   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S69Social media is a double-edged sword for the public image of Canadian labour unions   Union membership in Canada has been declining over the past four decades. In 2022, the percentage of employees who are union members fell to 29 per cent from 38 per cent in 1981. This decline has been partly attributed to the stagnant or outdated image of unions, which makes it difficult for some workers to relate to these organizations.There is hope that social media can breathe new life into the labour movement. Social media platforms offer unions the opportunity to communicate with their members, advocate for their causes, address grievances and rally public support swiftly and efficiently.
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S1Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter  Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean.
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S2Why You Shouldn't Treat Work Like School  Many young, talented people fall into the trap of treating work like school: thinking that their technical skills are enough, assuming that hard work alone will get them ahead, and believing that their efforts will lead to the equivalent of a high letter grade. That’s a big mistake. As the adage goes, “What got you here, won’t get you there.” Here are some things to remember as you embark on your career.
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S3How to Evaluate a Job Candidate's Critical Thinking Skills in an Interview  The oldest and still the most powerful tactic for fostering critical thinking is the Socratic method, developed over 2,400 years ago by Socrates, one of the founders of Western philosophy. The Socratic method uses thought-provoking question-and-answer probing to promote learning. It focuses on generating more questions than answers, where the answers are not a stopping point but the beginning of further analysis. Hiring managers can apply this model to create a different dialogue with candidates in a modern-day organization.
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S4Using Technology to Improve Supply-Chain Resilience  The Covid-19 pandemic brought many global supply chains to a halt. And as we emerged from the pandemic, many companies overcorrected by adopting “just-in-case inventory management.” What’s more, when consumer confidence varies widely from month-to-month and demand remains volatile, it is difficult for businesses to plan. In the apparel sector, for example, buyers must place peak-season orders six months in advance. With high volatility, demand forecasts in June can be completely different than actual demand in December. This raises the overall risk of either missing the season by not having enough, or facing enormous markdowns in January. To move forward, supply chain managers need more flexible, dynamic connections between trading partners to replace their current point-to-point, static connections that are unable to adapt to sudden, unexpected supply chain disruptions. What they need is a more modern, more responsive supply chain platform. This article discusses how today’s supply chain technology can help businesses build more resilience into their supply chains moving forward.
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S5Good Judgment Is a Competitive Advantage in the Age of AI  With generative AI, the technology game has changed — suddenly everyone is a potential programmer. But as we travel these technological leaps forward, there’s still a fundamental, longstanding capability every organization will need to realize AI’s true potential: judgment. That idea of judgment in the age of AI was a central tenet of the work of the authors’ late colleague, visionary friend, and longtime HBR contributor Alessandro Di Fiore. Alessandro believed in putting humans at the center and considered technology to be a way to help people augment their creativity, autonomy, and critical thinking. He argued that judgment will be the real competitive advantage for organizations as AI systems rise to new common operating standard.
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S6India's Tata wants a bigger bite of Apple's iPhone orders  Tata Group, one of India’s largest — and oldest — conglomerates, is eyeing a share in iPhone manufacturing in India. The sector has so far been dominated by Taiwanese manufacturers Foxconn, Pegatron, and Wistron.Tata Electronics, the company’s young mobile parts manufacturing arm, currently already makes iPhone casings at a factory in Hosur in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. It received orders for assembling iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus this year, according to market intelligence firm TrendForce.
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S7If You're Pregnant, These Vaccines Could Save Your and Your Baby's Life  The RSV vaccine is the latest in a series of immunizations that could protect pregnant people and their babies from severe disease and deathWhen the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the most recent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine on August 21, it became the first vaccine that had been developed specifically to be given during pregnancy to protect the baby after birth to receive the go-ahead. But it’s not the first vaccine that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended during pregnancy. It joins shots for influenza, Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis) and COVID—and is part of a strategy of immunizing people during pregnancy that has gained steam and accumulated supporting evidence in the past two decades.
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S8Bizarre Quantum Theory Explains Why Your Coffee Takes So Long to Drip through a Narrow Filter  Physicist John Cardy and his colleague just won the 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. We spoke with Cardy about conformal field theory, 2D black holes and coffee filtersWhat happens when matter transitions from one phase to another—a solid to a liquid or a liquid to a gas? Describing these critical points precisely, in solvable mathematical terms, is no simple feat. And for theoretical physicist John Cardy, work in this area has led to insights into everything from the way fluids percolate through a network of pores to calculations of the entropy of black holes.
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S9Autism, Human Connection and the 'Double Empathy' Problem  Despite stereotypes, many autistic people yearn for meaningful relationships, but they are daunted by neurotypicals’ assumptions about them“He paid no attention to persons around him. When taken into a room, he completely disregarded the people and instantly went for objects, preferably those that could be spun.” With this memorable description of his first autistic patient in 1943, a five-year boy he called “Donald T.,” child psychiatrist Leo Kanner established a template for viewing people with autism as so disinterested in forging connections with others that they ignore their own parents.
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S10Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?  Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychismMore than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Such things as colors, tastes and smells “are no more than mere names,” Galileo declared, for “they reside only in consciousness.” These qualities aren’t really out there in the world, he asserted, but exist only in the minds of creatures that perceive them. “Hence if the living creature were removed,” he wrote, “all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”
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S11Song of the Stars, Part 1: Transforming Space into Symphonies  Space is famously silent, but astronomers and musicians are increasingly turning astronomical data into sound as a way to make discoveries and inspire people who are blind or visually impaired.Jason Drakeford: It’s 2016, and we’re in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. A live orchestra and choir perform opera music while thousands of people press tiny cardboard boxes to their faces. This is the Hubble Cantata.
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S12S13Wind Energy Could Get Safer for Bats with New Research  Wind turbines threaten several bat species, but the Biden administration is funding research to reduce casualtiesCLIMATEWIRE | Nearly a million bats are killed each year in the United States by colliding with spinning wind turbines, prompting the Energy Department to give scientists millions of dollars to find ways to minimize bat casualties.
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S14How AI Changes Our Sense of Self  Instead of focusing on how people feel about technology, marketing research should examine how technology makes people feel about themselves, according to Wharton’s Stefano Puntoni.Generative AI is advancing so rapidly that market research needs to evolve along with it, by shifting its traditional focus from how people interact with technology to understanding how technology makes people feel about themselves.
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S15How I found myself -- by impersonating other people  Ever think you'd hear Sandra Bullock, Britney Spears and Dolly Parton in one TED Talk? Here they are, courtesy of "Saturday Night Live" star Melissa Villaseñor. She shares the life lessons of a comedian -- complete with celebrity impressions -- and reminds us to embrace all of our voices, even if they're a little silly.
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S16S17How to Actually Clean Install Windows 11  PCs, for a long time, had a bloatware problem. The major PC manufacturers—Dell, Asus, Acer, and the like—had a bad habit of including "free trials" of software like Norton AntiVirus on new devices. The software companies paid to be included. This got so bad in the late 2000s that many people simply chose to reinstall Windows on new computers before even attempting to use them.These days, though, a "clean Windows install" is an oxymoron, according to Andrew Cunningham. He persuasively argued in an Ars Technica piece that Microsoft itself is now the company adding all of the bloat.
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S18Booking.com Shows the True Scope of the EU's Big Tech Crackdown  When the European Union issued new rules for the internet earlier this year, officials in Brussels envisioned a system that would stop US Big Tech from growing out of control. But the bloc's latest antitrust decision sent a message that it's not only American tech giants that will be subject to increasing scrutiny, but European tech companies too.Today an acquisition by travel company Booking has been blocked by EU regulators, who cited concerns that the deal could harm competition and drive up prices. Booking Holdings, whose biggest subsidiary is the Amsterdam-based online travel agent Booking.com, was prohibited from buying Swedish peer Etraveli. Booking's chief executive hit back at the European Commission's decision, claiming it was "wrong" about both the law and the details of the case.
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S19Satellite Images Show the Devastating Cost of Sudan's Aerial War  On Thursday, the head of the Sudanese Army, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, asking for increased aid from the international community for Sudan and condemning the paramilitary groups that he says "have killed, looted, raped, robbed, and seized citizens' homes and properties, and destroyed infrastructure and government buildings." Since April, the country has been gripped by a civil conflict between the government and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a rebel group backed by the Russian mercenary company, the Wagner Group. At the beginning of the week, ahead of the General Assembly, a group of 50 human rights and humanitarian organizations published an open letter urgently calling for the UN Security Council to address the crisis in Sudan.A new report from the Conflict Observatory at Yale University has used satellite imagery and open source investigative tools to chart the catastrophic damage caused by fighting in the capital city of Khartoum. Open source imagery has been particularly hard to come by in Sudan, due in part to power and telecom blackouts, which makes it hard to assess the full extent of the damage caused by the conflict.
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S20How to Make a Pig Heart Transplant Last in a Person  A 58-year-old man has become the second person ever to receive a heart transplant from a genetically modified pig. The patient, Lawrence Faucette, was facing near death from heart failure and wasn’t eligible for a traditional transplant with a human organ.So surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center gave him the option of receiving a highly experimental procedure that has only been tried once before. Faucette agreed, and after undergoing the surgery on September 20, his heart is reportedly functioning well without any assistance from supportive devices. “At least now I have hope, and I have a chance,” Faucette said in a university statement before the procedure. For decades, the Maryland group and others have been exploring xenotransplantation, or transplanting animal organs into people, as a way to ease the donor organ shortage. In the United States alone, more than 104,000 people are waiting for a transplant, and 17 of them die each day. More than 3,000 are specifically in need of a heart, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
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S21FBI Agents Are Using Face Recognition Without Proper Training  The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has done tens of thousands of face recognition searches using software from outside providers in recent years. Yet only 5 percent of the 200 agents with access to the technology have taken the bureau’s three-day training course on how to use it, a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) this month reveals. The bureau has no policy for face recognition use in place to protect privacy, civil rights, or civil liberties.Lawmakers and others concerned about face recognition have said that adequate training on the technology and how to interpret its output is needed to reduce improper use or errors, although some experts say training can lull law enforcement and the public into thinking face recognition is low risk.
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S22Getty Images Plunges Into the Generative AI Pool  Earlier this year, the stock-photo service provider Getty Images sued Stability AI over what Getty said was the misuse of more than 12 million Getty photos in training Stability’s AI photo-generation tool, Stable Diffusion.Now Getty Images is releasing its own AI photo-generation tool, which will be available to its commercial customers. And it’s bringing in the big dog to do it: Nvidia.
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S23How Mars lost its magnetic field -- and then its oceans  The surface of Mars is barren and dry, with what little water there is tied up in icecaps or perhaps existing below the surface. But if you look closely at the surface, you will see what looks like shorelines or canyons where massive floods once took place.Billions of years ago, the atmosphere of Mars may have been denser and the air slightly warmer. By looking at deltas present on Mars, similar to river deltas on Earth, some have suggested that oceans used to partially cover the planet. (See Strange Map #1043.) Others have looked at the composition of Mars meteorites, which can show how the chemistry of Mars today compares to what the planet looked like billions of years ago. Both lines of evidence suggest that about four billion years ago, Mars’ northern hemisphere was covered with a massive ocean.
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S24When neutron stars collide  NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller talks about a heavy subject matter: neutron stars. These dead stars are so dense that just one teaspoonful of neutron star matter would equal the mass of Mount Everest. Two neutron stars in orbit around each other will eventually collide, and when they do, they create ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Thanks to LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, scientists can detect these gravitational ripples by detecting disturbances in laser light.
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S25Are America's distinct accents dying out?  In a recently published study, linguists at the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Brigham Young University reported that white Georgians seem to be losing their classic Southern accent. Analyzing vocal recordings of 135 native Georgians born between 1887 and 2003, they found that a few of the distinct vowel pronunciations that define the Southern accent have been disappearing over the generations. For example, words like “prize” and “fit” — once pronounced “prahz” and “feee-uht” — are now more often spoken as “prah-eez” and “fiht.” The shift was greatest between Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, and it has continued with Millennials and Gen Zers.These findings are the latest from a string of studies showing that other regional accents are fading as well. New Englanders are pronouncing more Rs (“harbor” vs. “hahbah”). Michiganders are altering the way they say their As. And Texans are losing their twang.
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S265 philosophy books that shaped Chinese thought  China is the cradle of the world’s most ancient continuous civilization. Boasting over 4,000 years of documented history, Chinese thought and philosophy offer a wealth of insights. Luckily for us, as in Western philosophy, a few key texts have exerted influence over the rest. Here, we spotlight five texts that have shaped Chinese thought, and more recently gained an international audience.The I Ching, also known as The Book of Changes, dates back to the 10th century BCE. The author is unknown. However, some traditions name Fu Xi as the author of the first section and the Duke of Zhou as the author of the second. The author of the commentaries known as the Ten Wings is traditionally listed as Confucius.
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S27Donna Noble is back and ready for a fight in trailer for Doctor Who specials  Doctor Who marks its 60th anniversary this year with three specials featuring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, with the first slated to air in November. The latest trailer shows the good Doctor reunited with his former companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) and facing off against two classic adversaries from the Whovian archives: an alien race called the Meeps and a celestial being known as The Toymaker, played by Neil Patrick Harris.
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S28The 2024 BMW i7 M70--electric luxury turned up to 11  LISBON, PORTUGAL—Driving BMW's new electric 7 Series was one of the true automotive surprises of 2022. The automaker rolled out electric and combustion-tech versions at the same time, with the electric i7 bettering the gas-burning 760i in just about every way. Now, BMW has sent its biggest and boldest EV off to its M division, the in-house tuning and motorsport people. The resulting car is the fastest-accelerating and most expensive electric BMW to date.
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S29Supreme Court considers limits on White House contacts with social media  The Supreme Court on Friday extended a stay of a lower-court order that would limit the Biden administration's contacts with social media firms, giving justices a few more days to consider whether to block the ruling entirely. The court could rule by the middle of this week on the Biden administration motion in a case in which the states of Missouri and Louisiana allege that speech related to COVID-19 and other topics was illegally suppressed at the behest of government officials.
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S30Pixel 8 leak promises 7 years of OS updates--even more than an iPhone  The Pixel 8 is rapidly approaching its October 4 unveiling, but before then there are a bunch of leaks out there. Reliable leaker Kamila Wojciechowska has a whole list of Pixel 8 and 8 Pro specs over at 91mobiles, along with some Pixel market materials. The big news is that Google is finally giving its Pixel phones a longer support window. Pixel phones are getting seven years of updates, which is longer than Apple. Google pitches the Pixel phones as the flagship of the Android ecosystem, and now, if this spec sheet pans out, the OS maker is finally giving them an update plan to match.
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S31ChatGPT update enables its AI to "see, hear, and speak," according to OpenAI  On Monday, OpenAI announced a significant update to ChatGPT that enables its GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 AI models to analyze images and react to them as part of a text conversation. Also, the ChatGPT mobile app will add speech synthesis options that, when paired with its existing speech recognition features, will enable fully verbal conversations with the AI assistant, OpenAI says.
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S32The first foldable PC era is unfolding  Lenovo launched the first foldable laptop in 2020, but the first real era of foldable PCs is only starting to unfold now. Today, LG became the latest OEM to announce a foldable-screen laptop, right after HP announced its first attempt, the Spectre Foldable PC, earlier this month.
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S33S34Ford pauses work on $3.5 billion battery factory in Michigan  The past couple of years have seen a flurry of newly announced battery factories in North America. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is the main reason—it ties an electric vehicle's federal tax credit to domestically sourced batteries, among other conditions, so automakers have been scrambling to build that capacity locally. But today's news is rather more unusual. According to the Detroit News, Ford is pushing pause on one such facility, suspending all work on the $3.5 billion project.
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S35S36S37More Schubert  I’ve passed the house of Mrs. Revere Often enough when her windows were open To know she’d rather listen to Schubert Most evenings than watch whatever the networks Are beaming into her neighbors’ homes.Now that she’s lived, as I have, far longer Than twice Schubert’s 31 years, I wonder if she’d be willing, as I tell myself I would be, to subtract some of the time still left her If it could be carried back to his era
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S38The Republican Betrayal of PEPFAR  How did one of President George W. Bush’s signature triumphs become a conservative target?Twenty years ago, a Republican president, George W. Bush, created the most successful, life-giving global-health program in history. This year, House Republicans appear determined to undermine it. If they succeed, it will be an act of extraordinary recklessness, done even while they claim to be the pro-life party.
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S39The Parents Trying to Pass Down a Language They Hardly Speak  Losing your family’s language can feel like an inevitable side effect of immigration—but it’s one I want to prevent.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.
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S40China Is All About Sovereignty. So Why Not Ukraine's?  Russia’s war has confronted Xi Jinping with a stark choice between standing for principle or defending his strategic partner in Moscow.By Beijing’s reckoning, the U.S.-led global order is in turmoil, and a Washington in decline has no answers to the world’s mounting problems. Fortunately for the future of humanity, however, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping does. He would like to replace Washington’s “rules-based” world order with a framework of his own—one whose most sacred principle is national sovereignty, or the right of states to govern themselves, free from outside interference.
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S41Dear Therapist: My Mother Is Rewarding My Brother's Bad Behavior  My brother is incarcerated. When he is released, he will be in his late 50s and will have no assets. As a felon and a sex offender, he will probably have difficulty finding a good job. He will move in with my mother, assuming she is still living. My mother has chosen to leave her mortgage-free home and its contents to him, and to divide the rest of her assets equally between us. There are no conditions in place, such as leaving the property in a trust, to deal with his possible recidivism, marriage, or financial irresponsibility (he has a history of foreclosures).The rest of her assets are not much, because she has spent so much on his legal fees and continues to support him financially while he is in prison. She is making significant improvements to her house, which will be his house. The value of his inheritance will continue to increase, while her liquid assets will continue to decrease. In the meantime, I am the one providing her with the everyday help and support she needs.
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S42Lincoln's Lessons  Abraham Lincoln was a politician, though people like to describe him in ways that sound more noble. Contemporaries considered him a Christlike figure who suffered and died so that his nation might live. Tolstoy called him “a saint of humanity.” Lincoln himself said he was only the “accidental instrument” of a “great cause”—but he preserved the country and took part in a social revolution because he engaged in politics. He did the work that others found dirty or beneath them.He always considered slavery wrong, but felt that immediate abolition was beyond the federal government’s constitutional power and against the wishes of too many voters. So he tried to contain slavery, with no idea how it would end, and moved forward only when political circumstances changed. “I shall adopt new views so fast as they appear to be true views,” he said shortly before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.
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S43S44Winners of the 2023 Astronomy Photographer of the Year  The winning and commended images from this year’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, run by Royal Observatory Greenwich, were recently announced. More than 4,000 entries were received this year from photographers in 64 countries, submitted to nine different categories. The contest organizers have shared some of the incredible winners and runners-up below—to see all of the top and shortlisted images, be sure to visit the exhibition site. Mars-set. Winner, Our Moon. An occultation of Mars that took place on December 8, 2022. During the occultation, the moon passed in front of the planet Mars, allowing the astrophotographer to capture both objects together. The image shows Mars behind the moon’s southern side in impressive detail. #
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S45These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech  Editor’s note: This searchable database is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can read about the origins of the database here, and an analysis of what’s in it here.This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. I wrote in The Atlantic about how the data set, known as “Books3,” was based on a collection of pirated ebooks, most of them published in the past 20 years. Since then, I’ve done a deep analysis of what’s actually in the data set, which is now at the center of several lawsuits brought against Meta by writers such as Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay, who claim that its use in training generative AI amounts to copyright infringement.
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S46S47A Little Bit O' Magic in Chicago  You’ve heard of Chicago-style pizza and Chicago-style hot dogs, but what about Chicago-style magic?Kaitlyn: We know it’s not called “the Windy City” because of the wind, but we don’t remember why it’s actually called that. Maybe it’s because, on our eighth annual fall trip, Ashley took me and Lizzie to her hometown of Chicago for a whirlwind tour of its most important sights. Hmm?
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S48The Next Supercontinent Could Be a Terrible, Terrible Place  About 250 million years from now, living on the coast could feel like being stuck inside a hot, wet plastic bag. And that bag would actually be the best home on the planet. Inland areas would be hotter than summer in the Gobi Desert, and up to four times as dry. This is life on Pangea Ultima, the supercontinent that an international group of scientists has predicted will form on Earth in a quarter of a billion years.“It wouldn’t be a fun place to live,” Alexander Farnsworth, a climatologist at the University of Bristol, told me. Farnsworth is the lead author on a new paper published today in Nature Geoscience detailing how a supercomputer model predicted what Earth would be like in the far-distant future. According to his team’s calculations, 250 million years from now, the continents will reunite and Earth will become unbearably hot, rendering much of the land uninhabitable and leading to mass land-mammal extinction. If the team is right, everything would be, as Farnsworth put it, “very bleak.”
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S49What It Would Take to Avoid a Shutdown  How we arrived at the brink of a government shutdown—and how the power to avert it lies with Kevin McCarthyThis 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.
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S50You can be a materialist and find meaning in the universe | Psyche Ideas  During my early adult life, as an upstanding member of not only North American Society but the most secular version of it – scientific academia – I strenuously ignored questions like this one. Along with most of my peers, I pushed existential concerns aside, to be dealt with… eventually. I had picked up the message that the meaning of life is not something productive members of our society are supposed to think much about. Or, if we must, we should simply accept that our existence has no meaning – so stop worrying about it and get a job! (Or, find a hobby! Make friends! Raise kids!)I went to grad school to get a PhD in psychological science, then became a psychology professor at a large Canadian university. I devoted much of my life to training graduate students, teaching undergrads, applying for grants, and publishing my research findings. I was granted tenure, the guarantee of a reasonably well-paid and prestigious job for life. And right around then, just as I faced the prospect of turning 40 with everything I’d worked my whole life toward checked off the to-do list, I realised something was missing.
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S51Angler Catches 283-Pound Alligator Gar in Texas, Potentially Setting Two World Records /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/17/45/174553a9-960e-41b7-a061-c3ba1ecf57d9/crocodile-thing.jpg) An angler in Texas made the catch of a lifetime when he reeled in a 283-pound alligator gar that is now poised to break two world records.Art Weston caught the enormous fish at Sam Rayburn Reservoir in southeast Texas on September 2. The reservoir, which is located about 140 miles northeast of Houston, is known for producing very large alligator gar (Atractosteus spatula), a distinctive-looking freshwater fish with a long snout and large, pointy teeth.
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S52S53S54A Sample of Ancient Asteroid Dust Has Landed Safely on Earth /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/bb/6b/bb6b68ea-98c7-4b52-829d-439d8a4886c0/53210883020_0f6135cb13_o.jpg) NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission retrieved bits of rock and dust from the asteroid Bennu, which could help scientists uncover the origins of life on our planetA capsule carrying bits of rock and dust from a distant asteroid touched down in Utah on Sunday morning. The asteroid samples—the first carried by a spacecraft to the United States—could help scientists better understand how planets formed in our solar system and trace the origin of organic molecules that led to the first life on Earth, according to a statement from NASA.
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S55S56Brainless Jellyfish Are Capable of Learning, Study Suggests /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/71/f7/71f7d250-18a1-4c4e-b8b4-9c841731d7c6/a_caribbean_box_jellyfish_credit_jan_bielecki.jpeg) Scientists provide evidence that tiny Caribbean box jellyfishâwhich lack a central nervous systemâcan learn to navigate through mangrove rootsIn the warm waters of the Caribbean, box jellyfish carefully dodge the roots of mangroves while hunting for small crustaceans to eat. Whether the water is murky or clear, the tiny creaturesâwhich are about the size of a grapeâavoid bumping into the roots, which could easily injure their soft bodies.
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S57Mathematicians Cross the Line to Get to the Point | Quanta Magazine  Imagine an endless piece of blank paper covered with a smattering of lines pointing every which way. A gust of wind comes and sprinkles dust on top of the paper â in effect covering the lines with points. Say a helpful mathematician tells you how much dust covers any one line. Based on that one piece of information, can you figure out how much dust is there in total?While there isn't enough information to give an exact answer, in 1999 Thomas Wolff, a mathematician at the California Institute of Technology, published a guess about the minimum amount of dust that must be covering the paper. This came to be called the Furstenberg set conjecture, after Hillel Furstenberg, whom Wolff credited with coming up with the problem.
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S58Three Differences Between Managers and Leaders  A young manager accosted me the other day. “I’ve been reading all about leadership, have implemented several ideas, and think I’m doing a good job at leading my team. How will I know when I’ve crossed over from being a manager to a leader?” he wanted to know.I didn’t have a ready answer, and it’s a complicated issue, so we decided to talk the next day. I thought long and hard, and came up with three tests that will help you decide if you’ve made the shift from managing people to leading them.
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S59S60S61 Reconnecting When Network Ties Go Dormant  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.We’ve known for a while that relationships that have fallen into a state of inactivity — or become dormant ties — can be resurrected. As people venture back into professional social settings after having experienced pandemic-induced disconnection, they are particularly keen to revive these inactive ties. Such connections have the potential to be incredibly valuable: During the period of dormancy, former contacts have been learning new things and developing new networks that could yield advice, referrals, emotional support, and even tangible resources.
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S62The 1979 riot that 'killed' disco  For fans of disco and baseball alike, the night of 12 July 1979 is one to remember for all the wrong reasons. In a notorious promotional stunt, a Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl detonated a dumpster filled with disco records between White Sox games at Comiskey Park, leading to a riot. Years later, Dahl claimed that disco was "probably on its way out" but admitted that his stunt "hastened its demise". Nile Rodgers of the disco group Chic told biographer Daryl Easlea, "It felt to us like a Nazi book-burning."More like this:- Why disco should be taken seriously- Stunning music from the US's most notorious prison- The forgotten godfathers of hip-hop
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S63An inside look at the real Rupert Murdoch  This week came the momentous news from media mogul Rupert Murdoch that he is stepping down as chairman of his companies Fox and News Corp, handing the roles over to his eldest son Lachlan from mid-November.While Murdoch has said he will stay on in the role of Chairman Emeritus, it represents a major loosening of the reins for a man who has exerted such a huge influence over British and US media and politics for decades. A divisive figure on both sides of the Atlantic, he was recently the inspiration for the hot-headed patriarch protagonist of hit TV show Succession, Logan Roy, which followed a feuding media dynasty with distinct similarities to the Murdochs.
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S64S65S66Young people with sexual or gender diversity are at higher risk of stopping their HIV treatment because of stigma and harsh laws  Ending the AIDS pandemic – particularly in eastern and southern Africa – cannot be achieved unless more resources are channelled to meet the needs of key vulnerable populations.This is one of the themes that emerged during an AIDS conference in June in South Africa. Prejudice against particular groups – such as men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender communities – interferes with treatment regimes and people’s adherence to treatment. These groups are also at higher risk from HIV due to increased levels of stigma, discrimination, violence and criminalisation.
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S67S68How long will a loved one live? It's difficult to hear, but harder not to know  Planning for the future is difficult for people living with a life-limiting illness. Clinicians, based on their experience, can offer broad estimates of survival — in days to weeks, weeks to months, or months to years. However, patients and their care partners often want greater precision when arranging or making decisions about their care. An accurate prediction of survival can enable earlier conversations about preferences and wishes at the end of life, and earlier introduction of palliative care.
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S70Why Einstein must be wrong: In search of the theory of gravity  Einstein’s theory of gravity — general relativity — has been very successful for more than a century. However, it has theoretical shortcomings. This is not surprising: the theory predicts its own failure at spacetime singularities inside black holes — and the Big Bang itself. Read more: Our understanding of black holes has changed over time
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