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 S61Inside Mathematicians' Search for the Mysterious 'Einstein Tile'   The quest for the einstein tile—a shape never seen before in mathematics—turned up even more discoveries than mathematicians counted onIn November 2022 a colleague of mine casually asked what I was working on. My dazed answer reflected the swirl of ideas that was consuming all my mental energy at the time: “Actually, I think the solution to a major open problem just fell into my lap.” A week before, I had received an e-mail asking me to look at a shape. That was the first time I saw “the hat,” an unassuming polygon that turned out to be the culmination of a decades-long mathematical quest.
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S36How to Build Wealth When You Don't Come from Money  The first step to attaining wealth — at least for people who are not born into it — is much more personal than building millionaire habits or investing wisely. Such approaches often fail to address the systemic and mental barriers faced by many of the marginalized groups who grew up without access to wealth. The author argues that changing your mindset, or building a mindset conducive to wealth, is the real first step.
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S58The 6 Most Intriguing Things We Learned about Pet Cats and Dogs This Year  In 2023 we learned that cats really are choosing to ignore humans and that—despite dogs getting all the glory when it comes to retrieving prowess—cats want to play fetch, tooAny pet parent has seen some odd behaviors from their furry companion—from sniffing butts and tilting heads to delivering unwanted, lifeless “gifts.” Every year scientists inch closer to explaining these mannerisms by finding evolutionary or genetic underpinnings to our favorite animals’ quirks. Here’s what the research told us about cats and dogs in 2023.
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S68The 47 Best Shows on Netflix Right Now  Streaming services are known for having award-worthy series but also plenty of duds. Our guide to the best TV shows on Netflix is updated weekly to help you know which series you need to move to the top of your queue. They aren’t all sure-fire winners—we love a good less-than-obvious gem—but they’re all worth your time, trust us.Feel like you’ve already watched everything on this list you want to see? Try our guide to the best movies on Netflix for more options. And if you’ve already completed Netflix and are in need of a new challenge, check out our picks for the best shows on Hulu and the best shows on Disney+. Don’t like our picks, or want to offer suggestions of your own? Head to the comments below.
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S69What was it like when the very first stars died?  The cosmic story that gave rise to us is a story rife with creation and destruction. At the start of the hot Big Bang, energetic particles, antiparticles, and quanta of radiation were created. Fractions-of-a-second later, most of the particle-antiparticle pairs had annihilated away. Protons and neutrons formed within the first second, and then over the subsequent minutes, atomic nuclei fused together, creating the first elements. Over the next several hundred thousand years, neutral atoms finally formed, and gravitation pulled matter together into clumps. Eventually, some of the largest clumps gravitationally collapsed, creating the first stars.But these stars, made up of the pristine material forged in the hot Big Bang, would not remain the only luminous objects in the Universe for very long. As these stars were overwhelmingly massive, 25 times the typical mass of stars created during modern times, they burned through their fuel rapidly, causing them to evolve through their life cycles extremely quickly. The more massive a star is, the shorter its lifespan, meaning that these very first stars didn’t live for long at all. The death of the first stars was absolutely necessary to give rise to the Universe as we know it today. Here’s the cosmic story you haven’t heard.
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S60You Can Literally Sniff Out Other People's Inner Feelings  Scents are not only important in our relationship to food and the natural world. They also play a role in how we communicate with people we knowAfter a viral infection robbed Chrissi Kelly, an American archeologist living in the U.K., of her sense of smell, she no longer felt like herself. It was as if she were “floating away,” untethered from the rest of the world. Smell, she says, is something that binds us to nature and to our family, and without it, we cannot fully participate in everyday life. She missed the social part of scents: the deep joy of hugging a loved one and taking in their personal aroma. “I found living without the sense of smell profoundly disorienting,” she says.
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S354 Distractions that Derail Meetings -- and How to Handle Them  Most of us have had the experience of attending a meeting that veered off course, leaving us feeling confused or like we wasted our time. But meetings don’t have to be time consuming, unproductive, or otherwise painful. Understanding a few common dysfunctional behaviors can help managers turn meetings to instruments for team success. The author presents four dysfunctional behaviors that cause meetings to derail, as well as what managers need to know to make their team’s meetings more effective, efficient, and productive.
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S32'Aquaman 2' is a Fitting Final Nail in the DCEU's Coffin  A little over 10 years after the DC Extended Universe began with Man of Steel, the long-troubled franchise has seemingly come to an end. As the new heads of DC Films, James Gunn and Peter Safran, have repeatedly made clear, the plan right now is to leave the DCEU behind. The construction of a new DC Cinematic Universe has already begun, and based on all current indications, it doesn’t look like there will be any room in it for Henry Cavill’s Superman, Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, or Ben Affleck’s Batman.It doesn’t even seem like Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry will survive the transition. Indeed, despite being the lead of the most successful DCEU film to date, Momoa’s Aquaman already seems to have one fin out the door. The character’s latest big-screen adventure, this month’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, has been billed as the DCEU’s final installment, a fact which led a not-insignificant number of fans to preemptively temper their excitement for it.
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S63Incredible Footage of the Volcanic Eruption in Iceland  The eruption in Iceland may look beautiful, but what is happening just below the surface is threatening safety and livelihoods on the surface.On December 18, a volcano emerged on the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland, just north of the town of Grindavik, near the world famous Blue Lagoon.
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S20Christmas movies always show us that being single sucks -- but that's not true  Being single sucks. At least that’s the impression you get when watching Christmas movies. So many of these films focus on finding love during the holiday season. But, can you name one about being happily single during the holidays? Probably not.Love Actually, The Holiday, Falling for Christmas, Last Christmas, Single All The Way, How to Fall in Love by Christmas, Inn Love by Christmas — there are numerous Christmas movies about finding love. So many, in fact, that Netflix has dedicated an entire genre to them.
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S50S62Reindeer Chew Their Food While Napping  Brain wave studies suggest that when it comes to eating and sleeping, reindeer multitask to survive in the harsh ArcticDespite all the talk of reindeer spending December pulling sleighs through the sky, prancing across rooftops and even running over the occasional lyrical grandmother, it turns out that the animals’ busiest time of year is in summer. And to cope with the high-pressure season, reindeer, like so many of us, turn to multitasking.
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S30Would You Swallow A Vibrating "Pill" To Lose Weight?  It may be a more cost-effective alternative to popular injectable treatments like Ozempic and Wegovy.Imagine a pill no bigger than a multivitamin vibrating in your stomach. If that’s got your mind in the gutter, better shift it to your gut: such tiny devices are very real and maybe the future of weight loss.
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S67'Ferrari' Is Michael Mann's Cinematic Auto Biography  Midway through Ferrari, the iconic Italian motor-racing impresario sits at a table with his adolescent son, born of his mistress. Enzo Ferrari sketches a design for a 12-cylinder engine, in long, chalky swoops, like a seamstress designing an elegant gown. He explains to his boy that the curved, sweeping angles create better airflow, which means more power, and more speed. "When a thing works better," Ferrari, played by Adam Driver, tells the child, "usually it is more beautiful to the eye."Ferrari's cars exemplified this principle. They were efficient. They were, at their peak, world-historically fast. They were also sleek, even sexyâcovetable as much for their power as their aesthetics. More than Ford, or BMW, or even Bugatti, the word Ferrari conjures a rare unity of form and function. Enzo Ferrari was equal parts engineer and artist. In this capacity, he's an ideal subject for Ferrari's director, Michael Mann.
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S52Are You a "Bottleneck Boss"?  More often than not, a firm that’s losing great employees year after year is being negatively affected by a leader’s bottleneck-style behaviors. These leaders don’t think they’re bottlenecks, but they’re often standing in the way of high-potential employees’ progress. To remove these bottlenecks in businesses, the author outlines the signs of a bottleneck leader and three strategies to delegate responsibilities and allow high-potential employees to take on more ownership: 1) Figure out who your rock-solid, high-potential employees are, 2) start delegating responsibilities for permanent ownership transfer, and 3) support your efforts with measurable results.
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S39Should You Launch Products During a Recession?  Economic downturns are frightening. Consumers curb spending, companies cut costs, and we all wait anxiously for the economy to recover. In such a climate, launching a product—an expensive and uncertain endeavor in the best of times—would seem to make little sense. But a new study finds that products launched during recessions outperform on several important measures.
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S59The Most Important Unsolved Problem in Computer Science  When the Clay Mathematics Institute put individual $1-million prize bounties on seven unsolved mathematical problems, they may have undervalued one entry—by a lot. If mathematicians were to resolve, in the right way, computer science’s “P versus NP” question, the result could be worth worlds more than $1 million—they’d be cracking most online-security systems, revolutionizing science and even mechanistically solving the other six of the so-called Millennium Problems, all of which were chosen in the year 2000. It’s hard to overstate the stakes surrounding the most important unsolved problem in computer science.P versus NP concerns the apparent asymmetry between finding solutions to problems and verifying solutions to problems. For example, imagine you’re planning a world tour to promote your new book. You pull up Priceline and start testing routes, but each one you try blows your total trip budget. Unfortunately, as the number of cities grows on your worldwide tour, the number of possible routes to check skyrockets exponentially, rapidly making it infeasible even for computers to exhaustively search through every case. But when you complain, your agent writes back with a solution sequence of flights. You can easily verify whether or not their route stays in budget by simply checking that it hits every city and summing the fares to compare against the budget limit. Notice the asymmetry here: finding a solution is hard, but verifying a solution is easy.
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S70Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom review: 'never attempts anything original or honest'  Ten years ago, Zack Snyder's Man of Steel was the first film to be set in a universe shared by DC's superheroes. The enterprise has had its ups and downs since then, and the last four DC films – Black Adam, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, The Flash and Blue Beetle – were definitely downs. It's probably for the best, then, that Warner Bros is now rebooting DC's cinematic universe, starting with James Gunn's Superman: Legacy in 2025. But that means that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is officially the final film in the continuity that began back in 2013. It's the end of an era. And yet it's unlikely that anyone who sees the film will be shedding a tear.Not that the sequel to 2018's Aquaman is especially terrible. It has its own distinctively cartoony undersea setting that sets it apart from every other superhero film, even if it does bear a marked resemblance to the world of The Little Mermaid. And it hurtles along, delivering all of the explosions, fight sequences and quips that we’ve come to expect from today's superhero blockbusters. Any parents who fancy a two-hour snooze over the Christmas holiday while their young children are stimulated by loud noises and colourful lights could do worse than to buy some tickets.
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S48S37How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together  To achieve performance- accountable brand building and brand-accountable performance marketing, firms must create metrics that measure the effects of both types of investments on a single North Star metric: brand equity. That is then linked to specific financial outcomes—such as revenue, shareholder value, and return on investment—and deployed as a key performance indicator for both brand building and performance marketing.
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S40Change Management Requires a Change Mindset  Every organization of every size struggles with change in some way. While midsize companies are no exception, their size offers a competitive advantage. Unlike small companies with limited resources, or large companies saddled by bureaucracy or “this is how we do it” norms, midsize companies are in the sweet spot for rethinking how to relate to change and uncertainty effectively. Helping your team develop and strengthen their change mindset should be a priority. Team discussions about one’s orientation to change could unlock hidden superpowers and create new pathways for internal mobility. This article discusses how to integrate scenario mapping into your strategic planning process to boost your “flux capacity” (your tolerance for change) and contribute to the kinds of futures you’d like to see.
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S51S29This Popular Beer Alternative May Be Better Than Traditional Brew  Producing a beer this low in alcohol requires the brewer to use practices and equipment uncommon to the general brewing process. The holiday season for me includes socializing over drinks with friends and family. But all the celebrating tends to catch up with my waistline, and by New Year’s Day, it’s time to get back in shape. Besides vowing to hit the gym more, my approach involves a “Dry January.” But as someone who teaches brewing science, spends a lot of time around breweries and bars, and thoroughly loves beer, abstaining is no easy task.
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S53ESG Is Under Attack. How Should Your Company Respond?  The so-called “anti-ESG” movement — a loosely defined collection of beliefs and actions aimed at fighting a perceived shift towards “woke” or progressive ideas in society and business — is top of mind for CEOs and other senior executives. But in order to navigate this terrain, leaders need to better understand exactly how ESG or sustainability are being used as a critique, and whether those doing the critiquing are doing so in good faith. The author has created a 2×2 to help executives identify exactly who they’re dealing with, what argument they’re making, and how to effectively respond.
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S56Octopuses Are Colorblind. Here's How They See the World  Roaming around dark ocean crevices, an octopus searches for flickers of light underwater that might indicate its next meal. It looks out for small fish darting across its visual field and crabs crawling along the ocean floor. Meanwhile the octopus is wary of a shadow gliding above—perhaps it’s a sperm whale, a common predator of the octopus and its prey. Finding food and staying safe as a soft, flexible cephalopod requires a different set of visual sensitivities and skills than the ones we humans use when we’re walking through a fluorescently lit food court to search for our next meal.Octopuses, cuttlefish and squid—the coleoid, or soft-bodied, cephalopods—are similar to humans in that they rely heavily on their visual system to guide their everyday activities. But their brain has developed an entirely different way of seeing their surroundings to help them with their aquatic endeavors. Scientists are still trying to figure out how these animals’ brain enables their unique way of seeing.
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S47S14S41Innovation Doesn't Have to Be Disruptive  For the past 20 years “disruption” has been a battle cry in business. Not surprisingly, many have come to see it as a near-synonym for innovation. But the obsession with disruption obscures an important truth: Market-creating innovation isn’t always disruptive. Disruption may be what people talk about. It’s certainly important, and it’s all around us. But, as the authors of the best-selling book Blue Ocean Strategy argue, it’s only one end of the innovation spectrum. On the other end is what they call nondisruptive creation, through which new industries, new jobs, and profitable growth are created without social harm. Nondisruptive creation reveals an immense potential to establish new markets where none existed before and, in doing so, to foster economic growth without a loss of jobs or damage to other industries, enabling business and society to thrive together.
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S6The large and fluffy tamale few know  Deep inside a 6th Century Mayan pyramid in Guatemala's Petén region, archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli stumbled on a massive carved frieze; a mythological scene. A Mayan king in apotheosis is flanked by two ancestor gods, each holding out a round-shaped offering. The glyph beneath reads: The first tamale."This was the biggest discovery of my life," said Estrada-Belli of the 2013 find. "It's very powerful symbolism that tells you how fundamental the tamale was regarded by the Maya."
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S3The Leadership Odyssey  A paradox of business is that while leaders often employ a hands-on, directive style to rise to the top, once they arrive, they’re supposed to empower and enable their teams. Suddenly, they’re expected to demonstrate “people skills.” And many find it challenging to adapt to that reality.
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S38Marketing When Budgets Are Down  The general rule of enterprise finance is that marketing budgets drop like a stone at the first sign of trouble and rise like a feather once the environment is more settled. In mid-2023 we’re far from a settled state — projected GDP growth in western markets is depressingly flat, inflation is proving to be rather stubborn, and those disruptions just keep on coming. It’s tough to see a significant increase in marketing budgets in the near term. Gartner’s annual survey of hundreds of CMOs charts the evolution of marketing spending over recent history, offering guidance for how enterprise leaders can deliver results and build the capabilities to fuel growth in a time of less.
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S33From 'Alan Wake 2' to 'Outlast Trials': 2023's Scariest Games Redefined a Classic Horror Trope  The moments leading to a video game jump scare can feel like a bow gradually getting tense. A long, obscure corridor with a door waiting at the end is enough to set the scene. The sudden rattle knocking on a window triggers an internal alert. Looking down at your pistol’s chamber to count the few bullets left inside is the first drop of sweat running down your face. By the time your hand is on the handle, you expect the bow to strike at any moment.But this is speaking in the traditional sense. Scenes like these are aplenty in horror video games. For Amnesia: The Bunker, creative lead Fredrik Olsson wanted that bow to be tensed by the player’s actions. Accidentally stepping on a trap, using a grenade to blow up a door and open a path, or even moving heavy objects can irritate the monster hunting for you.
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S49S65Congress Sure Made a Lot of Noise About Kids' Privacy in 2023--and Not Much Else  It's been 15 years since suicides overtook homicides as the second leading cause of death for children ages 10 to 14 years old. Two years since the first Meta whistleblower warned United States senators that America's children are at risk from "disastrous" decisions being made in Silicon Valley. (And a little over a month since a second Meta whistleblower testified, "They knew and they were not acting on it.") And it's been roughly one year since a wave of new, younger lawmakersâmany raising their own young childrenâwere seated in the House of Representatives. "As a mom of two kids, you know, we want to make sure that their online experience is safe," Representative Beth Van Duyne, a Texas Republican, tells WIRED.All those changesâincluding an alarming doubling of the adolescent suicide rateâand yet, one constant remains: congressional inaction. Amid a flurry of blockbuster whistleblower hearings, soaring campaign promises, tear-soaked press conferences with the families of teens lost to cyberbullying, and dozens of competing bills that members have introduced aimed at protecting kids in cyberspaceânothing.
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S57The Winter Solstice Has a Surprising Secret  How can the December solstice have the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere but neither the earliest sunset nor the latest sunrise? Earth’s orbital quirks offer answersIf you live in the midlatitudes of Earth’s Northern Hemisphere—and there’s a pretty good chance you do—you’ve probably noticed the days getting shorter and the nights growing longer over the past few weeks. This process started at the time of the June solstice, was fastest during the equinox in September and culminated at 10:27 P.M. EST on December 21 (3:27 A.M. UTC on December 22).
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S2345 Years Ago, a Terrifying Sci-Fi Remake Pulled Off the Impossible  Like “Transformers sequel” or “Snyder cut,” “horror remake” are two words that rarely go well together. If a horror movie got it right the first time, a remake probably won’t have much to add, and if it wasn’t good the first time, shiny new CGI won’t redeem it. In the decades since Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot Psycho replica, a glut of disappointing remakes — from 2011’s misguided Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark to 2015’s tedious Poltergeist — have reminded us that what’s really scary is something we haven’t seen before.But 45 years ago, Hollywood gave us that rarest of birds: a horror remake that’s not only great, but actually surpasses the original. 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a potent mix of paranoid thriller and supernatural horror that remains chilling nearly half a century later.
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S34Marvel Just Accidentally Found the Solution to Its Big Avengers Problem  The original conceit of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was deliciously simple: a series of solo superhero outings united every few years for a world-saving Avengers movie. This not only provided Disney with a steady stream of billion-dollar films, it also gave the MCU a reliable reset button. Each Avengers movie brought the entire ensemble together to reestablish the pecking order of power levels before releasing its growing roster of heroes to pursue their own adventures.It was a system that worked brilliantly and seemed to be endlessly repeatable. Then, Marvel Studios seemingly abandoned that system. It’s been almost five years since the last Avengers movie, and the MCU feels more chaotic and aimless than ever. Even worse, after making fans wait so long, the pressure on the next Avengers movie will be higher than ever, setting up the franchise for yet another failure (and that’s without getting into all the recent drama around “Avengers 5” and its planned villain Kang the Conqueror).
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S55Should we geoengineer volcanoes?  One night in 1986, a cloud of CO2 gas emerged from an unsettled volcanic lake in Cameroon. It crept downslope, clinging to the ground, entering farms and buildings. What happened next was nothing short of horrific: more than 1,700 people and 3,000 livestock were suffocated.The death toll from the disaster of Lake Nyos, caused by a so-called "limnic" eruption, was so high that scientists and engineers were tasked with preventing it happening again. Three years later, they began siphoning off the deadly gas from the bottom of the lake with a simple garden hose, which was followed later by bigger pipes. The procedure wasn't without risk – it's possible that the siphoning could have triggered another major gas release – but it worked. CO2 gas levels since then have been successfully controlled.
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S66This Fold-Up Jogging Stroller Is Perfect for Power Walkers  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 WIREDJogging strollers have been the bane of my existence in my months of testing for our strollers guide. They're massive! Unwieldy! Heavy! All in the name of a smooth run. I'm not much of a runner myself—I prefer a nice power walk—but you can still catch me (reluctantly) running in my neighborhood with the latest jogger I'm testing. Still, while I walk a lot with my son, that usually doesn't justify having such a massive stroller in my entryway.
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S64How Not to Be Stupid About AI, With Yann LeCun  Do not preach doom to Yann LeCun. A pioneer of modern AI and Meta’s chief AI scientist, LeCun is one of the technology’s most vocal defenders. He scoffs at his peers’ dystopian scenarios of supercharged misinformation and even, eventually, human extinction. He’s known to fire off a vicious tweet (or whatever they’re called in the land of X) to call out the fearmongers. When his former collaborators Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio put their names at the top of a statement calling AI a “societal-scale risk,” LeCun stayed away. Instead, he signed an open letter to US president Joe Biden urging an embrace of open source AI and declaring that it “should not be under the control of a select few corporate entities.”LeCun’s views matter. Along with Hinton and Bengio, he helped create the deep learning approach that’s been critical to leveling up AI—work for which the trio later earned the Turing Award, computing’s highest honor. Meta scored a major coup when the company (then Facebook) recruited him to be founding director of the Facebook AI Research lab (FAIR) in 2013. He’s also a professor at NYU. More recently, he helped persuade CEO Mark Zuckerberg to share some of Meta’s AI technology with the world: This summer, the company launched an open source large language model called Llama 2, which competes with LLMs from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google—the “select few corporate entities” implied in the letter to Biden. Critics warn that this open source strategy might allow bad actors to make changes to the code and remove guardrails that minimize racist garbage and other toxic output from LLMs; LeCun, AI’s most prominent Pangloss, thinks humanity can deal with it.
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S70S19S54The Hard Questions to Ask When Planning Your Strategy  Many managers view strategy as a complex subject, but at its essence it boils down to three questions: Where are we now? Where do we want to go? What is a credible path to get there? To successfully use these questions to chart a course, people must be brutally honest with themselves about where they are now. Once a company understands its present situation, it can chart a path to creating a truly differentiated offering that can create economic value.
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S46S25Alien Invasion! The 11 Most Gripping Alien and UAP Events Of 2023  There’s nothing like a little trouble at home to make you look for greener pastures. And green or not, aliens were everywhere in 2023. Well, at least in the news. From Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, the classy new way to talk about UFOs) to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and all the way to tiny molecules clinging to frozen dust grains in interstellar space, the eyes of experts and the public were looking for life elsewhere.
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S24Cookie Swap Rules For Safety: How to Stay Healthy During the Holiday Tradition  Sugar, shortbread, snickerdoodle, or RSV — who knows what you’ll be getting this year at the annual cookie swap?The innocent holiday tradition could be a breeding ground for catching someone else’s cold. If you’re not familiar with the cookie swap, the gist is this: Each participant bakes a batch (or several) of cookies at home. Next, all participants convene at a meeting space with their homemade cookies and Tupperware in tow. Now, the swapping commences. Everyone fills their containers with a variety of baked goods crafted by their friends. By the end of the event, all head home with an impressive assortment of cookies to enjoy over the holidays.
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S7How Christmas pudding tried to 'save' the British Empire  It has been called a "gastronomic paradox" – the most British of all dishes largely made from non-British ingredients. Today, Christmas pudding, the dense, fruit-packed confection that is boiled for hours and served with brandy butter or steaming custard just once a year, is loved and hated in equal measure, like Brussels sprouts or Marmite. Its cultural and political clout, however, have extended far beyond the dining table.Starting out as an affordable gruel enjoyed by the British working class, by the first half of the 20th century Christmas pudding had become a call to arms – a potent propaganda tool and a boastful symbol of British imperialism. Containing such exotic fare as candied orange peel from South Africa, raisins from Australia and spices from India and Zanzibar, the dish was sent into economic battle by the state and used to promote the empire’s family of nations with a simple message: just look at the wonders we can achieve when we all pull together.
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S3150 Cool Things That Are Blowing Peoples' Minds on Amazon  It’s a special moment when a product you stumble on has the capacity to stop you in your tracks with intrigue and astonishment. It can be something as party-ready as a charcuterie board set that includes a secret built-in drawer of cheese knives or something as day-to-day as a stackable lunch box and perfectly airtight condiment containers. These, amongst so many others, are a few of the cool things that are blowing peoples’ minds on Amazon.If you’ve got serious power demands at home or work, opt for this power strip tower that provides you with 12 AC outlets, three USB-A ports, and one USB-C port. Most importantly though, this tower provides layers of protection against overload, short-circuit, over-current, and more — essentially cutting power the minute a voltage surge is sensed. In addition, there are power switches on each side, allowing you to save energy on a certain bank of outlets if they’re not being used.
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S44S4How to Survive a Recession and Thrive Afterward  According to an analysis led by Ranjay Gulati, during the recessions of 1980, 1990, and 2000, 17% of the 4,700 public companies studied fared very badly: They went bankrupt, went private, or were acquired. But just as striking, 9% of the companies flourished, outperforming competitors by at least 10% in sales and profits growth.
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S15Drug shortages affected 111 products in the UK thisyear - but the outlook for 2024 may be better  Over the past year there has been a consistent stream of drug supply issues in the UK and internationally. Recent figures show more than 111 products have been affected in the UK alone. This is more than double the figure recorded for 2022.These supply issues have led to shortages of numerous products. While global scarcity of Ozempic and Wegovy have received much attention, many other drugs in the UK have been in short supply – including drugs used to manage type 2 diabetes, ADHD and menopause symptoms.
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S26This Bizarre, Innate Trait Helps Reindeer Sleep Soundly  Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, and yes, even Rudolph have evolved an excellent strategy to rest efficiently, a new study finds. Published today in the journal Current Biology, this paper by researchers in Switzerland and Norway gifts us a discovery about how rumination — the process of rechewing partially digested food called cud — rejuvenates reindeer.Like cows, deer, camels, and llamas, reindeer are ruminants. All ruminants are four-stomached herbivores who feed on rough plants, regurgitate the partially digested cud, then chew it again and swallow. But the new paper, which analyzed the brainwaves of four reindeer during sleep, found that chewing cud may be as instrumental to rest as sleeping.
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S45S21Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving  At seventy-four, Bruce Springsteen has been cementing his status as a rock-and-roll legend for almost fifty years: he released his widely heralded, but not initially widely heard, début, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” in 1973. But, true to form, the artist who became known to his fans as the Boss hasn’t rested on his laurels. After weathering a spate of health troubles this past year, which led him to cancel much of his tour, the rock icon plans to hit the road again in the new year, all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe. When Springsteen published his autobiography, “Born to Run,” back in 2016, David Remnick called it “as vivid as his songs, with that same pedal-to-the-floor quality, and just as honest about the struggles in his own life.” In October of that year, Springsteen appeared at the New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with the editor. (The event sold out in six seconds.) This entire episode is dedicated to that conversation. Springsteen tells Remnick how, as a young musician gigging around New Jersey, he decided to up his game: “I’m going to have to write some songs that are fireworks. . . . I needed to do something that was more original.” They talked for more than an hour about Springsteen’s tortured relationship with his father, his triumphant audition for the legendary producer John Hammond, and his struggles with depression. As Springsteen explains it, his tremendously exuberant concert performances were a form of catharsis: “I had had enough of myself by that time to want to lose myself. So I went onstage every night to do exactly that.”By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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S22When Philosophers Become Therapists  Around five years ago, David—a pseudonym—realized that he was fighting with his girlfriend all the time. On their first date, he had told her that he hoped to have sex with a thousand women before he died. They’d eventually agreed to have an exclusive relationship, but monogamy remained a source of tension. “I always used to tell her how much it bothered me,” he recalled. “I was an asshole.”An Israeli man now in his mid-thirties, David felt conflicted about other life issues. Did he want kids? How much should he prioritize making money? In his twenties, he’d tried psychotherapy several times; he would see a therapist for a few months, grow frustrated, stop, then repeat the cycle. He developed a theory. The therapists he saw wanted to help him become better adjusted given his current world view—but perhaps his world view was wrong. He wanted to examine how defensible his values were in the first place.
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S16UK ban on boilers in new homes rules out hydrogen as a heating source  Boilers will be banned in new-build homes in the UK from 2025, according to a long-awaited government consultation on energy efficiency standards in the housebuilding industry. The report said that there is “no practical way” that installing boilers of any type will “deliver significant carbon savings and ‘zero-carbon ready’ homes”. What’s more surprising is that hydrogen has also been ruled out as a potential heating source. Previously, hydrogen had been touted by both the government and the energy industry as a logical replacement for the natural gas (a fossil fuel and contributor to climate change) that is pumped through the national grid and burned in boilers throughout the UK.
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S28S5How much it costs to attend the Burning Man festival  It's not easy – or cheap – to pop up a bustling city from empty desert ground. But that's exactly what happens at the Burning Man festival, held annually in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.Burning Man started in 1986 at a San Francisco beach with 35 people united by "the pursuit of a more creative and connected existence in the world"; this week, nearly 70,000 people are making their way out of the muddy desert after Burning Man's 37th year. The now nine-day festival has morphed into a massive brand and destination, where so-called "Burners" from around the world build a civilisation together from scratch, complete with art installations, healing camps, inspiring talks and live DJs.
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S17Apple, Tesla and Nvidia were among 2023's 'magnificent seven' stocks - here's what to expect from them all in 2024  In the 1960 western The Magnificent Seven, a group of seven gunfighters protect a village from bandits. Only three survive to ride out of town at the end of the movie. The odds look much better for the seven tech companies recently dubbed the magnificent seven after dominating US stock markets in 2023. But there are problems that could ambush some of these companies in 2024. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Nvidia have driven a rally in US stocks in 2023. They now make up nearly a third of the S&P 500 measure of the largest listed US companies, which has risen more than 20% since January. These tech stocks had provided shareholders with a whopping 71% return by mid-November while the other 493 names added just 6%.
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S12S42What Leaders Need to Know About Spatial Computing  Spatial computing is an evolving form of computing that blends our physical world and virtual experiences using a wide range of technologies, thus enabling humans to interact and communicate in new ways with each other and with machines, as well as giving machines the capabilities to navigate and understand our physical environment in new ways. Apple’s entrance into the market is a big step for the technology, but the idea has been in development for years. Now, spatial computing is already starting to make an impact, including on communication and co-presence, manufacturing, gaming, human resources, media, sports and entertainment, and data visualization.
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S18Lift your spirits with our musical playlist: Don't Call Me Resilient's year in review  It’s been quite a year. The last few months especially have been particularly heavy for just about everyone. Amid the intensity of it all, my team and I on the Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast produced another two seasons — in our new, newsier format. Individually, each episode stands as an intimate exploration of some of the most pressing issues of our time. Collectively, our back catalogue serves as a library of critical conversations around systemic racism that can be revisited as similar issues continue to unfold in the world.
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S13Tatahouine: 'Star Wars meteorite' sheds light on the early Solar System  Locals watched in awe as a fireball exploded and hundreds of meteorite fragments rained down on the city of Tatahouine, Tunisia, on June 27, 1931. Fittingly, the city later became a major filming location of the Star Wars movie series. The desert climate and traditional villages became a huge inspiration to the director, George Lucas, who proceeded to name the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader “Tatooine”.The mysterious 1931 meteorite, a rare type of achondrite (a meteorite that has experienced melting) known as a diogenite, is obviously not a fragment of Skywalker’s home planet. But it was similarly named after the city of Tatahouine. Now, a recent study has gleaned important insights into the the origin of the meteorite – and the early Solar System.
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S27Sorry, But AI-Generated Video Kind of Sucks (For Now)  It turns out text is a lot easier to generate on the fly than video. Who could have guessed!The thrill that comes from generating text or images with an AI-powered tool is short-lived, but alluring. If there’s any reason AI caught the attention of normal people in 2023, it’s because you shouldn’t be able to type a few sentences and get out paragraphs of text or dozens of images. And yet, now with the right website or app, you can. We’re used to instantly getting what we want online, but not like that.
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S43S9Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott are heartbreaking in All of Us Strangers  The plot of All of Us Strangers makes it sound like a ghost story, and the details may lead you to expect violin strings and treacly melodrama. You can put those expectations aside. Andrew Haigh's eloquent, beautifully nuanced film is something entirely different.The ghosts are not ghoulish spectres but the ghosts of memory, as a middle-aged man, Adam – played by Andrew Scott at his emotionally piercing best – visits his parents, who died in a car crash just before he turned 12. Adam has a loving but clear-eyed, unsentimental view of his mother and father, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell with vibrant, down-to earth realism. Haigh and his cast, including Paul Mescal as Adam's new lover, give this film about loss, enduring love and hope for the future such truth and poignance that it is easily among the best of the year.
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S8From Trump's mugshot to Burning Man, 20 photos that shocked or moved us in 2023  The numbers in this piece do not represent ranking, but are intended to make the separate entries as clear as possible.At first glance, the image is joyously familiar, archetypal even – a child, launched into the air, waits to land in the expectant arms of one who loves him. But this (despite the presence of a Paw Patrol backpack on the left of the scene) is no playground. The photograph, taken on 29 March, captures the moment a little boy is propelled over the Rio Grande river as a large group of migrants cross the border from Mexico into the United States. Though wingless, the boy's frozen flight, suspended against a smooth cerulean sky, connects him with countless cherubs floating through art history – found in the frescoed firmament of church ceilings, and endlessly in Renaissance red chalk drawings, patrolling the border between the world we can see and one we can't.
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S11S10Wegovy: why half the people taking the weight loss drug stop within a year - and what happens when they do  Despite the effectiveness of the newer generation of anti-obesity drugs – called GLP-1 receptor agonists – few can tolerate them in the long run. A new study, published in the journal Obesity, reveals that of people prescribed weight-loss drugs, just 44% were still taking them after three months and only 19% after one year. Greater adherence to these drugs, such as Wegovy, which make you feel fuller faster and longer, is associated with greater weight loss. So why do people not persist with it?
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