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 S59Is salt really a new culprit in type 2 diabetes?   Lead for Evidence-Based Medicine and Nutrition, Aston Medical School, Aston University When people think of foods related to type 2 diabetes, they often think of sugar (even though the evidence for that is still not clear). Now, a new study from the US points the finger at salt.
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S1Research: Consumers Choose Shared Experiences Over Quality Ones  Some consumer experiences are best when they’re solo — but new research shows that people will forgo a high-quality experience in order to share it with a partner or loved one. As a result, they may have a worse time, which can lead to unsatisfied consumers, lower sales, and neglected business opportunities. This article explains why people tend to stick together, even when it isn’t necessarily beneficial, and outlines several ways marketers can encourage people to break apart (even briefly) in order to boost their satisfaction.
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S3S4S5S6Taupo: 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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S7Message 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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S8Did 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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S9Climate scientists are working with indigenous tribes  When the warm nights used to come each summer, Frank Ettawageshik would spend most of his time outdoors, sleeping outside, right on the ground. Today, he balks at the thought."I was 35 or so before I ever saw a tick," says the 74-year-old executive director of the United Tribes of Michigan, a Native American advocacy group. Now in northern Michigan, he says, "there's ticks all over the place".
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S10The people who live in multiple timelines  The first time I'd been a bit preoccupied and unprepared for the existential baggage of a milestone birthday – particularly since I thought I was only 38. I turned 40 again a few months later. Well, I never had been good at maths. But then I turned 41 a few times, and then 40 once more. Nope, time was clearly out of joint.It turns out many cultures are fine with experiencing multiple years – or multiple ages – simultaneously. Right now it is the start of 2023 everywhere in the world. But step into Myanmar and it's also 1384, while Thailand will shoot you forward to 2566. Moroccans are praying in 1444 but farming in 2972, and Ethiopians are working their way through 2015, which for them has 13 months. Meanwhile in South Korea, where I live, New Year is everybody's birthday. This explains how I turned 40 three times.
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S11Rats Use the Power of Imagination to Navigate and Move Objects in a VR Landscape  Humans use imagination for far more than daydreaming. The ability to visualize possible scenarios is something we do every single day. We mull over alternative routes to avoid traffic, cook up last-minute dinner plans and mentally prepare for tomorrow’s meeting.But we are not alone. A new research finding demonstrates quite vividly how humans are not the only species possessing an imaginative ability to think ahead. Researchers recently outfitted several rats with a high-tech device that tracks brain activity and observed how the rodents mentally maneuvered through a virtual reality environment. Their findings, published today in the journal Science, reveal that the rats are capable of seemingly thinking about locations and objects that are not immediately in front of them.
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S12The U.S.'s First Black Female Physician Cared for Patients from Cradle to Grave  Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first Black woman in the U.S. to receive an M.D., earned while the Civil War raged, and the first Black person in the country to write a medical book, a popular guide with a preventive approachRebecca Lee Crumpler, born in 1831, was the first African American female medical doctor in the U.S. and is considered the first Black person to publish a medical book. In it, Crumpler lays out best practices for good health, with a focus on women and children. She writes that she was inspired by her aunt, a community healer and midwife, who raised her in Pennsylvania.
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S13Zoomable JWST Image Brings Far-Distant Galaxies to Your Fingertips  The James Webb Space Telescope is gazing across the universe to find galaxies close to the “cosmic dawn”—and you can explore them from the palm of your handThat poetic phrase is what astronomers call the time just a few hundred million years after the big bang when the very first stars switched on, flooding the cosmos with light.
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S14Precision Cancer Drugs Glitter with Promise - If You Can Get Them  A growing arsenal of genetically tailored oncology treatments have spectacular results, but scope and access remain limitedThe landscape of cancer treatment changed forever in 1998, when U.S. authorities approved the first genetically tailored precision cancer therapy. The drug, Herceptin, zeroes in on the activity of HER2—a gene that can make breast cancers especially aggressive compared with HER2-negative cancers. When the gene is mutated, it overproduces the corresponding human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 protein to trigger unhinged cell division. More traditional treatments attack both cancerous and healthy cells, but Herceptin goes after the root cause of a cancer’s growth by blocking the gene’s misbehaving proteins. Today, thanks to such targeted drugs, people with HER2-positive breast cancers have similar long-term survival odds as those who don’t.
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S15Godzilla Is Warning Us Again about the Threats to Our Planet  It’s not just nukes: the power at the heart of the Godzilla franchise is our awareness of the global consequences of human follyThe beast is born in fire. Once a prehistoric denizen of the deeps, it comes ashore on a tsunami tide, tall as a thunderhead, shrugging off artillery as it bellows a foghorn scream. It stomps. It breathes atomic fire. And it’s the star of the world’s longest continually running film franchise, the latest of which debuts this December: Godzilla.
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S16Lost River Landscape Discovered below East Antarctic Ice  A preserved river landscape from the time before Antarctica was icebound persists more than a mile below the East Antarctic Ice SheetAn ancient river system from the era when the bottom of the world was ice-free is buried more than a mile deep below the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
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S17NASA Asteroid Mission Discovers Tiny Surprise Moon with 'Really Bizarre' Shape  NASA’s Lucy mission flew past an asteroid nicknamed Dinky, only to discover an even smaller space rock orbiting itNASA’s Lucy mission has just snagged a celestially good deal: two asteroids for the price of one flyby. While flying past a small main-belt asteroid called Dinkinesh the spacecraft found an even smaller “moon” orbiting it. The two form a binary asteroid pair.
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S18Starfish Are Heads - Just Heads  At first glance, starfish seem to be all limbs, with five appendages lined with rows of tube feet giving them their signature shape. Marine scientists have long wondered how they evolved to have such anatomy—and where their head might be.It turns out that, genetically speaking, the animals are actually almost all head and no trunk, according to a new study published in Nature. The finding upends previous hypotheses about the body plans of starfish and is outright surprising, even to experts. “They’re all head?!” wrote Gail Grabowsky, a professor of environmental science at the Chaminade University of Honolulu, who wasn’t involved in the paper, in an e-mail to Scientific American. The results are “just super cool,” she added. Plus, they offer clues about how these creatures became such bizarre evolutionary exceptions.
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S19Earth Reacts to Greenhouse Gases More Strongly Than We Thought  Climate scientists, including pioneer James Hansen, are pinning down a fundamental factor that drives how hot Earth will getFor nearly 40 years, Hansen has been warning the world of the dangers of global warming. His testimony at a groundbreaking 1988 Senate hearing on the greenhouse effect helped inject the coming climate crisis into the public consciousness. And it helped make him one of the most influential climate scientists in the world.
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S20AI Needs Rules, but Who Will Get to Make Them?  Skirmishes at the U.K.’s AI Safety Summit expose tensions over how to regulate AI technologyAbout 150 government and industry leaders from around the world, including Vice President Kamala Harris and billionaire Elon Musk, descended on England this week for the U.K.’s AI Safety Summit. The meeting acted as the focal point for a global conversation about how to regulate artificial intelligence. But for some experts, it also highlighted the outsize role that AI companies are playing in that conversation—at the expense of many who stand to be affected but lack a financial stake in AI’s success.
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S21Why You Can't Stop Reading About Daylight Saving Time  It was 15:37 (GMT) on a Thursday afternoon when we officially ran out of ideas. The request from the editors had been bouncing around for a couple of weeks: We need to write about the clocks going back. We'd groaned and tried to ignore it, but it kept resurfacing. Like time itself, the need was eternal.If you're not in the digital publishing business you might not know this, but people absolutely love reading articles about the clocks changing. They are routinely among the biggest performing stories on the site, and perhaps the purest distillation of how web traffic works in 2023: Find something that people are Googling and write about it so that when they Google it, they'll click on it.
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S22Xiaomi's 13T Pro Is a Slightly Cheaper Flagship Phone  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 WIREDXiaomi has put some features that make its devices compelling into a relatively affordable package called the 13T Pro. This smartphone, ahead of the next flagship generation, packs an excellent Leica-branded camera, a large display, and beefy specs. Sensible compromises keep the price down while still delivering a taste of Xiaomi’s top-tier tech.
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S23Review: 'Alan Wake II' Is Far Darker Than Its Predecessor--and Perfects the Horror Genre ![]() 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 WIREDAlan Wake II begins with a man stumbling naked through the woods at night. He has just emerged from a lake, mud clinging to his back, and his body a deathly blue that blends with the thick shadows of the forest. Whispered words and groans sound in his ears as he runs, sudden flashes of a screaming face explode before his eyes like fireworks, and homicidal figures in deer masks appear from the murk to threaten him. Very soon this man will be dead and splayed on a picnic table, a pair of FBI agents examining his rigid corpse for clues to the motivation behind his murder and the ritual defilement of his body.
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S2440% of people willfully choose to be ignorant. Here's why  Do you have an uncle who believes vaccines cause autism but refuses to study the reams of research showing them to be safe? What about a friend who avoids information about factory animal farming so they can eat cheap meat guilt-free? Or how about that CEO who claims their business is ethically minded, yet doesn’t investigate its supply chain for exploitation of the environment or the impoverished?Each is an example of what psychologists call willful ignorance — the intentional act of avoiding information that reveals the negative consequences of one’s actions. Not to judge: We all have a place in our lives where we look the other way and pretend everything is fine. It may be personal, political, or professional in nature, but just below the conscious surface, we know our actions don’t align with our stated values.
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S25The Kakhovka Dam disaster revealed an archaeological "goldmine"  One June 29, a local man was walking along the beach on the island of Khortytsia, in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, when he noticed what looked like a log half submerged in water. When he approached, he realized the log was part of a boat, one that was possibly centuries old.The man called wardens at the Khortytsia National Reserve, the large national park on the island. Soon the police arrived to cordon off the area, followed by engineers and archaeologists who started an operation to rescue the precious find.
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S26CRISPR cure for HIV now tested in 3 patients  California-based biotech company Excision BioTherapeutics has shared data from the first human clinical trial of a CRISPR cure for HIV — and it’s both encouraging and frustratingly light on details.The challenge: HIV is no longer the death sentence it once was, thanks largely to antiretroviral therapy (ART), daily medications that can decrease the amount of the virus in a person’s blood to levels that are undetectable and untransmittable.
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S27S28Dealmaster: Pre-Black Friday deals on home entertainment, Herman Miller chairs, and laptops  Whether you need a monitor for work or you want a larger living room screen for entertainment, our curated pre-Black Friday Dealmaster comes with plenty of savings on monitors, displays, and TVs. Complete the setup with upgraded audio, as we found some deals on soundbars, speakers, headphones, and more. In addition to home entertainment, there are savings on Lenovo laptops, Apple MacBooks and iPads, chargers and tech gear, and more. And for a luxurious and ergonomic upgrade, Herman Miller's popular office and gaming chairs, including the Aeron and Embody, are on sale at up to 25 percent off, making it a perfect self-care gift for yourself or your loved one for the holiday.
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S29What do we know about the Switch 2's hardware power?  That chip is the Nvidia T239, a scaled-down, custom variant of the Nvidia Orin T234 that is popular in the automotive and robotics markets. While Digital Foundry can't say definitively that this is the next Switch chip with "absolute 100 percent certainty," the website points to circumstantial links and references to the chip in a number of leaks, a recent Nvidia hack, LinkedIn posts from Nvidia employees, and Nvidia's own Linux distribution.
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S30S31S32S33A historic Falcon 9 made a little more history Friday night  CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—In three-and-a-half years of service, one of SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9 boosters stands apart from the rest of the company's rocket inventory. This booster, designated with the serial number B1058, has now flown 18 times. For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit.
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S34No, Okta, senior management, not an errant employee, caused you to get hacked  Identity and authentication management provider Okta on Friday published an autopsy report on a recent breach that gave hackers administrative access to the Okta accounts of some of its customers. While the postmortem emphasizes the transgressions of an employee logging into a personal Google account on a work device, the biggest contributing factor was something the company understated: a badly configured service account.
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S35Hitting the trails with a low-priced e-mountain bike  The subject of this review, SWFT's new Apex mountain bike, pulls together threads from two bikes we've looked at previously. One of those threads came courtesy of SWFT, which introduced itself to the world with the Volt, an exercise in trying to get e-bike prices down to the point where they weren't competing with a decent used car. While the Volt wasn't a great bike, it was perfectly functional and offered a decent ride at a sub-$1,000 price. Now, SWFT is trying to work that same magic with a mountain bike.
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S36When the natural gas industry used the playbook from Big Tobacco  In 1976, beloved chef, cookbook author, and television personality Julia Child returned to WGBH-TV’s studios in Boston for a new cooking show, Julia Child & Company, following her hit series The French Chef. Viewers probably didn’t know that Child’s new and improved kitchen studio, outfitted with gas stoves, was paid for by the American Gas Association.
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S37The Hong Kong Activist Who Called Washington's Bluff  The United States praised Joshua Wong and pledged itself to Hong Kong’s freedom. But when China cracked down, Wong found himself with nowhere to go.On the morning of June 30, 2020, Joshua Wong walked into an office tower called the St. John’s Building, directly across the street from the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong. He carried nothing but his cellphone.
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S38'There Will Probably Be a Cease-Fire. And Then They Will Just Be Names'  Earlier this week, while walking through central Jerusalem, I heard a chant in the distance. War has driven away tourists, and in a tourist city without tourists, sounds carry far. The discernible portion of the chant was a single word in Hebrew, akshav—“now.” I followed the sound to Safra Square, where a crowd had gathered, yelling in sorrow and fury, to protest the kidnapping of more than 240 people, most of them Israelis, by Hamas.Survivors from Kibbutz Nir Oz (which lost a quarter of its population in the October 7 pogrom) had taken over Safra Square and installed an exhibit consisting of beds, neatly made, for each of the hostages currently in Gaza. They were arranged in a grid. Some were queen beds. Others were singles. Some had books on nightstands nearby. Several were IKEA cribs, for the dozens of children among the captives. One didn’t need to know even that one word of Hebrew to figure out what the crowd was demanding—the return of the hostages, without delay—and what it was promising: the creation of a civic movement that will continue screaming at the Israeli government, in anger and recrimination, until the hostages are back.
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S39Where Was the Actual Ice During the Ice Age?  On November 14, 2016, a huge earthquake rocked Kaikōura, a town on New Zealand’s South Island, killing two people, triggering a tsunami, and thrusting stretches of coastline 18 feet up out of the sea. The biologists Ceridwen Fraser and Jon Waters were watching the aftermath on television. “We were seeing images of kelp and [abalone] lifted out of the water and dying,” Waters says.For these two scientists who had spent much of the previous decade looking for evidence of ecological upheaval on the coast, Fraser says, there was only one thing to do: “We got on a plane.”
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S40What Really Happens When You're Sick  This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.When you’re suffering from a cold, the situation might seem perfectly clear—your nose is stuffed. But the truth about what’s happening to you is a little more complicated. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is connected to the armpits.
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S41China's Two-Faced Approach to Gaza  A new pattern is emerging in Chinese foreign policy that bodes poorly for global stability: Chinese leader Xi Jinping pretends to favor peaceful resolutions to international conflicts while actually encouraging the world’s most destabilizing forces.In the Middle East, Beijing has vociferously called for an end to the fighting between Israel and Hamas and claims to take an evenhanded approach to the belligerents. But the Chinese government is, in effect, backing Hamas—and therefore terrorism. Xi’s position on Gaza is identical to his stance on the world’s other major conflict, the war in Ukraine. There, too, Beijing has asserted principled neutrality and even launched a peace mission, while at the same time deepening ties to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.
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S42America's Aging Presidential Front-Runners  President Joe Biden is facing a unique set of challenges as he prepares to run for reelection. The most unique of all: No one his age has ever run for president. And voters are worried, even those who give him credit for an improving economy. It’s also worth pointing out that Donald Trump is 77, and has been afflicted by more than the usual number of gaffes lately.On Capitol Hill, the GOP’s new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is a full week into the job and working to regain order. But the ideological divide among House Republicans is now attracting attention in the upper chamber after GOP anger over Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville stalling military promotions erupted on the Senate floor.
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S43How Generative AI Will Change Sales  Sales teams have typically not been early adopters of technology, but generative AI may be an exception to that. Sales work typically requires administrative work, routine interactions with clients, and management attention to tasks such as forecasting. AI can help do these tasks more quickly, which is why Microsoft and Salesforce have already rolled out sales-focused versions of this powerful tool.
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S446 Strategies for Leading Through Uncertainty  It seems that any given week provides ample reminders that leaders cannot control the degree of change, uncertainty, and complexity we face. The authors offer six strategies to improve a leader’s ability to learn, grow, and more effectively navigate the increasing complexity of our world. The first step is to embrace the discomfort as an expected and normal part of the learning process. As described by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, leaders must shift from a “know it all” to “learn it all” mindset. This shift in mindset can, itself, help ease the discomfort by taking the pressure off of you to have all the answers.
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S45Did American History X foreshadow the resurgence of white nationalism in the US?  When American History X was released in 1998, 25 years ago, it warned of a gathering storm of white supremacist violence. The indie crime thriller garnered both praise and criticism, but also a measure of suspicion. Some critics took exception to what they viewed as its "bombastic" tone and "red-meat melodrama," as though the film's racist zealots looked more like caricatures than anything that could have sprouted from the multicultural soil of US democracy.Warning: This article contains descriptions of extreme violence that some may find upsetting
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S46Understanding that chronic back pain originates from within the brain could lead to quicker recovery, a new study finds  We have been studying a psychological treatment called pain reprocessing therapy that may help “turn off” unhelpful and unnecessary pain signals in the brain. To do this, we carried out a study in which some people were randomly chosen to receive the pain reprocessing therapy treatment, while some got a placebo injection into their backs.We included 151 adults ages 21 to 70 years old with chronic back pain. We found that 66% of participants reported being pain-free or nearly pain-free after pain reprocessing therapy, compared with 20% of people who received a placebo.
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S47What is intersectionality? A scholar of organizational behavior explains  In modern conversations on race and politics, a popular buzzword has emerged to describe the impact of belonging to multiple social categories. Known as intersectionality, the social theory has a complex history and refers to the intertwining of different identities, such as class, gender and age. It is often applied as a way to understand how individuals may experience multiple forms of prejudice simultaneously.
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S48We analyzed over 3.5 million written teacher comments about students and found racial bias  Written teacher comments about students can show implicit racial or ethnic and gender biases in school discipline, according to our recent study. Our study showed that teachers wrote more when describing behavior incidents of Black students compared with white students. They also used more negative emotions, words like “anger,” “hurt” and “disrespectful,” and used more verbs, such as “scraped,” “hit” and “spanked.” We found the opposite was true for Asian and Hispanic students compared with white students.
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S49The world's boreal forests may be shrinking as climate change pushes them northward  Earth’s boreal forests circle our planet’s far northern reaches, just south of the Arctic’s treeless tundra. If the planet wears an Arctic ice cap, then the boreal forests are a loose-knit headband wrapped around its ears, covering large portions of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. The boreal region’s soils have long buffered the planet against warming by storing huge quantities of carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere. Its remoteness has historically protected its forests and wetlands from extensive human impact.
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S50Defending space for free discussion, empathy and tolerance on campus is a challenge during Israel-Hamas war  College and university campuses across the U.S. have seen polarization and unrest since the Israel-Hamas war began with the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. Students and faculty have held protests and rallies, argued on social media and signed statements, some of which have increased mistrust and turmoil on campus. Some college leaders have weighed in on the war, which has not necessarily calmed their campuses. At the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, scholar David Mednicoff chairs the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies. He spoke with The Conversation’s senior politics and democracy editor, Naomi Schalit, about how he and his colleagues and university leadership have tried to deal – as an educational institution and a community – with a highly charged situation on campus in which there is pain, anger and anguish on both sides. Mednicoff aims to contribute to an approach he believes central for his community: respectful discussion, listening and seeking understanding, and the chance for open minds and hearts in the middle of conflict. Immediately after the Oct. 7 attack, many Jewish students and community members with ties to Israel felt shocked, scared, confused and worried, and sought support from the university.
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S51Biden's executive order puts civil rights in the middle of the AI regulation discussion  Margaret Hu is a member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Privacy Forum. She is also a Fellow with the Center for Democracy & Technology and a member of the Scholars Council with Data & Society. On Oct. 4, 2022, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: A Vision for Protecting Our Civil Rights in the Algorithmic Age. The blueprint launched a conversation about how artificial intelligence innovation can proceed under multiple fair principles. These include safe and effective systems, algorithmic discrimination protections, privacy and transparency.
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S52Vampire viruses prey on other viruses to replicate themselves -  Have you ever wondered whether the virus that gave you a nasty cold can catch one itself? It may comfort you to know that, yes, viruses can actually get sick. Even better, as karmic justice would have it, the culprits turn out to be other viruses.Viruses can get sick in the sense that their normal function is impaired. When a virus enters a cell, it can either go dormant or start replicating right away. When replicating, the virus essentially commandeers the molecular factory of the cell to make lots of copies of itself, then breaks out of the cell to set the new copies free.
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S53When science showed in the 1970s that gas stoves produced harmful indoor air pollution, the industry reached for tobacco's PR playbook  In 1976, beloved chef, cookbook author and television personality Julia Child returned to WGBH-TV’s studios in Boston for a new cooking show, “Julia Child & Company,” following her hit series “The French Chef.” Viewers probably didn’t know that Child’s new and improved kitchen studio, outfitted with gas stoves, was paid for by the American Gas Association.While this may seem like any corporate sponsorship, we now know it was a part of a calculated campaign by gas industry executives to increase use of gas stoves across the United States. And stoves weren’t the only objective. The gas industry wanted to grow its residential market, and homes that used gas for cooking were likely also to use it for heat and hot water.
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S54All-UK astronaut mission shows that private enterprise is vital to the future of space exploration  The UK Space Agency has signed an agreement with a US company called Axiom Space to develop a space mission carrying four astronauts from the UK. The flight would most likely use the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle and travel to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew is expected to include a reserve astronaut recently selected by the European Space Agency (Esa) and two other commercial astronauts. There are also reports it could be commanded by the recently retired Tim Peake.
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S55BBC's emergency Gaza radio broadcasts show why World Service mustn't rely on digital technology  The BBC has just announced that it will start an emergency radio service for listeners in Gaza. Daily news bulletins will be produced in London and Cairo by BBC News Arabic, the corporation’s Arabic-language television service. The radio service will broadcast on medium wave, initially with a single afternoon programme from November 3, and an additional morning programme from November 10. The BBC’s stated aim is to provide “vital news daily to the people of Gaza during this time of urgent need”, including practical information about where to access shelter, food and water supplies.
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S56Gaza Update: as Israel begins its ground offensive, the conflict's reverberations are being felt far beyond the Strip  The ground assault on Gaza is now well underway and, as they advance into the Strip’s urban areas, the Israel Defence Forces are coming up against an elusive enemy that has been preparing for this conflict for years. For Hamas’s military wing, a key part of those preparations has been the construction of a large network of tunnels which it can use to move fighters from location to location to mount hit and run attacks and vanish again. Destroying this network is one of the key objectives of what Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says is the “second phase” of this campaign. Known as the “Gaza Metro”, this comprises an estimated 300 miles of tunnels, some as deep as 70 metres underground. The network has been under development for years, but construction was stepped up when Israel relaxed its embargo on the shipment of building supplies into Gaza in 2012.
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S57S58Israel-Hamas war puts China's strategy of 'balanced diplomacy' in the Middle East at risk  On Oct. 30, 2023, reports began to circulate that Israel was missing from from the mapping services provided by Chinese tech companies Baidu and Alibaba, effectively signaling – or so some believed – that Beijing was siding with Hamas over Israel in the ongoing war.Within hours, Chinese officials began to push back on that narrative, pointing out that the names do appear on the country’s official maps and that the maps offered by China’s tech companies had not changed at all since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. Indeed, the Chinese Foreign Ministry took the opportunity to go further, emphasizing that China was not taking sides in the conflict. Rather, Beijing said it respected both Israel’s right to self defense and the rights of the Palestinian people under international humanitarian law.
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S60S61Netflix is still growing its subscriber base  Netflix had a tough year in 2022. Big rivals such as Disney and Amazon Prime were circling, and viewers seemed to be rethinking their streaming habits amid rising prices in a turbulent global economy. Netflix lost subscribers, and its share value plummeted. According to its latest letter to shareholders, it added 8.8 million new subscribers in the third quarter of 2023, on top of the 5.9 million it gained in the three months before that. The total number of subscribers worldwide is now 247.2 million.
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S62Brooke Shields had a grand mal seizure - here's what you need to know about the condition  Actress and model Brooke Shields has revealed she suffered a grand mal seizure in September. In an interview, Shields revealed that the seizure caused her to lose control of her movements, froth at the mouth and eventually lose consciousness. The actress doesn’t have a history of seizures – and many people reading her story may be wondering if they’re also at risk.“Grand mal”, which means “great sickness” in French, is actually the old term for what’s now called a tonic-clonic seizure. These seizures involve both stiffening (tonic) and twitching (clonic) muscle movements. It’s just one type of seizure a person can experience.
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S63It's time to limit how often we can travel abroad - 'carbon passports' may be the answer  The summer of 2023 has been very significant for the travel industry. By the end of July, international tourist arrivals globally reached 84% of pre-pandemic levels. In some European countries, such as France, Denmark and Ireland, tourism demand even surpassed its pre-pandemic level.This may be great news economically, but there’s concern that a return to the status quo is already showing dire environmental and social consequences.
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S64S65PFAS: how research is uncovering damaging effects of 'forever chemicals'  Since their inception in the 1940s, the so-called forever chemicals have woven themselves into the fabric of our modern world. But recently, they’ve been appearing in alarming news headlines about their damaging effects on our health. Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) are man-made chemicals, numbering approximately 4,700 variants. What makes them different is their formidable carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds, renowned among scientists as the mightiest in chemistry.
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S66S67Running Gag: Trump Speaks!  Follow @newyorkercartoons on Instagram and sign up for the Daily Humor newsletter for more funny stuff.By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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S68A Decade of Black Lives Matter  After the notorious acquittal of the man who shot Trayvon Martin, a hashtag was born that quickly became a movement, and the most significant push for racial justice since the nineteen-sixties. Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, talks with David Remnick about the nationwide outcry over the killings of unarmed Black and brown people. A group of experts wrestle with the complicated question of how Black Lives Matter changed policing in the ten years since its founding and whether racial disparities among victims of police violence have abated at all. And the writer Nicole Sealey explains how the Ferguson, Missouri, protests over the death of Michael Brown led her to a response in poetry.The mother whose teen-age boy’s death inspired a movement a little more than a decade ago continues to grieve his loss, and to demand accountability.
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S69Donald Trump's Sons Get Challenged on the Witness Stand  Given that bad things tend to happen to virtually anyone who comes into Donald Trump's orbit, it was only a matter of time before his own family members got dragged into the mire. This week, Donald, Jr., and Eric, Trump's eldest sons, appeared as defendants in the civil fraud trial brought by the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, and both sons repeatedly had their credibility impeached on the stand.In the early years covered by the government's case, the brothers had independent roles at the Trump OrganizationâDonald, Jr., focussed on leasing and licensing deals; Eric worked on operations and new developments. But the testimony showed how they were also drawn into the web of deceit needed to sustain the myth that their father was a multibillionaire, which centered on the annual production of a Statement of Financial Condition that grossly exaggerated the value of Trump properties. Along with the former President himself and two former Trump Organization executives, the brothers stand accused of, among other things, engaging in a fraudulent conspiracy to file false business documents and engage in insurance fraud.
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S70High Camp and High Tragedy in Two Electrifying Off-Broadway Productions  Snatch Adams, a six-foot-tall walking vagina working as a red-nose clown, would usually be entertaining folks on the vaudevillian “Borsch” Belt comedy circuit—“borsch” as in (a)bort(ion)—but extremists have been closing Planned Parenthoods. There’s certainly not a lot of other things an unemployed, six-foot-tall vagina-clown can do. Start a podcast? Launch a wellness app? Snatch (Becca Blackwell) and their dear friend Tainty McCracken (Amanda Duarte) experience a flicker of confusion, but then the right idea strikes like a period on a day you’re wearing white pants: air a TV talk show called “It’s That Time of the Month,” which mashes together the best of Conan O’Brien, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” and performance artist Carolee Schneemann in her “Interior Scroll” era.Heretofore, the comic and experimental performer Blackwell’s best-known work was “They, Themself and Schmerm,” an immensely funny standup piece about their transition, which somehow got laughs out of stories about, among other things, childhood molestation. (“Schmerm” is the garbled sound a person might make when trying to say several pronouns at once.) Right before the pandemic shutdown—like, two days before—I saw Blackwell’s chilled-out show “Schmermie’s Choice,” at Joe’s Pub, another autobiographical, standup-flavored set, which explored the giddiness of sex on testosterone, and the ways that various tab A’s fit into various slot B’s. Their latest work, “Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month,” at SoHo Rep, retains some of Blackwell’s earlier shaggy-dog, low-fi vibe, but here the imagination and the glitz factor have been dialed up to Versailles. This, at last, is Blackwell’s magnum opus, or, to give the collaboratively devised piece its proper due, Blackwell and Duarte’s magnum o-pussy.
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