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 S6Your resting heart rate is a key sign of fitness and longevity. Improve it with 2 types of workouts. - Business Insider (No paywall)   Your resting heart rate (how many times your heart beats per minute while you're calm and sitting or lying down) can be a helpful sign of overall health and fitness, according to Dr. Edo Paz, a cardiologist at White Plains Hospital who's the senior vice president of medical affairs at the digital health company Hello Heart.If you're a tech millionaire or a biohacking enthusiast, you're keeping tabs on this stat. It's something the Bryan Johnsons of this world tout as proof that they're winning the race against aging. The rest of us are getting increasingly acquainted with our resting heart rates, too, with the rise of smartwatches and other fitness wearables that measure your cardiovascular health.
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S1First Comprehensive Plastics Database Tallies Staggering 16,000 Chemicals--And It's Still Incomplete - Scientific American (No paywall)  Plastics are inescapable. That soda bottle or disposable razor or even the coating on your mattress may expose you to hundreds of different chemicals, some of which scientists know very little about. Scientists are now a step closer to handling this complexity. On Thursday the PlastChem Project, a group of researchers in Norway and Switzerland, announced that it had identified more than 16,000 chemicals in plastic products in the first comprehensive database of all known plastic chemicals. The database, accompanied by a report, sorts the chemicals by their known environmental and health effects—a bank of information the PlastChem team hopes will inform governmental regulations, as well as international negotiations for a treaty to curb plastic use and production.“It’s a dynamite report,” says Miriam Diamond, who studies chemical contaminants at the University of Toronto and was not involved in the research. The new database brings together information from scientific papers and seven datasets that detail different chemicals, says Martin Wagner, PlastChem’s project lead and a biologist who studies plastics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It took his team about a year to compile and sort through all the data. A 2023 report from the United Nations Environment Program had previously estimated there are more than 13,000 chemicals associated with plastics. The new database expands this to a degree that shocks even scientists who study these issues. “Sixteen thousand chemicals—oh, my God,” Diamond says.
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S2S3What to Do When a Good Employee Has a Bad Attitude - StartUp Mindset  As a business owner, you probably already know that good employees are hard to find. That is why we value great employees for their productivity, performance, and commitment to their job. However, what happens when you have a great employee with a bad attitude? This is a situation any business owner, entrepreneur, or manager will experience at one point or another.Although a perfect employee does not exist, a good employee with a bad attitude presents a unique challenge: should you choose between performance or morale? Hopefully, you won’t have to choose as we will present what to do when a good employee has a bad attitude. But first, let’s take a look at the reasons why some good employees exhibit negative attitudes in the first place.
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S4S5Why I gave up on getting ahead - Business Insider (No paywall)  I was tired of doomscrolling through pandemic news and thought I'd take my mind off it by practicing my promotional spiel for my newly launched mental-health newsletter. It proved to be a bad idea. As viewers trickled in, I noticed the ominous hum of anxiety in my chest that I've grown familiar with over years of living with generalized anxiety disorder. Within seconds I was spiraling, sweating, and struggling to breathe — but I kept the camera on. "This is what a panic attack looks like, folks," I stammered.It also dawned on me that my unfiltered performance had inadvertently served my original plan: building my brand as an "authentic" and "vulnerable" mental-health storyteller to attract more readers to my newsletter. It's still not easy for me to admit it, but that night I used my pain to feed my professional ambition.
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S7A 3-Step Process to Break a Cycle of Frustration, Stress, and Fighting at Work - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  When we have a conflict at work, most of us blame the other person — an incompetent boss, a passive aggressive colleague, or the resource-hoarding peer in another department. But having fewer disagreements at work starts with working on yourself and breaking a cycle of frustration, stress, and conflict. Use a three-step process: Develop self-awareness about what’s causing your stress. Employ emotional self-control to manage negative feelings, see reality through a clear lens, and stop lashing out when you feel threatened. Lastly, build friendships at work but focusing less on what you get from your coworkers and more on what you can give. Mindfulness practices like yoga, meditation, deep breathing, and taking a solitary walk are invaluable when it comes to developing self-awareness, learning to manage our emotions, and short-circuiting the stress response.Bring to mind a conflict at work, and you’ll probably have the perpetrator in mind: your incompetent boss, that passive-aggressive colleague, or the resource-hoarding peer in another department. We spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about these people, avoiding them, and fighting with them. But if you want to manage conflict in the workplace, you can’t start with someone else. Usually there isn’t just one culprit, and if you want less fighting and a more enjoyable, productive workplace, you have to understand your own role in it and what you can do to break a vicious cycle that starts with frustration and stress and ends with workplace wars.
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S8What French Bakeries Get Right About Strategy - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  One would think that if you run a traditional consumer business that can’t compete on costs with more efficient competitors, you would want to avoid them like the plague. But a study of boulangeries in Lyon, France, found that by locating next to more efficient “modernist” rivals, “traditionalists” were able to better highlight their traditions and value.France’s traditionalist bakers, or boulangeries, should be out of business. Bread prices are competitive, leaving little room for pricing gambits. Ingredients are regulated (by law, the baguette traditionnelle can contain only flour, water, salt, and yeast). If you’re a self-proclaimed “traditionalist” the limitations are even more challenging, as traditionalists don’t permit themselves a variety of time- and cost-saving practices (such as the use of mixes and frozen dough), which are more or less invisible to consumers. Yet despite these disadvantages, traditionalists have maintained a strong majority share of the French bread market despite modernist competitors using more efficient production techniques.
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S9Einstein's Mother: A Poem by Tracy K. Smith  The forces of chance that chisel reality out of the bedrock of possibility — this improbable planet, this improbable life — leave ghostly trails of what-ifs, questions asked and unanswered, unanswerable. Why do you, this particular you, exist? Why does the universe? And once the dice have fallen in favor of existence, there are so many possible points of entry into life, so many possible fractal paths through it — so many ways to live and die even the most ordinary life, a life of quiet and unwitnessed beauty, washed unremembered into the river of time after this chance constellation of atoms disbands into stardust. There are, after all, infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.Every once in a very long while, chance deals a life out of the ordinary, islanded in the rapids of collective memory as one of lasting and profound legacy — a life that has seen far beyond the horizon of its own creaturely limits, into the deepest truths of the universe. Such lives are exceedingly rare — think how few of the billions of humans who ever lived are remembered and studied and revered a mere hundred years hence, how few the Euclids and Shakespeares and Sapphos.
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S11The Ozempic Pushers - The Cut (No paywall)  Othella Esposita had been on her period for four months straight when she went to the gynecologist last January. The sales administrator from Kansas City has polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal imbalance that messes with her menstrual cycle, and was trying to get pregnant. Esposita asked her doctor how to regulate her period, but instead the OB/GYN brought up a “new drug on the market”: Ozempic.The 38-year-old, who calls herself “super fat,” was confused. “My goal was not to lose weight,” Esposita says. “The whole reason I was there was the bleeding.” She told the doctor she doesn’t have diabetes and thought women trying to get pregnant weren’t supposed to be on the medication. “With your weight, you can’t get pregnant anyway,” the gynecologist said, adding that even if Esposita did, she or the baby would likely die from health complications. “I was shaking and tearing up,” Esposita says. “I was trying to still advocate for myself.” She worried that her insurance wouldn’t cover Ozempic, but her gynecologist kept pushing. She told Esposita that she and several of her staffers were on it, offered to prescribe alternative weight-loss drugs if Esposita’s claim was rejected, and told her about a voucher that would bring down the cost. “I could not keep fighting,” Esposita says. She left the office with a prescription that she didn’t plan to pick up.
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S12Menstrual fluid's underexplored medical treasures  What’s maybe more surprising, though, is that this aversion to menstruation hasn’t been limited to teen magazines and school corridors. It’s also found in the scientific literature — or the lack thereof. One set of researchers found that some 15,000 papers about semen were published in the 2010s … compared to around 400 about menstrual fluid. For the next two weeks, we’ll be digging into the potential treasures hidden away in menstrual fluid on Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast. But I also spoke to Hazard about her book and the many exciting possibilities for menstrual effluent she discovered while reporting it. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, condensed and edited for clarity.
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S13Snake Steak Could Be a Climate-Friendly Source of Protein - Scientific American (No paywall)  With some eight billion people on the planet today, all of whom require protein to stay healthy, finding new sources of these nutrients is a crucial issue. “The general conundrum we somehow need to solve is: Where do we get the appropriate amounts of protein for a still-growing global population without the big environmental footprint?” says Monika Zurek, a food systems scientist at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the new research. Humans’ dietary staples, particularly those of Westerners, have serious consequences. The environmental impacts of cattle products such as beef are especially costly: the animals produce nearly 10 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and growing food for them spurs deforestation. Pork brings a separate set of environmental hazards, notably water pollution from pig waste. The chicken industry faces similar issues.But how do you get from the challenge of providing sufficient protein to farming pythons for meat? For Dan Natusch, a herpetologist at Macquarie University in Australia, the idea came about tangentially. He and his colleagues were working with existing commercial python farms in Vietnam and Thailand to determine whether they could distinguish wild-bred snakes from captive-bred ones. During the study, the researchers noticed the farmed pythons’ propensity for speedy growth, which they’ve documented in research published in Scientific Reports on March 14.
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S14States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat - WIRED (No paywall)  Unless Florida governor Ron DeSantis has an unexpected change of heart, it will soon be a crime to sell or make cultivated meat in the Sunshine State. A bill passed by the Florida House and Senate is now awaiting the signature of DeSantis, who has already indicated his opposition to what he calls “fake meat.” If he does sign the bill into law, anyone who sells, makes, or distributes cultivated meat in Florida may be subject to a fine of up to $500 and 60 days in prison.“Beating somebody up and selling cultivated meat are the same in the eyes of the law in Florida,” says Justin Kolbeck, CEO of cultivated seafood startup Wildtype, who has been trying to persuade legislators to ease up on a number of proposed bans. As well as the Florida bill, there is also proposed legislation to ban cultivated meat in Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, and Tennessee. If all of those bills pass—an admittedly unlikely prospect—then some 46 million Americans will be cut off from accessing a form of meat that many hope will be significantly kinder to the planet and animals.
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S15S16Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments. - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  For many people, covid is an illness that blusters in and out of our lives as cases spike and recede. But for tens of millions of others, a case of covid is the beginning of a chronic and sometimes debilitating illness that persists for months or even years. What makes individuals with long covid different from those who get infected and recover? According to a new paper, an often overlooked part of the immune system is unusually active in these people.None of the existing research proves that these changes drive the disease. But they offer up a new avenue for treatment exploration by helping doctors pick the best people to trial certain drugs “There aren’t really any effective therapies,” says Aran Singanayagam, a respiratory medicine specialist who studies lung infections at Imperial College London. “So we are quite desperate, and it’s a big problem.”
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S17Tinnitus nearly drove me mad - The Economist (No paywall)  Some years ago now, I learned to love the rain. I was in my mid-20s and had recently noticed a ringing in my left ear and I was not in a good way. I wasn’t exactly sure when the ringing had arrived, but I remember assuming that it would disappear of its own accord, then realising it hadn’t. I remember not sleeping for nights on end. I remember thinking I would lose my mind.
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S18Effects of geoengineering must be urgently investigated, experts say  “My own belief is that we need to get a better understanding of what the impacts are,” he said. “I suspect some aspects of geoengineering are going to be an important component of the solution to reducing global warming, and all of the impacts of global climate change, like ocean acidification.”Spinrad said understanding the potential impact of geoengineering on the oceans was vital. “If we were to undertake an effort in some things like iron fertilisation [of the oceans], what are the consequence to the ecosystem of doing that? [Also important is] building good predictive models … and supporting decision-makers,” he said.
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S19How to Prepare for Rise of Digital Learning - Inc.com (No paywall)  There is no industry today that isn't tech-dependent in a sense, from automated processes in manufacturing to the agrotech space, media, finance, healthcare, and more. As innovation continues, we are finding new and better ways to integrate tech to streamline and enhance business processes.Education is one industry where technological integration is at its highest. Schools were already finding new ways to spice up the learning process and make it more engaging for students. This need brought about the growing digitization of the classroom experience. But the Covid-19 pandemic was a huge wake-up call, causing the education industry to go full throttle on making education as digital-leaning as possible.
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S20Deepfaked Celebrities Hawked A Massive Trump Scam On Facebook And YouTube - Forbes (No paywall)  The ad begins with a grainy but unmistakable video of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Soft, tense piano music plays in the background as he speaks: “We’ve been told again and again that we cannot vote for the man that did more for the Black community than any other president. If a Black man dares speak out in support of Donald Trump, a Democrat is always there to call that man an Uncle Tom, a house negro, or even worse.”The fake King continues for more than two minutes, praising Trump and trashing Democrats as photos and short videos of Black prison inmates, Democratic politicians and scenes of civil unrest cycle in the background. Then, the voice changes abruptly and implores viewers to take a free poll to support former President Trump. Complete it and they’ll be sent a free Trump flag, it says; they’ll need only cover shipping and handling.
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S21Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Research on the effect of social class on hiring found that elite law firms’ hiring practices discriminate strongly based on social class but that, surprisingly, an advantaged social background helps only men. In the studies, attorneys viewed higher-class candidates of either gender as better fits with the culture of large law firms, with some attorneys even steering lower-class candidates to less prestigious sectors of legal practice, where positions tend to be more socioeconomically diverse. But even though higher-class women were seen as just as good “fits” as higher-class men, attorneys believed these women were the least committed to working a demanding job of any group (including lower-class women). The findings confirm that the social class people come from greatly shapes the types of jobs they can attain, regardless of their achievements. There are ways to combat this discrimination, however: applicants can ditch the extracurricular activities on their resume, eliminating cues about their backgrounds. Hiring managers can help keep women in the pool by blinding evaluators to first names or substituting with initials.Every fall, tens of thousands of law students compete for a small number of coveted summer associateships at the country’s top law firms. The stakes are high: getting one of these rare internships virtually guarantees full-time employment after law school. The salaries are unbeatable, six-figure sums that catapult young students to the top 5% of household incomes nationally and are often quadruple of those offered in other sectors of legal practice. These jobs also open doors to even more lucrative employment in the private sector as well as prestigious judiciary and government roles. For these reasons, employment in top law firms has been called the legal profession’s 1%.
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S22Neurological conditions now leading cause of ill-health worldwide, finds study  The analysis in the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factors study suggested that the total amount of disability, illness and premature death caused by 37 neurological conditions increased by just over 18% from about 375m years of healthy life lost in 1990 to 443m years in 2021.In the UK, figures from Brain Research UK show one in six people have some form of neurological condition, with 2.6 million people living with the effects of traumatic brain injury or stroke.There are more than 944,000 people in the UK who have dementia, with the numbers expected to increase to more than a million by 2030.
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S23Oodles of noodles: how a global favourite became an economic red flag - FT (No paywall)  Instant noodles sit among the most potent weapons ever devised in the unending struggle against starvation: a product that towers, among processed foods, at the extreme value end of the cost-per-calorie scale and which its makers now proudly classify as a piece of “social infrastructure”. They are a portable, resilient and long-lasting store of nourishment in times of need — from dire to impulsive and all points between. There is a reason that instant noodles have replaced cigarettes as the primary currency of the informal economy in dismally catered US prisons. This ready-to-eat grub, pioneered in the late 1950s to feed a ruined Japan in the protracted aftermath of war, takes the prize for being cheap and fast, but delicious.
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S24Alan Cumming Wants Us All to Let Go - The New Yorker (No paywall)  Over a thirty-year career, Alan Cumming has been a stage star, a cabaret performer, a memoirist, a night-club owner, and a political activist. Animating many of these endeavors are his talents as a raconteur and an m.c., perhaps most famously in his Tony-winning role in “Cabaret” on Broadway, a show he starred in twice. This past Monday night, Cumming brought the latest of his numerous one-man shows, “Alan Cumming Is Not Acting His Age,” to Studio 54, in Manhattan. Between torch numbers—including Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” and “Mein Herr” from “Cabaret”—he talked about the time he drank a handle of liquor that Florence Henderson sneaked into Carol Channing’s ninety-fifth-birthday party. (Henderson died a few months later, Cumming said, but he has not forgotten her advice: “You never take chances with vodka.”) He talked about how he and his fellow-Scotsman Sean Connery developed pet names for each other (Connery was King, Cumming was Prince), and about the night when his “Battle of the Sexes” co-star Emma Stone brought the tennis legend Billie Jean King and Paul McCartney to Club Cumming, a cozy boitê and queer performance space that Cumming opened in the East Village, in 2017. “It sounds like a joke,” he said. “Emma Stone, Billie Jean King, and Paul McCartney walk into a bar!”Cumming packed similar stories into his second memoir, “Baggage,” from 2021, which charts his varied adventures in Hollywood. His highly eclectic film and television résumé includes everything from early breakout roles, such as a needy suitor in “Emma” and a recovering social reject in “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” to parts in franchises like “Spy Kids” and “X2.” He donned a tailored suit to play the campaign manager Eli Gold on a hundred and twenty-one episodes of “The Good Wife” on CBS; though he is queer and married to his partner, Grant Shaffer, he told the crowd at Studio 54, “I can butch up when I have to!” Most recently, though, he made a flamboyant foray into reality TV as the host of Peacock’s wildly popular competition show “The Traitors,” in which a group of scheming reality stars play a game of Mafia in a Scottish castle while Cumming presides in a series of plaid kilts and bejewelled capes. Season 2—whose finale aired last week—included betrayals, ultimatums, and several contestant-eliminating “murders” under cover of night. As Cumming aptly puts it, “It’s called ‘The Traitors,’ bitch!”
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