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 S47How to launch a Chinese smartphone in Mexico   Antonio Tercero is country manager in Mexico for Infinix, a Chinese-owned smartphone brand that launched in Latin America in 2022. For decades, Infinix’s parent company, Transsion, has been one of the top-selling smartphone companies in countries like Nigeria, Tunisia, and Pakistan. Now, Tercero is leading Infinix’s expansion in Mexico, a 127-million-person market that’s increasingly appealing for Chinese brands. As Huawei has reduced its market share in the country since 2021, brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, and Honor have stepped in.In Africa, our success is mostly based on our online sales because the brand is so well known there and has been so for years. Since we’re just introducing our phones to the Mexican market, we’re focusing on partnering with large physical stores nationwide so potential users can get to know our products firsthand.
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S62The 'Sex Update' for 'Cult of the Lamb' Is a Good Sign for Horny Video Games  The pitch is straightforward: What if this video game had sex? Fortnite needs sex. Among Us needs sex. Every game deserves a sex update, so the meme goes. In November, Cult of the Lamb, Massive Monster’s adorable, animal-themed roguelike about building and maintaining a cult, got in on the action: “We will add sex to the game if we hit 300k followers by the end of the year,” the game’s official account tweeted, in the style of the meme’s pseudo-horny forefathers. Now they’re making good on that promise.Video games have long served as an amorous playground. Some incorporate sex and romance directly into gameplay, as in BioWare’s Dragon Age and Mass Effect games. Others offer exploitation and titillation, like hiring sex workers in the Grand Theft Auto series. Still more offer mundane, mechanically sound methods: The Sims lets players “woohoo” (within the privacy of a rocking bed) to have babies. As games, and the ways people play them, evolve, players and developers have built entire communities around the delightful idea that games can be harmlessly horny. Taking that one step further to build off a meme, however—that’s where Massive Monster shines.
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S41How Companies Can Help Universities Train Tech Workers  Companies across the economy require new tech workers who have the training in state-of-the art technologies so they can hit the ground running. A model that has been applied at universities such as Arizona State, the University of California San Diego, and Oregon State, and Purdue can help address this need. It is based on five principles.
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S45The hacks that can help to keep your home warmer  Things came to a head last winter. Patsy Pope, a pensioner who lives alone in London, UK, could feel the cold air on her legs and back hampering her efforts to keep warm. The draughts were leaking in from around the windows in her council flat. Outside, temperatures fell to around 0C (32F) that December but the cost of heating had rocketed, due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.Pope tried wrapping up as best she could but was still miserably cold. So she called her local authority. They were soon on site with draught blockers and foil backing for her six radiators, the idea being that these reflect heat back into the room rather than letting it escape through the external walls.
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S53Time Management Hacks for Hybrid Workers | Michael Parke  Wharton’s Michael Parke talks about time management hacks and setting boundaries for yourself in the post-pandemic era, where the traditional workday is being redefined. This episode is part of a series on getting a “Fresh Start” this new year.Dan Loney: The dynamics of time management are rooted in our history as a country, as a culture. How do you think it has developed with the pandemic and all that we’ve experienced over the last few years?
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S51Ailing Peregrine Moon Lander Is on Course to Crash into Earth  Peregrine will likely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, the moon lander’s builder has saidA timelapse view of the launch of Astrobotic's Peregrine mission from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Jan. 8, 2024. After suffering an anomaly shortly after launch, the Peregrine spacecraft is now bound for a fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, where it will likely burn up.
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S37Your Burnout Is Trying to Tell You Something  Research has established that burnout is primarily the result of psychologically hazardous factors that occur at your workplace. Not being given the resources or time you need to manage your workload, for example, or working in an environment where you have insufficient control and autonomy, are known burnout triggers. No two experiences of burnout are exactly alike, and recovery requires that you pinpoint the unique workplace conditions that are contributing to your stress. One way to do this is to use your self-awareness skills to tune in and discover what your experience of burnout is trying to tell you — indeed, what it’s been trying to tell you all along. Here are some of the vital and lesser-known messages that burnout can reveal, and what to do about them.
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S40How SolarWinds Responded to the 2020 SUNBURST Cyberattack  In December of 2020, SolarWinds learned that they had fallen victim to hackers. Unknown actors had inserted malware called SUNBURST into a software update, potentially granting hackers access to thousands of its customers’ data, including government agencies across the globe and the US military. General Counsel Jason Bliss needed to orchestrate the company’s response without knowing how many of its 300,000 customers had been affected, or how severely. What’s more, the existing CEO was scheduled to step down and incoming CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna had yet to come on board. Bliss needed to immediately communicate the company’s action plan with customers and the media. In this episode of Cold Call, Harvard Business School Professor Frank Nagle discusses SolarWinds’ response to this supply chain attack in the case, “SolarWinds Confronts SUNBURST.”
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S58Even After a Landslide Victory, Trump Supporters Claim Iowa Caucus Was Rigged  Despite the overwhelming scale of former president Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have already claimed that the vote was rigged because he lost one single county.“After it was reported that President Trump won every county in Iowa tonight, Democrat shenanigans ensued and now it’s being reported that Johnson County in Iowa, which is a Biden +40 county, flipped to Nikki Haley by ONE VOTE,” Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who has been embraced by Trump, posted on X in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
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S57The Internet Couldn't Save Vivek Ramaswamy  At a ritzy boutique hotel on Monday night in Des Moines, Iowa, dozens of young voters braved subzero temperatures to see Vivek Ramaswamy deliver what they would soon learn to be his final speech as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.After thanking his team, campaign volunteers, and, of course, everyone watching the livestream, Ramaswamy suspended his campaign. "We've looked at it every which way and I think that it's true that we did not achieve the surprise that we wanted to deliver tonight," Ramaswamy told his room of supporters. "There is no path for me to be the next president absent things we don't want to see in this country."
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S49A Quantum Clock That Is Ticking Down, the Turbulent Milky Way and Dinosaur Lives  One of the biggest mysteries of the universe is why there is a universe at all. According to particle physics, the big bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and they should have immediately canceled each other out. But here we are! We're lucky enough to exist, and we get to live in a time when fundamental questions can be asked and potentially answered scientifically. Physicist Luke Caldwell narrates how he and his colleagues made the most precise measurement ever of a property of electrons that could help explain the existence of everything.It's tempting to think that our big old human brains are uniquely able to learn, store information, and use know-how to make decisions and solve problems. But bizarrely, recent research suggests that even rudimentary clumps of nonbrain cells—from the skin or the heart, for instance—can remember experiences and act on their knowledge. This work is leading to new ideas about the evolutionary origins of intelligence, as author Rowan Jacobsen writes. The field, called basal cognition, is full of startling examples that may change how you think about thinking.
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S31S56The Sad Truth of the FTC's 'Historic' Privacy Win  The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached a settlement last week with an American data broker known to sell location data gathered from hundreds of phone apps to the US government, among others. According to the agency, the company ignored in some cases the requests of consumers not to do so, and more broadly failed to ensure that users were notified of how their harvested data would be used.News that the settlement requires the company, formerly known as X-Mode, to stop selling people's “sensitive location data” was met with praise from politicians calling the outcome “historic” and reporters who deemed the settlement a “landmark” win for the American consumer. This “major privacy win,” as one outlet put it, will further require the company, rebranded as Outlogic after its activities were exposed, to delete all of the data it has illicitly gathered so far.
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S55Isabella Kirkland: The beauty of wildlife -- and an artistic call to protect it  "I think of my paintings as alarm clocks," says artist Isabella Kirkland. "They're reminders of what's at stake; the only problem is we keep pushing the snooze button." Investigating humanity's relationship to nature, she shares work that takes a creative stand against ecological despair — and quietly urges climate action through permanent images of vanishing wildlife.
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S61The 45 Best Shows on Disney+ Right Now  Disney+, if you didn’t know, isn’t just for kids. With its ownership of the Lucasfilm brand and the Marvel titles, the streaming service also offers plenty of grown-up content in its bid to compete with Netflix and Amazon—and we’re not just talking movies. Since launching the service, Disney has used the name recognition of Star Wars and Marvel to launch scores of TV shows, from The Mandalorian to Loki. In the list below, we’ve collected the ones we think are the best to watch, from those franchises and beyond.Want more? Head to our best movies on Disney+ list if you’re looking for movies, and our guides on the best shows on Netflix and best shows on Apple TV+ to see what Disney’s rivals have to offer. Don’t like our picks, or want to suggest your own? Head to the comments below and share your thoughts.
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S43Message 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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S63How the neuroscience of fandom can strengthen company culture  People sometimes say a diverse country like the United States is a “melting pot” for culture, but this metaphor suggests blending everyone’s identities into a big stew of sameness. Instead, I prefer the metaphor of a “garden salad” that’s filled with all kinds of vegetables and, when tossed together, create a dynamic explosion of flavor and texture in your mouth. A garden salad honors the uniqueness of each ingredient (or in this case, person), while also recognizing that putting it all together makes the whole better than the sum of its parts. And incidentally, research has found that talking about vegetables can actually help us let go of our biases.Two psychologists, Mary Wheeler and Susan Fiske, conducted a study where they asked white participants to look at Black faces and sort them into one of two groups by determining whether they were older than 21 years old, or younger. When participants did this, Wheeler and Fiske saw activity spike in the participants’ amygdala, the area of the brain that’s associated with fear and feelings of threat. However, when the white participants were asked to imagine whether the people in the photos preferred a certain type of vegetable—broccoli or carrots—they didn’t show the same spike in their amygdala. Wheeler and Fiske argue that this is because they saw the person pictured as an individual, with their own tastes and preferences, rather than as a member of a monolithic group. In other words, when we think about someone as an individual, rather than through the lens of their group identity, this helps circumvent the kinds of biases that can activate the fear center of our brain.
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S38Making Peace with Your Midlife, Mid-career Self  Research shows that happiness bottoms out for people in their mid to late 40s. We might struggle with mid-career slumps, caring for both children and aging parents, and existential questions about whether everything has turned out as we’d planned. But Chip Conley says we can approach this phase of our personal and profesional lives with a different perspective. He’s a former hospitality industry CEO and founder of the Modern Elder Academy, and he explains how to reframe our thinking about middle age, find new energy, and become more fulfilled and successful people at work and home. Conley wrote the book Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age.
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S50Why Does Salting Roads Make Them Safer?  How salt makes roads safer in winter—and why new methods could be better for the environmentIf you live in a region where winter weather is a regular hazard, you are likely used to pouring salt on your sidewalks or watching trucks douse the streets in it. But how does it work? And how much salt do humans dump onto our planet’s surface? The second question is easier to answer: a lot. We covered streets and sidewalks with nearly 23 million metric tons of salt across the U.S. in 2018 alone.
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S20Finding the Balance Between Coaching and Managing  Ask 100 people if they have good common sense, and more than 95% will tell you they do. Ask them if they are good coaches, and almost as many will say yes. Executives we talk to assume that if they’re good managers, then being a good coach is like your shadow on a sunny day. It just naturally follows.
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S35S60The Emmys Proved Streaming Changed TV for the Better  This year’s Emmys marked the event’s 75th anniversary. As part of the festivities, aired Monday night, the ceremony held cast mini-reunions for some of television’s biggest shows: Cheers, The Arsenio Hall Show, Grey’s Anatomy, Martin, even Game of Thrones. It was a testament to the way TV has infiltrated popular culture—and the ways streaming has altered that influence forever, giving space to weird, genreless shows that might have floundered in prime time.Take, for example, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. That show has been running for nearly 20 years; it’s TV’s longest-running live-action sitcom. Yet, when the gang—Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, Danny DeVito—took the stage during the Emmys telecast, it wasn’t to receive an award, it was to present one. During their pre-presentation bit, they asked around if anyone had an Emmy. DeVito was the only one who said yes. That was for Taxi in 1981. “Rhea [Perlman] won four for Cheers,” DeVito cracked.
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S44Did 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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S28S64This virtual 3D model lets you wander the streets of ancient Rome  During the 1930s, the city of Rome asked Italian architect and archaeologist Italo Gismondi to build a 1:250 scale replica of the ancient city. His model, which was initially only planned to be shown at the 1937-1938 Mostra Augustea della Romanità exhibit, proved so popular with visitors that it was later put on permanent display at the Museum of Roman Civilization.It was in this museum, in October 1976, that Bernard Frischer first saw Gismondi’s work with his own eyes. An archaeologist in training who had come to Italy as part of a postdoctoral fellowship in Classical Studies, Frischer already knew of the model, but descriptions failed to do the real thing justice. “I was blown away by its detail, its massive size (its largest dimension is about 60 feet), and the awesome sense it gave you of the unique grandeur of the Eternal City at the peak of its urban development in late antiquity,” he tells Big Think. As Frischer marveled at miniature versions of the Colosseum and the Pantheon, he daydreamed of turning Gismondi’s physical model into a virtual, life-size version of the city — one that would actually allow him to walk around in it.
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S42Taupo: 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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S48The New Story of the Milky Way's Surprisingly Turbulent Past  The latest star maps are rewriting the story of our Milky Way, revealing a much more tumultuous history than astronomers suspectedAstronomer Bob Benjamin has spent the past 20 years trying to figure out what the Milky Way looks like. The work isn't easy, because we're inside the galaxy and can't see it from the outside, but astronomers have ingenious workarounds, and Benjamin thinks “it's a knowable thing.” He carries in his mind a picture of what astronomers have been able to put together so far: a dense, barred center embedded in a layered disk of gas and stars, some of which pile up into arms that spiral through the disk, all encased in a sparse spherical halo of stars.
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S24So Your Boss Refused to Give You a Raise  While being rejected for a raise can be a blow to your self-esteem, it’s an opportunity for development, and not a step backwards. The author offers advice on how to maintain momentum after being denied a raise: 1) respond diplomatically, 2) unearth possible barriers and pressures, 3) propose alternatives, 4) master the art of authentic self-promotion, and 5) seek out additional advocates.
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S34S46Visualising the Great Pacific Garbage Patch  Over a thousand miles from land in the central North Pacific Ocean, the boat captain and oceanographer Captain Charles Moore puzzled over the source of the litter."It can't be a trail of breadcrumbs like Hansel and Gretel leading me home," he recalled thinking. "This has got to be a larger phenomenon."
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S22The Wild West of Executive Coaching Annual spending on executive coaching in the United States is estimated at $1 billion. Yet information about coaching’s effectiveness is scarce and unreliable. No one has yet demonstrated conclusively what qualifies an executive coach or what makes one approach to executive coaching better than another. Barriers to entry are nonexistent—many executive coaches know little about business, and some know little about coaching. The coaching certifications offered by various self-appointed bodies are difficult to assess, and methods of measuring return on investment are questionable.
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S19Negotiating Is Not the Same as Haggling There’s a popular misconception that in a negotiation you can either “win” or preserve your relationship with your counterpart — your boss, a customer, a business partner — but you can’t do both. People assume they need to make a choice between getting good results (by being hard and bargaining at all costs) or developing a good relationship (by being soft and making concessions to build the relationship). Thinking that way is dangerous, however, because you need both: You have to be able to stand firm and maintain important relationships.
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S21The Right Way to Present Your Business Case  You’ve already put a great deal of work into preparing a solid business case for your project or idea. But when it comes to the critical presentation phase, how do you earn the support of decision makers in the room? How do you present your case so that it’s clear and straightforward while also persuasive?
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S52Four New Octopus Species Discovered in the Deep Sea  Enigmatic octopuses that have been newly discovered in the waters off Costa Rica add to a growing registry of deep-sea dwellersA mother octopus broods her eggs near a small outcrop of rock unofficially called El Dorado Hill. When a female octopus broods (which can be a timespan of multiple years), she does not eat and dies around the same time her eggs hatch.
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S30S54Yara Shahidi: Let curiosity lead  Don't second-guess what "distracts" you, says actor-producer Yara Shahidi; that's your curiosity coming through. The star of hit shows like "black-ish" and "grown-ish" tells how she learned to spot clues to her own future — and how you can, too.
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S23S29S39Reinventing Your Career -- When It's Not Just About You  When you decide to change careers, the important people in your life have a stake in what you do, so it’s important to factor them in to your decision process. The challenge is to figure out how to honor your responsibilities to them without allowing yourself to be defined exclusively by what they feel you ought to be. To do this most effectively, Herminia Ibarra, an expert on career transitions, recommends a two-pronged approach that involves working closely with the primary “stakeholder” in your personal life to explore many different possibilities for yourself, and expanding the reference group within which you consider and evaluate possibilities.
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S66How we remember last weekend  One of the most difficult questions for the science of memory deals with the most obvious fact about memories: We can, well, recollect them. The problem is that no one knows exactly how we call to mind, and with such ease, that party last weekend, with all the samba dancing and clinking of ice in glasses, the scent of circulating hors d’oeuvres, the jolt up the spine from catching a lover’s eye across a crowded room. All these emotional and sensory elements, we know, are registered in distinct areas of the brain—but how is it that we can reminisce and conjure them all up at once, recalling the mental event as a single experience?A group of scientists based at the University of California, San Diego, have found a promising mechanism that may explain not just how recollection works, but also, more broadly, conscious experience itself.
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