Your Gaming Skills Can Help You Shape Your Career

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Your Gaming Skills Can Help You Shape Your Career Studies have shown the benefits of gaming — whether it’s better spatial awareness, faster cognitive processing, or improved mental health, social skills, and decision-making capabilities. Here are some ways you can harness the unique skills and lessons gaming has taught you to shape your future working life. Continued here

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Why Design Thinking Works While we know a lot about practices that stimulate new ideas, innovation teams often struggle to apply them. Why? Because people’s biases and entrenched behaviors get in the way. In this article a Darden professor explains how design thinking helps people overcome this problem and unleash their creativity. Continued here

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The Pope's Coat Is Here to Ruin Your Faith The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.Future generations will acknowledge the vibe shift. It happened last weekend, when all of a sudden social media feeds filled with images of Pope Francis, typically a pious and plain dude, looking like a boss in a sleek white puffer coat. It was instantly a meme, a LOL in a sea of bad news. It was also not real. Someone created the image using the artificial intelligence tool Midjourney. But it fooled a lot of people—so many that news outlets began calling it "one of the first instances of wide-scale misinformation stemming from artificial intelligence."  Continued here

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The Best Portable Storage Drives If you're running out of storage space on your laptop, or if you need to back up your data and store that backlog of videos you're going to edit one day (I am, I swear), an external hard drive can solve your problem. The trouble is, there are hundreds of drive options ranging from dirt cheap to crazy expensive—which one is right for your needs? I've tested dozens with different use cases in mind to find the best portable storage drives for your workflow. Be sure to check out our other guides, including How to Back Up and Move Your Photos Between Services, How to Back Up Your Digital Life, and How to Back Up Your iPhone. Continued here

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Kate Kahle: Why autism is often missed in women and girls Women and girls with autism spectrum disorder often don't display the behaviors people typically associate with neurodivergence, greatly impacting when, how -- and if -- they are diagnosed. Autism acceptance advocate Kate Kahle makes the case for more research into this gender discrepancy, sharing her personal experience with masking, being diagnosed as a teenager and how it allowed her to better understand herself. "Autism is not a disease, and it doesn't need to be cured," she says. "It's just a different way some brains can work." Continued here

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How to Tell If a Photo Is an AI-Generated Fake Artificial-intelligence-powered image-generating systems are making fake photographs so hard to detect that we need AI to catch themYou may have seen photographs that suggest otherwise, but former president Donald Trump wasn’t arrested last week, and the pope didn’t wear a stylish, brilliant white puffer coat. These recent viral hits were the fruits of artificial intelligence systems that process a user’s textual prompt to create images. They demonstrate how these programs have become very good very quickly—and are now convincing enough to fool an unwitting observer. Continued here

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Dinosaurs' Air Sacs Evolved Many Times and Let Them Take Over the World An extensive system of air sacs, evolved over and over, let dinosaurs grow larger without sacrificing strengthSome of the largest and most ferocious dinosaurs of all time had an anatomical secret to their success. Like many modern birds, Tyrannosaurus, Apatosaurus and other giants had complex networks of air sacs that grew out of their throats and lungs and into their bones. The resulting porousness made them lighter, saving energy while maintaining bone strength. The sacs also let the dinosaurs breathe more efficiently and may even have aided cooling. But researchers have been unsure of when and how this valuable adaptation first emerged in the animal kingdom. Continued here

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How to Back Up Your Digital Life Making backups is boring, but the alternative—losing your data—is the kind of excitement no one wants. I once lost 80 pages of a novel to a bad hard drive. I had no backups. While most of the world is thankful to have been spared those 80 pages, if that hard drive had lived, who knows? I might be sipping a mai tai on a Maine beach with Stephen King right now. Nowadays I back up my data at least three times, in three physically separate places. I know what you’re thinking—wow, he is really bummed about missing out on that mai tai. It may sound excessive, but it costs next to nothing and happens without me lifting a finger, so why not? Continued here

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The Discipline of Innovation In the hypercompetition for breakthrough solutions, managers worry too much about characteristics and personality—“Am I smart enough? Do I have the right temperament?”—and not enough about process. A commitment to the systematic search for imaginative and useful ideas is what successful entrepreneurs share—not some special genius or trait. What’s more, entrepreneurship can occur in a business of any size or age because, at heart, it has to do with a certain kind of activity: innovation, the disciplined effort to improve a business’s potential. Continued here

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The 12 Best Amazon Prime Movies Right Now Over the past year or so, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings (congrats, CODA!), but that doesn’t mean other streaming services don’t have excellent offerings. Like, for example, Amazon Prime. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up.Our picks for the 10 best films on Amazon Prime are below. All the films in our guide are included in your Prime subscription—no renting here. Once you’ve watched your fill, check out our lists for the best movies on Netflix and best movies on Disney+ if you’re looking for something else to watch. We also have a guide to the best shows on Amazon if that's what you're in the mood for.  Continued here

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Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything In the past few years, a new methodology for launching companies, called “the lean start-up,” has begun to replace the old regimen. Traditionally, a venture’s founders would write a business plan, complete with a five-year forecast, use it to raise money, and then go into “stealth mode” to develop their offerings, all without getting much feedback from the people they intended to sell to. Lean start-ups, in contrast, begin by searching for a business model. They test, revise, and discard hypotheses, continually gathering customer feedback and rapidly iterating on and reengineering their products. This strategy greatly reduces the chances that start-ups will spend a lot of time and money launching products that no one actually will pay for. Continued here

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How Apple Is Organized for Innovation When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, in 1997, it had a conventional structure for a company of its size and scope. It was divided into business units, each with its own P&L responsibilities. Believing that conventional management had stifled innovation, Jobs laid off the general managers of all the business units (in a single day), put the entire company under one P&L, and combined the disparate functional departments of the business units into one functional organization. Although such a structure is common for small entrepreneurial firms, Apple—remarkably—retains it today, even though the company is nearly 40 times as large in terms of revenue and far more complex than it was in 1997. In this article the authors discuss the innovation benefits and leadership challenges of Apple’s distinctive and ever-evolving organizational model in the belief that it may be useful for other companies competing in rapidly changing environments. Continued here

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Trump’s WWE Theory of Politics The former president grew up a wrestling fan—and mastered the dark art of arena-style rhetoric.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

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Vera Rubin Lives on in Lives of the Women She Helped in Astronomy The "Mother of Dark Matter" was a force of nature—and a forceful advocate for other women who also wanted to dedicate their careers to the cosmos.Teske: Vera Rubin means a lot to a lot of astronomers. This was one of the instruments that she used to help discover the presence of dark matter, which we now know is the dominant form of matter in our universe. Continued here

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The best public speaking tool is one you're always carrying--a smartphone Use a video camera to take your presentation skills to the next level. Continued here

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Judge's Decision Would Make Some No-Cost Cancer Screenings a Thing of the Past A federal judge’s ruling that invalidates part of the Affordable Care Act could mean people will have to pay for certain types of preventive care, though likely not immediatelyA federal judge on Thursday overturned a portion of the Affordable Care Act that makes preventive services, such as some cancer screenings, free to enrollees, a decision that could affect health insurance policyholders nationwide. Continued here

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Choosing a New Board Leader: Eight Questions In this Nano Tool for Leaders, Wharton’s Mike Useem and his co-authors suggest eight questions that can help guide your search for a new board leader.Nano Tools for Leaders®  — a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management — are fast, effective tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes, with the potential to significantly impact your success. Continued here

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5 Key Life Lessons You Didn't Know You Could Learn From a Workday You can learn a whole lot from an ordinary workday. Uncover these five practical life lessons. Continued here

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Stressed Plants 'Cry' - and Some Animals Can Probably Hear Them Plants do not suffer in silence. Instead, when thirsty or stressed, plants make “airborne sounds,” according to a study published today in Cell.Plants that need water or have recently had their stems cut produce up to roughly 35 sounds per hour, the authors found. But well-hydrated and uncut plants are much quieter, making only about one sound per hour. Continued here

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Leading with Purpose: Hamdi Ulukaya's Journey as an Immigrant Entrepreneur Hamdi Ulukaya talks about his experience founding Chobani as an immigrant entrepreneur, and how he cultivates a community for the brand. Continued here

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The Chinese app where women socialize over their menstrual cycles What do Chinese women want? In recent years, a wave of tech startups has emerged to answer this million-yuan question. From the beauty-focused photo-editing app MeituPic to the Pinterest-esque fashion app Meilishuo, companies have been vying for the attention of China’s lucrative female user base, hoping to tap into the country’s “she economy.” The intense competition is understandable: Chinese women comprise the world’s third-largest retail market — the size of Germany, France, and the U.K.’s markets combined.The app Meet You — pronounced as “meiyou” in Chinese, which means “beautiful pomelo” — identified a very specific need: Chinese women wanted to talk about their periods. Launched in 2013 as a simple period-tracking app, Meet You has since transformed into a social media platform with over 300 million users. Today, it provides an array of services to Chinese women — not only keeping track of their menstrual cycles but also focusing on their general sexual health, fertility, and well-being. Continued here

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Change Your Life, One Habit at a Time: How to Break a Bad Habit and Create a New One, Zero Willpower Required To build a better business or career, start by building a better--and more consistent--you. Continued here

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The Best Way to Master a New Skill? Try This Creative Approach. Becoming skilled at tackling anything means going on a journey of highs and lows. Both extremes provide important feedback that lets you know where you are in the learning process. Most of us know how to interpret the high of a big new idea, but fewer of us have the tools to make sense of the harder moments, when we’re struggling to understand a concept. We forget that discomfort is an essential part of discovery. In those moments, how do you get “unstuck” and navigate your way forward? Continued here

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How to Find Out If a Company's Culture Is Right for You Probably not. Sadly, this is the case in more companies than you might think, though they rarely admit that in the job description. A majority of respondents (61%) to a Glassdoor survey said that they found aspects of a new job different than what they had expected based on the interview process. Company culture was cited as one of the factors that differ most. Continued here

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What Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Workers Need from Employers Trans and Gender Nonconforming Workers Could Benefit From These Company Changes. Here's How. Continued here

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10 Ways to Boost Customer Satisfaction Customer satisfaction is at its lowest point in the past two decades. Companies must focus on 10 areas of the customer experience to improve satisfaction without sacrificing revenue. The authors base their findings on research at the ACSI — analyzing millions of customer data points — and research that we conducted for The Reign of the Customer: Customer-Centric Approaches to Improving Customer Satisfaction. For three decades, the ACSI has been a leading satisfaction index (cause-and-effect metric) connected to the quality of brands sold by companies with significant market share in the United States. Continued here

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Science News Briefs from around the World: March 2023 A linguistic puzzle, ancient DNA, the origins of bipedalism, and much more in this month’s Quick HitsCenturies-old tree rings in today's Czech Republic and southeastern Bavaria suggest drought may have driven Attila the Hun's invasion of the Roman Empire. The rings helped researchers to reconstruct the fifth-century climate, identifying dry spells that may have forced the Huns to move on. Continued here

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What California Means to Writers Writers have long found inspiration in the Golden State: Your weekly guide to the best in booksWhat about California captures the imagination of American writers? The state—the country’s most populous, and one of its most diverse—provides fodder for every sort of author. Continued here

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Cosmos, Quickly: Remembering the Genius of Vera Rubin Vera Rubin went from a teenager with a cardboard telescope to the "mother of dark matter." Some of her colleagues and mentees weigh in on her fascinating life, and how she was a champion for women in astronomy.Alycia Weinberger: When I first went there in the early 1990s, there was a bathroom in a heated, comfortable, computer-driven observing room and it did not have any plate on the door to say whether it was for men or women. But I already knew this story about Vera and the bathrooms and so I went looking for the bathroom in question [laughs] in the observatory.  Continued here

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You Need an Innovation Strategy Without such a strategy, companies will have a hard time weighing the trade-offs of various practices—such as crowdsourcing and customer co-creation—and so may end up with a grab bag of approaches. They will have trouble designing a coherent innovation system that fits their competitive needs over time and may be tempted to ape someone else’s system. And they will find it difficult to align different parts of the organization with shared priorities. Continued here

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How Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Will Disrupt the Consulting Industry Here's what consultants can do. Continued here

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AI Chatbots Can Diagnose Medical Conditions at Home. How Good Are They? As more people turn to chat-based AIs for medical advice, it remains to be seen how these tools stack up against—or could complement—human doctorsBenjamin Tolchin, a neurologist and ethicist at Yale University, is used to seeing patients who searched for their symptoms on the Internet before coming to see him—a practice doctors have long tried to discourage. “Dr. Google” is notoriously lacking in context and prone to pulling up unreliable sources. Continued here

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How to Write a Winning Business Plan You’ve got a great idea for a new product or service—how can you persuade investors to support it? Flashy PowerPoint slides aren’t enough; you need a winning business plan. A compelling plan accurately reflects the viewpoints of your three key constituencies: the market, potential investors, and the producer (the entrepreneur or inventor of the new offering). Continued here

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New Report: Inflation Is Letting Up--but Be Prepared for a 'Bumpy' Road Ahead Economists still anticipate recession in 2023, as increased service prices continue to drive inflation. But that doesn't mean it's time for business owners to panic. Continued here

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The Secret to Having More Energy as an Entrepreneur That No One Talks About From physical strength to mental well-being, how you take care of your body impacts what you can accomplish in business. Continued here

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Economic Engagement Is the Answer for Employees How can your company resolve Marx's four forms of alienation? Continued here

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The Real Taylor Swift Would Never Fans are using AI tools to synthesize the star’s voice, demonstrating how new technology is blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction.AI Taylor Swift is mad. She is calling up Kim Kardashian to complain about her “lame excuse of a husband,” Kanye West. (Kardashian and West are, in reality, divorced.) She is threatening to skip Europe on her Eras Tour if her fans don’t stop asking her about international dates. She is insulting people who can’t afford tickets to her concerts and using an unusual amount of profanity. She’s being kind of rude. Continued here

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ChatGPT data leak has Italian lawmakers scrambling to regulate data collection Today an Italian regulator, the Guarantor for the Protection of Personal Data (referred to by its Italian acronym, GPDP), announced a temporary ban on ChatGPT in Italy. The ban is effective immediately and will remain in place while the regulator investigates its concerns that OpenAI—the developer of ChatGPT—is unlawfully collecting Italian Internet users’ personal data to train the conversational AI software and has no age verification system in place to prevent kids from accessing the tool. Continued here

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How saying "me" or "we" changes your psychological response — and the response of other people What comes to mind when you think about three little words: I, you, and we? Likely you don’t give them any thought at all — or if you do, you might assume they are simply a way to mark who is speaking at any given moment. But we have discovered that these “little words” can carry a big punch: They convey a host of implicit messages that enable people to move beyond their own perspective to imagine how someone else would think or feel. The words we choose give humans the flexibility of either focusing inward on the self (“I always make mistakes”) or adopting a broader, more inclusive perspective (“We all make mistakes”). Whenever you express your own thoughts, beliefs, and insights, you are making a choice by virtue of the words that you use, often without even realizing it. In this way, human languages provide a relatively effortless mechanism for reframing experience from personal and isolated, to general and shared with others. In contrast to deliberately shifting perspective when instructed to do so (an effortful task that is often difficult to achieve), shifting perspective by pronoun shifts is intrinsic to the structure of human languages, highly practiced, and entrenched in everyday conversation.  Continued here

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The First Electoral Test of Trump’s Indictment The most important election of 2023 may also offer crucial insights into the most important election of 2024.Next Tuesday’s vote for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been justifiably described as the most consequential election in the nation this year, because it will determine whether liberals or conservatives control a majority of the body. The election’s outcome will likely decide whether abortion in the state is completely banned and whether the severely gerrymandered state legislative maps that have locked in overwhelming Republican majorities since 2011 are allowed to remain in place. Continued here

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Don't Panic: The Valentine's Day 2046 asteroid will not hit Earth. Here's why. On February 14, 2046, a small but still decent-sized asteroid will almost certainly not hit Earth.That’s generally the way to bet about any space rock, but if you only read the headlines last week when a new near-Earth asteroid was discovered, you might get a different impression. The basic gist of many of them was, ‘NASA says an asteroid could hit Earth on Valentine’s Day 2046.’ Continued here

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How the Wealthiest Got to Where They Are The super-rich have an affinity for private equity investment, an appetite for risk, and copious savings, according to a study of wealth creation in Norway over 22 years.The wealthiest people earned their coveted places by investing in risky assets like their private businesses and then multiplying the returns, regardless of whether or not they had initial wealth from rich parents. In fact, accumulating savings from employment earnings by investing in safe assets like housing is not the best route to become of one the wealthiest. Those are the top takeaways from a new paper titled “Why Are the Wealthiest So Wealthy? A Longitudinal Empirical Investigation” by Wharton finance professor Sergio Salgado, St. Louis Fed research officer Serdar Ozkan, Penn economics professor Joachim Hubmer, and Statistics Norway researcher Elin Halvorsen. Continued here

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A remotely operated lab is taking shape 2.5 km under the sea In 1962, one of the world's first underwater research laboratories and human habitats was established off the coast of Marseilles, France, at a depth of 10 meters. The Conshelf 1 project consisted of a steel structure that hosted two men for a week. Continued here

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Childbirth Is No Fun. But an Extremely Fast Birth Can Be Worse. When Tess Camp was pregnant with her second child, she knew she would need to get to the hospital fast when the baby came. Her first labor had been short for a first-time mother (seven hours), and second babies tend to be in more of a hurry. Even so, she was not prepared for what happened: One day, at 40 weeks, she started feeling what she thought was just pregnancy back pain. Then her water broke, and 12 minutes later, she was holding a baby in her arms.Needless to say, she didn’t make it into the hospital in time. But the first contraction after Camp’s water broke at home had been so intense—“immediate horrific pain; I could barely talk”—that she and her husband rushed into the car. He drove through town like a madman, running red lights. They were turning into the ER when she saw the baby’s head between her legs. Her husband tore out of the car, yelling for help. A security guard ran over to a terrified Camp in the passenger’s seat, and in that moment, her son slipped out and into the security guard’s hands. His umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. An ER nurse finally appeared to take the baby—still blue and limp—and resuscitated him right on the curb. Continued here

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Ask Ethan: Do infinite copies of me exist in the Multiverse? When we look out into the Universe, we find that even if we restrict ourselves to what we can observe, the Universe itself is absolutely tremendous. There are trillions upon trillions of galaxies present within it, strewn across several tens of billions of light-years in space. Further out there, beyond the observable limits of our cosmic horizon, is certainly more Universe: with more galaxies, more stars, and more planets, perhaps even an infinite number of them all told. But there are also a very large, perhaps even infinite, number of possible quantum outcomes that can occur within the Universe. Could there be enough galaxies, stars, and “copies” of what we know of to contain all of these quantum possibilities?One of the most surprising mathematical facts that people learn is that the concept of infinity — that no matter how high you count, or how large you imagine a number to be, it’s always infinitely far away from “infinity” — is that not all infinities are the same. Some types of infinity truly are larger than others: like they’re somehow a greater degree of “infinite” than other infinities. It was this line of thought that led Daniel Krstyen to write in and ask: Continued here

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Why friendship makes us healthier Benny Shakes has to ration his energy when it comes to his friends. "I'm cancelling friend dates all the time," he admits.He has a high-energy job, as a touring stand-up comedian based in Nottingham, UK. He also has mental health issues and cerebral palsy, so "it is hard to keep up with friendships a lot because of my condition. I'm tired most of the time because it takes it out of me just sitting here working on the computer. It's draining." Continued here

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Right to repair, universal charging port mandates eyed to save Canadians money Like in other parts of the world, Canada is working out what the right to repair means for its people. The federal government said in its 2023 budget released Tuesday that it will bring the right to repair to Canada. At the same time, it's considering a universal charging port mandate like the European Union (EU) is implementing with USB-C. Continued here

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Why Americans Care About Work So Much Workism is rooted in the belief that employment can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion.This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week. Continued here

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The Influencer Industry Is Having an Existential Crisis People who make their living by sharing content on giant social-media platforms have tried to strike, organize, and even unionize, but they don’t have much to show for it.Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end. Continued here

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How old coal mines can help the climate In a cavernous warehouse on the outskirts of Gateshead, north-east England, cases upon cases of wine tower into the distance. You might think that keeping these towering stacks of alcohol at a comfortable ambient temperature year round would lead to a mind-boggling energy bill – especially through the unforgiving north-east winters.But, as is the case for a small but growing number of buildings in Gateshead, this is not so. Continued here

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Existential hope: How we can embrace deep time and create the brightest of futures Excerpted from The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time by Richard Fisher, available now in hardback, ebook, and audio download (Wildfire)When I talk or write about the long term — particularly the deep future — I sometimes encounter a form of resigned nihilism, expressed as: “That’s all very well, but we’ll all be gone.” In some circles, it has become almost fashionable to quip that the apocalypse is nigh. In that context, it becomes something of a trap to talk about the long view: you’re either seen as far too optimistic or callously unconcerned with today’s problems. Too much pessimism, though, can lead to doomism — a perspective that remains locked in the present, mired in apathy, helplessness or anger. Continued here

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Google Drive does a surprise rollout of file limits, locking out some users "Please delete 2 million files to continue using your Google Drive account." That was the message that Reddit user ra13 woke up to one day. Google apparently decided to put a hard limit on the number of files you're allowed to have on one Google Drive account. Google rolled out this file limit without warning anyone it would happen. Users over the limit found themselves suddenly locked out of new file uploads, and it was up to them to figure out what was going wrong. Continued here

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Billie Eilish, Vincent van Gogh, and the trippy science of synesthesia Excerpted from Where We Meet the World: The Story of the Senses, by Ashley Ward. Copyright © 2023. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.Some years ago, I was introduced to a fellow student on my grad course. She pondered my name for a moment before saying, “Ashley… Oh, that tastes of cabbage.” Putting aside what felt a little like a swipe, I quickly learned that Samara was one of those rare people who live with the extraordinary condition known as synesthesia. (Estimates variously put the incidence of synesthesia as low as one in every 2,000 people, or as high as one in every twenty-five.) Her everyday experiences were colored by unusual sensory interactions. When one of her senses was stimulated, it triggered an additional response, a kind of perceptual ricochet, in an entirely different sense.  Continued here

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Making Sense of Stock Buybacks Politicians and corporate America are clashing over stock buybacks. Here are the facts, according to Wharton’s Michael Roberts.In this opinion piece, Wharton finance professor Michael R. Roberts examines some of the arguments against stock buybacks and explains why buybacks are an important mechanism for returning money to investors and avoiding unprofitable investments. Continued here

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Meet the Long-Awaited Financial Regulation That's Making Banks Nervous Advocates of the CFPB's final rule believe it could spur investment for underserved businesses and help close lending gaps. Bankssay it'll hike costs. Continued here

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Deadly fungal outbreak in Wisconsin linked to neighborhood construction Toxic fungal spores wafting around a Wisconsin neighborhood—possibly spread by recent construction in the area—sparked an outbreak of rare infections that left one person dead, state health officials reported Friday in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Continued here

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Twitter posts the code it claims determines which tweets people see, and why Twitter has made good on one of CEO Elon Musk's many promises, posting on a Friday afternoon what it claims is the code for its tweet recommendation algorithm on GitHub. Continued here

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Hackers exploit WordPress plugin flaw that gives full control of millions of sites Hackers are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in a widely used WordPress plugin that gives them the ability to take complete control of millions of sites, researchers said. Continued here

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Review: D&D: Honor Among Thieves is a worthy homage to the classic RPG Of all the films due for release this spring, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was one of my most anticipated premieres, solely on the strength of those killer trailers. The film does not disappoint. It's a fresh, good-humored, energetic, and vastly entertaining fantasy/action/comedy, boasting a stellar cast and solid emotional core that serves as a worthy homage to the famous RPG that inspired it. Continued here

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The psychedelic DMT causes the brain to become hyperconnected, scans reveal N,N-dimethyltryptamine, more commonly known as DMT, is one of the most powerful psychedelics known to humankind. “The DMT experience is one in which people report going into a different dimension, an alternate reality that feels convincingly real, even more real than this everyday reality. One that has a spiritual significance,” Christopher Timmermann, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, told Nautilus in an interview. Continued here

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A Tale of Maternal Ambivalence A new novel, The Nursery, explores the mix of unexpected emotions—including rage, regret, and loneliness—that new motherhood can bring on.Motherhood has always been a subject ripe for mythmaking, whether vilification or idealization. Although fictional accounts, from antiquity until today, have offered us terrible, even treacherous mothers, including Euripides’s Medea and Livia Soprano, depictions of unrealistically all-good mothers, such as Marmee from Little Women, are more common and provide a sense of comfort. Maternal characters on the dark end of the spectrum provoke our unease because their monstrous behavior so clearly threatens society’s standards for mothers. They show that mother love isn’t inevitable, and that veering off from the expected response to a cuddly new infant isn’t inconceivable. Continued here

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GM kills more than CarPlay support, it kills choice A long while back, Toyota told me it didn't want to give up interior real estate to Apple’s CarPlay. The automaker felt that losing that space to the tech company would be a huge mistake. Fast forward a few years, and after what I assume were some internal struggles, it caved and now you can get CarPlay and Android Auto on your fancy new Highlander, Prius, Tacoma, or Camry. It seemed like a silly decision had been reversed. Now it’s GM’s turn to go down the same path. Continued here

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The world’s most successful pirate was a Chinese woman At the dawn of the 19th century, a former prostitute from a floating brothel in the city of Canton was wed to Cheng I, a fearsome pirate who operated in the South China Sea in the Qing dynasty.One of the names under which we now know her, Ching Shih, simply means “Cheng’s widow,” but the legacy she left behind far exceeded that of her husband’s. (She is also known as Cheng I Sao or Zheng Yi Sao.) Following his death, she succeeded him and commanded over 1,800 pirate ships, and an estimated 80,000 men. In comparison, the famed Blackbeard commanded four ships and 300 pirates. Continued here

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Photos of the Week: Spiral Shelves, Steel Cube, Village Basketball The World Blind Golf Championships in South Africa, a memorial for victims of the school shooting in Nashville, a tattoo convention in Ecuador, a sunrise over Rio de Janeiro, flooding in California, protests in Israel and France, China Fashion Week in Beijing, a T. rex auction in Switzerland, and much more An engineer studies one of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park in South London on March 27, 2023, following news that the park will receive a new heritage grant for renovations. The dinosaur sculptures have been in Crystal Palace Park since its opening in 1854. They are listed "Grade 1" on Historic England's National Register of Heritage Monuments, but have also been registered as "at risk" and in line for conservation since 2020. # Continued here

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Google Bard gets better at homework with improved math and logic capabilities Google Bard is getting a little smarter today with the addition of math and logic capabilities. Google employee Jack Krawczyk announced the change on Twitter, saying, "Now Bard will better understand and respond to your prompts for multi-step word and math problems, with coding coming soon." Continued here