How Do I Make the Case for My First Raise?

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How Do I Make the Case for My First Raise?     Do your research, get your timing right, and document everything. Continued here

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Relativity and the physics of immortality     From your own experiential perspective, the laws of physics are stacked against you if you ever hope to achieve immortality. From a thermodynamic perspective, every system tends toward increasing entropy-and-disorder, and the only way you can combat that is by constantly inputting an external source of energy; in other words, your body and mind will eventually break down. And although you might try to leverage the power of relativity to dilate time and slow its passage, that will never work from your individual perspective; time only dilates or slows relative to an observer in a different reference frame from your own.While this may confine a human’s dream of immortality to solutions that rely on technological enhancements or science-fiction level technology that relies on novel physical laws and/or phenomena, there’s still plenty for relativity to say about living forever: at least, relative to the rest of the Universe. While nearly all of us living today will certainly be dead in another century, should we all remain on Earth, the lessons from both special and general relativity teach us that there are a few physical situations that we should strive for if we truly want to maximize the amount of time that we can spend as living creatures within our Universe. Here’s the key insight we all need to understand. Continued here

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New DNA Tests Are Identifying Missing Persons and Solving Crimes     Every year about 1,000 human remains go unidentified in the U.S. New genetic technology can give them names and return them to their familiesOn June 5, 2017, Ashley Loring Heavyrunner disappeared from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. The then 20-year-old college student stopped by her parents’ house that day and went to a party; then, at some point, she became part of an epidemic of missing Indigenous women. Six years later she’s still missing. Continued here

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If You Practice This 1 Habit, Your Leadership Skills Are Probably Better Than Most Managers'     People may dismiss it as unfit for the business world, but research supports its value. Continued here

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Protecting Plants and Animals at Risk Must Start before They Need the Endangered Species Act     The Endangered Species Act is an emergency measure turning 50 this year. Focusing on ecosystem preservation can keep us from ever needing itIn the 1950s and 1960s farmers, municipalities and even homeowners were widely spraying the insecticide DDT to kill pests. The chemical also polluted the food web and destroyed the eggs of Bald Eagles. By the early 1970s America's national symbol was almost extinct. Concern for the birds helped to prompt Congress to pass the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which was enacted on December 28, 1973. More than 1,600 animals and plants have been listed as threatened or endangered, and more than 60 species have recovered enough to be taken off the list—including the Bald Eagle. Continued here

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Annie Rauwerda: The joy of learning random things on Wikipedia     Writer Annie Rauwerda makes a habit of getting lost among the seemingly endless digital archives of Wikipedia, discovering fake towns, promiscuous tortoises, 19th-century fangirls and so much more. An avid editor of the crowd-sourced platform, she speaks to the joys of exploring niche and humorous subjects, accidentally learning just for fun — and broadening your horizons along the way. Continued here

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DeepMind Wants to Use AI to Solve the Climate Crisis     It’s a perennial question at WIRED: Tech got us into this mess, can it get us out? That’s particularly true when it comes to climate change. As the weather becomes more extreme and unpredictable, there are hopes that artificial intelligence—that other existential threat—might be part of the solution.DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence lab, has been using its AI expertise to tackle the climate change problem in three different ways, as Sims Witherspoon, DeepMind’s climate action lead, explained in an interview ahead of her talk at WIRED Impact in London on November 21. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.Sims Witherspoon: There are lots of ways we can slice the answer. AI can help us in mitigation. It can help us in adaptation. It can help us with addressing loss and damage. It can help us in biodiversity and ecology and much more. But I think one of the ways that makes it more tangible for most people is to talk about it through the lens of AI’s strengths. Continued here

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Simultaneous Megafires Will Increasingly Plague the Western U.S.     The Western U.S. faces a future of fighting multiple large wildfires at once—a situation that is more difficult than handling a single blaze, even if the total acreage is similarCLIMATEWIRE | Climate change is expected to help spark more simultaneous megafires in the western United States — a trend that could make it harder for firefighters to control the blazes. Continued here

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Sardinia's mysterious beehive towers     Expecting not to find much more than a pile of big stones, I followed the sign off the motorway into a little car park and there it was, rising from a flat, green landscape covered in little white flowers, with a few donkeys dotted around: Nuraghe Losa. From a distance, it looked like a big sandcastle with its top crumbling away, but as I walked towards it, I began to realise the colossal size of the monument in front of me.Nuraghi (the plural of nuraghe) are massive conical stone towers that pepper the landscape of the Italian island of Sardinia. Built between 1600 and 1200BCE, these mysterious Bronze Age bastions were constructed by carefully placing huge, roughly worked stones, weighing several tons each, on top of each other in a truncated formation.  Continued here

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The true story behind the US' first federal monuments     "Are you sitting down? I have news for you." Gwen Marable's cousin from the US state of Ohio called her at home in Maryland about 27 years ago. "We are descended from the sister of Benjamin Banneker, Jemima."The Banneker family, which numbers over 5,000 known descendants today, only learned about this astonishing connection to their ground-breaking but little-known ancestor through the wonders of DNA testing. As such, no personal stories about him, no artifacts, were handed down through the generations. Continued here

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Best Buy Just Made a Bittersweet Announcement. It's Truly the End of an Era     It's not just about getting rid of DVDs. Continued here

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The city with gold in its sewage lines     "He burned the sari and from it, handed us a thin slice of pure silver," said my mother, describing a moment that had taken place 30 years ago at her home in the city of Firozabad. The man in her story was no magician, but an extractor. Like many similar artisans in my mother's hometown, he'd go door to door collecting old saris to mine them for their precious metals. Until the 1990s, saris were often threaded with pure silver and gold, and I remember digging into my mother's wardrobe, searching for her glittery outfits like treasure. But as she told me, the extractors were looking for something even more valuable than clothing – they were looking for trash, and a kind of trash specific to this city. Continued here

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Elon Musk Says X, Formerly Twitter, Will Test Charging Users $1 Dollar a Year to Post, Like, or Share     Musk confirms that X is testing a new entry-level fee to write on the platform. Continued here

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Duna de Bolonia: The Spanish sand dune hiding Roman ruins     Near the southern tip of Spain's Cádiz province, where Europe lunges into the Strait of Gibraltar as if reaching out for the North African coast, the Duna de Bolonia is one of the continent's largest sand dunes. Rising more than 30m high and sprawling 200m wide, the white mound spills into the azure sea and appears as if someone has dumped a massive pile of sugar atop the surrounding Estrecho Nature Park's protected green forest.Like all sand dunes, Bolonia is a constantly moving ecosystem that shifts with the winds. But as climate change has intensified the hurricane-force gusts coming from the east, the dune has increasingly migrated inland towards the ecologically important cork and pine forests and scrubland – revealing remnants of the many past cilivilisations who have passed through here in the process. Continued here

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How maps can protect children from extreme heat     On a hot evening in August, when temperatures in Irving, a suburb in Dallas, Texas, can reach a stifling 45C (113F), outdoor pursuits and an active lifestyle can often be challenging for Christina and Landon Howard and their two young children, aged nine and 10."We can't go swimming or take part in other daily outdoor activities because it's just too hot outside," says Christina."Our son had to came back indoors the other day after 10 minutes of skateboarding because he felt exhausted by the extreme heat conditions." Continued here

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A secret site for the Knights Templar?     In a hole in the ground beneath the Hertfordshire market town of Royston, dimly illuminated by flickering light, I was looking at a gallery of crudely carved figures, blank-faced and bearing instruments of torture. Cave manager Nicky Paton pointed them out to me one by one. "There's Saint Catherine, with her breaking wheel. She was only 18 when she was martyred," Paton said, cheerfully. "And there's Saint Lawrence. He was burnt to death on a griddle."Amid the grisly Christian scenes were Pagan images: a large carving of a horse, and a fertility symbol known as a sheela na gig, depicting a woman with exaggerated sexual organs. Another portrayed a person holding a skull in their right hand and a candle in their left, theorised to represent an initiation ceremony – a tantalising clue as to the cave's possible purpose. Adding to the carvings' creepiness was their rudimentary, almost childlike, execution. Continued here

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Razer's High-End Webcam Delivers a Razor-Sharp Image. That's About It     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 WIREDRazer took an early lead when I began testing webcams back in 2020. Since then, it has continued to expand its lineup of Kiyo webcams, and that brings us to the Kiyo Pro Ultra. As the name suggests, this webcam takes aim at the very top end of the desktop camera market. Continued here

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Health Care Costs Are Rising. This Little-Known Plan Is Helping Employers     To save on costs, many business owners are ditching their group health care plans for individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements. Continued here

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How to Handle This New COVID Season     Josh Fischman: We bring you the latest vital health news: Discoveries that affect your body and your mind.  On today’s show, we’re doing a refresher course on COVID. Fall and winter usually see a peak in virus cases, so we thought it would be a good time to talk about where we’re at. That means knowing where COVID is spreading, how to stay safe, and when you should test yourself. Continued here

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What's Derailing Your Company's Transformation?     Misaligned incentives. Insufficient investment in training. Conflicting priorities. A few rotten apples on the executive team. All of these are typical responses to the question: What’s blocking your change efforts? And, in our view, such answers are insufficiently shallow. Finding the root cause of barriers to change requires leaders to probe into their organization’s subconscious to surface, diagnose, and ultimately address hidden, often subtle, barriers. Here’s how we did that for one of our clients and what we learned. Continued here

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Why clean air is a luxury that many can't afford     Every time Mithilesh turns on her stove to cook, her eyes begin to burn. The small home the 29-year-old housewife shares with her husband, daughter, son and elderly in-laws in the slums of the Indian capital Delhi quickly fills up with smoke, making it hard for anyone to see.Mithilesh has cooked over a traditional chulha – a metal coated combustor stove that uses firewood as fuel – since she was 13 years old. She often has difficulty breathing and experiences uncontrolled bouts of coughing. Continued here

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How Would We Know There's Life on Earth? This Bold Experiment Found Out     Thirty years ago, astronomer Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn a passing space probe’s instruments on Earth to look for life — with results that still reverberate todayIt began the way many discoveries do — a tickling of curiosity in the back of someone’s mind. That someone was astronomer and communicator Carl Sagan. The thing doing the tickling was the trajectory of NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which had launched in October 1989 and was the first to orbit Jupiter. The result was a paper in Nature 30 years ago this week that changed how scientists thought about looking for life on other planets. Continued here

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What Fast-Moving Companies Do Differently     Lack of speed has been troubling companies for decades. The difference is that, today, with everything moving so much faster, a lack of speed can mean more than just a few missed opportunities — it can put companies in a very precarious position, especially those in markets where they face competitors that can sense and respond far more quickly. Slow-moving companies increasingly will find themselves fighting for relevance or, in some cases, pure survival — and leaders know it. Companies that recognize the competitive advantage of speed do four things differently: 1) They rely on data (and know how to make sense of it); 2) They empower localized decision-making; 3) They reward speed over perfection; and 4) They create powerful ecosystems around the seamless exchange of data. Continued here

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It's never goodbye in South Asia     Today is the last edition of our South Asia newsletter, so we want to take a moment to thank all of you. Thank you for subscribing and reading us over the last two years. It has meant a lot to us. As you might know, South Asians don’t like to say goodbye — instead, across the many languages we speak in the subcontinent, we prefer versions of the phrase “see you again” or “may God be with you.”This newsletter has been a labor of love for our South Asia reporter, Nilesh Christopher; our deputy editor, Itika Sharma Punit; and most recently, yours truly. Together, we have taken you around the region: From Bangladeshi startups’ “narrative problem” to e-commerce in Pakistan capitalizing on the country’s love for cricket. With each dispatch, we took you to a different country. We’ve also explored a host of topics that matter to us — like how outsourcing giants get irked by moonlighting employees, or how the global funding winter affected the region. We’ve also celebrated the innovations that benefit large swathes of the population in South Asia, as well as disinformation campaigns that have potentially hurt our communities. Continued here

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New Pill Helps COVID Smell and Taste Loss Fade Quickly     The antiviral drug ensitrelvir, which has not been approved outside of Japan, shortens sensory problemsNew clinical-trial data suggest that an antiviral pill called ensitrelvir shortens the duration of two unpleasant symptoms of COVID-19: loss of smell and taste. The medication is among the first to alleviate these effects and, unlike other COVID-19 treatments, is not reserved only for people at high risk of severe illness. Continued here

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The i5 Is BMW's Best EV Yet     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 WIREDThe i3 and i8 were prescient precursors. The i4, iX and i7 moved the idea of an all-electric BMW center stage. Now things get real, for the numbers don’t lie. The i5 replaces one of the Bavarian behemoth’s heartland cars, the 5 series, a 10-million-plus bestseller across seven previous generations since 1972. Continued here

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How Indra Nooyi Brought Design Thinking to PepsiCo     As the former CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi played an important role in shaping the company’s global strategy. She shifted PepsiCo’s focus to healthier products, worked to improve sustainability, and perhaps most notably: introduced design thinking into the company’s innovation process. Continued here

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Getir bets big on the U.S. even as it bleeds cash     Late in 2021, the Turkish startup Getir rolled out its first dark stores in New York City, Chicago, and Boston. It hired Gen-Z Americans to tout its services online, with groceries delivered in minutes on late nights or in the rain. It filled subway trains with bright violet ads, appeared on-screen on city streets, and aired across Citi Field in partnership with the Mets. From the rolling hills of Istanbul to the dense cities of Europe, it seemed Getir was ready to serve the notoriously cutthroat American metropolis.“Just like every basketball player dreams of playing in the NBA, a startup dreams of playing in the U.S.,” founder and chief executive Nazim Salur said when his company arrived. Continued here

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Animals of the Safari Are More Afraid of Humans Than Lions     The savanna is a dangerous place: it has lions, buffalo and poachers. What scares animals the most in a South African national park?Despite heavy poaching of rhinos, South Africa’s Kruger National Park is still a natural paradise. One of the largest remaining lion populations in Africa lives there. Yet there is something the local animals fear even more than the big cats. Continued here

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How Kenvue De-Risked Its Supply Chain     Global disruptions that cause sudden swings in consumer demand are becoming more commonplace today, changing the way we think about supply chains and de-risking them. This article shows how Kenvue, a former Johnson & Johnson company invested in “real” insurance policies — capabilities and resources that make a supply chain resilient under conditions of high uncertainty. Specifically the company invested in three strategic capabilities: surge capacity, partnerships, and data and processes. Continued here