   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S61Sorry, 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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S36S30A Tumultuous Year in Politics  On Tuesday, Colorado’s Supreme Court disqualified Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot after determining that his actions on January 6, 2021, made him ineligible under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause.The Colorado court’s actions come on the precipice of another tumultuous year in politics, one featuring a general election and a likely rematch of the 2020 race between the former and present U.S. presidents.
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S49Drug 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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S202023 Ripple Rewind  From evolving workplace trends to achieving your goals, Wharton professors explain this year’s key research insights.In this special episode, listen to curated excerpts from this year’s Ripple Effect podcast, where Wharton professors discuss a range of trending business topics.
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S37The 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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S32Arlington's Civil War Legacy Is Finally Laid to Rest  A memorial tainted with Lost Cause mythology has at last been purged from the national cemetery. If only national memory were so easily resolved.The wind washed over the rows of white tombstones and carried the last leaves of autumn on its breath. I held the map of Arlington National Cemetery up to my face, clinging to its edges as its corners fluttered. I looked up, and saw the statue I was searching for in the distance, encircled by tall steel fencing that caught and held the light from the afternoon sun. Inside the fence, concentric circles of tombstones surrounded the memorial—gravestones of the more than 200 Confederate soldiers buried beneath. Workers in white construction hats and highlighter-yellow vests moved about while security officers in dark sunglasses and black uniforms stood along the fence’s edge. To my left was a massive yellow crane whose engine rumbled steadily as it sat staring at the bronze memorial before it.
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S63This 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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S42From 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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S60This 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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S41How 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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S5745 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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S39How 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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S56When 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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S58Cookie 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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S34Why the Holiday Movie Endures  This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.The question “What is a Christmas movie?” might seem straightforward. But there’s one film that has scrambled the logic of the holiday movie for years now—at least for those who probably spend too much time online. “Because of the dreaded incentives of social media, we force debate upon ourselves all the time, even at the most wonderful time of the year,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in 2021. “According to Google Trends, search traffic for the phrase Is Die Hard a Christmas movie jumps every November and December.”
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S47Tatahouine: '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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S53S68Marvel 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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S54Christmas 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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S59Alien 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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S67From '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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S50UK 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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S29Corvids seem to handle temporary memories the way we do  Humans tend to think that we are the most intelligent life-forms on Earth, and that we’re largely followed by our close relatives such as chimps and gorillas. But there are some areas of cognition in which homo sapiens and other primates are not unmatched. What other animal’s brain could possibly operate at a human’s level, at least when it comes to one function? Birds—again.
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S43Paul 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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S694 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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S62S2S46S66'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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S31The Case for Kwanzaa  Maybe it’s a corny holiday, but Black Americans deserve a time to remember that our identity doesn’t begin and end with oppression.For a few years of my childhood, Kwanzaa was a big deal. I recall attending three Kwanzaa celebrations hosted by Mt. Lebanon Baptist Church in Baltimore. My cousin Olivia Moyd Hazell, at the time the church’s director of Christian education, organized them. About 50 church members and friends, many wearing kente cloth, would file into a softly lit basement the weekend after Christmas. We’d listen to good music: Black R&B standards, Soul Train dance lines, and traditional djembe performed live. We’d eat familiar food, like collard greens and red beans and rice. And we’d speak unfamiliar words such as umoja and ujima. The mood was festive, but with a focus on giving everyone, children especially, time to speak about how the principles of Kwanzaa applied to their lives.
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S44Wegovy: 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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S26S6S45S23Undersea-Aged Champagne Is Starting to Surface  If you’ve ever been hit by a flying champagne cork, you will be painfully aware of the pressure in a bottle of fizz. And that pressure inside—and outside—the bottle has caught the imaginations of champagne innovators.“We conduct many trials every year to fine-tune the pressure to the vintage,” says Louis Roederer’s chef de cave, Jean Baptiste Lécaillon. “We have a lower pressure—so smaller bubbles—[because] we want a seamless and soft mousse.”
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S51Apple, 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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S52Lift 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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S6550 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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S33Six Books to Read During a Stressful Family Holiday  Reading about other people’s kin, fictional or not, may help you feel better about yours.Leo Tolstoy’s observation in Anna Karenina is famous to the point of becoming a cliché: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But it wouldn’t have become a truism if it didn’t resonate—whether or not you agree with the first part, the second half is inarguably a fact. Every family plays host to its own histories, neuroses, feuds, foibles, tragedies, traumas, triggers, pains, pet peeves, and dysfunctional patterns. Literature has long borne witness to humanity’s enormous diversity of potential interpersonal horrors, all of which seem to become accentuated during stressful periods—such as the holiday season. According to the American Psychological Association, a whopping nine out of 10 U.S. adults experience stress at the end of the year, in part because they are “anticipating family conflict.”
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S3S38How 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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S64Would 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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S55Bruce 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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S19S24The "Zebra Effect": Why collaboration matters  Zebras are, on first impression, ridiculous. They are herbivorous pack animals, and their natural habitat is usually some kind of treeless grassland or savanna — green, yellow, and brown. You’d think then, given the predatory appeal of their lean meat, that zebras would try and blend in more with a bit of camouflage to make themselves inconspicuous. But no. The zebra struts around in black and white stripes. It flaunts both its color and its design in such a way as to say, “Hello savannah! Here I am: a tasty, trotting crosswalk of a feast.”If we dig a bit deeper, though, we see the genius in the zebra’s game. Yes, alone, a zebra is ridiculous, but in a pack and moving at speed, they become brilliant. Because when you have a lot of black and white stripes jumping up and down, darting to and fro, and kicking up a dusty hullabaloo, it’s really hard to see what’s going on. Your eyes start to blur. Your head starts to spin. Imagine you’re a lion about to make chase. One minute, you’re salivating over a piano-key dinner. The next, you’re chasing an optical illusion.
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S25Why Americans may be dependent on processed cereals  Many American consumers are skipping the cereal aisle in grocery stores, viewing its contents as basically boxed candy. That’s understandable. A lot of cereals are chock-full of added sugars and refined grains, which can contribute to obesity and metabolic dysfunction. Ironically, at the same time, there may be no aisle more essential to the Americans’ health. That’s because cereals have become the de facto source for Americans’ micronutrients.For decades, cereal manufacturers have fortified their products with synthetic vitamins and minerals, and now, we’re kind of reliant on them.
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S14Did 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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S70How 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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S7S5S15What happens when you take too much melatonin?  Hands up those who use their smartphone in bed. From frantically scrolling to catch up on the latest news, to browsing social media channels at night – the blue light of the smartphone is never far away.Yet studies show replacing bedtime with screentime is having a devastating impact on our sleep. The reason is all down to melatonin, a hormone produced in the brain's pineal gland. Melatonin has a key role in regulating the body's sleep-wake cycle. It is sometimes referred to, rather spookily, as "the hormone of darkness", as levels are low during daytime, but rise at night once darkness descends.
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S40The 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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S12Taupo: 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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S4S18S17Decoding Your Hunger During the Holidays  Deciding when and what to eat is a complex calculus incorporating input from your eyes, your gut and your vagus nerveThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
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S13Message 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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S27Matter, set to fix smart home standards in 2023, stumbled in the real market  Matter, as a smart home standard, would make everything about owning a smart home better. Devices could be set up with any phone, for either remote or local control, put onto any major platform (like Alexa, Google, or HomeKit) or combinations of them, and avoid being orphaned if their device maker goes out of business. Less fragmentation, more security, fewer junked devices: win, win, win.
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S21The Internet Isn't Dead. It's 'Saturday Night Live'  The internet sucks now. Once a playground fueled by experimentation and freedom and connection, it’s a flimsy husk of what it was, all merriment and serendipity leached from our screens by vile capitalist forces. Everything is too commercialized. We commodified the self, then we commodified robots to impersonate the self, and now they’re taking our damn jobs. We live in diminished and degrading times. I miss when memes were funny. I miss Vine. I miss Gawker. I miss old Twitter. Blogs—those were the days!Stop me if these gripes sound familiar. In 2023, the idea that the internet isn’t fun anymore is conventional wisdom. This year, after Elon Musk renamed Twitter “X” and instituted a series of berserk changes that made it substantially less functional, complaints about the demise of the good internet popped up like mushrooms sprouting in dirt tossed over a fresh grave. Some people even complained on the very platforms they were mourning. Type “internet sucks now” into X’s search bar, you’ll see.
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S28S22This Radical Plan to Make Roads Greener Actually Works ![]() This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Makueni County, a corner of southern Kenya that’s home to nearly a million people, is a land of extremes. Nine months a year, Makueni is a hardened, sun-scorched place where crops struggle and plumes of orange dust billow from dirt roads. Twice yearly, though, the county is battered by weeks of torrential rain, which drown farm fields and transform roads into impassable morasses. “Water,” says Michael Maluki, a Makueni County engineer, “is the enemy of roads.”
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S16High-Flying Frigatebirds Collect Data from the Top of the Sky  Scientists accidentally discovered a new way of monitoring the Earth’s planetary boundary layer: high-flying great frigatebirdsCLIMATEWIRE | Great frigatebirds are among nature’s most effortless fliers, routinely soaring more than a mile above the ground and sometimes staying aloft for weeks at a time.
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S8S9S1119  George Cohon died this year at age 86. These quotes show the kind of man he was.
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