iNsAnItY iNtEnSiFiEd: How to Build a Company in an Overly Saturated Market

How to Build a Company in an Overly Saturated Market

Stand out from the competition with these five tips.

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Tesla finally agrees to open its charging network to all EVs in US

Today, the Biden administration announced new standards for expanding the national electric vehicle (EV) charging network in order to encourage widespread EV adoption by providing a "predictable" user experience. All charging stations will soon be required to adopt the same connector types, payment methods, and data privacy assurances. These new standards have pushed Tesla, for the first time, to make part of its proprietary charging network compatible with non-Tesla EVs in the United States.

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The Ohio Train Derailment Created a Perfect TikTok Storm

When a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in a small town in eastern Ohio on February 3, reports soon appeared in national news outlets. They showed how a fire followed the wreck, with ominous dark smoke clouds billowing over the town of East Palestine. Officials evacuated the region and began what they called a controlled release of chemicals from the train cars. But the disaster, in a town of fewer than 5,000 people, didn’t dominate mainstream news coverage.

That changed after Nick Drombosky, an engineer and entrepreneur who has made a hobby of studying industrial accidents, gave a science lesson on TikTok. His video breaking down the chemicals found at the scene has been viewed millions of times, and people have posted countless other videos about the derailment to the platform. “If I didn’t come out and say something, I think that this could have just been swept under,” says Drombosky, who has a personal connection to someone affected by the disaster in East Palestine who alerted him to the derailment. “The nature of TikTok is so unique, that me—essentially, on paper, just a guy in my home office reading what’s going on—I was able to reach millions of people.”

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The 8 Best Movies on Hulu This Week

In 2017, Hulu made television history by becoming the first streaming network to win the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy, thanks to the phenomenon that is The Handmaid’s Tale. While that painfully prescient adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel remains one of the best TV shows to watch on Hulu, it also set a bar for quality entertainment that the network has continued to match—and sometimes exceed—with original series like The Bear, The Great, and Only Murders in the Building.

While Netflix has largely cornered the streaming market on original movies, and even managed to convince A-listers like Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Martin Scorsese to come their way, Hulu is starting to find its footing in features too. Below are some of our top picks for the best movies (original and otherwise) streaming on Hulu right now.

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Archaeologists found evidence of trepanation on medieval woman's skull

Scientists analyzed the skull of a medieval woman who once lived in central Italy and found evidence that she experienced at least two brain surgeries consistent with the practice of trepanation, according to a recent paper published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. It's one of the few archaeological pieces of evidence of trepanation being performed on early medieval women yet found, although why the woman in question was subjected to such a risky invasive surgical procedure remains speculative.

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How to Succeed in Your First Job Out of College

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Google Fiber comes back to life with 5 gigabit service, plans for 8Gbps soon

Last year Google Fiber announced it was kind of coming back to life. For years, the service—which had Google roll into a town, lay down miles of fiber-optic cable, and start competing with the local ISP monopoly—had "paused" further expansion. Now, for whatever reason, Fiber is back, and the company is offering a new high of 5 gigabits per second.

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Winners of the 2022 Travel Photographer of the Year Contest

The winning entries in the 2022 Travel Photographer of the Year (TPOTY) were recently announced, with the Slovenian photographer Matjaz Krivic named the overall winner, selected from nearly 20,000 entries. Contest organizers have been kind enough to share some of the winners and honorable mentions, shown below. Captions were provided by the organizers and individual photographers, and have been lightly edited for clarity.

Winner, Travel Photographer of the Year 2022. Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Nanyuki, Kenya: Najin 33, one of the last two Northern White rhinos left in the world, rests under the hot afternoon sun with her friend and caretaker Zachary Mutai in Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The northern white rhino is all but extinct. The two last males died several years ago. The two females are still with us but are too feeble to bear babies. In an Italian lab, their eggs are now artificially fertilized by sperm from the late males and are kept frozen, in hopes that surrogate rhinos from another subspecies can carry the northern white back from the brink. #

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How to use note-taking for crystal clear focus

What would you learn about yourself if you temporarily stopped using the tools that make your life easier?

That’s the main question in this Big Think video with author Tiago Forte, who describes what happened when he changed the way he took digital notes.

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US Border Patrol Is Finally Able to Check E-Passport Data

The United States government is notorious for taking a “better late than never” approach to its tech rollouts. Following that tradition, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed today that after 16 years it has finally performed the necessary software upgrades to verify the cryptographic signatures stored in passport RFID chips.

Since 2006, the United States and many other countries have embedded these little chips in the back panel of their passports, or “e-Passports” as they're known. The chip digitally stores the personally identifying information of the document's owner, including name, date of birth, passport number, and biometric data like your photo, along with a cryptographic signature meant to act as a check against tampering or forgeries. For years, the US has required that Visa Waiver countries issue e-Passports to their citizens who want to enter the US. Yet in all this time, CBP hadn't actually deployed the software to execute these validity checks.

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Africa's most-funded EV startup faces engine trouble

In 2021, Nigerian mobility startup Metro Africa Xpress (MAX) became Africa’s most-funded startup in the electric vehicle (EV) space when it raised $31 million in a series B round to expand into Ghana and Egypt. The company set a goal to provide vehicle-financing loans to more than 100,000 drivers over two years and build EV infrastructure in its new markets.

Two years on, however, industry advocates believe the company’s goals are too ambitious given the high EV prices, unfriendly government policies, lack of charging infrastructure, high customs duties, and bad roads in African countries.

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The ancient diseases that plagued the dinosaurs

On a wet, stormy day some 77 million years ago in what is now south-eastern Alberta, Canada, a certain horned dinosaurwas having a very bad time.

The adult Centrosaurus apertus, a medium-sized plant-eating cousin of the larger Triceratops that lived alongside Tyrannosaurus, had an advanced malignant bone cancer in its shin. The cancer may have spread elsewhere in its body and it's thought that it was almost certainly terminal.

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Most Teams Do a Poor Job of Celebrating Wins. Here Are 5 Ways Great Teams Do It

Finding and celebrating wins is critical to building a high-performance culture; here are five ways you can create a positive focus.

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What to do if your inner voice is cruel

Our inner voices are incredible problem-solving tools. Just ask anyone who has spent time in the presence of a toddler. Because toddlers haven’t fully internalized their self-talk, you can hear how it assists them in navigating the world. They use self-talk to work out the solutions to shape-sorting puzzles. They narrate their emotions and daily adventures like storytellers. And when they approach a stove, they warn themselves of the dangers by expressing that it is “Hot! Hot! Hot!”

Our adult inner voices may be quieter, but they’re no less important. They help us regulate our emotions, learn from past mistakes, plan future events through simulation, and construct meaning and values from our experiences. This power, combined with its early development, has led many scientists to hypothesize that our inner voices evolved to give humanity a survival edge during its own toddlerhood in the African savannah.

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How pesticides impair our senses

Fifteen years ago, Tim Parton, a farm manager at Brewood Park Farm in Staffordshire in the UK, decided to take a leap and start to experiment with biological farming. Instead of using synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, he applies self-brewed biologically active natural inputs, such as trichoderma, a type of fungus, onto his crops, to help them both grow and fix nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil.

Parton is part of a growing farming community practising regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming that prioritises soil and environmental health by minimising synthetic inputs.

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Influencer Is a Real Job. It's Time to Act Like It

In July 2021, singer Olivia Rodrigo visited the White House as part of a campaign to encourage young people to get vaccinated. The visit consisted of a series of meticulously planned photo ops and social media-friendly content creation, including meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris while wearing coordinating light pink suits and posing with President Joe Biden in matching aviator sunglasses. Rodrigo and Dr. Anthony Fauci made a video of them reading positive tweets about vaccines, drawing on a popular late-night television trope in which celebrities read tweets about themselves.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

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The Asteroid Blast That Shook the World Is Still Making an Impact

The Chelyabinsk asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmosphere 10 years ago, the largest impact in over a century

On February 15, 2013, an asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmosphere at nearly 70,000 kilometers per hour. Almost the size of a tennis court, it blazed brilliantly in the sky, as if a second sun had appeared and was racing from southeast to northwest.

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Your Strategy Needs a Story

Business strategy is usually born of a highly rational process, grounded in facts and analysis. Storytelling, often associated with fiction and entertainment, may seem like the antithesis of strategy. But the two are not incompatible. A clever strategy on paper is only the starting point for engaging those who will implement it. Strategies must also be communicated and understood — and they must motivate action. Through stories, mere facts and information are turned into a shared mental model of how the business works and where it is heading. Knowing how to construct such a strategy story as a shared, and evolvable mental model can not only improve implementation but also greatly increase a company’s rate of learning, which can be a key source for competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced world.

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A New Age of UFO Mania

Escalating from grainy videos of so-called aliens to fighter jets blowing things out of the sky will only fuel America’s obsession.

In May 1957, an American fighter pilot stationed in the quiet English countryside was suddenly ordered to get into the air and shoot down an unidentified flying object. The pilot, Milton Torres, pursued the target, which appeared motionless at times before zooming at thousands of miles per hour. He locked on to the object and prepared to fire, but it vanished from radar screens. In secret documents that were declassified and released by the British government many decades later, Torres said of the experience, “To be quite candid, I almost shit my pants!”

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Outbreak of Marburg, Ebola's similarly deadly relative, spurs response race

Health officials are racing to stamp out a rare and concerning outbreak of the deadly Marburg virus in Equatorial Guinea, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.

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The Case for Taking Naps (Even at Work)

We deserve to have the autonomy to decide if, and when, we need rest.

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Inclusive Communication Builds Both People and Profits

Simple ways to make your communication more inclusive.

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Organizational Agility Starts with Learning and Career Growth - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM LINKEDIN

In today’s talent market, uncertainty reigns. Some sectors have seen massive reductions while others have more open roles than they do candidates. Across the board, there’s a rapid evolution of skills, with the pandemic accelerating digital transformation and with the rise of remote work fundamentally changing how we collaborate. Developing workforces that can adapt to continuous change is top of mind for CEOs.

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Meta develops an AI language bot that can use external software tools

Language models like ChatGPT have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, but they still struggle with some basic tasks such as arithmetic and fact-checking. Last Thursday, researchers from Meta revealed Toolformer, an AI language model that can teach itself to use external tools such as search engines, calculators, and calendars without sacrificing its core language modeling abilities.

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Military History Doesnâ€™t Say What Ukraineâ€™s Critics Think

Commentators on the Ukraine war who think that American support for Ukraine is pointless or dangerous commonly reach for references to military history. They not only often get it wrong, but they frequently get it backwards, construing that history into a case for Russia’s likely success.

Christopher Caldwell, for example, writes that American aid is intended to “fast-forward history, from World War I’s battles of position to World War II’s battles of movement,” and that this enterprise is doomed to fail. In his view, both Russia and Ukraine will continue to fight a war characterized by hordes of mud-covered soldiers huddling in freezing trenches before perishing in their thousands in a hail of fire as they go over the top, and some shipments of Western battle tanks to Ukraine will not stop that. Thus, and perversely, not bringing this futile war to an end by twisting Ukraine’s arm is America’s fault.

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Hyundai, Kia pushing updates so you can't just steal their cars with USB cables

After months of thefts that have led to at least eight deaths, car makers Hyundai and Kia are offering free software updates to roughly 8.3 million cars that can be stolen with the aid of a USB-A cable.

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How to Help Your Team Learn in the Flow of Work

Learning in the flow of work — when learning happens in the moment and as part of the regular working day — is essential for everyone. When teams don’t find ways to learn as they work, they limit their performance. But when they find their learning flow, it becomes so embedded into daily routines and rituals that it’s no longer labeled as “learning,” and instead becomes an integral part of how work happens. Here’s what managers need to know about learning in the flow of work — and how to implement it on their teams.

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Health info for 1 million patients stolen using critical GoAnywhere vulnerability

One of the biggest hospital chains in the US said hackers obtained protected health information for 1 million patients after exploiting a vulnerability in an enterprise software product called GoAnywhere.

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2 Values That Made Me Rich by Age 30

Without discipline and consistency, nothing else matters.

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Water Shortages Threaten to Increase Violence and Disappearances in Mexico

The U.S. government must fund water-saving efforts in Mexico if it wants to quell Mexico’s drug violence

In 2006, Mexico declared war against drug traffickers in the wake of escalating inter-cartel warfare. Since then, there have been more than 300,000 murders in the country, a death toll escalated by violence between law enforcement, the military and the cartels. An official list of the missing has risen to over 100,000 people, called los desaparecidos—the disappeared. Many of them are presumably among the roughly 52,000 unidentified bodies in Mexican morgues. The disappeared are, legally speaking, neither alive nor dead; they include people whose remains are undiscovered or unidentified, and others who may be still alive and held in captivity.

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Earthquake Victims in Turkey and Syria Need Help. How Your Business Can Support Through Gift Matching, Supply Donations, and More

Earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria are in dire need. Here's how businesses can make a difference through gift matching, supply donations, and more.

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Defining 'Authenticity' for Small and Midsize Businesses--It's Personal

Every business has its own story, don't be afraid to tell yours.

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Western Digital starts selling 44TB of external HDD storage for $1,500

Western Digital today announced bigger-capacity versions of its My Book and dual-drive My Book Duo external hard disk drives (HDDs). The new 22TB and 44TB offerings represent some of the roomiest consumer offerings the company has ever offered.

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Mesmin Destin: How everyday interactions shape your future

A few words can change the course of a life; they have the power to shrink, expand or transform someone's identity -- even your own. Social psychologist Mesmin Destin explores how everyday interactions and experiences play a powerful part in who we become, sharing the key moments and messages that can inspire us to grow into our best selves.

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7 thought experiments that will make you question everything

This article was first published on Big Think in April 2018. It was updated in February 2023.

Thought experiments are among the most important tools in the intellectual toolbox. Widely used in many disciplines, thought experiments allow for complex situations to be explored, questions to be raised, and complex ideas to be placed in an understandable context. Here are seven thought experiments in philosophy you might not have heard of, complete with explanations of what they mean and what questions they raise.

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You absolutely must not attempt to shoot down spy balloons

“What goes up, must come down,” is an old saying that remains true for any object thrown or fired from Earth’s surface that fails to escape into space. Even a bullet, fired straight up at the maximum speed a gunpowder blast can accelerate it to, will never leave the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere: our troposphere. A combination of gravity and air resistance will slow it down until it reaches a maximum height, whereupon it will fall back down to Earth’s surface.

When it does, however, its landing location will be wildly unpredictable owing to the effects of wind and air. It will be traveling much slower than when it was first fired, as its terminal velocity (due to air resistance) is far lower than the initial muzzle speed. But even so, these falling bullets can injure or even kill people: something that’s traditionally been most likely on July 4th and New Year’s in the United States, but that’s increasingly becoming a hazard in early 2023 with the hullaballoo surrounding “spy balloons” flying over American airspace.

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I've Started 13 Companies: Here Are the 6 Things I Have Learned

Knowing when to ignore the naysayers and listen to your research is vital.

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Love and the Brain: How Attached Are We to Attachment Styles?

Are you “anxious,” “avoidant” or “disorganized?” So-called attachment styles have taken the Internet by storm. But it turns out there’s a lot more to unpack than people think.

[TikTok Clip] Woman: Sometimes avoidants will try to make you hate them, so that you stop being anxious and pushy.

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What if buildings created energy instead of consuming it?

Buildings are bad news for the climate -- but they don't have to be. While our structures are currently responsible for a third of global energy consumption and emissions, a future where they create more energy than they consume is possible. Energy policy analyst Ksenia Petrichenko has a three-tiered strategy for thinking differently about buildings, transforming them from passive users to active players in the energy system and bringing us closer to our climate targets.

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A Robot Finds More Trouble Under the Doomsday Glacier

Icefin the robot is designed to go where no human can, swimming off the coast of Antarctica under 2,000 feet of ice. Lowered through a borehole drilled with hot water, the torpedo-shaped machine takes readings and—most strikingly—video of Thwaites Glacier’s vulnerable underbelly. This Florida-sized chunk of ice is also known as the Doomsday Glacier, and for good reason: It’s rapidly deteriorating, and if it collapses, global sea levels could rise over a foot. It could also tug on surrounding glaciers as it dies, which would add another 10 feet to rising seas.

In a pair of papers published today in the journal Nature, scientists describe what Icefin and other instruments have discovered underneath all that ice. Simply put: trouble. Models of future sea-level rise characterize the bit of Thwaites that’s floating on the ocean—known as an ice shelf—as having a fairly simple, flat underside, but the robot found that 10 percent of it is way more complex. There are terraces, for instance, of vertical walls over 30 feet high where melting is happening much faster than in flat areas. That small portion is “contributing 25 percent of the melting that we see,” says Britney Schmidt, an Earth and planetary scientist at Cornell University, who leads the Icefin project. (She’s the lead author of one of the papers and coauthor on the other.) “So it's a really outsized impact.”

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Do Repeat COVID Infections Increase the Risk of Severe Disease or Long COVID?

Many repeat infections are mild, but some studies suggest people who have been infected with COVID more than once are at a greater risk of severe disease or long COVID

Reinfections with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease, are on the rise, dashing hopes that vaccination or prior disease confers long-lasting immunity to infection. As more people get reinfected, they may be wondering: Do repeat infections lead to more severe COVID symptoms?

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10 Strategies to Increase Your Average Order Value

Boosting your AOV frees up capital for business growth an creates new revenue opportunities.

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The Scramble to Save Twitter's Research From Elon Musk

two years ago, Twitter launched what is perhaps the tech industry's most ambitious attempt at algorithmic transparency. Its researchers wrote papers showing that Twitter's AIÂ system for cropping images in tweetsÂ favored white faces and women, and thatÂ posts from the political right in several countries, including the US, UK, and France, received a bigger algorithmic boost than those from the left.Â

By early October last year, as Elon Musk faced a court deadline to complete his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the company'sÂ newest research was almost ready. It showed that a machine-learning programÂ incorrectly demoted some tweets mentioning any of 350 terms related to identity, politics, or sexuality, including "gay," "Muslim," and "deaf," because a system intended to limit viewsÂ of tweets slurring marginalized groups also impededÂ posts celebrating those communities. The findingâ€”and a partial fix Twitter developedâ€”could help other social platforms better use AI to police content. But would anyone ever get to read the research?Â

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Eagles Are Falling, Bears Are Going Blind

It was late fall of 2022 when David Stallknecht heard that bodies were raining from the sky.

Stallknecht, a wildlife biologist at the University of Georgia, was already fearing the worst. For months, wood ducks had been washing up on shorelines; black vultures had been teetering out of tree tops. But now thousands of ghostly white snow-goose carcasses were strewn across agricultural fields in Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas. The birds had tried to take flight, only to plunge back to the ground. “People were saying they were literally dropping down dead,” Stallknecht told me. Even before he and his team began testing specimens in the lab, they suspected they knew what they would find: yet another crop of casualties from the deadly strain of avian influenza that had been tearing across North America for roughly a year.

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How Allon Bloch of K Health Used AI to Make Medicine More Accessible

Over 300 million people have taken advantage of the healthcare delivery app.

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Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

As the demands of the workplace keep rising, many people respond by putting in ever longer hours, which inevitably leads to burnout that costs both the organization and the employee. Meanwhile, people take for granted what fuels their capacity to work—their energy. Increasing that capacity is the best way to get more done faster and better.

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What Nikki Haley Can Learn From Carly Fiorina

Nikki Haley is running for president. She is the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the former governor of South Carolina. She is a savvy communicator and conservative. And she is a woman.

In 2023, thank goodness, Haley’s candidacy will not be defined by her sex—a credit to all the women who have run before and toppled expectations. And yet, Haley is the only woman to enter the 2024 presidential race so far, and that might remain the case. The fact of her sex will create opportunities and pitfalls—especially when it comes to the question of how she campaigns against the Republican front-runner, Donald Trump.

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Elon Musk's New Twitter Superpower Is Dangerous

On Twitter, Elon Musk is inescapable. Users logging in this week have found their feeds dominated by a stream of memes posted by the Twitter CEO after a change to the platform's algorithm started to boost his tweets, apparently above all other accounts. As one user put it:Â "When did Elon become MySpace Tom?"

For years, politicians and researchers working on the integrity of civic spaces have warned about the risks of social media platforms being used by their owners to change public opinion. On TikTok, the reported existence of aÂ secret "heating button," which allows the company to boost content delivered via its For you algorithm, was greeted with breathless reporting that it could be used to promote Chinese interests in the West. Fears that the Chinese government might use the app to spy on or collect data from users have led to calls to ban TikTok in the United States and the United Kingdom.

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The Future of Weight Loss Looks a Lot Like Its Past

A revolution in weight loss is apparently underway. It started in 2021, when the FDA approved the diabetes drug semaglutide for weight loss. The weekly injectable—sold under the brand name Wegovy—can help users lose 5 to 10 percent of their body weight, leading commentators to describe the drug as both a “medical breakthrough” and a “silver bullet” for obesity. Elon Musk says he’s taking it, Kim Kardashian is rumored to be using it, and everyone from Hollywood to the Hamptons reportedly wants a prescription.

Soon, there will be a new weight loss medication on the block—and it’s even more potent than its peers. Last fall, the FDA fast-tracked the review process for using tirzepatide as a weight loss drug after a clinical trial showed that people with BMIs labeled “overweight” or “obese” lost a staggering 22.5 percent of their body weight on the highest dose. If all goes according to plan, that will make Mounjaro the latest in a fast-growing biomedical sector—spanning everything from bariatric surgery to deep brain stimulation for binge-eating—that aims to combat, if not cure, the problem of “excess” weight.

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Can cosmology untangle the universeâ€™s most elusive mysteries?

“The first thing we know about the universe is that it’s really, really big,” says cosmologist Michael Turner, who has been contemplating this reality for more than four decades now. “And because the universe is so big,” he says, “it’s often beyond the reach of our instruments, and of our ideas.”

Certainly our current understanding of the cosmic story leaves some huge unanswered questions, says Turner, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago and a visiting faculty member at UCLA. Take the question of origins. We now know that the universe has been expanding and evolving for something like 13.8 billion years, starting when everything in existence exploded outward from an initial state of near-infinite temperature and density — a.k.a. the Big Bang. Yet no one knows for sure what the Big Bang was, says Turner. Nor does anyone know what triggered it, or what came beforehand — or whether it’s even meaningful to talk about “time” before that initial event.

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The top 10 learning and development conferences of the year

Beyond the allure of traveling to exciting stateside destinations like Las Vegas, or international tourist hot spots like Palma de Mallorca, Spain, learning and development conferences serve an important purpose among L&D leaders – it gives them a chance to stay at the forefront of their field.

When an organization sends an individual or a group to a learning and development conference, the ripple effect is felt far and wide. It not only empowers the attendees with new knowledge and ideas, but when they return to the office and apply their learnings, they’re better able to support their fellow employees. This impacts the entire organization’s development efforts.

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Report: Musk had Twitter engineers boost his tweets after Biden got more views

Twitter CEO Elon Musk had Twitter engineers set up a "special system" to boost his tweets after his post about the Super Bowl got fewer views than a tweet from President Biden, according to a report by Platformer yesterday.

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Cofounders Need to Learn How to (Productively) Disagree

While there are many factors to consider on the road to success, one lies directly within your control. Sixty-five percent of startups fail due to founder conflict, according to Noam Wasserman, author of The Founder’s Dilemmas. That means, if you want your new venture to beat the odds, you need to learn how to productively collaborate, and more importantly, disagree with your business partner.

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How to Build a $5 Billion Business Around a Single Pain Point

Fivetran has scaled, in part, by narrowing its original focus.

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The Power of Work Friends

Despite claiming “people are our greatest asset,” too many executives still expect employees to leave their personal lives at the door when they come to work. Yet Gallup data shows that having a best friend at work is strongly linked to business outcomes, including improvements in profitability, safety, inventory control, and employee retention. And Gallup’s latest findings show that since the start of the pandemic, having a best friend at work has an even greater impact on important outcomes — like workers’ likelihood to recommend their workplace, intent to leave, and overall satisfaction. With the unavoidable increase in remote and hybrid work, best friends at work have become lifelines who provide crucial social connection, collaboration, and support for each other during times of change. The author offers four ways managers can create and maintain a friendship-friendly workplace that delivers measurable results.

Millions of people suffer from loneliness. More than 300 million people globally don’t have a single friend, according to Gallup data. And more than 20% of people don’t have friends or family they can count on whenever they need them.

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An attempt to solve a quantum problem just deepens the mystery

The mark of a good scientific theory is that it predicts many separate measurements. In the subatomic world, however, there are two large discrepancies that don’t match predictions stemming from the Standard Model of particle physics. A recent paper in the journal Nature Communications attempted to solve this mystery and the result was that it made things worse.

The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory that best predicts the behavior of matter. It covers electricity, magnetism, light, atomic theory, and radiation, to mention a few. (It doesn’t cover the effects of gravity; that’s a different theory.)

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Bring on the Boring EVs

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.

If you tune in to Queer Eye next season, you may find the “Fab Five” talking about the transformative power of a carefully curated refresh from the interior of a zero-emissions Hummer pickup truck. The placement is part of a new deal between Netflix and General Motors to feature electric vehicles on the streaming service, a deal that both companies are promoting as a step toward “creating a better, more sustainable future for our world.” But the idea that placing EVs in TV shows is leading-edge progressivism seems somewhat dated. Even the prospect of the Hummer EV—an icon of gas guzzling transformed into a green mode of transportation—seems about as transgressive and edgy as Queer Eye itself in 2023, which is to say: not very.

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Edwin Hubble and a really big telescope: How cosmology was born

Sure, the cosmic story began well before our ancestors walked the Earth. If we compress the Universe’s 13.8 billion years into a single 24-hour frame, Homo sapiens arrives around 1.88 seconds before midnight, 300,000 years ago. But the Universe that abided before our stories was mute. It followed its evolution from the Big Bang onward without creatures capable of reconstructing how primordial matter turned into stars and planets. And even if there are other intelligences out there capable of and interested in telling the cosmic history, they will do it in their own way. Their cosmic story will not be like ours.

During the 20th century, modern cosmology emerged from speculative mathematics to blossom into a data-rich science. This revolution in our understanding of the Universe involved a combination of extraordinary theoretical and technological advances. It is nothing short of spectacular. The mirrors that capture light in optical telescopes grew. From the 100-inch (2.54-meter) telescope at Mount Wilson — the one Edwin Hubble used to discover the expansion of the Universe in 1929 — we came to use giants like the 36-foot South African Large Telescope. Many students from Dartmouth, the university where I work, are there right now, learning and exploring the Cosmos.

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A Sensitive Movie About a Literary Oddity

A new film about Emily Brontë offers a fresh, provocative look at the misunderstood Wuthering Heights author.

Of the Brontë sisters, Emily has long been considered the most vexing. She was reportedly jovial around her siblings but disagreeable and timid around anyone else. Her equally tempestuous and aloof reputation left her friendless, and the novel Wuthering Heights—her bold, brutal masterpiece—incensed some readers while enthralling others. She’s a literary oddity, a creature whose reserved disposition seemed to belie a wildly inventive imagination.

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How to Emotionally Process a Layoff

“I am so sorry Shyamli, but we will not be able to extend your contract. We’re expecting you to wrap up your assignments and leave by the end of the year,” the disembodied voice of my manager trailed off the Skype call. On an autumn afternoon in 2011, I was told that I was being let go. In the moment, contrary to my expectations, I felt relieved. I’d been disengaged and anxious at work for the past few months, and this layoff, I assured myself, was going to be the end of my debilitating anxiety.

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Trumpâ€™s Last-Ditch Gamble to Avoid Indictment

An unusual and little-noticed missive from the former president maps out his defense against any charges relating to January 6.

At one time, Donald Trump’s every word was subject to intense scrutiny; remember the close reading of covfefe? Those days are gone, and altogether for the better, but one strange result is that the former president can make a surprising or interesting comment and have it go largely ignored by the general public. Yesterday afternoon, Trump sent out a curious, lengthy statement via Truth Social and his press email list. Understandably, almost everyone overlooked the missive, titled “Statement by President Donald J. Trump on the Witch Hunt of January 6th.” After all, how many of those have we gotten?

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What Happens When Politicians Brush Off Hard Questions About Gender

Dismissing good-faith inquiries about a gender self-identification law drained Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon’s authority.

What brought down Nicola Sturgeon? The resignation of Scotland’s first minister this morning wasn’t exactly a surprise. Her party’s poll ratings, as well as her own, have been dropping in recent months. The troublesome coziness of the pro-independence Scottish National Party—whose chief executive is her husband, Peter Murrell—was being openly questioned at last. During interviews, reporters had begun to savage Sturgeon with the kind of brutality that suggested she was politically doomed.

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What Not to Ask Me About My Long COVID

Before I got long COVID, I tuned out virtually all stories about it. They were tedious because I was tired of the pandemic, because we are all tired of the pandemic, because it is as familiar as rain and honestly just as dreary; I can hardly believe we once called the coronavirus novel.

Today, I still tune out most long-COVID stories, though for different reasons. (Busman’s holiday. I outsource the job to my family.) But millions of us suffer from long COVID (“the pandemic after the pandemic,” as a Washington Post editorial put it last week), so today I’d like to discuss … etiquette. That’s right: manners. I’d like to offer a civilian’s guide to navigating the sensitivities of those furious, frustrated, irritable millions—and to better understanding them.

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Requiem for the Spartans

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On the banks of the Red Cedar, a modest tributary that winds through the heart of one of America’s magnificent college campuses, there’s a school that’s known to all. Its specialty is winning: Michigan State University boasts numerous programs that rank among the world’s best, including supply-chain management, agricultural engineering, and graduate education. Oh, and those Spartans play good ball, on the gridiron and the hardwood and beyond, racking up Big Ten titles and churning out professionals, all-stars, Hall of Famers. It’s the home of overachievers and underdogs, an ideal place for someone with a point to prove. The official mantra, “Spartans Will,” is more than a deft motto; it’s a defiant mentality that makes the school exceptional.

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Ben Okri on Manipulating Reality

“The Third Law of Magic” is a new story by Ben Okri. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Okri and Katherine Hu, an assistant editor for the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Katherine Hu: In your short story “The Third Law of Magic,” an artist sells snowballs at a market. We get a clear view into his motivations for the show, which take on a philosophical weight as they accrue. When do you choose to focus on your character’s thoughts instead of their actions?

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Donâ€™t Be Embarrassed to Commit to the Bit

Before last summer, Adonna Biel, a 27-year-old who works in communications, did not consider herself a fan of the high-energy rapper Pitbull. She knew the hits—“Timber,” featuring Kesha; the club smash “I Know You Want Me”—because Pitbull was elemental to the 2010s pop music that Biel had grown up hearing. But she’d given Pitbull little thought until last July, when she heard that he was performing an hour away from where she lived in Washington, D.C. She mentioned it offhandedly to some work friends. Things escalated. Within days, Biel and five of her colleagues—who had spent hardly any time together outside of the office—got their hands on VIP tickets.

Not only that: They assembled a collaborative playlist of Pitbull tracks. They rented a car, which they dubbed the “Pitbus,” to take them to the concert. On the ride over, one co-worker passed around a bald cap. (Pitbull is famously bald.) And at the concert itself, Biel bought a Pitbull shirt.

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iNsAnItY iNtEnSiFiEd

Thursday, February 16, 2023

How to Build a Company in an Overly Saturated Market

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