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 S53How the neuroplastic "Tetris Effect" can unblock work-life obstacles   Sophie arrived late to the Game of Thrones craze. She held off for a while because she “doesn’t do dragons,” but she watched the first episode, and now she’s hooked. She watched the entire first season in a single lounge-lizard day. As she gets into bed that night and goes to sleep, she sees dragons. She sees swords and medieval armor. Her imagination conjures up, jumbles about, and relives nine hours of Westeros. Her waking mind absorbs, and her sleeping mind repeats.John has watched a lot of Louis Theroux. For John, no other interviewer is half as interesting as the awkward, strange-looking Brit. John has learned about the niche, eccentric fringes of society, and he loves how Louis gets people to open up. But John’s friends have noticed something odd. John has started talking like Louis. His intonation and his beat are all Theroux. He even pauses more often and seems to embrace an interrogative conversation. He doesn’t know it, but John is being someone else.
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S47Inequality Is a Health Risk--and It's Getting Worse  In 2024, the maternal mortality rate (MMR) in the United States and the United Kingdom will grow, although postmortem reviews conclude that 80 percent of maternal deaths in high-income countries are preventable. Rates in high-income countries across Western Europe and Asia did decrease between 1990 and 2010, yet in some of these countries, like the UK, MMRs have risen over the past decade. The US MMR has been an outlier throughout, almost doubling in the first decades of the 21st century.Reasons to support the prediction that MMRs will go up include the continuing consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, MMR increases in the US and UK predated Covid, suggesting the pandemic exacerbated deeper problems.
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S55Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says  It's not just you—Google Search is getting worse. A new study from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence looked at Google search quality for a year and found the company is losing the war against SEO (Search Engine Optimization) spam.
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S37Israel's War in Gaza Is Creating Enormous Hidden Health Problems  A toxic mix of dust, ash and other material from 15 million tons of rubble now blankets Gaza and all who live there, posing major health concernsPalestinian civilians and rescuers help clear the rubble in the heavily bombarded city center of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip following overnight Israeli shelling, on October 10, 2023.
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S66'Pok  Who would have guessed that the next great Pokémon show would be an office comedy? Netflix’s new animated series Pokémon Concierge is set on a small island resort where human and nonhuman guests can get away from it all—if they can figure out how to relax. The show is designed to be a guaranteed hit with children—four short episodes, cute animal characters, almost no plot—but, given its workplace setting, it’s just as much fun for an adult audience. The show introduces Haru (voiced by Non in Japanese and by Karen Fukuhara in the English dub), a young human stuck at a crossroads familiar to any 20- or 30-something. After a series of mishaps in her professional and social life, Haru packs up and arrives at the Pokémon Resort, landing a job as a concierge.On her second day, the kindly hotel boss, Ms. Watanabe, tells Haru that her job is to “make the Pokémon feel the exact same way that you do”—happy and relaxed. The only catch is that anxious, type-A Haru can’t stop working and struggles to take things in stride. Any small task or straightforward question tips Haru into an abyss of overthinking. When Ms. Watanabe asks Haru how her first day went, Haru pulls up an entire slideshow presentation replete with graphs and charts before realizing that her boss just wanted to know how she felt. Watching a Pokémon show whose main character has a job and social anxiety feels like watching the franchise grow up alongside its audience. For the Millennials who traded Pokemón cards in the 1990s, this series manages to address the nuances and worries of early adulthood.
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S33Message 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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S51How the Mighty Heat Pump Is Helping (but Not Solving) EVs' Cold Weather Problem  Perhaps you've heard: In many places, it's really very cold out. Deep freezes hit wide bands of the US this week; snow and freezing rain have swept across northern Europe. This is all less than ideal for electric vehicles, which historically have not loved the cold. A handful of Chicago Tesla Supercharger stations made headlines this week after some EVs affected by the temperatures completely ran out of battery and had to be towed.Electric vehicles have a hard time in cold weather for two reasons. One is chemical: Lithium-ion batteries, the kind that make electric cars (and phones) go, rely on lithium ions moving from their negatively charged conductors (cathodes) to the positively charged ones (anodes). Cold makes the ions move more slowly to the anode, meaning it's harder to charge a chilly battery than a toasty one. The other reason is more practical: Cold weather means car occupants are more likely to turn on the heat, and the heaters used to warm up a car draw power from the electric battery. This reduces range, sometimes significantly. Tests by AAA, Consumer Reports, and the EV battery data company Recurrent have found that freezing temperatures reduce vehicles' ranges by somewhere between 16 and 46 percent. (Very cold weather also reduces gas-powered vehicles' mileage, by between 15 and 24 percent.)
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S63S52Ask Ethan: What explains the Fibonacci sequence?  One of the most fascinating facts about the natural world is that so many entities within it — both biologically and purely physically — obey a specific set of patterns and ratios. Many galaxies exhibit spiral shapes and structures, as do a wide variety of plant structures: pinecones, pineapples, and sunflower heads among them. Ammonites, shelled animals that went extinct more than 60 million years ago, also show that spiral pattern, where one of the key features of spirals is that the next “wind” around outside the prior one displays a specific length ratio to the size of the prior, interior winding.That ratio, in any such structure, is often extremely close to the ratio of two adjacent numbers found in the Fibonacci sequence. This mathematical sequence, often taught to children, simply starts with the numbers “0” and “1” and then gets the next term in the sequence by adding the two prior terms together. It’s arguably the most famous mathematical sequence of all, but what explains the sequence’s pattern, and is it truly, inextricably linked to nature? That’s what Ragtag Media wrote in to ask, inquiring:
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S35The Alpine acrobatics that make ski lift journeys safer  It's late December and I am at the foot of a ski lift in the Dolomites in northern Italy, with snow-covered peaks looming high above me. Large glass bubbles are gliding peacefully up and down the mountain, suspended from a single steel rope. I am about to board one of them, and learn about the behind-the-scenes repairs that keep them safe. But first, I'll need to take a deep breath – and overcome my own personal terror of this dangling, gravity-defying icon of the Alps.Cable cars, also known as ropeways, are actually among the safest forms of transport in the world. According to an unpublished global analysis from 2022 by Tüv Süd, a testing and certification company that tests their safety around the world, riding a cable car is more than ten times safer than travelling by car, and is even safer than flying. Comparing the number of fatalities for every 100 million hours of travel, for every 25 fatalities from car accidents, and 16 from flying, there are only two from cable car accidents, according to the analysis, which is based on data from more than 20 members of the International Meeting of Technical Authorities for Cableways (ITTAB). Most of the cable car accidents were caused by passenger behaviour, according to the analysis.
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S62WordPad out; 80Gbps USB support and other Win 11 features in testing this month  Windows 11's big feature update in September included a long list of minor changes, plus the Copilot AI assistant; that update was followed by Windows 11 23H2 in late October, which reset the operating system's timeline for technical support and security updates but didn't add much else in and of itself. But Windows development never stops these days, and this month's Insider Preview builds have already shown us a few things that could end up in the stable version of the operating system in the next couple of months.
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S58S31How to Vet a Corporate Intelligence Vendor  Demand for intelligence vendors is substantial and increasing. In 2022, global cyber threat intelligence was estimated to be a $4.93 billion industry, and U.S. security services was a whopping $48.1 billion. Geopolitical and security risk intelligence is an unquantified but essential and rapidly growing part of the story. But how do you know whether an intelligence vendor aligns with your company’s needs, risk tolerance, and ethics? The authors, from Harvard University’s Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project, have developed a database of 70 vendors that corporate intelligence professionals identified as informing their work. Their systematic analysis of this dynamic ecosystem revealed four key questions for corporate decision makers to ask in order to maximize their return on vendors.
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S45S41Asthma Drug Still Being Prescribed to Kids Despite Potential Mental Health Risks  The allergy and asthma drug montelukast, also known as Singulair, can cause psychiatric side effects—and researchers aren’t sure whyIn 1998 an asthma and allergy drug called montelukast hit the U.S. market under the name Singulair. In the years that followed, commercials filled with flowers and cats proclaimed that it was “a different way to treat allergies.” During the next two decades it became many doctors’ go-to antiallergy and asthma prescription—especially for children because, unlike other asthma medications, it comes in pill form and does not require fiddling with an inhaler. “It used to be prescribed like vitamins,” says Andrei Constantinescu, a pediatric pulmonologist at Columbia University Medical Center.
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S28S54Biology or technology: Which moves more information per second?  When people try to define life, they tend to focus on things like reproduction or metabolism. It’s true that moving matter and energy around to simply stay alive or produce offspring is a fundamental characteristic of living systems. But there’s another and perhaps more all-encompassing way of understanding life that puts information front and center. In this view, what makes life special — what makes it different from all the other physical systems — is its ability to use information. Stars, for example, can be described in terms of information but it doesn’t make much sense to think of them as using that information. By “use,” I mean deliberately storing, copying, transferring, and processing information toward some end. But what if we want to look at life as a planetary-scale process? The idea of the biosphere — the sum total of Earth’s life — goes back more than a century. The Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky coined the term biosphere when he recognized that life was not a passive rider on Earth’s geophysical evolution. Instead, Vernadsky saw that life as the biosphere was an equal player in setting the planet’s trajectory along with the other “geospheres”: atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), cryosphere (ice), and lithosphere (land). Since then, the concept of the biosphere has become foundational to fields ranging from climate science to astrobiology.
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S59S38S48How to Opt Out of Comcast's Xfinity Storing Your Sensitive Data  Your internet service provider could have a good idea of who you're planning to vote for in the 2024 election as well as the gender of the last person you slept withâand it's saving that information for later. Major internet providers, like Comcast's Xfinity, stockpile more revealing data than users might initially realize.For example, Xfinity customers are automatically opted in to allow the company to store sensitive personal information. This could include your "race, ethnicity, political affiliations, or philosophical beliefs," according to Xfinity's website. Your sexual orientation, immigration status, biometric info, and precise location are also considered to be sensitive data. While Comcast does not sell this info, the company does use sensitive data in a variety of ways, like to serve up personalized ads and recommendations.
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S40Peregrine, a Private U.S. Moon Lander, Burns Up in Earth's Atmosphere  Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, which endured a crippling postlaunch malfunction for longer than expected, could set a precedent for a coming wave of U.S. moon missionsAstrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander as seen on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, as the spacecraft awaited integration with its launch vehicle at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. A post-launch anomaly brought the private mission to an early end, with Peregrine ultimately burning up upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
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S49A Glimpse at the Future of Streaming in 4 Mind-Blowing Stats  Pea-Max? Para-flix? Regardless of what portmanteau they might end up with, odds are good that streaming services are going to spend a bit of time merging in 2024. Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount were already talking about it at the end of last year, continuing the trend that started when WarnerMedia and Discovery merged in the first place. After years of Everybody Has a Streaming Service, that plethora of streaming video apps is getting pared down as people start making tough decisions about which streamers are actually worth it. If ad-supported models, password-sharing crackdowns, and cancellations don’t turn streamers into profit powerhouses this year, consolidation might, and the results look awfully boring.In a report released this week, Parrot Analytics, a firm known for calculating what value any particular show has for a streamer, looked at what various streamers would have to offer in four possible merger scenarios: Warner Bros. Discovery merging with Paramount Global, Netflix with Paramount, NBCUniversal with Warner, and Paramount with NBCUniversal, or NBCU for short. The results show a world where a Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount merger would create the greatest demand in terms of people wanting to watch the shows exclusive to those companies—and one where the results are so muddled they’re almost meaningless.
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S69It's Just a Water Bottle  The world can be a baffling place. That’s true in many important senses, but also in plenty of unimportant ones, and the urge to make order and meaning doesn’t necessarily select for relevance. That’s why, for the past two weeks, a huge chunk of the internet’s attention has been focused on one baffling phenomenon in particular: What, exactly, is a Stanley cup, and why are suburbanites willing to scuffle over it in their most sacred space (their local Target)?Let’s recap. As the new year began, Stanley, a century-old company that for much of its history made reinforced lunch boxes and drinking vessels for outdoorsmen and blue-collar workers, launched three pink, limited-edition Valentine’s Day versions of its jumbo-size Quencher cups, all in different shades of pink and only available at Target. The third of these cups, which came out a few days after the first two, was the grandaddy of them all—a new addition to the brand’s ongoing partnership with Starbucks, glazed in a shimmer finish instead of Stanley’s standard matte. All three flew off the shelves. Fans lined up in parking lots in the predawn hours to increase their chances of snagging one. In at least one instance captured in a now-viral video, an argument erupted over who was cutting whom in line, fingers were pointed, and a store manager was summoned to referee. A few videos of rushing shoppers and tepid interpersonal conflicts, plus one that appears to show store patrons trying to tackle a man who had grabbed a box full of tumblers and made a run for it, did the rounds on TikTok before jumping to local news broadcasts and the generalized zeitgeist.
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S39Here's What I Learned as the U.S. Government's UFO Hunter  A forthcoming investigational report from an office of the Pentagon has found no evidence of aliens, only allegations circulated repeatedly by UFO claim advocatesSean Kirkpatrick, then-director of All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office at the Department of Defense, gives a presentation at a public meeting of NASA’s unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) independent study team on May 31, 2023.
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S22S307 Steps to Repair a Damaged Business Partnership  No long-term partnership — personal or professional — is without challenges. Getting key issues on the table in a timely way and having open, direct, and respectful conversations can reduce frustrations and facilitate needed change. In this article, the authors outline seven steps to take if your business partnership has gotten rocky.
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S43S50Apple Shares the Secret of Why the 40-Year-Old Mac Still Rules  On January 24, Apple’s Macintosh computer turns 40. Normally that number is an inexorable milestone of middle age. Indeed, in the last reported sales year, Macintosh sales dipped below $30 billion, more than a 25 percent drop from the previous year’s $40 billion. But unlike an aging person, Macs now are slimmer, faster, and last much longer before having to recharge.My own relationship with the computer dates back to its beginnings, when I got a prelaunch peek some weeks before its January 1984 launch. I even wrote a book about the Mac—Insanely Great—in which I described it as “the computer that changed everything.” Unlike every other nonfiction subtitle, the hyperbole was justified. The Mac introduced the way all computers would one day work, and the break from controlling a machine with typed commands ushered us into an era that extends to our mobile interactions. It also heralded a focus on design that transformed our devices.
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S67Erasing Jewish History Will Not Help Palestinians  The assertion that Jesus was Palestinian is often made in an effort to negate Jewish history.For Jews, the events of October 7—the worst massacre of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—were horrifying and traumatizing. But what has happened in the three months since is also deeply unsettling, though in a different way. Much of the world, rather than offering empathy and compassion for Israel, has turned on it.
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S57S68Why Israel Is Taking the Genocide Case Seriously  South Africa dropped a bombshell on the international community in December, claiming in the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest judicial body, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. No doubt Pretoria, a longtime supporter of Palestine and in a deteriorating diplomatic relationship with Israel, had political reasons to bring what most Israelis view as an outrageous claim. But to dismiss the case as political theater would be a mistake.Israel did not send a team of government attorneys to put up a defense in The Hague, or hire one of the leading members of the ICJ bar, merely because of politics. Rather, Israel understands the stakes: The ICJ’s ruling will influence how states, international organizations, and the public view not only the conflict in Gaza, but also Israel itself, and more broadly, the obligation of states to prevent genocide. The case could even encourage legal action against specific Israelis in courts worldwide.
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S70The Spirit Airlines Paradox  Read one way, the decision this week by a federal judge to block JetBlue’s acquisition of Spirit Airlines is a milestone in the effort to revive American antitrust law. President Joe Biden has made competition enforcement a central part of his economic policy, and the JetBlue ruling marks the first time that federal regulators have ever won a lawsuit to stop a major U.S. airline merger. In his opinion, William G. Young—who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1985—explains in admirably plain language that absorbing Spirit would allow JetBlue to raise prices and reduce service on the routes where the two airlines currently compete. This would violate the federal Clayton Act—“a statute,” Young wrote, “that continues to deliver for the American people.”Yet Young’s decision also inadvertently struck an odd note—one that hints at the limits of what antitrust enforcement alone can do to improve air travel. “Spirit is a small airline,” he wrote. “But there are those who love it. To those dedicated customers of Spirit, this one’s for you.”
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S56S60Everything we learned today about Vision Pro configurations, specs, and accessories  Apple's Vision Pro went up for preorder this morning at 8 am ET. As expected, shipment dates for preorders quickly backed up to March as initial supply was accounted for. Regardless of whether you're in for the start or taking a wait-and-see approach with Apple's ultra-pricey new device, though, we have access to a little more information about the device than we did before thanks to updates to the Apple Store website.
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S46How film changes the way we see the world  "People told me this was an unadaptable book, so the only logical thing to do was to try to adapt it," says writer, producer and filmmaker Ava DuVernay of her work taking the award-winning title "Caste" from page to screen. In conversation with Pat Mitchell, DuVernay talks about the resulting film, "Origin," and discusses her process for turning ideas into pictures that pack a punch.
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S36This Nearby Brown Dwarf May Have Auroras--And a Moon, Too  Glowing methane on a brown dwarf dozens of light-years from Earth may signal the presence of a large lunar companionAn artist's concept of the cold brown dwarf W1935, which is located 47 light-years from Earth. Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope found an infrared glow from methane in W1935's atmosphere, which is a possible sign of aurorae (shown here in red) on the brown dwarf.
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S21S42Ice Fishing Turns Deadly as World Warms  Record warmth last December and balmy temperatures in early January have turned lake ice in Minnesota into a death trap. Fatalities, injuries and rescues are piling upCLIMATEWIRE | MINNEAPOLIS — On Friday, Richard Gadbois, 80, did what he had done countless times on freezing January days in northern Minnesota.
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