Scientists can't agree on when the first animals evolved - our research hopes to end the debate

There are estimated to be nearly 8 million species of animals living today, making up the majority of Earth’s documented biodiversity and inhabiting almost all of its environments. However, for most of Earth’s history animals were completely absent. The date of the first animals marks a shift in the history of life on Earth. Of course, as animals ourselves, it’s also the story of our origins. Without animals, our planet would have been a very different world.

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Build a Winning AI Strategy for Your Business

Artificial intelligence is a kind of catalyst; it’s the next wave of truly transformative technology with potential we cannot yet fully envision or appreciate. Companies will start by using this new technology to do “old things” before discovering the new opportunities it creates. So, how should they go about this process? They should: start by experimenting, deploy for productivity, transform experiences, and then try to build new things. Throughout this process, they should prioritize security and responsible use.

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You're Not Powerless in the Face of Imposter Syndrome

Research shows that high achievers from underrepresented backgrounds often find themselves confronting imposter syndrome or feeling they don’t fit in, are not welcome, or don’t belong. But understanding imposter syndrome does little to end it. The author, who studied underrepresented board members for his PhD and who interacts with hundreds of aspiring and existing board directors in his role at an executive search firm, has found that attributes of moxie — strength of will, self-discipline, and the ability to persist despite challenges — were vital to underrepresented directors’ success. He recommends four tactics to help make moxie your own super power.

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How to Keep Working When You're Just Not Feeling It

Motivating yourself is one of the main things that sets high achievers apart, and it’s hard. How do you keep pushing onward when your heart isn’t in it? In her research, Fishbach has identified some simple tactics: Set goals that are intrinsically rewarding, and make them very specific. If a task isn’t satisfying, focus on aspects of it that are or combine it with pleasant activities. Reward yourself in the right way for getting things done. To avoid slumps, break objectives into subgoals; look at how much you’ve accomplished until you’re halfway there; and then count down what you have left to do. And use social influence: Let high performers inspire you, boost your get-up-and-go by giving advice, and keep the people you want to succeed for front of mind.

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3 Ways Disney's Rumored Push Into Video Games Is a Lesson in What Not to Do

Bob Iger has enough problems. He doesn't need a gaming division to make things worse.

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The Billionaire Who Inspired Warren Buffett Just Died at Age 92. Here's Why Buffett Called Him 'My Hero'

"To those wondering about giving while living: Try it. You'll like it." Feeney said.

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Taupo: The super volcano under New Zealand's largest lake

Located in the centre of New Zealand's North Island, the town of Taupo sits sublimely in the shadow of the snow-capped peaks of Tongariro National Park. Fittingly, this 40,000-person lakeside town has recently become one of New Zealand's most popular tourist destinations, as hikers, trout fishers, water sports enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies have started descending upon it.The namesake of this tidy town is the Singapore-sized lake that kisses its western border. Stretching 623sq km wide and 160m deep with several magma chambers submerged at its base, Lake Taupo isn't only New Zealand's largest lake; it's also an incredibly active geothermal hotspot. Every summer, tourists flock to bathe in its bubbling hot springs and sail through its emerald-green waters. Yet, the lake is the crater of a giant super volcano, and within its depths lies the unsettling history of this picturesque marvel.

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Message sticks: Australia's ancient unwritten language

The continent of Australia is home to more than 250 spoken Indigenous languages and 800 dialects. Yet, one of its linguistic cornerstones wasn't spoken, but carved.Known as message sticks, these flat, rounded and oblong pieces of wood were etched with ornate images on both sides that conveyed important messages and held the stories of the continent's Aboriginal people – considered the world's oldest continuous living culture. Message sticks are believed to be thousands of years old and were typically carried by messengers over long distances to reinforce oral histories or deliver news between Aboriginal nations or language groups.

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Did Australia's boomerangs pave the way for flight?

The aircraft is one of the most significant developments of modern society, enabling people, goods and ideas to fly around the world far more efficiently than ever before. The first successful piloted flight took off in 1903 in North Carolina, but a 10,000-year-old hunting tool likely developed by Aboriginal Australians may have held the key to its lift-off. As early aviators discovered, the secret to flight is balancing the flow of air. Therefore, an aircraft's wings, tail or propeller blades are often shaped in a specially designed, curved manner called an aerofoil that lifts the plane up and allows it to drag or turn to the side as it moves through the air.

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I'm Charging My Toothbrush With Wireless Power Over Distance--and It's a Trip

For the past month or so, my electric toothbrush has been charging wirelessly, but not the way you think. My toothbrush charger is not plugged into an outlet. There are no wires or cables. The charging cradle can sit anywhere on the bathroom counter and continue to charge my toothbrush. This is because I am beta testing a prototype from Wi-Charge, an Israeli company that employs infrared technology to deliver wireless power across distances of up to 30 feet.Several companies have demonstrated wireless power over distance in the past decade, but tangible products have failed to materialize. More than a century has passed since Nikola Tesla thought up the idea of transferring electrical energy through the air, so you could be forgiven for thinking it's simply not feasible (or at least not profitable) to implement. I've been watching this space for over five years and have grown increasingly skeptical.Â

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Hit the Dirt Hard With This Nimble and Powerful Electric Mountain Bike

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 WIREDFull disclosure: I’m a runaway fan of commuter ebikes because they eliminate the use of cars and make mundane errands way more fun. Electric mountain bikes, not so much. For an able-bodied cyclist, adding an electric motor to the equation feels like overkill. Plus, in my unscientific opinion, because of their weight and gravitational force, e-MTBs seem to do more damage to dirt trails, freak out other riders and wildlife, and feel less safe than conventional mountain bikes.

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11 Must-Play Games on Xbox Game Pass

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 WIREDXbox Game Pass is a solid deal for anyone who likes to try new games and bounce around between titles. A subscription to Game Pass Ultimate costs $17 a month for access to online multiplayer and a regularly refreshed library of over 100 games.

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Soccer goalkeepers literally see and hear the world differently

In soccer, the goalkeeper is a team’s last line of defense, whose primary role is to stand in the goal mouth and prevent the opposing team from scoring. This highly specialized position involves diving or jumping to intercept the ball and “save” it from entering the goal.A goalkeeper’s view of the matchplay is often obscured by other players, so these explosive movements typically require split-second decisions based on limited sensory information. Michael Quinn of University College Dublin and his colleagues therefore hypothesized that goalkeepers would have an enhanced ability to integrate auditory and visual information compared to other players.

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Starts With A Bang Podcast #98 - The line between star and planet

Out there in the Universe, there’s a whole lot more than simply what we find in our own Solar System. Here at home, the largest, most massive object is the Sun: a bright, hot, luminous star, while the second most massive object is Jupiter: a mere gas giant planet, exhibiting a small amount of self-compression due to the force of gravity.But elsewhere in the Milky Way and beyond, numerous classes of objects exist in that murky “in-between” space. There are stars less luminous and lower in mass: the K-type stars as well as the most numerous star of all: the red dwarf. At even lower masses, there are brown dwarf stars, possessing various temperatures ranging from a little over ~1000 K all the way down to just ~250 K at the ultra-cool end.

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In Japan, ghosts haunt the bathroom

As any horror film fan can attest, the bathroom can be a scary place. From Janet Leigh’s infamous shower scene in Psycho to the blood-spewing drain pipes of Stephen King’s It, there’s no shortage of genuinely startling imagery connected to lavatories. But when it comes to conjuring up the most terrifying possible interruptions to our most private moments, no one beats Japan.In Japanese folklore, there are a number of spirits rumored to appear in bathrooms. Some reach out from the insides of toilets; others whisper through the stall walls. Each one has its own grim story and particular behavior, but they all share a connection to the bathroom.

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Adding spider DNA to silkworms creates silk stronger than Kevlar

The study and copying of nature’s models, systems, or elements to address complex human challenges is known as “biomimetics.” Five hundred years ago, an elderly Italian polymath spent months looking at the soaring flight of birds. The result was Leonardo da Vinci’s biomimetic Codex on the Flight of Birds, one of the foundational texts in the science of aerodynamics. It’s the science that elevated the Wright Brothers and has yet to peak. Today, biomimetics is everywhere. Shark-inspired swimming trunks, gecko-inspired adhesives, and lotus-inspired water-repellents are all taken from observing the natural world. After millions of years of evolution, nature has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. They are tricks we can learn from. And now, thanks to some spider DNA and clever genetic engineering, we have another one to add to the list.

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This exoplanet might literally be the most metal planet out there

Metals are everywhere in the Universe, from hot gas giants where it rains molten iron to heavy elements formed as a star goes supernova. Exoplanet GJ 367b one-ups them all. This planet is made of metal.

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Plant-based cheese may be getting more appetizing

There is no questioning our ongoing love affair with cheese. From pizza and pasta to that decadent slice of cheesecake, we can’t get enough. But the dairy industry that produces cheese has had a negative impact on our climate that is not exactly appetizing.

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Inside Gaza's Last Catholic Parish

It’s just past 1 a.m. on October 12, the fourth day of Israel’s assault on Gaza, and my friend Rami is awake, texting me from a pew in the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, where he and his family are sheltering from air strikes.He tells me their apartment building was hit last night, their home completely demolished. Now he, his wife, and their two kids are sleeping on mattresses in the church hall, alongside almost 200 other Gazans evacuated or displaced from their homes. Because Rami fears for his safety, I’m using only his first name here.

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Only Wes Anderson Could Have Adapted Roald Dahl This Way

The director’s renditions of the famed author’s short stories ask us to think actively—even skeptically—about what we’re seeing.Wes Anderson’s recent collection of Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix are so specifically theatrical that you could replicate them on virtually any stage armed with just a small troupe of repertory actors and a meager budget. Characters narrate what’s happening while staring directly at us, the implied audience; obliging stagehands shift scenery and assist with costume changes and makeup right in front of our eyes. The action is so resolutely analog that it feels like a manifesto for good old-fashioned stagecraft in a cinematic era steamrolled by CGI—our imaginations are forced to fill in the gaps when, say, a train rushes right over a character, or a man appears to levitate several feet off the ground. This is storytelling that shows you all of its seams. The question is: Why?

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The Gal

By the late 19th century, whalers, settlers, and pirates had changed the ecology of the Galápagos Islands by poaching some native species—like Galápagos giant tortoises—and introducing others, such as goats and rats. The latter species became pests and severely destabilized the island ecosystems. Goats overgrazed the plants the tortoises ate while rats preyed on their eggs. Over time, the tortoise population plummeted. On Española, an island in the southeast of the archipelago, the tortoise count fell from thousands to less than 20. Along the way, as goats ate all the plants they could, Española—once akin to a savanna—turned barren.In the following century, conservationists set out to restore the Galápagos giant tortoise on Española—and the island ecosystem. They began eradicating the introduced species, and capturing Española’s remaining tortoises and breeding them in captivity. With the goats wiped out and the tortoises in cages, the ecosystem transformed once again. This time, the overgrazed terrain became overgrown with densely packed trees and woody bushes. Española’s full recovery to its savanna-like state would have to wait for the tortoises’ return.

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"The Month of Painted Leaves"

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.In the October 1862 issue of The Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau argued that foliage was not getting the attention it deserved. “The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our own literature yet,” he wrote. “October has hardly tinged our poetry.”

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