   
CEO Picks - The best that international journalism has to offer!
 S12The Israel-Palestine conflict: a reading list - The Economist (No paywall)   Tensions in the Middle East are a political inheritance of the dissolution of the Ottoman empire after the first world war and the piecemeal settlements of 1922. This landmark book, published in 1989 and named as a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, provides a sweeping account of the period between 1914 and 1922, ranging from the Mediterranean to Afghanistan. It astutely traces the Allies’ motivations for carving up the Arab world and shows why the West’s imperial vision was doomed to fail.When, exactly, the Israel-Palestine conflict began is hard to say. Many consider November 2nd 1917 to be the starting-point: that is the date of the Balfour Declaration, when the British government vowed to use its “best endeavours” to create a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine, a territory it would take from the Ottomans. This balanced book, praised by Palestinian and Israeli historians alike, offers a tour of the past century of conflict.
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S31 Who Profits the Most From Generative AI?  The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.In the months since the public launch of ChatGPT, massive investments have been made in the form of venture capital firms plowing money into generative AI startups, and corporations ramping up spending on the technology in hopes of automating elements of their workflows. The excitement is merited. Early studies have shown that generative AI can deliver significant increases in productivity.1 Some of those increases will come from augmenting human effort, and some from substituting for it.
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S34Let's Get to Work | Abbie Lundberg  The spring 2024 issue's special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The spring 2024 issue's special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.Our ambition at MIT Sloan Management Review is to arm business leaders with information to make a positive impact: on your organizations and careers, for sure, and also on your employees, customers, trading partners, and the broader world within which you operate. Right now we are exploring ways to increase our own impact.
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S32 Steer Clear of Corporate Venture Capital Pitfalls  The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The authors set out to investigate factors in the success or failure of corporate venture capital initiatives. They interviewed leaders of 164 CVC units and probed for details on how their organizations are set up, financed, and governed; their relationships with their corporate parents; how decisions are made; and how members of CVC teams are compensated. They also collected and analyzed data about these CVCs’ investments and co-investors, and the backgrounds of their investment team members.
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S30 Health Care Platforms Need a Strategy Overhaul  The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The market for digital health services is growing rapidly. Worth more than $175 billion globally in 2022, it is expected to have a compound annual growth rate of 27% until 2030.1 Digital health services are provisioned over platforms that match patients with medical professionals while integrating artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and data analytics to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health care delivery. Despite attracting both users and venture capital (with $45 billion in funding in 2021 alone), digital health platforms struggle to match the success of other platform businesses, with many failing to achieve profitability.2
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S13What to read about boardroom battles - The Economist (No paywall)  YOU’VE FINISHED “Succession”. Where to get another fix of power grabs and power lunches? Worry not: here are four books and one podcast to satisfy your craving. They recount real-life succession battles and hostile takeovers. Their portrayal of business as a messy sport is one that Logan Roy would have recognised. “Life is not knights on horseback,” the patriarch of “Succession” told his son. “It’s a number on a piece of paper. It’s a fight for a knife in the mud.”
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S14Case Study: Navigating Labor Unrest - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Paulo Ferreira, the president of Luna Brazil, has an ambitious plan to turn around the dismal performance of the plant he oversees in Campinas. The wrinkle is, he needs the buy-in of the powerful local union, which is still smarting from a 10-year-old labor conflict and lately has begun to step up its demands and picket outside the factory. Headquarters, running out of patience with the dispute, wants Paulo to consider converting the plant to a distribution center. But that would mean hundreds of layoffs, which would decimate the local community that Paolo loves.In the corner office at the Campinas plant of Luna Motors, the dim light of a desk lamp illuminated a series of charts. Paulo Ferreira, the president of Luna Brazil, had been so deep in thought he hadn’t even noticed that it was now dark outside. Each line, curve, and number on the papers in front of him painted a disheartening picture of the plant’s performance: rising defects, increasing absenteeism, and a record high in vehicles lost to labor issues. The plant was no longer competitive within the larger Luna network.
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S10Radioactive waste, baby bottles and Spam: the deep ocean has become a dumping ground  The deep has long been treated as somehow separate from the surface world, a shadowy non-place populated by alien creatures. While this is partly a response to the difficulty of studying it, it also reflects an ingrained tendency. As the writer Robert Macfarlane has observed, humans are creatures of the air and light, and we have often regarded the spaces beneath our feet with abhorrence, associating them with death, entombment and the unseen and unnameable. And while what Macfarlane calls the underland might be a place of ritual power as well as a place of burial, the ocean’s depths are more frequently equated with loss and forgetting.Although those versed in traditional wayfinding techniques often understood the ocean in more complex ways, the idea of the deep as an unknowable non-place was also embedded in navigational practices. For European sailors plying the waters of the Mediterranean sea and the Atlantic and Indian oceans, all that really mattered was knowing where potential obstacles and risks such as reefs and sandbars lay – a way of thinking that transformed the ocean’s depths into a blank irrelevance.
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S11How to Cultivate Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride on Your Team - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Leaders want teams that work hard and persevere in the face of challenges. But it’s not enough to nurture grit among your employees. You also need to encourage grace – decency, respect, and generosity, all of which mark a person as someone with whom others want to cooperate. Managers can foster grace by cultivating three specific emotions: gratitude, compassion, and pride. Research has shown that employees who feel these emotions at work demonstrate more patience and perseverance, but also stronger social bonds because these feelings make us more willing to cooperate with and invest in others – and encourage others to see us in a positive light.As a leader, what traits should you cultivate in your employees? Grit – the ability to persevere in the face of challenges? Sure. A willingness to accept some sacrifices and work hard toward a successful future are essential for the members of any team. But I believe there’s another component that matters just as much: grace. I don’t mean the ability to move elegantly or anything religious. Rather, I mean qualities of decency, respect, and generosity, all of which mark a person as someone with whom others want to cooperate.
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S27JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon: Not out of the woods on recession, but 'worst case would be stagflation' - Fortune (No paywall)  “The world is pricing in a soft landing, at probably 70-80%,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief executive officer said via video link at the Australian Financial Review Business Summit in Sydney on Tuesday. “I think the chance of a soft landing in the next year or two is half that. The worst case would be stagflation.”The comments strike a slightly less optimistic tone from the top banker, who has recently painted a sanguine outlook for world markets — a sharp divergence from his views less than two years ago when central banks first started tightening interest rates. Dimon made headlines for warning in 2022 that a “hurricane” was about to hit the US economy.
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S28Oppenheimer Reminds Scientists to Speak Up for a Better World - Scientific American (No paywall)  Handwringing over the proper place of scientists has long preoccupied political observers in the U.S., both inside and outside the scientific community. We need look back no further than the pandemic’s intense debates over vaccines and shutdowns for examples. Speaking out—or even helping to craft good public policy—doesn’t come naturally to every scientist. A recent poll found that over 90 percent of scientists now consider political activism a “sometimes,” “most of the time,” or “always” responsibility. Scientists across the world see the gap between research and policy and recognize the need to undertake the often-uncomfortable duty of fact-checking leaders and informing the public. But there is even more that scientific experts can and should do. What we call science policy entrepreneurship, working with scientific experts and concerned people to craft solutions for lawmakers, offers a crucial way to generate smart policy.
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S16All the Carcinogens We Cannot See - The New Yorker (No paywall)  In the nineteen-seventies, Bruce Ames, a biochemist at Berkeley, devised a way to test whether a chemical might cause cancer. Various tenets of cancer biology were already well established. Cancer resulted from genetic mutations—changes in a cell’s DNA sequence that typically cause the cell to divide uncontrollably. These mutations could be inherited, induced by viruses, or generated by random copying errors in dividing cells. They could also be produced by physical or chemical agents: radiation, ultraviolet light, benzene. One day, Ames had found himself reading the list of ingredients on a package of potato chips, and wondering how safe the chemicals used as preservatives really were.But how to catch a carcinogen? You could expose a rodent to a suspect chemical and see if it developed cancer; toxicologists had done so for generations. But that approach was too slow and costly to deploy on a wide enough scale. Ames—a limber fellow who was partial to wide-lapel tweed jackets and unorthodox neckties—had an idea. If an agent caused DNA mutations in human cells, he reasoned, it was likely to cause mutations in bacterial cells. And Ames had a way of measuring the mutation rate in bacteria, using fast-growing, easy-to-culture strains of salmonella, which he had been studying for a couple of decades. With a few colleagues, he established the assay and published a paper outlining the method with a bold title: “Carcinogens Are Mutagens.” The so-called Ames test for mutagens remains the standard lab technique for screening substances that may cause cancer.
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S33 Our Guide to the Spring 2024 Issue  The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The spring 2024 issue’s special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.Top Takeaways: Since the launch of ChatGPT, interest and investments in generative AI models have surged. Which players stand to gain the most from the growth and adoption of this technology? Given that it is resource- and data-intensive and benefits from network effects, incumbents have the greatest advantage. However, there are some areas where new entrants can create and capture value. Leveraging proprietary, first-party data will be critical to delivering value and building differentiation.
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S5S26Meet India's MrBeast -- selfless saint or fame-hungry vlogger?  At 5:20 a.m. on a Wednesday, two trucks packed with 22 buffaloes and a dozen young calves rolled into Kothapet village in the south Indian state of Telangana. The cattle had traveled over 1,000 miles to make a star appearance in the latest video of Telugu-language social media sensation Harsha Sai. The 24-year-old YouTuber — also the platform’s top 2022 breakout creator in India — has amassed an online following of over 20 million with his flamboyant acts of charity. For this particular video, titled “I made a poor milkman into a millionaire,” Sai was orchestrating a surprise for a milkman, his wife, and their ailing son. The buffaloes were 100-pound bovines from the Murrah breed, known as “black gold” because of their high-volume milk production. At 6:30 a.m., Sai’s crew unloaded the buffaloes onto the unsuspecting family’s front yard.
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S29Not all employers are tolerating Gen Z's laid-back language  When Anna landed a job in the art department at a prominent London-based hedge fund straight out of university in 2022, she was the youngest member of her team by a decade. Unfazed by the age gap, Anna, who'd graduated at the top of her class, was eager to learn from colleagues. Their feedback was mostly positive, she recalls, but for one issue: her boss said her casual language and informal manner undermined her credibility.She brushed it off. "I had good relationships with clients – I think it's better to be personable than austere," says Anna, now in her mid-20s. "I was performing well and thought that would be enough."
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S18The Big Problem With the Giant Stanley Cup - WIRED (No paywall)  Once a masculine emblem of construction workers and hikers, Stanley drinkware is now a status symbol for the wellness-oriented internet trend-chaser. The ubiquitous 40-ounce Quencher H2.0 FlowState Tumbler is at the heart of some of the 2020s’ most recognizable woman-dominated and pastel-toned trends, like the “hot girl walk” and TikTok’s controversial #WaterTok niche. The Stanley cup, as it is universally known, is toted by countless influencers and even some A-list celebrities who praise its supposedly superior functionality even as it draws mockery for its sometimes comical impracticality.The movement against disposable containers is urgently needed, and reusable water bottles have been fashionable for decades. In the past, consumers signaled their love of hydration and the environment with water bottles from brands like Nalgene, Swell, Hydro Flask, and Yeti. But none of Stanley’s predecessors inspired a frenzy on a scale so large that it threatens to symbolize the very kind of environmentally-harmful consumption that reusable containers are supposed to end.
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S17How I Learned to Concentrate - The New Yorker (No paywall)  A defining feature of the theory group was the explicit value that the researchers there placed on concentration, which I soon understood to be the single most important skill required for success in our field. In his book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!,” the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman recalled delivering his first graduate seminar at Princeton, to an audience that included Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli: “Then the time came to give the talk, and here are these monster minds in front of me, waiting!” At M.I.T., we had our own monster minds, who were known for their formidable ability to focus.I was astonished at how the most impressive of my colleagues could listen to a description of a complicated proof, stare into space for a few minutes, and then quip, “O.K., got it,” before telling you how to improve it. It was important that they didn’t master your ideas too quickly: the dreaded insult was for someone to respond promptly and deem your argument “trivial.” I once attended a lecture by a visiting cryptographer. After he finished, a monster mind in the audience—an outspoken future Turing winner—raised his hand and asked, “Yes, but isn’t this all, if we think about it, really just trivial?” In my memory, the visitor fought back tears. In the theory group, you had to focus to survive.
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S20Legal Weed in New York Was Going to Be a Revolution. What Happened? - The New Yorker (No paywall)  A few years ago, Howell Miller was in prison in New York State, walking laps around the track with a fellow-inmate he’d befriended, who happened to be a former U.S. congressman. Prior to the prison stint, Miller, a cheerful guy in his early fifties, had run a construction company and a serious marijuana operation, simultaneously. “I was a silent baller,” he told me. “Then one of my guys got caught with forty-four hundred pounds on a truck.” As Miller neared the end of a twelve-year sentence, he began hearing stories of people getting rich running weed shops: “I was thinking, Why the hell am I still in jail?” His ex-congressman friend, Anthony Weiner, told him on the track that day that the first dispensary licenses were going to be awarded to people who had marijuana convictions. “I thought, I’m gonna get out and look into that,” Miller said.What Weiner had described was the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, or CAURD. It’s the flagship program of the Office of Cannabis Management (O.C.M.), the agency created, in 2021, to oversee the legalization of marijuana in New York. The state’s cannabis restrictions had been loosening for almost a decade, but that year the government passed a law that would have seemed unthinkable just a short while before. The governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, had been pushed left on the issue during a primary challenge from Cynthia Nixon; after his reëlection, he found himself knee-deep in multiple scandals, and unusually pliable. The law not only made pot legal for adults; it also allocated forty per cent of weed-related tax revenue to communities where cops had made disproportionate marijuana arrests, and it set a goal of awarding half of all licenses to “social and economic equity” applicants: women, people of color, service-disabled veterans, distressed farmers, and residents of those overpoliced communities.
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S35Jesse Eisenberg's Weird New Sasquatch Movie is One of the Best Surprises of the Year  The Zellner Brothers cast big-time actors as grunting, pooping cryptids — and it works like a charm.You’d be forgiven for imagining the dulcet tones of Sir David Attenborough narrating Sasquatch Sunset. A surreal comedy by David & Nathan Zellner (The Curse), the film often feels like a tender nature documentary, with an unobtrusive, observant camera capturing a quartet of bipedal Sasquatches from afar. However, its conceit is geared towards bridging that spatial and narrative gap. For their bizarre experiment, the Zellners cast recognizable faces like Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Riley Keough (Mad Max: Fury Road), lather them in makeup until they’re almost indistinguishable, and slowly but surely imbue them with human qualities, until the movie becomes a meaningful, raucous tragicomedy unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
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S6This Startup Says It Can Beat Deepmind's Gamechanging Protein AI - Forbes (No paywall)  In 2018, Google's AI lab Deepmind released an algorithm that took the biology world by storm. Called AlphaFold, the software was able to accurately predict protein structures â a complex problem that was heralded as a major scientific breakthrough. Understanding how proteins interact is key to understanding everything in biotech from how to make food taste better to how to make crops survive climate change to curing cancer. Since its release, AlphaFold, its successor AlphaFold2 and the hundreds of millions of protein structures it has generated over the past few years have become a key part of the toolkit of biotech researchers around the world.But while AlphaFold has helped propel the industry forward, it has its own set of limitations. Researchers are still a long way from the Holy Grail of synthetic biology: where an AI model can take a desired protein shape and figure out how to create it by either finding the right chemical to interact with it or wholly designing a protein found nowhere in nature.
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S7Give us our homes! The angry victims of China's property crisis - The Economist (No paywall)  Gu Lin chose the apartment at One Riviera because of its location: a quiet residential neighbourhood just a few kilometres south of Shanghai’s financial district and a short bike ride from the Huangpu river, which bisects the city into east and west. Although Gu had to pay a premium for such an area, he reckoned it made the flat more likely to hold its value if the property market, as he suspected it would, eventually ran out of steam.He made a 70% downpayment on the 20m yuan ($2.8m) flat in March 2020. His wife and their child, along with Gu’s parents, were due to move into the three-bedroom home in spring 2022. Gu, who is from Shanghai and has a well-paid, management-level job, imagined strolling with his family beneath the 300 cherry trees the developer planned to plant next to the two residential towers. But almost two years after the family were meant to get the keys, One Riviera is still a building site.
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S8Research: How One Bad Employee Can Corrupt a Whole Team - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Even your most honest employees become more likely to commit misconduct if they work alongside a dishonest individual. And while it would be nice to think that the honest employees would prompt the dishonest employees to better choices, that’s rarely the case. Among co-workers, it appears easier to learn bad behavior than good. A recent study has found that financial advisors are 37% more likely to commit misconduct if they encounter a new co-worker with a history of misconduct. This result implies that misconduct has a social multiplier of 1.59 — meaning that, on average, each case of misconduct results in an additional 0.59 cases of misconduct through peer effects.
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S15"Oppenheimer" breaks the recent trend at the Oscars - The Economist (No paywall)  CINEMAGOERS and Academy voters have not seen eye to eye for more than a decade. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” had grossed only $139m at the global box office when it won Best Picture last year; according to Box Office Mojo, which tracks films, it ranked 34th of all the movies released in 2022. It was hardly a mainstream smash, yet it had a strong showing compared with some of its predecessors: “Nomadland”, “Spotlight” and “Birdman” all ranked in the 70s in their year of release. (“Moonlight” did not make the top 100.) Little wonder the viewing figures for the ceremony have been low: the public has not cared about the winning films.
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S37James Gunn's DCU Is Repeating a Controversial Star Wars Decision  The DC Universe is starting over with a completely blank slate. After the dark, slow-mo-riddled era of Zack Snyder films and weird Joker performances failed to find a foothold, The Suicide Squad and Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn is taking over to try to bring some color to the franchise’s next chapter. However, the transition isn’t going to be as clean as we first thought, as a new quote from Gunn reveals one DCU show will have a foot in both worlds.In a post on Threads, Gunn revealed that he’s hard at work on upcoming DCU projects, including Peacemaker Season 2 and Superman (previously titled Superman: Legacy). The two projects will film simultaneously, but due to the writers’ strike, Peacemaker Season 2 will premiere after Superman.
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S3New Nonprofit Spotlights AI Trained on Copyrighted Work with Permission - Scientific American (No paywall)  Using a powerful text- or image-generating artificial intelligence can feel like witnessing the mythical birth of Athena as she strides, fully formed and dressed in armor, out of Zeus’ forehead. Write a short prompt, and an instant later, lucid paragraphs or realistic images appear on the screen (joined, possibly soon, by convincing video). Those first impressions can be electrifying, as though your computer had been touched by a thunder god’s spark.But there is another version of the Greek tale that paints Zeus less as a creator and more as a regurgitator. He eats his pregnant wife, Metis, who has done the labor of carrying Athena and has also forged her armor. Athena bursts forth only after Metis gives birth in Zeus’s mind. Generative AI systems can’t produce anything unless they, too, feed on what already exists. First, they atomize sentences, artwork and other content made by humans, and then they make connections among those digested bits. To learn how to generate text, for instance, OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, which powers the free version of the company’s popular ChatGPT, was trained on some 300 billion words that were scraped from posts on Wikipedia and other websites.
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S4Can You Get a Full-Body Workout in 20 Minutes? (Published 2022)  One of the biggest barriers to establishing a regular workout routine is a lack of time. Finding an extra hour (or more if you include travel to a gym) to exercise most days of the week can feel like an insurmountable challenge, especially if you have a busy work schedule, family responsibilities or a long commute.A large study from 2019, for instance, found that replacing 30 minutes of sitting each day with moderate to vigorous physical activity was associated with a 45 percent reduction in mortality risk. And many studies have found that short, intense workouts two to three times a week can improve lung function and cardiovascular health.
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S21The Benefits of Innovation That Isn't Disruptive - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  SmileDirectClub (SDC), an American teledentistry company once valued at nearly $9 billion and poised to disrupt the traditional braces industry, went bankrupt in December 2023. SDC offered a breakthrough solution for teeth straightening. With the price (originally some $1,800 vs. the standard $3,000-$6,000), the time of treatment (6 months vs. around 2 years), no required office visits, plus clear aligners you can slip on and off, it is not surprising that SDC took off. Since its founding in 2014, a customer base of 2 million people opted for SDC vs. traditional braces.
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S23U.S. Must Act Quickly to Avoid Risks From AI, Report Says  The U.S. government must move “quickly and decisively” to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species,” says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published on Monday.“Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security,” the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. “The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.” AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less.
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S38What in the World Is Going On With Cybertruck's $3,000 Tent Accessory?  Surprise, surprise; Tesla has shipped out a product that has underdelivered on people’s expectations. No, it’s not the Cybertruck itself, but instead the Basecamp accessory for the all-electric pickup truck. The rooftop tent accessory has made it to some Cybertruck owners, but early testimonies are pointing out some initial flaws.Criticisms are comparing the existing Basecamp to the original concept image that was shared back when the Cybertruck was revealed in 2019 while some are defending Tesla, saying that the concept image was just that — a rendering meant to show off an idea. It doesn’t help that customers have now gotten their own experience with the Basecamp and that Rivian just revealed its own rad-looking “treehouse” rooftop tent for its upcoming EVs which appears to be a mostly-finished design and even has a projector inside.
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S39'FF7 Rebirth' Grasslands Checklist: Every Quest, Weapon, Materia, and More  Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is one of the biggest games the series has ever seen, jam-packed full of optional quests, battles, and treasure. After just a few hours, Rebirth drops you into a massive area called the Grasslands, and introduces its exploration and a wealth of side content. It’s a lot to take in, and you can easily spend a dozen hours in this starting area alone. If you’re a completionist, you’ll likely want some way to keep track of everything. To that end, we’ve compiled a list of everything you can see and do in the Grasslands area of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, from equipment and materia, to side quests. There are six side quests to complete in the Grasslands. Five of these quests can be completed as early as Chapter 2, while the final one won’t unlock until late in the game, in Chapter 12. However, keep in mind that, once unlocked, these side quests can be completed at any time, and aren’t missable.
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S22How Much Caffeine Is Too Much? - Scientific American (No paywall)  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends that people consume no more than about five milligrams of caffeine per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of body weight daily, which adds up to around 400 mg for a 79-kg (175-pound) person. Although you may be able to have more without negative consequences, there is theoretically a limit to how much caffeine your body can handle. “You can certainly die from caffeine overdose,” says Jose Antonio, a sports and exercise scientist at Nova Southeastern University. Fortunately, consuming that much caffeine is really, really difficult. “We’re talking multigram doses,” in the neighborhood of 10 grams or more, he says. On average, an eight-ounce (about 240-milliliter) cup of drip coffee prepared at home contains around 100 mg of caffeine, so most people would need to consume more than 100 cups of joe in a single sitting before they started to get into dangerous territory.The amount of caffeine in a cup of commercially brewed coffee can vary wildly, however. A Starbucks grande dark roast contains about 260 mg of caffeine, while a medium hot coffee from Dunkin’ has 210 mg. And some energy drinks can contain up to 300 mg in a 16-ounce (473-milliliter) can. Caffeine pills and powders can be dangerous if taken in bulk and should be used cautiously.
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S2440 trailblazing companies that are beating the West  If these names surprise you, they shouldn’t. Startup ecosystems outside the West have been churning out billion-dollar tech companies and radically innovative products for years. But their achievements are rarely celebrated or known here in the U.S. Today, not only are entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires, Lagos, and Jakarta building businesses that create huge economic opportunity and value, they’re also competing directly with Silicon Valley for users and growth in these markets. And they’re winning.Our 2023 annual list is devoted to 40 trailblazing companies that, in their own ways, beat the West. Some of them won by market combat: Years of bruising competition led to lucrative acquisitions by their Western rivals, or acquisitions of the Westerner’s local assets. A few just dominate their sector outright.
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S25China, the World's Shopping Cart  China is no longer just the world’s factory; now, it’s also the world’s mall. As online shopping slows within China, a new generation of e-commerce companies has emerged, with their sights set on foreign customers. Their rise has been meteoric: In the past few years, Shein has cornered the fast-fashion market and is now expanding to sell almost anything; Temu only launched at the end of 2022 and now has 130 million global users; and TikTok is converting its vast user base into online shoppers with TikTok Shop.The rise of these Chinese shopping platforms has reshaped online shopping for buyers and sellers. Their ultra-low prices have enticed customers and beaten back the competition but also invited scrutiny. Governments are starting to question the impact on local business and the integrity of supply chains — in some cases changing import rules or even banning platforms outright.
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S40The Most Exciting Sci-Fi Saga Is About to Reinvent Itself With a Risky Move  For the first time in over 40 years, the Mad Max saga will focus on someone other than the eponymous Road Warrior. With the upcoming Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, director George Miller’s not-too-distant dystopian future is about to get a whole lot bigger.Furiosa will explore the origins of a fan-favorite character, Imperator Furiosa. Charlize Theron’s fierce fighter was a scene stealer in the latest Mad Max adventure, 2015’s Fury Road, but even before the actress buzzed her hair and donned a biomechanical arm, director George Miller had huge plans for the character. Fury Road made it clear Furiosa has a lush backstory, and that’s because Miller penned a screenplay about her origins that followed her life in the idyllic “Green Place” and her early years in the unforgiving Wasteland.
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S42The Apple Pencil Could Actually Be the Vision Pro's Best Companion  With rumors that Apple is planning on refreshing its iPad lineup later this month or in early April via Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, there’s a hint that Apple may be updating its Pencil accessory. That refresh could mean a lot of things, but it’s not all about iPads: this could be the perfect time to make the Apple Pencil compatible with the Vision Pro.What does the Apple Pencil have to do with the Vision Pro, you ask? Well, for one, it’d be a more intuitive way to tackle tasks that require accuracy when working in Apple’s spatial computer. We’ve already seen from Meta, which offers a stylus attachment for its Quest Pro controllers. But unlike a clunky controller, Apple already has the perfect device to pair with its Vision Pro. Even though Apple designed its Vision Pro with no plans for VR controllers, there’s still evidence that it’s looked into something similar, thanks to a patent that’s been floating around that suspiciously looks like an updated Apple Pencil.
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S44'X-Men '97' Runtime Reveals One Exciting Change From the Classic Show  X-Men ‘97 is meant to replicate the feeling of the original X-Men: The Animated Series, the classic half-hour Saturday morning cartoon. There are only two big issues: it’s not premiering on Saturday mornings, and it’s not a half-hour. Recently leaked runtimes reveal that X-Men ‘97 is deviating from its predecessors’ episode lengths, but this could actually be the show’s smartest move.According to @Cryptic4KQual on Twitter, a leaker who’s correctly predicted the length of every major Disney+ release, the first three episodes will have runtimes of 28:30, 28:39, and 23:33, respectively. Throw in two minutes of credits, and the first two episodes will stretch past the 30-minute mark.
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S45Meet the 'Dune' Superfan Who's Already Seen Part Two in IMAX 14 Times  After a couple of shaky years, “event movies” are starting to make their return. There’s no greater proof of this than Dune: Part Two, which had the most successful opening weekend of 2024 so far. Part of that success came from one of the movie’s biggest fans: a person who has turned a love of Dune into an all-encompassing hobby — and there’s no sign of him stopping any time soon. Mac J., who asked that we not use his last name, has been posting on Twitter every time he watches Dune in IMAX. As of writing, he’s on round 14 in IMAX with no plans of stopping yet. As his number of watches grow, so does the attention from other users.
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S4625 Years Ago, A Misunderstood Sci-Fi Movie Missed Out on the Crossover of a Lifetime  Just two months before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace hit theaters, 20th Century Fox released another sci-fi action movie. On March 12, 1999, the outer space war epic Wing Commander dropped, starring bro-buds Freddie Prinze Jr. and Matthew Lillard as hot-shot starfighter pilots Christopher Blair and Todd “Maniac” Marshall. You can call it Top Gun in space, or, you can call it what Freddie Prinze Jr. later called it — “a piece of crap.” Either way, Wing Commander represents a moment that had great potential and was tragically squandered. But, if this film was made today, one big casting decision would have almost certainly been different, and in that single pivot, a good movie could have been made out of a deeply underrated video game series. Here’s why Wing Commander was both great and terrible and how it could have been so much better.
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