If an organization is a Blue for Business subscriber, they will be able to connect an unlimited number of their affiliated individuals, businesses and brands to their account. When they do, affiliated Twitter accounts will get a small badge of their parent company's profile picture next to their checkmark.

Twitter explained its newest move:

By creating this connection, we’re making it possible for businesses to create networks within their own organizations–on Twitter. Businesses can affiliate their leadership, brands, support handles, employees or teams. Journalists, sports team players or movie characters can all be affiliated. You name it, we got it. Each affiliate will be verified and officially linked to their parent handle based on a list provided by the parent business. We will share any new criteria, pricing or process as we update them.

It is not yet known how much Blue for Business will cost, which organizations will be eligible, and how its verification system will work. Twitter warns, however, that not all features are available on all platforms, and Blue for Business features may change periodically.

Grey checkmarks galore

After giving gold checkmarks (along with square profile pictures) to certain businesses on Twitter, the microblogging platform is now also rolling out a new grey checkmark badge for government and multilateral accounts. Some accounts on Twitter, such as the @WhiteHouse and @IndianEmbassyUS already sport the checkmark.

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Despite the success of the COVID-19 vaccination campaigns, vaccine confidence has declined significantly since the start of the pandemic. This is according to a new study published in Vaccine.

Two anonymous surveys in the winters of 2019 and 2022 were carried out to investigate people’s attitudes towards vaccinations and the factors that might underpin hesitancy and refusal by researchers from the University of Portsmouth in England.

By comparing the responses of more than 1,000 adults overall, they discovered that the post-pandemic group was considerably less confident in vaccines than the pre-pandemic group.

Recently published in the medical journal Vaccine, the paper revealed nearly one in four participants reported a fall in confidence since 2020, and this was observed regardless of participants’ age, ethnicity, gender, religious belief, and education.

Dr. Alessandro Siani, Associate Head (Students) of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Portsmouth, said: “While vaccine hesitancy is not a new phenomenon, COVID-19 vaccines have been met with particular hostility despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of their safety and effectiveness.

“This isn’t just among conspiracy theorists though, but also those who don’t consider themselves ‘anti-vaxxers’ and had supported other vaccination campaigns in the past.”

Participants were asked how much they agreed with statements including:

• Vaccines are safe
• I think vaccines should be a compulsory practice
• I believe if I get vaccinated it would benefit the wellbeing of others
• Vaccines are a necessity for our health and wellbeing

In both surveys, participants who held religious beliefs were significantly more vaccine-hesitant than atheist and agnostic ones, and individuals from Black and Asian backgrounds were more hesitant than those belonging to White ethnicities.

However, gender showed no association with vaccine confidence.

While these overall trends remained largely similar between the two surveys, some noteworthy changes were observed in the post-pandemic survey. For example, the analysis revealed that while in 2019 middle-aged participants were considerably more apprehensive about getting vaccinated than younger groups, this was not the case in the 2022 survey.

“This could be because COVID-19 infections notoriously lead to more severe outcomes in older patients,” added Dr. Siani.

“Young people who are infected rarely experience severe symptoms that lead to hospitalization and death, so it’s possible that many have become complacent and don’t feel the need to get vaccinated. On the other hand, older people may have been more wary of the consequences of the infection, and more appreciative of the protection offered by the vaccine.”

While providing precious insight into how the pandemic affected the public perspectives on vaccinations, the study is not without limitations. The original survey was designed as a standalone piece of research, so a different group of people had to be sampled in 2022. This resulted in a cross-sectional study as opposed to a longitudinal one.

Dr. Siani explained: “We didn’t expect a worldwide pandemic to break out only a few months after carrying out the 2019 survey. Because our findings don’t reflect the changing opinions of the same group of people over time, but rather a comparison of responses provided by two different cohorts, they should be interpreted with a grain of salt.

“However, the study is consistent with other observations suggesting that vaccine confidence may be yet another victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

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The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a federal court order requiring Epic Games to pay $275 million for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and an additional $245 million in refunds to customers. The FTC Chair, Lina M. Khan had this to say in the official press release, put out by the Commission:

“As our complaints note, Epic used privacy-invasive default settings and deceptive interfaces that tricked Fortnite users, including teenagers and children […] "Protecting the public, and especially children, from online privacy invasions and dark patterns is a top priority for the Commission, and these enforcement actions make clear to businesses that the FTC is cracking down on these unlawful practices.”

This move follows the FTC’s investigation into the Activision acquisition. Indicating a potential change in direction and strategy regarding the video game industry, which has mostly avoided government scrutiny, the FTC made waves in the industry recently when it announced that it was filing a lawsuit against Microsoft over its planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

It could be argued that these moves are well over joy with videogames offering corporations mainline access to children’s bedrooms, which has caused a series of problematic issues ranging from ridiculous in-app purchase prices for virtual currencies, loot boxes and their associated gambling risks, and a plethora of other privacy and security related issues.

It is heartening then to see that as a part of its settlement with the FTC, Epic Games has agreed to update Fortnite to require that voice and text communications are turned off by default for children and teenagers who play the game. The move is aimed at safeguarding the privacy and security of young people who use online services and serves as a warning to other companies that may be considering similar practices.

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After a long struggle with Martian dust, NASA’s InSight probe has gone quiet

Automotive chip shortages to continue throughout 2023, industry says

The HIF synthetic fuel plant near Punta Arenas in Chile.

Porsche

 

This week, a Chilean startup called Highly Innovative Fuels officially opened its first synthetic gasoline production facility. HIF was created to run the new plant, which is the result of a collaboration between the automaker Porsche, Siemens Energy, Exxon Mobil, Enel Green Power, the Chilean state energy company ENAP, and Empresas Gasco. Initially, the site will produce around 34,000 gallons (130,000 L) a year, scaling up to 14.5 million gallons (55 million L) a year by 2024, with plans to increase that tenfold to 145 million gallons (550 million L) a year by 2026. The first gasoline produced by the plant was used to ceremonially fill a Porsche 911, a task performed by Chile's energy minister, Diego Pardow.

 

"Yesterday, we celebrated together with all the employees from HIF and our partners, this historic moment," said Barbara Frenkel, Porsche's board member for procurement. "It was a very special evening, because we are encountering something which is, of course, very important to us for our sustainability strategy, but also as we see big potential in e-fuels for the decarbonization of the Earth's climate. So, the synthetic fuel we are producing here, stemming from wind energy, water and CO2 is really a compelling idea," she said.

 

The site, located in Punta Arenas in Southern Chile, will use wind to power the process—the area sees high winds roughly 270 days a year, and a wind turbine can expect to produce up to four times as much energy as one in Europe, according to Frenkel.

 

As you might expect, the project has been in the works for some time now. "In 2017, two engineers from Porsche on the one side and from AME—this was the predecessor company of HIF—came into contact with the idea [of] establishing an e-fuel pilot plant here down in [the] southern part of Chile, in Magellanes, where there is a high wind load," explained Michael Steiner, Porsche's board member for research and development.

 

"And from this, we started to find partners who would like to join this compelling idea, and we started with Exxon Mobil, who had a process developed—methanol to gas—and also with Siemens who is famous for electrolyzers. So getting electric energy into hydrogen and with these two partners, we started to plan the pilot plant we will open today," he said.

 

As Steiner explained, the e-fuel plant will use wind power to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is then combined with carbon captured from the air or industrial sources to synthesize methanol, which in turn can then be converted into longer hydrocarbons to be used as fuel. The synthetic e-fuel is a direct drop-in for pump gasoline, and initially Porsche will take all the site's production and use it to run its one-make Porsche Supercup race series as well as using it to fuel vehicles at its Porsche Experience Centers around the world. (These are locations where one can go and test different Porsches.)

 

HIF has long-term plans to build out 12 synthetic fuel plants worldwide, including locations in the US and Australia, with a goal of each site capturing 2 million metric tons of CO2 per year. "Without any doubt, there are a lot of regions all around the world where you have potential of really high-efficient windmills or photovoltaic or even hydropower to get green energy," Steiner said.

 

"What might be a little bit more difficult is, could you get green CO2 in the same amount? So starting, you could always gain green CO2 from biomass or other processes, point sources, but long term, we have also to find better ways to directly capture CO2 from ambient air. So this is still a technology that needs some more research and development," Steiner said.

 

The synthetic e-fuel won't be exactly cheap—Steiner thinks at current prices, it works out to around $8 per gallon ($2/L), although that obviously doesn't include any taxes or duties, which make up most of the price of fuel in most regions around the world. But it's an important project, given that more than 1.3 billion combustion engine vehicles are operating on roads globally today, and with the best will in the world, those aren't all going to be replaced by electric vehicles any time soon.

 

We may even see some of the fuel end up in Formula 1. That sport has a goal of being carbon net-zero by 2030 and, in 2026, is switching to carbon-neutral fuel. Although Porsche's plans to enter F1 in 2026 as an engine manufacturer look to be in doubt, its corporate sibling Audi will do so that year, and it's possible that team may source its sustainable fuel from HIF.

 

Porsche’s synthetic gasoline factory comes online today in Chile

Both the Tesla CEO and the former president have used that platform, Twitter, as a sword and a shield — a soapbox to rouse the passions (and tap the pocketbooks) of tens of millions of followers and repulse the other side.

Trump weaponized Twitter before he was banned after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Musk was a persistent Twitter poster, taunting stock market regulators and railing against his version of conformity in numerous tweets. Then he decided to buy the platform.

Now both face a reckoning this week brought on at least in part by their use of Twitter to advance their agendas and feed their outsize id.

Trump is confronted with a select congressional committee’s unanimous recommendation to the Justice Department on Monday that he be criminally prosecuted for his part in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by supporters stirred to action that day by his public remarks, on and off social media.

Right behind that could come the release Tuesday of Trump tax returns, now in the hands of another House panel, that he has spent years fighting to keep private.

After firing about half the Twitter workforce and sowing chaos with impulsive and ever-changing policies, Musk essentially asked users whether he should fire himself. In an unscientific poll he set up, a majority of the 17.5 million respondents said he should step down as Twitter chief. No word yet whether he will honor the result as promised.

The tribulations of these two June babies, born 25 years and continents apart, may be unlike anything thrown at them before.

“The biggest thing they have in common is little experience with true failure, that is, failure with consequences,” said Eric Dezenhall, a consultant to companies beset by crisis.

“Even though Trump has failed multiple times, he’s always been protected by family money and amazing luck,” Dezenhall said. “While Musk is a genius, he’s had the good fortune to have built multiple businesses on government funding rather than in the bruising free market.

“Given their life experiences, how could these guys not feel invincible?”

Kindred spirits at least in part, Musk invited Trump back on Twitter shortly after he bought it. So far, Trump is sticking with his own platform, Truth Social, which has miniscule reach in comparison.

Musk’s invitation was a selective exercise of the right to free speech, as he also suspended a variety of mainstream journalists from Twitter and banned links to “prohibited” social media sites like Facebook, before relenting to some degree on both fronts.

Musk was until recently the world’s richest man, with the amount verified by the worth of his stock. Trump has often argued he should be considered among the wealthiest, though behind that claim was a mirage.

Both have operated from a sense that things begin and end by CEO fiat. But Musk has also built viable companies and genuine wealth, in contrast with Trump’s record of self-branding, fraught real estate deals and dubious enterprises regarding steaks, vodka or even his own real estate investor “university.”

Musk registers 120 million Twitter followers; Trump, a Republican, had 88 million when he was barred from the platform after the Jan. 6 insurrection. The site has vastly amplified both their voices, in a way that has benefited Musk’s businesses and Trump’s political career over the years, though at a cost to their reputations.

“A hater hellscape,” Musk called Twitter in 2017. But it also was a siren’s call to him.

“On Twitter, likes are rare & criticism is brutal,” he tweeted in 2018. “So hardcore.

“It’s great.”

On that platform, Musk comes across less as the visionary engineer who made electric vehicles hot, builds reusable rockets and cares deeply about climate change than as a petty settler of personal scores who can sink into right-wing conspiracy theories and misogyny.

A month ago, teasing Trump for holding out just after Twitter agreed to let him back in, Musk posted a depiction of a woman naked from the waist down, with the Twitter logo covering her genitals and Trump, as Jesus, looking on. “And lead us not into temptation,” said Musk’s post.

Both men have used Twitter to assail the mainstream media, spread misinformation, push the limits of what’s acceptable in social media and engage in provocations that can make it hard to look away.

But of the two, only Trump held the power of office. For all his spacecraft, Musk’s universe is much smaller. In the public-opinion influence game, it’s made up mostly of tweets and corporate policy about how to manage them.

Their politics don’t match — Musk’s right-wing and libertarian beliefs come with a devotion to controlling global warming, for example, and Trump’s don’t. Their personalities differ in some respects, too — Musk admits error and even apologizes on occasion; Trump doesn’t.

Their work ethic bears no resemblance to each other.

Trump, a 76-year-old from Queens in New York City, spends most of his time at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, after a presidency notable for ample time on the golf links. Musk, a 51-year-old native of South Africa who lived in Canada as a young man, is known for working insane hours, hands on, these days in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

But as disrupters, they might as well be twins separated at birth.

“Both of these guys are free-stylers,” said Dezenhall. “There is never a plan, never a strategy, just a collection of on-the-fly tactics. This has worked out very well for them.

“It wouldn’t be the case for the rest of us.”

________

Associated Press writers Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco and Josh Boak in Baltimore contributed to this report.

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Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter and a whole lot of other companies, literally asked Twitter's users, "Should I step down as head of Twitter?" And, following this, he declared, "I will abide by the results of this poll."

The results are in, and with 17.5-million votes, the people have spoken, and they've said, by a 57.5% to 42.5% vote, that he should quit.  

Let me pause for a moment to quote former Twitter Trust and Safety Council member, Lesley Podesta, "The idea that someone makes decisions on a company he bought for $44b by running a twitter poll is astonishing." Yes, it would be, except we're seeing there's nothing Musk won't say or do.

Oh, and the Twitter Trust and Safety Council? Musk disbanded it.

I would say something about how Musk should quit while he's ahead. Except, well, he's anything but ahead. For all his rah-rah social media blather about how much better Twitter is doing, there's no proof whatsoever of that.

What we have seen is a drastic increase in right-wing rhetoric, hate speech, and tech glitches. We've also seen over half of Twitter's advertisers abandon ship. Even the World Cup couldn't help. Twitter's US ad revenue was running at 80% below expectations. Not being able to make money with the World Cup for Twitter is like Fox being unable to cash in on the 2023 Super Bowl: Inconceivable.

Oh, and the new Twitter Blue? If you think that's going to make up for the ad dollar bleed out, I have a great bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Make no mistake about it. Musk buying Twitter for $44-billion was always a financially foolish move. But, now, he's ruining what little value the company has left.

Don't believe me? Look at the record. He fired over half of the company's staff the moment he set foot in its headquarters. Sure, fire the C-level people. But half of the staff? There went the people running the company's day-to-day operations, the developers, and the people selling the ads. Oh, and with a company based on open-source software, he got rid of literally all the open-source programmers. A software services company without developers is like trying to drive a Tesla without a battery. It may roll downhill for a while, but eventually, it stops.

In the last few days alone, Musk also fired still more staffers. And, not just any staffers. Right before the holidays, he fired people from the infrastructure crew who literally keep Twitter's lights on and Tweets tweeting.

But, wait, there's more. Despite all his shouting for hardcore work, dumping working from home, and cutting back on sick and other leave days, he found time to fly to Qatar for the World Cup. What a guy!

Nevertheless, Musk found time to tweet alt-right memes and jokes. He followed that up by firing Twitter executives who suggested this might not be a good move. He's also banned journalists more or less on how peeved he was at any particular one of them at a given moment.

Musk is running Twitter essentially by whim. This is no way to run any company, much less one that depends on people feeling that they're part of an online community. Chaos and communities don't mix.

While all this is happening at Twitter, Tesla, Musk's real crown jewel, has lost more than 60% of its value this year. If Musk really wants success, he should step away from Twitter and go back to running a company he knows something about. What's happening at Twitter is an object lesson in how to foul a company up beyond all recognition.

So, do what you said, Elon. Do yourself, Twitter, and everyone else a favor and do what you said you'd do: Quit.

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Berlin, Nevada, is a treasure chest for paleontologists. Just down the road from now-abandoned gold and silver mines, a rockbound collection of bones hints at an even richer past. The Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park is teeming with dozens of fossils of ancient marine reptiles. That bone bed is so abundant and weird that researchers have been scratching their heads over it for decades.

“There are sites with way more dense occurrences of ichthyosaur skeletons, including places in Chile and Germany,” says Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “But this place, Berlin-Ichthyosaur in eastern Nevada, has really escaped explanation for a long time.” In one particular quarry, at least seven individuals from the genus Shonisaurus—a bloated, bus-sized dolphin with four limb-like flippers—lay essentially stacked atop one another.

Previous hypotheses largely focused on physical or environmental reasons for the cluster of fossils. One suggested that the animals had gotten stranded in shallow water and died as a group some 230 million years ago. Or maybe a volcanic eruption did them in. Pyenson had another hunch, one that his team tested using 3D visualizations of the site, as well as fossils and other clues in the geological record.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, today Pyenson’s team presents evidence that the shonisaurs came there to reproduce. The team concludes that the animals migrated long distances to give birth, like some whales do today. The discovery not only represents an example of “convergent evolution,” in which the same traits independently evolve in different species, but also the oldest example of migration in groups to a designated calving ground.

“They're making quite a convincing case,” says Lene Liebe Delsett, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Oslo, Norway, who was not involved in the study. “Ichthyosaurs were the first large marine tetrapods. And throughout the Triassic, they varied quite a lot, so there was a large diversity. It's just a very interesting period of time to know more about.”

The origin story of the shonisaurs begins with death—a lot of it.

Some 251 million years ago, between the Permian and Triassic periods, Earth's biggest extinction event annihilated about 95 percent of all marine species. This so-called “Great Dying” mowed down the diverse landscape of creatures in the ocean.Some of the animals that grew back in their place turned out to be weirder and larger than ever before.

The ensuing Triassic started an evolutionary arms race. Prey evolved harder shells and better mobility, predators crunched through ammonite shells and hunted fish better than ever, and so on. Ichthyosaurs, which evolved from terrestrial reptiles into new species of various sizes, partly drove this pressure and quickly dominated the ocean. The Shonisaurus genus, in particular, grew to be some of the largest marine predators around. “They achieved whale sizes before anything else,” says Pyenson.

Pyenson is normally more of a whale guy; he specializes in mammals, which split from reptiles about 325 million years ago. But ancient marine reptiles like those under the order Ichthyosaur bear many similarities to existing marine mammals. Their ancestors came from land, they birthed live young, they had similar flippers, and they are tetrapods, meaning four-limbed. And Pyenson is well versed in this type of mystery. About a decade ago in Atacama, Chile, he and his South American collaborators used 3D mapping and chemical analyses to show that a tight cluster of at least 40 fossilized whales must have died from a toxic algal bloom 7 to 9 million years ago.

“It was a neat proof of concept, and a surprising discovery,” Pyenson says, because 3D scanning allowed for the data to be analyzed away from the actual site over long time periods. “It was innovative, because none of those fossil whales ever left Chile.”

When it came to the mystery of Nevada’s boneyard, he recalls chatting with paleontologist and study coauthor Neil Kelley of Vanderbilt University about the convergent evolution of the traits shared by ichthyosaurs and marine mammals. “We put our heads together,” says Pyenson. What if there were not only convergences in anatomy, but behavior?

They turned to chemical sampling and huge 3D scans of the site to test some hypotheses. Long-range lasers allow researchers to digitize enormous surfaces (like fossil sites) down to a centimeter scale. The resulting “point cloud” shows where each skeleton sits in space. “When you're confronted with parts of the skeleton that are that large and also distributed over a very large area,” says Pyenson, “taking one photo doesn't really provide the kind of data you need to test the ideas you have. That's where creating an undistorted 3D model has its huge advantages.”

First, based on geological evidence from the site, they ruled out one of the previous theories: mass stranding. The mudstone and carbonate sediment around the specimens indicates that the site had been deep underwater. The team also nixed the lethal volcanic eruption theory—they found no telltale signal like elevated levels of mercury in the rock.

Then they tried to figure out what else might have been going on. They inferred from the location that although the water was deep, the site had not been too far from shore. Although Nevada is inland today, this park is thought to have once been a tropical gulf near an archipelago, or cluster of islands. “Archipelagos are really good environments if you want to be protected,” says Pyenson. “So that setting becomes really important when you consider the other clues that we collected.”

The biggest clue the team noticed from analyzing fossils was their demographics. Each was either really big or really small—tiny enough to be an embryo or newborn. “We suspect that these are the remains of recently born or soon-to-be born ichthyosaurs from this time,” says Pyenson. “We find nothing else there.” The lack of adolescents signals that this was a group nursery or calving ground, and given the preponderance of bones, they believe these animals continued coming here for hundreds of thousands of years.

Pyenson thinks this is evidence of separation between places where the animals ate and where they gave birth. “They travel vast distances to feed in one place and give birth in another,” he says. “It’s something that we see in today's large oceangoing predators, including large whales and sharks.” They also find no evidence of large prey that could support such big ichthyosaurs at this site.

This behavioral overlap across such different species fascinates Pyenson. Sharks evolved long before ichthyosaurs. Whales evolved long after. But the same behavior keeps cropping up. (His team has created an interactive website if you want to explore their results.)

Reproduction is understudied in the field, says Delsett, even though “it's the most central thing that animals do.” Delsett praises the thoroughness of the new study, and is already thinking about how to incorporate its lessons into her own work. She has been studying a site with about 30 ichthyosaurs in Spitsbergen, a Norwegian archipelago near the North Pole. “We have this one question we never answered: Why do we have so many ichthyosaurs in one site?” she says. “This is a good framework. I can use all of these lines of research.”

Mark McMenamin, a paleontologist at Mount Holyoke College who was not involved with the study, agrees that the team’s laser scanning methodology is valuable for the field. However, he disagrees with their interpretation. McMenamin has long argued that the strange Nevada site is the work of a giant, ancient cephalopod—like a squid or octopus—who killed the shonisaurus and deliberately arranged their bones. McMenanin notes patterns in the skeletons: a partial tail with nothing else attached could be the aftermath of a kill; tiling or “tessellations” in the fossil bones could suggest deliberate manipulation.

“They're out hunting in blue water, and there was something else out there that began hunting them,” he says. (This hypothesis, known as “Triassic Kraken,” has not been validated by peer review.)

Pyenson rejects the kraken hypothesis outright. “I would charitably say it's an implausible and untestable hypothesis,” he says. “It assumes the existence of taxa and behaviors that we don't have any evidence for.” That solitary tail skeleton shows no evidence of predation, he says, like teeth marks. And the tessellations McMenamin noted may just look regular because the bones fell aligned like dominoes. “We think what we've put our finger on is a compelling biological explanation—that it's grouping behavior,” says Pyenson.

Still, the two ideas illustrate that some details from 230 million years ago are just unknowable. For example, the new paper doesn’t explain how these ichthyosaurs actually died. We may never know, says Pyenson. The fossil site, he says, has been “massively deformed by tectonism and just that amount of geologic time—the bones aren't as well preserved.”

Sometimes new evidence or methods can demystify fossils in surprising ways. Paleontologists used to think that shonisaurs were toothless filter-feeders like today’s large whales, eating the small prey slipped into their mouths. Then, they found adults with teeth. Shonisaurus may have even preyed on other ichthyosaurs. “We don't know. That's among the many mysteries,” says Pyenson. “We have a really hard time reconstructing that food web.”

Unsatisfying answers are just part of the job, he continues: “We do our best, move the ball as far downfield as we can, and leave the rest for the next generation of scientists.”

The Mystery of Nevada’s Ancient Reptilian Boneyard

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Every year, deep in certain Swedish mines, the bat population is recorded. Each time I take part in the count, I turn out the light for a moment inside the darkness of the mountain to experience the unique sensation of stillness. I’ve started to try to bring that experience with me out of the mine and into my everyday life. Whenever I get the chance, I switch off for a little while and sit in the dark. In an armchair, in the garden, or in the forest. It’s rare that the darkness is as dense and compact as it is in the underworld of the mine passages, but a dark room or an unlit forest path grants the same kind of rest. Darkness is a pause from the constant flood of impressions, it’s a visual silence – and a sort of primitive experience – in the otherwise too well-illuminated modern world.

For bats, darkness isn’t a form of respite: it’s essential. This animal, which has looked roughly the same for at least 55 million years, has always been nocturnal. None of the 1,400 bat species alive today have acclimatised to the brightest hours of daytime. Darkness is their security, and their senses are formed accordingly. For humans, it’s the opposite: we’re a highly diurnal animal, dependent on sense impressions; light is our safety. Being afraid of the dark is woven deep within our genetic and cultural inheritance and it isn’t strange that today we light up the gardens of our houses, industrial areas and carparks. Humanity has extended the day past dusk and into the night, all the while squeezing out those that seek the darkest corners.

We call this light pollution – the artificial and undesired light from our streetlights and advertising that spills out into nature. As early as the 1880s English astronomers complained that the gas lights in London interfered with their night vision and ability to see objects in space. That was just the start. Less than a third of the world’s population can see the Milky Way, and in Europe there will soon be an entire generation who have never properly seen it. But the effects of light pollution are not just aesthetic – it also disrupts the natural rhythms and behaviour of plants and animals.

For some years now, an increasing number of scientists have taken an interest in the impact of light on physiology and ecology. We have begun to pay attention to the consequences of the absence of darkness, notably in the extinction of crepuscular and nocturnal animals, in plants that fail to be pollinated or bud too early and leaves that drop too late, in migrating animals that cannot navigate without the starry sky. In addition to global heating, plastic pollution, deforestation, noise, and other human-made problems, we also urgently need to take responsibility for the overproduction of light.

Birds that fly at night navigate incorrectly or crash into skyscrapers and city trees wait ever longer to drop their leaves

We’ve all seen the dance of death performed by moths around a street lamp on an August evening. Nocturnal insects, which navigate by moon and starlight among other things, are tricked into steering towards the artificial light in their path. This draws them closer and closer to the light source, they spiral around it, and there they stay, dying of exhaustion, of heat from the bulb, or falling victim to predators. On a larger scale, it’s not just urban insects being displaced – entire ecosystems are drawn in from the dark of the periphery towards light from the cities. The phenomenon, known as the vacuum cleaner effect, along with pesticides and urbanisation, is one of the causes of the current insect die-off.

The problem, of course, isn’t confined to the insect world. Birds that fly at night navigate incorrectly or crash into skyscrapers, newly hatched sea turtles that obey their 200 million-year-old instinct to follow the lightest point on the horizon, out to the sea, stray instead into beach hotels and city centres. Coral animals that rely on the phases of the moon to know when it’s time to mate fail to properly make out the blurry night-time signals. And city trees wait ever longer to drop their leaves since the amount of light around convinces them it’s still summer.

For the first time in 2020 the Swedish list of endangered species cited the brown long-eared bat as “near-threatened”. This is possibly the first species in the country, maybe the first in Europe, that has made the endangered list due to light pollution. Bats here often live in church attics, where they bear and raise their young close to lush churchyards with plenty of food at hand in the form of insects. But in the last 30 years church facade lighting has turned them into islands of daylight.

Today we can go anywhere we want and do anything, whenever the mood strikes us. It’s always light. It is my hope that a greater understanding of what darkness allows to thrive – from insects to bats, extending outwards to an entire web of life – will convince us that protecting it should be a priority.

And if not for other creatures, then for ourselves: our circadian rhythm, our inner clock, evolved in a time without artificial light. Natural cycles of light and dark control our hormonal systems. The sleep hormone melatonin is only produced when it’s getting dark outside and, in its wake, other hormones get switched on and off. Only at night do we find true rest.

Rather than being a threat or something inconvenient, darkness needs to be recast in our minds as a resource that must be preserved, like so many other precious natural habitats.

Johan Eklöf is a Swedish zoologist and author of The Darkness Manifesto. This essay was translated by Elizabeth DeNoma.

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Elon Musk appeared destined to quit running Twitter Monday after more than 10 million users voted for him to step down less than two months after he bought the social media platform for $44 billion.

The Tesla mogul had polled users late Sunday, asking if he should “step down as head of Twitter” and vowing to “abide by the results of this poll.”

Voting ended just before 6:20 a.m. ET — with 57.5% choosing for him to leave.

With more than 17.5 million voting in the online poll, that meant more than 10 million users wanted to see Twitter no longer be run by Musk, who is once again the world’s richest man.

Musk did not immediately comment on the poll’s results. But he’d earlier insisted that no one was lined up to replace him.

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” he tweeted after warning users to “be careful what you wish, as you might get it.”

Elon Musk at World Cup Sunday.
Elon Musk vowed to “abide by the results of this poll.”
Niviere David/Abaca/Sipa USA

“The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive,” he also wrote ominously.

When podcaster Lex Fridman offered to take the job, Musk warned: “You must like pain a lot.”

He added: “You have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?”

The poll ended with 57.5% voting for him to step down.
Twitter/@elonmusk

Fridman — who offered to run the site for free to “focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world” — was not the only one showing interest in the long-hours gig.

Rapper Snoop Dogg also polled his 20.8 million followers, asking “Should I run Twitter” — with 81.7% of the more than a million voting wanting him as the new boss.

Musk — who was in Qatar to watch the World Cup final Sunday — took over as “Chief Twit” after ousting former CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after he acquired the social media giant for $44 billion in late October.

Elon Musk said running Twitter has been “the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
Dan Mullan/Getty Images

It started a radical period of change at the site, with the new boss firing around half the company’s staff and exposing backroom goings on at the site, including bowing to federal pressure and the old leadership’s censorship of The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

He had continued clashing with users on multiple fronts up until his poll Sunday, including over the suspensions of a number of journalists as well as a policy update that prohibited content that contains links or usernames for rival platforms.

Minutes before his poll, Musk apologized and tweeted “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes.”

That promise soon led to the poll about his leadership, which for many followers appeared to come out of nowhere.

However, Musk told a Delaware court last month that he would reduce his time at Twitter and eventually find a new leader to run the company.

Shares in Tesla were initially up more than 4% in pre-market U.S. trade on Monday as investors closely watched the results of the poll.

The electric carmaker’s shares have fallen almost 60% this year, with investors increasingly concerned about Musk being distracted and the slowing global economy.

He has also cashed out nearly $40 billion of his Tesla shares over the past year, including big chunks of stock since buying Twitter in October.

“Given how much of a distraction Musk’s tenure at Twitter has become, shareholders in the electric vehicle manufacturer will be breathing a big sigh of relief if he steps back from Twitter and gets back to the day job at Tesla,” said AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould.

With Post wires

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•     Elon Musk said there was no successor if he were to step down as Twitter CEO.

•     Twitter has to find a boss who is able to keep the social-media platform "alive," he said.

•     Musk made the comments before the closure of his Twitter poll, which asked users if he should stay.

Elon Musk on Sunday said there was no successor to take over Twitter if he were to step down as CEO.

In response to a Twitter user who assumed Musk had already chosen a new leader, the billionaire wrote in a tweet that "no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive." He added that he had no successor in the pipeline.

He made the comments the same day that he tweeted a poll asking his followers if he should step down as the head of Twitter. After posting the poll, he said he would "abide by the results."

By the time the poll had closed on Monday, 57.5% of respondents voted in favor of him stepping down as Twitter's CEO.

Twitter didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment made outside of normal US operating hours.

Musk has previously spoken about how he had to sell some Tesla stock to "save Twitter," according to a transcript of a Twitter meeting obtained by The Verge. He told employees Twitter was in a "dire situation from a revenue standpoint" and the platform urgently needed to increase subscriptions because of an upcoming and "serious recession."

It was unclear who could replace Musk if he stepped down as head of Twitter. Musk told a Delaware judge in November he planned to reduce his time at Twitter and find a new boss for the company over time, according to an Axios report.

In further tweets on Sunday, Musk said: "The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive." He added, "be careful what you wish, as you might get it."

"Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it," Musk then tweeted.

Musk officially acquired Twitter 53 days ago. Since then, thousands of employees have left, some new features have been launched and revoked, and various celebrities have quit the platform. Now, there could be a change of leadership.

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My mother was suffering from severe hunger and cold as a child. Germany had just lost the Second World War  and she got a "care parcel" from the US - the old "enemies" sent her food to survive. That's what made them the real winners, at least for my mother. Whenever she told us children about what it was like to receive this wonderful food, her eyes were shining. It still makes me cry. Such a generous gesture!

So it was one friendly person in the US in 1945 /1946 who kicked it off  - and made my parents and us as their children help people in war, not asking whether they are friends or enemies. I can't tell you how grateful I still am today. It meant so much to my mother and her family, and I would like to encourage you: Never forget to pass on the kindness you received! 

In Germany you can send your parcels without any charge via the DHL:

https://www.dhl.de/de/privatkunden/information/hilfe-ukraine.html

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Many occasions in everyday life can make us question whether lapses in memory are normal, a sign of cognitive decline, or even the beginning of dementia.

Our first instinct might be that it's due to deterioration in our brains. And it's true that like the rest of our body, our brain cells shrink when we get older. They also maintain fewer connections with other neurons and store less of the chemicals needed for sending messages to other neurons.

But not all memory lapses are due to age-related changes to our neurons. In many cases, the influencing factors are more trivial, including being tired, anxious, or distracted.

Some forgetfulness is normal

Our memory system is constructed in a way that some degree of forgetting is normal. This is not a flaw, but a feature. Maintaining memories is not only a drain on our metabolism, but too much unnecessary information can slow down or hamper retrieving specific memories.

Unfortunately, it's not always up to us to decide what's important and should be remembered. Our brain does that for us. In general, our brain prefers social information (the latest gossip), but easily discards abstract information (such as numbers).

Memory loss becomes a problem when it starts to affect your typical day-to-day living. It's not a huge issue if you can't remember to turn right or left.

However, forgetting why you are behind the wheel, where you are meant to be going or even how to drive are not normal. These are signs something may not be right and should be investigated further.

Then there's mild cognitive impairment

The road between aging-associated memory loss and the more concerning memory loss is coined as mild cognitive impairment. The degree of impairment can remain stable, improve, or worsen.

However, it indicates an increased risk (around three to five times) of future neurodegenerative disease such as dementia. Every year, around 10-15 percent of people with mild cognitive impairment will develop dementia.

For people with mild cognitive impairment, the ability to undertake usual activities becomes gradually and more significantly impacted over time. Besides memory loss, it can be accompanied by other problems with language, thinking and decision-making skills.

A mild cognitive impairment diagnosis can be a double-edged sword. It affirms older people's concerns their memory loss is abnormal. It also raises concerns it will develop into dementia. But it can also lead to the exploration of potential treatment and planning for the future.

Losing your way can be an early marker

Impairment in navigation is thought to be an early marker for Alzheimer's disease, the most common type of dementia. Magnetic resonance imaging ( MRI) studies have shown the areas that crucially underpin memories for our spatial environment are the first to be affected by this degenerative disease.

So, a noticeable increase in occasions of getting lost could be a warning sign of more pronounced and widespread difficulties in the future.

Given the predictive link between declines in the ability to find your way and dementia, there is an incentive to develop and use standardized tests to detect deficits as early as possible.

Currently, the scientific literature describes varying approaches, ranging from pen-and-paper tests and virtual reality, to real-life navigation, but there is no gold standard yet.

A specific challenge is to develop a test that is accurate, cost-effective and easy to administer during a busy clinic day.

We have developed a five-minute test that used scene memory as a proxy for way-finding ability. We ask participants to remember pictures of houses and subsequently test their ability to differentiate between the pictures they have learned and a set of new images of houses.

We found the test works well in predicting natural variations in way-finding ability in healthy young people, but are currently still evaluating the effectiveness of the test in older people.

Get help when your memory lapses are consistent

While everyday memory lapses are not something we should unduly worry about, it is prudent to seek professional health care advice, such as from your GP, when those impairments become more marked and consistent.

While there is currently still no cure for Alzheimer's, early detection will allow you to plan for the future and for more targeted management of the disorder.

Oliver Baumann, Assistant Professor, School of Psychology, Bond University and Cindy Jones, Associate Professor of Behavioral Sciences, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Elon Musk asked Twitter users Sunday night if he should step down as head of the social media site. More than 17 million votes were cast and delivered a clear verdict: 57.5 percent said he should quit,  in a Twitter “poll” that closed on Monday.

Mr. Musk had said that he would abide by the results of the vote.

If he follows through, Mr. Musk would be handing over the reins of the company that he bought for $44 billion in late October. The turbulent weeks since then have been marked by mass layoffs at the company, falling advertising sales, executive resignations and various high-profile user accounts suspended for infractions of newly invented policy.

On Sunday, Twitter announced a policy to prevent users from sharing links and user names from other social platforms, like Instagram, Facebook and Mastodon, and then apparently curtailed the same policy.

But for some users, including former supporters of Mr. Musk, the chaotic weekend was a breaking point.

Mr. Musk’s latest actions with Twitter were “the last straw,” Paul Graham, a founder of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, tweeted on Sunday.

Mr. Graham had supported Mr. Musk’s takeover, but on Sunday he wrote, “I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.” His account was briefly suspended.

Last week, Twitter suspended about two dozen accounts that tracked the locations of private planes, including one that followed Mr. Musk’s private jet, justifying the decision with a new policy that banned accounts if they shared another person’s “live location.” The accounts of some journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other outlets, were also suspended last week, seemingly under the same policy, and then reinstated after Mr. Musk asked users if they should be allowed back. Fifty-nine percent responded yes, in a Twitter “poll” with 3.7 million votes.

After asking users whether he should stay on as chief executive of Twitter, Mr. Musk said in another tweet: “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”

There are signs that Mr. Musk’s ownership and focus on Twitter are interfering with his other business ventures. Since Mr. Musk acquired Twitter, the value of Tesla has sunk. The car company’s share price was $225 on Oct. 27, the day Mr. Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter. On Friday, Tesla shares closed at $150.

Last week, Mr. Musk disclosed that he had sold another $3.6 billion worth of Tesla stock. This year, Mr. Musk has now sold $23 billion worth of Tesla stock, much of it after he pledged in April to stop selling shares to finance his Twitter deal.

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Also:  Elon Musk: Twitter users vote in favour of boss resigning.

Nearly a year later, a coroner officially ruled that he'd died of a peculiar phenomenon, the Irish Independent reported – spontaneous human combustion.

This phenomenon, as it has been understood over the centuries, involves a body suddenly bursting into flames without being ignited by an external source.

Coroners typically walk into a scene where the victim's hands and feet are intact, while the torso and the head is burned to ashes, Roger Byard, a pathologist at the University of Adelaide, told Insider. Nearby furniture is often minimally damaged.

But if spontaneous human combustion is a real phenomenon, Byard added, why doesn't it happen more often? He said approximately 200 reports of such events have occurred in the past 300 years.

"The reality is that people combust – but not spontaneously," Byard said.

Firemen shoveled rubble at spot where the disintegrated body of a woman was found in her Florida apartment in 1951. (Youtube/Moonlit Sapphire)

'Spontaneous' human combustion over the centuries

In the 17th century, a Danish anatomy expert described the first known case of spontaneous human combustion.

It came from Italy sometime in the late 14th century, when a knight called Polonus Vorstius drank wine one night before bursting into flames.

The idea of a human suddenly enveloping into flames was often associated with the excessive consumption of alcohol.

Charles Dickens fed the flames of the myth by writing about it in his 1853 novel "Bleak House". In it, a character named Krook, who was an alcoholic, spontaneously catches fire and burns to death.

Charles Dickens' Bleak House, MacMillan and Co, New-York London 1895 page 402

Others over the years have attributed the phenomenon to a visitation from God, obesity, or intestinal gases.

But Byard said these theories don't hold much scientific weight.

While human combustion is plausible and accurate to several accounts, he said, the idea that it happens spontaneously is a misnomer: "Yes, people's bodies burn, but there's absolutely no proof that it occurs as a spontaneous combustion."

Practically every account has involved an external source of flame, Byard added. The most common culprits are lit cigarettes, lamps, or candles.

An illustration from an 1895 edition of Charles Dickens's "Bleak House", depicting the discovery of Krook's body. (Charles Dickens' Bleak House, MacMillan and Co, New-York London 1895 page 402)

Science says bodies can act like a candle

The prevalent scientific explanation for spontaneous human combustion is known as the wick effect, which proposes that humans can act like candles do.

In 1998, as part of a BBC television program, scientists in the UK replicated similar conditions with a dead pig. They wrapped the pig in a blanket before lighting it on fire. The pig's feet were left behind – exactly the result of many reported cases of spontaneous human combustion.

The wick theory suggests that fat acts as a fuel source, and a human body is kept aflame through its own fat after being ignited. Blankets and clothing, meanwhile, act like a candle wick.

"You can picture people wrapped in blankets, drinking spirits – and spilling the spirits, which basically act like an accelerant with petrol or gasoline," Byard said. "What happens is they drop a cigarette into this massive pool of alcohol, which then ignites and just burns very slowly. We know that fat can actually burn at very low temperatures."

Because hands and feet have less fat, they don't provide enough fuel to be entirely consumed by flame.

"People are believing in urban myth," Byard said. "The underlying mechanism is much, much simpler than divine intervention."

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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Specifically, the Twitter Support account stated that "we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post."

In a tweet justifying the new policy, Musk argued that he could no longer allow "relentless free advertising of competitors" on his social media platform, while then adding that "no traditional publisher allows this and neither will Twitter."

However, as former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti noted in a reply to Musk, Twitter and other social media platforms are not traditional publishers, as such publishers have civil and criminal legal liability for the things that they publish.

In other words, if Twitter decides to classify itself as a traditional publisher, it would be legally liable for every tweet that is posted on the website.

"It appears that you admit that you’re a publisher for purposes of Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code," Mariotti explained to Musk.

"Have you thought about the consequences of the positions you’re taking, or are you just winging it?"

Éric Freyssinet, the deputy director of France's Cyberspace Gendarmerie Command, similarly warned Musk that his company could lose protections against both civil and criminal legal liabilities if it really enforces this policy.

"Any attempt to remove my tweets that link to my other social media accounts, not violating any law, would actually make Twitter an editorial media, and no longer a social media platform, with civil and criminal liability for *any* illegal content therein," he explained.

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What is Ginkgo Biloba?

Ginkgo biloba is a medicinal herb that comes from a tree also known as the maidenhair tree. Among the oldest tree species in the world, ginkgo trees are considered “living fossils” because they’ve survived planetary extinction events. Maidenhair trees grow at least about 130 feet tall and can live well over a thousand years.[1]

Ginkgo biloba leaves have been dried and ground into powder in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years. The dried ginkgo leaves were also used to make tea. Today, you can find ginkgo biloba pills and ginkgo extract liquid drops in health food stores.

Ginkgo biloba is also known as the maidenhair tree and is a species of tree native to China. It is the last living species in the order Ginkgoales, which first appeared over 290 million years ago.

8 Benefits of Ginkgo Biloba

People take ginkgo biloba for a range of purposes. According to what research has uncovered, here are the health benefits ginkgo biloba can provide:

1. Combats ADHD

Ginkgo biloba improves the flow of blood to the brain, causing measurable increases in blood circulation in the visual cortex.[2] In a 6-week study on children with ADHD, ginkgo biloba improved symptoms better than a placebo.[3] While ginkgo supplementation may be helpful for people with difficulty concentrating, it doesn’t necessarily enhance an already optimally-functioning brain.

2. Protects the Aging Brain

Ginkgo shows promise in improving symptoms for dementia patients, which suggests it may also help protect against neurodegeneration in healthy individuals.[4] In a meta-analysis of studies involving ginkgo biloba and Alzheimer’s patients, researchers concluded that 3 to 6 months of ginkgo biloba supplementation can improve cognitive function in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.[5]

3. May Help with Anxiety

In a 4-week study on 107 people with generalized anxiety disorder, 480 mg of ginkgo biloba per day improved symptoms significantly relative to a placebo.[6] Another study suggests that these results come from ginkgo’s ability to modulate gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors.[7]

4. Boosts Libido

One of the common causes of suppressed sex drive or low libido is the use of anti-depressants. In a study on men and women taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other types of anti-depressants, ginkgo biloba improved sexual desire, lubrication, and orgasm in 84% of the participants. Among the female participants, the success rate was 91%.[8] Other studies have found that ginkgo biloba effectively boosts libido and sexual function in postmenopausal women.[9]

5. Helps Relieve PMS

Ginkgo biloba has been found in studies to improve symptoms of PMS in women. In one study that looked at 165 women over three menstrual cycles, breast tenderness and pain were reduced by ginkgo biloba, as well as neuropsychological symptoms.[10] Another study that looked at just two consecutive cycles found that 40 mg of ginkgo biloba leaf extract improved symptoms of PMS better than a placebo, including both physical and psychological symptoms.[11]

6 Treats Some Headaches and Migraines

In traditional Chinese medicine, ginkgo was prescribed for treating headaches and migraines, though modern research hasn’t been done to confirm its efficacy. It could work by lowering inflammation and improving cerebral blood flow. However, headaches with other causes may not respond to ginkgo biloba.

7. Supports Heart Health

Many of ginkgo’s benefits come from its ability to boost blood circulation. According to traditional Chinese medicine, ginkgo actually opens channels in the body and allows vital organs like the lungs, liver and brain to be stimulated by “chi.” In people at risk of heart attack and stroke, the blood vessels generally aren’t able to dilate sufficiently for blood to flow.

In a study published in Phytotherapy Research, participants given ginkgo biloba had immediate increases in blood flow and a 12% increase in nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is vital to heart health, as it helps dilate blood vessels.[12] In another study, healthy older adults experienced increased blood flow and blood vessel dilation with ginkgo biloba, suggesting it may help lower the risk of developing heart disease in elderly people.[13]

8. Provides Antioxidant Support

Besides its ability to reduce inflammation and boost blood flow, ginkgo’s powerful antioxidant action is also responsible for many of its health benefits. The antioxidants in ginkgo biloba can potentially improve anxiety, help in the prevention of cancer, as well as protect against neurodegenerative diseases.[14] Antioxidants work by neutralizing free radicals that enter the body from the environment or as a result of normal metabolic functions. By preventing oxidative damage caused by free radicals, antioxidants protect against cellular and DNA damage, in turn, protecting against chronic diseases.

Ginkgo Biloba Dosage and Side Effects

Side effects of ginkgo biloba are rare, except when taken in doses above the recommended limit. The best dose for ginkgo is between 60 and 240 mg for 6 months at a time.[15] However, you should always follow the recommendation on the label of the product you’re using. Potential side effects of ginkgo can include headaches, dizziness, heart palpitations, and gastrointestinal dysfunction.

Can Ginkgo Biloba Benefit Your Health?

Ginkgo biloba is an herb that’s been cultivated as medicine in Asia for millennia. It has many healing properties that help with a wide range of health issues. As an herbal supplement, ginkgo can potentially help ward off diseases. As a natural remedy, you can use it to improve circulation, replenish your sex drive, relieve PMS symptoms or even release a headache.

Keep in mind that even natural substances can potentially cause unwanted side effects. To ensure your safety, it is recommended to consult with a healthcare provider before using herbal products or other supplements, especially if you have existing medical conditions, are taking other medications or supplements, or are pregnant.

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Studies show that people who go out of their way to practice kindfulness are happier and have better mental and physical health than those who don’t spend as much time helping others. During hard times such as the pandemic, research suggests that helping gestures assuage worry and concern. Often during emergencies and crises, people perform acts of kindness at random. Performing good deeds can make you feel in control—even give you bursts of euphoria called “the helper’s high” from dopamine and endorphin squirts released in the brain. But findings from a wide body of research suggests five additional reasons why it pays to practice everyday kindfulness even when there is no work crisis or emergency.

Five Reasons It’s Cool To Practice Kindfulness At Work

Reason # 1: Millions of people suffer from loneliness. Gallup data shows that two in 10 employees spend much of the workday feeling lonely.

Toxic organizations perpetuate isolation in favor of one-sided communication and iron-fisted management styles—one of the biggest complaints from the American workforce. In an employee-centered work environment, employees enjoy a satisfying connection with company leaders and colleagues. Leaders check in with employees to keep them in the loop, let them know they belong and keep them connected to the company.

Reason # 2: A cut-throat culture of competitiveness and unkindness. According to Workhuman’s Human Workplace Index, a monthly survey of 1,000 U.S. full-time workers, employees reported experiencing the following unkind situations the most frequently at work:

•     Seeing someone else receive credit for their work (36.60%)

•     Working with colleagues they clash with (33.90%)

•     Overhearing negative comments about a colleague (33.20%)

•     Being put on the spot in a meeting (24.60%)

“Just knowing you’re not alone can be a huge comfort on the individual level,” explains Steve Pemberton, CHRO of Workhuman. “On a company scale, effective management and a culture of open, empathetic communication can make these moments far less uncomfortable, reducing fear of embarrassment or consequence.”

Reason # 3: Kindfulness is essential for retention and acquisition. A recent study found that job seekers rate workplace kindness as an essential component for their mental health:

• 77% of respondents were more likely to apply for a job posting that listed “kindness” as an important value of the company.

• 74% of respondents said it’s important to have a kind community in the workplace such as having managers check in on their team members for professional and personal support.

• 89% of young workers see mental health and kindness as high priorities in the workplace.

Reason # 4: Increase of digital and remote interactions. “Developing meaningful professional relationships matters more than ever,” according to Yiannis Gavrielides, co-founder and CEO of COVVE. He cites collaborating effectively with colleagues, building trust with clients, negotiating with suppliers and aligning with shareholders as skills that will differentiate the future professionals. He stresses the importance of building a habit of keeping in touch with people. “We are often too busy to stay in touch,” he admits, but advises that we, “Dedicate time every day to reach out to people. In a world where digital interactions are taking over, remember the importance of in-person meetings. Body language and eye contact matter greatly, especially in negotiations and other occasions where being present can be more impactful. Actively listen to people's opinions, understand their priorities, offer to help and connect them with people that can help.”

Gallup’s data also shows that having a best friend at work provides essential social and emotional support, and it is strongly linked to business outcomes, including improvements in profitability, safety, inventory control and employee retention. Writing for Gallup, Alok Patel and Stephanie Plowman, state, “Imagine, for example, the working parent who leaned on their best friend at work (who also has a child) when the pandemic required them to juggle at-home learning and their job responsibilities. Their best friend at work offered judgment-free encouragement during the toughest storms—the kind of support that communicates, ‘You're not alone.’”

Reason # 5: Workplace kindfulness promotes well-being. Studies show that small actions such as buying a cup of coffee for a coworker can improve their mood. Given the tumultuous nature of the workplace this year, the workweek affords many opportunities for kind actions. But a set of studies in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Amit Kumar and Nick Epley discovered that people usually don’t take advantage of kind opportunities because they don’t realize the positive impact kindfulness can have on their colleagues.

In their research, they found that a little good goes a long way and that kindness increases happiness in both the givers and receivers. But in experiments of giving away a cup of hot chocolate in a park to giving away a gift in the laboratory, givers tend to undervalue the positive impact of their kindness, which supports the old adage that it’s better to give than receive. They also found that kindness can be contagious and the consequences of a kind action goes beyond a single recipient. People who had just been on the receiving end of a kind act gave substantially more to an anonymous person than those who had not. These findings suggest that what might seem small when we are deciding whether or not to do something nice for someone else could matter a great deal to the person we do it for,” Kumar concludes. “Given that these warm gestures can enhance our own mood and brighten the day of another person, why not choose kindness when we can?”

A Final Word

“Science is showing that kindfulness at work is cool. Employers and employees who practice random acts of kindfulness may not fully recognize the impact of their behavior on others, but studies show that it has long reaching positive effects. Workers are happier, more engaged and productive, and kindfulness boosts the company’s profitability. “When businesses invest in their employees through acts of appreciation, words of encouragement or making investments in their success, they build a culture where people take pride in their work and feel a sense of engagement and accountability,” says co-founder and CEO of &Open, Jonathan Legge. “When companies fail to do that, employees will simply check-out.”

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Monday, December 19

• The first launch of the week comes from Innospace, a South Korean rocket startup. It plans to launch its suborbital technology demonstration rocket, Hanbit-TLV. This rocket will be used to test the first stage engine which will eventually be used in another rocket called the Hanbit Nano orbital launcher that will orbit satellites. The Monday launch is scheduled for 9:00 a.m. UTC from Alcantara Space Center in Brazil.

Tuesday, December 20

• The second and final launch of the week will see an Arianespace Vega C rocket launch two Pleiades Neo Earth observation satellites. Pleiades Neo is a constellation consisting of four satellites that capture very high-resolution images of Earth. This launch will also carry up a secondary payload, the QQ Technology nanosat. This mission is due to launch at 1:47 a.m. UTC from French Guyana.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was a Long March 4C carrying the Shiyan-20 A/B satellites from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China. They will be used for space environment monitoring.

• Next, an Ariane 5 launched the Meteosat Third Generation-Imager 1 (MTG-I1), Galaxy 35, and Galaxy 36 satellites. The launch took place from French Guyana.

• On Wednesday, a Chinese Long March 2D launched Yaogan-36 05 to its planned orbit from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

• Friday brought us the launch of a Long March 11, again from the Xichang SLC. This rocket was carrying the Shiyan-21 satellite which will be used for in-orbit verification of new space technologies.

• Next, SpaceX launched NASA's Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission. It will conduct the first global survey of the Earth's surface water.

• It was a busy few days for SpaceX as it then had to launch two SES O3b mPOWER satellites before landing the first stage of the rocket on a droneship.

• Finally, SpaceX concludes our list this week with the launch of a Falcon 9 carrying 54 Starlink satellites to orbit. These will provide internet connectivity on Earth.

That's all for this week, check in next week!

TWIRL 96: South Korea startup Innospace set to launch Hanbit-TLV rocket

Putting a screen in front of a child is a tried and trusted way of keeping them entertained and quiet – and it works pretty well for adults, too – but as a constant calming technique, it may have its drawbacks, according to a new study.

Researchers looked at the way digital devices were used to soothe upset children aged between 3 and 5 years old. The study involved 422 parents and the same number of children and was carried out between August 2018 and January 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic upended schools and home life.

What the team found was that increased use of devices as calming mechanisms was linked to greater emotional reactivity or dysregulation in the kids over the course of several months: think rapid shifts between moods and heightened impulsivity, for example.

The association was particularly strong in young boys and in children who already had signs of hyperactivity, impulsiveness, and a strong temperament. It seems as though these gadgets can prevent kids from developing their own ways of regulating emotions.

"Using mobile devices to settle down a young child may seem like a harmless, temporary tool to reduce stress in the household, but there may be long-term consequences if it's a regular go-to soothing strategy," says developmental behavioral pediatrician Jenny Radesky from the University of Michigan.

"Particularly in early childhood, devices may displace opportunities for development of independent and alternative methods to self-regulate."

Of course, as any parent or carer would know, the age group looked at in the study includes kids that are particularly prone to tantrums, intense emotions, and fighting back against the world, which makes the option of using a tablet or a phone to calm them down all the more appealing.

And it works too – but what the researchers are suggesting is that short-term relief from an upset child might be leading to long-term problems with their emotional development. Other ways of coping can get shut out.

The study's authors are keen to emphasize that device use in moderation can be useful and can't easily be eliminated altogether while also warning that it shouldn't be used as a primary or frequent way of trying to keep children calm.

This is a topic that isn't new, and in the past, parents have been concerned about giving their youngsters too much television time or playing video games. The modern-day media-consuming experience is much more fragmented, interactive, and accessible, however.

"Caregivers may experience immediate relief from using devices if they quickly and effectively reduce children's negative and challenging behaviors," says Radesky. "This feels rewarding to both parents and children and can motivate them both to maintain this cycle."

"The habit of using devices to manage difficult behavior strengthens over time as children's media demands strengthen as well. The more often devices are used, the less practice children – and their parents – get to use other coping strategies."

The researchers have put forward some other options for calming kids down, including sensory experiences (from listening to music to squishing putty in their hands to jumping on a trampoline), and the deliberate naming of emotions to help understand them.

Color-coding emotions can also help kids learn, identify and understand their moods, and easily communicate how they are feeling. Offering replacement behaviors, including hitting a pillow, rather than hitting a sibling or a friend, can also help.

These options can be talked through and explained while kids are calm, the researchers suggest, before any tantrums strike. Meanwhile, screen timers and strict boundaries around the use of apps might also be ways of keeping control over device use.

"All of these solutions help children understand themselves better and feel more competent at managing their feelings," says Radesky.

"It takes repetition by a caregiver who also needs to try to stay calm and not overreact to the child's emotions, but it helps build emotion regulation skills that last a lifetime."

The research has been published in JAMA Pediatrics.

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Elon Musk’s war on journalists marched on this weekend with Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz getting temporarily booted from Twitter after she asked the erratic billionaire for comment on a story.

“When I went to log in and see if he had responded to our query, I was suspended. I received zero communication from the company on why I was suspended or what terms I violated,” Lorenz wrote on her Substack.

Musk said on Sunday morning that Lorenz was suspended for “prior doxxing action by this account” and that it would be lifted “shortly.”

The suspension came after Musk axed and then reinstated the accounts of several other prominent journalists who had made reference to the account @elonjet, run by a college kid who tracks the movements of his private aircraft.

It also followed a recent complaint to Musk by influencer manager Ariadna Jacob, who was the subject of a critical article by Lorenz and who subsequently sued the reporter for defamation.

Jacob claimed that Lorenz doxxed her in the article, which appeared in The New York Times when she worked there. In Lorenz’s story, she linked to a public Zillow listing of an influencer collaboration home.

“Such shameful behavior will not be tolerated going forward,” Musk wrote in reply on Friday, a day before Lorenz was suspended from Twitter.

The suspension of Lorenz with not clear explanation of her alleged infraction has been a theme of previous journalists bans.

For instance, Twitter banned some reporters who merely linked to @elonjet’s new account on social media rival Mastodon—which was also briefly banned on Twitter.

“Twitter has served as an essential real time news source and played a crucial role in the journalism world,” Lorenz wrote, “but Musk’s arbitrary suspensions of journalists who report on him should worry anyone who values journalism and free expression.”

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How's your year been?

Crazy? Confusing? Uplifting after the pandemic was finally deemed to have receded? Miserable because you quiet-quit and then got quiet-fired?

For tech companies, it's all seemed relatively sobering.

They began to realize their glory might be finite. Their employees began to realize their jobs might be finite too.

Some companies, though, continued to believe that everything would be just fine.

Apple, for example, appeared to frustrate customers only because it couldn't get enough iPhones into stores. And as for the way it talked to those customers, well, sometimes it left much to be desired.

For example, when Apple wanted to wish its customers happy holidays, it presented yet again, a couple of fine young people dancing around with an AirPod in one ear, completely disregarding the feelings of locals.

It was as if oblivious vacuousness represented some sort of twisted brand safety. Mustn't offend, so let's dance.

I couldn't help, then, but to marvel at the contrast with Google. The company recently released its end-of-year summation, one that's actually capable of making you feel and think.

The ad is not merely an anthem for how humans felt in 2022 -- and what they searched for -- but also points to what might be the biggest human concerns of 2023.

As Google explains: "The world searched 'can I change,' more than ever before."

Increasingly, more humans have seen the limits of capitalism, the demands it places on them, and the effects it has on them.

It may still be the best way for society to prosper, but it's become increasingly unfeeling and, some might even sniff, inhumane.

Some might even suggest technology has contributed to this. When you're just a cipher, why should you accept the cyberworld you're being forced to embrace?

Why not do something different, learn something different, believe that you're more than you imagined, or just disappear for a while?

For too long, indeed, tech companies have insisted they're making the world a better place when it seems that people have become less happy, less secure, less mentally healthy, and questioning of what life is all about.

Naturally, Google is somewhat selective in the scenarios it presents here.

It's easy to be charmed by the woman who says: "I just quit my job and moved to Scotland with no money or plans. Or friends."

It's also easy to be moved by people here who make personal changes, small and large. Everything from a different haircut, to learning to dance, to embracing a completely different lifestyle, such as becoming a fighter pilot.

But while women of color in space unquestionably represent change, I wonder how many sentient humans would believe the British royal family does, too. Yet there it is.

Still, the spirit of what's being offered here suggests a company that somewhere, perhaps very buried in the vault of its soul, continues to hope that it can help people see the new year as a new opportunity to find change they can believe in.

With Apple, somehow, you believe it'll be more of the same. Dance to our tune, dear customers. We'll give you a new watch here, a new MacBook Pro there, and a new profit number that'll create oohs and aahs in very select forums.

Optimism is hard to maintain. Reality tends to brutalize it with regularity.

But for these 2 minutes, I could believe that 2023 might offer something uplifting. All right, I could make myself believe it.

More uplifting, at least, than a young man lifting a young woman as they dance with inane abandon.

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Unless, that is, you’re in Cambridge, where occasionally, instead of daubing an anatomically dubious male appendage in the frost, some clever dick will create something that genuinely exercises the brain.

This image was spotted on a car windscreen by Dr Flavio Toxvaerd, a University of Cambridge economist and fellow of Clare college who focuses on industrial organisation and the economics of infectious diseases.

Writing on Twitter, he said: “Where I grew up, kids would write obscenities in the snow. But this is Cambridge. Anyone know what formula it is?”

His tweet generated more than 5,000 likes and more than 400 retweets and more than a few suggestions and solutions (a number of them correct), while others responded with images of more, well, basic snow etchings they’d spotted.

We sought the help of the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, home of its Department of Physics, to confirm the answer to Flavio’s question.

And sure enough, the Cavendish - 30 members of which have won Nobel Prizes since their inception in 1895 - came up with the goods.

“It’s the Lagrangian for electromagnetism,” a scientist at the department told us. “This means that it’s the elegant way to capture all four of the Maxwell equations that describe the electric and magnetic field. Among other things, this is the equation that predicts light!”

The discoveries of James Clerk Maxwell - a 19th-century Scottish mathematician and scientist who studied and worked in Cambridge in two spells - helped bring in a new era in physics. Considered a genius in terms of theory and experimentation, his work provided an essential link between the physics of Newton and Einstein.

He developed the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation - describing electricity, magnetism and light as manifestations of the same phenomenon.

His seminal 1865 work, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, showed that electric and magnetic fields travel through space as waves, moving at the speed of light. He wrote that "light and magnetism are affections of the same substance" - and bringing together light and electrical phenomena led to him predicting the existence of radio waves.

Maxwell came to the University of Cambridge in October 1850, having already studied at the University of Edinburgh. He attended Peterhouse briefly, but switched before the end of his first term to Trinity, as he thought it would prove easier to obtain a fellowship there. At Trinity, he joined an elite secret debating society known as the Cambridge Apostles.

Having graduated in mathematics with the second highest score in his final examination in 1854 - behind Edward Routh - he was awarded a fellowship earlier than usual in October 1855, but left in November 1856 to take up the role of chair of natural philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen, aged just 25.

After narrowly surviving smallpox, he had a productive spell at King's College, London, from 1860-65, before returning to Glenlair in Scotland. But he was in back in Cambridge in 1871, becoming the first Cavendish professor of physics and in charge of the development of the now world-famous Cavendish Laboratory. He designed the original laboratory in Free School Lane and was responsible for the regeneration of physics research in Cambridge.

He died of abdominal cancer on November 5, 1879 at the age of 48.

Today, the Maxwell Centre - which opened on the university’s West Campus on April 7, 2016 - bears his name. It is the focal point for industrial engagement with the physical scientists and engineers on the site.

Maxwell's four equations describe one phenomenon each, but he did not actually create them. Instead, he combined four equations made by Gauss, Faraday and Ampere. He added the displacement current into the Ampere's law - the 4th equation - to complete the equation.

The equations are:

1.     Gauss's law for static electric fields
2.     Gauss's law for static magnetic fields
3.     Faraday's law, which says a magnetic field changing with time produces an electric field
4.     Ampere-Maxwell's law, which says an electric field changing with time produces a magnetic field.

Combining the third and fourth equations explains an electromagnetic wave, such as light, that can propagate on its own.

And the combination describes that a changing magnetic field produces a changing electric field, and this changing electric field produces another changing magnetic field. The cycle continues, making an electromagnetic wave that propagates through the space.

The equations can be expressed in integral equations form and in differential equations form.

So the Lagrangian - defined as a function that describes the state of a dynamic system - that was written in the snow on a car in Cambridge is a way of bringing these equations together. And it’s certainly more befitting a city of learning than the usual efforts.

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Last week began with Musk installing mattresses at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco, which spurred an investigation by city officials, since the move could violate safety codes. Musk’s move to “go to the mattresses” wasn’t surprising, given his earlier proclamation that Twitter would be “extremely hardcore.” In response to the investigation, Musk angrily tweeted at San Francisco Mayor London Breed that he was just “providing beds for tired employees.” By week’s end, Musk was posting a tweet calling for the prosecution of Anthony Fauci. And on Thursday night, without warning he banned several journalists, including reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Meanwhile, as Musk was consumed with Twitter, the stock price of Tesla declined 14% in just the past five days.

What’s most surprising is that this is the same man who so brilliantly transformed the automotive industry by shifting from a less efficient and nonrenewable energy source with a lot of downstream negative costs—like burning up the planet—to a more efficient and renewable one. So how does this science–and data-driven genius adopt such an incredibly backward idea of how human energy works? It’s the equivalent of Musk announcing that the next Tesla model will be running on coal—which would be fitting, because the Industrial Revolution is the model he’s using for human energy. That’s when our collective approach to work was defined by the idea that humans are machines, and more time up and operating meant a higher rate of production.

Now we know that this is actually not how humans achieve peak performance. In fact, many super successful CEOs (including Satya Nadella and Jeff Bezos) seem to know about the connection between sleep, recovery, and peak performance. High performance athletes like LeBron James, Mikaela Shiffrin and Tom Brady know. The military knows. In October 2020, the Army released its first updated field and fitness manual in eight years with sections on sleep. “To achieve optimal readiness, soldiers must have sleep and the more sleep obtained the better,” the manual reads. “Sleep is necessary to sustain not only alertness, but also higher-order cognitive abilities such as judgment, decision making and situational awareness.”

In a 2017 piece on Thrive entitled “Sleep Is a Weapon,” Admiral Jim Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, contrasted this with the burnout-fueled model. “That sort of cultural approach in the military—of the leader as super-human and not in need of rest—is a mistake, and our military leaders must recognize that to make the right decisions—ethical, moral and tactical — they must regard sleep as a weapon that strengthens and enhances their performance as surely as the latest technology,” he wrote. “Rested commanders are the best commanders.”

Last week, The New York Times ran a piece about the increasing presence of high-achieving executives and CEOs in Ironman triathlons. And here’s Matt Dixon, who has coached several of them: “A lack of sleep used to be a badge of toughness amongst high-performing people. Now it’s a badge of stupidity. Every single high-performing CEO that I work with prioritizes sleep. Every single one. I don’t work with a CEO who doesn’t sleep at least seven hours every night.”

Of course, Musk is hardly the only one ignoring the science, especially in the tech world, which has long been the boiler rooms of burnout. The newly arrested FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is another recent cautionary tale, described by Insider as “famously sleeping four hours a night on a beanbag chair next to his desk and taking calls from clients and investors at 3 a.m.”

But even in tech, the culture is shifting. The Information reported on tech’s “overnight shift”—how, instead of moving mattresses into their offices, Silicon Valley leaders are now optimizing their smart mattresses for sleep: “The biggest flex in the tech world used to be bragging about how little you slept—now it’s a high sleep score.”

Every day Musk has been proving the high costs of this unscientific way of using his energy—monetary costs, brand costs, opportunity costs. And that’s all in addition to the undeniable health costs. They may not be obvious right away but we have tons of data that show us how dangerously real the health costs of burnout are. This is a man running multiple major companies—and he’s wasting time, day and night, trolling the world on Twitter? With results that are not exactly an advertisement for burnout as a badge for high performance.

Advertisers are taking note, with half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers pausing their ads, while investors shorting Tesla have made $11.5 billion so far this year. And there have been multiple reports on Tesla investors increasingly frustrated with “Musk’s erratic behavior.” As one investor put it, sounding like the exasperated parent of a toddler, “You’ve got a great car company — just stop it.” On Wednesday, Tesla’s third-largest individual shareholder, Leo KoGuan, called on Musk to step down as Tesla CEO, tweeting, “Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO. Tesla needs and deserves to have working full time CEO.”

Mario Nataralli, of MBLM, an agency that researches the connection between brands and consumers, recently spoke about what Musk is doing to his great car company. “This is creating real damage for the Tesla brand,” he told Automotive News. “When I see people commenting that they are no longer considering a Tesla car or are embarrassed to drive it, I think that’s reaching the point of significant equity damage for the brand.”

According to the U.K.-based research firm YouGov, Tesla’s approval rating fell into negative territory for the first time last month.

Tesla’s not just any great car company, but a revolutionary car company whose founder is now spending way too much of his valuable energy on stunts like auctioning Twitter’s espresso machines. It’s not about how much money this will or won’t bring in—it’s about the cognitive opportunity costs of even thinking it up. As Steve Jobs once said, “Focus is about saying no. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products.” And great companies.

So yes, Musk’s Twitter working model is a regression. But so many business leaders in every industry are going the other way (the future-looking way)—and following the science. They know the costs of trying to power through burnout for themselves and for their employees. And for the few who don’t, Musk is hopefully doing us the service of providing an overdue kiss of death for the backward-looking, anti-science, bad-for-humans and bad-for-business idea that burnout, performance, and great business results are somehow a match made in heaven. If Burnout Inc. were a company, the short sellers would be making a fortune.

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