How Venture Capital Works

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How Venture Capital Works The popular mythology surrounding the U.S. venture-capital industry derives from a previous era. Venture capitalists who nurtured the computer industry in its infancy were legendary both for their risk-taking and for their hands-on operating experience. But today things are different, and separating the myths from the realities is crucial to understanding this important piece of the U.S. economy. Continued here

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This Algorithm Could Ruin Your Life It was October 2021, and Imane, a 44-year-old mother of three, was still in pain from the abdominal surgery she had undergone a few weeks earlier. She certainly did not want to be where she was: sitting in a small cubicle in a building near the center of Rotterdam, while two investigators interrogated her. But she had to prove her innocence or risk losing the money she used to pay rent and buy food. Imane emigrated to the Netherlands from Morocco with her parents when she was a child. She started receiving benefits as an adult, due to health issues, after divorcing her husband. Since then, she has struggled to get by using welfare payments and sporadic cleaning jobs. Imane says she would do anything to leave the welfare system, but chronic back pain and dizziness make it hard to find and keep work. Continued here

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How 'Anomalous Health Incidents' in Cuba Sidelined Science The Havana syndrome saga is an epic failure of science, one with severe consequences both for patients and for international relations In 2016, U.S. diplomats began suffering from a bewildering collection of neurological symptoms, officially known as “anomalous health incidents” (AHIs) and widely branded as “Havana syndrome.” First reported in Cuba but later spread to U.S. diplomatic missions worldwide, their most common explanation was that medical science now faced a new disease produced by “directed energy” weapons wielded by unidentified enemies. The story was eagerly embraced in news reports and by some U.S. government officials, but met with skepticism from many scientists, a standoff that went on for years. Continued here

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Michael Middlebrooks: The fantastically weird world of photosynthetic sea slugs Meet the fantastically colorful and astonishingly adaptable sea slugs that found a way to photosynthesize (or create energy from sunlight) like plants. Diving deep into these often overlooked creatures, invertebrate zoologist Michael Middlebrooks introduces the solar-powered slugs that lost their shells -- but gained the ability to directly harness the power of the sun. Continued here

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What Chernobyl's Stray Dogs Could Teach Us about Radiation A multiyear project studying stray dogs around Chernobyl aims to uncover the health effects of chronic radiation exposure In the early hours of 26 April 1986, two explosions rocked the nuclear power plant near the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, then part of the Soviet Union. The accident at reactor four spewed radioactive material into the air, leading Soviet authorities to evacuate thousands of people from the surrounding area. Homes were left behind — and, in many cases, pets. Continued here

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The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer Diversify your product line. Stick to your knitting. Hire a professional manager. Watch fixed costs. Those are some of the suggestions that entrepreneurs sort through as they try to get their ventures off the ground. Why all the conflicting advice? Because in a young company, all decisions are up for grabs. Continued here

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The Five Stages of Small Business Growth Categorizing the problems and growth patterns of small businesses in a systematic way that is useful to entrepreneurs seems at first glance a hopeless task. Small businesses vary widely in size and capacity for growth. They are characterized by independence of action, differing organizational structures, and varied management styles. Continued here

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How M.M. LaFleur Made Its Supply Chain Sustainable It wasn't easy, but M.M. LaFleur founder and CEO, Sarah LaFleur felt a responsibility to go green. Continued here

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Why Companies Do "Innovation Theater" Instead of Actual Innovation As organizations grow, they begin to prioritize process over product. That impedes real innovation. When organizations realize this, they typically respond in three ways: By hiring consultants to do a reorg (that’s “organizational theater”), adopt new processes such as hackathons to spur innovation (that’s “innovation theater”), or take steps to try to reform their bureaucratic behaviors (that’s “process theater”). Instead, what organizations need is an Innovation Doctrine that addresses culture, mindset, and process and guides the organization’s efforts to achieve real innovations. Continued here

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Startups Want to Cash In on the US Student Debt Crisis Twenty-six million Americans are waiting to see if the US Supreme Court will allow a plan to cancel some student debt to move forward. Regardless of the court’s decision, a trillion-dollar mess remains—and, circling it, a cohort of startups looking for opportunity amid the crisis.  Some 100 startups have launched to try to build businesses on the mountain of US student debt, more than half since 2016. Companies focused on student financing have raised more than $4 billion in the past five years, according to data from Dealroom, which collects data on startups. They cover a range of business models. Online bank SoFi has a service for refinancing student loans, Peanut Butter helps companies offer student loan assistance as a worker benefit, and Chipper helps people find the most efficient way to pay down their loans or get relief. Continued here

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SPACs: What You Need to Know Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they’ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion invested; and in the first quarter of 2021 alone, 295 were created, with $96 billion invested. In 2020, SPACs accounted for more than 50% of new publicly listed U.S. companies. Continued here

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Removing Demographic Data Can Make AI Discrimination Worse A recent study suggests that denying AI decision makers access to sensitive data actually increases the risks of discriminatory outcome. That’s because the AI draws incomplete inferences from the data or partially substitutes by identifying proxies. Providing sensitive data would eliminate this problem, but it is problematic to do so in certain jurisdictions. The authors present work-arounds that may answer the problem in some countries. Continued here

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The Strategic Secret of Private Equity The huge sums that private equity firms make on their investments evoke admiration and envy. Typically, these returns are attributed to the firms’ aggressive use of debt, concentration on cash flow and margins, freedom from public company regulations, and hefty incentives for operating managers. But the fundamental reason for private equity’s success is the strategy of buying to sell—one rarely employed by public companies, which, in pursuit of synergies, usually buy to keep. Continued here

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5 Steps to Take Your Company's Remote Work Ambitions from Policy to Practice - SPONSOR CONTENT FROM DELOITTE GLOBAL TAX Remote work is here to stay. Eighty percent of organizations around the world have now articulated some form of remote work policy, according to Deloitte’s recent global remote work survey. More than half say they permit hybrid work, allowing employees to work outside of the office regularly but still requiring some in-office presence. Twenty-seven percent say they allow employees to work fully remote without ever going to the office. Just one in 10 say they do not allow any form of hybrid or remote working. Continued here

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Genpact CEO Tiger Tyagarajan: AI Is Getting Good, But Still Can't Replace Human Curiosity HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius sat down with Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO of Genpact. As CEO of a $4 billion global firm that advises clients on digital transformation, Tiger had a lot to say about AI, the metaverse, and how companies often fail on their innovation journey. “When it comes to digital transformation, it’s not just about technology,” he said. “It’s about processes, about the data underlying those processes; it’s about people.” Tiger also had interesting things to say about his biggest passion: cricket. (He schedules his board meetings so that they won’t clash with the Indian cricket team’s matches.) Continued here

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Are You Actually Going to Get Fired? If you’re just starting out in your career, it’s likely that you often worry about things like failing, disappointing others, and getting fired or laid off from you job. But worrying, to the point of catastrophizing, can be dangerous for you and your career. Here are some questions that will help you determine whether or not your fears are grounded in reality. Continued here

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When -- and How -- to Keep a Poker Face at Work Maintaining a poker face doesn’t necessarily mean suppressing your feelings or being dishonest. It simply means practicing emotion regulation by being aware of your facial expressions and body language and using them strategically. In this piece, the author explains when to put on a poker face, or not, and offers practical strategies for how to interrupt your inner eruption. The better you can self-regulate, the easier it will be to express your emotions in a way you feel proud of. Continued here

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Start Using Any of These 3 Methods and You're Much More Likely to Fall Asleep Within Minutes, Starting Tonight A little science, a few simple techniques, and a better night's sleep. Continued here

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Twitter API error broke the site today as Musk blames "brittle" platform Twitter suffered an embarrassing technology failure today that temporarily broke links to outside websites and even to Twitter's own webpages. The problem lasted for about 45 minutes or so. Continued here

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'Pretty Epic' Mountain Snowfall Stuns Californians A near-record amount of snow in California could ease some water restrictions after years of climate-change-fueled drought CLIMATEWIRE | California's snowpack neared record levels Friday, offering good news for the state's tight water supplies. Continued here

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Stop Mimicking Real-Life Interactions at Your Virtual Job If you are a new grad or just-hired remote employee, sitting in a makeshift home office, alone and isolated, eight hours a day isn’t good for your health — or your job for that matter. To truly flourish at work, you need to connect with and trust your colleagues. Trying to mimic the interactions you used to make in-person won’t help. Instead, do this: Continued here

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The Book That Teaches Us to Live With Our Fears In classic fables and fairy tales, no predator—and perhaps no villain—makes more frequent appearances than the wolf. Greek antiquity gives us the Boy Who Cried Wolf, Little Red Riding Hood famously gets eaten by a wolf, and yet another one blows down the Three Little Pigs’ houses. Wolfish, the writer Erica Berry’s debut, looks both at these invented wolves and at the real ones that have, of late, returned to her home state of Oregon; she also examines the more contemporary wolf metaphors—lone-wolf terrorists, warriors as wolves—that many people use to describe, or perhaps justify, their fear of other humans. Berry has suffered badly from fear of that “symbolic wolf”—a term she gets from the veterinary anthropologist Elizabeth Lawrence. This is Wolfish’s true subject. Her wolf is a male one, created by a string of disturbing encounters with men and by a lifetime of messages—explicit and subliminal alike—that tell girls and women to perceive men as threats. One of Berry’s projects is dismantling this idea, both to defuse the danger it creates for poor men and men of color and to free herself from the anxiety it creates. She writes of realizing that the “calm I chased on human streets would not come from pepper spray but from metabolizing, and contextualizing, the things that had scared me in the past.” Continued here

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What Scientists Are Learning about Women's Health from Other Female Animals Projected on the massive screen behind me onstage, a herd of giraffes rushes across a sweep of savanna. With the video set to loop, the giraffes gallop endlessly, giving me time to slowly lean across the podium and ask my audience: “Did you spot the pregnant giraffes?” I am delivering a plenary lecture at the 2019 Nobel Conference in Stockholm. The theme of that year's conference was bioinspired medicine—finding solutions in nature to human health problems—and I wanted to call attention to the connections between women and other female animals. As a cardiologist and evolutionary biologist, I'd been posing this question about the giraffes to medical students in my courses at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, for years, so I could tell it had landed as planned. I watched the crowd scan the troop of giraffes for evidence of pregnancy—a baby bump, a lagging mother-to-be. I suspected that few, if any, of the assembled scientists and physicians had considered this question when first taking in the scene. That was precisely my point. Given the importance of female health challenges such as pregnancy to the survival of a species—including our own—shouldn't the realities of female life in the wild be more than an afterthought for doctors and biomedical researchers? Continued here

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How Poppi Went From Kitchen Concoction to TikTok Sensation Allison Ellsworth says speaking from the heart on social media has helped the brand connect with consumers. Continued here

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Nuclear Waste Is Piling Up. Does the U.S. Have a Plan? We needs a permanent national nuclear waste disposal site now, before the spent nuclear fuel stored in 35 states becomes unsafe As small modular nuclear reactors come closer to reality in the U.S., managing and disposing of their highly radioactive waste should be a national priority. Forty years after the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, there is, “no clear path forward for the siting, licensing, and construction of a geologic repository” for nuclear waste, according to a recent U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine report. Continued here

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The Founder's Dilemma The author’s studies indicate that a founder who gives up more equity to attract cofounders, new hires, and investors builds a more valuable company than one who parts with less equity. More often than not, however, those superior returns come from replacing the founder with a professional CEO more experienced with the needs of a growing company. This fundamental tension requires founders to make “rich” versus “king” trade-offs to maximize either their wealth or their control over the company. Continued here

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The Focal Bathys Are the Ultimate Noise-Canceling Headphones 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 Headphone nerds are a tough crowd, especially when you take away their precious cables. Ask anyone who regularly browses the r/headphones subreddit whether noise-canceling or wireless headphones are any good, and you’re likely to get a lot of folks telling you that they’re fine for reducing outside sound, but can’t approach what wired headphones can offer in terms of sound quality. Continued here

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What if Every Business Owner in America Did Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy? The mind-blowing journey of magic mushrooms, from underground taboo to founder's little helper to mental health unicorn. Continued here

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Managers and Leaders: Are They Different? Managers and leaders are two very different types of people. Managers’ goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at defusing conflicts between individuals or departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organization’s day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes toward goals. They look for the opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense, and their working environment is often chaotic. Continued here

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Test Marketing in New Product Development To every marketing executive, the necessity and value of test marketing are often murky issues. The problem is partly that new products aren’t developed and put through their paces in a systematic enough way to let marketing men know when a test market is really in order. Compounding this difficulty is that the goals of test marketing are sometimes unclear and that the information, once gathered, is often improperly used. This article is an attempt to lay bare the bones of the issue. Beginning with an overview of sound new product development, it clarifies when a test market should be done, what its aims should be, and to what uses it should be put. Relying for many of their judgments on quoted first-person interview material with marketing executives, the authors finish with a postscript on how technological innovation can aid in test marketing. Continued here

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The Best Leaders Ask These 5 Questions Every Week, According to a Behavioral Scientist Regular check-in meetings may be more beneficial than you think. Continued here

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Microsoft aims to reduce "tedious" business tasks with new AI tools On Monday, Microsoft bundled ChatGPT-style AI technology into its Power Platform developer tool and Dynamics 365, Reuters reports. Affected tools include Power Virtual Agent and AI Builder, both of which have been updated to include GPT large language model (LLM) technology created by OpenAI. Continued here

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GPT-4 Might Just Be a Bloated, Pointless Mess Will endless “scaling” of our current language models really bring true machine intelligence? As a rule, hyping something that doesn’t yet exist is a lot easier than hyping something that does. OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model—much anticipated; yet to be released—has been the subject of unchecked, preposterous speculation in recent months. One post that has circulated widely online purports to evince its extraordinary power. An illustration shows a tiny dot representing GPT-3 and its “175 billion parameters.” Next to it is a much, much larger circle representing GPT-4, with 100 trillion parameters. The new model, one evangelist tweeted, “will make ChatGPT look like a toy.” “Buckle up,” tweeted another. Continued here

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How Helper Sharks Discovered the World's Largest Seagrass Ecosystem Scientists partnered with tiger sharks to map seagrass—the unsung hero of ocean conservation. An unlikely team of researchers and—get this—tiger sharks  has discovered the world’s largest seagrass ecosystem. It’s been hiding in plain sight, just off the coast of the Bahamas. Their results appear in Nature Communications. Continued here

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Spotlight on Women in Science Born 300 years ago this month, Agnesi was the first woman to write a mathematics textbook and to be appointed to a university chair in math Her husband, Claude, helped create the computer revolution, but few knew that she was his closest collaborator Continued here

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Employers Can No Longer Mute Departing Workers Non-disparagement clauses have been a standard part of severence agreements, but the NLRB says that buying silence isn't legal. Continued here

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“The New Anarchy”––In The Atlantic’s Cover Story, Adrienne LaFrance Reports That America Is Facing an Extremist Violence It Does Not Know How to Stop In “The New Anarchy,” a sweeping new cover story for the April issue of The Atlantic, executive editor Adrienne LaFrance draws upon years of reporting to argue that America is experiencing an era of increased acts of violence intended to achieve political goals, whether driven by ideological vision or by delusions and hatred. Examples can be drawn from the headlines on almost any day: the January 6 storming of the Capitol. A paramilitary group’s plans to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. A man in body armor trying to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati field office. The attack on Paul Pelosi in his home in San Francisco. A failed Republican candidate for state office in New Mexico arrested for the alleged attempted murder of local Democratic officials in four separate shootings. What America faces now, LaFrance writes, can best be understood as “a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies. Unchecked, it promises an era of slow-motion anarchy.” Today’s political violence, LaFrance observes, is fueled by something new and dangerous: National leaders, as we see in an entire political party, are complicit in the violence and seek to harness it for their own ends. With all of the historical conditions that breed political violence present in our era, LaFrance’s cover story asks: How can America survive this period of mass delusion, deep division, and political violence without seeing the permanent dissolution of the ties that bind us? For the answer, LaFrance looked overseas, and across history—including to 1970s Italy and the anarchist movement in early-20th-century America—and found lessons for our nation that are both deeply complicated and crucially important. She warns that the conditions that make a society vulnerable to political violence are complex but well established: “Highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in democratic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the ‘other,’ a sharply divided electorate, and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it. All of those conditions were present at the turn of the last century. All of them are present today.” During such eras, LaFrance writes, “societies tend to ignore the obvious warning signs of endemic political violence until the situation is beyond containment, and violence takes on a life of its own.” In contemporary America, one place where political violence became an everyday reality is Portland, Oregon, with its recent long period of clashes among anti-police protesters, right-wing counterprotesters, and the police. Reporting from the city, LaFrance interviews Portland’s mayor and goes on to write: “The situation in Portland became so desperate, and the ideologies involved so tangled, that the violence began to operate like its own weather system—a phenomenon that the majority of Portlanders could see coming and avoid, but one that left behind tremendous destruction. Most people don’t want to fight. But it takes startlingly few violent individuals to exact generational damage.” The decisions that we as a society make today will determine everything tomorrow. LaFrance concludes: “Someday, historians will look back at this moment and tell one of two stories: The first is a story of how democracy and reason prevailed. The second is a story of how minds grew fevered and blood was spilled in the twilight of a great experiment that did not have to end the way it did. “The New Anarchy” builds upon LaFrance’s past work for The Atlantic, including “The Prophecies of Q,” from June 2020, which demonstrated how American conspiracy theories were entering a dangerous new chapter. Both articles join The Atlantic’s ongoing, broad coverage on the rise of extremism and the worsening democratic crisis, which LaFrance also collected in a reader’s guide for the magazine in January 2022, and which includes the essential reporting of Anne Applebaum, Barton Gellman, George Packer, Adam Serwer, and a range of other Atlantic writers and contributors who have investigated the growing threats to global democracy in recent years. Continued here

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This Nemo Tent Is a Lightweight, Roomy, Stargazing Delight 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 At a campground last week I watched someone set up what looked like an old-school canvas tent, complete with a wood-burning stove in it (it is winter), and I thought: See, you don't really need all that expensive high-tech gear. Army tents still work. When I got home, I looked up that tent and realized it was more expensive than most of my backpacking equipment combined. Never mind, I'll stick with the lightweight nylon. Continued here

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Could Giant Blankets and Other Extreme Actions Save Glaciers? Plastic coverings, gravity snow guns and painted rocks could slow ice melt in high mountains Snow guns blasted human-made snow during the winter of 2021–2022 at Diavolezza—a 3,000-meter-high ridge in Switzerland’s Upper Engadine Mountains with nine ski slopes, a cable car and views of some of the Alps’ highest peaks. But the gun operators weren’t just trying to enhance ski conditions. They were testing a new way to make snow, with a goal of helping to save the disappearing Morteratsch Glacier, just to the west. Continued here

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Mystery of Ancient Space Superstorms Deepens A fresh analysis of tree-ring data suggests barrages of cosmic radiation that washed over Earth centuries ago may have come from sources besides our sun When the Hydro-Québec power grid collapsed on March 13, 1989, the outage plunged the entirety of Quebec—more than six million people—into darkness for several hours. The event was triggered by a ferocious storm, but the tempest wasn’t of Earth’s making. Instead the source was the sun: our nearest star had unleashed a swarm of high-energy particles and radiation that wreaked havoc on our technological infrastructure. Continued here

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YouTube has created a multimillion-dollar dubbing economy In the spring of 2021, Farbod Mansorian temporarily moved from his home in Los Angeles to Greenville, North Carolina to pitch one of YouTube’s biggest stars an unexpected idea: taking his act into Spanish. Jimmy Donaldson, known on YouTube simply as MrBeast, runs the fifth-biggest channel on the platform, with over 130 million subscribers — all tuning in for English-language content. Mansorian’s pitch to MrBeast was to expand beyond English through dubbing, and repackage his content for the other 87% of the world. Continued here

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Should Companies Offer Bonuses Instead of Raises? It's unlikely to seem like a good deal to employees. Continued here

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Tips for Overcoming Impostor Syndrome and Being More Confident in the Workplace No one feels confident at work all the time. Here's what you can do about it. Continued here

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Dealmaster: Microsoft's Surface laptops and tablets are on sale today If you're in the market for a Microsoft Surface computer or tablet, now's a good time to grab some deals on the lineup. Continued here

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Become More Comfortable Making Bold Decisions Leaps of faith make great scenes in a movie, but in real life they fill us with stress and uncertainty, two emotions that are not comfortable for the human brain. To face down our discomfort, we can take advantage of a revealing data set that we often ignore: our past decisions. Looking back at our decision-making history allows us to see patterns that we might not otherwise notice, thus providing a crucial perspective for understanding (and solving!) complex and unique current and future problems. Continued here

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Scientists have found Lake Huron wreck of 19th century ship that sank in 1894 In 1894, a schooner barge called Ironton collided with a Great Lakes freighter called Ohio in Lake Huron's infamous "Shipwreck Alley." Ohio's wreck was found in 2017 by an expedition organized by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Now the same team has announced its discovery of the wreck of the 191-foot Ironton nearly 130 years after its sinking, so well-preserved in the frigid waters of the Great Lakes that its three masts are still standing, and its rigging is still attached. Its discovery could help resolve unanswered questions about the ship's final hours. Continued here

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Warren Buffett Says Working for This Type of Leader Will Be the Difference Between Success and Failure You'll find such leaders to be the ones who bring out the best in their employees. Continued here

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India's crypto industry is imploding On February 24, Indian crypto exchange WazirX abruptly shut down its NFT marketplace “due to low volume and traction.” The company said it had collected a fee of just around $6 over the past 30 days while its “server expenses are in thousands of dollars.” The development occurred about a month after WeTrade, an Indian cryptocurrency trading app, suddenly paused operations due to the “crypto winter deepening and the ambience turning increasingly hostile.” WeTrade had originally targeted a turnover of 100 crore rupees (around $12 million) for the 2023 financial year. Continued here

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Why the Supreme Court’s Leak Investigation Failed Immediately following the leak of its draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health last spring, the Supreme Court in a press release described the incident as an “egregious” breach of trust. Chief Justice John Roberts directed the marshal of the Supreme Court to investigate the leak. That investigation resulted in a report, issued earlier this year, that did not uncover the source of the leak. This result did not surprise me. As the inspector general of the Department of Justice and acting inspector general of the Department of Defense for many years, I was often asked to conduct leak investigations. They are notoriously difficult to resolve. Continued here

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Is "The Great Gatsby" really that great of a book? It’s been nearly a century since F. Scott Fitzgerald sent his manuscript for The Great Gatsby to the printing press. During that time, opinion on what has inarguably become the author’s best-known work has shifted quite a bit. Many refer to it as “The Great American Novel.” Many others insist it is not a novel but a novella, and not a particularly great one at that. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson famously said he typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby to teach his fingers what it felt like to produce impeccable writing. His impression of the book could not have been more different from that of its earliest reviewers, who called Fitzgerald “bored and tired and cynical,” and his writing style, always striving for elegance, “painfully forced.” Continued here

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Could 3D printing help solve America's housing crisis? Have you always dreamed of owning a technologically advanced, energy efficient home of the future, at an affordable price?  Well that dream could be closer to reality thanks to advances in large-scale 3D-printing capabilities.  Continued here

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The Food System Is Awful for the Climate. It Doesn't Have to Be A steak at a market sells at an explicit price per pound. But it also has a much higher implicit price: It took energy, land, and water to grow the feed that nourished the cow. As that cow grew, it belched methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. Still more emissions arose from shipping the meat to market.  With an ever-expanding population—and a ballooning middle class consuming more meat—humanity is spewing ever-more planet-warming gasses in its quest to feed itself. A new estimate shows just how bad it could get: By the year 2100, the global food system alone could contribute almost a degree Celsius of warming. For context, humanity has already warmed the planet 1.1 degrees since the dawn of the Industrial Age. The Paris Agreement's goal is to limit warming to 2 degrees above preindustrial levels, or ideally just 1.5 degrees. Agricultural emissions alone could push us past 2 degrees—and food systems are just a fraction of overall global emissions. Continued here

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Twitter revenue, earnings reportedly fell 40% shortly after Musk buyout Twitter's revenue and adjusted earnings reportedly fell about 40 percent year over year in December 2022 amid an advertiser exodus following Elon Musk's takeover. Continued here

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Pregnancy Shouldn’t Work Like This Some mammals pause their pregnancies for nearly a year, like a DIY version of freezing your embryos. Female tammar wallabies are rarely, if ever, truly alone. Their pregnancies last almost exactly 12 months—and within hours of giving birth, most of the marsupials can be found mating again, conceiving another embryo that they may end up carrying for the next year, save for the single day on which they labor, deliver, and couple up once more. Continued here

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Sensitivity is both a brain booster and a survival mechanism Excerpted from SENSITIVE by Jenn Granneman and Andre Sólo. Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Granneman and Andrew Jacob. Used by permission of Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.  Editor's note: The first section of this excerpt, which includes a definition of "sensitive," was taken from an earlier section of the book. Continued here

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Threat actors are using advanced malware to backdoor business-grade routers Researchers have uncovered advanced malware that’s turning business-grade routers into attacker-controlled listening posts that can sniff email and steal files in an ongoing campaign hitting North and South America and Europe. Continued here

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Thousands scammed by AI voices mimicking loved ones in emergencies AI models designed to closely simulate a person’s voice are making it easier for bad actors to mimic loved ones and scam vulnerable people out of thousands of dollars, The Washington Post reported. Continued here

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New "Canary" channel will showcase more-experimental, less-stable Windows builds Microsoft started its Windows Insider program in 2014 to get public feedback on Windows 10 as it was being developed. Ever since then, the company has continued to provide regularly updated prerelease builds of Windows 10 and Windows 11 to preview and test new features. Continued here

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Apple's 15-inch MacBook Air reportedly coming soon, along with new Mac Pro and iMac Apple is readying a new batch of Macs to launch "between late spring and summer," according to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Continued here

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These 5 great historical leaders had this one trait in common Great leaders are few and far between, so Nancy Koehn, a historian of business at Harvard Business School, has put together a compendium of anecdotes from five great leaders throughout history.  It reads like a who’s who of humanitarianism, with true stories of grit and determination from the likes of explorer Ernest Shackleton, American President Abraham Lincoln, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Nazi-resisting Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the environmental activist Rachel Carson.  Continued here

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The small launch industry is brutal--yes, even more than you thought One of the most honest moments in a new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale, comes during a discussion between two aerospace technicians working at the rocket company Astra in December 2018. On a Sunday, Les Martin and Matt Flanagan were watching football inside an RV parked at Astra's facilities near Oakland, California. Continued here

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Mass means (almost) everything in astronomy Ice-rich objects become spheroidal at ~3 × 1019 kg, while rocky/metallic objects require ~3 × 1020 kg. Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in images, visuals, and no more than 200 words. Talk less; smile more. Continued here

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5 sci-fi utopias that will seduce you (and likely freak you out) Science fiction and fantasy are often used to examine the world we live in, so it’s no wonder that the genres have delivered more than their fair share of utopian literature. However, not every allegedly perfect place is as perfect as it seems, even if the technology is (to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke) indistinguishable from magic. Here are five engrossing sci-fi and fantasy novels exploring worlds you might or might not want to live in. As the only utopian novel of the 17th century written by a woman, The Blazing World is the work of Duchess Margaret Cavendish. A poet, scientist, and philosopher, she was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, where she interacted with thinkers including Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes.  Continued here

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Cunningham's Law: The satisfying benefits of feigning stupidity I used to work with someone who was incredibly annoying, and I’ll tell you why. First, if you said something — anything at all — this person would try to find the tiniest and most insignificant bit of trivia to “correct” you. If they couldn’t conjure up trivia, they smile and nod patronizingly, as if to tell the room that what you said was so obvious that not even a trainee dunce would say it. Some people love being right. They love it even more when everyone knows they’re right. In any given room, there’s almost always a portion of people who yearn to be the seen as the best. They want others to gasp at their superior intelligence or their years of hard-won acumen. So, for a few years, I’d let my colleague wind me up, and I’d get increasingly and irrationally furious at her behavior. But then one day I realized how to beat her. I talked nonsense. Continued here