These Cities Are On Europe's Shortlist For Capital Of Smart Tourism 2024 | They Raised a $1 Million for a Device That Gives You Lucid Dreams. Could It Really? | The California-to-Texas pipeline is drying up, and Florida is the big winner of the exodus from the Golden State | An Awkward Evolutionary Theory for One of Pregnancy’s Biggest Complications

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These Cities Are On Europe's Shortlist For Capital Of Smart Tourism 2024 - Forbes

Pintxos at a barn in the Old Town in San Sebastian, one of the finalists to become European Capital ... [+] of Smart Tourism.

Six cities in Europe have been shortlisted by the European commission to be named the 2024 European Capital of Smart Tourism.

Granted to cities that demonstrate "an extraordinary commitment to shaping the future of sustainable and innovative tourism,” the award is an EU initiative recognizing intelligent solutions in five categories: accessibility, sustainability, digitalization, cultural heritage and creativity.

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They Raised a $1 Million for a Device That Gives You Lucid Dreams. Could It Really? - Slate Magazine

Eric Wollberg’s interest in facilitating lucid dreams emerged while living in Jerusalem, reading lots of theology. “Abraham, Muhammad, Buddha, all those prophets received their prophetic wisdom in their dreams,” the startup and tech investment alum told me recently. During some periods of his life, Wollberg too regularly experienced the sorts of dreams where he knew he was awake. He wondered whether there was a way to use emerging technology to have them on demand.

Last February a hint came from, of all people, Grimes. The electronic pop artist retweeted a software engineer named Wesley Berry III, who was playing around with turning brain waves into art and running his computer with his thoughts. Soon Wollberg was at Berry’s house in San Francisco, pitching him on applying one of these electrode-filled brain activity–monitoring headsets to lucid dreams.

Within just four months, Wollberg and Berry’s new company, Prophetic, raised more than $1 million in funding for a consumer device—the “Halo”—from venture capital heavy hitters and acquired advisers who’d worked in neurotech at Apple. They also promptly forged a research collaboration with a widely respected neuroscience institute and a company that built hardware for Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink, a detail that has been featured in articles about this new “A.I. startup.” Already they’ve invited customers to pay to reserve one of the first devices, which they intend to start shipping in 2025. At an event in New York City on Friday, potential investors will see a “prototype” of the Halo and learn about the company’s plan to use generative A.I., similar to the tech behind ChatGPT, on brain data to induce and stabilize lucidity in the dreamer.

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The California-to-Texas pipeline is drying up, and Florida is the big winner of the exodus from the Golden State - Fortune

The number of former Californians who became Texans dropped slightly last year, but some of that slack was picked up by Arizona and Florida, which saw their tallies of ex-Californians grow, according to new state-to-state migration figures released Thursday.

The flow of Californians to Texas has marked the largest state-to-state movement in the U.S. for the past two years, but it decreased from more than 107,000 people in 2021 to more than 102,000 residents in 2022, as real estate in Texas’ largest cities has grown more expensive. In Florida, meanwhile, the number of former Californians went from more than 37,000 people in 2021 to more than 50,000 people in 2022, and in Arizona, it went from more than 69,000 people to 74,000 people during that same time period.

California had a net loss of more than 113,000 residents last year, a number that would have been much higher if not for people moving to the state from other countries and a natural increase from more births than deaths. More than 343,000 people left California for another state last year, the highest number of any U.S. state.

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An Awkward Evolutionary Theory for One of Pregnancy’s Biggest Complications - The Atlantic

In the early 1990s, while studying preeclampsia in Guadeloupe, Pierre-Yves Robillard hit upon a realization that seemed to shake the foundations of his field. Preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that causes some 500,000 fetal deaths and 70,000 maternal deaths around the world each year, had for decades been regarded as a condition most common among new mothers, whose bodies were mounting an inappropriate attack on a first baby. But Robillard, now a neonatologist and epidemiologist at Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de La Réunion, on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, kept seeing the condition crop up during second, third, or fourth pregnancies—a pattern that a few other studies had documented, but had yet to fully explain. Then, Robillard noticed something else. “These women had changed the father,” he told me. The catalyst in these cases of preeclampsia, he eventually surmised, wasn’t the newness of pregnancy. It was the newness of paternal genetic material that, maybe, the mother hadn’t had enough exposure to before.

Robillard’s idea was unconventional not only because it challenged the dogma of the time, but because it implied certain evolutionary consequences. Preeclampsia appears to be exclusive (or almost exclusive) to humans, and may have arisen as a by-product of the particularly aggressive ways in which our fetuses pillage their mother’s body for resources. So, Robillard and his colleagues posited, maybe the dangers it poses then pressured humans into developing a bizarre trait: being rather inefficient at conceiving offspring. Maybe, if humans aren’t terribly fertile, they need to have a lot of sex; maybe having a lot of sex repeatedly exposes a mother to her partner’s semen, inuring her to the molecular makeup of future offspring. If preeclampsia is a kind of immune overreaction, then perhaps unprotected sex is the world’s most unconventional allergy shot.

That, at least, is what Robillard and his colleagues contend—a notion that’s “a bit controversial, and a bit awkward,” Inkeri Lokki, an immunologist and reproductive biologist at the University of Helsinki, told me. She remembers a senior researcher in the field once framing the upshot of the hypothesis as “pick your partner early, and practice.”

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