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 S57To Defend the Genome, These Cells Destroy Their Own DNA | Quanta Magazine   Marie Delattre was studying the sexual reproduction practices of microscopic worms when she noticed something unexpected. Under the microscope, an embryo of the nematode Mesorhabditis belari was dividing as it should, progressing from one cell to two to four. But inside a few cells she saw an inexplicable spray of DNA fragments floating around where they didn't belong."There was DNA everywhere, inside the nuclei and outside the nuclei â big chunks of DNA," she said. "I thought it was a dead embryo."
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S38S58How to Fight a Price War  Price wars—retaliatory cuts in prices to win customers—can devastate managers, companies, even entire industries. Yet they’re increasingly common in electronic and traditional commerce. Witness the great price battle of 1999 in the long-distance phone industry: after the dust cleared, AT&T, MCI, and Sprint all saw their stock prices dip by as much as 5%. To survive a price war unscathed, you need weapons other than price cuts. Emphasize your product’s quality, for example, or superior service. This article outlines both non-price and price tactics that let you walk away with the spoils of war.
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S62Time travel to the Tardis: 10 facts you need to know about Doctor Who before watching  The Doctor is a Time Lord from the "shining world of the seven systems", the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous, 250 million light years away from where you are (probably) reading this. The Doctor has been travelling across space and time in a time-travelling spaceship called the Tardis, protecting people, things and planets from malevolent aliens and monsters, armed with only a Sonic Screwdriver.As the Fourth Doctor (played by Tom Baker) said in an episode from 1983, "I never carry weapons. If people see you mean them no harm, they never hurt you – nine times out of 10" (the 10th time perhaps being the operative number). The Doctor does, however, carry a Sonic Screwdriver, a small, pen-like device that buzzes and glows when it is switched on. It can be used variously for fixing and breaking things, opening doors, and general scanning and investigation. It's not entirely clear how it works. Try not to think about it too much.
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S60Influencing can be a high-earning career. Why don't we take it seriously?  Most days, Chloe Homan's work schedule is jam-packed. The 32-year-old from Wisconsin, US, usually starts her week with planning and touching base with her team, while Tuesdays are back-to-back with meetings. Wednesday and Thursday are reserved for focused work. With Friday spent wrapping up loose ends before the weekend, Homan says she can sometimes rack up 80 to 90 hours of work each week. Yet in spite of her long hours and intense work schedule, plenty of people still don't see her line of work as a "real job". Homan is a professional influencer, who has been on the receiving end of plenty of eye-rolling about her career.
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S53The World's Oldest Post Office Gets New Owners /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/3a/f4/3af40906-c4cb-4d5b-9040-b8c5a4f0d964/gettyimages-848925856.jpg) The world’s oldest working post office has been operating continuously in southern Scotland since 1712. But when its owners decided they were ready to retire in 2019, some onlookers worried the facility would close and lose its title.Barry and Mary Ford have now taken over the 311-year-old site in Sanquhar, a small village situated about 50 miles south of Glasgow in Scotland’s Dumfries and Galloway region. They will be the 17th operators in the facility’s history.
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S67S52Artificial Wombs for Premature Babies Might Soon Begin Human Trials /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/2f/5f/2f5f711f-d9ef-413d-b5f8-9d176c8f575c/gettyimages-509885450.jpg) An FDA panel discussed the new technologyâtested only on animals so farâalong with its risks and potential to improve survival of preterm infantsA Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee met last week to discuss human trials of artificial wombs, which could one day be used to keep extremely premature, or preterm, infants alive.
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S54Earth's Next Supercontinent Could Wipe Out Mammals in 250 Million Years /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/57/31/5731443d-7cfb-4974-b01c-08e1157f08a0/gettyimages-1661641716.jpg) Termed "Pangea Ultima," the predicted future landmass might be extremely hot, plagued by volcanoes and largely inhospitable, per a new modeling studyIn 250 million years, the vast majority of Earth could become inhospitable to mammals as the planet's landmasses merge together to form the next supercontinent. At least, that's the dire outlook of a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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S51See Washington National Cathedral's New Racial Justice-Themed Stained-Glass Windows /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/4b/e5/4be5be4d-b4f8-4c3e-b490-16f2ea5a442e/windows-1.jpg) Designed by artist Kerry James Marshall, the panels replace windows depicting Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall JacksonFor more than 60 years, stained-glass windows honoring Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson hung at Washington National Cathedral. But after a gunman shot and killed nine Black worshippers at a church in South Carolina in 2015, the cathedral decided to take them down.
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S45So Much for 'Learn to Code'  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.The quickest way to second-guess a decision to major in English is this: have an extended family full of Salvadoran immigrants and pragmatic midwesterners. The ability to recite Chaucer in the original Middle English was unlikely to land me a job that would pay off my student loans and help me save for retirement, they suggested when I was a college freshman still figuring out my future. I stuck with English, but when my B.A. eventually spat me out into the thick of the Great Recession, I worried that they’d been right.
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S55S63Kindness has persisted in a competitive world - cultural evolution can explain why  Recently, I was walking with some fellow parents after nursery drop-off when we came across a five-pound note lying on the pavement. We stood around it for a moment, a bit awkwardly, until someone suggested putting it on a nearby bench. Then one of the parents remarked that we’d probably have behaved differently — that is, we would have just taken the money — had we been alone.Yet, despite a common theme of dismissing the ethical teachings of many organised religions worldwide, one of the points of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of repentance, is to help us learn to behave better regardless of who is watching. There’s an evolutionary beauty to the teachings of religions, which are the products of thousands of years of cultural change and refinement.
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S56Antarctic Winter Sea Ice Hits a Record Low 'by a Wide Margin' /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/5a/99/5a99c4a3-32a3-43da-a4dc-c2063adbc87d/gettyimages-167346783.jpg) On September 10, the ice reached its lowest annual maximum in the books amid a record-smashing year that’s ringing “alarm bells” for polar iceAt the end of each Antarctic winter, which occurs in September, the frigid continent’s sea ice has spread to its greatest extent of the year. This month, the ice reached its annual maximum on September 10—and it set a grim record.
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S66'Design of Coffee' course teaches engineering through brewing the perfect cup of coffee  Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching. In 2012, my colleague professor Tonya Kuhl and I were drinking coffee and brainstorming how to improve our senior-level laboratory course in chemical engineering. Tonya looked at her coffee and suggested, “How about we have the students reverse-engineer a Mr. Coffee drip brewer to see how it works?”
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S48The Origins of the Socialist Slur  Reconstruction-era opponents of racial equality popularized the charge that protecting civil rights would amount to the end of capitalism.For years after World War II, the “liberal consensus”—the New Deal idea that the federal government had a role to play in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and promoting infrastructure—was a true consensus. It was so widely popular that in 1950, the critic Lionel Trilling wrote of the United States that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”
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S65S70The Supreme Court's originalists have taken over - here's how they interpret the Constitution  Today a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices are either self-described originalists or strongly lean toward originalism. Yet less than 50 years ago, originalism was considered a fringe movement, hardly taken seriously by most legal scholars. Originalism is the theory that judges are bound to interpret the Constitution as it would have been interpreted in the historical era when it was written. Understood this way, originalism is the idea that judges must follow the law as written and not merely ignore it or reinterpret it to their liking.
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S50Facing a tedious to-do list? This trick could make it easier | Psyche Ideas  is a staff writer at Psyche. Her science journalism has appeared in Vice, The New York Times and Wired, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.It’s late afternoon, and your inbox is overflowing with emails. Imagine that many of them require a reply from you that involves intense concentration: they might be about complex logistics, or summarising sensitive work details to managers. And yet there’s another set you need to answer that is about a work party, an enjoyable event you’re looking forward to. This email task – mainly about choosing a restaurant – is lighter, fun even.
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S59 Halt Impostor Syndrome Before It Happens  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.Isabela is an associate at a global management consulting firm, where she started working shortly after earning an MBA from a top business school. Her strong analytical and quantitative skills, coupled with her interpersonal and communication skills, have garnered Isabela high performance ratings. But despite a stellar performance record and clients’ and senior managers’ characterization of her as “at manager level,” Isabela did not apply for the manager position that recently became available.
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S43Where the New Identity Politics Went Wrong  Don’t let right-wing culture warriors obscure the fact that some ideas behind this progressive ideology have genuine problems.In universities and newspapers, nonprofit organizations and even corporations, a new set of ideas about race, gender, and sexual orientation has gained huge influence. Attitudes to these ideas—which are commonly called “woke,” though I prefer a more neutral term, the “identity synthesis”—have split into two camps: those who blame them for all of America’s ills and those who defend them, largely uncritically.
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S44The Painful Afterlife of a Cruel Policy  Across memoir and fiction, Fae Myenne Ng has explored the true cost of the Chinese Exclusion era.In an age of democratized self-expression, you need not be Serena Williams or Prince Harry to write a memoir—or for people to want to read about your life. Not all of these first-person works are good, but more of them means that some will be good, even fascinating. Take an ever-swelling corner of the memoir market: those written about the Asian American experience. Identity, in these books, is a constant theme, but refreshingly, it plays out in all sorts of different registers—say, racial politics (Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings) or grief (Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart) or friendship (Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Stay True). The most compelling of these create space for bigger questions—about the historical legacy of marginalization, or the nature of belonging—through the details of a particular set of lives.
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S35This week's dead Google products: Google Podcasts, basic Gmail, and more!  Google is killing off so many products lately we need to do a roundup or we won't get anything else done today. First on the docket is the inevitable death of Google Podcasts. We've been side-eying Google Podcasts ever since Google's new podcast platform, YouTube Podcasts, launched in April. YouTube has been slowly consuming all of Google's media properties, and podcasts completes the trinity along with videos (both amateur and scripted Hollywood content) and music.
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S61Why massive shoes are the trend of the year  From cowboy boots and kitten heels to Mary Janes and court shoes, 2023 has heralded the return of many established shoes to the runway. But it has also seen the rise of a new, more surprising one: the cartoonishly oversized shoe. Pre-empted by the likes of Bottega Veneta’s BV "puddle boot" (a chunky-soled rubber rain boot with a bulbous toe that debuted in 2020), and Kerwin Frost's super-stuffed Adidas Superstars (a 2021 collaboration that saw the classic Superstar sneaker padded out to appear clownishly large), the maximalist look was galvanised in February of this year when the US label and art collective MSCHF released its attention-grabbing "big red boot".Seeming to have leapt straight from the pages of the 1990s Japanese manga series Astro Boy, the giant, pillarbox-red boots, rendered in TPU and EVA foam, are simultaneously nostalgic, futuristic, and utterly absurd; as MSCHF declared in its press release, "If you kick someone in these boots, they go boing!" Yet, despite their silliness and inadvertent suction issues – see the viral TikTok video in which one wearer gets stuck in their BRBs – the unisex boots were soon being sported by everyone from Doja Cat and Lil Nas X to Iggy Azalea and Janelle Monáe.
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S49American Democracy Requires a Conservative Party  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.Every nation needs parties of the left and the right, but America’s conservative party has collapsed—and its absence will undermine the recovery of American democracy even when Donald Trump is gone.
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S40How We Got 'Democracy Dies in Darkness'  I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement.“There’s someone to gather the facts,” Hanks said in the ad. “To bring you the story. No matter the cost. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free.”
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S41The Coming Attack on an Essential Element of Women's Freedom  No-fault divorce has improved the lives of millions. Now some extreme Republicans want to abandon it.For the past half century, many women in America have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom and legal protection, not because of Roe v. Wade or antidiscrimination laws but because of something much less celebrated: “no fault” divorce. Beginning in the early 1970s, no-fault divorce enabled millions of people, most of them women, to file for divorce over “irreconcilable differences” or the equivalent without having to prove misconduct by a spouse—such as adultery, domestic violence, bigamy, cruelty, abandonment, or impotence.
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S39S68S46The Horror Stories of Black Hair  The Hulu series The Other Black Girl dramatizes the pains of managing Afro-textured hair—and other people’s perceptions of it.In the 1989 surrealist satire Chameleon Street, two Black men bicker after one says that he prefers women with light skin and “good hair.” After being criticized for the comment, the man makes a self-deprecating joke: “I’m a victim, brotha. I’m a victim of 400 years of conditioning. The Man has programmed my conditioning. Even my conditioning has been conditioned.” Nearly a decade later, the rap duo Black Star would sample the dialogue at the beginning of their song “Brown Skin Lady,” which is framed as a rebuke of this pervasive bias against dark skin and kinkier hair, and an ode to an idealized vision of a head-wrap-donning natural woman whose “skin’s the inspiration for cocoa butter.”
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S69Aerobic and strength training exercise combined can be an elixir for better brain health in your 80s and 90s, new study finds  People in the oldest stage of life who regularly engage in aerobic activities and strength training exercises perform better on cognitive tests than those who are either sedentary or participate only in aerobic exercise. That is the key finding of our new study, published in the journal GeroScience.We assessed 184 cognitively healthy people ranging in age from 85 to 99. Each participant reported their exercise habits and underwent a comprehensive battery of neuropsychological tests that were designed to evaluate various dimensions of cognitive function.
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S37S42The Supreme Court Needs to Make a Call on Trump's Eligibility  The question of the former president’s possible disqualification needs to be resolved sooner or later. Sooner is better than later.There’s an old saying that sometimes it is more important for the law to be certain than to be right. Certainty allows people to plan their actions knowing what the rules are going to be.
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S36S47A New Coca-Cola Flavor at the End of the World  Y3000, the latest Coke flavor, was purportedly made with the assistance of AI. What does it taste like?Coca-Cola often experiments with new flavors, and they’re usually flavors you can imagine, having tasted them before: vanilla, cherry, lemon. But the latest is called Y3000, a reference to the far-off year 3000, and one that Coca-Cola says was concocted with the help of, in some way, artificial intelligence. It smells like circus-peanut candies and tastes mostly like Coke.
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S2The goats fighting fires in Los Angeles  It's a typical Los Angeles scene: the Pacific Ocean sparkling under a crystal-clear, bright blue sky, with miles of golden sandy beaches stretching as far as the eye can see. There's also a herd of goats precariously perched on a clifftop, enjoying the multimillion-dollar view.These aren't just any goats, though – they're California's new secret weapon in the fight against wildfires, and they're being put out to graze across the state.
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S3The little-known blockchain firm behind Southeast Asia's digital payment systems  In 2016, Makoto Takemiya, co-founder of Japanese blockchain startup Soramitsu, received a Telegram message from someone claiming to be from Cambodia’s central bank. He thought it was a scam. “It said something like, ‘Hey, I’m from [the] National Bank of Cambodia. We want to discuss a pilot. Can somebody contact me?’” Takemiya told Rest of World.It had been mere months since Takemiya and Okada founded Soramitsu, and they only had a few projects under their belt. The company had been funded from Okada’s savings, and was making just enough money for the two to “eat some food and pay some basic expenses,” said Takemiya.
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S4Heavily persecuted, highly influential: China's online feminist revolution  Lying in bed one night in 2021, Zhang Zirui was swiping through Weibo when she came across a post that gave her pause. The post, by feminist influencer Lin Maomao, argued that women don’t owe their family any obedience. In others, she called on women to be selfish, mean, and not care about their partner, their parents, or anyone but themselves.The message hit home. At the time, Zhang felt trapped — in her family, her relationship, and her hometown in Ningxia, an underdeveloped and conservative inland province. Her parents looked down on her. They had forbidden her to study physics, her dream university major, because “it is not for girls.” Instead, she was studying to become a preschool teacher. Her boyfriend, with whom she had once wanted to start a family, mistreated her and made her believe it was all her fault.
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S5How Mathematical Objects Are like People and Other Mysteries of Intersection Theory  Hannah Larson is obsessed with understanding what happens when two or more mathematical objects intersect. Larson, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute, recently won a 2024 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize. It’s named after the first female mathematician to win the Fields Medal, often described as the Nobel Prize of math. The New Frontiers Prize is given to exceptional female mathematicians who have recently earned their Ph.Ds.Intersection theory, one of Larson’s specialties, is a branch of a field called algebraic geometry. Intersection theory can be used to probe relatively simple questions about, say, how two lines intersect, but it’s also a powerful way to understand what happens in more challenging situations involving objects in greater numbers or ones that are more complicated to study.
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