town on one side and the tempestuous Elbe River on the other – throw in an evil witch and Schmilka would be straight out of a 19th-Century Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Or, at least, of that age: the buildings go back around two centuries, the food and beer are prepared using techniques just as old, and I had to run up and down the town's one street (cobblestoned, of course) to find a wi-fi signal. Talk about a time warp.

"Schmilka used to be a holiday village 200 years ago," said Andrea Bigge, a local art historian. It is again, she added, but it still feels like it exists in that era.

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Quantum superposition begs us to ask, "What is real?"

The world of the very, very small is a wonderland of strangeness. Molecules, atoms, and their constituent particles did not readily reveal their secrets to the scientists that wrestled with the physics of atoms in the early 20th century. Drama, frustration, anger, puzzlement, and nervous breakdowns abounded, and it is hard for us now, a full century later, to understand what was at stake. What happened was a continuous process of worldview demolition. You might have to give up believing everything you thought to be true about something. In the case of the quantum physics pioneers, that meant changing their understanding about the rules that dictate how matter behaves.

In 1913, Bohr devised a model for the atom that looked somewhat like a solar system in miniature. Electrons moved around the atomic nucleus in circular orbits. Bohr added a few twists to his model — twists that gave them a set of weird and mysterious properties. The twists were necessary for Bohr’s model to have explanatory power — that is, for it to be able to describe the results of experimental measurements. For example, electrons’ orbits were fixed like railroad tracks around the nucleus. The electron could not be in between orbits, otherwise it could fall into the nucleus. Once it got to the lowest rung in the orbital ladder, an electron stayed there unless it jumped to a higher orbit.

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A Recently Discovered Gas Cloud Near Andromeda Stumps Astronomers

With dozens of large telescopes scattered across Earth and some well above it, you might think we’ve pretty much discovered all there is to find in the sky. But this is, literally, too narrow a view.

The recent discovery of a huge cloud of gas floating near the Andromeda galaxy—one of the most extensively studied objects in the heavens—is the latest proof that the sky still offers a vast amount of celestial real estate to sift through. This cloud has been hiding in plain sight for decades. And the best part is that its origin is a mystery.

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The Maine lake full of sunken steamboats

"A hundred years ago there were dozens of these things cruising around here," said a man who'd suddenly appeared next to me at the dock as I watched the approaching steamboat. He'd startled me out of my reverie, my gaze caught somewhere between the shimmer that dances across Moosehead Lake and the seaplanes taking off toward Mount Katahdin.

I grew up in the US state of Maine at a smaller lake not far from here, and I spent many summers taking day trips to Moosehead Lake with my family. But this was the first time I boarded the historical Steamboat Katahdin, the last of a once-numerous fleet that used to ferry hordes of well-dressed elites from nearby train depots to the area's luxury resorts for their summer holidays.

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The Himalayas' ancient earthquake-defying design

In 1905, a deadly earthquake rocked the landscape of Himachal Pradesh, an Indian state in the western Himalayas. Sturdy-looking concrete constructions toppled like houses of cards. The only surviving structures were in towns where the residents had used an ancient, traditional Himalayan building technique known as kath kuni.

On a warm Tuesday afternoon, I was headed towards one of them: Naggar Castle, which was built more than 500 years ago as the seat of the region's powerful Kullu kings, and which remained standing, unscathed, after that calamity.

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The Best Tea Accessories for Sipping Steamy Beverages

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Tea is the world's most popular beverage. Well, after water. Whether you like to brew from a bag or only sip rare yellow tea smuggled out of China by yak, there's something for everyone. However, if you're new to drinking tea, the different gadgets and styles can be overwhelming at times. To get you started, we put together a roundup of some of the tools and teas you might want to try on your journey to finding the perfect cup.

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The mysterious Viking runes found in a landlocked US state

"[Farley] spent the majority of her adult life researching the stone," said Amanda Garcia, Heavener Runestone Park manager. "She travelled all around the US, went to Egypt and went to different places looking at different markings."

Faith Rogers, an environmental-science intern and volunteer at the Heavener Runestone Park, led me down a cobblestone path toward one of the 55-acre woodland's biggest attractions – which is also one of the US' biggest historical mysteries. We were deep in the rolling, scrub-forest foothills of the Ouachita Mountains in far eastern Oklahoma, and we were on our way to view a slab of ancient sandstone that still has experts scratching their heads and debating about the eight symbols engraved on its face.

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5 Ways to Outmaneuver Competitors Using Intellectual Property

Plan ahead, startup founders! Copycats are never far behind a successful new product or service.

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The sustainable brilliance of Indigenous design

When human rights advocate Manu Peni returned to Papua New Guinea from abroad, he built a home for himself using modern techniques -- and promptly learned a harsh lesson on how the newest ideas aren't always the best ideas. Peni calls for us all to rethink who we consider experts, particularly when it comes to building in the face of climate change, showing how Indigenous wisdom must work in harmony with new science and technology if we want to create a sustainable future.

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Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

The ancient Romans were masters of engineering, constructing vast networks of roads, aqueducts, ports, and massive buildings, whose remains have survived for two millennia. Many of these structures were built with concrete: Rome’s famed Pantheon, which has the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome and was dedicated in A.D. 128, is still intact, and some ancient Roman aqueducts still deliver water to Rome today. Meanwhile, many modern concrete structures have crumbled after a few decades.

Researchers have spent decades trying to figure out the secret of this ultradurable ancient construction material, particularly in structures that endured especially harsh conditions, such as docks, sewers, and seawalls, or those constructed in seismically active locations.

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Spain's ingenious fairy-tale houses

Deep in Spain's north-western corner, the windswept Ancares mountains are dotted with centuries-old houses that look straight out of a fairy tale – or the Asterix and Obelix comic-book series – but that are cleverly suited to the harsh realities of this remote region.

Known as pallozas, the round huts are made of stone and topped with a teardrop-shaped roof of rye straw. There are more than 200 scattered among Galicia's and Castile-León's rural villages, including Piornedo, Balouta, O Cebreiro and Balboa. Many of these homes were built 250 years ago, though their architectural roots stretch back millennia – some historians contend that pallozas are pre-Roman, an evolution of Celtic and Iron Age constructions.

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2022 Wasn't the Hottest on Record. That's Nothing to Celebrate

NASA and NOAA, two leading atmospheric science research agencies in the United States, have someÂ ostensibly good climate news: Their twin annual analyses of global temperatures revealed today that 2022, likeÂ 2021, wasn't an all-time record-breaker. Instead, NASA says it tied with 2015 as the fifth-warmest year on record, and NOAA says it was the sixth. (The agencies use slightly different methodologies, and the difference between fifth and sixth place is just a hundredth of a degree Celsius.) Still, humanity remains on a dangerous trajectory because the past nine years have been the nine hottest since measurements began.

"The heat waves this summer in Europe, the rainfall in Pakistan, the floods here and there and everywhereâ€”they've been juiced by the overall global warming," says Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and lead scientist of the agency's analysis. "It doesn't need to be the warmest year on record for these things to happen."

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3 Lessons Learned During a Company Rebrand

Rebranding can be complex and fear-inducing. Ultimately it's about who you and your business are at your deepest core.

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Microbial Cocktails Are More Than a Gut Feeling

In 2023, our understanding of the microbes that live inside the human gut will lead to new ideas for medicine. Today, we know that gut microbes help develop and sustain our immune system. They do that by producing high levels of three types of short-chain fatty acid molecules: acetic acid, propionic acid, and butyric acid (or butyrate). The last of these, butyrate, promotes the activity of immune cells called regulatory T cells, or T regs. These cells are specialists at turning off the activity of other immune cells, which is vital to keep the immune system from damaging the body. The other short-chain fatty acids also affect immune cells, as well as the cells of the gut lining, although these other processes are not as well understood.

This story is from the WIRED World in 2023, our annual trends briefing. Read more stories from the series here—or download or order a copy of the magazine.

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People Love Electric Vehicles! Now Comes the Hard Part

The tech world’s biggest gadget show, CES, which took place in Las Vegas last week, looked a lot like a car show—and specifically an electric car show. Automakers and parts suppliers crowded the convention center halls with futuristic outlet-powered prototypes, sleek electric concepts, and software built to power that next generation of EVs. Yet the most vital electric auto project of the moment could hardly feel further from the limelight of Las Vegas.

Drivers are embracing electric vehicles faster than industry analysts had expected, and sales are booming. But those e-wheelers will need somewhere to charge up, creating an infrastructure problem much less glamorous than the latest electrified sports car. Right now, some 90 percent of US electric vehicle owners can charge at home or at work. But convincing more Americans to buy electric is crucial (if not sufficient) to hitting climate goals. And more than a third of US residents live in apartment buildings, where installing a personal charger may not be an option. The US Department of Energy says there are just under 50,000 public electric vehicle chargers in the US, but one analysis projects that the country will need 495,000 if it hopes to hit state and federal goals to ban gas car sales by 2035. Each charger can cost more than $100,000 each to install.

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Friday, January 13, 2023

This cool new approach to refrigeration could replace harmful chemicals

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