Anemia afflicts nearly 1 in 4 people worldwide, but there are practical strategies for reducing it

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Anemia afflicts nearly 1 in 4 people worldwide, but there are practical strategies for reducing it     Anemia is a major health problem, with nearly 2 billion people affected globally. It afflicts more people worldwide than low back pain or diabetes – or even anxiety and depression combined. Despite this, investments in reducing anemia have failed to substantially reduce the massive burden of anemia globally over the last few decades. Continued here

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Johannesburg fire: there was a plan to fix derelict buildings and provide good accommodation - how to move forward     Writing fellow at the African Centre for Migration Studies, University of the Witwatersrand Centennial Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Architecture and Planning, Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies, University of the Witwatersrand Continued here

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Bharat: why the recent push to change India's name has a hidden agenda     The invitations to a state dinner to mark India’s hosting of this year’s G20 came not, as you’d expect, from the office of the president of India, but from the “president of Bharat”. This has prompted speculation from observers both at home and abroad about whether this signifies an official government intention to rename the country.Some have suggested that the ruling BJP (Bharatiya Janata arty) is rattled, and is responding to the adoption of the acronym INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) by a group of more than two dozen opposition political parties ahead of the general elections in 2024. Continued here

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Is Google's Search Engine Smart or Sneaky? A Court Will Decide     A family member's hurried Google search for a last-second visa to visit New Zealand recently caused a headache—and provided a timely reminder of why Google faces a landmark US antitrust trial next week.Tapping on the first link took us off to a website that after a few swipes charged $118 for the necessary paperwork. Only later did it emerge that we'd paid a so-called "internet-based travel technology company" and not a government agency, and been fleeced for more than double the required cost. Continued here

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Our Favorite Digital Notebooks and Smart Pens     If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDDo you take a lot of notes? Whether you're in school or working in a job that requires lots of jotting down ideas, you may opt for typing notes on a laptop, but physically writing something down helps you remember and learn more. Putting real pen to paper also just feels good. However, having a digital backup is convenient for on-the-go organization and studying. Continued here

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The Best Meal Kit Delivery Services for Every Kind of Cook     If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDTrying to choose the best meal kit delivery service? It's easy to feel overwhelmed by all the options. Whether you're going vegan, cooking for a family of six, or are a complete newbie in the kitchen, there's probably a service that caters to your needs. Some meal kits provide ingredients paired with recipes, while others send groceries or premade meals. All of them are meant to make the process of planning and cooking meals more convenient. Continued here

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The worst prediction in all of science     A successful scientific theory is one that makes precise and accurate predictions. Scientists are even happier when two distinct theories make predictions that agree with one another. Thus, physicists are a bit chagrined when they use their two best theories to predict the simplest possible quantity, and the result is that they disagree spectacularly enough that it is often called “the worst prediction in the history of science.”Empty space is, well, empty. Containing nothing, it would seem that calculating the energy of empty space would be simple and the prediction would be zero. However, that expectation is not correct. Continued here

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Could we burn iron for energy instead of fossil fuels?     Try burning an iron metal ingot and you’ll have to wait a long time — but grind it into a powder and it will readily burst into flames. That’s how sparklers work: metal dust burning in a beautiful display of light and heat. But could we burn iron for more than fun? Could this simple material become a cheap, clean, carbon-free fuel?In new experiments — conducted on rockets, in microgravity — Canadian and Dutch researchers are looking at ways of boosting the efficiency of burning iron, with a view to turning this abundant material — the fourth most common in the Earth’s crust, about about 5% of its mass — into an alternative energy source. Continued here

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The truth is out there: Celebrate 30 years of The X-Files with our 30 favorite episodes     In September 1993, fictional FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) made their broadcast TV debut on The X-Files and went on to investigate alien abductions and all manner of strange phenomena for nine full seasons and two feature films, followed by two additional limited-run seasons in 2016 and 2018. This hugely popular and influential series celebrates its 30th anniversary this month, giving us a prime opportunity to pay homage to our favorite episodes and characters. Continued here

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Photos of the Week:     The World Tango Championship in Argentina, devastating floods in Greece, a scene from the 80th Venice Film Festival, a cricket game in Afghanistan, a light festival in South Africa, a buffalo police patrol in Brazil, a muddy mess at the Burning Man Festival, and much more This picture taken on September 2, 2023 shows a player scoring a try during the Water Rugby Lausanne by jumping into Lake Geneva from a floating rugby field. The match was part of a three-day tournament organized by the LUC Rugby that gathered more than 240 players in Lausanne, Switzerland. # Continued here

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Three Cheers for Partisanship     My most vivid memories of my early years at sleepaway camp, when I was 10 and 11, focus on the bizarre institution of color war. The campers were divided randomly in half for a wide-ranging competition between teams defined around no common identity, status, experience, or prior allegiance—just pure partisan competition. For one entire day, half of my bunkmates and possibly one or both of my brothers would become the sworn opposition. Despite knowing these divisions were both temporary and arbitrary, I engaged in the competition with the utmost seriousness—in relay races, basketball games, and whatever else was on the packed schedule.At day’s close, two climactic showdowns involved the whole camp, each team gathered on opposite sides of a ball field. The first competition required us to shout self-congratulatory cheers; the victory was awarded to the team that impressed the judges as louder and, thus, more spirited. I would scream myself hoarse. The finale, a tug-of-war, relied less on an umpire’s subjective assessment. We lined up alongside a massive rope stretched across the field and pulled with all our collective might. I can still picture the anchor of my team during one of those summers, a stout boy with a low center of gravity from the oldest age group, wrapping himself with the far end of our rope, his face red from the strain. I also remember the magical feeling, after what seemed like an endless and titanic effort, when the rope began to edge slowly but decisively in our direction. Continued here

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The 9/11 Speech That Was Never Delivered     The long-hidden drafts of Condoleezza Rice’s remarks offer a portrait of a lost world—and some lessons for the present.William Safire wrote in the introduction to his classic compendium Lend Me Your Ears that “what makes a draft speech a real speech is the speaking of it.” But I’ve found that some of the most interesting speeches written were never delivered at all. I spent years collecting examples of the words that went unspoken because events intervened, or a leader had a change of heart, or history took a sudden turn. Continued here

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The Origin Revisited     — After a visit to the Yaak Valley in Kootenai National Forest, Montana, where the U.S. Forest Service has announced a logging project called Black RamWhat is there to be done now, but enter               against abandonment, become a hollow sound Continued here

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'He'll Ruin Your Life the Way His Daddy Ruined Ours'     My father and mother met in the winter of 1976. I’ve seen photos. There they are, looking as young and untroubled as any two high-school students on a Friday-night date. Not yet parents, not yet weighed down with the responsibility of caring for four children, both are smiling, my father standing behind my mother, who sits on a stool with her head nestled into his chest.My parents were introduced by my father’s cousin Larry, whose easy smile and welcoming personality marked him as a charmer. Larry and my mom attended school at J. O. Johnson High in Huntsville, Alabama, where he was two years ahead of her. Intrigued by the sly older boy, my mother dated him, but after the second outing, she opted to let him down easy by introducing him to her friend Wanda. Larry, in turn, suggested that my mother meet his cousin Esau, who went to school out in the country, at Gurley High. Continued here

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Red States Are Rolling Back the Rights Revolution     The struggle over the sweeping red-state drive to roll back civil rights and liberties has primarily moved to the courts.Since 2021, Republican-controlled states have passed a swarm of laws to restrict voting rights, increase penalties for public protest, impose new restrictions on transgender youth, ban books, and limit what teachers, college professors, and employers can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Some states are even exploring options to potentially prosecute people who help women travel out of state to obtain an abortion. Continued here

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The Joy and the Shame of Loving Football     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.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is the staff writer and author Mark Leibovich. Mark has recently written about the long-shot presidential candidate who has the White House worried, and how Moneyball broke baseball. Continued here

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Where End-of-Life Care Falls Short     Advance directives are meant to honor a person's final medical wishes. Why do so few Black Americans have them?When Kevin E. Taylor became a pastor 22 years ago, he didn’t expect how often he’d have to help families make gut-wrenching decisions for a loved one who was very ill or about to die. The families in his predominantly Black church in New Jersey generally didn’t have any written instructions, or conversations to recall, to help them know if their relative wanted—or didn’t want—certain types of medical treatment. Continued here

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Earthquakes Are a Special Kind of Nightmare     Morocco is facing the particular trauma that comes from watching the world around you crumble in an instant.On Friday, around 11:11 p.m. local time, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake exploded through the High Atlas mountains in Morocco, not far from the populous city of Marrakesh. People as far away as Spain and Portugal felt a strange vibration ripple beneath their feet. But millions in Morocco felt the planet shake and splinter, jolt and disintegrate, before thousands of the most unfortunate were greeted by tectonic rage. At least 2,100 people are dead, and that number is expected to rise. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center, an NGO, several aftershocks convulsed through the area earlier today. Continued here

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The Half-Life of Hope     After breaking out of timidity with “Spell Against Indifference,” an offering of another poem — this one inspired by a lovely piece of science news that touched me with its sonoro… Continued here

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Dumb Money review: GameStop comedy is 'funny, irreverent and crowd-pleasing'     There's a strange disconnect whenever a major Hollywood studio releases a film that seems to be about little guys beating a big, bad system. It's a jarring undertone that Dumb Money, based on the real-life story of how small-time investors briefly thwarted Wall Street, can't escape. Sony stands to make lots of money on the film, which mocks the rich and powerful. But it may be best not to think about that for a couple of hours and just enjoy the show.Dumb Money is not as smart or skewering as it pretends to be – on-screen text at the end claims that Wall Street has permanently changed because of this financial blip – but it is funny, irreverent and crowd-pleasing, with a kaleidoscope of likeable characters and actors. Director Craig Gillespie (Cruella and I, Tonya) has turned a saga that ended up before a Congressional finance committee into a breezy entertainment.  Continued here

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Mangosuthu Buthelezi was a man of immense political talent and contradictions     Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, who has died, was a history maker. He was born on 27 August 1928 into a tumultuous global century, and into the local conditions of racist rule.A man of singular political talent, Buthelezi was among the country’s most influential black leaders for the majority of his long and remarkable life. Yet he occupied an anomalous position within the politics of the anti-apartheid struggle. He brokered Zulu ethnic nationalism, feeding a measure of credibility into apartheid ideals of “separate development”. This, against growing calls for unity under a democratic, South Africanist banner. But he claimed his position to be a realistic strategy, as opposed to armed struggle. Continued here

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Mangosuthu Buthelezi: the Zulu nationalist who left his mark on South Africa's history     Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi played a prominent role in South African politics for almost half a century. He was one of the last of a generation of black South African leaders who influenced the transition from the white minority apartheid regime to a society under a democratically elected government. Prince Buthelezi (95) was born on 27 August 1928 in Mahlabatini into the Zulu royal family. His mother Princess Magogo ka Dinuzulu was the daughter of King Dinizulu. His grandfather was the prime minister of King Cetshwayo. So, he was the first-born in line to the Buthelezi chieftainship. Continued here

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Ancient shoes: tracks on a South African beach offer oldest evidence yet of human footwear     When and where did our ancestors first fashion footwear? We cannot look to physical evidence of shoes for the answer, as the perishable materials from which they were made would no longer be evident. Ichnology, the study of fossil tracks and traces, can help to answer this unresolved question through a search for clear evidence of footprints made by humans who were shod – that is, wearing some kind of foot covering. We also considered the areas where ancient hominin tracks have been reported. This revealed that there are two prime places on the planet to look for footprint evidence of early shod hominins: western Europe and the Cape coast of South Africa. We followed up with a little crafting of our own to create the types of footwear that might have been worn. Most of the tracksites we have found are between about 70,000 years and 150,000 years in age, so that is the time period we focused on. Continued here

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A Departure from Reality, by Viet Thanh Nguyen     In order to re member yourself and your mother, you examine the paper fragments of your past. Sometime before the fall of 1990, you visit your mother in what you remember as the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward. In a fitful, fragmentary journal you keep in college, you describe yourself as feelingNone of the patients, your mother included, appears to be a member of your reality. Seven or eight months later, while you are a sophomore at Berkeley, you try to write about the Asian Pacific Psychiatric Ward in a seminar led by Maxine Hong Kingston. In your essay, you describe how a woman named Trinh rolls on the floor before a ward attendant, a Black woman, gently picks her up. Then Continued here

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Naomi Klein Sees Uncanny Doubles in Our Politics     In 2008, in a Profile for this magazine, Larissa MacFarquhar described Naomi Klein as “the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago.” Klein became famous in 1999 for “No Logo,” her manifesto about globalization and consumption; she published “The Shock Doctrine,” in 2007, about disaster capitalism, and 2014’s “This Changes Everything,” about the climate crisis. She’s been a prominent Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate and public advocate for the Green New Deal.Klein’s books are serious, though not humorless; she cuts a reliably resolute figure, modelling for her audience that one’s mind can be on dissolution and disaster while one’s person remains entirely poised, even cool. And so her new book, “Doppelganger,” comes as something of a surprise. Its leaping-off point is not global warming or the expansion of government surveillance but, rather, the fact that Naomi Klein, for more than a decade, has been regularly mistaken for Naomi Wolf. “We both write big-idea books,” Klein writes, and “have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting. . . . We’re both Jewish.” Both had partners named Avram. (Klein’s husband, who in 2021 ran for office with Canada’s socialist party, goes by Avi.) And though they had once had distinct areas of expertise, their specialties eventually began to converge. I can attest to the durability of this confusion: before I interviewed Klein at The New Yorker Festival in 2017, I received multiple texts from friends saying, “Good luck with Naomi Wolf!” Continued here

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You Need to Watch the Greatest Sci-Fi Movie Ever Made on Amazon ASAP     In the late ‘60s, one movie somewhat amazingly united the niche sci-fi audience, hardcore film snobs, and a chunk of mainstream viewers like no movie before (or since). This Stanley Kubrick masterpiece wasn’t an overnight success, but well-received theatrical revivals in 1971 and 1974 changed its perception. Well before the Lucas-Spielberg sci-fi movie renaissance of the 1980s, the standard was, in many ways, 2001. At one point in the ‘70s, John Lennon claimed he watched this movie “every week.”But does it deserve its crown as the greatest sci-fi movie ever? Is its story of an evil AI still relevant today? And what is it that makes 2001: A Space Odyssey so unique? The short answers are kind of, very much so, and because there was never a collaboration like this in the history of sci-fi before or since. Read on for the long answer. Continued here

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Scientists Debunk the Most Advanced Space Tech We've Ever Seen in Star Wars     Ahsoka is about to make Star Wars history by traveling to another galaxy. Could humanity do the same thing one day?Ahsoka is taking familiar Star Wars characters to a place they have never gone before: a different galaxy, promising to be every bit as sprawling and vibrant and beautiful as the one we’ve long seen. Continued here

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'Ahsoka' Embraces the Best Part of Star Wars' Sequel Trilogy     The Battle of Yavin may be the event the entire Star Wars timeline officially revolves around, but the destruction of the Jedi Order at the end of Revenge of the Sith is arguably more important. The Star Wars franchise has begun to feel increasingly separated into two eras: Before Order 66 and After. Despite that, fans haven’t seen many characters fully grapple with the fallout of the Jedi Order’s dissolution.That’s what makes Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) and his role in Ahsoka so compelling. While the character’s plans remain shrouded in mystery, Baylan’s entire personality seems to be a direct reaction to Order 66 and the downfall of Anakin Skywalker. He says as much during his confrontation with Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) on Seatos, making his bitterness over the fate of the Jedi tragically clear. Through Baylan, Ahsoka has begun to explore the true psychological impact the Jedi Order’s destruction had on its few surviving members. Continued here

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You Need to Play the Most Underrated Metroid Game on Nintendo Switch Online ASAP     In the early 2000s, selling two games at once became something of a trend. Blame it on Pokémon, whose Red and Blue sold approximately a bajillion copies. The only difference between the Red and Blue versions was which Pokémon you got, and the mandate to “catch ‘em all” made grabbing both irresistible.It was also a period of technological shift, as the second generation of 3D consoles became the unquestioned top dogs. But Pokémon had shown that the consoles no longer had to operate alone. Games like Pokémon Stadium had shown that big consoles like the N64 could operate in cohesion with their handheld siblings. Continued here

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Why Does My Cat Eat Plastic? Veterinarians Reveal The Surprisingly Simple Answer      For all the tasty kibble, pâtés, treats, and home-cooked meals you offer your pets, sometimes they still gobble up strange non-food items. But perhaps nothing is as bizarre as a cat’s obsession with plastic. Whether it's ribbons or bandaid ends, even the most well-fed cats seem to jump at the chance to chow down on plastic. It turns out there is a reason for this odd behavior.The general term for eating an item that isn’t food is called pica (PIE-ca). Anyone — not just our pets — can have this condition, but pica can be especially dangerous to pets because it may cause a life-threatening intestine or bowel obstruction. Molly DeVoss, a cat behavior specialist, tells Inverse that she doesn’t know of any particular chemical compound that cats and dogs might be attracted to. Continued here