These are The Economist’s favourite podcasts of 2023 | How to Manage Anxiety and Boost Your Confidence in the 5 minutes Before Your Talk | New York To Paris In 90 Minutes. Can This Startup Make It Happen? | The Strange and Gruesome Story of the Greenland Shark, the Longest-Living Vertebrate on Earth

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These are The Economist’s favourite podcasts of 2023 - The Economist

A dissection of failures, covering everything from Quibi, a short-lived mobile-video platform, to Juicero, an expensive but pointless drinks machine. This podcast lays out how bad ideas become a (usually brief) reality.

Joe Pera, an American comedian, invites listeners to doze off to his relaxing tones. Episodes feature tales of the mundane: a tour of a music shop, for example, and a history of soup. Insomniacs will delight in his gentle narration—even if they never get to the end of a show.

This podcast untangles colonialism’s complex legacy. William Dalrymple and Anita Anand have examined the imperial pasts of Britain and Russia, as well as the history of slavery. The latest season focuses on Persia, “the first great superpower”.

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How to Manage Anxiety and Boost Your Confidence in the 5 minutes Before Your Talk - Inc.com

Exclusive: The Ample Hills Co-Founders Have Been Let Go--Less Than 6 Months After They Returned to the Company

You have a pitch or a big presentation on your calendar. Maybe it's been there for weeks or months. You've been watching the days count down, and it's almost "showtime."

How you manage the last five minutes before that event, interview, or meeting is the difference between so-so and spectacular. You didn't put in all this thought and work just to show up, right? You want to score a big win--whether that's a sale, investment in your idea, or an offer to join the team.

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New York To Paris In 90 Minutes. Can This Startup Make It Happen? - Forbes

Earlier this month, a curved aluminum skeleton 40 feet long sat waiting in Hermeus’ cavernous Atlanta factory. It was the prototype of a drone called Quarterhorse. It will never fly. Instead, it’s scheduled for ground-testing starting in September. Hermeus CEO AJ Piplica and his cofounders believe it’s the first step on a long road to an audacious goal: building a plane capable of carrying 20 passengers at hypersonic speed — five times faster than sound, or 3,850 miles per hour.

Imagine New York to Paris in 90 minutes. Quite an upgrade from the seven-and-a-half hours of a commercial flight today.

It’s been 20 years since the last flight of Concorde, the groundbreaking but money-losing supersonic jetliner. So far, none of a parade of startups that have tried to bring back supersonic travel have left the ground. Piplica acknowledges that Hermeus is taking on even harder technical challenges in building an airliner that can fly for long periods of time in the intense heat and weird dynamics created the farther you climb above the speed of sound. But he says that’s not the biggest problem. “The business challenges are actually the real hard ones,” Piplica, 35, tells Forbes. “You’re not just going to raise billions of dollars to develop a passenger aircraft.”

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The Strange and Gruesome Story of the Greenland Shark, the Longest-Living Vertebrate on Earth - The New Yorker

Greenland sharks are among nature’s least elegant inventions. Lumpish, with stunted pectoral fins that they use for ponderously slow swimming in cold and dark Arctic waters, they have blunt snouts and gaping mouths that give them an unfortunate, dull-witted appearance. Many live with worm-like parasites that dangle repulsively from their corneas. They belong, appropriately enough, to the family Squalidae, and appear as willing to gorge on fresh halibut as on rotting polar-bear carcasses. Once widely hunted for their liver oil, today they are considered bycatch. For some fishermen, a biologist recently told me, netting a Greenland shark is about as welcome as stepping in dog poop.

And yet the species has an undeniable magnetism. It is among the world’s largest predatory sharks, growing up to eighteen feet in length, but also among its most elusive. Its life history is a black box, one that researchers have spent decades trying in vain to peer inside. Where do Greenland sharks mate? What is their global range and population structure? And, most enticing of all, how long do they live? A study begun in the nineteen-thirties suggested that the species’ lifespan might well be extraordinary, based on the slow growth rate of a single shark that a scientist was lucky enough to catch twice. Verifying this, however, proved nearly impossible. To determine age in other sharks, biologists count the growth rings on their fin spines and vertebrae. But Greenland sharks have no hard tissues in their bodies; even their vertebrae are soft. The longevity question seemed unanswerable.

The mystery might have lingered were it not for the work of three Danish scientists—a physicist named Jan Heinemeier and two marine biologists, John Fleng Steffensen and Julius Nielsen. Nine years ago, Heinemeier and four of his colleagues published a paper on lens crystallines, a class of proteins found in the human eye. Like all organic molecules, crystallines contain carbon, including trace amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14. Unlike other proteins, which undergo constant recycling and replenishment, crystallines remain stable throughout a person’s life; they are envelopes sealed at birth, their contents an artifact from the womb. And, if crystallines are the envelopes, then carbon-14 is the postmark. The isotope has always occurred naturally on Earth, formed wherever incoming cosmic rays strike the atmosphere, but some of the current supply also comes from nuclear-weapons tests. The level fluctuates from year to year, and that means that every given time period has its own carbon-14 signature. (There was a particularly huge spike, called the bomb pulse, in the nuke-happy heyday of the fifties and sixties.) Experimenting on cadavers’ lenses, Heinemeier found that he could measure how much carbon-14 they contained and use it to determine the deceased’s date of birth.

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