'Unsolvable' Code Hidden in Antique Dress Pocket Is Finally Cracked

Short, handwritten lines of unrelated words contained coded weather reports to send via telegraph in the late 19th centuryMysterious messages found in the pocket of an antique dress have finally been decoded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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Rumble Is Part of an 'Active and Ongoing' SEC Investigation

Rumble, the so-called free speech alternative to YouTube, is the subject of an investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), according to the company and a letter from the SEC.The SEC confirmed its investigation involving Rumble in response to a public records request that WIRED first filed in November, seeking documents related to the company. The agency denied WIRED's request on the grounds that related documents were part of an “active and ongoing” investigation. Confirmation of the probe follows public allegations that Rumble inflated key user metrics, which the company denies.The SEC says that the existence of the probe should not be an indication that “any violations of law have occurred with respect to any person, entity, or security.” The exact nature of the SEC investigation is still unknown.

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Cells Across the Body Talk to Each Other About Aging | Quanta Magazine

Chemical signals released by mitochondria are somehow communicated to mitochondria in other tissues, with consequences for how rapidly organisms age.Aging can seem like an unregulated process: As time marches along, our cells and bodies inevitably accumulate dings and dents that cause dysfunctions, failures and ultimately death. However, in 1993 a discovery upended that interpretation of events. Researchers found a mutation in a single gene that doubled a worm's life span; subsequent work showed that related genes, all involved in the response to insulin, are key regulators of aging in a host of animals, from worms and flies to humans. The discovery suggested that aging is not a random process â indeed, specific genes regulate it â and opened the door to further research into how aging proceeds at a molecular level.

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Prejudice is more of a problem for some disabilities than others | Psyche Ideas

is a commissioning editor at Psyche. He was previously a senior editor at Psychology Today.Use of the term ableism, referring to discrimination against people with disabilities, goes back to at least the 1980s but has increased significantly in the past decade. In giving a name to prejudiced behaviours and attitudes toward people with a variety of different conditions – such as disabilities affecting movement, sensory disabilities, or a range of psychiatric disorders – the concept has helped call attention to an important social problem. Yet confronting it requires better understanding of how people with disabilities tend to experience ableism, which is sure to depend on specifics like which of the many types of disability someone has.

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Japan's ancient art of taiko drumming

Taiko may simply mean "drum" or "the art of Japanese drumming" in Japanese, but these wooden, barrel-shaped instruments symbolise the powerful, rhythmic and dynamic energy of Japanese percussion. They have also been a vital part of Japanese culture for millennia, as they were used to initiate religious ceremonies, set the marching pace for feudal troops and call soldiers to the battlefield since as early as 10,000 BC. To experience taiko is to witness lively shouts and choreographed movements from performers that mirror those of various Japanese martial arts.Here, however, blind content maker Lucy Edwards learns the art of taiko and proves that its beauty can be felt and heard just as powerfully as it can be seen.

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The Last Frontier of Machine Translation

When Google Translate was released, in 2006, I was an eighth grader stumbling through introductory Spanish, and my teacher had little reason to worry about her students using it to cheat. It’s almost hard to remember now, but early machine-translation systems were laughably poor. They could give you the general thrust of, say, a Portuguese website, but they often failed at even basic tasks. In one case from 2010, a Google-translated summons reportedly instructed a defendant to avoid court instead of showing up there.Machine translation didn’t become the juggernaut we know until 2015, when Baidu released its large-scale neural machine-translation system, built with the same basic architecture that chatbots such as ChatGPT use today. Google started switching from a statistical model to a neural system not long after, as did peers such as Systran and Microsoft Translator. It was a major leap forward: Tourists can order coffee and haggle for knickknacks thanks to the magic of Google Translate; I’ve occasionally used Reverso Context, an AI tool, in my own published translations. But still, one area of translation has proved remarkably impervious: literature, which many researchers call the “last bastion” of human translation.

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Viral Lists Reveal Artists Whose Work May Have Trained an A.I. Art Generator

Thousands of painters, cartoonists, sculptors and other creatives are featured in the documents, which reinvigorated debates around copyright infringement and consentArtists are accusing the developers of an artificial intelligence art generator of ripping off their work after a list containing the names of thousands of creatives recently began circulating online.

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A Vision of Russia as a Country That Runs on Violence

As Vladimir Putin’s army continues to wage war in Ukraine—destroying cities and villages, murdering civilians, and kidnapping children—many people may find themselves probing the culture of modern Russia in an effort to make sense of the atrocities. In the past, those looking to art or literature to better understand Russian society might have picked up works by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. But these writers feel less relevant today: The 19th century is receding into the distance, and so are the glorified or mystical qualities its authors ascribed to Russia and its people.Today, few books offer the level of insight into modern Russian history as Chevengur does, a 1929 novel by the Soviet writer Andrey Platonov, composed as the Bolsheviks established the Soviet Union and consolidated power. Never published in its entirety in his lifetime, Platonov’s epic of the Russian Revolution has recently been translated into English by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, the first such undertaking since 1978.

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A Nightmarish Flight's Aftermath

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.On Friday, a short flight teetered into near disaster when a chunk of the plane flew off during its ascent. Whatever the results of the pending investigation into what went wrong, the accident comes at a bad moment for Boeing.

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Home Influencers Will Not Rest Until Everything Has Been Put in a Clear Plastic Storage Bin

Now that the frenzy of the holidays has spat you out into the harsh light of the new year, you might be tempted to look around your disheveled home and decide that it’s time to get your life together. Maybe your fridge is empty, or your pantry is full of the stuff you bought for Christmas baking projects you never quite got around to, or the laundry from your family’s trip to visit Grandma and Grandpa still isn’t done. The internet is full of suggestions on exactly how you might rectify this domestic chaos, but if you go looking for organizational inspiration, the tips and tricks you find will center disproportionately on a single object: the humble clear acrylic storage container.If you’re unsure what to do with one, an entire video genre has sprung up on social media over the past few years to provide some inspiration. Watch a couple, and the tropes become clear. A pair of disembodied, feminine hands—wrinkle free, well manicured, adorned with trendy jewelry—unpacks consumer goods from their original containers and arranges them neatly inside their new acrylic homes, sometimes adorning the exterior with a customized label that identifies the contents. The videos are sped up so that the hands move with maximum efficiency and purpose; some include the same set of hands cleaning the containers and storage area to spotless perfection before the main event. There’s little to no narration or background music to be found—just the amplified sounds of objects plunking and crunching against hard plastic.

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LG OLED T is a transparent 77-inch TV that will arrive in 2024

LG today announced plans to sell a TV with transparent-display technology that has almost exclusively been relegated to commercial applications and demonstrations at tech shows.

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Oppo's Find X7 Ultra has four 50 MP sensors, two periscope lenses

Oppo's newest flagship is the Find X7 Ultra. This phone's claim to fame is having two periscope camera lenses on the back. Like most Oppo phones, this will land in China first, probably Europe later, and won't come to the US.

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How Developers Can Lower AI's Climate Impact

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.AI is booming. The public release of large language models like ChatGPT has popularized the technology, which was already becoming a critical driver of companies' efforts to innovate and grow. But as these models get bigger, so too does their appetite for energy: Training the open multilingual language model BLOOM produced nearly 24.7 tons of carbon emissions. AI itself might be a valuable tool for helping to find opportunities for sustainability improvements, but it could also become a drag on collective efforts to mitigate the global climate emergency.

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Wi-Fi 7's theoretical speeds make your Internet connection seem even more sad

Wi-Fi 7 devices can now be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The new standard can provide higher throughput, linked wireless bands for better stability, and reduced latency. It also can make people who skipped over Wi-Fi 6E feel like they made the smart move.

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How I Discovered a Likely Pen Name of Louisa May Alcott

An English scholar’s search uncovered several stories likely written by the author of Little WomenLouisa May Alcott took part in a 19th-century literary culture of anonymity and guessing games.

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Webinar: Preparing Your Organization for a Generative Future

In your feelings? Turns out, we all experience emotions differently

Emotions are a powerful force. They’re so powerful, in fact, that sometimes it’s hard to look past our own feelings and see what others are experiencing. To better understand this concept, we sat down with Kristen A. Lindquist, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Powerful emotions feel like irrefutable facts,” she says. “They wash over us, take over our bodies and change our perceptions. We call this ‘affective realism,’ where your emotional experiences feel like they are the truth of the world around you, when in reality the culture we live in shapes your emotions…and your emotions serve as a lens for interpreting the world around you.”

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What Was Jo Koy Thinking?

Here are some things I saw while tuning in to last night’s Golden Globes that made me laugh harder than anything the ceremony’s host, the comedian Jo Koy, said onstage: this video of Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy looking lost on the red carpet; the moment The Bear star Ayo Edebiri remembered to acknowledge her “real family also,” after thanking her castmates; this tweet.Which is to say, well, Koy bombed. His opening monologue began poorly—“We all dreamt of this moment!” he declared enthusiastically to silent, apparent disagreement—and only got worse. Like any awards-show host, Koy shouted out individual nominees, but practically every joke failed to land, mostly because the punch lines were dated or obvious. He poked fun at eventual best-drama winner Oppenheimer’s three-hour run time, claiming he’d finish watching the movie in 2025. For Barbie, which later won the new prize for cinematic and box-office achievement, he admitted he didn’t know what to expect from a movie about “a plastic doll with big boobies.” He made a quip about Meryl Streep winning all the time—who hasn’t?—and then, apropos of nothing, asked her to do the “Wakanda Forever” pose from Black Panther.

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WIRED's Favorite 'Buy It for Life' Gear

We're all tired of spending money on stuff that breaks. Whether it's a tool that wears out instantly or a pair of pants that gets a hole too soon, it seems like more things in this world should be something you buy for life. They're not as common, but numerous companies make excellent products that last a long time and can be repaired when or if they fail.Anyone who has spent time on the Buy It for Life subreddit on Reddit likely knows about many of these products already, but we have a few rules for our guide. For one thing, everything you see here can be bought right now. You can purchase them used—buy them that way if you want!—but we wanted to make sure each item can be bought new with its original factory warranty and is still supported by the company that made it. The second major rule? A WIRED Gear reviewer has to have personally used each product for years and vouch for it. That way, you know who to scream at in the comments if yours breaks.

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AI in 2024: Five trends workers need to know

As much as 2023 marked a turning point for artificial intelligence, AI is poised to make an even bigger impact in 2024. Yet this time, workers are ready.Now that generative AI has been on employees' radars for more than a year, they're not only better positioned to understand its place in the contemporary work landscape, but also equipped to embrace the changes and possibility that comes with it.

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Time-Management Tips From the Universe

Time can feel like a subjective experience—different at different points in our lives. It’s also a real, measurable thing. The universe may be too big to fully comprehend, but what we do know could help inform the ways we approach our understanding of ourselves, our purpose, and our time.Theoretical physicist and black-hole expert Janna Levin explains how the science of time can inspire new thinking and fresh perspectives on a much larger scale.

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Webinar: Generative AI Demystified: What it Really Means for Business

Early Primates May Have Feasted on Soft, Sweet Fruits

An analysis of more than 400 fossilized teeth suggests the creatures weren’t eating many seeds, nuts or other hard foodsFossilized teeth, preserved for the last 29 million to 35 million years, show very few chips, though they have some cavities, report scientists in a recent study. This suggests the ancestors of apes and humans were feasting on soft, sweet fruits, rather than on hard nuts and seeds.

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The Two Souls Within: Hermann Hesse on the Dual Life of the Creative Spirit

“Like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happ…

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iPhone owners get $92 payouts from Apple in phone-throttling settlement

US-based iPhone users are finally getting long-awaited payments to compensate them for Apple's decision to throttle the performance of iPhones with degraded batteries.

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Uranus and Neptune Have Similar Hues, New Study Shows

A new analysis finds that images from Voyager 2's close encounter with Neptune show the planet as being far too blueThese newly reprocessed images of Uranus (left) and Neptune (right), originally taken during close encounters with each planet by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, show how both worlds have remarkably similar colors.

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Tao Zhang: Is alternative meat the recipe for a healthier planet?

A Chinese saying goes, "There's no pleasure in eating without meat." And the data backs that up: every year, China consumes 26 percent of the world's meat and 45 percent of its seafood — numbers that could grow alongside rising incomes. Impact investor Tao Zhang shows why getting Chinese consumers to switch to plant-based alternatives is vital to tackling climate change and explores how it's also a massive business opportunity to bring tasty, affordable new proteins to market.

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Lily Gladstone Makes Golden Globes History as First Indigenous Best Actress Winner

The “Killers of the Flower Moon” star accepted the award by speaking in the Blackfeet languageLily Gladstone won Best Actress at the Golden Globes last night, becoming the first Indigenous person in history to receive the award. She began her acceptance remarks by speaking in the Blackfeet language.

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CES 2024 Live Blog: News, Gadgets, and Photos From Tech's Big Show

Get live, up-to-the-minute reports of all the products, trends, and weird stuff we're seeing at CES in Las Vegas.Every January, the giant trade show known as CES takes over Las Vegas. It's a global bazaar featuring the best and worst tech ideas the industry has to offer. The products on display are by different turns wearable, pocketable, audible, rideable, mountable, and—in some cases—digestible. There are also a few dozen new cars to ogle, with most major automakers present. Here on this page, we'll be keeping a running report of everything we find interesting, from fascinating new EV concepts to bio-scanners to the latest smart home tech.

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How many times must you fold a paper to reach the Moon?

After 20, 30, and 40 folds, the paper becomes over a million, a billion, and then a trillion times thicker than the original.Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words. Thanks to Lewis & Clark College’s Prof. Michael Broide for teaching the author this lesson in 2009.

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Plans to Install Contemporary Stained-Glass Windows in Notre-Dame Cathedral Spark Backlash

French officials have called on artists to submit designs for six new windows in the structure’s south aisleWhen a fire raged through Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019, it didn’t destroy the structure’s stained-glass windows, which were created by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859. Last month, however, French President Emmanuel Macron proposed replacing them with contemporary designs.

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Webinar: Finding Transformation Opportunities with Generative AI

America's first lunar lander in a half-century won't reach the Moon

A few hours after a successful liftoff on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, Astrobotic's first commercial lunar lander ran into serious trouble. The robotic Peregrine lander, still in orbit around Earth, appears to have a propellant leak that will prevent it from reaching the Moon.

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Moon Shot: Lessons From a Small Private Company Doing the First U.S. Moon Mission in Six Decades

Astrobotic wants its lander on the moon. It's a very big target for a pretty small firm.

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Cerne Abbas Giant is a depiction of Hercules

A major attraction of Dorset, England, is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 180-foot-tall figure of a naked man wielding a large club carved with chalk into a hilltop. A pair of historians offers a strong case that this figure was originally meant to represent Hercules from Greek mythology, perhaps to inspire West Saxon armies, who could have used the site as a muster station. They outlined their arguments in a recent paper published in the journal Speculum. The authors also found a possible early reference to the giant in texts dating back to the mid-11th and early 12th centuries, a period in which the carving may have been reinterpreted as representing Saint Eadwold of Cerne.

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Is GenAI's Impact on Productivity Overblown?

Generative AI like LLMs have been touted as a boon to collective productivity. But the authors argue that leaning into the hype too much could be a mistake. Assessments of productivity typically focus on the task level and how individuals might use and benefit from LLMs. Using such findings to draw broad conclusions about firm-level performance could prove costly. The authors argue that leaders need to understand two core problems of LLMs before adopting them company-wide: 1) their persistent ability to produce convincing falsities and 2) the likely long-term negative effects of using LLMs on employees and internal processes. The authors outline a long-term perspective on LLMs, as well as what kinds of tasks LLMs can perform reliably.

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The joy of 'cosycore' and hunkering down

January. Traditionally, it's a time for new year's resolutions – for turning your back on the excesses of December, and hitting the gym or dusting off your trainers for a run; for punishing healthy eating regimes largely centred around juice, or at the very least, attempting to go "dry" for the first month of the year. But what if January is, in fact, exactly the wrong moment for "new year, new you"? In the northern hemisphere at least, January is bad enough as it is: it's cold, it's dark, and Christmas and new year have probably left you exhausted and broke… none of which scream "unlimited sources of willpower and energy".What if we could instead lean into the fact that it is still winter, and embrace the urge to hunker down? Leave the renewal for springtime – and let January be a time to rest and recharge; to hibernate, rather than be hard on ourselves. Less gym bunny, more snoozy bear.

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Canonical wants better Snap support outside Ubuntu, based on latest hires

Snaps, the self-contained application packages that Ubuntu has long seen as a simpler app store and a potential solution to dependency hell, could be getting better support outside Ubuntu itself, based on one recent hire and potentially more.

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'Plant-Based' Has Lost All Meaning

A label once intended for meat replacements is now used for shampoo, booze, and nearly every other product imaginable.Several years ago, I made a New Year’s resolution to eat more plants. Doing so, I assumed, would be better for my health, for animals, and for the planet. Besides, it would be easy: The rise of plant-based meat alternatives, offered by companies such as Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat, made it a breeze to eat less meat but still satisfy the occasional carnivorous urge. I could have my burger and eat it too.

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Taupo: 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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