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 S3What Does It Actually Take to Build a Data-Driven Culture?   Building a data driven culture is hard. To capture what it takes to succeed, the authors look at the first two years of a new data program at Kuwait’s Gulf Bank in which they worked to build a culture that embraced data, and offer a few lessons. First, it is important to start building the new culture from day one, even as doing so is not the primary mandate. Second, to change a culture, you need to get everyone involved. Third, give data quality strong consideration as the place to start. Finally, building this new culture takes courage and persistence.
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S70The Year of the Orca  On the night of May 4th, the skipper Werner Schaufelberger was sailing the Swiss yacht Champagne toward a Spanish port town on the Strait of Gibraltar when he heard a loud rumble. His first thought was that the boat had hit something, but he quickly realized that the vessel was under assault—by a group of orcas. “The attacks were brutal,” Schaufelberger told the German magazine Yacht. Three orcas, the large black-and-white dolphins also known as killer whales, worked in tandem; a large orca rammed the boat from the side while two smaller ones gnawed at the rudder until it was destroyed and the yacht was taking on water. Schaufelberger radioed for help, and the Spanish Coast Guard sent a helicopter and rescue cruiser to collect the four people on board. None were injured. The only casualty was the Champagne itself, which sank while being towed toward land.The orcas that sunk the Champagne are part of a small group, thought to number fifteen altogether, that have been having run-ins with boats in and near the Strait of Gibraltar since 2020. That was the third vessel that they had sunk in a year. It wasn’t the last. The orcas have continued their disruptions—with encounters happening almost every day in May and June—and coverage in both traditional and social media has bloomed. One sailor said that the orcas had playfully thrashed his boat around “like a rag doll,” removed the rudders, and left him marooned for days. Another, Captain Dan Kriz, described an encounter with the same group of orcas that had rammed his boat three years earlier: they had honed their strategy, he reported, working more quickly and quietly than they had before. On Instagram, a video of the orcas tailing Kriz’s boat showed two of them tidily detaching both rudders. “Check the rudder in its mouth! This is crazy!!” the caption exclaimed (posted only after the crew was safe on land). In those summer encounters, the damaged vessels stayed afloat. In late October, several orcas spent the better part of an hour ramming and otherwise roughing up a yacht called the Grazie Mamma II, off the Moroccan coast. Everyone on board was safely rescued, but the Grazie Mamma II sank.
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S612023's Mind-Bending Revelations in the Brain Sciences  This year the explosion of interest in AI had a profound impact on how experts in the fields of neuroscience and psychology think about biological intelligence and learningA video presents a stylized depiction of a new language decoding process. A decoder generates multiple word sequences (paper strips) and predicts how similar each candidate word sequence is to the actual word sequence (beads of light) by comparing predictions of the user’s brain responses against the actual recorded responses.
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S63Cars Are Getting Bigger. Can Smarter Software Make Them Safer?  It’s not just you: American cars have gotten bigger. Over the past two decades, growing numbers of US buyers have turned in their sedans for SUVs and pickup trucks. And those SUVs and pickups have grown ever more hulking. The electrification of driving isn’t slowing the growth spurt. Batteries are heavy, and many carmakers are prioritizing their most popular vehicles to convert into EVs—focusing on larger pickups and crossovers.Larger vehicles require more materials to make and more energy to propel, and they wear down infrastructure quicker. Researchers have suggested they may have caused the jump in US road deaths since the pandemic, especially of pedestrians, that is unequaled elsewhere in the world. The laws of physics mean heavier cars cause more damage when they hit things, and bigger vehicles can have larger blind spots. (Plenty of other factors, including smartphone use and bad road design, influence road safety.)
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S26S322023 Ignited a New Era For Nuclear Fusion. 2024 Could Be Even Brighter  “For the first time, all the pieces of the puzzle are there: the physics, the policy drivers, and the investment.”In 2023, energy from nuclear fusion — where two nuclei combine to form a new nucleus and release a ton of energy — became the topic du jour among some very influential people. Just weeks before COP28, the world’s preeminent climate conference, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said of fusion, “For the first time, all the pieces of the puzzle are there: the physics, the policy drivers, and the investment.” His enthusiasm was matched at COP28 when John Kerry announced a call to action for engagement on fusion energy, and a host of panels circled in on the topic. This for a technology generally accepted even a few years ago to be “not what they’re cracked up to be.” So what changed? Evidence, that’s what.
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S67Derinkuyu: Mysterious underground city in Turkey found in man's basement  We live cheek by jowl with undiscovered worlds. Sometimes the barriers that separate us are thick, sometimes they’re thin, and sometimes they’re breached. That’s when a wardrobe turns into a portal to Narnia, a rabbit hole leads to Wonderland, and a Raquel Welch poster is all that separates a prison cell from the tunnel to freedom.Those are all fictional examples. But in 1963, that barrier was breached for real. Taking a sledgehammer to a wall in his basement, a man in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu got more home improvement than he bargained for. Behind the wall, he found a tunnel. And that led to more tunnels, eventually connecting a multitude of halls and chambers. It was a huge underground complex, abandoned by its inhabitants and undiscovered until that fateful swing of the hammer.
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S58How humans have changed the Earth's surface in 2023  There are few places on the Earth where humans have not left a mark of some kind. An estimated 95% of our planet's landmass – not including Antarctica, even though humanity has left its imprint there, too – now show some signs of human activity. About 16% of that land has been heavily modified, according to one recent analysis.Urban development, large-scale engineering works and mining projects are reshaping entire landscapes, while deforestation and agriculture are altering entire ecosystems. Pollution produced by humans can be found in almost every corner of our planet.
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S68Acid rain: Real danger or overhyped doomsaying?  Thirty-five years ago, the waters of Lake Colden in New York’s Adirondack Mountains were found to be too acidic to support fish, making the picturesque, high-altitude body of water one of the signature casualties of acid rain. Red spruce trees in New England were also showing signs of strain as the rain leached vital calcium from the soil, severely stunting the trees’ growth. Today, Lake Colden’s trout have returned and the spruce trees are flourishing, tangible signs that the decades-long effort to mitigate acid rain has worked.Now that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions — the causes of acid rain — are greatly reduced in Europe and North America, a success based on capstone environmental legislation, it’s easy to look back on the panicked news stories from the 1980s and 1990s and wonder if acid rain was really more of a “nuisance, not a catastrophe,” as William Reville, an emeritus professor of Biochemistry, wrote for the Irish Times. Seeing as how we dealt with the problem, we may never conclusively know the answer.
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S29The Year of the Female Creep  A new literary character has logged on. It’s unclear how long she’s been here; her arrival itself went unnoticed. Instead of speaking, she lurks. Her profile picture is the default “girl” emoji, seemingly chosen for its inoffensiveness and opacity. No one exactly knows who invited her, but she must belong because, otherwise, she wouldn’t have come. Right?Vaguely menacing wallflowers have been haunting fiction for a while (Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Eileen,” Claire Messud’s “The Woman Upstairs”), but this year they took center stage. In “The Guest,” by Emma Cline, the main character, Alex, is a sex worker whose ultra-wealthy boyfriend (fifties, fitness nut) kicks her out of his house in the Hamptons. She spends the novel sidling through homes and beach parties, trying to avoid being exposed as an outsider and packed off back to the city. Alex is a careful watcher. She watches, for instance, the neat, friendly, efficient activity outside of a private club—how swiftly a man in uniform moves to eject a sunbather sitting in the wrong deck chair! And, to make sure she fits in, Alex elevates self-inspection to an art, drifting repeatedly to the bathroom mirror to check for food in her teeth or flaws in her makeup. She has a “running list: Keep fingernails clean. Keep breath sweet.”
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S59Our favorite Rest of World photos from 2023  Technology is reshaping the daily lives of the 4 billion people living outside the West. You can see it through the lenses of Rest of World’s photographers: From the quiet corners of coworking spaces in Colombia to talking card readers in India to large-scale water-guzzling EV factories and emoji-shaped pinãtas in Mexico.In 2023, we sent 39 photographers to 31 cities and 22 countries, from Uganda to Iraq. Our photographers went to India in search of scam call centers and met with a crypto pastor in an Argentine prison.
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S37Netflix Just Quietly Added an Iconic Thriller With an Extremely Influential Fight Scene  Action movies are only as good as the motivation their hero has. That can vary from avenging a dog to saving the universe, but one of the strongest human emotions is also one of the most effective: revenge. Twenty years ago, Korean film legend Park Chan-wook made the quintessential revenge thriller, one that’s had a massive influence on nearly every action movie that followed it. Now, a new restoration is streaming on Netflix, and the classic remains well worth your time.
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S305 Years Later, Netflix's Riskiest Sci-Fi Experiment Remains an Intriguing Failure  Black Mirror has always tried to be on the cutting edge of streaming, be that in-universe or out. In the Season 6 episode Joan is Awful, an average woman discovers she’s the target of an AI-produced show about her life. Later, she discovers the show is part of a massive effort by “Streamberry” to completely customize content for each viewer.Five years ago, that’s more or less what Netflix and Black Mirror tried to do for real... and the effort was sort of a success.
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S19S70Researchers come up with better idea to prevent AirTag stalking  Apple's AirTags are meant to help you effortlessly find your keys or track your luggage. But the same features that make them easy to deploy and inconspicuous in your daily life have also allowed them to be abused as a sinister tracking tool that domestic abusers and criminals can use to stalk their targets.
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S34One Overlooked Game Genre Had An Incredible Year in 2023  This has been a year full of blockbuster game releases, leading to the common refrain that 2023 might be one of the best years ever for games. Most of that attention has naturally been fixed on the year’s biggest releases — the sprawling RPGs, long-awaited comebacks, and remakes of all-time greats. Far from the spectacle of AAA hits, 2023 has also been an incredible year for the all-too-often overlooked visual novel.In some corners of the internet — the ones perpetually litigating the gaming discourse of a decade ago — visual novels are still hardly games at all. We’re going to ignore those arguments, because who has the time for that kind of nonsense? But even setting that aside, visual novels are still often seen as something separate from, and implicitly less interesting, than more action-packed games. If there’s ever been a year to cast that prejudice aside and embrace visual novels as one of the most vibrant spaces in gaming, it’s 2023.
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S53S52S66What was it like when the cosmic dark ages ended?  Forming stars sounds like the easiest thing in the Universe to do, given enough time. However, making stars that are actually visible to an observer is, perhaps surprisingly, a lot more challenging. Once you get a sufficiently large amount of mass together, so long as you give it enough time to gravitate, you’ll be able to watch it collapse down into small, dense clumps. If enough mass comes together in those clumps under the right conditions, stars will no doubt ensue. This is how you form stars today, and it’s how we’ve formed stars all throughout our cosmic history, going back to the very first ones some 50-100 million years after the Big Bang.But even with the first stars burning, as they go about fusing hydrogen into heavier elements and converting that energy into a form that results in the emission of tremendous amounts of light, those stars aren’t necessarily visible to anyone around to observe them. The Universe is simply too good at absorbing and blocking that light. The reason? All of the atoms in the Universe, during the time that the first stars exist, are neutral, and there are simply too many of them for the starlight to penetrate. It took hundreds of millions of years for the Universe to allow that light to freely pass through it: a time known (from the perspective of light) as the cosmic dark ages, but known (from the perspective of atoms) as the epoch of reionization. It’s a vital part of the cosmic story of us whose importance is greatly underappreciated.
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S65The Best Slow Cookers for People Who Don't Have Time To Cook  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 WIREDSlow, low-heat cooking is perfect for delicious one-pot dishes and getting the best flavor from cheaper cuts of meat such as lamb shoulder or chicken thighs. With intuitive control panels, the best appliances allow you to throw all the ingredients into the pot, turn it on, and get on with your day while your food simmers along nicely. Prep your recipe in the morning and the keep-warm setting will ensure you have a home-cooked evening meal that’s piping hot and ready to serve come nightfall. Then all you need to do is dish up praise for your efforts from everyone at the dinner table.
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S43'What If' Season 2 Just Set Up a Huge Avengers 5 Twist  When it comes to the founding members of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is right up there with original Avengers like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America. Tony’s personal assistant turned head of security hasn’t had quite as much to do recently, but the MCU’s latest entry suggests that could finally change.What If...? Season 2’s holiday special, “What If... Happy Hogan Saved Christmas,” gives Happy Hogan a starring role when Iron Man 2 villain Justin Hammer attacks the Avengers tower in an attempt to steal some Hulk blood and turn himself into a superhero.
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S51S33These 11 Space Photo Award Winners Are Truly Out of This World  See the wispy aurorae, amazing star clusters, and picturesque planets that make this year’s Royal Museums Greenwich Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest.For the past 15 years, England’s Royal Museums Greenwich has held an annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest, highlighting all the incredible nebulas, breathtaking gas clouds, awesome aurorae, and gobsmacking galaxies captured throughout the year. This year’s 11 winners encompass both professional photographers and amateur astronomers, and the shortlisted photographs are just as incredible.
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S45The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer  Diversify your product line. Stick to your knitting. Hire a professional manager. Watch fixed costs. Those are some of the suggestions that entrepreneurs sort through as they try to get their ventures off the ground. Why all the conflicting advice? Because in a young company, all decisions are up for grabs.
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S35What A Week of Holiday Drinking Does To Your Gut Health --  ‘Tis the season to throw back some bubbly. For some of us, the most wonderful time of the year is synonymous with stress, anxiety, and depression, what’s referred to as the holiday blues, resulting in coping mechanisms like imbibing more alcohol.As we ease into a dry (or damp, if you can’t go cold turkey) January, here’s something to consider: too much booze could wreak havoc on your gut microbiome. Excessive drinking disrupts this delicate ecosystem of microbes residing in your gut, causing a slew of health issues, and may even encourage you to drink more by “reprogramming” your gut microbiome, some studies find.
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S25What COVID diaries have in common with Samuel Pepys' 17th-century plague diaries  People keep diaries for all sorts of reasons – to record events, work through difficult situations, or manage stress and trauma. The ongoing COVID inquiry shows diaries also have important political and historic significance. The UK’s former chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance’s diaries have been a key source of evidence, exposing the chaos within government at the time. This has resulted in a large number of COVID diaries being made available in archive collections around the UK, plus many more online in the form of blogs or social media. I’ve been looking specifically at 13 COVID diaries donated to the Borthwick Institute for Archives and the East Riding Archives, both in Yorkshire. Most were originally private documents, offering a more spontaneous, honest and intimate portrayal of pandemic experiences than their online counterparts.
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S60Zapping the Vagus Nerve Could Relieve Some Long COVID Symptoms  Ongoing research shows electrical vagus nerve stimulators could relieve some long COVID symptoms. But are the expensive devices worth the price?Can a condition as gnarly and disparate as long COVID be treated without drugs? Social media is buzzing over an experimental therapy that taps the vagus nerve, which acts as the body’s “information superhighway” by carrying crucial signals between the brain and various internal organs. A mild electrical zap to this long cranial nerve triggers a rush of autonomic responses associated with relaxation—and may confer health benefits well beyond this.
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S16S572023: A Strange, Tumultuous Year in Sustainability  The year 2023 contained several important sustainability narratives and trends. The author outlines three key ones — the anti-ESG movement, China’s acceleration of a clean economy, and the rise of reporting regulations — and then suggests a series countervailing forces pushing against each. He also outlines several smaller stories that leaders need on their radar as well.
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S692023 was the year that GPUs stood still  In many ways, 2023 was a long-awaited return to normalcy for people who build their own gaming and/or workstation PCs. For the entire year, most mainstream components have been available at or a little under their official retail prices, making it possible to build all kinds of PCs at relatively reasonable prices without worrying about restocks or waiting for discounts. It was a welcome continuation of some GPU trends that started in 2022. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel could release a new GPU, and you could consistently buy that GPU for roughly what it was supposed to cost.
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S47S54S31Every Game I Loved in 2023 Was Imperfect  Stop me if you’ve heard this before: 2023 is the best year in recent memory for video games. Well, not to be the resident Scrooge, but I am tired of this sentiment. There have been a lot of games this year. We’ve even given out more than a handful of 10/10s to several of them. Alas, as the new year approaches and I look back at every game I’ve played in 2023, I can’t help but question the sentiment that it’s been a great year for games. Rather, I find so much imperfection in every game I’ve loved this year.Part of the problem is that 2022 was, to me, already an excellent year for games. Citizen Sleeper came out in the first half of the year and immediately established itself as one of the best games I have ever played. The second half of the year kept things going with Signalis, a game I can’t stop thinking about even a year later.
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S39'Star Wars Outlaws' Could Finally Deliver On A Canceled Game's Vision  Star Wars has always been uniquely suited to video game adaptions, and dozens of titles have effortlessly embraced the core ideas of the franchise, including 2023’s Jedi Survivor. Yet, they all tend to focus on the good side of the galaxy with countless Jedi and hero-centric stories. That’s left some huge opportunities to explore Star Wars’ seedy criminal underbelly on the table. Star Wars Outlaws might finally deliver on that vision, which is something fans have been clamoring for since the cancellation of the promising Star Wars 1313.At Gamescom 2012, Lucasarts revealed Star Wars 1313, a surprisingly gritty-looking take on the franchise. The game was supposed to follow a young Boba Fett as he navigated the criminal underworld of Coruscant. Even with just one trailer, it was a concept that gained immediate interest from flocks of fans. Unfortunately, 1313 would never progress any further than that first trailer as, less than a year later, Lucasarts announced its cancellation.
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S36Marvel Just Quietly Rewrote MCU History For the Better  Peggy Carter has become something of a focal point for Marvel’s What If...? She might be the character most affected by the multiverse, often for the better. After all, Hayley Atwell’s super spy was the first character remixed in What If Season 1, going from Steve Rogers’ spunky romantic foil to a super soldier in her own right. Now known as Captain Carter, Peggy is the de facto face of What If. She’s popped up in a handful of episodes to demonstrate just how different the universe might have been if she were the first Avenger. Now, thanks to a minor detail in Season 2, we know just how impactful her role as Captain Carter is across the MCU.What If Season 2 Episode 5, titled “Captain Carter Fought the Hydra Stomper,” reframes the events of The Avengers and Captain America: The Winter Soldier from Peggy’s perspective. Her presence doesn’t only diversify the Avengers line-up, a fact proven by a blink-and-miss-it cameo from the Wasp (aka, Hope Van Dyne). According to executive producer A.C. Bradley, Captain Carter’s mere existence in this universe made it possible for Hope to become an Avenger at a younger age — and it changed a whole lot more.
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S40Apple's Next Vision Pro Headset Could Have One Major Upgrade  Apple’s first-ever mixed reality headset hasn’t even hit the shelves yet, but we’re already hearing rumors about the second-gen Vision Pro.According to Omdia, a market research firm, Apple is planning to use improved micro-OLED displays that would make for a brighter and more efficient display in its next-gen mixed reality headset, as first reported by The Elec.
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S41Netflix Just Quietly Released the Best Pok  Netflix's four-part miniseries gives its Pokémon — and its audience — a much-needed vacation.For 25 years, the Pokémon saga has been focused on only one aspect of its eponymous monsters. Generations of trainers have used Pokémon in battles against their own kind, and while that concept has only recently run out of steam, it’s high time those Pokémon got a chance to rest on their laurels.
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