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"PERHAPS IT IS COINCIDENCE, perhaps prescience, but Berlinica Publishing has rereleased an out-of-print book in English translation called Germany? Germany! Satirical Writings: The Kurt Tucholsky Reader. A collection of 65 short essays written between 1907 to 1932, the book starts with a spirited introduction by Ralph Blumenthal, who aptly calls Tucholsky "an astute eyewitness to history" and "a puckish critic of the universal human comedy." In a secondary introduction, Harry Zohn (the book's late translator) adds that the man was "the heckling voice in the gallery, and the conscience of Germany.""

"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

In more than 1,000 years, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as Gulf Stream System, has not been as weak as in recent decades. This is the result of a new study by scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany. The researchers compiled so-called proxy data, taken mainly from natural archives like ocean sediments or ice cores, reaching back many hundreds of years to reconstruct the flow history of the AMOC. They found consistent evidence that its slowdown in the 20th century is unprecedented in the past millennium; it is likely linked to human-caused climate change. The giant ocean circulation system is relevant for weather patterns in Europe and regional sea levels in the U.S.; its slowdown is also associated with an observed cold blob in the northern Atlantic.

Analysis by WWF found that just 29 sites across South America, Africa and South East Asia were responsible for more than half of the global forest loss.

For decades, scientists have been using a classical experimental search task-which involves placing a single rat in a complex maze to search for a reward-to deepen understanding of navigation, memory, and learning. However, rats are highly social animals that build and live in complex burrow systems in nature. Yet very little is known about how they explore as a group. In the new study, researchers from institutes in Germany and Hungary turned the classical experimental search task into the first experimental study on rodent group search behavior in a confined maze.

A large team of researchers working with Google Inc. and affiliated with a host of institutions in the U.S., one in Germany and one in the Netherlands has implemented a quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) on a 53-qubit noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) device. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics,, the group describes their method of studying the performance of their QAOA on Google's Sycamore superconducting 53-qubit quantum processor and what they learned from it. Boaz Barak with Harvard University has published a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.

An international research team from Germany and France has created structures in which light fields interact with electrons so strongly that the quantum vacuum itself is significantly altered. Using extremely short bursts of light, they interrupted this coupling much faster than the timescale of a vacuum fluctuation and observed an intriguing ringing of the emitted electromagnetic field, indicating the collapse of the vacuum state. Their key achievement could improve our understanding of the nature of nothingness-the vacuum of space itself, paving a way toward photonics exploiting vacuum fluctuations. The results are published in the current issue of Nature Photonics.