With Only 11 Words, Tim Cook Just Gave the Most Important Business Advice You'll Hear This Year

Sometimes the single most important thing a leader does is say 'no.'

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Xiaomi'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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The 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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AI 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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40% 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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Climate 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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Precision 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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Rats 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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Why 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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This One Mindset Shift Could Radically Change How We Experience Chronic Pain

People often use the phrase “mind over matter” to describe situations where aches and pains in the body are overridden using the mind. People often use the phrase “mind over matter” to describe situations where aches and pains in the body are overridden using the mind. A gardener comes in from gardening and is surprised to discover a nasty cut on her hand, something she wasn’t aware of while focused on her plants. Or a soldier in Afghanistan is wounded by a bullet but feels little pain until he is safe in the infirmary. If pain was directly and entirely linked to bodily injury, these examples would be impossible. A cut would always lead to mild pain, whereas a gunshot wound would immediately cause severe pain. But this is not always the case.

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Zoomable 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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The 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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CRISPR 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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Keep Forgetting Things? Neuroscience Connects This Simple Habit to 17 Percent Better Memory Outcomes

Forgetting things. It's the worst.

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Review: '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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Research: 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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NASA 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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29 Years After Moving to the Seattle Area, Jeff Bezos Is Leaving. Here's Why I'm Staying Put

He says he wants to be near his parents and fiance. But there may be another reason he's relocating.

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To Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking, Stop Thinking About Yourself

Even the most confident speakers find ways to distance themselves from their audience. It’s how our brains are programmed, so how can we overcome it? Human generosity. The key to calming the amygdala and disarming our panic button is to turn the focus away from ourselves — away from whether we will mess up or whether the audience will like us — and toward helping the audience. Showing kindness and generosity to others has been shown to activate the vagus nerve, which has the power to calm the fight-or-flight response. When we are kind to others, we tend to feel calmer and less stressed. The same principle applies in speaking. When we approach speaking with a spirit of generosity, we counteract the sensation of being under attack and we feel less nervous.

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'Rick and Morty' Is Finally About to Explain the Season 7 Trailer's Weirdest Moment

An oft-forgotten tidbit about Rick Sanchez is that he just might be the best cook in the multiverse, despite the fact we rarely ever see him do much more in the Smith family kitchen than chug booze. He relished in garnishing the canapés he made for the party in Rick and Morty Season 1’s “Ricksy Business,” and the non-toxic version of Rick in Season 3’s “Rest and Ricklaxation” was delighted at the prospect of picking fresh basil in the garden for a “nice scallopini.” Now, in Season 7’s fourth episode, it’s time for… Rick’s Famous Spaghetti!“That’s Amorte” features a previously unknown Smith family tradition of spaghetti Thursdays. But is there a marinara-colored red flag that something strange is going on? Rick and Morty Season 7, Episode 4 is almost here, so here’s everything you need to know from the release date and time to the episode title and other details.

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The Beatles Just Released 'Now and Then,' Their Very Last Song. It's a Poignant Lesson About Partnership

It could never have happened without AI.

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Earth 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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The 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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Be Gay and Do Crime in The Best Swashbuckling Video Game of 2023

For years I have wanted to take up fencing. The idea of doing a sport that gives me a reason to own and use a sword has always been the perfect sales pitch for me. Sadly, in my research to take up foil (or saber, or épée — I haven’t decided), I found that fencing is quite an expensive sport to dive into. Thank god there are video games like En Garde! The self-described swashbuckling title is an indie delight on PC that blends humor, style, and satisfying swordplay.Even before getting to the sword fighting, players will take note of the Pixar-esque art style of En Garde! The warm sun-drenched environments decorated with specks of color and vibrant costumes that drip with personality are a feast for the eyes. At the center of all this visual wonder is the game’s protagonist Adalia de Volador.

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Can You Learn to Meow Like Your Cat? Yes and No, According to an Animal Behavioralist

Whenever my cat meows incessantly in my direction despite my attempts to play with him, I so wish I could just speak meow to figure out what he really wants. (Though I'd place my bets on it being treats.)“It's kind of a yes-no answer,” Molly DeVoss, a cat behavior specialist, tells Inverse. Cats do recognize different pitches and tones, she says. In fact, cats seem to pay attention to the way their owners address them and can recognize whether they’re being spoken to based on voice and tone. One 2022 study published in the journal Animal Cognition found that if a pet owner spoke in baby talk to their cat, the cat responded with much more alertness to this voice than to their owner speaking normally to other humans or speaking to a stranger in baby talk.

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Godzilla 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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How to Stop Saying "Um," "Ah," and "You Know"

When you get rattled while speaking — whether you’re nervous, distracted, or at a loss for what comes next — it’s easy to lean on filler words, such as “um,” “ah,” or “you know.” These words can become crutches that diminish our credibility and distract from our message. To eliminate such words from your speech, replace them with pauses. To train yourself to do this, take these three steps. First, identify your crutch words and pair them with an action. Every time you catch yourself saying “like,” for example, tap your leg. Once you’ve become aware of your filler words as they try to escape your lips, begin forcing yourself to be silent. Finally, practice more than you think you should. The optimal ratio of preparation to performance is one hour of practice for every minute of presentation.

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When 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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Starfish 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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What 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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Where 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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'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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Writing a Rejection Letter (with Samples)

I have a friend who appraises antiques — assigning a dollar value to the old Chinese vase your grandmother used for storing pencils, telling you how much those silver knickknacks from Aunt Fern are worth. He says the hardest part of his job, the part he dreads the most, is telling people that their treasure is worthless.

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6 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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Amazon's Selling a Ton of These 50 Weird, Cheap Things That Work So Freaking Well

Sometimes you have to think outside the box to come up with a great solution to all of life’s little problems. And the weird items on this list are gaining new fans daily thanks to their low prices and high level of functionality. From a popular cover that will keep your microwave clean to a bug-shaped flashlight that runs for 22 hours, everything has a genius design that allows it to work effectively.Coming with a retractable brush, a microfiber cloth, and two multifunctional pens, you’ll have everything you need to keep your devices spotless with this laptop cleaner kit. You’ll be able to remove embedded dirt from between keys and leave your screens streak-free. The tools can also be used on your phone, camera, wireless earbuds, and more.

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Defending 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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High 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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Biden'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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China'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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What 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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