When it comes to keeping the fizz in your champagne, bottle size matters

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When it comes to keeping the fizz in your champagne, bottle size matters     A large part of the pleasure of imbibing a glass of champagne comes from its effervescence: all those bubbles rising from the glass and ticking the nose and palate. If there's no fizz, there's no fun—and also less flavor and aromas to savor. A recent paper published in the journal ACS Omega found that the size of the champagne bottle is a key factor in determining when the wine inside will go flat. Continued here

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Alabama Is Defying the Supreme Court on Voting Rights     Supreme Court rulings are meant to be the law of the land, but Alabama is taking its recent opinion on the Voting Rights Act as a mere recommendation. In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district.Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander. Continued here

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The 12 Best Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now     Over the past year or so, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings (congrats, CODA!), but some of the best movies are on Amazon Prime Video. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up.Our picks for the 10 best films on Amazon Prime are below. All the films in our guide are included in your Prime subscription—no renting here. Once you’ve watched your fill, check out our lists for the best shows on Netflix and best movies on Disney+ if you’re looking for something else to watch. We also have a guide to the best shows on Amazon if that's what you're in the mood for.  Continued here

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European satellite plunges back to Earth in first-of-its-kind assisted re-entry     The European Space Agency deftly guided one of its satellites toward a fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere Friday, demonstrating a new method of post-mission disposal to ensure the spacecraft would not fall into any populated areas. Continued here

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Helium in Distant Galaxies May Help Explain Why the Universe Exists     New measurements from Japan’s Subaru telescope have helped researchers study the matter-antimatter asymmetry problemThe following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Continued here

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Here's How AI Can Predict Hit Songs With Frightening Accuracy     Sophie Bushwick:  Last month, AI researchers claimed an impressive breakthrough. They published a paper showing that AI can predict, with 97 percent accuracy, if any song will be a hit. And it does this by measuring how the listener’s body responds to the music. Lucy Tu: But it might be too soon to anoint AI as the next big talent scout for the music industry. I’m Lucy Tu, the 2023 AAAS Mass Media fellow for Scientific American. Continued here

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This company keeps selling TB-tainted bone grafts, causing deadly outbreaks     For the second time, contaminated bone graft products from the medical company Aziyo Biologics Inc. are linked to a highly unusual and deadly outbreak of tuberculosis. Continued here

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Is A Mega Ocean Current About to Shut Down?     An alarming study predicts an imminent collapse of a mega ocean current, but some experts say the evidence is insufficientCLIMATEWIRE | An enormous ocean current that warms some continents and cools others as it snakes around the world could collapse decades earlier than scientists predicted. Continued here

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Hands On With Google Search's Answer to ChatGPT     Last weekend, I turned to Google Search for help figuring out how many stamps I needed to put on an 8-ounce piece of mail. (Naturally, I was sending a copy of the latest issue of WIRED!). It's the exact sort of question that I hoped Google Search's new generative AI feature, which I've been testing for the past month, would solve much faster than I could through my own browsing.Google's clunkily named Search Generative Experience, SGE for short, infuses its search box with ChatGPT-like conversational functionality. You can sign up at Google's Search Labs. The company says it wants users to converse with its search chatbot, which launched to testers in May, to dive deeper into topics and ask more challenging and intuitive questions than they would type into a boring old query box. And AI-generated answers are meant to organize information more clearly than a traditional search results page—for example, by pulling together information from multiple websites. Most of the world's web searches run through Google, and it's been developing AI technologies longer than most companies, so it's fair to expect a top-notch experience. Continued here

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John Romero's 'Doom' Memoir Drops You Into Id's Early Days     Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUHJohn Romero, cocreator of the popular first-person shooters Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D is one of the video game industry’s best known designers. In his new book, Doom Guy: Life in First Person, Romero relates the many ups and downs of his life and career. Continued here

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What's the Faintest Star You Can See in the Sky?     The “magnitude scale” for measuring stellar brightness also reveals the limits of naked-eye stargazingOne of the most obvious things about looking at stars in the sky is that they’re not all the same brightness. A handful are so bright that you can easily see them even in a big city’s washed-out sky, while others are so faint that they’re invisible unless you’re stargazing on a moonless night from an essentially light-pollution-free locale (if you can find one). This varying visibility of stars is so obvious you may not have given it much thought. Continued here

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The Legal Saga of Uber's Fatal Self-Driving Car Crash Is Over     It’s been more than five years since an Uber self-driving car struck and killed a woman named Elaine Herzberg as she walked her bicycle across a road in Tempe, Arizona. Herzberg’s death instantly turned what had been a philosophical conundrum into a glaringly real, legal one: Who gets blamed for a road fatality in the awkward, liminal era of self-driving cars, when humans are essentially babysitters of imperfect, still-learning AI systems? Is it the company with the erring car? Or the person behind the wheel who should have intervened?On Friday, we got an answer: It’s the person sitting behind the wheel. In an Arizona courtroom, the test operator during the crash, Rafaela Vasquez, the subject of an in-depth WIRED feature last year, pleaded guilty to one count of endangerment and was sentenced to three years of supervised probation, with no time in prison. In Arizona, endangerment is defined as “recklessly endangering another person with a substantial risk of imminent death or physical injury.” Continued here

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Android malware steals user credentials using optical character recognition     Security researchers have unearthed a rare malware find: malicious Android apps that use optical character recognition to steal credentials displayed on phone screens. Continued here

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Ask Ethan: How does light escape from a black hole?     The most important feature of a black hole is that it has an event horizon: a region of space where the gravitational field is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. How, then, do we explain the matter and radiation that we both see being emitted from them, and also that we predict should come from them? That’s what Russell Sisson wants to know, as he asks:“Everything you read about black holes indicates that ‘nothing, not even light, can escape them’. Then you read that there is Hawking radiation, which is ‘blackbody radiation that is predicted to be released by black holes’. Then there are relativistic jets that ‘shoot out of black holes at close to the speed of light’. Obviously, something does come out of black holes, right?” Continued here

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Fishermen Spot Rare Endangered Rice's Whale in the Gulf of Mexico     Scientists say no more than 100 individuals of the species exist in the wild, placing the Rice’s whale among the scarcest marine mammals in the worldTwo fishermen had the wildlife sighting of a lifetime this week, when they spotted a massive animal likely to be a Rice’s whale swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. Continued here

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AI-Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models     As AI-generated content fills the Internet, it’s corrupting the training data for models to come. What happens when AI eats itself?Thanks to a boom in generative artificial intelligence, programs that can produce text, computer code, images and music are readily available to the average person. And we’re already using them: AI content is taking over the Internet, and text generated by “large language models” is filling hundreds of websites, including CNET and Gizmodo. But as AI developers scrape the Internet, AI-generated content may soon enter the data sets used to train new models to respond like humans. Some experts say that will inadvertently introduce errors that build up with each succeeding generation of models. Continued here

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Reddit calls for "a few new mods" after axing, polarizing some of its best     Reddit is campaigning to replace numerous longstanding moderators who were removed from their positions after engaging in API protests. Over the past week, a Reddit employee has posted to subreddits with ousted mods, asking for new volunteers. But in its search, the company has failed to address the intricacies involved in moderating distinct and, in some cases, well-known subreddits. And it doesn't look like the knowledge from the previous moderators is being passed down. Continued here

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The #1 way to strengthen your mind is to use your body     Exercise can have surprisingly transformative impacts on the brain, according to neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki. It has the power not only to boost mood and focus due to an increase in neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline, but it also contributes to long-term brain health. Exercise stimulates the growth of new brain cells, particularly in the hippocampus, improving long-term memory and increasing its volume. Continued here

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Remove Boredom and Frustration from Your Customer Journey     Over recent decades, traditional business practices have been increasingly disrupted by technology-empowered business models. Technology and innovation — from online shopping and mobile connectivity to social media- and data-driven marketing — have reconfigured the business landscape and brought new opportunities and challenges. Yet, the basics of the customer experience remain: Consumers recognize a need to be fulfilled, then interact with companies and their offerings to seek a satisfying way to fulfill this need. This core motivation for creating a meaningful customer experience is unchanged. Continued here

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When Judaism Went      In the early 1970s, American Jews were, on the whole, centrist and conventional. Most were married, and most to other Jews. Their largest religious denomination was the Conservative movement, with its bland, spacious suburban synagogues, representing the middle ground between fusty tradition and full-forced reform. This was a community that seemed to have settled into a comfortable status quo, steadily assimilating in the postwar years and ascending into the middle class.Still, there were signs that when it came to actual religious practice, a younger generation, coming of age during the 1960s, found this stability stultifying. The desire for change could be felt bubbling from below. In 1972, the first female rabbi was ordained. Two-thirds of Jews under 30 belonged to no synagogue at all. But in cities such as Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., groups of young, well-educated Jews had begun informally worshiping and studying together, eschewing institutional supervision and their parents’ conformity. Continued here