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 S63Physics reveals secret of how nature helped sculpt the Great Sphinx of Giza   Leif Ristroph, a physicist and applied mathematician at New York University, was conducting experiments on how clay erodes in response to flowing water when he noticed tiny shapes emerging that resembled seated lions—in essence, miniature versions of the Great Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. Further experiments provided evidence in support of a longstanding hypothesis that natural processes first created a land formation known as a yardang, after which humans added additional details to create the final statue. Initial results were first presented last year as part of the American Physical Society's Gallery of Fluid Motion, with a full paper being published this week in the journal Physical Review Fluids.
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S1Everything You (Don't) Want to Know About Raising Capital  Most entrepreneurs understand that if the fundamentals of a business idea—the management team, the market opportunities, the operating systems and controls—are sound, chances are there’s money out there. The challenge of landing that capital to grow a company can be exhilarating. But as exciting as the money search may be, it is equally threatening. Built into the process are certain harsh realities that can seriously damage a business. Entrepreneurs cannot escape them but, by knowing what they are, can at least prepare for them.
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S210 Pitfalls That Destroy Organizational Trust  In their new book, Move Fast and Fix Things, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss outline five strategies to help leaders tackle their hardest problems and quickly make change. Their second strategy is to build — or rebuild — trust with your stakeholders. This means they need to believe three things: that you care about them (empathy), that you’re capable of meeting their needs (logic), and that you can be expected to do what you say you’ll do (authenticity). Most organizations are shaky on at least one of these trust pillars, commonly in one of the below scenarios.
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S3How Generative AI Could Disrupt Creative Work  In the face of technological change, creativity is often held up as a uniquely human quality, less vulnerable to the forces of technological disruption and critical for the future. Today however, generative AI applications such as ChatGPT and Midjourney are threatening to upend this special status and significantly alter creative work, both independent and salaried. The authors explore three non-exclusive scenarios for this disruption of content creation: 1) people use AI to augment their work, leading to greater productivity, 2) generative AI creates a flood of cheap content that drives out human creatives, and 3) human-made creative work demands a premium.
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S4S5S6S7S8S9S10S11S12S13S14When Your Go-To Problem-Solving Approach Fails  We make decisions all day, every day. The way we make decisions depends largely on context and our own unique problem-solving style. But, sometimes a tough workplace situation turns our usual problem-solving style on its head. Situationality is the culmination of many factors including location, life stage, decision ownership, and team dynamics. To make effective choices in the workplace, we often need to put our well-worn decision-making habits to the side and carefully ponder all aspects of the situation at hand.
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S15Nvidia's CEO What It Takes To Run An A.I.-Led Company Now  The future of AI goes far beyond individuals using ChatGPT. Companies are now integrating artificial intelligence into all aspects of their businesses. One key player in this transition is Nvidia, the AI-driven computing company, which makes both hardware and software for a range of industries. In this episode, HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius speaks with Nvidia’s CEO and cofounder Jensen Huang at HBR’s Future of Business conference about how he keeps his company agile in the face of accelerating change and where he sees AI going next.
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S16Is Your Curiosity Helping or Hurting Your Work?  Undirected curiosity has the potential to derail you from your work and keeps you from ending up where you want to go. But intentionally directed curiosity, where you make a conscious choice to think creatively about something important, can be an incredible force for good in your job and dramatically increase your overall innovation and effectiveness. It can help you slow down and reflect, so you can solve business problems, build better relationships, and reduce stress. In this article, the author outlines how to intentionally harness your curiosity to maximize your results instead of undermine them: First, identify what’s useful to your work, and hold off on everything else for later. Second, use your curiosity to solve problems. Third, improve your work relationships by thinking through their situation with openness and empathy. Finally, use curiosity to identify and reduce your stress.
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S174 Ways Silicon Valley Changed How Companies Are Run  Silicon Valley firms don’t just create technology. Over the past 30 years they’ve invented a new way of running companies, what author Andrew McAfee calls the “Geek Way.” It’s comprised of four norms that increasingly define successful businesses: Speed, ownership, science, and openness. Companies that resist this recipe risk being left behind.
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S18Let Corporate Purpose Guide You Through ESG Turbulence  In the midst of divergent ESG (environmental, social, and governance) practices between the U.S. and Europe, companies face a challenging landscape. While U.S. stakeholders push for reduced ESG efforts, European regulations demand more stringent sustainability measures. The key to navigating this complexity lies in a corporate “statement of purpose.” This statement provides clarity and direction in balancing profitability with social and environmental solutions. It helps companies address stakeholder interests, create value for investors, and navigate regulatory differences. Despite varying opinions on ESG’s impact on investor returns, a clear, stakeholder-inclusive statement of purpose can guide companies toward innovative, profitable solutions for societal and environmental challenges.
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S19Improve Your Company's Use of AI with a Structured Approach to Prompts  Despite their power and seemingly intuitive interface, it can be hard for new users to really put AI’s capabilities to work. Companies need to invest in both prompting and fine tuning. The authors suggest a framework for doing so: building an internal library based on their prompt-query alignment model (PQAM). This framework provides a structured approach to crafting prompts and fine-tuning AI models to enhance productivity, quality, and human upskilling. PQAM consists of three key components: a prompt library, prompt customization, and a feedback loop.
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S20Taupo: 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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S21Message 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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S22Did 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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S23Why polar bears are no longer the poster image of climate change  In a derelict hunting camp in the Baffin Islands, Northern Canada, photographers Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen watched in horror as a polar bear took what were likely its last steps.With mangey, discoloured fur and a gaunt frame the bear dragged its feet, taking slow and laboured movements. At one point, it paused, to scavenge for food in an abandoned barrel – chewing on the foam seat of a snowmobile, which had been burned and tossed away.
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S24The invisible dangers of travelling through time  One of the most common occurrences in Doctor Who is characters getting into trouble by changing, or trying to change, the past. As with so many time-travel stories, interfering with past events is represented as incredibly dangerous.In the Season Six finale The Wedding of River Song, the Doctor's friend and lover River Song changes the course of history when she refuses to shoot the Doctor – even though, this being a story about time travel, the audience has already seen her do it and knows it is inevitable.
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S25Quiz: Can you identify Temu's weirdest gadgets?  If you’ve spent time online over the past year, you’ll likely have come across ads for some strange products. Some sort of yellow slime, a squishy toy with eight legs … What actually is that thing?Online shopping platform Temu — owned by Chinese company PDD Holdings, which also operates the local e-commerce juggernaut Pinduoduo — launched in the U.S. towards the end of 2022, and is now in markets across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. This rapid expansion has been accompanied by an aggressive digital marketing and advertising campaign, enticing people to “shop like a billionaire” with ads for low-cost and often highly peculiar products.
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S26This startup is cashing in on the e-waste from India's EV revolution  When it launched in 2013, Indian startup RecycleKaro used to dismantle electronic waste. It has since developed processes to extract cobalt, nickel, and manganese from lithium ion batteries. According to managing director Rajesh Gupta, the company plans to leverage the boom in electric vehicles — and the consequent battery waste — through its upcoming 6.9-hectare facility that will extract nickel from scrapped lithium ion batteries.Only 30% of this market is organized. We still don’t have proper mechanisms to collect e-waste from Indian households.
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S27How Shein and TikTok Shop are trying to shake the 'Made in China' reputation  In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Liz Monroy became one of the top sellers on the Latin American e-commerce platform MercadoLibre. Her brand, Distribuidora Cheap Price, which mostly sells wholesale hair accessories, was getting around 1,000 orders per month by mid-2021, earning her $15,000 in revenue.Looking to expand on her success, Monroy turned to other shopping platforms to sell her wares. She first considered Amazon but found the process confusing. “Selling on Amazon is almost as complicated as selling to the government — they ask for many documents and the process to become a seller is very long,” she told Rest of World.
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S28Cricket, influencers, layoffs: Alibaba's risky bet in Pakistan  The world outside Yousuf Najmuddin’s Karachi warehouse was a cacophony of impatient drivers and insistent hawkers one Wednesday in August. Inside, there was an industrious calm as workers moved between floor-to-ceiling shelves in search of mousetraps, child safety locks, or other home improvement products. Najmuddin’s office was in a back corner — a small, air-conditioned room. There, his laptop pinged every other minute to announce new orders through Daraz, Pakistan’s largest e-commerce site, owned by Chinese tech giant Alibaba.Najmuddin is one of Daraz’s top sellers. But his laptop doesn’t ping as often as it used to, he told Rest of World.
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S29How Chinese e-commerce fuels counterfeit fashion in Nigeria  On a windy September afternoon at Balogun Market, a popular textile and fashion market in Lagos, small traders displayed their wares. Some spread into the road, causing traffic to back up and forcing pedestrians to step around them. Many of the items for sale looked familiar. Some traders sold shoes bearing logos reminiscent of the Nike swoosh or Adidas’ three stripes — but sporting a different name. Other products featured labels with one or two letters omitted, added, or switched to create recognizable brand names: Clothing branded Aidads, Baiencglaca, Berbuery, and Guccy hung on rails or was displayed on the floor. The foot soldiers of bigger traders who can afford to rent store space inside moved around the market, sweet-talking customers and dragging them by their hands and shirts to their stores. “Original designer jeans, belts, shoes; follow me and I’ll give you wholesale price,” one said, flashing business cards with tiny pictures of products for sale in front of customers’ faces.
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S30At home with Asia's shopping influencers  For Pham Van Thoai, a shopping influencer based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, one of the most exciting parts of his job is checking his sales figures.“There’s a ‘wow’ moment when there are so many buyers,” Thoai told Rest of World before a recent livestream session. “For instance, ‘Wow, we sold 2,000 electric toothbrushes in a minute!’ or ‘Wow, 10,000 people are watching! Now it’s 20,000!’”
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S31How China took over the world's online shopping carts  Sales at Yiheng Battery were stagnating in the fall of 2022. The company, based in the eastern Chinese city of Yiwu, had done good business for 30 years selling button cell batteries — used in watches and other small devices — to customers at its factory and on Chinese shopping platform 1688. But the Covid-19 pandemic had taken a toll. “The [Chinese] economy was not doing well, and people were not spending,” Huang Qianqian, whose parents own the factory, told Rest of World. That October, Huang, 28, quit her job at a tech company to help out the family business.Huang’s friends eventually told her about a new e-commerce platform, Temu, which had just launched in the U.S. Temu is owned by PDD Holdings, which also owns Pinduoduo, a Chinese online shopping app that is popular in China for its low prices and gamified features. Temu used similar tactics, but targeted American customers.
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S32How Did Nuclear Weapons Get on My Reservation?  A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation digs into a decades-long mystery: how 15 intercontinental ballistic missiles came to be siloed on her ancestral lands.This article is part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.
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S33What Radioactive Fallout Tells Us about Our Nuclear Future  The U.S. has embarked on the largest and most expensive nuclear build-out ever. The U.S. military says it is necessary to replace an aging nuclear arsenal. But critics fear the risks.This article is part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.
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S34Dyslexia, Dark Energy and a New Arms Race  We're in the early stages of a new nuclear arms race. It has not gotten much popular attention yet, and we at Scientific American hope that our special report will help people think through the dangers and implications of a $1.5-trillion (with a T) plan to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Perhaps the most controversial part of the plan involves refurbishing the land-based missile system. Upgraded nuclear missiles will be planted in hundreds of silos across five states, where they will be potentially vulnerable to attack. As our editorial points out, it's basically a “kick me” sign on the middle of the country.The next decade is going to be a “boom time” for nuclear weapons, as a nonproliferation scholar tells journalist Abe Streep. Streep takes us to nuclear weapons sites across the U.S. to understand how the previous arms race shaped history and what future the new arms race might bring.
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S35S36Why the Life Expectancy Gap between Men and Women Is Growing  Women are outliving men by nearly six years—and COVID and drug overdoses are a major cause, according to a new reportWomen have outlived men for more than a century in the U.S. Demographers have largely attributed this well-known statistical gap to differences in behaviors in areas such as smoking and drinking habits, risk of injury and drug use. Overall U.S. life expectancy had been slowly improving for decades, but data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show some of this progress has recently been overturned—especially among men.
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S37Climate Changes Threatens Every Facet of U.S. Society, Federal Report Warns  The new U.S. National Climate Assessment details how climate change will alter nearly every aspect of American life—and how the U.S. can help avoid “potentially catastrophic outcomes”CLIMATEWIRE | A long-awaited federal climate report, released Tuesday, delivers a blunt warning: Rapidly curb planet-warming emissions or face dire consequences to human health, infrastructure and the economy.
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S38New Portable Breast Cancer Scanner Can Fit in a Bra  Scientists have developed an ultrasound device to detect aggressive breast cancer that may develop between screeningsIf breast cancer is caught early, its survival rate is nearly 100 percent. If not, that rate can quickly drop to roughly 25 percent. Women older than 50 in the U.S. are advised to get mammograms every two years, but the most aggressive tumors often arise and are diagnosed between screenings.
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S39Scientists Discover First-Ever Vampire Virus Latched to Neck of 'MindFlayer'  This colorized transmission electron microscope image shows a newly discovered satellite virus latched onto its helper virus. This research represents the first time scientists have observed one virus attached to another. Out of 50 observed helpers, 40 had a satellite bound. Bioinformatic analysis of the satellite and helper viruses’ genomes provides clues as to why the satellite may have evolved to attach to the helper, and suggests this pair may have been co-evolving for about 100 million years.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.
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S40Will It or Won't It? Iceland's Volcano Threatens Eruption  An enormous magma intrusion under Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula is causing earthquake swarms and forcing evacuationsThis photo taken on November 13, 2023, shows a crack cutting across the main road in Grindavík in southwestern Iceland following earthquakes. The southwestern town of Grindavík—home to around 4,000 people—was evacuated in the early hours of November 11 after magma shifting under Earth’s crust caused hundreds of earthquakes in what experts warned could be a precursor to a volcanic eruption.
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S41How Retail Stores Compete With Amazon | Barbara Kahn  Wharton’s Barbara Kahn assesses the holiday shopping season, how retailers compete with Amazon, and why opposing indicators make it hard to forecast trends. This episode is part of a series on “Holiday Retail.”Dan Loney: We are towards the end of the year. What’s your feel for the retail landscape right now?
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S42How Private Equity Has Evolved to Compete in Global M&A  PE firms have shed old skin and in recent decades become bigger, smarter, and more relevant in M&A and markets than ever before, argues a new paper co-authored by Wharton's Paul Nary.In April this year, the founders of the legendary investment firm KKR, or Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, resolved that they didn’t want to live with the unsavory parts of their past and launched an image makeover with a change at the helm.
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S43Building Your Brand in a Post-pandemic Market  Wharton’s Americus Reed explains the brave new world of branding, where it’s no longer enough to rely on price, style, or convenience. Consumers want to connect on a deeper level.After nearly three years of disruption, anxiety, and worry, shoppers are no longer content to buy products and services based just on price, style, or convenience. They want a deeper connection with companies that align with their values, said Wharton marketing professor Americus Reed. That’s why brands need to articulate their purpose and vision.
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S44The Best Posture Correctors to Put a Stop to Your Slouch  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 WIREDWE SLOUCH AT our desks for at least 40 hours a week and bend our necks toward our phones the rest of the time. All of this may be affecting our back health. Bad posture doesn’t just cause temporary pain and stiffness; it can cause a permanent hunch. If you just adjusted your shoulders while reading this, it's time to work on your posture.
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S4514 Gifts for the Best Mom You'll Ever Have  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 WIREDThe category of "mom" encompasses a tremendous amount of variety. There are moms like me, who are coming out of that first year haze of diapers and no sleep, and are slowly reclaiming their hobbies and free time. There are moms who are balancing teenagers and threenagers simultaneously (and those mothers are stronger than I will ever be). And there are moms who might have an empty nest, but you’re still calling them to ask how long you really cook chicken for. This guide has something for hopefully all of them, spanning tools that make motherhood a little easier, to things she can enjoy when the kids are finally in bed.
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S46Here's the Proof There's No Government Alien Conspiracy Around Roswell  Across the 75 years since somethingâsomethingâcrashed outside Roswell in early July 1947, the very name itself has taken on a life of its own: Today, it's shorthand for UFOs, extraterrestrials, and a vast government conspiracy, perhaps even where the very idea of the deep state itself was born. The city of 50,000 in southeastern New Mexico, about three hours from Albuquerque and El Paso, has leaned into its infamy: There's a UFO museum, a space walk, and even a flying-saucer-shaped McDonald's, not to mention any number of kitschy souvenir stands.Untangling what exactly happened there, though, was a half-century journey through secret government programs, the Cold War, nuclear secrets, and the rise of conspiracy theories in US politics. We know something did crash in Roswell in late June or early July 1947, just weeks after the age of the flying saucer dawned. The modern age of UFOs began on June 24, 1947, when a 32-year-old Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold, an experienced rescue pilot with some 4,000 hours of mountain-high-altitude flight time, noticed a bright light out the window of his CallAir A-2 prop plane while flying near Mount Rainier in the Pacific Northwest.
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S47Google DeepMind's AI Weather Forecaster Handily Beats a Global Standard  In September, researchers at Google's DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfallâeons in forecasting termsâand official forecasts were still waffling between the storm landing on major Northeast cities or missing them entirely. DeepMind's own experimental software had made a very specific prognosis of landfall much farther north. "We were riveted to our seats," says research scientist Rémi Lam.A week and a half later, on September 16, Lee struck land right where DeepMind's software, called GraphCast, had predicted days earlier: Long Island, Nova Scotiaâfar from major population centers. It added to a breakthrough season for a new generation of AI-powered weather models, including others built by Nvidia and Huawei, whose strong performance has taken the field by surprise. Veteran forecasters told WIRED earlier this hurricane season that meteorologists' serious doubts about AI have been replaced by an expectation of big changes ahead for the field.
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S48WIRED Exclusive | The Top US Cybersecurity Agency Has a New Plan for Weaponized AI  Last month, a 120-page United States executive order laid out the Biden administration's plans to oversee companies that develop artificial intelligence technologies and directives for how the federal government should expand its adoption of AI. At its core, though, the document focused heavily on AI-related security issues—both finding and fixing vulnerabilities in AI products and developing defenses against potential cybersecurity attacks fueled by AI. As with any executive order, the rub is in how a sprawling and abstract document will be turned into concrete action. Today, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) will announce a “Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence” that lays out its plan for implementing the order.CISA divides its plans to tackle AI cybersecurity and critical infrastructure-related topics into five buckets. Two involve promoting communication, collaboration, and workforce expertise across public and private partnerships, and three are more concretely related to implementing specific components of the EO. CISA is housed within the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
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S49Asian Americans Raise Alarm Over 'Chilling Effects' of Section 702 Surveillance Program  Dozens of prominent Asian American groups are asking United States lawmakers this morning to hold fast in the face of an anticipated campaign by congressional leaders to extend the Section 702 surveillance program by securing it, like a rider, to another "must pass" bill.Sixty-three groups across the country representing and allied with Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have signed a letter of "strong opposition" to any "short-term extension" of the 702 programâsurveillance, the groups say, that is almost certainly impacting Asian Americans at a disproportionate rate.
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S50The 32 Best Black Friday Deals on Outdoor Gear  Black Friday is traditionally the season when you shop for televisions or Christmas presents, and not so much for outdoor gear. But that has changed in the past few years with REI's Get Up Get Out Sale and other outdoor retailers. It turns out now is a great time to score a deal on tents, backpacks, sleeping pads, Garmin devices, and more. The deals are here now, even if the turkey isn't. Don't see anything you like? Don't forget to check out our buying guides for our best outdoor recommendations, including our guides to The Best Tents, The Best Sleeping Pads, Camp Cooking Gear, The Best GoPros, and The Best Barefoot Shoes.We test products year-round and handpicked these deals. Products that are sold out or no longer discounted as of publishing will be crossed out. We'll update this guide through November.
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S51The 41 Best Shows on Disney+ Right Now  Disney+, if you didn’t know, isn’t just for kids. With its ownership of the Lucasfilm brand and the Marvel titles, the streaming service also offers plenty of grown-up content in its bid to compete with Netflix and Amazon—and we’re not just talking movies. Since launching the service, Disney has used the name recognition of Star Wars and Marvel to launch scores of TV shows, from The Mandalorian to Loki. In the list below, we’ve collected the ones we think are the best to watch, from those franchises and beyond.Want more? Head to our best movies on Disney+ list if you’re looking for movies, and our guides on the best shows on Netflix and best shows on Apple TV+ to see what Disney’s rivals have to offer. Don’t like our picks, or want to suggest your own? Head to the comments below and share your thoughts.
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S52Can you trust your own brain? Neuroscientist Heather Berlin explains  Have you ever told a story to your friends, and someone who was there interrupts you to say that’s not how it happened? Annoying, right? Chances are they’re not just being rude, they have genuinely perceived the events differently.“We’re all living inside of our own perception box,” explains Dr. Heather Berlin, neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. “Physically speaking, each brain is unique. It’s slightly different, and it’s shaped throughout our lives based on our experiences. Only you know your own first-person subjective experience. I will never know it. And although we might have similarities, there’s these differences that create our own box that we perceive the world through.”
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S53Harvard astronomer's "alien spherules" are industrial pollutants  Perhaps the biggest question in all of the cosmos is that of life beyond Earth. With so many stars and planets, and with the raw ingredients for life found strewn all about the Universe, there are enormous numbers of proverbial lottery tickets out there: chances for life to arise, survive, persist, and thrive. But humanity still awaits the discovery of our first instance of life beyond Earth, whether it be primitive life on worlds far beyond our own, complex life on a world where biological activity has occurred for billions of years, or intelligent, technologically advanced life that we might someday contact and communicate with.That lack of success, so far, should in no way dissuade us from continuing the search for life elsewhere in the Universe. However, we have to be extremely wary of those who claim to see evidence for the existence of aliens where none exists. Recently, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has put forth a series of extraordinary claims concerning alien technology, asserting that:
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S54Humility: Why modern leaders need to resurrect this ancient virtue  Many ancient thinkers have written about the dangers of arrogance. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius warned against losing one’s modesty in The Meditations. Saint Augustine called pride the “origin of evil” in The City of God. Confucius said, “A superior man is modest in his speech but exceeds in his actions” in The Analects. Finally, the classic: “Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18.And yet, history remembers the greats and the conquerors, not the meek or the mild. CEOs and celebrities become icons for their charisma and grand lifestyles. Even ordinary people have become locked in a spiral of one-upmanship — endlessly outdoing each other with larger houses, sportier cars, and more luxurious vacation photos clogging up social media feeds.
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S55New paper argues that the Universe began with two Big Bangs  Two cosmological mysteries continue to fascinate scientists and science enthusiasts alike. The first is understanding in detail how the Universe came into existence. The second is the nature of dark matter, a substance which is thought to be far more prevalent than all the stars and galaxies in the Universe. A recent paper explores a possible intricate connection between these two phenomena and proposes that the beginning of the Universe included not one, but two, Big Bangs.To understand the implications of this interesting new idea, we must first consider the prevailing understanding of both the Big Bang and dark matter.
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S56S57World expert and film consultant debunks 3 gladiator myths  One of the most iconic moments in movie history is when Russell Crowe, dressed in leather and brandishing a bloodied gladius, turns to an awe-struck and silent coliseum to shout, “Are you not entertained?” Yes, Russell, we are. Very much so. Whether it be big-screen Hollywood blockbusters, TV historical dramas, or Las Vegas live shows, people love the idea of ancient gladiatorial fights.What’s there not to love? There’s blood, sweat, and tears. There’s swinging, punching, kicking, and slashing action, punctuated by shocking gore and the promise of imminent death. In the bloodthirsty chants of a frenzied crowd, we see our shadow selves. We may tut at the Rome Colosseum, yet we cannot turn our heads away from the violence.
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S58Google sues people who "weaponized" DMCA to remove rivals' search results  Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors' websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants "created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs," said Google's lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
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S59Rivian blames "fat finger" for infotainment-bricking software update  The more innovation-minded people in the auto industry have heralded the advent of the software-defined car. It's been spun as a big benefit for consumers, too—witness the excitement among Tesla owners when that company adds a new video game or childish noise to see why the rest of the industry joined the hype train. But sometimes there are downsides, as some Rivian owners are finding out this week.
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S60Trust in science down; trends worst in minorities, Republicans  On Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released its latest look at how the US public views scientists and the scientific endeavor. While recent years have shown a decline in the public's trust in science, these could be viewed as a return to normalcy after a spike in positive feelings during the pandemic's peak. But this year's data shows the decline has continued, creating a decline that has now taken us below pre-pandemic levels of trust.
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S61AI outperforms conventional weather forecasting for the first time: Google study  On Tuesday, the peer-reviewed journal Science published a study that shows how an AI meteorology model from Google DeepMind called GraphCast has significantly outperformed conventional weather forecasting methods in predicting global weather conditions up to 10 days in advance. The achievement suggests that future weather forecasting may become far more accurate, reports The Washington Post and Financial Times.
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S62S64S65People think white AI-generated faces are more real than actual photos, study says  A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science on Monday found that AI-generated faces, particularly those representing white individuals, were perceived as more real than actual face photographs, reports The Guardian. The finding did not extend to images of people of color, likely due to AI models being trained predominantly on images of white individuals—a common bias that is well-known in machine learning research.
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S66S67KeeperFX keeps Dungeon Keeper alive by making it actually playable  In an interview about The Making of Karateka, a wonderful interactive documentary and game-about-a-game, Chris Kohler of Digital Eclipse notes that, based on the company's data, people don't actually play the games inside "classics" collections. Maybe they spend 5 minutes inside a few games they remember, but that's about it. Presenting classic games, exactly as they were when they arrived, can be historically important but often falls short of real engagement.
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S68Sitcom  A rabbit tried to kill Louise Once when I was a kid. I’m saying Louise now But I’d have said Miss Louise then, as she appeared On our screens once a week Wearing blues I haven’t seen Since, her long hair curled, Combed out, and pushed up Into a volume so thick, you felt Both the power of an Afro and The requirement of a relaxer On a woman rounder than most Of her penthouse neighbors, Hair that wouldn’t move No matter how much she Shook when she yelled At her husband or when Trapped by a man Dressed as a rabbit who Wielded a snub-nose .38 Special We thought scary before We knew what an AR-15 Could do. Miss Louise Never sang, but she had a voice That left you wondering How singing might sound On her. She was that beautiful. And dark. They had a grown son. She wasn’t a young woman. By the time I saw the Halloween Rerun, the youngest men In my hometown had organized Themselves into colors, red and Blue. They were patriots. Like Patriots, they’d shoot. And They’d shoot each other too. They’d shoot you if you Accidentally scuffed their shoes At a club or a concert. They’d Shoot driving by from their cars Into houses and parks. They’d Sell you something so good, You’d sell our TV to get more Of it. And I cannot say I didn’t Love them. They killed my first Girlfriend—a stray bullet meant For her brother—and I loved Them. They killed my cousin, But some of them were my Other cousins, and I still loved Us in all my fear of our gold Teeth and oversize Dickies. They’d kill me today, yet remain A problem I mean to solve. I’m grown now. I know Louise Was the star of the show, The leading lady. No writer Would kill her off on a sitcom. Murder is meant for real life. Anybody can get a gun, but Nobody kills Louise Jefferson. There is a place where Black people don’t die, A deluxe apartment in the sky. All week, I worried about the next Episode. Mornings, I’d dress Myself and my little sister, Making sure we wore nothing That looked like the flag, and When the appointed night fell, The jokes were still funny, The rabbit apprehended. The white rabbit didn’t murder The Black lady, no, not on TV.
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S69The Plight of the Eldest Daughter  Women are expected to be nurturers. Firstborns are expected to be exemplars. Being both is exhausting.This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
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S70Have Yourself an Early Little Christmas  All of the arguments that chestnuts should not be roasting on an open fire in the month of November make sense to me: the nagging fact that retailers haul out the proverbial holly before Halloween has fully passed for purely commercial reasons, further cheapening an already materialistic mode of celebration; the dilution of a particularly special time of year by stretching it to the point of exhaustion; the infringement upon both Thanksgiving and the traditional Christian season of Advent, which each tend to be swallowed up by premature Christmas cheer; the obnoxious recruitment of Christmas into the culture wars—think malicious wishes for a “merry Christmas”—that can make the entire season feel alienating and isolating. Every position above has its merits, and none of them stops me from rockin’ around my Christmas tree starting November 1.Maybe there is no good defense of getting into the Christmas spirit as early as I do—though I can’t help but feel a sense of kinship with those other handful of houses already decked out in lights before Thanksgiving. So have some patience with those of us who need a little Christmas right this very minute: a two-and-a-half-month Christmas really does have a few pleasures to recommend it.
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