Just how rich are businesses getting in the AI gold rush? - The Economist (No paywall)

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Just how rich are businesses getting in the AI gold rush? - The Economist (No paywall)     Barely a day goes by without excitement about artificial intelligence (AI) sending another company’s market value through the roof. Earlier this month the share price of Dell, a hardware manufacturer, jumped by over 30% in a day because of hopes that the technology will boost sales. Days later Together AI, a cloud-computing startup, raised new funding at a valuation of $1.3bn, up from $500m in November. One of its investors is Nvidia, a maker of AI chips that is itself on an extended bull run. Before the launch of ChatGPT, a “generative” AI that responds to queries in uncannily humanlike ways, in November 2022 its market capitalisation was about $300bn, similar to that of Home Depot, a home-improvement chain. Today it sits at $2.3trn, $300bn or so short of Apple’s. Continued here

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Never-Repeating Patterns of Tiles Can Safeguard Quantum Information - WIRED (No paywall)     If you want to tile a bathroom floor, square tiles are the simplest option—they fit together without any gaps in a grid pattern that can continue indefinitely. That square grid has a property shared by many other tilings: Shift the whole grid over by a fixed amount, and the resulting pattern is indistinguishable from the original. But to many mathematicians, such “periodic” tilings are boring. If you’ve seen one small patch, you’ve seen it all.In the 1960s, mathematicians began to study “aperiodic” tile sets with far richer behavior. Perhaps the most famous is a pair of diamond-shaped tiles discovered in the 1970s by the polymathic physicist and future Nobel laureate Roger Penrose. Copies of these two tiles can form infinitely many different patterns that go on forever, called Penrose tilings. Yet no matter how you arrange the tiles, you’ll never get a periodic repeating pattern. Continued here

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The latest twist in John Green's anti-tuberculosis story: working with governments     WASHINGTON — John Green, the popular novelist and YouTube star, gave the health care world a taste of his clout last year when he and his “Nerdfighter” fan base pressured corporations to cut prices for tuberculosis treatment. This week, he announced a more collaborative strategy for fighting tuberculosis — a public-private funding partnership with USAID and the Philippines.Green and his family are contributing up to $4 million of the $57 million in new funding to test and treat tuberculosis in the Philippines. He is hoping to see an expansion of public-private funding models to accelerate the fight against TB, which kills 1.5 million people globally each year. Continued here

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The TV Shows That Don't Solve Their Mysteries - The Atlantic (No paywall)     In 1996, the Fox network exploited our worries about the coming of the year 2000 with a show titled Millennium, and it was, initially, superb. Millennium followed the adventures of a possibly psychic former FBI agent who seemed to be on the trail of a rising tide of mayhem sparked by the approaching new era. But Millennium wasn’t a crime procedural: Something huge was going on in the show, something that involved demons, a shadowy group (maybe Nazis, maybe not) searching for chunks of the cross of Jesus Christ, and deranged killers shouting things like “The thousand years is over!”I know, I know. Almost everyone loved Jodie Foster and Kali Reis in True Detective, and they were great. The show lured us in with a horrifying mystery: a “corpsicle” of naked, mutilated, frozen bodies in the Alaskan snow. Characters began to see ghosts. The dead spoke to the living. Body parts showed up in a mysterious lab. And after several episodes, we finally learned … Continued here

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Analysis: Amazon sellers say their businesses are facing an extinction event--they might not be wrong - Fortune (No paywall)     “This time” refers to the latest class of fees levied on sellers by Amazon. More than 60% of the goods that Amazon sells across the globe are supplied by these small and mid-sized businesses, and Amazon already takes a cut of at least 50% on average from every sale when it handles the storage and shipping of a merchant’s goods.Now the amount that merchants fork over to Amazon is likely to grow even more thanks to a couple of additional fees that have quickly become controversial enough that the Federal Trade Commission has begun probing them, as Fortune reported exclusively last week. The consistent message that long-time, level-headed sellers are sharing with each other? Selling on Amazon may soon be untenable. Continued here

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Visualizing all the Global Endangered Languages     ’s Continued here

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17 astounding scientific mysteries that researchers can't yet solve     “Whatever we know is provisional,” Priya Natarajan, a Yale physicist, told us about research on dark matter. But the sentiment also applies to science overall. “It is apt to change. What motivates people like me to continue doing science is the fact that it keeps opening up more and more questions. Nothing is ultimately resolved.” Unexplainable isn’t about how scientists don’t know anything. Science is a process of narrowing a gap between the questions we have and the capabilities of our tools and know-how to answer them. In many cases, that gap appears closed. No one doubts, for instance, the existence of gravity. Continued here

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Photos of the Week: Bridal Carry,     X-ray analysis of an 18th-century violin in France, scenes from the Academy Awards in Hollywood, a march for International Women's Day in Mexico, the launch of a SpaceX rocket in Texas, white-water canoeing in New Zealand, Ramadan prayers in Indonesia, the Crufts dog show in England, and much more Demonstrators take part in a march to mark International Women's Day in San Salvador on March 9, 2024. # Continued here

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Erich Fromm on What Self-Love Really Means     “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion famously wrote in making her case for the value of keeping a notebook. But many of us frequently find it hard enough to be on nodding terms even with the people we currently are. “We have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism,” psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote in contemplating the perils of self-criticism and how to break free from the internal critics that enslave us. And yet can we even imagine self-celebration — do we even know what it looks like — if we are so blindly bedeviled by self-criticism? Can we, in other words, celebrate what we cannot accept and therefore cannot love?How to break this Möbius strip of self-rejection is what the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explores in a portion of his timeless 1956 treatise The Sane Society (public library) — the source of Fromm’s increasingly timely wisdom on our best shot at saving ourselves from ourselves. Continued here

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Digital twins are an effective new way to control your metabolism     Some of the first digital twins ever created were “living models” of NASA’s moon missions, first used to help study what went wrong aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft. These models were a step forward from conventional computer simulations of physical aircraft. Data was continuously being collected and analyzed, so these models would update and learn, and be able to better predict faults or reactions to different conditions. Jahangir Mohammed founded Twin Health to create a digital twin for an even more complicated machine: the human body. He’s using personalized digital avatars to help treat patients with type 2 diabetes. Continued here

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The Importance of Adaptability in Leadership     Change is constant in the business world, and leaders must be willing to embrace it. Here's how. Continued here

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1 Year Ago, Taylor Swift Launched 'The Eras Tour' and Taught the World This Powerful Lesson     On March 17, 2023, Taylor Swift set out on what would turn out to be the most successful concert tour of all time. The Eras Tour would go on to break records and earn more than $1 billion, and it isn't even over yet. In addition to the concert tour, the last year has been particularly good for Swift overall. She released her most popular album, 1989 (Taylor's Version), became the NFL's most famous fan, and got to cheer on her boyfriend as his team won the Super Bowl. Oh, and she was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year.  Continued here

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In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times     It has been a difficult year — politically, personally. Through it all, I have found solace in taking a more telescopic view — not merely on the short human timescale of my own life, looking back on having lived through a Communist dictatorship and having seen poems composed and scientific advances made under such tyrannical circumstances, but on far vaster scales of space and time.When I was growing up in Bulgaria, a great point of national pride — and we Bulgarians don’t have too many — was that an old Bulgarian folk song had sailed into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft, the 1977 mission NASA launched with the scientific objective of photographing the planets of the outer solar system, which furnished the very first portrait of our cosmic neighborhood. Human eyes had never before been laid on the arresting aquamarine of Uranus, on Neptune’s stunning deep-blue orb, on the splendid fury of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot — a storm more than threefold the size of our entire planet, raging for three hundred years, the very existence of which dwarfs every earthly trouble. Continued here

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Your Dream Job May Not Exist, and That's Okay     For decades, the mantra “follow your passion” has been one of the most popular pieces of career advice. Ever since Steve Jobs famously told Stanford graduates back in 2005 to “find what you love”, university students have been nudged to pursue careers that align perfectly with their personal interests. But this approach can be misguided. In her book, The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality, Erin Cech argues that students from underprivileged backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to the pitfalls of this advice. This is because they lack the financial safety nets and don’t have the luxury to spend time exploring various career options before making a definitive decision.  Continued here

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A Video Captures a Searing Portrait of the Subway, and of the City Above     A nearly five-minute recording of a fight on the A train shows New York’s gravest problems, like illegal guns and mental illness, distilled in a single subway car. Continued here

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Quit-Tok: why young workers are refusing to leave their job quietly - FT (No paywall)     Videos of people resigning or being made redundant are going viral on social media in bid for workplace transparency Continued here

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Behind the Brand With TED's Chris Anderson     After a lucrative career as a media mogul in the internet's early days, Chris acquired TED through his private nonprofit in 2001 and transformed it from a $4,000-per-ticket, small, niche, in-person conference to one of the most recognizable media organizations in the world.TED's free talks and "ideas worth spreading" have collectively reached billions, inspiring hundreds of derivative TEDx events worldwide where humans highlight profoundly impactful and personal discoveries. Continued here

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The Wonder and Danger of Nature     Jesse Lenz's new collection of photographs, The Seraphim, opens with a striking image: A child stands facing away from the camera, hair caught in the wind, gazing out at a forbidding landscape. The frame is caught—about to advance, as if it's a movie playing out; it holds the promise of an unfolding moment. This opening captures the overarching theme of the book, which explores through the lens of childhood the wonder of life and the rhythms of nature.Lenz spent four years documenting his six children against the backdrop of their farm in rural Ohio. These are not sweet images of children in nature: "I don't think about children (or childhood) as innocent," he told me. "Having six, you certainly know they are not." Lenz views nature as a place for children to discover a sense of wonder and mystery—and the essential element of danger: "Nature has always been what teaches humans first about the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is where we are tested, where we experience the numinous, and where we are confounded." Continued here

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The Real Lessons of the Alabama IVF Ruling     The regulation of the fertility industry is strangely underdeveloped, leaving parents, children, clinics, and practitioners lacking even basic information, protections, and boundaries.When the Alabama Supreme Court found on February 16 that frozen embryos are protected by the state's wrongful-death law in the same way that embryos inside a mother's womb are, it set off one of those depressing and familiar 21st-century political firestorms. Continued here

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Consultants Are Paid to Fix Businesses. Why Can't They Fix Their Own? - WSJ (No paywall)     At Boston Consulting Group, junior staffers have been peppering more senior consultants with a now-familiar query: Do you have work for me?The answer has often been no.Big and established consulting firms such as McKinsey, BCG and Deloitte, which are paid to predict the future for the world's biggest corporations, have gotten their own destiny wrong.The fallout is messy. Continued here

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Opinion | The Spectacle of the Ambani Wedding Event Reveals India's Inequality     On a long weekend in early March, members of the global elite gathered to celebrate the impending nuptials of the billionaire business titan Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, Anant, and Radhika Merchant. Monarchs, politicians and the ultrawealthy, including Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump, descended on an oil refinery city in the western Indian state of Gujarat for an event so extravagant you’d be forgiven for thinking it was, well, a wedding. But that will take place in July. For the long windup to the big day, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars, though invited as guests, took to the stage to sing and dance in what amounted to a bending of the knee to India’s most powerful family.Watching the event, I couldn’t help thinking of the 1911 durbar, or royal reception, when King George V was proclaimed emperor of India. Once India won its independence from Britain in 1947, it committed itself to becoming a democratic welfare state — an audacious experiment that resulted in what is now the world’s largest democracy. But in advance of this year’s general election, expected to begin in April, the Ambani-Merchant matrimonial extravaganza shows us where true power in India now lies: with a handful of people whose untrammeled wealth and influence has elevated them to the position of India’s shadow leaders. Continued here

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Opinion | The Best Way to Find Out if We Can Cool the Planet     As the disastrous effects of climate change mount, Congress has asked federal scientists for a research plan, private money is flowing and rogue start-ups are attempting experiments — all signs that momentum around solar geoengineering is building fast. The most discussed approach involves spraying tiny particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. Other proposals include injecting sea salt into clouds to increase their reflectivity or using giant space parasols to block the sun.It might all sound like dystopian science fiction, but some techno-futurists, like OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, are already normalizing it: “We’re going to have to do something dramatic with climate like geoengineering as a Band-Aid, as a stop gap,” he said in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Continued here

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Amazfit Balance Review: Most Improved, Still Exasperating     It's much better than previous ones I've tried, but exasperating software does not make up for great-looking hardware. Continued here

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We should be open about organoid research to avoid a backlash - New Scientist (No paywall)     SCIENTIFIC advances and societal norms rarely progress at the same pace, a mismatch that is behind some of the biggest controversies in science, from the theory of evolution to genetically modified foods. Should scientists be doing more to take the public with them as research fields develop?Researchers behind a high-tech advance in healthcare (see “Organoids made from uterus fluid may help treat fetuses before birth”) should be praised for their open approach. The work involves obtaining cells that have been shed by a fetus in the uterus and coaxing them into forming tiny balls of tissue, sometimes called… Continued here

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Need to Spark Ideas and Inspiration? Pack Your Suitcase for Some Time Away     Continued here

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The Hidden Toll of Surviving Layoffs     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.Workers who keep their jobs after layoffs are considered the lucky ones. Still, dealing with the stress and guilt of a changed workplace can be harrowing for those unsure if they will be next. Continued here

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A Civil-War Movie With No One Worth Cheering     Alex Garland's new film imagines a United States torn asunder, and denies any easy explanations about why.In Alex Garland's new film, Civil War, the United States has fallen into an internecine conflict pitting the government against separatist forces—a narrative with uncomfortable resonance in these politically polarized times. Unlike in our own world, it's never really clear in the movie why the nation is fighting itself. We kick off with vague talk of "western forces" and an implausible-sounding alliance between Texas and California, but there isn't much more explanatory world-building. All we know is that America is a battleground; the other blanks can be filled in however you'd like. Continued here

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What SPF Should I Use?     SPF, or sun protection factor, gauges the extent to which sunscreen protects your skin against ultraviolet UVB rays. Kseniya Kobets, M.D., board-certified dermatologist and director of cosmetic dermatology at Montefiore Einstein Advanced Care, explained that UVB and UVA rays both cause DNA damage, but UVB causes more immediate skin burning whereas UVA damage is more delayed and causes hyperpigmentation on the skin.As for how the SPF number indicates protection level, it helps to explain by example. The SPF number indicates a multiplier of protection. For example, wearing an SPF 30 means that your skin  will take 30 times longer to burn than it would without sunscreen.  Kobets breaks it down further: If you would normally burn after five minutes in the sun, then with SPF 30 it will take 2.5 hours to burn. Another way to think about it is that SPF 15 sunscreen will block 93 percent of UVB radiation, which is significant coverage, but SPF 30 blocks 97 percent, and SPF 50 blocks 98 percent of rays. Continued here

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Reddit's Sale of User Data for AI Training Draws FTC Inquiry     The platform says it stands to make more than $200 million in coming years from Google and other companies that want user comments to feed AI projects. Regulators have questions. Continued here

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The FCC Now Says Broadband Speed Should Be at Least 100 Mbps     Continued here

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The 47 Best Movies on Netflix This Week     From Spaceman to Leave the World Behind, here are our picks for the best streaming titles to feast your eyes on. Continued here

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Walmart Is Selling the Apple MacBook Air With M1 for Just $699     Plus: Reddit gives advertisers tools to make them look like regular users, the FTC wants you to eat more ice cream, and TikTok is in lawmakers' crosshairs yet again. Continued here

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11 Best Organic Mattresses, Toppers, Bedding (2024): Nontoxic and Natural     These nontoxic beds and bedsheets are easier on the environment and your health—and they feel like a dream. Continued here

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How to Free Up Space in Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive     How many unread emails do you have right now? Sixty? Six thousand? Well, all of those messages and attachments take up space, whether they're unread, old, or archived. And if you're on Gmail and aren't one of those weird inbox zero people who stays on top of things, you might be running out of space.If Google's got its Gmail hooks into you, there's a good chance you're also invested in the other parts of Google's Cloud ecosystem—Drive and Photos. Google used to be a bastion of infinite storage space—once offering unlimited room for photos and emails. But now the company has been a lot more strict about counting the megabytes you use across its services. Soon, even WhatsApp backups may count against your storage allotment. Continued here

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Winners of the British Wildlife Photography Awards     Organizers of the 2024 British Wildlife Photography Awards just announced their collection of winners and runners-up. More than 14,000 images were submitted in 11 different categories, celebrating the wildlife and wild spaces found across the United Kingdom. Competition organizers were kind enough to share some of this year's amazing images below. Captions were provided by the photographers. Running on Water. RSPB Young British Wildlife Photographer of the Year and 15-17 Years Winner. "I woke up at 4:45 a.m. with the hope of capturing backlit waterfowl images at Frensham Pond in Surrey. I lay down at the edge of the pond and waited for the birds to become active. As the morning progressed, rays of sunlight began to shine through trees along the edge of the pond, creating spotlights in the morning mist. This created a beautiful atmosphere, which I aimed to capture in my images. This coot was fleeing a fight, running across the water to take flight through the mist and rays of light." # Continued here

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7 Strategies for Identifying Hidden Challenges Through Questioning     Every business team has blind spots that limit their effectiveness and success, and due to ego, over-confidence, or deferential subordinates, many live totally in the dark. Some leaders are smart and humble enough to assume that they don't know what they don't know but lack an effective process for shining a light on their blind spots. Both are equally surprised by their every setback.As a mentor, I recently found some real insight on this subject in a classic book by Robert Bruce Shaw, aptly named Leadership Blindspots. Shaw specializes in organizational performance and has helped a wealth of business leaders identify and overcome their weaknesses. He provides a detailed analysis of the blind spots of many well-known business powerhouses. Continued here

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Best AirPods (2024): Which Apple Headphones Should You Buy?     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 WIREDit's easy to find yourself locked into Apple's ecosystem, what with the seamless continuity across the company's hardware. If you're looking for wireless earbuds and want to maintain that ease of use, you might naturally gravitate to the AirPods. They pair automatically with Apple gadgets and can switch automatically between them—handy when you're moving between a MacBook and an iPhone. More importantly, they deliver good sound quality and have a laundry list of top-end features, like excellent noise canceling, spatial audio, and a killer transparency mode. Continued here

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The Persistent Mystery of Protein Intake     This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic's archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.If nutritional information were a slice of bread, we'd be living in a world full of dense 24-grain-and-seed loaves. The internet is stuffed with listicles, tips, and tricks for consuming the right ratio of "macros" (fats, carbs, and proteins). Rows and rows of vitamins and supplements fill pharmacy aisles. Calorie-counting apps track every savored crumb. But in 1918, the answer to the question "What and how much should we eat?"—the title of an Atlantic article that year—was just beginning to be scientifically understood. Continued here

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Why Does My Neck Look So Much Older Than My Face?     The skin on your neck also doesn’t heal as well as it does elsewhere on the body because the skin there is less durable and has fewer stem cells and other structures that help repair it, said Dr. Katie Given, a board-certified dermatologic surgeon in the Bay Area who has written about skin aging in the lower face and neck. When it comes to slowing the aging process for neck skin, she said, “the trick is prevention, prevention, prevention.”“Sun is your neck’s enemy,” Dr. Mauro said. Many signs of aging on the neck can be traced back to sun exposure. When your skin is exposed to even a little sunlight, she explained, ultraviolet A waves reach the dermis, or the skin’s inner layer, and damage the cells that are responsible for producing collagen and elastin. Continued here

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Meetings Are a Trainwreck. Avoid These 7 Fatal Errors to Make Your Meetings Better Right Now     71 percent of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient -- you can do better. Continued here