How to Write a Strong Personal Statement

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How to Write a Strong Personal Statement Whether applying for a summer internship, a professional development opportunity, such as a Fulbright, an executive MBA program, or a senior leadership development course, a personal statement threads the ideas of your CV, and is longer and has a different tone and purpose than a traditional cover letter. A few adjustments to your personal statement can get your application noticed by the reviewer. Continued here

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The Era of "Move Fast and Break Things" Is Over Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst argues that the era of “move fast and break things” is over; that in the wake of the Facebook scandal, the public is less tolerant of tech startups that ignore the societal ramifications of their innovations; and that VCs should analyze not only for market size and product viability, but for whether founders show sufficient foresight and concern about the unintended consequences of the ideas they are pursuing. Instead of just “minimum viable products,” today VCs need to screen for “minimum virtuous products.” The author offers eight questions to help VCs identify entrepreneurs who can meet this evolving need. Continued here

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How to Equip Your Team to Problem Solve Without You In trying to “protect” their teams, many managers become what the authors refer to as “umbrella managers”: well-intentioned leaders who want to protect their teams from all inclement organizational weather. But this type of leadership comes with a heavy price for the manager, the team, and the organization. Many individuals leading highly sophisticated teams for the first time need help to figure out the balance between supporting their teams and delegating effectively. The authors present several key mental shifts umbrella managers should make to move from protecting their employees to supporting them. Continued here

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TikTok's 6 Most Inspiring Women in Business As if you needed another reason to get on TikTok, check out these incredible women who will teach you something new--and make you laugh while they're at it. Continued here

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Autism Doesn't Hold People Back at Work. Discrimination Does. Did you know that an autistic professional is up to 140% more productive than an average employee when properly matched to a job that fits their skills? Yet, discrimination against neurodivergent people continues. That’s because most of the “common” workplace practices at the workplace are established for neurotypicality. While the onus to change this really lies with the organizations, the author offers a few strategies to help neurodivergent employees take control of their own success at work. Continued here

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What's the Best Way to Build Trust at Work? This past year, it has been particularly difficult to establish among team members who have never met one another before, and even more so for people who entered the workforce or switched jobs during the pandemic. Still, it is essential to doing our best work, being satisfied in our jobs, and having good relationships with our coworkers. Continued here

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Your Biggest Cybersecurity Risks Could Be Inside Your Organization Today more than 300 million people are working remotely — creating, accessing, sharing, and storing data wherever they go — and data breaches arising from insider threats and simple mishaps can cost businesses an average of $7.5 million annually. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if a breach is intentional or accidental. Insider risk programs should be part of every company’s security strategy. To be successful, organizations should lead with their employees as partners in the effort and supplement their program with advanced tools that detect and mitigate insider risks wherever they arise. The author offers four lessons he’s learned as Microsoft’s chief information security officer. Continued here

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10 Tactics to Boost Your Customer Lifetime Value A higher CLV can improve your company's reputation and the bottom line. Continued here

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The far-reaching influence of Alaska's sea otters Like whales, bison, and beavers, they were exploited to within a hair's breadth of extinction by colonial powers and the settlers they left in their wake. But since they were first protected in the early 20th Century, sea otters have made a remarkable recovery, and reintroductions have led their population to boom again. Continued here

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A new mission to see Titanic Four-hundred miles from St Johns, Newfoundland, in the choppy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, a large industrial vessel swayed from side to side. Onboard, Stockton Rush expressed a vision for the future: "There will be a time when people will go to space for less cost and very regularly. I think the same thing is going to happen going under water." Continued here

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How Frank Gehry Delivers On Time and On Budget When the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened, in 1997, critics hailed Frank Gehry’s masterpiece as one of the architectural wonders of the past century. The provincial government’s ambitious projections had called for 500,000 people a year to make the trek to Bilbao to visit the museum; in the first three years alone, 4 million came. The term “Bilbao effect” was coined in urban planning and economic development to describe architecture so spectacular it could transform neighborhoods, cities, and regions. Continued here

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Tapping Into Your Creativity: Our Favorite Reads If you pictured any of those people, or someone like them, then like me, you are guilty of imagining a stereotype. Despite what we were taught when we were younger, creativity ≠ artistic. In fact, one of the most damaging myths about creativity is that it’s a personality trait that some people have and others don’t. In decades of research, no such trait has ever been found. Continued here

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Why Your Business Should Hire Workers With Disabilities Helping adults with disabilities expand their work skills can be a win-win for small business owners. Continued here

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3 Tactics Companies With Low Turnover Rates Use to Retain Employees Talent retention is more challenging than ever. These companies have figured out how to beat the odds. Continued here

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Don't Ignore Technical SEO This year it is the essential element of a successful SEO strategy. Continued here

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What Makes a Great Leader? Tomorrow’s leaders master three key roles — architect, bridger, and catalyst, or ABCs — to access the talent and tools they need to drive innovation and impact. As architects, they build the culture and capabilities for co-creation. As bridgers, they curate and enable networks of talent inside and outside their organizations to co-create. And as catalysts, they lead beyond their organizational boundaries to energize and activate co-creation across entire ecosystems. These ABCs require leaders to stop relying on formal authority as their source of power and shift to a style that enables diverse talent to collaborate, experiment, and learn together — a challenging yet essential personal transformation. Continued here

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Autism: Understanding my childhood habits No one knew I was autistic as a child but, looking back, there were a number of sensory clues. Apart from a tendency to repetitively stroke soft fabrics or run grains of sand through my fingers, I also found swirling and gentle rocking mesmerisingly soothing. When I was eventually diagnosed with autism much later in life – at the age of 60 – it gave me a new understanding of how and why I behave the way I do. That includes certain childhood behaviours, from fabric-stroking to the way I played with toys and insisted on specific foods. But it also raised questions, such as what might these preferences reveal about how children with autism experience the world? And how could we use this understanding to help children fulfil their potential, form friendships, and enjoy life? Continued here

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How Warren Buffett puts data into context to persuade readers of Berkshire's annual letter. Put data into context to elevate your presentations. Continued here

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Here's How You Can Support Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the U.S., Even as a Small or Private Company Historically Black Colleges and Universities can use corporate support. Here's how private and small companies can get involved. Continued here

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To Overcome Resistance to DEI, Understand What's Driving It Employees often resist DEI initiatives, which of course hinders their effectiveness. The authors — experts in the resistance to social-change efforts — write that the key to overcoming resistance to any effort is figuring out why people are resisting. When it comes to DEI initiatives, they argue, people resist because they experience at least one of three forms of threat: status threat, merit threat, and moral threat. Depending on the kinds of threat they experience, they then tend to engage in three kinds of resistance: defending, denying, and distancing. The authors explain these forms of threat and resistance and then offer suggestions for how to overcome them. Continued here

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The Debate on Deepfake Porn Misses the Point When Blaire, a streamer known online as QTCinderella, first heard that her face had been deepfaked onto a porn performer’s body, she was puzzled. A popular creator with more than 800,000 followers on Twitch, she often streamed herself playing video games or baking. When her boyfriend told her what had happened, she was busy planning the second annual Streamer Awards, an event she launched in 2022. The deepfake was creepy, and it was definitely gross, but it was a stranger’s body. “I didn’t really understand what was in store for me,” she says.  The images themselves first came to the internet’s attention on January 26, when viewers of Brandon “Atrioc” Ewing’s Twitch stream spotted a website on his screen that contained nonconsensual deepfake pornography he’d bought that depicted popular streamers, like Blaire, Pokimane, and Maya Higa. These were Ewing’s colleagues and, in some cases, friends. Blaire and Ewing occasionally streamed together. She made Ewing and his wife a wedding cake. To make matters worse, he’d exposed the existence of those deepfakes to countless thousands of people; Ewing has more than 300,000 followers on Twitch alone. It took mere hours for some viewers to spread screenshots of the site, and then of the deepfakes themselves. Ewing had lit a match, and the fire was running wild. Continued here

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The Return of the Office: 3 Tips to Get Your Team Back With economic uncertainty, companies need to optimize for efficiency, and managing remote teams may be far too challenging. Continued here

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Tinder robberies have men in Brazil on high alert João Eleutério da Silva, a 51-year-old man from São Paulo, has changed his dating habits on Tinder over the past year and a half. He’s afraid of becoming another victim of the recent spate of kidnappings, money transfer scams, and even homicides — all of which start by luring men like him on dating apps. So, when his Tinder match, a woman decades younger than him, showed intense interest but refused to meet in public, he became suspicious. “The offer [of company] was too easy,” da Silva told Rest of World. “I didn’t feel safe and ended up not following up with the conversation.” His behavior is not unwarranted: Police statistics show that nine out of 10 kidnappings in São Paulo in the past year have occurred after a date was arranged through Tinder and similar apps. According to Eduardo Bernardo Pereira, a police officer from the São Paulo anti-kidnapping division, men like da Silva — ranging from 30 to 65 years old — are the main targets. The fear over what have become known as “Tinder robberies” has left thousands of Brazilians on dating apps to devise their own safety measures. Rest of World spoke to three current users of dating apps, all of whom confirmed that their behavior on these apps had changed drastically in recent months. They now rigorously verify their date’s identity on other social media platforms and insist on meeting in public places, cutting conversations short when they don’t feel safe. Continued here

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Still Don't Have a Yearly Strategic Plan for Your Business? Try This Instead Focus on what's important more than what's urgent in 2023. Continued here

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The problems with TikTok's controversial 'beauty filters' When I came across my first "beauty filter" – technology designed to "improve" your appearance, now popular on Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok – one of my first reactions was that it evened out the playing field and not, necessarily, in a bad way. Before the pandemic, I usually put on some make-up before going out. It made me feel more attractive – and the different way people treated me when I put on a bit of mascara only bolstered that perception. But then came lockdown, working from home, and having a baby. Finding the time and motivation to apply lipstick felt like a thing of the past. And so, when I first saw a filter that did the work for me – or for my online presence, at least – I was amazed. And I had to wonder: was there really that much of a difference between spending 15 minutes applying make-up in the morning, and slapping a filter on my online persona? Or was the latter just an ingenious way to save time? Continued here

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Six-Word Sci-Fi: Stories Written by You Disclaimer: All #WiredSixWord submissions become the property of WIRED. Submissions will not be acknowledged or returned. Submissions and any other materials, including your name or social media handle, may be published, illustrated, edited, or otherwise used in any medium. Submissions must be original and not violate the rights of any other person or entity. 🏔🏃‍♀️🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏽‍♀️🦑🛸 —@jessbeckah42, via Instagram Continued here

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Why Capital Investment in Equipment Doesn’t Hurt Employment A new study co-authored by Wharton’s Daniel G. Garrett shows that giving businesses tax breaks for investment in new equipment doesn’t lead them to replace workers with machines. A new paper by experts at Wharton and elsewhere has set to rest “widespread concerns” that increased capital investment in equipment is at the cost of worker employment. In the study of tax incentives that boost capital investment in equipment at U.S. firms between 1997 and 2011, the experts found that such investment resulted in matching employment growth, although it did not stimulate wage or productivity growth. Continued here

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What Limits Any U.S. Alliance With India Over China Though sharing concerns about Beijing’s growing aggression, New Delhi has always been wary of aligning too closely with Washington. The front lines of the widening confrontation between the United States and China stretch from the halls of the United Nations to the island nations of the South Pacific. Yet, as in any great geopolitical game, certain countries carry more significance than others for American interests—foremost among them India. Continued here

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The Insta360 Link Is the Rolls-Royce of USB Webcams 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 WIRED “That’s probably the best-looking webcam I’ve seen you test," one of my colleagues remarked over Zoom the other day as I stared into the eye of the Insta360 Link webcam. A chorus of agreement piped in through my computer speakers from the rest of the team. I’m zoom, zoom, zooming more work days than not, so it’s a great way to test webcams. Two birds, one stone. Continued here

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Ukrainians Shift to Renewable Power for Energy Security amid War Russia’s war in Ukraine has caused widespread power cuts, spurring a rise in demand for residential solar power units CLIMATEWIRE | It’s not easy to talk about climate change and carbon-free power when your country is a battlefield. Continued here

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Pakistan's lost city of 40,000 people A slight breeze cut through the balmy heat as I surveyed the ancient city around me. Millions of red bricks formed walkways and wells, with entire neighbourhoods sprawled out in a grid-like fashion. An ancient Buddhist stupa towered over the time-worn streets, with a large communal pool complete with a wide staircase below. Somehow, only a handful of other people were here – I practically had the place all to myself. I was about an hour outside of the dusty town of Larkana in southern Pakistan at the historical site of Mohenjo-daro. While today only ruins remain, 4,500 years ago this was not only one of the world's earliest cities, but a thriving metropolis featuring highly advanced infrastructures. Continued here

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How AI Could Transform Email What if your inbox were jam-packed with AI-generated emails? You may already be on the receiving end of emails written by artificial intelligence, with the help of a human prompter. Austin Distel, a senior director of marketing at Jasper, is one of those humans.  Austin smiles as he demonstrates Japer’s knack for email composition. “These are tools in my tool belt that helped me perform faster, but also better,” he says before sharing that he often uses generative AI to rewrite work emails so they sound like Jerry Seinfeld. Continued here

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Sharpshooter Insects Use 'Superpropulsion' to Catapult Their Pee Sharpshooter insects use a physics phenomenon called superpropulsion to efficiently fling away droplets of pee at extremely high speeds Few threats are more damaging to a vineyard or citrus grove than a blight of sharpshooters. The half-inch-long insects are destructive agricultural pests because of their unquenchable thirsts and splashy bathroom habits: when nature calls, these bugs launch droplets of their watery pee and create puddles of disease-causing waste. Continued here

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If neutrinos have mass, where are all the slow ones? For many years, the neutrino was among the most puzzling and elusive of cosmic particles. It took more than two decades from when it was first predicted to when it was finally detected, and they came along with a bunch of surprises that make them unique among all the particles that we know of. They can “change flavor” from one type (electron, mu, tau) into another. All neutrinos always have a left-handed spin; all anti-neutrinos always have a right-handed spin. And every neutrino we’ve ever observed moves at speeds indistinguishable from the speed of light. But must that be so? After all, if neutrinos can oscillate from one species into one another, that means they must have mass. If they have mass, then it’s forbidden for them to actually move at the speed of light; they must move slower. And after 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, surely some of the neutrinos that were produced long ago have slowed down to a reasonably accessible, non-relativistic speed. Yet, we’ve never seen one, causing us to wonder where are all the slow-moving neutrinos? As it turns out, they’re probably out there, just at levels well-below what current technology can detect. Continued here

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Where Is a Large Predator Most Likely to Attack You? A global survey of predator attacks on humans shows that South Asia is the world’s most dangerous spot "Man is a wolf to man," wrote the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. And given the atrocities we inflict on one another, that certainly can’t be dismissed. Yet many people have a particular fear of nonhuman predators such as wolves, bears or other large carnivores, even though the likelihood of falling victim to them is very low. Continued here

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ChatGPT and Whisper APIs debut, allowing devs to integrate them into apps On Wednesday, OpenAI announced the availability of developer APIs for its popular ChatGPT and Whisper AI models that will let developers integrate them into their apps. An API (application programming interface) is a set of protocols that allows different computer programs to communicate with each other. In this case, app developers can extend their apps' abilities with OpenAI technology for an ongoing fee based on usage. Continued here

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Why Tim Chen Sought Out Venture Capital Funding Only After NerdWallet Was Profitable What started off a simple tool to help pick the right credit cardhas now scaled into apersonal finance giantservingover 19 million users. Continued here

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How skills-based training can build the workforce of the future There’s a lot of buzz about organizations pivoting to a skills-based hiring approach, and the very low, post-pandemic unemployment rate has a lot to do with it. According to Harvard Business Review, when the demand for talent far exceeds supply, employers de-emphasize degrees when filling open positions.  But skills-based learning pathways are on the rise, as well. Research conducted by the Conference Board confirms that the traditional job-based approach to talent development is too rigid, particularly in industries where skills requirements are evolving rapidly and unpredictably.  Continued here

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How Do You Stop Lawmakers From Destroying the Law? Lorenzo Córdova is a lawyer and a scholar, a man with an office full of books. For most of the past decade, Córdova has served as president of the Mexican National Electoral Institute, an independent, nonpartisan but government-funded organization that first came into existence more than 30 years ago. The INE, as it is usually called (demonstrators chant “ee-nay, ee-nay”), has been so successful that until recently, its existence was taken for granted. Why? Because men and women like Córdova have spent the past three decades systematically creating an electoral register and voter-ID cards, still the most secure form of identification in Mexico. Every time an election happens, even in the remotest corners of the country, INE sets up tens of thousands of polling booths. Citizen poll workers are recruited through a national lottery and trained to run polling stations, and INE organizes that too. Factors well outside INE’s remit—poverty, violence, clientelism—continue to undermine Mexican politics, and like any institution, INE makes mistakes. Still, most judge it by its greatest achievement: Mexico was a one-party state for most of the 20th century, where the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party fraudulently dictated electoral outcomes. Now the voters decide. Continued here

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NASA's DART impactor shows how planetary defense can work When the NASA DART mission slammed into a small asteroid, we knew with great precision how much the spacecraft weighed and how fast it traveled. If you combine that with our estimates of the motion and mass of its target asteroid, Dimorphos, then you could easily do the math and estimate how much momentum would be lost by the asteroid and what that would mean for its orbit. That bit of math would suggest that Dimorphos' orbit should end up roughly seven minutes shorter. Continued here

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How to quit your job -- without ruining your career Stuck in an unfulfilling or stagnant job? To achieve a smooth departure without burning bridges, try this three-step exit strategy from career coach Gala Jackson. She'll help you move on to your next position with courage, confidence and clarity. Continued here

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The mind-blowing virality of music Do humans have something like an instinct for music? The musicologist Michael Spitzer thinks so. As he points out, every person is born with an innate ability to recognize rhythm, beat in time to it, and recognize and recall melody. Music-related abilities may be universal, but musical preferences and styles can differ greatly from culture to culture. Continued here

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First wave of PCIe 5.0 SSDs arrives with high prices and ridiculous heatsinks In the high-end PC market, it's vitally important that the numbers always continue to go up. That means faster performance, newer specs, and (on occasion) new model numbers for existing components. One of the latest numbers to go up is the PCI Express version number supported by many motherboards; all PCs built around AMD's Ryzen 7000-series chips and some PCs using Intel's 12th- or 13th-generation CPUs support graphics cards solid-storage drives that use the PCI Express 5.0 interface, which is up to two times faster than version 4.0. Continued here

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7 Ways Jimmy Carter Has Improved America's Energy Future - Or Tried To As U.S. president, Jimmy Carter championed renewable energy, conservation and other then fringe efforts that are powerhouses today Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter entered hospice care at his Plains, Ga., home last month. Much has been written about his legacy of stamping out Guinea worm disease, creating affordable housing through Habitat for Humanity and inspiring cancer patients with his own successful fight against metastatic melanoma. Carter may also be the politician who, more than any other, changed the country’s energy future. Under his four years of American leadership, landmark events and legislation opened up a new world of “alternative energy” as a way to wean the country from its troublesome reliance on fossil fuels. Here are seven highlights from the beginning to end of his term. Continued here

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The Pandemic's Mental Toll, and Does Telehealth Work? Your Health Quickly, Episode 1 Hosts Josh Fischman and Tanya Lewis explore the pandemic’s mental health toll on teens and young adults. They also delve into the effectiveness of telehealth, which has been booming since the start of the pandemic. Fischman: Now it's the first episode of a new show that's about COVID, but also a lot more. Continued here

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Ancient Tsunami Detectives Hunt for Long-Lost Cataclysms Gigantic tsunamis have been decimating coastlines since time immemorial and hold warnings for our present and future A boulder weighing more than 40 tonnes sits on the sand high above the ocean. Dwarfing every other rock in view, it is conspicuously out of place. The answer to how this massive outlier got here lies not in the vast expanse of the Atacama Desert behind it but in the Pacific Ocean below. Hundreds of years ago, a tsunami slammed into the northern Chilean coast—a wall of water 20 meters high, taller than a six-story building, that swept boulders landward like pebbles. Continued here

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Parents, boys also have body image issues thanks to social media Male body ideals have changed strikingly. While men have always aimed to be muscular, the past two decades have witnessed a gradual amplification in what qualifies as fit. Today’s idolized male body not only has well-defined shoulder, chest, and arm muscles; it also sports low body fat, a chiseled six-pack, and glutes shaped to callipygian perfection. As pointed out by health writer Sarah Berry, this muscle creep is evident in America’s icon of masculinity: the superhero film. When actor Hugh Jackman first played the character of Wolverine in X-Men (2000), he embodied the fitness and “muscularity” of the day. Then the shredded Spartans of 300 (2006) kick-started a literal arms race leading to increasingly swole physiques among heroes such as Thor, Superman, and Blank Panther. Even Jackman’s original Wolverine looks “nothing short of doughy” compared to his most recent performances in the role. Continued here

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The FBI Desperately Wants to Let Trump Off the Hook The way conservatives tell it, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a hive of anti-Trump villainy, filled with agents looking for any excuse to hound the former president with investigative witch hunts. But the thing to understand about Donald Trump’s legal troubles is that they exist not because federal agents are out to get him, but despite the fact that the FBI is full of Trump supporters who would really like to leave him alone. This morning, The Washington Post reported that FBI investigators clashed with federal prosecutors over the decision to search the former president’s residence, where highly classified documents were found despite Trump’s insistence that he had none. Continued here

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We Must Prevent a New Nuclear Arms Race Smart U.S. leadership and international pressure on Russia can prevent an unconstrained global nuclear arms race Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calamitous invasion of Ukraine has killed at least tens of thousands, displaced millions, and disrupted countless lives around the globe. Putin’s implied threats to use nuclear weapons against any who would interfere, have also raised fears of a nuclear conflict in ways not seen since the end of the cold war. Continued here

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Meta says $725M deal ends all Cambridge Analytica claims; one state disagrees Tomorrow is the day that Meta expected would finally end its Cambridge Analytica woes. That’s when a US district court in California is scheduled to preliminarily approve a $725 million settlement agreement that Meta believed would release the company of all related claims. Continued here

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Winners of the 2022 World Nature Photography Awards The entries in this year’s World Nature Photography Awards have been judged, and the winning images and photographers have just been announced. Jens Cullmann was awarded the grand prize for his image of a crocodile lurking in the mud in Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe. Competition organizers have once again shared some of the winning images, shown below, from their 14 categories. Captions were provided by the photographers and have been lightly edited for clarity. First place, Animal portraits, and Grand Prize Winner. A crocodile's head is just visible in a mud pool in Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe. # Continued here

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What Active-Shooter Trainings Steal From Synagogues I’ve long been ambivalent about the effects of such drills—but when one came to my synagogue, I felt compelled to attend. On a Sunday late in November, I spent the day at my synagogue in Philadelphia. The Germantown Jewish Centre, where I am a member, was holding a day-long security training on what to do if an active shooter came to our community’s home, and I felt compelled to attend. Continued here

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Many Differences Between Liberals and Conservatives May Boil Down to One Belief Conservatives tend to believe that strict divisions are an inherent part of life. Liberals do not Disagreement has paralyzed our politics and our collective ability to get things done. But where do these conflicts come from? A split between liberals and conservatives, many might say. But underlying that division is an even more fundamental fissure in the ways that people view the world. Continued here

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18 Readers on Their Relationship With Religion This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week, I asked readers to describe their relationship with organized religion. What follows is but a fraction of the outpouring of responses—in fact, I’ll be sending another email next week with more replies. (And I’ll be back tomorrow with this week’s conversations and provocations.) Continued here

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It's Time to Fall in Love With Nuclear Fusion—Again If nuclear fission is associated with catastrophe, nuclear fusion is associated with delay and fraud. The joke about fusion, the synthesis of lab-grown stars, is that it's always 10 years away. Or 20. Two lonely little isotopes, each with a pathetically low mass, are joined in holy electromagnetism in a massive artificial thunderclap. The remaining nucleus is smaller than the mass of the reacting nuclei, and the leftover mass is converted into light or heat by virtue of E = mc2. But what a utopia fusion seems to promise. Even with the jokes and equivocation and scams, it's hard to be blasé about fusion's stellar possibilities. So let's indulge: Once fusion arrives, handmade suns, sources of unlimited clean energy, would—will—wipe out all human problems in a go. Our glorious pet stars, requiring only everyday hydrogen to whip up in a lab, won't belch out carbon or radioactive waste. Instead they'll exhale helium. Helium! That nonrenewable resource that's already running low! Fusion, my friends, means not just infinite carbonless energy but more balloons. Continued here

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The World Is Finally Cracking Down on ‘Greenwashing’ Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’s newsletter about living through climate change, here. Let’s say you want to buy a T-shirt and you want your investment to be as environmentally sustainable as possible—after all, clothing production generates 8 to 10 percent of global carbon emissions. How should you research your purchase? I don’t know. But I know how you shouldn’t research it: by listening to what the companies themselves say about their sustainability. Continued here

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Eli Lilly cuts insulin prices after years of outrage Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, one of the country's leading insulin makers, announced Wednesday that it will slash its high list prices for some of its insulins and will immediately offer programs to limit out-of-pocket costs to $35 per month for people with commercial insurance as well as those who are uninsured. Continued here

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Night skies are getting 9.6% brighter every year For most of human history, the stars blazed in an otherwise dark night sky. But starting around the Industrial Revolution, as artificial light increasingly lit cities and towns at night, the stars began to disappear. We are two astronomers who depend on dark night skies to do our research. For decades, astronomers have been building telescopes in the darkest places on Earth to avoid light pollution.  Continued here

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Texas Republican wants ISPs to block a wide range of abortion websites A proposed state law in Texas would force Internet service providers to block websites containing information on how to obtain an abortion or abortion pill. Republican lawmaker Steve Toth, a member of the state House of Representatives, introduced the bill last week. Continued here

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"Moto Rizr" rollable phone shows why rollables don't work in the real world Mobile World Congress is this week, and that means wild flexible display concepts that will probably never see the light of day. Motorola has been letting everyone try out the new "Moto Rizr" concept, a name it resurrected from its line of candybar slider phones in the early 2000s. The new Rizr is a rollable display phone that was initially announced in October, but Motorola is sharing a lot more details about the phone at MWC. Continued here

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Daisy Jones and the Trap of the Love Triangle How could a show about a chart-topping band care so little about the making of their music? Gossip can provide sensational grist for an entertainer’s appeal, for better or worse. But for singer-songwriters whose artistry is often diaristic, scandal is especially intriguing. They can’t release or play their music without the audience wondering how personal it is: Are these songs about them? Is what’s happening onstage actually a performance? How did they write these lyrics? What could they possibly get out of being the subjects of such attention? Continued here

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The Game Show That Parodies Your To-Do List Taskmaster reveals both the inanity of our daily obligations and the joy that we can find in them. Imagine you are sternly handed an assignment: Express appreciation for your boss in the most meaningful way possible. The boss will determine who, out of several people, did it best. How would you approach the task? Continued here

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The Reason the Recession Hasn’t Happened Yet Despite soaring prices and interest rates, businesses and consumers have proved surprisingly resilient. What happened to that recession? The recession we were supposed to be in right now, I mean—the one that various forecasters assured us was a sure thing. The “writing is on the wall,” many economists believed in June. A downturn was “effectively certain” as of October. Maybe the dip was already here, some suspected, and we just had yet to notice it. Continued here

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Microsoft unveils AI model that understands image content, solves visual puzzles On Monday, researchers from Microsoft introduced Kosmos-1, a multimodal model that can reportedly analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions. The researchers believe multimodal AI—which integrates different modes of input such as text, audio, images, and video—is a key step to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can perform general tasks at the level of a human. Continued here

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What will happen to society when "AI lovers" fool millions of people? Microsoft’s search engine Bing is powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, maker of the chatbot ChatGPT, and right now, it is all over the news. Witness the disturbing article by Kevin Roose, who describes for the New York Times his interactions with the search engine’s AI. After some prodding from Roose, the AI declared its love for its human interlocutor, suggesting that Roose leave his wife and family to bond with it — even if no one is sure exactly where or how a human could bond with an AI chatbot.  There is no “where” in physical space for such machine-human bonding. There are only cold lines on a flat computer screen. But as many users of dating sites know, sometimes that is all you need to feel closer to someone — or some thing. After his conversation, Roose concluded that “Bing is not ready for human contact. Or maybe humans are not ready for it.” Continued here

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What Losing My Two Children Taught Me About Grief This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      I was in acute grief, the depths of which I couldn’t have previously imagined. In the summer of 2019, we had been T-boned by a drunk and high driver going 90 miles an hour in a 50-mile-an-hour zone. My wife, Gail, and I had survived the crash, but our two teenage children in the back seat, Ruby and Hart, had not. Continued here

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Medieval manuscripts may have described "new" whale feeding trick centuries ago About 10 years ago, marine biologists witnessed two different species of whales in different geographic locations engaged in a novel feeding strategy.  The whales would position themselves at the water's surface and stay motionless with their mouths wide open. Fish would swim into their mouths, and the whales would snap their jaws and swallow. It's been dubbed trap feeding, or tread-water feeding. A clip of whales engaged in trap feeding even went viral on Instagram in 2021. Continued here

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Nvidia's new AI upscaling tech makes low-res videos look sharper in Chrome, Edge Nvidia's latest GPU driver introduces its new AI-based upscaling technique for making lower-resolution videos streamed offline look better on a high-resolution display. Now available via the GeForce driver 531.18 released on Tuesday, Nvidia's RTX Video Super Resolution (VSR) successfully cleaned up some of the edges and blockiness of a 480p and 1080p video I watched on Chrome using a 3080 Ti laptop GPU-powered system, but there are caveats. Continued here