T-Mobile users saw other customers' personal data due to "system glitch"

A T-Mobile mistake during an overnight technology update resulted in some customers seeing the private information of other users today. T-Mobile users posting on social media said they saw other customers' billing details instead of their own during the incident that reportedly lasted for three hours or so this morning.

Continued here

After 'Absurdly Long' 100-Day Freeze, Rat Kidneys Were Successfully Transplanted

Thousands of donated organs are discarded every year. As soon as one becomes available, doctors race to find a compatible recipient—but transplantation time lines are measured in hours, and many organs still can't be used. Now researchers publishing in Nature Communications have successfully preserved rat kidneys for 100 days before thawing and transplanting them into other rats.Scientists have cryogenically preserved organs for decades via vitrification: cooling them so quickly that ice cannot form and rupture cells. But thawing them quickly enough to avoid damage has proved nearly impossible. “If the outside heats faster than the middle, you get thermal stress—like when you drop an ice cube in water and you hear it crack,” says study author Erik Finger, a transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota. “You could basically put a crack right through the middle of the organ and make it not function.”

Continued here

Move over, Cordyceps, there's a new "zombie" parasite to haunt our dreams

Parasites that control and alter the behavior of their hosts are well-known in nature. Most notably, there is a family of zombifying parasitic fungi called Cordyceps—more than 400 different species, each targeting a particular insect species, whether it be ants, dragonflies, cockroaches, aphids, or beetles. In fact, Cordyceps inspired the premise of The Last of Us game and subsequent TV series. And earlier this month we reported on a study of how a parasitic worm (trematode) targets a particular species of marsh-dwelling brown shrimp (amphipod), turning the shrimp an orange hue and altering the host shrimp's behavior.

Continued here

Intel's biggest laptop CPU update in years is a huge departure from past designs

Intel’s next-generation Meteor Lake laptop processors are nearing release—the company announced this week that the first processors will launch on December 14. It’s unclear whether actual Core and Core Ultra systems will be available to buy on that date, but at a bare minimum, the official announcement will pave the way to many laptop announcements at CES in January.

Continued here

You Might Like

Early Prime Day TV Deals Are Already Here

Black Friday is almost synonymous with great deals on TVs. The original American shopping holiday has featured bargain televisions going back to the days of big-screen sets that weighed as much as a refrigerator. Amazon's own shopping holidays are increasingly catching up. In July, Prime Day deals on TVs were plentiful, including screaming sales on sets from LG, Samsung, and Vizio. We expect similar sales for Prime Big Deals Days, Amazon's new October event which will be on October 10 and 11, 2023.Maybe it's the start of the NFL season and fall TV schedule, but some of the current TV deals are actually on par with what we've seen on Prime Day. We will have the best Prime Day TV deals in October, tracking prices closely on top WIRED-recommended TVs, soundbars, and 4K streaming devices. In the meantime, here are a few current TV sales to keep an eye on.

Continued here

French drillers may have stumbled upon a mammoth hydrogen deposit

On the outskirts of the small town of Folschviller in eastern France stand three nondescript sheds. One of these temporary structures has recently become a hive of activity due to a continuous stream of visitors, including scientists, journalists, and the public.

Continued here

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.

Continued here

The UK Is Burning Climate Pledges to Fuel a Culture War

The UK government has taken the unusual step of scaling back major climate commitments, despite widespread pushback from scientists, businesses, and lawmakers across the political divide. In a speech today, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the UK would push back deadlines for the planned phaseout of gas-powered vehicles, ending fossil-fuel heating in homes not connected to the natural-gas grid, and a proposed ban on the installation of natural-gas-powered boilers in new homes.“We’ve stumbled into a consensus about the future of our country that nobody seems to be happy with,” Sunak said of policies introduced previously by his own party. It should be up to the individual, not the government, to decide when to make green transitions such as switching to electric vehicles, he added, citing the cost-of-living crisis as a motivation for rolling back the policies.

Continued here

E-Commerce Platforms Must Prioritize the Consumer-Influencer Relationship

In China, content-based platforms are generating a growing proportion of e-commerce, presenting a growing threat to established platforms like Alibaba and JD.com. In this model, consumers buy products during their engagement with the content provider. Managing the platform to generate sales, therefore, is about enabling the right content to reach the right viewers. Savvy content-based platforms are leveraging AI to this trend and carefully curate their influencer relationships. Are the big retail platforms ready for this new model?

Continued here

Trump Is the Reason Women Can't Get Abortions

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion striking down Roe v. Wade triggered the emergence of an invasive system of surveillance and control targeting women as a class.In Nebraska, a mother and daughter pleaded guilty to charges related to the daughter having an abortion after their Facebook messages about acquiring abortion pills were handed over to authorities. In Texas—where the law grants those who snitch on acquaintances, friends, or loved ones who end a pregnancy financial remuneration—legislators want to outlaw searching for information about the procedure on the internet, and make traveling to get an abortion illegal. Aiming to extend their command over people’s lives into states that Republicans do not control, conservative judges have revived archaic federal laws seeking to ban the delivery of abortion medication all over the country. Every day, the conservative legal movement seeks to discover new ways to extend state domination over people’s private lives in order to prevent women from deciding for themselves whether to have a child.

Continued here

Leading Change May Need to Begin with Changing Yourself

Behavior change is hard, but it’s a skill leaders who want to succeed amid near-constant organizational change need to develop. By increasing their self-awareness, committing to change, overcoming limiting thoughts, and deliberately practicing new behaviors, leaders raise the likelihood that the change initiatives they’re tasked to lead will be successful.

Continued here

What Comes After the British Museum?

In 1802, a marble procession of horses, humans, and gods was chiseled and sawed off the pediments where they had long watched over Athens, and marched overland to the port of Piraeus to begin a forced odyssey from which they have not yet returned. In Alexandria, at about the same time, a slab of igneous rock etched with Greek and hieroglyphics was packed onto a 40-gun ship and made to brave the waves of the Mediterranean. Later, a colossal pair of winged lions floated on rafts down the Tigris to Baghdad and eventually sailed out of the Persian Gulf, around Africa’s cape, and into the Atlantic. In 1868, a giant, heavy-browed head undertook an even longer journey, voyaging all the way from Polynesia to London, to converge with these other ancient travelers inside a single building called the British Museum.When the British Museum opened its doors to the public in 1759, it was a new thing in the world. Scholars of museology have since given it a name: an “encyclopedic museum,” an institution that tries to tell the whole story of human culture across a single collection of objects. The Brits’ idea caught on. After the Bastille fell, the Jacobins converted the Louvre royal palace into a museum with similarly comprehensive aims. During the 19th and 20th centuries, American industrialists filled the Met and the Getty with encyclopedic collections.

Continued here

How to stop your amygdala from hijacking your emotions

Have you ever been surprised by the intensity of your own [emotional] response? Or perhaps by the intensity of someone else’s response to a seemingly innocent question or comment? It’s biological. No, I’m serious, it is. And scientifically, it’s referred to as an amygdala hijack.The amygdala is a small but powerful part of the brain that serves as the seat of your emotions. Ordinarily, the brain works like this: The thalamus (the central processing system) takes in data, and then sends it on its way, first to the frontal cortex (the center of your logic and reason) and finally to the amygdala.

Continued here

OpenAI's new AI image generator pushes the limits in detail and prompt fidelity

On Wednesday, OpenAI announced DALL-E 3, the latest version of its AI image synthesis model that features full integration with ChatGPT. DALL-E 3 renders images by closely following complex descriptions and handling in-image text generation (such as labels and signs), which challenged earlier models. Currently in research preview, it will be available to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers in early October.

Continued here

What Emily Dickinson Left Behind

Few American writers are more intimately connected to a single house than Emily Dickinson was. Apart from brief trips to Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., the reclusive Dickinson did not stray far from her comfortable two-story residence in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she wrote nearly 2,000 poems. Only a handful were published in her lifetime, and all anonymously. The house, known as the Dickinson Homestead, and its contents—every sherry glass, quilt, and doll’s slipper—were the locus of her imagination. For Dickinson, the domestic and the literary form one seamless line. Last week, a public database cataloging all those family objects—more than 8,000 of them—went live. The unparalleled collection has been assembled by the Amherst-based Emily Dickinson Museum and stored in an undisclosed warehouse in Western Massachusetts. For the past year, museum staffers have unpacked, identified, stabilized, and photographed the items for future researchers. What this major offering won’t reveal is the circuitous, acrimonious story of who guarded the trove, and how it nearly disappeared.Upon Dickinson’s death, in 1886, her sister, Lavinia, entered the poet’s room in the Homestead to clean out her effects. She was astonished to find sheet upon sheet of verse, some bound together with string, tucked away in a bureau. The family knew that Dickinson wrote poetry and had corresponded with a few writers and editors, but they had no idea how many poems she had produced. Vinnie asked Susan Dickinson, her sister-in-law, to help sort the verse for possible publication. Susan lived next door at the house called the Evergreens with Austin Dickinson and their children. She delayed, and Vinnie became impatient.

Continued here

Don't repeat Google's mistake. "Agile innovation" can unleash and retain talent

It was all looking inevitable. Google/Alphabet, funded by its near-monopoly on search ads, had invested heavily in generative artificial intelligence. For years, this “superstar company” had their pick of software engineers and other talent. Multiple Google executives told me some version of, “After aggressive hiring and the acquisition of Deepmind, we had two-thirds of all the superstar AI talent.” With such advantages, the question seemingly wasn’t whether Google would come to dominate the AI industry — people took that for granted. Instead, they wondered whether governments would intervene to prevent its control or perhaps whether AI would become sentient and try to dominate us instead.Then, out of nowhere, a startup funded by Microsoft managed to win the AI race with ChatGPT. Google’s leaders panicked, declared code-red, and quickly released a ChatGPT imitator with a flawed demo. The company’s stock lost a third of its value, while Microsoft, long derided as a dead-end for innovation, regained its earlier heights. It’s too early to count Google out, but the company was so alarmed that it called in help from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Continued here

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.

Continued here

JWST's first triple-image supernova could save the Universe

One of the biggest problems facing modern astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists — every scientist who studies the Universe itself for a living — is that we do not understand how quickly the Universe is expanding. The most direct method of measuring the expansion rate, by looking at more and more distant objects and tracking how quickly they appear to recede from us, consistently gives answers that are about 9% higher than the values we get from looking at signals imprinted in the very early Universe. This has led many to question whether there’s a crisis in cosmology, and if we need to overhaul our entire way of looking at the Universe.One potential solution could lie in directly measuring larger numbers of objects whose intrinsic properties are known — so-called “standard candles” like type Ia supernovae — at ever-greater distances. A huge challenge to this has been that supernovae are rare, infrequent, and very difficult to observe at extreme distances. Even with its unprecedentedly powerful eyes, JWST, with its narrow field-of-view, will only observe these events rarely.

Continued here

Foreign tech workers hit hard by South Africa's new immigration laws

Ishmael Sithole had high hopes for his future when he graduated with a degree in software engineering from the University of Zimbabwe in 2009. Within a few weeks, he had secured a well-paid corporate job in Harare, but Zimbabwe’s economy was already crumbling. As the fast-rising inflation rate rendered Sithole’s salary meaningless, he migrated to South Africa on an asylum visa — he had heard stories about tech skills being in demand in the country. By 2013, Sithole had secured a critical skills work visa. He now worked at global mining company Anglo American, and earned around 37,000 rand ($1,956) per month.

Continued here

Linux gives up on 6-year LTS kernels, says they're too much work

The LTS (long-term support) period for the Linux kernel is being cut down. In 2017, the kernel jumped from two years of support to six. Now, six years later, it turns out that's a lot of work. ZDNet reports that at the Open Source Summit Europe this week (videos will be out in a few weeks), Linux Weekly News executive editor Jonathan Corbet announced the Linux kernel will return to two years of LTS support.

Continued here

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.

Continued here

The true story behind the US' first federal monuments

"Are you sitting down? I have news for you." Gwen Marable's cousin from the US state of Ohio called her at home in Maryland about 27 years ago. "We are descended from the sister of Benjamin Banneker, Jemima."The Banneker family, which numbers over 5,000 known descendants today, only learned about this astonishing connection to their ground-breaking but little-known ancestor through the wonders of DNA testing. As such, no personal stories about him, no artifacts, were handed down through the generations.

Continued here

Grisham, Martin join authors suing OpenAI: "There is nothing fair about this" [Updated]

Yesterday, popular authors including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and George Saunders joined the Authors Guild in suing OpenAI, alleging that training the company's large language models (LLMs) used to power AI tools like ChatGPT on pirated versions of their books violates copyright laws and is "systematic theft on a mass scale."

Continued here

Radical Vegans Are Trying to Change Your Diet

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.A few hens lay on the ground, unmoving, ill or dead. Many were injured, with festering sores on their feet. Some bled from their posteriors—they were likely suffering from a prolapsed cloaca, a painful, potentially fatal condition often caused by repeated egg-laying. Others looked dirty and ragged, though chickens, given a choice in the matter, tend to be fastidious. Everything, everywhere in this farm for “free-range” chickens was covered in excrement. The industrial hangar was so enormous, filled with so many clone-birds, that I felt like I was staring into an infinity mirror.

Continued here

To find a new world, watch how a planet dances with its star

We are witnessing a revolution in our knowledge of other worlds, planets orbiting stars far away from our Solar System. Once the stuff of imagination and speculative fiction, we now can state with confidence that most stars have planets orbiting them. That we can do this is no small feat: Finding a tiny planet around bright stars dozens or hundreds of light-years from Earth is extremely difficult.Planets don’t shine, of course, and are overwhelmed by their star’s brightness. So, the techniques to hunt for exoplanets rely on indirect methods. Because planets affect the stars they orbit, we can look for those effects to find them.

Continued here

Amazon Upgrades Alexa for the ChatGPT Era

When Amazon launched the Alexa virtual assistant nine years ago, its ability to decode voice commands to set a timer or play a song seemed almost magical. Today, the bar for impressive language skills is much higher, thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Amazon is giving its voice assistant a reboot that takes advantage of the technology behind the new wave of chatbots that can engage in remarkably lifelike conversation.Amazon announced the upgrade to Alexa at an event held at its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The assistant will answer much more complex questions and engage in more flowing, open-ended conversation, dropping the need for users to say “Alexa …” at each turn.

Continued here

It's Time to Engineer the Sky

Global warming is so rampant that some scientists say we should begin altering the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight, even if it jeopardizes rain and cropsOn the crisp afternoon of February 12, 2023, two men parked a Winnebago by a field outside Reno, Nev. They lit a portable grill and barbecued a fist-sized mound of yellow powdered sulfur, creating a steady stream of colorless sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas. Rotten-egg fumes permeated the air as they used a shop vac to pump the gas into a balloon about the diameter of a beach umbrella. Then they added enough helium to the balloon to take it aloft, attached a camera and GPS sensor, and released it into the sky. They tracked the balloon for the next several hours as it rose into the stratosphere and drifted far to the southwest, crossing over the Sierra Nevada Mountains before popping and releasing its gaseous contents. The contraption plummeted into a cow pasture near Stockton, Calif.

Continued here

A Newly Discovered Brain Signal Marks Recovery from Depression

Implanted electrodes pick up a pattern of brain waves that can signal the presence or absence of depression and perhaps predict its relapseOn February 4, 2019, before he was wheeled into the operating room, Tyler Hajjar, then age 28, hugged his mother and quipped, “It’s just brain surgery.” Hajjar, a resident of Johns Creek, Ga., had traveled to Emory University in Atlanta to outfit his brain with a device that might reset it in hopes of easing the depression that had severely diminished his quality of life—and, at times, threatened that life—for a decade. “Sometimes the best thing I could do was literally just lay in bed all day,” he recalls of his long illness, “but honestly, that was better than anything else that was going through my mind—which would have been irreversible.”

Continued here

OpenAI's Dall-E 3 Is an Art Generator Powered by ChatGPT

OpenAI has announced Dall-E 3, its latest AI art tool. It uses OpenAI's smash-hit chatbot, ChatGPT, to help create more complex and carefully composed works of art by automatically expanding on a prompt in a way that gives the generator more detailed and coherent instruction.What's new with Dall-E 3 is how it removes some of the complexity required with refining the text that is fed to the programâwhat's known as "prompt engineering"âand how it allows users to make refinements through ChatGPT's conversational interface. The new tool could help lower the bar for generating sophisticated AI artwork, and it could help OpenAI stay ahead of the competition thanks to the superior abilities of its chatbot.

Continued here

How to Write a Resume That Stands Out

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span><span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>

Continued here

The Most Interesting Things Amazon Announced Today

Every fall, Amazon holds a “Devices and Services” media event where it unleashes a flood of new gadgets and software into the world. At the 2022 edition, Amazon announced a Kindle with a stylus, a robot dog, and a refreshed line of Echoes and Eeros, among other smart home gadgets.This year, the company was eager to prove that it hasn’t been left behind by its rivals’ recent advances in artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces. Executives showed off a smarter version of Alexa that’s been given an AI boost, as well as new smart home products that harness Amazon’s computer vision, machine intelligence, and face recognition technologies. There were some stumbling blocks during the presentation, but here are the highlights of what Amazon announced today.

Continued here

How a Multinational Publishing House Pivoted to Digital

HANNAH BATES: Welcome to HBR On Strategy, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock new ways of doing business. Wolters Kluwer — the Dutch multinational corporation — started in the 1830s as a publishing house. But it has grown into a global, information services company – and now earns more than 90% of its revenue from digital products. In this episode, chair and CEO Nancy McKinstry discusses how she successfully shifted the company’s strategy to focus on digital products – like tax compliance software for accountants. She explains how investments in product innovation contributed to Wolters Kluwer’s successful digital transformation. McKinstry also emphasizes the importance of patience, as consumers slowly adopted new products and services. This episode originally aired on HBR IdeaCast in December 2019. Here it is.

Continued here

Permission denied for reentry of Varda's orbiting experiment capsule

A first-of-its-kind commercial spacecraft owned by an in-space manufacturing startup called Varda Space Industries has been in orbit two months longer than originally planned, waiting for government approval to return to Earth with a cache of pharmaceutical specimens.

Continued here

Biodiversity Flourishes in Historic Lawn Turned Wildflower Meadow

An experiment at the University of Cambridge highlights the environmental cost of a well-manicured lawnThe well-manicured lawn behind King's College Chapel at the University of Cambridge predated the American Revolution. Then, in 2019, an ecologically minded head gardener secured permission to tear up a portion of the grass and plant a meadow in its place. Before long it bloomed with poppies, buttercups and Queen Anne's lace.

Continued here

iOS 17 review: StandBy for more features

With the impending launch of Vision Pro and visionOS, it might look like iOS and iPadOS aren’t Apple’s main focus right now. Nevertheless, this year’s update promises some notable additions—even if some won’t be available until weeks or months down the line.

Continued here

Should You Get a Blood Test For Alzheimer's?

Consumers can now get easy tests for Alzheimer’s. But these tests may not really help patients that much–yet.Josh Fischman: We bring you the latest vital health news: Discoveries that affect your body and your mind.

Continued here