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S9Don't Let the Boeing Headlines Fool You. Air Travel Is Really Very Safe - WIRED (No paywall)   The incidents feel like they started in January, when a door plug blew out of a midair Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft operated by Alaska Airlines. Ensuing investigations have led to a series of revelations about a faltering safety culture at Boeing and its contractors. Then the creepy headlines kept coming. Just this month, a wheel fell off a United Airlines jetliner as it took off from San Francisco; flames shot out of an United flight's engine as it left Houston, Texas; another United flight ran off the runway in Houston as it came in to land; and a Boeing 787 Dreamliner operated by the Chilean airline Latam and bound for Auckland, New Zealand, suddenly lost altitude while midair, injuring dozens of passengers.But data, stringently collected by the US Federal Aviation Administration and other global regulators, suggests that commercial flight is really very safeâand has even gotten safer over just the past two decades. "Statistics don't show any significant abnormality," Adjekum says. "Millions of flights are operated by airlines all over the world every day, and passengers get from A to B safely."
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S12This self-driving startup is using generative AI to predict traffic - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  The new system, called Copilot4D, was trained on troves of data from lidar sensors, which use light to sense how far away objects are. If you prompt the model with a situation, like a driver recklessly merging onto a highway at high speed, it predicts how the surrounding vehicles will move, then generates a lidar representation of 5 to 10 seconds into the future (showing a pileup, perhaps). Today’s announcement is about the initial version of Copilot4D, but Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun says a more advanced and interpretable version is deployed in Waabi’s testing fleet of autonomous trucks in Texas that helps the driving software decide how to react. While autonomous driving has long relied on machine learning to plan routes and detect objects, some companies and researchers are now betting that generative AI — models that take in data of their surroundings and generate predictions — will help bring autonomy to the next stage. Wayve, a Waabi competitor, released a comparable model last year that is trained on the video that its vehicles collect.
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S13Kate Middleton and Prince William's united front fell apart - Business Insider (No paywall)  As the world slowly emerged from lockdown, William and Kate were suddenly everywhere. They visited Westminster Abbey to mark their 10th wedding anniversary, hung out with children on a farm, launched a joint YouTube channel, played soccer with more kids, and hosted a drive-in movie night — all before June.There were also plenty of snaps of the couple together, and many noticed that William and Kate were suddenly more affectionate in public. That May, they visited the University of St Andrews — where they first met — and an Access Hollywood story noted that William "even affectionately put his hand on Kate's back in a tender moment we don't often see from the perfectly poised heir."
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S32There's a better way to wake up. Here's what experts advise. - National Geographic Premium (No paywall)  Every morning, your brain needs to transition from sleep to waking. “It takes us a little while for our brains to come back online after we've woken up,” says Andrew McHill, director of the Sleep, Chronobiology, and Health Laboratory at Oregon Health and Science University. While your brain is booting up, you might get a hazy, confused feeling.Known as “sleep inertia” or “sleep drunkenness,” this feeling is perfectly normal and typically lasts for 20 to 30 minutes after we wake up, McHill explains. But if it lasts longer than that, it could be for various reasons, McHill says, including insufficient or poor sleep, the sleep phase you were in when you woke up, or even a sleep disorder.
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S7The Simplest Math Problem Could Be Unsolvable - Scientific American (No paywall)  At first glance, the problem seems ridiculously simple. And yet experts have been searching for a solution in vain for decades. According to mathematician Jeffrey Lagarias, number theorist Shizuo Kakutani told him that during the cold war, “for about a month everybody at Yale [University] worked on it, with no result. A similar phenomenon happened when I mentioned it at the University of Chicago. A joke was made that this problem was part of a conspiracy to slow down mathematical research in the U.S.”The conjecture itself can be formulated so simply that even primary school students understand it. Take a natural number. If it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1; if it is even, divide it by 2. Proceed in the same way with the result x: if x is odd, you calculate 3x + 1; otherwise calculate x / 2. Repeat these instructions as many times as possible, and, according to the conjecture, you will always end up with the number 1.
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S6How the world has radically cut child deaths, in one chart  The worldwide mortality rate for kids younger than 5 years old was slashed in half in 2022 compared to the turn of the century. Child mortality was even higher in 1990, when 13 million children under 5 died. By 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, that number hovered around 4.9 million. The rate is currently an estimated 37 deaths per 1,000 births, the UN report released this week concluded. (The agency takes all of the relevant data available from national governments — such as vital registration systems, censuses, and household surveys — then statistically adjusts and models that data to arrive at its worldwide and regional child mortality estimates.)
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S16S4Use the Spillover Effect to Turn 1 Small Change Into Multiple Positive Habits - Inc.com (No paywall)  Psychologists call it the spillover effect: the way making one positive choice, no matter how small, inspires you to make other positive choices. The way focusing on improving one thing, no matter how small, will naturally -- in fact, nearly effortlessly -- lead to making improvements in other areas.One science-based example? Leadership. An internal Google study found that when managers talked with new hires on their first day about their roles and responsibilities, those new employees reached expected productivity levels a month faster than other employees, and the managers became better leaders.
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S8Here Are the Best Places to View the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse - Scientific American (No paywall)  The sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, but it’s also 400 times farther away from us—a glorious cosmic coincidence that has the moon precisely covering the sun’s face when the two align. The result is a total solar eclipse. The alignment is visible only within a narrow band, the path of totality, which will arc across North America on April 8. (The last total eclipse on the continent was in August 2017.) More than 40 million people live within the totality path, and millions more are a few hours away. Spring weather will affect visibility; much of the northeastern U.S. and maritime Canada tends to be cloudy this time of year. If you aim to see the spectacle, keep an eye on the weather and try to stay mobile, recommends Michael Zeiler, an eclipse cartographer who runs the Great American Eclipse website. (The April event will be the 12th he will witness.) Zeiler guarantees that “no one who has ever traveled to see totality has regretted the effort.”A partial eclipse is cool—the sunlight thins, and shadows take on a crescent shape—but for seasoned eclipse chasers, the umbra is the only game in town. Within the umbral shadow, the moon covers the sun completely. The sky darkens to a twilight blue, with sunset oranges at the horizon. The faint plasma of the sun’s corona is visible, stretching across the sky.
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S14I read all the studies on the economic impact of bike lanes. Here's what I learned. - Business Insider (No paywall)  Businesses hate bike lanes. Sure, they reduce pollution, slow the pace of climate change, cut traffic fatalities, and make cities healthier and more pleasant. But they also take away parking spaces, which makes it tougher for shoppers to load up their cars with piles of stuff. Freaked-out business owners have been fighting bike lanes coast to coast, in cities from San Diego to Cambridge, Massachusetts. They worry — not unreasonably — that anything that makes it harder for customers to get to their stops will eat into their already precarious margins. “As someone whose family had a small business when I was growing up, I know how invested you get in it,” says Joseph Poirier, a senior researcher at the urban-planning consultancy Nelson Nygaard. “It’s your whole life. Anything you think could threaten that, even if the government and their consultants tell you it’s not going to be a problem, is very scary. It makes sense.”
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S33S15âItâs still very hard to just beâ: how workaholism can leave lifelong scars  When Marion's* workaholism caused her to lose the sight in one eye, her response was to work even harder to prove she was healthy and fit enough to do her job. When Laura lost consciousness during a meeting because she had worked 24 hours a day for the preceding three days, she was so appalled by the idea that people might think she was not able to work properly that she got back up off the floor and insisted the meeting continue."On the rare occasions I was physically present, I wasn't mentally there: I was always thinking about work. Anything else left me entirely cold," he said. "I even moved abroad at one point so I could work without having to waste working time, pretending I was going to spend time with my family."
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S345 Years Ago, Netflix Made its Riskiest Sci-Fi Show Yet  Netflix has always experimented with how subscribers use its platform, from hosting live events to creating interactive, choose-your-own-adventure TV episodes. But one of its more underappreciated gambles was a risky anthology series that changed how Netflix approached TV — and how we watch it. Love, Death & Robots began as an attempt by filmmakers David Fincher and Tim Miller to remake the controversial 1981 animated film Heavy Metal. They envisioned it as an animated anthology film, with different directors directing each segment. The movie floundered, but after Fincher worked on House of Cards and Mindhunter for Netflix, he realized the platform’s potential to show work beyond the restraints of broadcast television.
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S35The Most Inventive Action Game of the Decade Is Finally on PS5  Every once in a while a game comes along that feels like a revelation, something so wildly innovative that you can’t believe it hasn’t been done before. Hi-Fi Rush is one of those games: a raucous fusion of multiple genres — rhythm, fighting, adventure — brimming with personality. It’s a joyful experience that’s easily one of the best Xbox exclusives ever made, but now with Microsoft’s release of the Hi-Fi Rush on PS5, even more players can join the party. Even if you’re not a fan of music and rhythm games, Hi-Fi Rush is one of the must-play titles of this generation. Hi-Fi Rush tells the story of Chai, a 25-year-old with a disabled arm who dreams of being a rockstar. Chai volunteers for an experimental program that’ll outfit him with a snazzy cybernetic arm. Unbeknownst to him, the company running the experiment, Vandelay Industries, is outfitting him to be a garbage collector, but the experiment goes wrong. In a ludicrous twist, Chai’s music player ends up getting implanted into his heart, which makes him see the entire world as a pulsating rock concert.
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S40S22We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt, the Power of Defiant Goodwill, and the Art of Beginning Afresh  “We speak of four fundamental forces,” a physicist recently said to me, “but I believe there are only two: good and evil” — a startling assertion coming from a scientist. Beneath it pulsates the sensitive recognition that it is precisely because free will is so uncomfortably at odds with everything we know about the nature of the universe that the experience of freedom — which is different from the fact of freedom — is fundamental to our humanity; it is precisely because we were forged by these impartial forces, these handmaidens of chance, that our choices — which always have a moral valence — give meaning to reality. Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”
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S43Alex Garland's Apocalypse Thriller is a War Epic Like No Other  Alex Garland’s terrifying dystopian war movie takes an apolitical bent for a political purpose.A disorienting premonition, Alex Garland’s Civil War yanks us into a dystopian future United States that doesn’t feel too far in the distance, even though the movie goes to great lengths to skirt around political specifics. This disconnect is hard to reconcile at first, but the further it goes on, the more it pulls back on its opaque fabric, revealing a surprisingly lucid portrait. A story of war photographers who observe, capture, and transmit history’s horrors, it bears little resemblance to its action-heavy trailers, but instead reveals something far more thoughtful and visceral. If you meet it on its wavelength, it’ll leave you shaken.
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S26Analyzing the CEO-CMO relationship and its effect on growth  Robert Tas: Across the industry, there are lots of titles and changes in the definition of marketing. We’ve seen new roles such as the chief growth officer, chief digital officer, and chief customer officer. The traditional four Ps of marketing have been fragmented across multiple roles in the organization, which creates a challenge.Robert Tas: The standard Procter & Gamble definition is product, price, place, and promotion. The four Ps have been moved into different parts of the organization. Even though some of this is good, you still need that aggregator, that chief customer advocate across the organization, to make sure the four Ps are working together synergistically.
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S4534 Years Ago, an Iconic Time-Travel Movie Predicted a Mind-Blowing Scientific Discovery  In 1989, we were told the transportation of the future would float — as long as you weren’t over a body of water.That’s the year Back to the Future Part II was released, which, as anyone who was a child in the late ’80s or early ’90s will tell you, was the cool one. Not because of plot, necessarily, but because that’s when Marty McFly (impersonating his future son) first took off on a hoverboard. But in the streets around him, you also had floating and flying cars.
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S46New Twin Study Reveals A Potential Brain-Gut Connection  Could the microbes in our gut hold the key to preventing cognitive decline in our ageing population?In just 12 weeks, a daily fiber supplement improved brain function in twins over the age of 65. Could the microbes in our gut hold the key to preventing cognitive decline in our aging population?
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S48Wes Anderson's First Oscar Winner Just Got a Big Upgrade on Netflix  A lot has been written about how streaming services like Netflix have hurt Hollywood. Between the damaging, industrywide reduction in residuals caused by it, to how it has further pulled some viewers away from movie theaters, the streaming boom has had many consequences both intended and not. However, one of the good things that Netflix’s takeover of Hollywood has done is encourage filmmakers to experiment with their output and form in ways they might not have otherwise.See, for instance, director Wes Anderson's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. After releasing one of the best movies of 2023 in Asteroid City, the filmmaker unveiled not just one but four short films on Netflix near the tail end of last year. The first, mentioned above, is an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story of the same name and went on to win the Oscar this year for Best Live-Action Short. In addition to The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Anderson also released three more short-form Dahl adaptations: The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison, all of which run around 17 minutes long.
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S5Brazil is fighting dengue with bacteria-infected mosquitos - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  The dengue crisis is the result of the collision of two key factors. This year has brought an abundance of wet, warm weather, boosting populations of Aedes aegypti, the mosquitoes that spread dengue. It also happens to be a year when all four types of dengue virus are circulating. Few people have built up immunity against them all. Brazil is busy fighting back. One of the country’s anti-dengue strategies aims to hamper the mosquitoes’ ability to spread disease by infecting the insects with a common bacteria—Wolbachia. The bacteria seems to boost the mosquitoes’ immune response, making it more difficult for dengue and other viruses to grow inside the insects. It also directly competes with viruses for crucial molecules they need to replicate.
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S31These are the real dunes that inspired Dune--and you can visit them - History (No paywall)  The iconic landscapes of Wadi Rum in Jordan and southern Africa’s Namib Desert have long been celebrated as the visual inspiration behind the fictional world of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi epic, Dune. However, the true origins of Herbert’s imagination lie closer to home, along the misty shores of the Oregon Coast.Stretching roughly 40 miles between the towns of Florence and North Bend, 7,000 acres of sand dunes run along the Pacific Coast. Protected as part of the 31,500-acre Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, these 500-foot-high behemoths have been shaped over centuries by water and 100-mile-per-hour winds, resulting in North America’s largest expanse of temperate coastal dunes.
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S3S2In the Belly of MrBeast  “The idea is that he will be strapped to this,” says Kyle Bennett, pointing to a contraption that looks alarmingly like the bed in a lethal-injection chamber. “And we have a glass case that’s gonna go over the top and we have 1,000 spiders that are about the size of my palm that are going to cover him, and I’m personally testing this tomorrow …” He stops and looks around, but the producer has lost his audience. Jimmy Donaldson, the 25-year-old video wizard better known around the globe as MrBeast, has quietly left the room. “Classic,” says Bennett.Donaldson is supposed to be showing a reporter and a film crew of one around the set for the next in his series of wildly popular videos of improbable stunts. In this one, a contestant must face six of his worst fears to win $800,000, hence the spiders. Elsewhere on the set is a chest of snakes, and somewhere outside there’s a car full of money that’s going to be pushed into a lake. But Donaldson’s not happy. He has been away on another shoot for 11 days, and he’s not thrilled with the progress of this one. “I’m not really good at these things,” says the world’s most successful YouTuber.
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S20S30How to Get Noticed by Your Boss's Boss - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  How do you get noticed by senior leadership without going over your boss’s head? One way to show how serious you are is to invest time outside of the office in learning skills that will help you grow and contribute to the company. This could mean taking courses that support the work you are doing, or reading texts in the areas you want to master. Senior leadership notices those who work collaboratively — so you should also be thoughtful in your interactions with others. Whether you are giving a presentation, working on a group project, or having a difficult conversation with your boss, it’s important to know your audience and prepare how you will communicate with them in advance. Finally, don’t be afraid to raise your hand and ask to participate in opportunities that could help you grow.
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S363 Reasons Apple Will Never Make a MacBook With a Foldable Screen  Where does the MacBook go next? It’s too early to tell, but in the custom silicon era, Apple’s laptops are settling into a comfortable pattern. There are yearly M-series chip updates to boost performance, like Apple did with the M3 MacBook Pros and more recently the M3 MacBook Airs, with actual changes to the design of the laptops a much more infrequent affair. The MacBook Air was redesigned in the shift to the M2 and the MacBook Pro when the M1 Pro and Max came out, but other than new colors, it seems highly likely Apple’s going to stick with what works on its laptops: a squared-off aesthetic and ports.That hasn’t stopped the endless speculation and, on some level, the desire for a more dramatic departure from the MacBook’s tried-and-true clamshell. Apple has been rumored to be exploring foldable devices for as long as there has been glass that can fold, including folding iPhones, iPads, and according to the latest survey from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, a 20.3-inch foldable MacBook coming in 2027.
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S37How a Renegade Sci-Fi Subgenre Keeps Defying Hollywood's Worst Habit  "I was thrust into a world that seemed scarier and unstable,” Mosh tells Inverse. “I wanted to control everything. So, being a filmmaker, I decided to explore those feelings through my work. I’d had the idea for a ‘gun that murders people in the past’ for a while, and it always just seemed too big and broad. Then, I realized I could use that sci-fi hook as a way into the story I wanted to tell about parenthood."That idea evolved into Aporia, a 2023 sci-fi drama about Sophie (Judy Greer), a widow struggling with grief after her husband Malcolm was killed by a drunk driver. Overwhelmed by depression, Sophie’s relationship with her daughter Riley suffers. But then, Malcolm’s best friend reveals he created a machine capable of sending a subatomic particle through time. With the right data, they can send that particle to a specific moment in time and have it kill any living being who makes contact with it. Sophie is offered the chance to use the machine to kill the man responsible for Malcolm's death, but messing with the past has dark consequences for the present.
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S38'Zone of Interest's Streaming Release Date is Sooner Than You Think  Disturbing movies can take all forms, from high-tension thrillers to jumpscare horror. But last year’s most disturbing film wasn’t effective because it was strange. Instead, it treated its setting as so unremarkable that reality only crashes in like a freight train in its closing moments. It’s unlike any other movie, and it’s coming to streaming sooner than you think. According to Variety, The Zone of Interest, directed by Under the Skin’s Jonathan Glazer, will be available to stream on Max starting April 5. The Zone of Interest follows Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their children as they live in a lavish villa in 1940s Germany. Much of the film is dedicated to their day-to-day lives as they play in the pool, fish, and garden.
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S21Can an A.I. Make Plans? - The New Yorker (No paywall)  Last summer, AdamYedidia, a user on a Web forum called LessWrong, published a post titled “Chess as a Case Study in Hidden Capabilities in ChatGPT.” He started by noting that the Internet is filled with funny videos of ChatGPT playing bad chess: in one popular clip, the A.I. confidently and illegally moves a pawn backward. But many of these videos were made using the original version of OpenAI’s chatbot, which was released to the public in late November, 2022, and was based on the GPT-3.5 large language model. Last March, OpenAI introduced an enhanced version of ChatGPT based on the more powerful GPT-4. As the post demonstrated, this new model, if prompted correctly, could play a surprisingly decent game of chess, achieving something like an Elo rating of 1000—better than roughly fifty per cent of ranked players. “ChatGPT has fully internalized the rules of chess,” he asserted. It was “not relying on memorization or other, shallower patterns.”This distinction matters. When large language models first vaulted into the public consciousness, scientists and journalists struggled to find metaphors to help explain their eerie facility with text. Many eventually settled on the idea that these models “mix and match” the incomprehensibly large quantities of text they digest during their training. When you ask ChatGPT to write a poem about the infinitude of prime numbers, you can assume that, during its training, it encountered many examples of both prime-number proofs and rhyming poetry, allowing it to combine information from the former with the patterns observed in the latter. (“I’ll start by noting Euclid’s proof, / Which shows that primes aren’t just aloof.”) Similarly, when you ask a large language model, or L.L.M., to summarize an earnings report, it will know where the main points in such documents can typically be found, and then will rearrange them to create a smooth recapitulation. In this view, these technologies play the role of redactor, helping us to make better use of our existing thoughts.
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S24S29How to verify a data breach | TechCrunch  Over the years, TechCrunch has extensively covered data breaches. In fact, some of our most-read stories have come from reporting on huge data breaches, such as revealing shoddy security practices at startups holding sensitive genetic information or disproving privacy claims by a popular messaging app.It’s not just our sensitive information that can spill online. Some data breaches can contain information that can have significant public interest or that is highly useful for researchers. Last year, a disgruntled hacker leaked the internal chat logs of the prolific Conti ransomware gang, exposing the operation’s innards, and a huge leak of a billion resident records siphoned from a Shanghai police database revealed some of China’s sprawling surveillance practices.
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S39The Longest Running Sci-Fi Show Just Completely Changed its Release Strategy  Doctor Who has a brand new Tardis and a brand new home: Disney+, where the 60th anniversary specials were made available to stream outside the United Kingdom. While this new deal means better production quality and an easy way to watch the series, it also made following Doctor Who even more confusing. This spring, the 14th season of the show’s 2005 reboot is supposed to premiere. But if you pull it up on Disney+, it will be listed as “Season 1.” This new season’s premiere date has been announced, and it’s only adding to the shakeup. Season 1, née 14, will shift how Doctor Who is released to fans.
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S41SpaceX's Starship Perished In a Haze of Plasma -- Here's When the Next Launch Could Be  SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the most powerful ever built, successfully reached space for the second time on Thursday. After the mighty first-stage booster Super Heavy delivered Starship into Earth orbit, the rocket achieved many firsts. But it also fell short.The 397-foot-tall orbiter ended its test flight after flying longer and faster than ever before. It perished after entering Earth’s atmosphere during reentry and crashing into the Indian Ocean.
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S42Will my cat eat me if I die? Science holds the delicious answer  The question has probably crossed most cat owner’s minds, at least once. Would their sweetly purring feline ever ... choose to eat them? Is the urban legend true? Cats, unfortunately, only sashay away when confronted by the Question — leaving owners alone with their unsettling thoughts. Luckily, cat experts are game to answer.
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