How Apple plans to update new iPhones without opening them

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How Apple plans to update new iPhones without opening them     Unboxing a new gadget is always a fun experience, but it's usually marred somewhat by the setup process. Either your device has been in a box for months, or it's just now launching and ships in the box with pre-release software. Either way, the first thing you have to do is connect to Wi-Fi and wait several minutes for an OS update to download and install. The issue is so common that going through a lengthy download is an expected part of buying anything that connects to the Internet. Continued here

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The Deaths of Effective Altruism - WIRED (No paywall)     Effective altruism is the philosophy of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto wunderkind due to be sentenced tomorrow for fraud and money laundering. Elon Musk has said that EA is close to what he believes. Facebook mogul Dustin Moskovitz and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn have spent mega-millions on its causes, and EAs have made major moves to influence American politics. In 2021, EA boasted of $46 billion in funding—comparable to what it’s estimated the Saudis spent over decades to spread Islamic fundamentalism around the world.Effective altruism pitches itself as a hyperrational method of using any resource for the maximum good of the world. Here in Silicon Valley, EA has become a secular religion of the elites. Effective altruists filled the board of OpenAI, the $80 billion tech company that invented ChatGPT (until the day in November when they nearly crashed the company). EA is also heavily recruiting young people across rich universities like Stanford, where I work. Money is flowing from EA headquarters to entice students at Yale, Columbia, Berkeley, Penn, Swarthmore—if you went to a wealthy school, you’ll find EAs all over your alma mater. Continued here

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What’s next for generative video - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)     Fast-forward 18 months, and the best of Sora’s high-definition, photorealistic output is so stunning that some breathless observers are predicting the death of Hollywood. Runway’s latest models can produce short clips that rival those made by blockbuster animation studios. Midjourney and Stability AI, the firms behind two of the most popular text-to-image models, are now working on video as well.A number of companies are racing to make a business on the back of these breakthroughs. Most are figuring out what that business is as they go. “I’ll routinely scream, ‘Holy cow, that is wicked cool’ while playing with these tools,” says Gary Lipkowitz, CEO of Vyond, a firm that provides a point-and-click platform for putting together short animated videos. “But how can you use this at work?” Continued here

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Why Playing It Safe Is the Riskiest Strategic Choice - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)     In the current era of digital disruption, the pace of change has dramatically accelerated, leaving traditional risk management wisdom lacking. Across a variety of industries, technology-enabled disruptors have changed the rules. Many brands that moved cautiously have dramatically increased their risk of irrelevance or set themselves on a path to extinction. The author thus argues that playing it safe is in fact the riskiest choice. He illustrates this with the example of traditional brick-and-mortar retail companies that chose a “timid transformation” — as well as those that effectively pivoted and avoided that fate. Moving faster doesn’t mean being reckless or endless moonshots, but cultivating a culture of experimentation and finding ways to “shrink the change” so that companies can better deliver value to customers. Continued here

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Retailers and Health Systems Can Improve Care Together - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)     Health systems are struggling to address the many shortcomings of health care delivery: rapidly growing costs, inconsistent quality, and inadequate and unequal access to primary and other types of care. However, if retailers and health systems were to form strong partnerships, they could play a major role in addressing these megachallenges.The Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath have starkly highlighted the shortcomings of health care delivery in the United States and many other countries: rapidly growing costs, inconsistent quality, and inadequate and unequal access to primary and other types of care. However, if retailers and health systems were to forge strong partnerships, they could play a major role in addressing these megachallenges. While some retail–health care partnerships exist—for example, one between Target and Kaiser Permanente in Southern California began in 2014—they are rare and have only scratched the surface of their potential. To fundamentally change how health care is delivered, more of these partnerships are needed, and many of those that exist must be reoriented toward a different goal. Rather than focusing on the direct-to-consumer model that retailers have largely employed to provide a handful of basic services, the partnerships must offer much broader care. They should, of course, target the needs of consumers, but they must also help employers and insurers manage the overall health—and health care spending—of the populations they cover. In this article, we make the case for these partnerships and highlight four key actions that retailers and health systems must take to achieve this larger goal. Continued here

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YouTube could be worth $400 billion — that's more than Disney and Comcast combined. We should be paying more attention. - Business Insider (No paywall)     We could spend time here explaining Nathanson's math and assumptions — he thinks that in 2023, YouTube generated operating profits of $5.5 billion on revenues of $45 billion; he also thinks its future growth will be spurred by subscription services like YouTube TV, as its advertising growth slows.But let's be honest. Those numbers aren't going to sink for many of you. Just like YouTube's massive size doesn't seem to register with politicians like the ones on the US Senate Judiciary Committee, who hosted a big hearing on "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis" in January and grilled the CEOs of Meta, Snap, TikTok, and platforms — and gave YouTube a pass. Continued here

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Djibouti, the port-state squeezed by the Houthis’ Red Sea campaign - The Economist (No paywall)     We found the beach between two black hills. On the wet sand, yellow crabs scuttled across the tracks of a gazelle. The sun beat down on a rusting tank, left by French soldiers who once came here for artillery practice. There was something dreamlike about the scene: how the desert blurred into the shore, the waves into the sky.Our driver parked the ambulance beside two clusters of dark rocks, arranged too neatly to be a natural feature of the landscape. “Here we have maybe ten, and there we have 14,” said Dr Youssouf Moussa. I realised we were looking at grave markers and that he was counting the people buried in the sand. “Behind that mound we have 20 more bodies. And behind that, in one place we have 43, in another place we have 16 bodies, in a third place we have five bodies…The 43 were, most of them, minors, children.” Continued here

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Exercise May Help Counteract the Toll of Poor Sleep     The new research builds upon a large body of work showing just how critical both sleep and fitness are for overall health. Various studies show that healthy amounts of each individually are linked to increased longevity. And at least one suggested that sleep problems tended to increase the chances a subject would die during the follow-up period but that regular exercise helped eliminate that risk.A team of researchers based in China wanted to better understand the protective power of exercise, so it examined data collected in the United Kingdom from over 92,000 adults between the ages of 40 and 73. Participants spent a week between 2013 and 2015 wearing a wristband that measured how much they exercised and slept, which the researchers used as an indication of their lifestyle habits. Continued here

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Brain Cancer Was Supposed to Kill Me. Instead, It Gave Me a Second Life.     The French neuroscientist David Servan-Schreiber, who survived 18 years with brain cancer, is one of many philosophers of cancer who speak of the phenomenon of the Second Life. Faced with a terminal diagnosis, patients realize that a new vista has just opened up. It is one of doctors, impairment and uncertainty, to be sure, but also one of surprising beauties and benefits. Continued here

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Can Certain Foods Really Reduce Your Cancer Risk?     Scientists have a good idea of what you should avoid to reduce your risk of cancer, such as red and processed meats, “fast” or processed foods, alcohol and sugary drinks. But knowing what to eat isn’t always straightforward, said Johanna Lampe, a cancer prevention researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.Many nutrition studies rely on people to accurately remember what they consumed up to a year ago, Dr. Lampe said. And it’s tricky to understand how single foods may influence your health when they’re part of a larger diet, she said, adding that your lifestyle, environment, hormones and genes can also play a role. Continued here

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‘A Chance to Live’: How 2 Families Faced a Catastrophic Birth Defect     The consequences of trisomy 18 are dire. The babies have three copies of chromosome 18 instead of two and, as a result, have serious medical and developmental problems. Nearly all are unable to eat, walk or talk, and all have severe cognitive disabilities. They often need open-heart surgery and feeding and breathing tubes. Many women, after hearing what is in store, choose abortion. Continued here

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Particle physics finally charts a healthy path forward     Just a decade ago, the field of particle physics looked to be in a state of chaos. The Large Hadron Collider had recently turned on, and although they found the Higgs boson — the final undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model — it failed to turn up any evidence for any of the other leading theories that would take us beyond the Standard Model. Fermilab, the prior leader in the energy frontier, shut down its main accelerator permanently, and puzzles such as:seemed to be stagnating, with little progress to show on either the experimental or theoretical fronts. Continued here

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How leaders can overcome the fear of reinvention     I define the core role of leaders as helping others reach places they wouldn’t have reached otherwise. In order to do that, they need to reinvent their organizations — and themselves in the process.Take the B-Lab UK movement, whose CEO and Leadership Team I have been supporting over the past year. They have introduced the influential BCorp standard which allows businesses to certify based on their environmental and social impact. Companies in the BCorp movement have already reached 3% of the UK GDP. But they want to do even more by having a more systematic impact on the business sector. That’s the kind of reinvention we are talking about. It takes determination and it takes courage. But it can be done.  Continued here

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Genius and blood: How cheap light transformed civilization     For nearly all of human history, fire was our only source of artificial light. Difficult to make and challenging to safeguard from wind and rain, fire was our first window into the darkness of night. Fire and the artificial light and radiant warmth it produced changed everything and helped catapult humans toward the modern age.We have forgotten how unrelentingly dark the pre-industrial world was. Switch on a nightstand lamp or kitchen light, and you instantly and effortlessly summon into existence more illumination than was available to entire pre-industrial households. Artificial light has historically been the expensive privilege of the wealthy and powerful, while simultaneously being laborious and dirty to produce and maintain, and extremely limited in availability and quality for nearly everyone — but most especially for the world’s poor, which until industrialization was basically everyone.  Continued here

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There are more active volcanoes than you think     Many people know that Naples is built on two very active volcanoes, Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei, and that it is one of the cities most at risk from volcanic activity in the world.But practically nobody knows that Rome is also built right in between two major explosive volcanoes: Sabatini to the north and Colli Albani (or Alban Hills) to the south. These haven’t erupted within historic memory — so Sabatini is considered “extinct” and no one worries much about Colli Albani. Yet both are hot and emitting volcanic gases. There is magma there, but deeper down in the crust, out of sight. Our analysis of the latest data indicates that these are long-lived volcanoes potentially brewing new volcanic eruptions. Continued here

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VP Harris Calls for Agencies to Show Their AI Tools Aren't Harming People's Safety or Rights     "When government agencies use AI tools, we will now require them to verify that those tools do not endanger the rights and safety of the American people," Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters ahead of the announcement.Each agency by December must have a set of concrete safeguards that guide everything from facial recognition screenings at airports to AI tools that help control the electric grid or determine mortgages and home insurance. Continued here

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After 57 Years, Southwest Airlines Is Making a Big Change That Will Surprise Its Longtime Customers     Founded in 1967, Southwest Airlines has always taken its own unique path to success. Founder Herb Kelleher was an irreverent maverick in an industry that was highly regulated and conservative. Flights were expensive when Kelleher started up Southwest, in his words, "When I started working on Southwest Airlines, I kid you not, only people flying on business and very wealthy people ever flew."By adhering to some very simple, but industry-norm-busting (and cost-saving) principles, Kelleher and Southwest ushered in the age of the discount airline, putting flying within the reach of a much greater portion of the American public. Continued here

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Amazon Adds an Additional $2.75 Billion to Stake in AI Startup Anthropic     "Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers' experiences, and look forward to what's next," said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS, Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary.Under the deal, Anthropic will use AWS as its "primary" cloud provider and use Amazon's custom chips to build, train and deploy AI models. It will also provide AWS customers, which are mostly businesses, with access to models on an Amazon service called Bedrock. Continued here

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Salary Surge: In-Person Jobs Are Paying Almost 40 Percent More Than Last Year     The average salary for in-person roles in the U.S. has risen to $82,037 so far in 2024--an almost 40 percent increase from the 2023 average, according to new ZipRecruiter data. While salaries for hybrid and remote jobs have also increased, the boost isn't nearly as staggering: 9 percent for remote jobs and 11 percent for hybrid.  Some of the spike is due to the nature of the industries that are hiring right now, says ZipRecruiter's chief economist Julia Pollak, including health care, transportation, and construction. Companies in these sectors are on the hunt for talent, but job seekers are "disproportionately interested in remote and hybrid opportunities," Pollak says.  Continued here

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Adobe Just Demonstrated How AI Can Create Stellar Marketing Materials for Coca-Cola--or Any Company     At Adobe's two-day summit in Las Vegas this week, CEO Shantanu Narayen announced  new generative AI-powered tools designed to help companies mass-produce digital marketing content. Narayen said that the tools would empower marketers and creative teams to dramatically speed up the process of producing new content. To demonstrate how, Ann Rich, Adobe's senior director of design, platform, monetization, and GenStudio, pointed to a fictional example from a company that was given early access to the software: Coca-Cola. Using Adobe GenStudio, a new portal application designed to help enterprises rapidly create new content for marketing campaigns with generative AI, Rich played the part of a Coca-Cola marketer, tasked with using GenStudio to create ads for a campaign. Continued here

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The Government Just Expanded Its     People of Middle Eastern or North African descent will, at long last, get their own category on the U.S. Census and other federal forms. And people of Hispanic identity will no longer face a separate question that left many confused.The Biden administration announced on Thursday that it's expanding race and ethnicity standards on federal forms, a shift that may boost diversity in entrepreneurship and unlock opportunities for founders of color.  Continued here

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The Key Bridge Collapse Means $2 Million a Day in Lost Worker Wages     Two days after a cargo ship smashed into Baltimore's Francis Scott Key bridge, collapsing the structure into the water and killing six construction workers, the disaster's economic toll is coming into focus. With remnants of the bridge still stymying water traffic at the Port of Baltimore, one of the city's primary economic engines is completely shut down, depriving some 15,000 people who work directly at the port or in an adjacent industry of their livelihoods.  Continued here

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How 3 Female Entrepreneurs Are Making Strides in Finance's Male-Dominated Landscape     The financial industry has always been a bit of a boys' club. Women have been and continue to be underrepresented on the corporate side -- and despite ongoing changes in the industry, female entrepreneurs continue to face an uphill battle.Rochelle Nawrocki-Gorey, founder of Chicago-based social impact fintech company SpringFour, has spent her entire career in finance. Women-led firms "do not get the same attention as male-led companies do, whether it's from investors, partners, or the media," Nawrocki-Gorey says. Continued here

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How E.l.f. Cosmetics and Liquid Death Sold Out Their Spooky, Successful Collab     Los Angeles-based Liquid Death, a canned water company, teamed up with E.l.f. Cosmetics, a beauty brand based in Oakland, California, to launch a coffin-shaped makeup set on Tuesday. And it sold out in 45 minutes. The E.l.f. x Liquid Death Corpse Paint Vault, which retailed on E.l.f.'s and Liquid Death's websites for $34 included setting spray, black eyeliner, a makeup brush, black lipstick, and white cream eye shadow, packaged in a reusable coffin-shaped box. Currently, the E.l.f. x Liquid Death Corpse Paint Vault is selling on eBay for as much as $125. Continued here

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United Airlines Just Announced a Big Change for Passengers, and I Didn't Even Know This Was a Thing     This is why I was intrigued to learn recently that United Airlines is rolling out a new program under which United's MileagePlus members can combine miles into a pooled account, and then use those miles for award travel for any person within the pool.But now that United is allowing pooled accounts, the 5,000 or 10,000 miles she might accumulate in a big year (say, a trip to California to visit relatives, and maybe a spring family vacation in Florida) might actually come in handy. Continued here

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How Gamification Can Boost Employee Engagement     Employee disengagement is a persistent problem, and attempts to inject excitement often fall flat. However, gamification — using elements of games to motivate — has serious potential when thoughtfully executed. This article explores the psychology behind gamification, successful examples, and how to leverage probabilistic rewards (like lotteries tied to performance) to increase employee motivation. Continued here

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Getting Your Company's Data Program Back on Track     Many senior managers find themselves wondering: If data is such a game changer, why is it so hard to extract any value from it? For companies struggling to actually see results from their data program, it might be time to make a fresh start. There are three important issues managers need to understand as they restart: 1) Too many companies have made the mistake of viewing data as a technology problem, but data is a management problem, and it cannot be solved with technology alone. 2) Many companies try to tackle issues that are too difficult straight out of the gate. 3) Data is a different sort of asset: intangible, nuanced, both potentially valuable and dangerous. People need to spend time working with it to understand its properties. Continued here

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Why Playing It Safe Is the Riskiest Strategic Choice     In the current era of digital disruption, the pace of change has dramatically accelerated, leaving traditional risk management wisdom lacking. Across a variety of industries, technology-enabled disruptors have changed the rules. Many brands that moved cautiously have dramatically increased their risk of irrelevance or set themselves on a path to extinction. The author thus argues that playing it safe is in fact the riskiest choice. He illustrates this with the example of traditional brick-and-mortar retail companies that chose a “timid transformation” — as well as those that effectively pivoted and avoided that fate. Moving faster doesn’t mean being reckless or endless moonshots, but cultivating a culture of experimentation and finding ways to “shrink the change” so that companies can better deliver value to customers. Continued here

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Scale AI's Remotasks platform is dropping whole countries without explanation     Grace Mumo started working with Remotasks after she lost her job in 2020. To the single mother caring for three children, the remote clickwork service offered a way to make money by annotating images or labeling Lidar data.But on March 7, she was abruptly cut off from the service — along with all other Remotasks workers in Kenya — without any explanation of what had happened. Mumo is now left scrambling to make ends meet. “As I speak, I am wondering what the children will have for dinner because I have no money,” she told Rest of World. Continued here

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Brazil banned these killer kites. Influencers are keeping the black market alive     Above the treetops and shabby rooftops of Brazil’s favelas, hoards of colorful kites soar across the sky on any given day. In these densely populated and poverty-stricken neighborhoods, the centuries-old game of kite fighting draws people of all ages.Kite fighters do everything they can to bring down the kites of their opponents — including using strings doused with wax, or sharp materials like glass or quartz, which turn kite lines into razors. Continued here

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ShopeeFood drops non-compete clause after Rest of World reporting     ShopeeFood, one of Southeast Asia’s biggest food delivery platforms, has dropped a controversial non-compete clause that forbade its workers from working for rivals. The stipulation had forced delivery drivers to use a second phone to log on to a rival app to bump up their earnings.The clause was removed on March 27, days after Rest of World reached out to ShopeeFood’s parent, the Singapore-based Sea Group, for comment on it. Continued here

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The Earth Will Feast on Dead Cicadas     Brace yourselves, Illinoisans: A truly shocking number of cicadas are about to live, make sweet love, and die in a tree near you. Two broods of periodical cicadas—Brood XIX on a 13-year cycle and Brood XIII on a 17-year cycle—are slated to emerge together in central Illinois this summer for the first time in over two centuries. To most humans, they're an ephemeral spectacle and an ear-splitting nuisance, and then they're gone. To many other Midwestern animals, plants, and microbes, they're a rare feast, bringing new life to forests long past their death.From Nebraska to New York, 15 broods of periodical cicadas grow underground, quietly sipping watery sap from tree roots. After 13 or 17 years (depending on the brood), countless inch-long adults dig themselves out in sync, crawling out of the ground en masse for a monthlong summer orgy. After mating, they lay eggs in forest trees and die, leaving their tree-born babies to fall to the forest floor and begin the cycle anew. Cicadas don't fly far from their birthplace, so each brood occupies a distinct patch of the US. "They form a mosaic on the landscape," says Chris Simon, senior research scientist in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. Continued here

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Is a Nintendo Switch Worth Buying Right Now? (2024)     It's been nearly seven years since the original Nintendo Switch came out. In that time, the company has sold a staggering 132 million-plus units and has become the portable home of dozens of exclusive and indie games. But we've also been waiting a long time for Nintendo to announce its next console, and a new one is surely around the corner. But if you're considering jumping into Nintendo's world, is a Switch worth it right now? Or does it make sense to wait?Here's the short answer: If having the latest games or hardware matters to you, the Switch will still be the latest console for a while longer. Since the original NES, Nintendo has never taken longer than six years to release a new console, but we're living through extraordinary times. The global disruption of the pandemic in 2020 set back … everything. It's unlikely the Switch's successor will arrive in 2024. Continued here

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RFK Jr. Has Assembled His Anti-Vax Conspiracy Squad     Conspiracy theories and the people creating them have overwhelmed the US political process, and they're becoming only more prevalent with each passing year. 2024 will be no different, if not worse: We're already uncovering all kinds here on the WIRED Politics desk, from election conspiracy groups to claims that Boeing planes were made faulty on purpose. In the past few days alone, we've seen theories swirl online about the Baltimore bridge collapse and Kate Middleton's cancer announcement.A number of conspiracies were also given a boost this week by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s long-shot presidential campaign. Let's talk about them! Continued here

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A First Look at Samsung's 2024 TV Lineup     Spring is in the air, and that means the fresh crop of 2024 TVs are getting ready to make their way out of the lab and into living rooms. In anticipation, Samsung offered reviewers like me an early look at some of its biggest models ahead of official release, including the new S95D QD-OLED, the QN900D 8K QLED, and the brand's flagship 4K QLED TV, the QN90D. We also got a chance to sample the new Music Frame speaker, a sort of sonic counterpart to Samsung's Frame TVs.Before digging in, a couple of points to note. First, I had limited time and resources with these TVs, and the models we saw are not ready-to-ship production models, so they'll likely see more tweaks before they hit shelves. On top of that, Samsung's New Jersey facility had local internet outages during my test period, which caused some unexpected performance hurdles. Continued here

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12 Best Umbrellas (2023): Windproof, Cheap, Tiny, and Clear Bubble     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 WIREDIt always seems to rain when you least expect it. That's when I'd usually hit a corner store here in New York City to grab a cheap $20 umbrella. A few months later, I'd bring out the same umbrella and it would already have small rips on the canopy, or the stretchers would break and make a floppy mess in the wind. Rinse and repeat. Continued here

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AWOL LTV-3500 Pro Review: So Bright, So Expensive     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 WIREDProjectors can be a niche option for your living room, if only because they often require a lot of special care that typical TVs don't—like a separate reflective screen, dark curtains or rooms with no windows, and complicated ceiling mount systems. The AWOL LTV-3500 Pro doesn't eliminate those problems entirely, but it substantially shifts the balance of those trade-offs. That comes at a price, though. Continued here

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FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison     A US federal judge in the Southern District of New York has sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, to 25 years in prison. In addition, Bankman-Fried has been ordered to forfeit $11 billion.Last November, at the end of a month-long trial, Bankman-Fried—known colloquially as SBF—was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in connection with the collapse of FTX. Continued here

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The 30 Best Shows on Max (aka HBO Max) Right Now     It may not have the shine it once did, but Max (previously HBO Max) is still home to some of the best TV shows of the past 25 years, from The Sopranos and The Wire to Game of Thrones and The Leftovers.Max has gotten into the original content game too, with highly acclaimed series like Hacks, Station Eleven, and The Staircase (the owl did it!). So even if you've watched all of the HBO classics, there's more to devour. Continued here

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Bug Zappers Are Swarming on Amazon     Data from Fakespot, a service owned by Mozilla that helps consumers spot fake reviews and scams on shopping sites, shows a bizarre rise in the number of listings for bug zappers on Amazon over the past three years. At the same time, Fakespot has logged an increase in the number of negative or unreliable reviews for this product category.Saoud Khalifah, founder and director of Fakespot at Mozilla, says bug zappers are just one example of the convergence of recent trends in ecommerce: a growing number of listings from third-party sellers on Amazon.com, more merchants seeking to sell low-cost products with high margins, and generative AI tools making it easier for sellers to churn out questionable marketing copy and reviews. Continued here

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Oregon's Breakthrough Right-to-Repair Bill Is Now Law     Oregon governor Tina Kotek yesterday signed the state's Right to Repair Act, which will push manufacturers to provide more repair options for their products than any other state so far.The law, like those passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, will require many manufacturers to provide the same parts, tools, and documentation to individuals and repair shops that they provide to their own repair teams. Continued here

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Why Do Colors Change during a Solar Eclipse?     When the moon fully eclipses the sun, it’s not just the sky that changes. Your eyes do, tooIn and around totality—the brief moments during a total solar eclipse when the moon fully hides the sun—the sudden shift from light to darkness can profoundly change color perception. Continued here

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Global Warming Is Slowing the Earth's Rotation     Drastic polar ice melt is slowing Earth’s rotation, counteracting a speedup from the planet’s liquid outer core. The upshot is that we might need to subtract a leap second for the first time ever within the decadeAs rising global temperatures melt Earth’s polar ice sheets, the shifting water is creating such a huge redistribution of our planet’s mass that its rotation speed is dropping. This unusual result of climate change is interacting with other forces that affect the planet’s rotational speed in ways that could ultimately even alter the way we keep time. In just a few years, we may have to make the first-ever deletion of a “leap second”—according to a new study published on Wednesday in Nature. Continued here

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NASA's New Asteroid Sample Is Already Rewriting Solar System History     Scientists have scarcely begun studying pristine material from asteroid Bennu brought back to Earth by the OSIRIS-REx mission, but have already found several surprisesSourced from a 121.6-gram sample returned to Earth by NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, a small speck of material from the asteroid Bennu sits on a prepared microscope slide in an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Continued here

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What Google's New AI Fruit Fly Can Teach Us about Real Behavior     To learn how to move, groom itself and flap its wings, a fruit fly AI devoured hours of video of real insectsThe tiny fruit fly, one of the most popular model organisms in science, lives fast and dies at about 50 days old. But this brief life is anything but unremarkable. The fly fills its days with intricate routines and schemes—and, on occasion, romance. To better understand how such a minuscule brain can power these complex behaviors, scientists have already created a connectome, a virtual “map” showing the links between each of the fruit fly’s 200,000 neurons. Continued here

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Song Lyrics Really Are Getting Simpler and More Repetitive, Study Finds     An assessment of hundreds of thousands of songs confirms that choruses and hooks have taken over—but simpler isn’t necessarily worseWhen comparing today’s hit tunes with the top 40 of past decades, strong opinions are never in short supply. Every generation seems to lament its successor’s musical tastes and listening habits. Though science can’t necessarily account for such subjective preferences or generational divides, new research suggests popular music has indeed undergone some measurable and significant shifts over the past 50 years—with popular song lyrics becoming simpler and more repetitive, according to a study published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. Continued here

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The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science     The Morris sisters made significant contributions to botany and entomology, but their stories were erased from the history of early American science, both accidentally and by design.In this episode of Lost Women of Science Conversations, Michelle Nijhuis talks to historian Catherine McNeur about how she rediscovered the lives and work of Elizabeth Carrington Morris and Margaretta Hare Morris, two natural scientists who made significant contributions to botany and entomology, respectively, in the mid-19th century. Elizabeth collected rare plant species and sent them to institutions around the world. Margaretta not only discovered new insects but also helped farmers combat the pests that were devastating their fields. Despite these women’s contributions, their accomplishments were once lost to history. McNeur tells us how that happened and how, piece by piece, she recovered their stories. Continued here

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Let your garden grow wild     Many gardeners work hard to maintain clean, tidy environments ... which is the exact opposite of what wildlife wants, says ecological horticulturist Rebecca McMackin. She shows the beauty of letting your garden run wild, surveying the success she's had increasing biodiversity even in the middle of New York City — and offers tips for cultivating a garden that can be home to birds, bees, butterflies and more. Continued here

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Biden orders every US agency to appoint a chief AI officer     The White House has announced the "first government-wide policy to mitigate risks of artificial intelligence (AI) and harness its benefits." To coordinate these efforts, every federal agency must appoint a chief AI officer with "significant expertise in AI." Continued here

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China has a big problem with super gonorrhea, study finds     Health officials have long warned that gonorrhea is becoming more and more resistant to all the antibiotic drugs we have to fight it. Last year, the US reached a grim landmark: For the first time, two unrelated people in Massachusetts were found to have gonorrhea infections with complete or reduced susceptibility to every drug in our arsenal, including the frontline drug ceftriaxone. Luckily, they were still able to be cured with high-dose injections of ceftriaxone. But, as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bluntly notes: "Little now stands between us and untreatable gonorrhea." Continued here