   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S50Fire ants are on the march. Here's what happens when they sting   Red imported fire ants are a particularly nasty type of ant because they are aggressive, and inflict painful stings that may be life threatening. That’s in addition to being a serious threat to agriculture and biosecurity. In recent weeks, we heard these ants had spread from Queensland, south into northern New South Wales.
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S39We thought we'd find 200 species living in our house and yard. We were very wrong  There was nothing extraordinary about our 400 square metre block of land in Annerley, a suburb of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. Roughly half the block was occupied by a three-bedroom house.What was extraordinary was the number of species we discovered there. As revealed in our just-published study, starting on the first day of lockdown and continuing over the course of a year, we catalogued 1,150 species on our inner-city property.
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S40S61Zack Snyder's 'Rebel Moon' Is Coming to Netflix Sooner Than You Think  Get ready to experience the rebellion just a bit earlier than expected. Netflix is set to unleash the first half of Zack Snyder’s two-part sci-fi epic, Rebel Moon, this December, and the streamer’s rolling out the red carpet. In efforts to “eventize” its release, Netflix has nudged Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire out of its December 22 premiere and into a prime time slot. The film will now be available to stream a few hours earlier, hitting Netflix on December 21 at 7:00 p.m. PST (or 10:00 p.m. EST). Netflix Geeked broke the news with a new teaser, offering a closer look at the sprawling cast that Snyder assembled for his epic. Sofia Boutella stars as Kora, a retired soldier whose peaceful life on a remote moon is suddenly threatened by occupational forces. A Child of Fire follows Kora as she traverses the galaxy in search of warriors that will help her defend her home, but audiences will have to wait a few months to see the epic battle realized in Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver.
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S34How bird feeders help small species fight infection  Every day, throughout the world, people put huge quantities of food out at feeding stations for birds and other wild animals. Winter can be tough for small birds. During cold winter nights, small birds reduce their body temperature by several degrees. While this would be lethal for a human, it saves lots of energy, helping birds to survive particularly cold nights. However, reducing body temperature is risky, and hypothermic birds are slow to wake and respond to a predator.
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S60'The Boy in the Heron' Reveals Miyazaki's Most Pervasive Idea  Fantasy and reality have always collided in Miyazaki movies, but The Boy and the Heron makes the choice between them explicit.Splattered with bird feces, the family at the center of The Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki’s new animated masterpiece, can’t contain their joy once they return to 1940s Japan after getting lost in a fantastical, timeless realm somewhere between life and death.
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S31Seven original 1970s skateparks that show why these urban treasures should be protected  Historic Environment Scotland – whose function to date has largely been confined to protecting standing stones, cairns and castles – is proposing to add to its roster the Livingston Skatepark near Edinburgh, signalling an interest in heritage of an altogether newer kind. Designed by local architect Ian Urquhart, the Livi, as it is known, put the small Scottish town on the skateboarding map, when it opened in 1981. Visits from luminaries including American superstar Tony Hawk and the Bones Brigade have nurtured a still-vibrant local skate scene.
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S38Friday essay: blind people are often exhausted by daily prejudice - but being blind is 'inherently creative'  Andrew Leland was in his thirties when he had to stop driving at night – and then stop driving at all. Next, he had to start using a cane in public. As the cycle of decreasing vision became familiar, each absent sliver of vision required more adjustment to how he navigated the world. He moves through the same steps in the same sequence each time, but each loss is unique, and uniquely stressful. And he can still see the disdain of sighted people, which makes him long to lose all his vision at once:
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S44The sky's the limit: A brief history of in-flight entertainment  As the winter holidays draw near, many of us are already booking flights to see friends and family or vacation in warmer climates. Nowadays, air travel is synonymous with some form of in-flight entertainment, encompassing everything from the reception offered by the aircrew to the food choices and digital content.These services all add value to flying for customers. Passengers are now so familiar with in-flight entertainment that to travel without it is unthinkable.
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S55The Capital Has a Bad Case of Year-End Panic .jpg) Sometimes Washington needs to scare itself silly to get anything done. This year’s repeated threats of government shutdown are classic examples, even if the crisis has not been permanently averted but merely deferred to early 2024. The current panic is over U.S. assistance to Ukraine, which is set to run out at a moment when Russia has successfully stalled Ukraine’s counter-offensive and the onset of winter has brought a new round of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure.For President Biden, who has repeatedly promised Ukraine that America would be there “as long as it takes,” basic credibility is on the line. For weeks, he and his Democratic allies in the Senate have tried and failed to pry a deal from their G.O.P. colleagues, who have set increased border funding and stricter immigration reforms as the price for unlocking Biden’s proposed sixty billion dollars for Kyiv. With prospects fading for an agreement, Democrats have spent the past few days warning of geopolitical catastrophe. “I just don’t think there’s any question that we are about to abandon Ukraine,” Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, who has been one of the lead negotiators, told reporters. “When Vladimir Putin marches into Kyiv and into Europe, Republicans will have to live with the fact that our sons and daughters will be over fighting when Vladimir Putin marches into a NATO country.”
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S68'Big Walk': 'Untitled Goose Game' Dev Reveals Absurd Multiplayer Puzzle Game at The Game Awards 2023  Just minutes into The Game Awards 2023 (if we’re not counting the pre-show), we already got confirmation of free DLC for God of Wår: Ragnarok, but for fans of cute, weirdo indie games, it may have immediately been eclipsed. House House, the developer of Untitled Goose Game, revealed its first game after the avian nonsense simulation, and somehow it looks even cuter (and weirder).Details were sparse on House House’s Big Walk, but it does seem to have a much larger scope than Untitled Goose Game, which was mostly confined to a few backyards. This time, you’ll have a vast wilderness area to explore, and you won’t be alone.
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S63This Repurposed Drug May Allow Type 1 Diabetics to Make Insulin Again  Baricitinib works by blocking protein receptors that trigger an overactive immune response.Out of the 50 hormones identified in the human body, insulin arguably ranks among the top dogs. This hormone acts like a key, opening your cells up to glucose from your food. Without it, your cells can’t get the energy they need, and for some living with diabetes, the health consequences can be devastatingly fatal.
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S595 Years Ago, Nintendo's Biggest Franchise Knocked Out the Competition -- Once and For All  Over the years, countless games have tried to reproduce the wild success of Super Smash Brothers. For the most part, they always fail. Smash Bros. has proved to be a phenomenon over the years. To this day, there’s still a vibrant competitive scene for Super Smash Bros. Melee, which came out in 2001 for the GameCube, and teasers for new Smash Ultimate characters have served as major announcements at events like The Game Awards. But five years ago, Nintendo decisively proved that no one will ever be able to reach its heights. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is still a staggering success, a game with such vibrant vision and ambition it manages to succeed at everything it does. A raucous multiplayer experience, it’s hard to believe the amount of content and quality crammed into every corner of Smash Ultimate. It’s a celebration of decades of video game history and quite simply the best party game ever created.
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S8When research study materials don't speak their participants' language, data can get lost in translation  Language is a key barrier to participation, as even those with some English proficiency are less likely to participate in studies when recruitment materials aren’t in their native language. Language barriers also hinder a person’s ability to provide informed consent to participate.A translator is not a conduit of meaning, but both a reader of the original text and a writer of the translation. As such, translators have their own positioning in the world that comes with a set of conscious or unconscious values and knowledge that bias how they read and write. Translation is a process of interpretation regardless of how objective a translator aims to be.
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S10What does weight-inclusive health care mean? A dietitian explains what some providers are doing to end weight stigma  This includes practices such as eating for overall well-being rather than for the number of calories. It may also include prioritizing activities to reduce stress, avoiding smoking, drinking less alcohol and striving to be physically active in enjoyable ways.People with larger bodies often experience weight stigma as discrimination, prejudice, negative stereotypes and judgments from others – including their own doctors and other health care providers. More than 40% of U.S. adults across a range of body sizes report experiencing weight stigma in their day-to-day lives.
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S12How I identified a probable pen name of Louisa May Alcott  Before Louisa May Alcott published the bestselling “Little Women” in two volumes – the first in 1868, the second in 1869 – she wrote melodramatic thrillers, selling these short stories to magazines to bring in cash for her impoverished family.On a cold November day in 2021, I was rereading Madeleine B. Stern’s introduction to her 780-page edition of “Louisa May Alcott’s Collected Thrillers.”
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S70How Trump Has Transformed Evangelicals  Donald Trump and American evangelicals have never been natural allies. Trump has owned casinos, flaunted mistresses in the tabloids, and often talked in a way that would get him kicked out of church. In 2016 many people doubted whether Trump could win over evangelicals, whose support he needed. Eight years later, a few weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, evangelical support for the former president and current Republican frontrunner is no longer in question. In fact, there are now prominent evangelical leaders who have come to believe that Trump is “God’s instrument on Earth,” says Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. How did evangelicals shift from being reluctant supporters of Trump to among his most passionate defenders? How did some evangelicals, historically suspicious of politicians, develop a “fanatical, cult-like attachment” to Donald Trump? And what happened to the evangelical movement as some bought into Trump’s vision of America and others recoiled?
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S48As the temperature rises, so do rates of domestic violence  Large parts of Australia are currently in the grip of a heatwave, and climate change means we’re in for more frequent and intense heat events into the future.Our team analysed close to one million reported incidents of domestic, non-domestic and sexual assaults over a 13 year period (2006-2018) in New South Wales. We examined trends related to season, temperature, and where the incidents occurred (inside or outside).
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S62Max Teases 'House of the Dragon' Season 2 and a Return to Genre Television  Max, the streamer formerly known as HBO Max, has always claimed to be “the one to watch,” and for fans of genre storytelling, this has been more or less true. After a big launch tied to the heavily anticipated Snyder Cut of The Justice League, Max did everything it could to claim the genre throne.But Max’s focus shifted over time. Its merger with the Discovery+ streaming service seemed to put a new emphasis on reality show sludge, especially since sci-fi hits like Westworld were removed from the service entirely. A bombastic 2024-25 slate could, however, signal a return to form. A teaser for the coming year has given us a look at the return of House of the Dragon, two movie spinoffs, and a spooky detective drama.
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S64The Cybertruck's "Wade Mode" Is Made For Plowing Through Potentially Treacherous Water  For as big of a release as the Cybertruck was, we’re still uncovering random features from the fans and not Tesla itself. The latest feature we’re getting insight into is “Wade Mode” which was discovered in the settings for the Cybertruck’s Off-Road Baja menu by X user @niccruzpatane.As you can see in the image, Tesla made the Cybertruck capable of adjusting ride height to protect the battery when you’re driving through water.
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S37Councils are opening the door to tiny houses as a quick, affordable and green solution  Soaring rents and home prices, increasing mortgage stress, record immigration and a growing population are fuelling a housing crisis and increasing homelessness. In the face of this pressing need, tiny houses offer an alternative housing option. Tiny houses have become popular in the United States. Their popularity is growing in other developed countries such as the UK and Canada. In Australia, however, planning and housing regulations present many barriers to using tiny houses as permanent homes.
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S53Few Films Make Ideas Exciting, but "Origin" Succeeds  Hollywood movies have a problem with intellectual endeavor; just look at the thinly imagined inner lives of the titular protagonists of "Oppenheimer" and "Maestro." But Ava DuVernay's new movie, "Origin," a bio-pic about the journalist and historian Isabel Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), has no such problem. It's hard to recall a movie made for general audiences that takes ideas so seriously, that makes the pursuit of them appear so thrilling, or that is so replete with the intellectual substance of the protagonist's endeavors. Even good movies about writers often downplay the hard partâtheir work. DuVernay embraces Wilkerson's work wholeheartedly and rises to the artistic challenge with one of the most unusual and ingenious of recent screenplays. The film is based on Wilkerson's 2020 book "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," and DuVernay's approachâturning a work of historical and sociological nonfiction into a dramatized story centering on its authorâis audacious. The narrative framework is capacious enough to give free rein to Wilkerson's intellectual curiosity, to pursue the subjects of her attention far, and to parse their details clearly; and within this framework, DuVernay establishes a wellspring of narrative tension that makes the activities of research, contemplation, and writing dramatically captivating onscreen.The stakes of the drama, and of Wilkerson's subjects of study, are heralded by the movie's opening scene, which depicts not Wilkerson (or, rather, let's call the character Isabel) but, instead, a young man who buys snacks from a convenience store, puts up his hoodie against the inclement weather, and realizes, as he walks home, that someone is following him. The young man is Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost), and he would soon be confronted and killed by George Zimmerman, who wrongly assumed that he was up to no good. Meanwhile, Isabel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Times who's on hiatus from the paper, is in Germany, delivering a lecture about a German resister to the Nazi regime. There, she runs into a Times editor, Amari Selvan (Blair Underwood), who wants her to write about the Trayvon Martin case. She hesitates, but listens to the 911 tapes of the incident that he forwards. (It's illustrative of DuVernay's method that, as Isabel listens, the events that the tapes refer to unfold onscreen.) Isabel begins to speculate that the case involves something more than just racism, and that the term isn't sufficient to describe the injustices borne by Black Americans.
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S13Biases behind transgender athlete bans are deeply rooted  In 2023, 24 states had laws or regulations in place prohibiting transgender students from participating on public school athletic teams consistent with their gender identity. These bans mean that a person whose sex assigned at birth was male but who identifies as a girl or woman cannot play on a girls or women’s athletic team at a public school in that state.The topic has spurred many debates about fairness, the science behind sports performance, civil rights and sports as a human right.
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S66Here's Everything We Know About the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra So Far  And with the expected upcoming release of the Galaxy S24 models, several leaks have been making the rounds as we get closer to a likely debut in early 2024. While smartphone generations tend to lean toward the iterative side, we have some rumors about the upcoming Galaxy’s titanium design, specs, and the potential for generative AI that could make for a notable update. Here are all the leaks you need to know about Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S24 models.
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S67How To Watch the Game Awards 2023, the Biggest Night of the Year for Gaming  Don’t miss out on all the awards and announcements from Geoff Keighley’s end-of-year gaming celebration.The Game Awards 2023 is nearly here. Invariably one of the biggest shows in gaming, The Game Awards enjoys a stature previously enjoyed only by E3. Even compared to the many E3 replacements that have appeared in the past few years, The Game Awards is an unmatched spectacle packed with announcements, awards, trailers, and appearances from developers and celebrities alike.
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S42When 'rights' divide: Trans kids need supportive families  Protests in support of “parental rights” have taken place across Canada in recent months. Many taking part in these demonstrations have railed against “gender ideology” in school curricula and mixed bathrooms. Much of this rhetoric is based upon the transphobic fallacy that age-appropriate inclusive health education will somehow manufacture queer and trans children all over the place.
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S11Why dozens of North American bird species are getting new names: Every name tells a story  This winter, tens of thousands of birders will survey winter bird populations for the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, part of an international bird census, powered by volunteers, that has taken place every year since 1900.For many birders, participating in the count is a much-anticipated annual tradition. Tallying birds and compiling results with others connects birders to local, regional and even national birding communities. Comparing this year’s results with previous tallies links birders to past generations. And scientists use the data to assess whether bird populations are thriving or declining.
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S30This 17th-century portrait was given plumper lips years after it was finished - an expert explains why  For the everyday visitor to a gallery or museum, alterations to artworks made years, sometimes decades, after their original creation are rarely obvious. After all, the skill of the modern art conservator is for their work to remain imperceptible at normal viewing distance, thus retaining the integrity of the original artwork. Modern-day art conservators tend to favour minimal interventions – avoiding both painting over original paint and changing the picture. The idea these days is that any interventions – such as cleaning varnish, mending tears, or in-painting (retouching) – should not interfere with the artist’s original intent.
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S14S46How to stay hopeful in a world seemingly beyond saving  As world leaders embark upon yet another COP climate conference, it can be easy to be cynical, afraid or overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the impacts that climate change is having (and will continue to have), upon our world. After all, the realities of rising sea levels and more frequent and severe storms are scary prospects.
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S29New investment labels aim to help savers spot sustainable products - but won't always stop greenwashing  From the nutritional traffic light system displayed on a box of cereal, to the efficiency ratings we look at when buying a house, ratings and labels help us work out how to spend money responsibly. A new scheme from the UK’s financial regulator also aims to use them to help you invest responsibly.The Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) first sustainable investment labelling regime is part of a larger sustainability overhaul kickstarted by the UK government in 2021. This also includes the creation (still to be finalised) of a green taxonomy for UK companies – a set of thresholds and targets to gauge whether products or activities meet sustainable objectives.
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S49S41S51Taken together, the NDIS review and the royal commission recommendations could transform disability housing  Dr Di Winkler is the CEO and Founder of the Summer Foundation. Summer Foundation is an industry partner on a La Trobe University led ARC Linkage Grant about measuring the outcomes of tenants who move to new SDA. Dr Winkler is also a volunteer director of a not for profit Specialist Disability Accommodation provider called Liverty Housing (formerly known as Summer Housing)A home – in the physical and emotional sense – is foundational to living an ordinary life with a feeling of inclusion. National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participants with the highest support needs require housing and living services. Disability can make living in mainstream housing impossible for some people, or they may need housing where support can be efficiently and safely provided.
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S57How To Fry The Perfect Latke (According To Science)  “Potato pancake” can mean something different depending on who you ask, but as Joshua Resnick, lead chef at the Institute of Culinary Education, sees it, there are generally two categories. “The first one is a flaky potato starch that’s almost a mashed potato that gets seared into a pan,” he tells Inverse.The second popular type of potato pancake, Resnick says, resembles a hashbrown. The hashbrown is often finely shredded and crispy on the outside — it presents “more of the look of a latke” — but it’s missing onion, which is one of the prime ingredients that qualifies a latke as a latke.
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S54The Fight for a Free Press in the Muscogee Nation  In November, 2018, the legislative body of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation—a self-governed tribe in Okmulgee, Oklahoma—called an emergency session to repeal a three-year-old law that guaranteed a free press. Of the five hundred and seventy-four federally recognized Native American tribes, only five have codified press freedom. “This isn’t personal against the newspaper staff, but there’s just too much negativity in the newspaper,” one council member said at the time. “There just needs to be more positive coverage.” Overnight, Mvskoke Media, the nation’s only press outlet—with print, radio, and television coverage—became subject to the tribal government’s censorship. After the vote, tribal leaders ordered that a report on the repeal be removed.The filmmakers Joe Peeler and Rebecca Landsberry-Baker, who is a member of the Muscogee Nation and the former editor of Mvskoke Media, captured all that came next. Their new documentary, “Bad Press,” follows Mvskoke Media during a three-year struggle to secure a constitutional amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press in the Muscogee Nation. In addition to the typical media problems of staff attrition and low pay, the journalists in the film face intimidation from tribal leaders and suspicion from members of their audience, many of whom instinctively distrust reporters who wade into tribal politics. If feature films like “All the President’s Men” and “The Post” have romanticized the press’s place in civic life, “Bad Press” succeeds in conveying what modern journalism is often like: a pretty bleak profession populated by smart, funny people chasing pockets of hope and juicy stories.
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S69'Alan Wake 2' Wins Best Narrative at the Game Awards 2023  This was a year dominated by great stories in games, but only one can take home the coveted Best Narrative trophy from the Game Awards 2023. Each game in contention this year was lauded for its storytelling — on top of being some of the most popular games of 2023 overall — so there was no clear frontrunner before the show. From the open-ended narrative of Baldur’s Gate 3 to the gripping occult mystery of Alan Wake 2, the nominees represent not only some of the best stories of the year, but the many different ways games have of telling them.While every game on the list made a strong case for itself this year, only one can come out ahead. With the show underway, Alan Wake 2 has now been crowned the winner of Best Narrative at the 2023 Game Awards.
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