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 S48S32Heat-Related Death of Postal Worker Leads to Controversial Fine   CLIMATEWIRE | Federal regulators are fining the U.S. Postal Service over its failure to protect workers from heat after a letter carrier died of heat stroke in Dallas this past June.Eugene Gates collapsed while delivering mail on June 20, a day when the National Weather Service had issued an excessive heat warning. His death garnered national attention over USPS policies that can exacerbate heat illness in its workers.
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S61Photos of the New Year: Ringing in 2024 Around the World  Fireworks, countdowns, and celebrations took place Sunday night across the globe, as people bid farewell to the year 2023 and welcomed 2024. The first sunrise of the year brought some of those same revelers back out to take part in New Year’s Day swims, or to reflect on the past and offer prayers for the year ahead. Gathered below, images of some of the varied ways people ushered in the year 2024. Fireworks explode next to the Arc de Triomphe during New Year celebrations in Paris, France, early on January 1, 2024. #
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S58The Least Common, Least Loved Names in America  When my husband and I got married, we decided we should share a last name, and that the name should be hyphenated. He didn’t want to lose a marker of his Chinese heritage, and I didn’t want to co-opt one—or give up my name if he wasn’t giving up his. So we just smushed our names together on the marriage license, figuring this was a normal thing to do, or at least unobjectionable.But objections have indeed been raised. Not yet to my face—the worst I’ve heard has been along the lines of “I’d never hyphenate, but that’s great for you.” But I also know that anti-hyphen sentiment is widely shared: Very few American newlyweds hyphenate their names, survey data show, and it’s not hard to find op-eds that describe the practice as “crazy” and “pretentious”—the sort of arrangement that might produce a maladjusted, antisocial human being along the lines of, say, Sam Bankman-Fried.
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S63Claudine Gay's Resignation Was Overdue  This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Claudine Gay engaged in academic misconduct. Everything else about her case is irrelevant, including the silly claims of her right-wing opponents.
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S26Did 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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S34Life is hard. Art helps  Cartoonist Liana Finck's drawings hold our hands through life's predicaments, big and small: dating, breakups, what to make for dinner, how to leave a party without being rude, how to think about our relationship with God. In a funny, moving talk, she shares some of her drawings and shows how she uses creativity to navigate false starts and cluelessness in the search for belonging.
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S35How to Start (and Keep) a Healthy Habit  It's almost that time of year. Everyone you know will soon be hitting the gym, smiling while eating broccoli, or crushing out a last cigarette. For some, the gym really will become a new part of life, and that really will be the last cigarette they smoke. But most of us have probably experienced the letdown—perhaps even self-loathing—of failing to stick to a New Year's resolution.I can't promise the advice I've collected will help—anyone who knows me would laugh hysterically at the idea of me guiding anyone toward successful habit formation—but there are some things you can do to set yourself up for success and make sure your resolutions become more than just that.
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S42Jason Derulo gets real about his darkest moments: "I thought of giving up."  When Jason Derulo broke his neck in 2012, he saw his career flash before his eyes. He had spent years building a name for himself in the music industry by winning the 2006 season finale of the TV show Showtime at the Apollo, writing songs for the likes of Diddy and Lil Wayne, and starting his own record label. But after he fell rehearsing acrobatics for a dance routine, he feared it would all come crashing down.“I thought of giving up…I thought it would be my demise,” the 33-year-old singer says. The grueling seven-month recovery process challenged his resolve and left him questioning his self-worth. “I couldn’t tie my shoes. I couldn’t take a shower by myself. It was a really kind of a debilitating place to be in, as you can imagine.”
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S59Hamas Doesn't Want a Cease-Fire  Recently, I drove along Israel’s northern border, west to east. To my American sensibility, it is the best road trip in Israel—a 90-minute version of a trip that would take many hours on California back roads—from the ocean through scrubby hills and finally to the Golan Heights. These days there is no illusion of peace, and every few miles I was reminded that across the border in Lebanon is Hezbollah, a threat that would make Hamas look like a nasty but minor nuisance by comparison. At checkpoints, I was forbidden from turning left, toward the border, because the Israel Defense Forces had evacuated the area out of concern over Hezbollah rockets and raids. I was stuck behind military transport trucks in low gear as I gained altitude. When I stopped near Mitzpe Hila, I heard, or rather felt, a ka-chunk, as the IDF fired artillery at Lebanon. The residents of that village told me these booms were a regular occurrence, and I could tell they were not kidding, because only I startled when the next round went out, with another window-shattering ka-chunk. Not even the little dog lazing outside looked up.The war in Gaza is still going on, and the reports of Hamas’s utter demolition remain exaggerated. (This weekend, the group still had enough capability and freedom of movement to fire missiles into central Israel—a fresh war crime, because it made no effort to discriminate between civilian and military targets.) The progress of this war, and the question of who should administer Gaza after it—An Israeli permanent occupation? The Palestinian Authority? A consortium of Arab states?—remains urgent. More urgent, though, is the question of what will happen if the war expands to include Hezbollah and the West Bank.
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S46Michael Cohen gave his lawyer fake citations invented by Google Bard AI tool  Donald Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted providing fake AI-generated court citations to his own lawyer, who failed to check whether the cited cases were real before submitting them in a court brief. Cohen said the fake court cases came from Google Bard and that he thought Bard was like "a super‑charged search engine" rather than a generative AI tool.
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S30Ancient Indigenous 'Songlines' Match Long-Sunken Landscape off Australia  Researchers have found ancient watering holes long ago buried by rising seas. The watering holes may be ones referred to in an Indigenous Australian songlineWhen marine geologist Mick O’Leary showed a group of Australian First Nations Elders a digital model of two ancient watering holes he had recently located—now under 14 meters of ocean—one man perked up, struggled to his feet and began speaking excitedly in his native tongue. Soon the whole group was talking and gesturing. O’Leary didn’t understand most of what they were saying, but did hear the phrase “half-and-half.”
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S60When Did Humans First Start Wearing Clothes?  The naked human is a vulnerable creature. Lacking the fur of our mammalian ancestors and relatives, we have bare skin that offers little defense against the sun’s brutal rays or wind’s biting chill. So instead, we have had to invent a technology to replace our long-lost fur: “portable thermal protection,” as the archaeologist Ian Gilligan calls it or, more simply, clothing.Without clothing, humans would never have reached all seven continents. This technological breakthrough allowed our ancestors to live in Siberia during the height of the Ice Age, and to cross the frigid Bering Sea to the Americas some 20,000 years ago. But no clothing survives from this period. Not a single article of clothing much older than 5,000 years has ever been found, in fact. The hides and sinews and plant fibers worn by our ancestors all rotted away, leaving little physical trace in the archaeological record. Humans had to have worn clothing more than 5,000 years ago, of course. Of course! And in clever, indirect ways, experts have pieced together a surprising number of clues to how much longer ago.
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S54S29Fueling the future of space travel with robots that mine resources on the moon  Jason Zang is the co-founder and lead robotics engineer at Starpath Robotics, a startup focused on building equipment to mine the ingredients for rocket fuel in space. With pre-seed venture funding led by Hummingbird Ventures and Valhalla Ventures, Starpath is striving to build the first end-to-end robotics platform for resource mining stations on the moon and Mars. While interning at SpaceX, my co-founder Saurav Shroff learned that the company does not have a team working on in situ resource utilization, specifically mining water on extraterrestrial bodies for rocket fuel. This, combined with my constraints as a Chinese national in the U.S. aerospace industry, led us to establish Starpath. Our goal is to simplify space logistics by using off-world resources, reducing dependence on Earth-based supplies, and aligning with our futuristic vision of space travel.
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S69 Build a Stronger Culture: 10 Must-Reads for 2024  The winter 2024 issue features a special report on sustainability, and provides insights on developing leadership skills, recognizing and addressing caste discrimination, and engaging in strategic planning and execution.The winter 2024 issue features a special report on sustainability, and provides insights on developing leadership skills, recognizing and addressing caste discrimination, and engaging in strategic planning and execution.Whether or not culture eats strategy for breakfast, as Peter Drucker is credited with saying, it remains a pressing topic for MIT SMR’s readers. A few years into hybrid work arrangements, leaders are still facing cultural concerns head-on, which is why we’ve gathered 10 resources covering psychological safety, workplace toxicity, and proven approaches to culture change — including ways to win over skeptics. We’ve also dug into issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and approaches to building a culture of honesty and trust.
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S33What's Missing from the Emoji Animal Kingdom?  In the digital age, some scientists argue the emojisphere should better represent Earth’s biosphere—tardigrades, flatworms and allEcologists and biologists commonly conduct surveys of the plants, fungi and animals in the environment they study. It’s less common, however, for that environment to be the virtual emojisphere. Emoji, the cutesy digital characters that have become their own mode of communication in text messages and online, are chock-full of representations of the natural world. Yet those representations are seriously skewed, according to a study published recently in the journal iScience.
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S56Whatever Happened to Zika?  In 2015, a horror movie came to life. The mosquitoes that swarm almost all tropical climates began infecting people with a strange new virus. In most, Zika caused no symptoms, or a mild rash and fever. But if it happened to infect a pregnant woman, her baby could be born with severe birth defects. Zika dramatically increased the risk of a condition called microcephaly, or a clinically small head. Over the following years, about 4 to 9 percent of infected pregnant women gave birth to babies with permanent brain damage.Suddenly, pregnant women in America and elsewhere were told not to travel to the Caribbean and South America. Expecting mothers in Miami, where local mosquitoes were transmitting the virus, stayed inside all summer long. Today, thousands of Brazilian families struggle to care for profoundly disabled 8-year-olds, “their limbs rigid, their mouths slack, many with foreheads that sloped sharply back above their dark eyes,” as The New York Times described in 2022.
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S37To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare  many times a year, as if on a hidden schedule, some tech person, often venture-capital-adjacent, types out a thought on social media like “The only thing liberal arts majors are good for is scrubbing floors while I punch them” and hits Send. Then the poetry people respond—often a little late, in need of haircuts—with earnest arguments about the value of art.I am an English major to death. (You know us not by what we’ve read but by what we are ashamed not to have read.) But I learned years ago that there’s no benefit in joining this debate. It never resolves. The scientist-novelist C. P. Snow went after the subject in 1959 in a lecture called “The Two Cultures,” in which he criticized British society for favoring Shakespeare over Newton. Snow gets cited a lot. I have always found him unreadable, which, yes, embarrasses me but also makes me wonder whether perhaps the humanities had a point.
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S45S62An Old-Fashioned Scandal Fells a New Harvard President  Claudine Gay resigned on Tuesday, becoming the shortest-tenured president in the university’s history.For all the focus on recent changes in the political mood on college campuses, the downfall of Harvard President Claudine Gay turns out to be a story about some of the oldest values of academia.
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S25Message 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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S5234 years later, a 13-year-old hits the NES Tetris "kill screen"  For decades after its 1989 release, each of the hundreds of millions of standard NES Tetris games ended the same way: A block reaches the top of the screen and triggers a "game over" message. That 34-year streak was finally broken on December 21, 2023, when 13-year-old phenom BlueScuti became the first human to reach the game's "kill screen" after a 40-minute, 1,511-line performance, crashing the game by reaching its functional limits.
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S43Do you struggle getting out of bed in the morning? Marcus Aurelius can help  Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was emperor of Rome from 161 AD until his death in 180. The last in a series of rulers that historians now refer to as the Five Good Emperors, he was chosen as imperial heir when he was still a child. Raised with his future job in mind, Aurelius was pulled out of the empire’s questionable public school system and educated at home by Greek tutors and Stoic philosophers.As intended, this world-class education ended up having a positive influence over Marcus Aurelius’ reign. His decisions were informed not by lust or jealousy or greed — as had been the case for many Julio-Claudian emperors — but by his deep understanding of law and logic. Often cited as the very embodiment of Plato’s “philosopher-king,” Marcus Aurelius always weighed his options, acting only when he felt he was making the right call.
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S16S49One of Tekken 8's "colorblind" modes is causing migraines, vertigo, and debate  Modern fighting games have come quite a long way from their origins in providing accessibility options. Street Fighter 6 has audio cues that can convey distance, height, health, and other crucial data to visually impaired players. King of Fighters 15 allows for setting the contrast levels between player characters and background. Competitors like BrolyLegs and numerous hardware hackers have taken the seemingly inhospitable genre even further.
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S4SPACs: What You Need to Know  Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they’ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion invested; and in the first quarter of 2021 alone, 295 were created, with $96 billion invested. In 2020, SPACs accounted for more than 50% of new publicly listed U.S. companies.
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S40Sex, Drugs, and AI Mickey Mouse  On January 1, Mike Neville gave Midjourney the following prompt: “Steamboat Willie drawn in a vintage Disney style, black and white. He is dripping all over with white gel.”There’s no polite way to describe what this prompt conjured from the AI image generator. It looks, very much, like Mickey Mouse is drenched in ejaculate.
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S50S68Evolution: Fast or Slow? Lizards Help Resolve a Paradox. | Quanta Magazine  The green anole (Anolis carolinensis), native to the United States, was one of four key lizard species in a recent study on stabilizing selection.James Stroud had a problem. The evolutionary biologist had spent several years studying lizards on a small island in Miami. These Anolis lizards had looked the same for millennia; they had apparently evolved very little in all that time. Logic told Stroud that if evolution had favored the same traits over millions of years, then he should expect to see little to no change over a single generation.
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S17S64What Are These Mysterious Dark 'Spokes' on Saturn's Rings? /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/a0/5e/a05eac57-5544-4262-9399-c1d0dfd8edd5/ezgifcom-webp-to-jpg-converter.jpg) A Hubble image highlights the seasonal features, which scientists think could be caused by interactions between the planet’s magnetic field and solar windA new photo of Saturn from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures mysterious dark blotches that appear on the planet’s rings. Called “ring spokes,” the spots circle Saturn along with its signature bands of icy debris.
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S67Public Libraries Reveal the Most Borrowed Books From 2023 /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/15/cf/15cfaa4a-8fe5-4504-ade0-89fc64c4513a/gettyimages-700714167.jpg) Titles that appeared on multiple lists include “Lessons in Chemistry,” “Spare” and “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow”Across the country, public libraries are announcing their most popular titles from last year. While no definitive nationwide rankings have been published, many popular texts appear on lists from multiple library systems.
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S53Ancient desert mega-structures were planned using carved maps to scale  During the 1920s, aerial photographs revealed the presence of large kite-shaped stone wall mega-structures in deserts in Asia and the Middle East that most archaeologists believe were used to herd and trap wild animals. More than 6,000 of these "desert kites" have been identified as of 2018, although very few have been excavated. Archaeologists found two stone engravings—one in Jordan, the other in Saudi Arabia—that they believe represent the oldest architectural plans for these desert kites, according to a May paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.
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S31The Curious Joy of Being Wrong  Cultivating intellectual humility can offer individual and social benefits, a psychologist explainsThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
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S47Early Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain--and AI is already on the case  On January 1, three early Mickey Mouse cartoons entered the public domain in the US, and AI experimenters have wasted no time taking advantage of it. On Monday, a digital humanities researcher named Pierre-Carl Langlais uploaded an AI model to Hugging Face that has been trained on those public domain cartoons, and anyone can use it to create new still images based on a written prompt. While the results are rough and sometimes garbled, they show notable early experimentation with integrating public domain Mickey into the AI space.
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S36What It's Like to Use Apple's Lockdown Mode  With the releases of iOS 16 and macOS Ventura in 2022, Apple debuted its Lockdown Mode for people at particular risk of being targeted by mercenary spyware. The feature is essentially a set of configurations for iOS and macOS that limit or block niceties like link previews in Messages and shared albums in Photos. Lockdown Mode also restricts your device's ability to accept unsolicited communications like FaceTime calls from phone numbers and accounts you've never called before. And this year, in iOS 17, Apple added additional improvements, meaning more safety-focused limitations. The company has consistently emphasized that Lockdown Mode is not meant for mainstream use by most peopleâbut in a week of testing, it's surprisingly tolerable.Turning on Lockdown Mode simply involves confirming the setting change with your device PIN or a biometric authentication in "Privacy & Security" and then rebooting so the system can apply all the restrictions and limitations. Enabling Lockdown Mode is similar to changing the language of your deviceâthe system needs to comprehensively adopt the new configuration and apply it everywhere. Once the reboot is complete, your device comes back on looking pretty much like normal.
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S12S66Could A.I. Help Seismologists Predict Major Earthquakes? /https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/63/f3/63f3c86f-7658-46f8-9156-6f2f2c5c2fec/gettyimages-1893315593.jpg) The 7.5 magnitude quake in Japan highlights the need for earthquake prediction, a science shedding its “unserious” reputation and inching toward realityIn Japan, the new year began with disaster as a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck the Noto peninsula on the country’s western edge on Monday. Dozens more aftershocks, many measuring between four and six in magnitude, shook near the coastal epicenter in the hours since, and scientists warn that more are expected in the coming days. The Japan Meteorological Agency issued a major tsunami warning for much of Ishikawa prefecture, where the quake occurred, but has since reduced it to an advisory. As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 55 people are confirmed to have died.
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S18It's Time to Prioritize Employees' Financial Health  When an individual has financial health, they experience greater overall well-being and bring their best selves to the workplace. Unfortunately, 80% of employees report being financially stressed, and only 28% of employers offer financial wellness programs. Today’s workers must navigate complicated benefits packages and make critical decisions about their personal finances with limited or no guidance from their employers. This article discusses three steps you as an employer can take to boost the financial health of your employees and alleviate money-related stress and distractions: 1) take an “ecosystem” approach to employees’ financial health, 2) help employees effectively navigate benefits, and 3) recruit an external firm or in-house expert to provide education on financial well-being.
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