Want to Improve Your Mental Health in 2023? This 5-Question Quiz Will Tell You What to Focus On
Want to Improve Your Mental Health in 2023? This 5-Question Quiz Will Tell You What to Focus On  The research-backed mental health quiz will tell you what to focus for the biggest boost in happiness. Continued here |
Up close and personal: Dolphin POV caught on camera while hunting for tasty fish Scientists attached GoPro cameras to six dolphins and captured the sights and sounds of the animals as they hunted and devoured various species of fish—even squealing in victory at the capture of baby sea snakes, according to an August paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. While sound and video has previously been recorded for dolphins finding and eating dead fish, per the authors, this is the first footage combining sound and video from the dolphins' point of view as they pursued live prey while freely swimming. The audio element enabled the scientists to learn more about how the dolphins communicated while hunting. Continued here |
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The last fisherman of Monaco It's often just past midnight when Eric Rinaldi unties the mooring lines and carefully manoeuvres his fishing boat Diego out of Monaco's harbour, Port Hercules. Contemplating the hours of inky darkness in front of him, he'll steer past rows of superyachts as he heads out into the open sea, their polished hulls and elaborate designs a stark contrast to the simple practicality of his fibreglass workboat. Onboard Diego – named for his young son – Rinaldi's biggest luxury is an old Nespresso machine, one of the few comforts among the jumble of nets, hooks, bright orange buoys and other tools of his trade. Continued here |
What Squirrels Taught Me About Life After Divorce Only 25 percent of gray squirrels survive their first year. Success rates for second marriages are almost equally dire. Noah likes to feed the squirrels naked. I don’t know if he does it this way when I am not here. But like clockwork on the weekend mornings we spend together, the squirrels will start to tap on the window. And Noah will rise from the bed as if responding to a baby monitor. He will stumble to the kitchen, grab a handful of unsalted almonds from a jar in the cabinet, return to the bedroom, and crack the window an inch, popping the almonds out one by one so they land on the sill in a line. Continued here |
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Does Influencer Marketing Really Pay Off? Influencer marketing is a huge industry, with companies around the world spending billions of dollars on these partnerships. But do these investments actually pay off? To quantify the ROI of influencer marketing, the authors analyzed engagement for more than 5,800 influencer posts and identified seven key variables that drive a campaign’s effectiveness, including characteristics of both the influencer and of their individual posts. They further found that by optimizing these variables, the average brand could boost ROI by 16.6%, suggesting that many companies are designing campaigns that leave substantial value on the table. By adopting these research-backed guidelines, brands can move past anecdotal evidence to ensure that their marketing dollars go toward the partnerships and content that are most likely to offer returns. Continued here |
With Only 6 Words, Patagonia Explained the Brilliant Reason It Closed All of Its Stores and Paid Its Employees to Take a Week Off Sometimes your employees need a break. Continued here |
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Jorie Graham Takes the Long View The poet Jorie Graham is one of our great literary mappers of everything, everywhere all at once. As James Longenbach put it, she engages “the whole human contraption . . . rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems.” Graham is a chronicler of bigness, the overawing bigness of our planet but also the too-bigness, at times, of the self. “I am huge,” she writes mournfully, in “Prayer Found Under Floorboard,” an elegy for what humans have already blotted out. Many of Graham’s subjects—politics, technology, natural history, and climate loss—have a sweeping scope. This year, she compiled four of her books on global warming—“Sea Change,” “Place,” “Fast,” and “Runaway”—into “[To] The Last [Be] Human,” which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022. In spring, Graham will publish “To 2040,” her fifteenth collection. (It begins: “Are we / extinct yet.”) Graham’s attention to bigness is set off by a gift for evoking smallness. She notices an “almost tired-looking” tendril of wisteria; she pauses to wonder “what it is we mean by / ok.” Our own comprehension of enormity, Graham writes, slides off of us “like a ring into the sea.” It’s a truism that poetry’s task is finding amazement in the everyday. Graham turns this into a terrifying as well as a moral project. (In her ocean metaphor, the ring is vast, and the unknowingness in which we lose it is vaster still. Perhaps her poems are salvage divers.) What makes Graham especially unique is her long, galloping line, a line that she consistently thematizes: she has described line breaks as cliffs that the reader tumbles down, over and over. Some of the poems in “[To] The Last [Be] Human” are right-justified; rather than fall off a ledge, the reader careens into a wall. Continued here |
Space traffic is about to get worse — thanks to the U.S. military Sometime this coming March, a network of 10 small satellites winged with solar panels is scheduled to launch into Earth's low orbit. Though likely invisible to the naked eye, the satellites will be part of a future herd of hundreds that, according to the Space Development Agency, or SDA, will bolster the United States' defense capabilities. The SDA, formed in 2019, is an organization under the United States Space Force, the newly formed military branch that operates and protects American assets in space. And like all good startups, the agency is positioned as a disruptor. It aims to change the way the military acquires and runs its space infrastructure. For instance, the forthcoming satellite network, called the National Defense Space Architecture, will collectively gather and beam information, track missiles, and help aim weapons, among other tasks. Continued here |
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Here’s the truth about chronic pain — and what you can do to help When pain persists beyond the normal healing time, it is no longer considered simply a symptom but a disease in its own right. Imagine living with pain every day for months or even years — pain that is so intrusive it disrupts every day of your life. Continued here |
You've Been Choosing Your Goals All Wrong If you're getting ready to set your yearly goals for 2023, stop. Chances are, you're going about building and breaking habits all wrong, according to the experts—especially if you're extremely motivated in January, but find yourself getting distracted or overwhelmed come February. Before we get into the specifics of how to start or break a habit that you'll actually stick to, there are a few things you need to know. The most important thing is that habits are actually separate from goals. "Goals are how we make decisions—how we commit to an exercise program, or to eating healthily, or to saving money," says Wendy Wood, provost professor emerita of psychology and business at the University of Southern California and the author of Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick. "But habits are how you stick with a behavior." Continued here |
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The Superhero Movie That Actually Pulls Off Blockbuster Magic Xochitl Gonzalez’s culture picks include Yellowjackets, the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, and Black Panther This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Continued here |
The "McGurk effect" is a mind-blowing auditory illusion—and you can listen to it here This article was first published on Big Think in January 2022. It was updated in January 2023. Imagine you were locked in a dark room for a very long time with no sound, no light, and not the slightest hint of what might be happening outside of your room. Every so often, a man called McGurk would come into the room and tell you what’s going on in the outside world. Continued here |
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Pope Benedict XVI: A man at odds with the modern world who leaves a legacy of intellectual brilliance and controversy To many observers, Benedict, who died on Dec. 31, 2022 at the age of 95, was known for criticizing what he saw as the modern world’s rejection of God and Christianity’s timeless truths. But as a scholar of the diversity of global Catholicism, I think it’s best to avoid simple characterizations of Benedict’s theology, which I believe will influence the Catholic Church for generations. While the brilliance of this intellectual legacy will certainly endure, it will also have to contend with the shadows of the numerous controversies that marked Benedict’s time as pope and, later, as pope emeritus. Continued here |
How to party if you're shy, socially awkward - or just plain boring Three writers who struggle with socialising explain how they make it through festive season Fanny Brice was right. People who need people are the luckiest people, at least when party season rolls around. Imagine, if you will, wanting to go to a party. Imagine knowing that you will have a good time - that the mere experience of being around people fills you, as a matter of course, with joy and contentment. That you go home with a spring in your step, a song in your heart, a smile on your lips - refreshed, restored, rejuvenated and ready for the next one. Continued here |
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In-Person Events Are Back. How Activity-Based Businesses Are Striking a Balance Between Virtual and IRL In-person events are coming back. But businesses say they still need online services to survive in this gloomy economy. Continued here |
The 10 most exciting sci-fi movies coming out in 2023 2023 is looking to be a big year for science fiction. Marvel and DC both have highly anticipated new installments, while Brandon Cronenberg tries his hand at doppelgangers and Greta Gerwig tries her hand at satire. From Adam Driver fighting the dinosaurs to Timothée Chalamet riding sandworms, this year’s sci-fi movies offer a wide and exciting variety of stories. Whether you’re looking for original epic stories, exciting sequels, or the latest entries in your favorite fandom or franchise, here are 10 sci-fi movies that we’re looking forward to the most in 2023, ranked from least to most exciting. Continued here |
Tampa, Bali bombings, 9/11 and the Kyoto Protocol: today's cabinet paper release shows what worried Australia in 2002 Every year, the National Archives of Australia releases the cabinet records from 20 years earlier, and this year’s batch is out today. This release, from the cabinet records of 2002, is framed by two events of the previous year. Continued here |
Where did the new year's resolution come from? Well, we've been making them for 4,000 years As we welcome in the new year, a common activity across many cultures is the setting of new year resolutions. New year represents a significant temporal milestone in the calendar when many people set new goals for the year ahead. Here in Australia, over 70% of men and women (over 14 million Australians) are reported to have set at least one new year resolution in 2022. New year pledges or promises are not new. This practice has been around for some time. Most ancient cultures practised some type of religious tradition or festival at the beginning of the new year. Continued here |
The language that doesn't use 'no' Through the winter mist of the hills of the Terai, in lowland Nepal, 18-year-old Hima Kusunda emerges from the school's boarding house, snug in a pink hooded sweatshirt. Hima is one of the last remaining Kusunda, a tiny indigenous group now scattered across central western Nepal. Their language, also called Kusunda, is unique: it is believed by linguists to be unrelated to any other language in the world. Scholars still aren't sure how it originated. And it has a variety of unusual elements, including lacking any standard way of negating a sentence, words for "yes" or "no", or any words for direction. Continued here |
What happened to the world's ozone hole? In the late 1970s, Jonathan Shanklin, a meteorologist with the British Antarctic Survey, spent much of his time tucked away in an office in Cambridge working through a backlog of data from the southernmost continent on our planet. Shanklin was responsible for supervising the digitisation of paper records and computing values from Dobson spectrophotometers – ground-based instruments that measure changes in atmospheric ozone. Continued here |
A Guide to Doing Nothing for People Who Are Really Bad at It This article is part of SELF’s Rest Week, an editorial package dedicated to doing less. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that taking care of yourself, physically and emotionally, is impossible without genuine downtime. With that in mind, we’ll be publishing articles up until the new year to help you make a habit of taking breaks, chilling out, and slowing down. (And we’re taking our own advice: The SELF staff will be OOO during this time!) We hope to inspire you to take it easy and get some rest, whatever that looks like for you. Angela Neal-Barnett, PhD, finds solace under her hair dryer. That’s when, for just a few moments, she can truly relax. The psychologist and director of the Program for Research on Anxiety Disorders Among African Americans at Kent State University is legally deaf. She uses cochlear implants and hearing aids throughout the day, but when she dries her hair, there’s no noise. “I feel calmer and do my best thinking then. It’s forced relaxation,” Dr. Neal-Barnett tells SELF. Continued here |
The Best Advice I Ever Got: Fred Carl, Jr., Founder and CEO, Viking Range In 1986 I was working full-time in the construction business and renting an unfinished one-room office in an old cotton exchange building in downtown Greenwood, Mississippi, trying to start a company in my spare time. I had dozens of detailed sketches for what would be the first Viking range, and little else. Continued here |
Look up! 5 celestial events you can't miss in January 2023 Don't miss the full Moon, Earth's close approach with the Sun, a meetup of two bright planets, and more skywatching events in January 2023. Continued here |
Building Wealth: Our Favorite Reads At the time, my uncle’s explanation didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I nodded, let it go, and didn’t think more about it until a few years later when I finished grad school with massive debt from a student loan. The first job I took barely covered my expenses. I had to rely on a credit card, even when I didn’t fully understand how credit worked. Living in a city as overpriced as New York (and later New Delhi) was a daily reminder of how expensive life could get. Continued here |
The M.T.A. Holiday Train Shit Show If you enjoyed the Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Garden, you might want to catch the M.T.A. Holiday Train Shit Show, inspired by some of the greatest achievements of New York’s finest transportation system. All our displays are fabricated from a special compound of floor bagels, rat hair, and tunnel-stalactite juice. Continued here |
You need to play the best sci-fi brawler on Nintendo Switch Online ASAP Like any form of art, video games build on each other. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, this was especially apparent to anyone paying even moderate attention. Games were starting to take quite liberally from those around them, which sometimes resulted in lawsuits. To follow one specific strain, in 1986, Enix released the first-ever Dragon Quest game, an RPG in a fantasy world setting. In 1987, Technos released the first-ever Double Dragon game, a massive beat ‘em up hit about two brothers taking down endless hordes of bad guys. Elements of both were pulled for Sega’s 1989 arcade game Golden Axe, a beat ‘em up set in a fantasy world where you can ride dinosaurs and stab enemies. Continued here |
Marvel’s biggest movie ever could finally make the X-Men MCU canon The map of Marvel’s Multiverse Saga is a long and winding one, and the arc that began with WandaVision in 2021 will conclude with Avengers: Secret Wars in 2026. Since the beginning of Phase 4 and the weekly mystery of WandaVision, fans have speculated that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) would usher mutants into the MCU in a reversal of her infamous “no more mutants” spell from the comic book storyline House of M. That proliferation of mutants hasn’t happened… yet. Sure, we’ve seen a few, including Professor X in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the reveal that Ms. Marvel is a mutant herself. But we’re still pretty far away from a full-blown X-Men invasion of the MCU. Continued here |
What Are You Reading? Hey, thanks for coming over to catch up. How are you? Actually, let me stop you right there, because I have a more important question. Let’s dim the lights. I’ll recline on this lush, velvet daybed, and you can rest on that one. I’m lowering my eyelids, tilting my head a little bit, and settling into my deep Kathleen Turner voice. Continued here |
The Best Places to Travel in 2023 It’s our favorite time of year: the Where to Go season, when AFAR reveals our list of the ultimate places to travel in the coming year. How to choose? Our editorial team reached out to writers, reporters, and correspondents around the world and curated 12 global destinations for 2023 that feel poised for a “moment": creative cities, seaside villages, national parks, and other places where wonder prevails. Read on and prepare to start wandering... Across this secluded and beautiful island state near Melbourne, irreverence and experimentation reign. Continued here |
Borrowing money isn't always a bad thing - debt can be a sensible way to build wealth Bomikazi Zeka works for the University of Canberra and does not use this platform, or any other, to provide financial advice. Debt, in some form or another, is part of our financial profiles whether we like it or not. And it can be a useful way to build wealth if it is managed carefully and wisely. Continued here |
Exploring the mathematical universe - connections, contradictions, and kale Science and maths skills are widely celebrated as keys to economic and technological progress, but abstract mathematics may seem bafflingly far from industrial optimisation or medical imaging. Pure mathematics often yields unanticipated applications, but without a time machine to look into the future, how do mathematicians like me choose what to study? Over Thai noodles, I asked some colleagues what makes a problem interesting, and they offered a slew of suggestions: surprises, contradictions, patterns, exceptions, special cases, connections. These answers might sound quite different, but they all support a view of the mathematical universe as a structure to explore. Continued here |
My favourite fictional character: Seven Little Australians' wild heroine, Judy, was equipped to conquer the world - but not to survive it I can’t remember if I first met Judy Woolcot on the TV screen or in print: the two versions have cohered into a single entity. The television series of Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians first aired in 1973, so if I met her on-screen, it must’ve been via re-runs. I know my mother’s paperback copy of the novel featured a still from the series on its cover: a family portrait — Meg, Bunty, Baby, Nell, Pip; the General in a nightshirt, clinging to his young mother. The ultra-Victorian Captain Woolcot, played by Leonard Teale, his chin jutting out so precipitously that it threatens to pierce through the picture. And Judy, with bundles of shoulder-length hair, perched on a sofa arm, seeming somehow too big, too angular for the frame. Continued here |
Making a New Year’s Resolution? Don’t Go to War With Yourself “The difference between not doing anything at all and doing 10 minutes a few times a week is absolute.” New Year’s resolutions are a time for reflection—a chance to think about the limited time we have on this Earth and how to use it wisely. Continued here |
When Your Company's Results Fall Short, Grab a Mirror
If effort doesn't match results, the problem is usually in the C-Suite.Continued here
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