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S5S6Your Team Members Aren't Participating in Meetings. Here's What to Do. - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  Traditional advice for leaders who want to increase meeting participation call for clarifying expectations, setting clear agendas, and asking open-ended questions. While these strategies have their merits, they might not always work because they’re usually based on the leader’s assumptions about what the team needs, rather than facts about what they actually need. Managers who want their teams to be more engaged in meetings need to foster a safe, inclusive team culture, which requires a deep understanding of their team’s unique dynamics. The author presents several strategies for encouraging employees to engage during meetings.
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S7What is fate? And how can it both limit and liberate us? The concept of fate, or the idea of fatefulness, seems to crop up everywhere we look in one form or another. Fate is a key belief enduring across cultures and generations.
What is fate? Generally speaking, fate is thought of as a power or agency determining events and destinies, acting beyond our control.
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S8Synced brains: why being constantly tuned in to your child's every need isn't always ideal Humans connect with each other by synchronising in many ways. Called bio-behavioural synchrony, this involves imitation of gestures and the alignment of heartbeats and hormone secretion (like cortisol and oxytocin). Even brains can synchronise – with brain activity decreasing and increasing in the same areas at roughly the same time when we spend time with others.
A lot of current parenting advice recommends parents to be constantly “in sync” with their kids. It tells parents to be physically close and attuned to their children and to anticipate and immediately respond to their every need.
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S9Nightmares could be an early warning sign of an autoimmune disease flare-up - new study Nightmares are unpleasant, but perfectly normal – for most. However, my colleagues and I have recently discovered that they can also presage autoimmune diseases, such as lupus.
Our study, published in The Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine journal, explored possible early warning signs of autoimmune disease flare-ups. We surveyed 676 patients with lupus and 400 doctors and carried out over 100 in-depth interviews.
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S10Electric cars: swappable batteries could be the way to revive flagging sales The rate of adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in western countries continues to wane. In the UK, EVs’ market share of all new cars for 2024 will barely hit 20%, somewhat below the government goal of 22%. New car registrations of hybrid cars have grown at almost double the rate of battery EVs in the first four months of the year.
In a far cry from a year or two ago, the same has been happening in other countries. Hybrid market share across Europe has risen from about 25% to 30% in the past year, while battery EVs are down from about 18% to 13%. This has encouraged automakers like Ford to switch from prioritising battery EVs to hybrids.
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S11 How to Come Back Stronger From Organizational Trauma 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.
It is a sobering reality of life today that many organizations across sectors and industries will face trauma. My institution, the Lee Business School at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), became one of them on Dec. 6, 2023, when a shooting on campus profoundly changed our community.
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S12How Wasps Make Use of Biological Weapons To Conquer Their Prey If you puncture the ovary of a wasp called Microplitis demolitor, viruses squirt out in vast quantities, shimmering like iridescent blue toothpaste. “It’s very beautiful and just amazing that there’s so much virus made in there,” says Gaelen Burke, an entomologist at the University of Georgia.
M. demolitor is a parasite that lays its eggs in caterpillars, and the particles in its ovaries are “domesticated” viruses that have been tuned to persist harmlessly in wasps and serve their purposes. The virus particles are injected into the caterpillar through the wasp’s stinger, along with the wasp’s own eggs. The viruses then dump their contents into the caterpillar’s cells, delivering genes that are unlike those in a normal virus. Those genes suppress the caterpillar’s immune system and control its development, turning it into a harmless nursery for the wasp’s young.
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S1322 Years Later, Cillian Murphy Returns to the Apocalypse Thriller that Made His Career -- With a Twist The star of 28 Days Later will make a “surprising” appearance in the long-awaited sequel.
After two decades, 28 Days Later is finally getting the sequel it deserves — but it may not look or feel the way that anyone is expecting. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland are reuniting for 28 Years Later, a direct follow-up to the 2002 sci-fi horror that put the duo on the map. With Sony Pictures’ backing, the film it set to hit theaters in summer 2025. It’ll also set the stage for a new trilogy, and the studio is reportedly hoping to film the first two installments back-to-back.
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S14'Wordle' Has Nothing to Fear From Its Newest Puzzle Game Competitor I know what you’re thinking — you wish there was somewhere to go online where you could read the most inane social media drivel possible, find out which of your old college friends just became unemployed again, and play games all on the same site. We’ve all been there. And now, your wish has been granted, as the world’s greatest repository of brain-addled corporate executive spam has become a choice destination for word game fans. At least, its owners seem to be hoping so.
Following in the footsteps of The New York Times, LinkedIn has turned to word puzzles as a way of driving users to its site. If you head to LinkedIn’s games page, you’ll currently find three different games. Pinpoint reveals five words one by one and challenges players to identify the category they all belong to after revealing the fewest words. Queens is a Sudoku-esque game about correctly placing crowns on a grid with rules that restrict where they can be placed. Crossclimb asks players to guess five words from crossword-like clues, then rearrange them so that each word has just one letter different from the previous one, then guess two more words to finish off.
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S15Apple Previewed the Future of the iPad and Nobody Noticed The new iPad Pros are still the best tablets for all your basic stuff like reading, watching videos, and playing games, but accessories like the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil Pro, and performance from the M4 chip, allow them to perform even more like a laptop or drawing tablet than ever before.
But is that it? Is the iPad’s future only incremental updates that inch it closer to laptop functionality, but never morphs it fully into a MacBook with a Surface Pro-like form factor because of various software limitations (iPadOS vs. macOS) and input differences (touchscreen vs. mouse and keyboard)?
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S16Wait, The Brain Has Its Own Microbiome? What New Research Tells Us The microbes that live in your gut are having their moment in the sun. Even if you haven’t been following the research, you can’t have missed the hundreds of adverts for probiotics and prebiotics aimed at selling your products to keep your microbiome healthy.
Other microbiomes have also recently been discovered, and these, too, play an important role in your health. Your mouth, nasal cavity, skin, and scalp all have their own unique microbiomes. Some have even proposed that the brain has its own microbiome.
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S17Smoking fentanyl can cause irreversible brain damage, report shows A middle-aged American man with no previous medical history was found unconscious in his hotel room, with “unidentified crushed pills and a white residue” on a nearby table, according to a recent paper in BMJ Case Reports. White powder was visible around the man’s mouth.
This situation would be fairly unremarkable for a country that is in its tenth year of an illicit fentanyl epidemic. However, there was something remarkable about this case. It was the first reported instance of toxic leukoencephalopathy – damage to the brain’s white matter from a toxic substance – from smoking fentanyl.
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S18How Neanderthal language differed from modern human - they probably didn't use metaphors We shared an ancestor with the Neanderthals around 600,000 years ago. They evolved in Europe while we did so in Africa, before dispersing multiple times into Eurasia. The Neanderthals became extinct around 40,000 years ago. We populated the world and continue to flourish. Whether that different outcome is a consequence of differences in language and thought has been long debated.
But the evidence points to key differences in the brains of our species and those of Neanderthals that allowed modern humans (H. sapiens) to come up with abstract and complex ideas through metaphor – the ability to compare two unrelated things. For this to happen, our species had to diverge from the Neanderthals in our brain architecture.
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S19Kenya is badly prepared for floods: four steps to reduce devastation and deaths Floods in Kenya in April/May 2024 led to the deaths of over 250 people and caused damage estimated at 4 billion Kenya shillings (US$35 million).
Not for the first time, Kenya’s lack of preparedness was apparent as flooding rampaged through rural and urban landscapes. There was also confusion as to who would deal with the disaster – the national or county governments. And it took several weeks before the government mobilised emergency agencies.
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S20Hepatitis C: thousands of people are undiagnosed - here's what you need to know about the virus Demand for hepatitis C tests has surged in the UK following the publication of the infected blood inquiry findings in May 2024. According to the BBC, “1,750 people in the UK are living with an undiagnosed hepatitis C infection after being given a transfusion with contaminated blood.” Globally, there are thousands more unknowingly living with virus.
So what is this infection, how would you know if you had it – and what can you do about it?
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S21Met Gala: what fairytales can teach us about modern fashion trends Fairytales have long woven magic with fabric. But this year’s Met Gala, the annual fundraiser for the the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York, took the connection between fantasy and fashion a step further.
Themed around the museum’s Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion exhibition, the dress code focused not on opulent displays of nature’s bounty but a more complex reality: the natural world and the essence of time. Inspired by J.G. Ballard’s short story, The Garden of Time, designers were invited to explore the intricate relationship between materials, their origins, and the fleeting nature of fashion trends.
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S22Why Chile has a Palestinian football team - the bigger history Club Deportivo Palestino, a football team, play in a uniform of white, green and red. Their stadium flies Palestinian flags and their social sports club boasts an open-air pool in the shape of pre-1948 Palestine. But this football team does not play in Palestine, or even the Middle East. Better known as Palestino, they actually play in Chile’s top football league, the Primera División de Chile.
Chile is home to the largest population of Palestinians outside of the Middle East. This Palestinian diaspora, which currently stands at just under 500,000 people, has helped shape nearly a century of Chilean policy towards Palestine. At the heart of this community, Palestino has not only served as a rallying point for the diaspora, but also an instrument of cultural exchange and diplomacy.
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S23How Sicilians are resetting their social norms to strengthen future generations against mafia influence Bearing witness to the profound consequences of violence and injustice for a long period of time can deeply fracture communities, resulting in collective trauma. But, where there is oppression, a determined resistance will always rise to challenge it. One such example is the unyielding battle Sicilians have waged against the mafia.
Despite facing the overwhelming force of the mafia, with its violent methods and sinister political alliances, many Sicilians have refused to remain silent. Archival records indicate that as far back as the 1870s, Sicilians started to defy and confront the mafia’s tyrannical power.
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S24S25Was Beethoven truly the greatest? On May 7, 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony premiered in Vienna, Austria. On its 200th anniversary, much was made about this seminal achievement of a composer routinely touted as the greatest master who ever lived.
In an essay for The New York Times, conductor Daniel Barenboim wrote that Beethoven was “the master of bringing emotion and intellect together.”
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S26S27S28Netflix Just Quietly Added the Most Misunderstood Marvel Movie of the Decade Is Madame Web a self-aware camp classic, or a spectacular overestimation of Sony’s Spider-Verse? It all depends on who you ask. From a box office standpoint, the 2024 film didn’t make Sony’s nascent franchise any more viable; it’s the lowest-grossing film based on a Marvel character, ever. The box-office and critical reception was so bad, that the failure of Madame Web might have Sony reevaluating its plans for the universe: the studio was reportedly building a handful of spin-offs around Dakota Johnson’s unlikely heroine but might have pulled the plug since.
But perhaps time will be kind to Madame Web. Or rather, maybe Madame Web was never destined to find its audience as a movie theater blockbuster tentpole. Instead, it’s the kind of film that you watch watches with friends and forget a day later. Studios are now hungrier than ever for the next big phenomenon, the film that’s going to reshape the world. Madame Web was never going to be that, because it belongs to a bygone era, one where mid-budget chick flicks and low-risk cult classics had just as much pull as superhero tentpoles. It straddles those two worlds to varying success. Sure, it flopped at the box office, but it’s been getting a much warmer reception with the help of a platform like Netflix.
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S29Chevy's Electric Camaro Could be One of the Most Affordable EVs in America General Motors has been busy electrifying its entire portfolio and the company’s president, Mark Reuss, told MotorTrend that he wants the Chevrolet Camaro to make a comeback as an EV that stays true to its pony car roots.
That’s a stark contrast to what Ford has done with the Mustang. Instead of keeping the classic American muscle look, Ford went with an SUV design that would appeal to more people. On top of that, Reuss told MotorTrend that the Camaro EV could be around the same price as the Equinox EV, which starts at around $35,000. That’s not as cheap as the current gas-powered Camaro, but an electric version could get the benefit of up to $7,500 in federal tax credits.
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S30Star Wars Is About to Expand Into a Disturbing New Genre One of the joys of Star Wars is that it can take any form. The Mandalorian alone has adopted wildly different genres for different episodes, ranging from space Westerns to samurai stories to heists. It’s a great way to see how different styles fit into the Star Wars galaxy, and now The Acolyte appears to be taking Star Wars in yet another new direction by leaning into a classic genre.
We still don’t know much about The Acolyte. It appeared to focus on Mae, a Sith assassin targeting Jedi during the last days of the High Republic. But in the newest trailer, “Plan,” the reality seems far more complicated: Mae is a former Jedi being hunted by her former master. Despite the fact we’ve already seen Mae in hand-to-hand combat with Jedi Master Indara, she insists she isn’t the murderer.
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