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CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!  S39S1Did the Universe have zero entropy when it first began?   One of the most inviolable laws in the Universe is the second law of thermodynamics. It tells us that, in any physical system, where nothing (no particles and no energy) is exchanged with the outside environment, entropy always increases. This is true not only of a closed and isolated system within our Universe, but of the entire Universe itself. If you look at the Universe today and compare it to the Universe at any earlier point in time, you’ll find that the entropy has always risen and continues to rise, with no exceptions, throughout all of our cosmic history.But what if we go all the way back to the earliest times of all: to the very first moments of the Big Bang? What about even earlier: to the epoch of cosmic inflation that preceded and set up the hot Big Bang? If entropy has always increased, does that mean that the entropy of the Universe started from a value of zero at some initial time, and a state of what we might think of as “maximal organization” at some point?
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S2Cosmism: The 19th-century movement to reach space and immortality  In the 2009 documentary Transcendent Man, the American inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil shares his thoughts on death. Although many philosophers and theologians accept mortality as an inevitable and indeed defining feature of human existence, Kurzweil refuses to accept this line of thinking. “Death is a great tragedy, a profound loss,” he declares in the film, haunted by the memory of losing his father at age 22. “I don’t accept it.”Kurzweil would have found an ally in the little-known 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, whose posthumously published text Philosophy of the Common Task made the at-the-time daring argument that death was little more than a design flaw — one which advancements in science and technology could help to rectify. Fedorov also believed that this goal of rectification — of achieving immortality — would unite social groups whose mutual fear of death had historically pitted them in opposition to each other.
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S3Stone Age megastructure under Baltic Sea sheds light on strategy used by Palaeolithic hunters over 10,000 years ago  Archaeologists have identified what may be Europe’s oldest human-made megastructure, submerged 21 metres below the Baltic Sea in the Bay of Mecklenburg, Germany. This structure – which has been named the Blinkerwall – is a continuous low wall made from over 1,500 granite stones that runs for almost a kilometre. The evidence suggests it was constructed by Palaeolithic people between 11,700 and 9,900 years ago, probably as an aid for hunting reindeer.The archaeologists investigating the Bay of Mecklenburg used a range of submarine equipment, sampling methods and modelling techniques to reconstruct the ancient lake bed and its surrounding landscape. This revealed that the Blinkerwall stands on a ridge running east to west, with a 5km-wide lake basin a few metres below the ridge to the south.
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S4The EU's AI Act and How Companies Can Achieve Compliance  The EU’s forthcoming AI Act imposes requirements on companies designing and/or using AI in the European Union, and backs it up with stiff penalties. Companies need to analyze where they might fail to be compliant and then operationalize or implement the requisite steps to close the gaps in a way that reflects internal alignment. For most companies, that won’t be easy. The article lays out what boards, C-suites, and managers need to do to make this process work and ensure their companies will be compliant when regulation comes into force.
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S5How Co-Leaders Succeed  Co-leadership, where an executive, department, or team leadership role is shared, can result in more creative and strategic problem solving and wiser decision making. But it can also lead to unhealthy game playing in the pursuit of dominance and positioning for the next role, resulting in organizational misalignment, inertia, and confusion. It doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to become a political animal who spends their days looking to outmaneuver their co-leader. Instead, perform this role with integrity, canniness, and positivity, recognizing that it will feel uncomfortable at times. These seven strategies will increase your chances of making your co-leadership a success.
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S6How a Well-Executed Social Initiative Strengthens Your Brand  In the modern competitive business environment, innovative social initiatives offer a unique avenue for growth, customer loyalty, and employee engagement, often overlooked by organizations. Traditional social efforts like standard volunteering and environmental goals lack impact due to their inability to establish a unique and emotionally engaging identity. The effectiveness of social programs hinges on their alignment with a company’s identity and their ability to resonate with societal challenges, create a strong brand identity, generate excitement, and be scalable. Exemplary cases from Barclays, Dove, Hellmann’s, and Thrivent demonstrate the transformative impact of well-executed social initiatives. These programs not only revitalized brand images and increased public trust, but also significantly boosted sales and customer engagement. Implementing these signature programs requires a committed leadership, a supportive culture, and a passionate team, highlighting an underused strategy for business growth and brand strengthening.
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S7What comes after big data?  Charity projects from tech giants tend to play off the companies’ strengths: collecting and processing data. One Google-backed project harvests agricultural data to predict crop-devouring pests. Another Microsoft scheme processes health data to find “insights into what drives disease.”There are dozens of these projects, all tackling real problems with good intentions and unbounded optimism. The results are sometimes underwhelming, but not always — and they have set the tone for a kind of sensible data-driven philanthropy that appeals to the general ethos of the tech industry. If optimization is good for the company, why shouldn’t it be good for the world, too?
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S817 Tips to Take Your ChatGPT Prompts to the Next Level ![]() ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and other tools like them are making artificial intelligence available to the masses. We can now get all sorts of responses back on almost any topic imaginable. These chatbots can compose sonnets, write code, get philosophical, and automate tasks.However, while you can just type anything you like into ChatGPT and get it to understand you. There are ways of getting more interesting and useful results out of the bot. This "prompt engineering" is becoming a specialized skill of its own.
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S9An AT&T Outage Is Wreaking Havoc on US Cellular Networks ![]() It started around 3:30 in the morning on the East Coast, reports flooding in about an AT&T service outage. Customers complained across Reddit and X and logged their issues on Downdetector, a site that, well, detects when services go down.The impact appears to be widespread; AT&T users from New York to Atlanta to Dallas claimed no signal, phones stuck in SOS mode. Multiple police departments, including in San Francisco, reported that some users were unable to contact 911 as a result of the outages. By 9 am ET, Downdetector was showing more than 72,000 AT&T outages across the US; the site's baseline for AT&T service issues is 42.
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S10Best Galaxy S24 Cases (2024): Screen Protectors, Chargers, and More ![]() If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDYou'll inevitably drop your smartphone. Once at a theater, my Galaxy Note slipped out of my pocket and fell onto the seat's metal frame, crushing the side button so that the phone kept trying to activate Bixby, Samsung's voice assistant. The phone was very hot by the end of the movie. A case might have prevented any damage ⦠or not.
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S1120 Best Portable Battery Chargers (2024): For Phones, iPads, Laptops, and More ![]() If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDPortable devices have a Murphy's law-like ability to run out of power at the least convenient moment: as you step on the bus, right in the middle of an important meeting, or just as you get comfortable on the couch and press Play. But if you keep a battery-powered portable charger handy, all those situations are a thing of the past.
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S12Leak Reveals the Unusual Path of 'Urgent' Russian Threat Warning ![]() A decision by US House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) chair Mike Turner to sound the alarm over space-based Russian military research was far more extraordinary than previously reported.A WIRED review of an internal messaging system used by the United States Congress shows that HPSCI rarely sends members invites to review classified documents and has notâÂÂin at least 15 yearsâÂÂalarmed lawmakers by announcing an âÂÂurgentâ threat against the United States.
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S13The 27 Best Movies on Hulu This Week ![]() In 2017, Hulu made television history by becoming the first streaming network to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, thanks to the phenomenon that was The Handmaid's Tale.While Netflix has largely cornered the streaming market on original moviesâand even managed to persuade A-listers like Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Martin Scorsese to come aboardâHulu is starting to find its footing in features too. Below are some of our top picks for the best movies (original and otherwise) streaming on Hulu right now.
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S14Google's 'Woke' Image Generator Shows the Limitations of AI ![]() Google has admitted that its Gemini AI model âÂÂmissed the markâ after a flurry of criticism about what many perceived as âÂÂanti-white bias.â Numerous users reported that the system was producing images of people of diverse ethnicities and genders even when it was historically inaccurate to do so. The company said Thursday it would âÂÂpauseâ the ability to generate images of people until it could roll out a fix.When prompted to create an image of Vikings, Gemini showed exclusively Black people in traditional Viking garb. A âÂÂfounding fathersâ request returned Indigenous people in colonial outfits; another result depicted George Washington as Black. When asked to produce an image of a pope, the system showed only people of ethnicities other than white. In some cases, Gemini said it could not produce any image at all of historical figures like Abraham Lincoln, Julius Caesar, and Galileo.
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S15Intel's CEO Says AI Is the Key to the Company's Comeback ![]() When veteran engineer and executive Pat Gelsinger returned to Intel as CEO in 2021, the once-great chipmaker was in a slump. After failing to adapt to the mobile era and then missing several steps in cutting-edge microprocessor manufacturing, it was now also falling behind in supplying chips to feed the tech industryâÂÂs growing hunger for artificial intelligence.With optimism that at times seemed reckless, Gelsinger promised that Intel would make an epic comeback. He vowed to shake up its sleepy corporate culture, refocus on core engineering, and deliver a revitalized manufacturing plan that would put rivals TSMC and Samsung on notice.
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S16Reddit's IPO Filing Is Missing Something: Cofounder Alexis Ohanian ![]() Reddit cofounders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian spent about eight straight years living together, initially as college roommates, playing World of Warcraft late into the night and later working together on the foundations of the discussion forums service now frequented by nearly 270 million people. But that history was missing from RedditâÂÂs sales pitch to investors published Thursday announcing its plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange: RedditâÂÂs filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission didnâÂÂt mention Ohanian at all.Huffman, who has been RedditâÂÂs CEO since 2015, and Ohanian, who after stepping back from helping run the business had sat on its board for years, split in 2020 over how to handle some of the hateful content on Reddit. TheyâÂÂve spoken little since. The lack of a nod to Ohanian in the new document could reflect both that schism and HuffmanâÂÂs attempt to cast a company thatâÂÂs been around for 19 years in a new light.
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S17S18Many children must live with the trauma of war. Here's how to help them  When the Bosnian war broke out in 1992, Selma Baćevac was a seven-year-old in Sarajevo. Her life changed overnight. Her father disappeared for long stints, fighting on the front lines. Baćevac herself had to hide from shrapnel more than once. She survived bombings. She lost her home. "So many atrocities occurred, I could speak to you for hours and not get everything in," she says now from her home in Florida in the US.Even play wasn't safe. Like many other war-affected children, Baćevac and her brother would role-play scenes of danger, or being refugees. They drew pictures of bombs and explosions. When they met other children, they had to find hidden spots to play that seemed less likely to be shelled. Once, when she went to a marketplace with her father to buy a Barbie doll, a mortar bomb struck the crowd, killing 68 people. She later lost the Barbie – and all of her other toys – in a fire when her home was bombed.
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S19The women, poems and menus saving Ecuador's beloved blue crab  As a young girl, Amada Cortez Caicedo would collect blue crabs and clams from the once dense mangrove forests along the coast of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. She and her two sisters would traverse the trees' tentacled roots that stand high above the water, to harvest them from muddy burrows."I liked spending time in the wetlands because you would find molluscs and crustaceans in the ground, but in the branches you would see other wildlife," says Caicedo. "So I would go and gaze at the birds and catch snails."
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S20Rivian to Lay Off 10 Percent of Workers as EV Demand Wanes  Electric vehicle startups Rivian and Lucid forecast 2024 production well below analyst estimates on Wednesday as persistently high borrowing costs keep consumers from buying relatively pricier battery-powered cars.Shares in Rivian and Lucid plummeted 15% and 8% respectively after the announcements--the latest signs of a slowdown in EV demand flagged by automakhttps://www.inc.com/hannah-hall/rivian-patent-brand-electric-truck.htmlers including Ford, General Motors and market leader Tesla. The plateauing demand sparked a price war last year as companies drained margins to woo customers.
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S21Bella Hadid Is Launching a Wellness Brand, Orebella  The 27-year-old model announced the launch of her brand, Orebella, with a mysterious teaser on Instagram today. While her post shared scant details about the company--aside from a tagline "reveal your alchemy--the brand's trademark filing suggests it may offer scented lotions, candles, fragrance reed diffusers, soaps, shampoos and conditioners, and styling creams. Hadid encouraged interested shoppers to join a waitlist to receive updates and an "exclusive gift" upon its May 2 launch. An Instagram post the model shared at the office of Bolingbrook, Illinois-based beauty retailer Ulta on February 8 suggests a potential partnership.This isn't Hadid's first step into the business world; in 2021, she joined the Austin-based adaptogenic beverage brand Kin Euphorics as a co-founder alongside founder Jen Batchelor. Entrepreneurship also runs in her family: In 2022, her sister Gigi Hadid launched a cashmere fashion brand, Guest in Residence.
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