Mysterious 3,800-Year-Old Canaanite Arch and Stairway Unearthed in Israel

Researchers don’t know the purpose of the brick arch, which leads to a set of stairs descending deeper undergroundArchaeologists have made a stunning—yet thoroughly puzzling—discovery in northern Israel: a 3,800-year-old Canaanite arch and stairway, perfectly preserved underground.

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JWST reveals dusty secrets inside spiral galaxies

To truly understand how dust impacts a galaxy’s evolution, multiwavelength views are necessary.Hubble and ground-based observatories can measure stars, starlight, and energized regions directly.

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What Makes a Good Salesman

Despite millions of dollars spent on combating the high turnover rate among insurance agents, the rate—approximately 50% within the first year and 80% within the first three years—had remained steady for the more than 35 years preceding the publication of Mayer and Greenberg’s 1964 article. The authors devoted seven years of research to studying the problem of the ineffectiveness of large numbers of salespeople. They discovered flaws in the established methods of selection and revealed the two basic qualities that any good salesperson must have: empathy and ego drive.Empathy, in this context, is the central ability to feel as other people do in order to sell them a product or service; a buyer who senses a salesperson’s empathy will provide him with valuable feedback, which will in turn facilitate the sale. The authors define the second of the two qualities, ego drive, as the personal desire and need to make the sale—not because of the money to be gained but because the salesperson feels he has to. For sales reps with strong ego drives, every sale is a conquest that dramatically improves their self-perception. In the dynamic relationship between empathy and ego drive, each must work to reinforce the other.

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Oktoberfest 2023: Scenes From the Opening Weekend

On Saturday, the 188th Oktoberfest beer festival opened in Munich, Germany. Organizers say they expect millions of visitors over the 18-day festival at Munich’s Theresienwiese—the last keg will be tapped on October 3. The Associated Press reports that the cost for a one-liter mug this year is between 12.60 euros and 14.90 euros ($13.45 to $15.90). Gathered here are images from the opening weekend of Oktoberfest 2023. A waitress reacts as she carries beer mugs in a festival tent during the opening of Oktoberfest, Munich's annual beer festival, on September 16, 2023, in Munich, Germany. #

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I'm completely blind and far more capable than you might think | Psyche Ideas

was a professor of psychology for more than 25 years and is currently a freelance science writer and disability advocate. He advocates for creating accessible digital spaces, documents, and technology. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.While walking near my house a few months ago, I heard a car pull into a driveway behind me. The driver stuck his head out the window and, sounding concerned, asked: ‘Are you OK?’ This seemed to me a strange question to ask an adult who was simply walking down the street. But you might think otherwise when you learn that I was using a white cane.

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MDMA Moves Closer to Approval for PTSD Treatment After New Clinical Trial

If endorsed by the FDA, the drug would become the first psychedelic approved for mental health treatment in the United StatesA new clinical trial suggests that the drug MDMA, paired with therapy, is effective in reducing symptoms in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The study paves the way for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as the first new treatment for PTSD in two decades.

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Pay Transparency Is Sweeping Across the US

Applying for a new job is always a venture into the unknown, but when it comes to the pay on offer, that uncertainty is lessening. Salary disclosure in US job ads appears to now be the norm. New data from job marketplace Indeed shows that as of August more than half of US job postings on the site included a salary range.Pay transparency laws have recently spread across the US, taking effect in Colorado in 2021, New York City in 2022, and California and Washington states this year. New York state enacted its own law yesterday. But the trend to more openness about pay may also reflect a growing awareness that pay transparency is good for business.

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Parent Diplomacy Is Overwhelming Teachers

Parent diplomacy has always been a dicey endeavor for educators. The war stories teachers swap about nightmare parents are the stuff of legend. But in the decade since I started teaching in a public school outside of Boston—and particularly during the pandemic—strained conversations have become the norm. Expectations about how much teachers communicate with parents are changing, burnout is getting worse, and I’m worried about what this might mean for the profession.More parent involvement is, on its face, a good thing. Research shows that kids whose parents stay involved in school tend to do better, both academically and socially. But when I hear from some parents all the time and I can’t reach others at all, students can start to suffer. As I’ve talked with colleagues and experts in the field, I’ve realized that this is a common problem, and it’s been intensifying.

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What Makes Life Tick? Mitochondria May Keep Time for Cells | Quanta Magazine

Just as people in different places seem to operate at different rhythms, so too do different species. They age at their own rates: Some, like the fruit fly, race to adulthood so they can reproduce before their ephemeral food source disappears, while creatures like humans mature slowly over decades, in part because building a large, complex brain requires it. And at the very beginning of an embryo's life, small tweaks in the timing of when and how different tissues develop can dramatically alter an organism's form â a mechanism that evolution exploits in creating new species. However, what sets the tempo of an organism's growth has remained a mystery."Our knowledge of what controls developmental timing has really lagged behind other areas in developmental biology," said Margarete Diaz Cuadros, who leads research focused on developmental tempo at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

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Chinese hackers have unleashed a never-before-seen Linux backdoor

Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen backdoor for Linux that’s being used by a threat actor linked to the Chinese government.

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Massive Sun Outburst Smacks NASA Spacecraft

If it had hit Earth, this coronal mass ejection could have caused continent-scale blackouts, scientists sayNASA’s Parker Solar Probe was built to withstand the ravages of the environment near our sun—and with good reason.

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Why the Pulitzer Prizes Are Expanding Eligibility to Non-U.S. Citizens

The prestigious awards will soon be open to permanent residents and those who call the U.S. their “longtime primary home”When Javier Zamora learned that his memoir, Solito, wouldn’t be eligible for certain literary awards because he isn’t a United States citizen, the writer was disheartened.

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Airbnb Really Is Different Now

The morning after a wedding in Vermont this summer, my friends were recovering in a hot tub while I battled a garbage disposal. And scrubbed the kitchen counter. And stripped the bed. And took out the recycling. Everyone was blissed-out at a hotel before braving the six-hour drive back to New York—except my boyfriend and me, who made the mistake of staying at an Airbnb. Despite the $95 cleaning fee, we were stuck completing a baffling list of pre-checkout chores.Something feels a bit off with Airbnb these days. Those searching for a quaint and homey place to stay now often have to brave high prices, inconsistent fees, laborious checkout demands, and untrustworthy photos and descriptions. You risk ending up, like I did in Vermont, in one of multiple cookie-cutter units listed by the same host, units that lean less “cozy ski lodge” and more “IKEA display room that has never known human touch.” Not only are customers mad, expressing their outrage across social media, but cities have also been cracking down. Earlier this month, New York City instituted a drastic new law that effectively bans most short-term rentals, resulting in the disappearance of 15,000 Airbnb listings.

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Artificial Womb Trials in Humans Could Start Soon

U.S. regulators will consider clinical trials of a system that mimics the womb, which could reduce deaths and disability for babies born extremely pretermA hairless, pale-skinned lamb lies on its side in what appears to be an oversized sandwich bag filled with hazy fluid. Its eyes are closed, and its snout and limbs jerk as if the animal — which is only about three-quarters of the way through its gestation period — is dreaming.

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Humans Have Exceeded Six of the Nine Boundaries Keeping Earth Habitable

Scientists find we are "well outside the safe operating space for humanity" in a new study meant to assess the health of our planetHuman activities have caused the Earth to exceed six of nine boundaries necessary for keeping the planet healthy, pushing the environment "well outside the safe operating space for humanity," scientists warn in a new study published last week in Science Advances.

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The Agony of the School Car Line

For parents across America, the school car line is a daily punishment. The stern, annoyed command from some poor teacher or volunteer to “pull all the way forward, please!” The breakdown of the whole process when someone inevitably doesn’t. The long minutes spent idling, spewing exhaust. The cones, and walkie-talkies, and little signs hung from rearview mirrors that help deliver so many kids, individually, right to their school’s doorstep.Car lines are a classic tragedy-of-the-commons problem: Every parent acting in their perceived self-interest—Oh I’ll just drop him off again; it’ll only take a minute—makes us collectively worse off in the form of dirtier air, increased traffic, less human connection, and more frustration.

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40 Amazingly Addictive Couch Co-Op Games

If you need to recharge, what better way than to cozy up with friends or family and play some couch co-op games? Whether you want space shooter action, a platform challenge, or a tricky puzzler, we have a game here for every co-op crew, including games built for pairs, trios, quartets, and more. Here are the very best cooperative titles for the PlayStation, Xbox, Windows PC, and Nintendo Switch.For co-operative fun when you can't get together physically, check out the Best Online Co-Op Games.

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The assassination of JFK: One of the US's biggest mysteries

This November, it will be 60 years since the assassination of President John F Kennedy. A significant anniversary usually provides a chance to remember and reflect on past events – but, in the case of JFK's death, interest has never really faltered. Almost immediately after those gunshots rang out on a sunny autumn day in Dallas, speculation over Kennedy's death began, and it hasn't stopped since.More like this: - The greatest spy novel ever written - The hit song that has divided the US - A watershed moment for 'faith-based' filmmaking

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The 'Whiteboy Brooklyn Novelist' Grows Up

Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel presents a story of gentrification without sentimentality.One afternoon a few months ago, he took me to Dean Street, the block in Boerum Hill where he grew up in the ’70s. The area is the setting of his 2003 book (and one of my favorite novels), The Fortress of Solitude, and of his new one, Brooklyn Crime Novel.

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Working Remotely Can More Than Halve an Office Employee's Carbon Footprint

By not going into the office, an at-home worker can cut greenhouse emissions in excess of 50 percent if they take energy-conservation stepsAt the height of the COVID pandemic, an estimated 50 percent of all Americans began working remotely. Since then many workers have returned to the office—but around 20 percent have continued to work from home at least part-time.

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Autoworker strike could give GM breathing room to fix battery production

Last Thursday, the United Auto Workers went on strike at a trio of factories owned by Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. Negotiations to replace an expiring contract reached a stalemate, leading to thousands of UAW members stopping work in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. The strike has been targeted to disrupt profitable production lines like Ford's Bronco, but there might be a silver lining to the strike for General Motors.

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What to Do When Your Political Party Loses Its Mind

I was a Conservative until Boris Johnson expelled me. It was a painful experience, but here’s what I’ve learned.For three years now, I’ve had a recurring dream. I am walking into the British Parliament, which seems to have become a cathedral. Passing beneath coffered ceilings, Gothic wallpaper, and sinuous brass work, I arrive at a marble version of the debating chamber, in which I can see my sometimes-antagonist, the Conservative member of Parliament Jacob Rees-Mogg, lying in what appears to be a bishop’s surplice on one of the pews. When I step in to join my other colleagues, a large man in a tailcoat intercepts me, indicates courteously that this place is no longer for me, and escorts me out.

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Americans Are Sleepwalking Through a National Emergency

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The United States of America is facing a threat from a sometimes violent cult while a nuclear armed power wages war on the border of our closest allies. And yet, many Americans sleepwalk as if they are living in normal times instead of in an ongoing crisis.

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Into the Blue Beyond: William Beebe's Dazzling Account of Becoming the First Human Being to See the Deep Ocean

“It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived… an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world.”

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A Refresher on Statistical Significance

When you run an experiment or analyze data, you want to know if your findings are “significant.” But business relevance (i.e., practical significance) isn’t always the same thing as confidence that a result isn’t due purely to chance (i.e., statistical significance). This is an important distinction; unfortunately, statistical significance is often misunderstood and misused in organizations today. And yet because more and more companies are relying on data to make critical business decisions, it’s an essential concept for managers to understand.

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Women are returning to work, but there's more to the story

Finally, there's some good news for women workers. After a three-year period that saw their workforce participation plummet – so severe, it was labelled the "she-cession" – scores of women are actively searching for jobs. Many are finally back to work.It's been a long road. During the pandemic, women were disproportionately affected by job losses; since 2020, they've been dropping out of the workforce in record numbers, largely to tend to caring responsibilities (particularly mums of colour). Meanwhile, employment sectors that women workers have traditionally been dominated – such as education, nursing and hospitality – took the brunt of job losses during lockdowns and social distancing.

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Design Your Marketing Organization to Fit Your Company's Growth Stage

Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Our special report on innovation systems will help leaders guide teams that rely on virtual collaboration, explores the potential of new developments, and provides insights on how to manage customer-led innovation.Determining the optimal design of a department or function is a key aspect of organization design and one of the most important decisions C-level executives make. Organization design establishes the essential infrastructure that enables or hinders companies' effective deployment of strategic decisions, yet it is one of the least studied and understood by business leaders. Typically, leaders find themselves contemplating restructuring for the first time in their careers after being promoted to an executive level and facing an organizational problem that needs urgent attention. It takes adeptness for an executive to even recognize that they have a structural design problem rather than a staffing issue.

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Xiaomi's Fantastic Folding Phone Is the Slimmest Yet

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDFolding phone fans have more options than ever right now, from Google’s Pixel Fold and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold5 to the Motorola Razr+ and Galaxy Z Flip5, but it’s worth looking at smartphones like Xiaomi’s new Mix Fold 3. It’s only available in China, and even if you do import it, you’ll need to jump through hoops to get Google apps working. But it offers a peek at what might come to our shores in the not-too-distant future.

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Keeping Google's search secrets protects its monopoly, DOJ argues in court

Since Google has a right to protect its trade secrets during the US Department of Justice's trial digging into how the tech giant allegedly monopolized Internet searches, some of the trial's most revealing moments will come during sealed testimony closed to the public.

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Can Zillow's Low Down Payment Program Help Thaw the Housing Market?

Wharton’s Benjamin Keys weighs in on Zillow’s new 1% down payment loan, saying the fintech firm is trying to innovate in a housing market that just isn’t moving.Zillow’s new promotion is enticing for eligible home buyers in Arizona who can’t save enough for a down payment: Pay as little as 1% down, and the company will contribute 2% in closing costs to help them get in the door of a new home.

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An Intellectual and a Moral Failure

This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled The Origins of Woke, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of identity politics. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the legal system that began with the Civil Rights Act, in the 1960s. “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon,” Hanania argues, “it was law.” The Origins of Woke offers a plausible defense of this claim, and it features a smattering of interesting observations about the historical relationship between the legal system, corporate and education policy, and identity politics.Yet these fleeting virtues are an insufficient counterbalance to the fatal flaw at the heart of Hanania’s book: It is a racist, sexist fever dream, the product of an author whose not-inconsiderable intellect has been warped and distorted—like many young conservatives’—by a noxious mixture of racist pseudoscience and the casual misogyny of the extremely online right.

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A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About

Earlier this year, I was at a conference on fighting poverty, and a member of the audience asked a question that made the experts visibly uncomfortable.“What about family structure?” he asked. “Single-parent families are more likely to be poor than two-parent ones. Does family structure play a role in poverty?”

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The Dark Economics of Russell Brand

There was a brief, strange moment in 2015 when Russell Brand mattered in mainstream British politics. With an election looming, the opposition Labour Party was trailing in the polls against a coalition government that was the very definition of establishment—led by an Eton- and Oxford-educated prime minister in David Cameron and his Westminster- and Cambridge-educated deputy, Nick Clegg, now president of global affairs at Meta. So the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, went seeking the endorsement of Brand, the actor, comedian, and emerging online provocateur whose anti-corporatist screeds to his 9.5 million Twitter followers and 100,000 YouTube subscribers gave him the appearance of a power player. Miliband got Brand’s endorsement but lost the election.Since then, Brand’s reach has exploded. His YouTube channel now has 6.6 million subscribers, his X account more than 11 million followers. But his anti-establishment message has morphed, from a broader, almost coherent response to the politics of fiscal austerity that shaped the UK after the 2008 financial crisis to a series of cultish, conspiracy-driven narratives that draw in Covid denialism, Russian disinformation, and the far-right-inspired “Great Reset” theory, united by the meta-conspiracy that the mainstream—the “elites”—have darker agendas based on control.

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Building leaders ready for anything: 4 critical change leadership capabilities

It is difficult to name an organization that hasn’t been affected by significant change in recent years, and the pace of that change shows no sign of decelerating. Organizations continue to struggle with developing strong leaders who are not only adept at managing today’s challenges — whether those are customers, competitors, communities, climate change, or the realities of the post-COVID economy — but also prepared for whatever the future may bring.Why is change leadership so difficult? Because leaders too often assume that revising policies, incorporating new technology, or communicating updated financial goals will drive the desired results. If it were that simple, there wouldn’t be such a long history of highly touted shake-ups, reorganizations, and innovations now used as case studies for what not to do.

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All Our Pretty Sons

All our pretty sons on the playground running in bright colors, their high, bright voices ringing out. Now the slides, now climbing, now leaping from swings. They’re wonder-struck at the sight of a green maple tree spilling its magic, waving its arms at blue sky. They are so little, the language of violence hasn’t yet entered them. Older boys haven’t yet taught them how to be cruel. They touch the world with small hands and are delighted—a xylophone bell ringing a rainbow of sounds like concentric circles cast by a pebble on the surface of a lake. It’s late afternoon. We join the shadows of other mothers, pushing our swinging children. Little parabolas. They go higher and higher into what seems an endless sky. The enormous shadows thrown by our bodies are us but not us, like silhouettes of women moving behind white sheets on a clothesline. And now this evening before the solstice, swinging our sons and the shadows of our sons suspended in midair. We own nothing, not even our own shadows, tethered as we are to time.

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The Overlooked Danger That's Massacring Wildlife

The surface of the United States is crisscrossed by 4 million miles of public roads—more than that of any other nation in the world. Roads are an essential part of infrastructure; they allow people, goods, and services to flow quickly and efficiently from one corner of the country to another. Bud Moore, who began a long career with the U.S. Forest Service in 1934, and spent decades cutting roads into the American West, once believed that these incursions also benefited wildlife and wildlands. With better access, “elk could be cared for. Natural stream fisheries could be improved. Log jams could be moved … to create more room for fish to spawn.” Nature was messy, he reasoned; human beings could bring order to it.The environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb shows otherwise in his new book, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. Crushing turtles, severing ancient deer migration routes, isolating cougar populations—Goldfarb argues that “there may be nothing humans do that causes more misery to more wild animals than driving.” Even Moore realized this toward the end of his life, noting in his 1996 book that “none of us had the wisdom to foresee the consequences.”

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