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S61Giant 'kings of apes' once roamed southern China. We solved the mystery of their extinction   Giant creatures are usually associated with dinosaurs, woolly mammoths or mystical beasts. But if you go back though the human lineage you’ll find a very distant relative that stood three metres tall and weighed around 250 kilograms. This was Gigantopithecus blacki, the mightiest of all the primates and one of the biggest unresolved mysteries in palaeontology.Despite surviving for nearly two million years in what is now the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of southern China, the entire species is represented in the fossil record only by a few thousand teeth and four jawbones. Nothing from the neck down.
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S48Mothers are more likely to work worse jobs - while fathers thrive in careers   On the other hand, men who become fathers are perceived as self-reliant and decisive. And they are often rewarded at work with opportunities and pay. Campaigns by groups like Pregnant Then Screwed make explicit that, in the UK, this “motherhood penalty” extends to pregnancy discrimination, the extortionate costs of childcare and ineffective flexible working policies. Yet we still know little about how it extends to job quality.
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S25Sweden's enduring love for cardamom and buns   Buns are to the Swedes what croissants are to the French: an everyday staple that epitomises the culture. They are consumed during the daily Swedish coffee break known as fika and can be found everywhere from supermarkets and cafes to artisanal bakeries. There is even an annual day of celebration called Cardamom Bun Day held on 15 May.Eating a cardamom bun (known as kardemummabulle) is a feast for the senses. The first thing you notice is its intricate braided design, dusted with cardamom and sugar. In close quarters, the heady scent of cardamom seduces you. Biting into a bun, you are met with a combination of textures – the crispy top layer breaks off to reveal a soft and buttery interior. The bottom is crisp and caramelised, where sugar and butter have pooled and crystallised while baking. As you eat it, the flavour of cardamom floods your tastebuds.
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S53Healthy cities aren't a question of boring or exciting buildings but about creating better public space   The US developers of a 300ft glowing orb, set to be built in the middle of Stratford, east London, and accommodate upwards of 21,500 concert goers, have withdrawn their planning application. Las Vegas, in the US, already boasts one such venue, known as Sphere. Citing its “extreme” disappointment at London residents not similarly benefiting from what a spokesperson said was its “groundbreaking technology and the thousands of well-paying jobs it would have created”, Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSG) has decided the British capital is not one of the forward-thinking cities it aims to work with.
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S35Pope Francis called surrogacy 'deplorable' - but the reasons why women and parents choose surrogacy are complex and defy simple labels   Pope Francis made headlines on Jan. 8, 2024, when he called for a global surrogacy ban, stating, “I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.”The use of surrogacy, in which a woman carries and delivers a child for someone else, has grown exponentially in recent years and is expected to continue to do so. While headlines often surface when celebrities like Paris Hilton grow their family using the technology, it also gets attention on the rare occasion a surrogate refuses to relinquish the child they carried, or when surrogates experience exploitation.
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S29A beginner's guide to sound baths - what they are, how to choose a good one and what the research shows   In recent years, sound bathing, a therapy in which sound is used for healing, has been marketed as one of many “self-care” practices, such as journal-keeping or candle-burning, in support of personal well-being. Sold also as sound “immersions,” or sound “healing” or “therapy,” sound baths are pitched as a safe and effective way to reduce stress and increase inner peace.Some people claim erroneously that what we call sound baths are an ancient practice. There is a long-standing tradition in yoga of using sound to focus one’s meditative efforts, perhaps most famously in chanting “Aum.”
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S31 S40Biden's not yet getting a poll bump for the improving economy - history tells us why   When Americans are confident about their economy, they tend to support the incumbent president. When they are not confident, they tend to withdraw that support. The chart below shows that relationship between consumer confidence and public approval of incumbent US presidents’ performances over the last 45 years from January 1978 to December 2023, using monthly data.The relationship between the two measures is not perfect, but when consumer confidence increased rapidly as it did under Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and again under Democrat Bill Clinton in the 1990s, presidential approval ratings also increased rapidly at the same time.
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S58 S5730 years of LGBTQ+ history in Russia: from decriminalisation in 1993 to 'extremist' status in 2023   In 2023, the “LGBTQ+ movement” in Russia was labelled as “extremist”. This marked the culmination of a troubling 30-year cycle from the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993, via the introduction of the “gay propaganda law” in 2013 through years of political and public discrimination against sexual minorities. The progression in the mistreatment of LGBTQ+ people in Russia has coincided with the progression of Putin’s regime, which has become more autocratic. The Russian supreme court’s recent judgment that the international LGBTQ+ community is an “extremist” movement represents a hybrid recriminalisation of homosexuality 30 years after the ban was removed.
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S38 S52How we almost ended up with a bull's-eye bar code   Few objects in the world are more immediately recognizable than the bar code. After all, bar codes are all around us. They’re on the books we buy and the packages that land on our doorsteps. More than 6 billion bar codes are scanned every single day. They’ve become such an accepted part of our daily lives that it’s hard to imagine how they could look any different.Our story begins in 1949, when Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver submitted a patent for the first bar code. That patent described the basic structure of using pairs of lines to represent numbers that is still used in bar code technology more than 70 years later.
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S59'Legal animism': when a river or even nature itself goes to court   Enseignant Chercheur en Economie, Directeur d'Origens Media Lab, ESC Clermont Business School On 30 March 2011, a truly unprecedented event took place at a provincial court in Loja, Equator, located some 270 miles from the capital of Quito. The Vilcabamba River, a plaintiff in a trial there, convinced the tribunal that its own rights were being undermined by a road development project. The project was then halted due because it would have jeopardised the river’s flow.
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S28 S56Why domestic politics will prevent a thaw in China-Canada tensions in 2024   China-Canada relations appear caught in a well-charted downward spiral in recent years amid tensions on various fronts that encompass human rights concerns, cybersecurity issues and, of course, disputes related to the arrests of Meng Wanzhou and the “two Michaels.” Read more: Meng for the two Michaels: Lessons for the world from the China-Canada prisoner swap
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S42How to keep a new year's resolution: ask yourself why you're doing it   It is easy, in December, when surrounded by chocolate wrappers and leftover Christmas pudding, to decide to change your life when January comes around. It’s quite different when January arrives, bringing with it more darkness, more rain and possible feelings of low mood. By now, it may well be that all the good intentions you had when browsing the Boxing Day sales for athleisure and sports equipment, signing up for gym memberships or committing to going vegan for a month have started to fall by the wayside.
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S46War in Europe is more than 5,000 years old - new research   Conflict has existed throughout human history, and it has often been violent. Attacks, assassinations, raids, ambushes and vendettas feature in archaeological records almost as far back as the origin of humankind itself. But not war. War – as opposed to conflict – requires organisation, be it temporary or permanent. This usually involves the creation of institutionalised armies belonging to at least one of the groups involved. War legitimises violence, meaning one person can kill another without it being considered murder. War is also temporary by nature, usually lasting for a period of months or years.
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S41Poor Things: meet the radical Scottish visionary behind the new hit film   Director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things tells the story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), an irrepressibly free woman who seems to have the mind of an innocent child. She embarks on an exuberant voyage of discovery, travelling around 19th-century Europe and reaching Egypt, experiencing many new things as her intellect rapidly develops, before returning home to face her secret past.The film is based on the 1992 novel of the same name by the Glaswegian Alasdair Gray. Gray was a maverick and polymath – a writer, artist, polemicist, dissident and civic nationalist – who had an immense influence on contemporary Scottish literature and beyond.
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S34From besting Tetris AI to epic speedruns - inside gaming's most thrilling feats   After 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first human to beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris, he dedicated his special win to his father, who passed away in December 2023. The Oklahoma teen beat the game by defeating level after level until he reached the “kill screen” – that is, the moment when the Tetris artificial intelligence taps out in exhaustion, stopping play because its designers never wrote the code to advance further. Before Gibson, the only other player to overcome the game’s AI was another AI.
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S32Earth isn't the only planet with seasons, but they can look wildly different on other worlds   Spring, summer, fall and winter – the seasons on Earth change every few months, around the same time every year. It’s easy to take this cycle for granted here on Earth, but not every planet has a regular change in seasons. So why does Earth have regular seasons when other planets don’t? That slight tilt has big implications for everything from seasons to glacier cycles. The magnitude of that tilt can even determine whether a planet is habitable to life.
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S60 S54How Anatomy of a Fall reversed French art cinema's box office decline   Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s courtroom thriller about a writer accused of murdering her husband at their isolated mountain chalet, has won Golden Globes for best non-English language film and best screenplay. It is a triumph for French arthouse drama, which has been in decline in recent years.Since winning the Palme d’Or (the awards’ biggest prize) at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023, Anatomy of a Fall has performed impressively well at the international box office. In the US, it earned nearly US$4 million (£3 million), becoming the highest-grossing foreign-language release since the pandemic, according to Neon, its US distributor. In the UK and Ireland, it became the first French-language title in over a decade to surpass £1 million at the box office.
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S50 S67Provincial policies on campus sexual violence are inconsistent across Canada   Incidents of campus-based sexual violence and gender-based violence are not new. Though, in the past decade, there has been increased awareness and action from campus administrations in response to campus sexual violence.In 2021, students at Western University protested rape culture on campus following allegations that women were being drugged and sexually assaulted during orientation week. Police investigated, but no charges were laid. Western launched a task force on sexual violence and mandated consent and violence prevention training for students.
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S49 S69 S47Post Office will struggle to rebuild brand trust - as Boeing and Facebook scandals show   The Post Office, once an iconic British brand has fallen from grace following the Horizon IT Scandal. With over 11,500 branches, it’s the largest retail franchise network in Europe, offering a variety of products – not just postal, but cash and banking, foreign exchange and government services. Post offices are also often an important social hub for communities, not to mention offering a chance to run a vital local business for people around the UK.The Horizon system, developed by Fujitsu, was introduced in 1999 to help branches manage transactions, accounts and stocktaking. It has since been revealed as faulty, causing account shortfalls often initially blamed on those people running the branches (known as sub-postmasters and mistresses). As a result of the system’s errors, these workers were accused of fraud and theft, and wrongly prosecuted. A new ITV four-part drama has put a spotlight on the scandal, renewing pressure on the government Post Office to exonerate and compensate hundreds of former workers.
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S45 S55 S64ADHD medication - can you take it long term? What are the risks and do benefits continue?   Alison Poulton is a director of the Australasian ADHD Professionals Association. She has previously taken part in an advisory panel and received personal fees and non-financial support from Takeda Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures ADHD medications including some mentioned in this article. She has received book royalties from Disruptive Publishing (ADHD Made Simple).Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a condition that can affect all stages of life. Medication is not the only treatment, but it is often the treatment that can make the most obvious difference to a person who has difficulties focusing attention, sitting still or not acting on impulse.
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S68Time for a Weed-Free January? How cannabis users could benefit from a 'dry' month   By now, most are familiar with the idea of Dry January, a voluntary month without alcohol that follows a month when many drink more than usual.The idea of Dry January started in the United Kingdom in 2012, and has become popular internationally since then. The point is to use a date on the calendar that traditionally prompts resolutions to encourage drinkers to make a month-long commitment to giving their bodies a break and resetting their attitudes and habits in a healthier way for the rest of the year and possibly beyond.
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S33 S37A Supreme Court ruling on fishing for herring could sharply curb federal regulatory power   Fisheries regulation might seem to be unusual grounds for the U.S. Supreme Court to shift power away from federal agencies. But that is what the court seems poised to do in the combined cases of Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. vs. Department of Commerce. The cases are scheduled for oral argument in tandem on Jan. 17, 2024.The question at the core of both cases is whether the secretary of commerce, acting through the National Marine Fisheries Service and following the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, can require commercial fishers to pay for onboard observers whom they are required to take on some fishing voyages. In both cases, the plaintiffs assert that the Commerce Department has exceeded its legal authority. That claim turns on how much deference the court should give the agency’s interpretation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
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S62 S43 S66How 2023's record heat worsened droughts, floods and bushfires around the world   2023 was a year of record-breaking heat, devastating storms and floods, deepening droughts and raging wildfires. These events showed how climate change is affecting the global water cycle and our livelihoods.The report summarises conditions and events in 2023 and long-term trends. We found global warming is profoundly changing the water cycle. As a result, we are seeing more rapid and severe droughts as well as more severe storms and flood events.
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