Our Top Song of the Summer Picks

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Our Top Song of the Summer Picks     Music is a sport, and summer is the most competitive time of the year for artists. Which musician will reign supreme? What song will be played on repeat? What anthem will color the nostalgia of our sun-smooched days? The Song of Summer is among the most coveted trophies because it lives with us forever, locked safely in the cellar of our memory. It is a reminder of who we were in the unfading light of July, at our most radiant and carefree.But the metrics for competition are changing—and fast. Music streamers are swollen with content. TikTok thinks it knows best (it doesn’t). With terrifying precision, AI-generated songs are creeping into the mainstream. Yet our nine contenders for this year’s summer anthem endure in spite of the sugary suck of the algorithm. They endure despite the artificially rendered future on the horizon. Continued here

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Everything Samsung Announced at Summer Galaxy Unpacked 2023     It seems like it was just yesterday when Samsung announced its first-ever folding smartphone, and here we are at its fifth generation. At its biannual Galaxy Unpacked event—taking place for the first time in Samsung's home city of Seoul, South Korea—the company took the wraps off of several new products. The new Galaxy Z Flip5 and Z Fold5 are its latest folding smartphones, the Galaxy Watch6 and Watch6 Classic smartwatches succeed last year's Watch5 series, and as usual, there are three new flagship tablets in the Galaxy Tab S9 series.    The hardware hasn't been dramatically updated. Many of the upgrades this year (like most years of late) are iterative. Here's everything you need to know. Continued here

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'Critical Role' Lays Out the Next Era in Tabletop Games and Live-Action Role-Play     The gang behind Critical Role, an immensely popular Dungeons and Dragons podcast, began playing together in December 2012. They started their show on Twitch via the Geek and Sundry channel just two years later. Since then, their success has come to define the "actual play" genre of podcasting, building on successive layers of momentum to attempt ever grander projects.Critical Role now has its own production company in Metapigeon, publishing group at Darrington Press, and charitable body in the Critical Role Foundation. What began as an experimental Dungeons and Dragons podcast between friends has resulted in a hit Amazon Prime animated series, multiple tabletop game systems of their own design, and a nonprofit funding children's programs and emergency aid around the world. Continued here

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The US government is taking a serious step toward space-based nuclear propulsion     Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter. Continued here

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Ancient Greek and Roman statues originally were painted. This is what they should look like     During the early 1980s, a German archaeologist named Vinzenz Brinkmann was scrutinizing the surface of an ancient Greek sculpture in search of tool marks. Although he never found what he was looking for — like the painters of the Italian Renaissance, Greek sculptors were so skilled they hardly left a trace of their own handiwork — he did discover traces of something else: paint.Almost exactly a century before that, an American art critic named Russell Sturgis made a similar discovery when he traveled to Athens to attend the excavation of an ancient statue near the Acropolis. To his surprise, the statue didn’t look anything like the ones displayed in museums. Whereas those are as white as the marble they are made of, this one was covered in brittle dabs of red, black, and green pigment. Continued here

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The Namibian fairy circle debate rages on: Could it be sand termites after all?     Himba bushmen in the Namibian grasslands have long passed down legends about the region's mysterious fairy circles: bare, reddish-hued circular patches that are also found in northwestern Australia. In the last 10 years, scientists have heatedly debated whether these unusual patterns are due to sand termites or to an ecological version of a self-organizing Turing mechanism. Last year, a team of scientists reported what they deemed definitive evidence of the latter, thus ruling out sand termites, but their declaration of victory may have been premature. A recent paper published in the journal Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics offers a careful rebuttal of those 2022 findings, concluding that sand termites may be to blame after all. Continued here

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Who discovered dark matter: Fritz Zwicky or Vera Rubin?     It’s hard to believe, but the idea that the Universe was dominated not by normal matter but rather by dark matter — a novel form of non-interacting matter that’s completely distinct from protons, neutrons, and electrons — goes all the way back to 1933. For decades, the overwhelming majority of the leading astronomers and physicists dismissed the idea as being ill-motivated, and it gained very little traction on both the theoretical and observational fronts throughout the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. It was only with the novel results and improved instrumentation initially leveraged by Vera Rubin and Kent Ford, and then further developed by Rubin on her own, that dark matter was brought into the cosmological mainstream in the 1970s.But did either Fritz Zwicky, who first presented that 1933 evidence and even coined the term dunkle materie, which directly translates to dark matter, or Vera Rubin actually discover dark matter or the overwhelming evidence in favor of it? Or is it unfair to say that dark matter was actually discovered by either of them, including up through and including the present day? Continued here

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World's heaviest commercial communications satellite will launch tonight     The heaviest commercial communications satellite ever built is folded up for launch on top of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket Wednesday night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Continued here

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Dealmaster: Save on laptops, vacuums, and back-to-school supplies     Whether you need a new laptop to catch up on some work this summer or you're prepping for your kid's return to school, we have plenty of deals for the summer. From storage boxes to noise-canceling headphones, and SSDs to pens and supplies, there are plenty of savings on our curated back-to-school shopping list. Continued here

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America Already Has an AI Underclass     Search engines, ChatGPT, and other AI tools wouldn’t function without an army of contractors. Now those workers say they’re underpaid and mistreated.On weekdays, between homeschooling her two children, Michelle Curtis logs on to her computer to squeeze in a few hours of work. Her screen flashes with Google Search results, the writings of a Google chatbot, and the outputs of other algorithms, and she has a few minutes to respond to each—judging the usefulness of the blue links she’s been provided, checking the accuracy of an AI’s description of a praying mantis, or deciding which of two chatbot-written birthday poems is better. She never knows what she will have to assess in advance, and for the AI-related tasks, which have formed the bulk of her work since February, she says she has little guidance and not enough time to do a thorough job. Continued here

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Psychologists Struggle to Explain the Mind of the Stalker     Attempts to understand the psychopathology of romantic infatuation and sexual predation are still in their infancyTales of the relentless pursuit of a romantic interest date back to antiquity, turning up in the Epic of Gilgamesh. More than 4,000 years from the time that poem emerged, society still runs into enormous difficulties in understanding and dealing with someone who engages in such obsessive and unwanted pursuits. Laws on stalking are still in their infancy. The first U.S. law criminalizing stalking passed in 1990, and within two decades similar laws arose worldwide. The growing realization of the harm stalking causes also ignited an explosion of multidisciplinary scientific research aimed at defining it, understanding its pathology and developing prevention strategies. Continued here

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Before you start celebrating a possible Tesla factory in India ...     If Indian newspapers are to be believed, Tesla is looking to set up an electric vehicle factory in the country.For the past couple of weeks, Indian media has speculated about the production capacity of this planned factory, and the kind of cars it will produce. Most of these reports are based on anonymous sources as neither the government nor Tesla have officially shared any details of such plans. Continued here

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Windows, hardware, Xbox sales are dim spots in a solid Microsoft earnings report     It has been a tough year for PC companies and companies that make PC components. Companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have all reported big drops in revenue from the hardware that they sell to consumers (though the hardware they sell to other businesses is often doing better). Continued here

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The UFO reports piquing Nasa's interest     It was just a normal day's flying for Alex Dietrich – until it wasn't. Streaking through the sky over the tranquil expanse of the Pacific Ocean near San Diego, the US Navy lieutenant commander was taking her F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet on a training mission with a colleague in another plane. Then came a voice through the crackle of the radio.It was an operations officer aboard the warship USS Princeton, asking them to investigate a suspicious object flitting around: on several occasions, it had been spotted 80,000ft (24.2km) high, before suddenly dropping close to the sea and apparently vanishing.  Continued here

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How to Set Up Your New Android Phone     If you’ve just unboxed a new Android phone, you’re probably excited to play with it. There’s a little bit of setup to deal with first, but don’t worry—whether it’s a Samsung Galaxy or a Google Pixel, the process of getting started with Android is nearly the same on all devices and blessedly simple. Here’s what you want to have before you get started:If you do have your old phone, it’s also worth tracking down a USB-C cable so you can connect your old phone to your new one to quickly copy data. Continued here

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Are 'Cocaine Sharks' Really Scarfing Down Drugs off Florida's Coasts?     With their stealth, speed and serrated teeth, sharks are predators to be reckoned with. And that’s before factoring in the cocaine some sharks may be eatingWhile sharks on cocaine sounds like a clumsy Jaws-Scarface crossover, some researchers say the idea may not be as wacky as it sounds—especially in the waters off Florida. There sharks in a diverse assemblage swim along a major drug-smuggling throughway, which potentially exposes the toothy predators to floating bundles of narcotics. “This is the only place in the world where a shark could come into contact with such massive doses of cocaine,” says Tom Hird, a marine biologist and broadcaster based in England. Continued here

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Increasing Power Outages Don't Hit Everyone Equally     Some of the most vulnerable communities in the U.S. live in places that are particularly prone to frequent, prolonged power outages Multiple rounds of storms tore through parts of Illinois and Missouri in the first week of July, triggering widespread power outages that left tens of thousands of people without electricity—some for days after the storms had passed. It was just one of many such events to hit people around the U.S. this year. Government data show that blackouts are worsening in number and duration, and a new study shows they disproportionately affect already vulnerable communities. Continued here

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Why fraud still thrives on Wall Street     As a forensic accounting expert, Pope understands how this power comes with significant responsibilities and potential pitfalls. The pressure from market expectations can sometimes drive companies to inflate their financial performance, creating a precarious ethical landscape for the accountants overseeing the company’s financial activity.Pope highlights a key problem area: the mismatch between the money a company actually has (cash) and the money it records as earned (revenue). In the wrong hands, this system can be exploited, leading to serious legal consequences. She emphasizes that accountants often face hard choices and must stand firm in their ethics to ensure transparency and fairness in business. Continued here

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Shape-Shifting, Self-Healing Machines Are Among Us     Electronics that can bend, stretch and repair themselves could potentially work in applications ranging from tougher robots to smart clothesShape-changing machines have long been a staple of science fiction—for good reason. Consider the power of the villainous killing machine in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day. When the liquid-metal T-1000 arrives, the heroes quickly realize they have two big problems: First, their foe can morph, turning human-looking appendages into deadly blades. Second, blowing holes in the machine barely slows it down; it can heal itself! Continued here

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Man open-sources the self-repairable AirPods Pro case that Apple won't make     Consumer tech has faced scrutiny over the years around "planned obsolescence": making devices so difficult to repair that shoppers have to buy new products and toss devices sooner than they'd like. Now, one do-it-yourself-er is on a mission to prove that it doesn't have to be this way. And he's starting with the (original) Apple AirPods Pro. Continued here