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a recent working paper by Nico Voigtländer and Sebastian Ottinger of the University of California at Los Angeles argues that leaders’ impact can indeed be isolated—thanks to the genomes of kings like Charles.

In theory, each round of inbreeding should have made monarchs slightly stupider—and thus worse at their jobs. This yields a natural experiment. Assuming that countries’ propensity for incest did not vary based on their political fortunes, the periods in which they had highly inbred (and probably dim-witted) leaders occurred at random intervals.

The authors analysed 331 European monarchs between 990 and 1800. They first calculated how inbred each ruler was, and then assessed countries’ success during their reigns using two measures: historians’ subjective scores, and the change in land area controlled by each monarch. The authors only compared each ruler against their own country’s historical averages.

The modularity of DAC systems implies that costs for CO2 removal might drop 90% to 95% over a couple of decades, just like the recent cost declines for other modular solutions such as wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.

Unlike other pollutants, what matters with carbon dioxide isn’t the location of its release but the total atmospheric accumulation. Releasing greenhouse gases in industrial corridors and then removing them from the atmosphere in remote locations has essentially the same net effect as if the carbon wasn’t emitted in the first place. That means we can deploy DAC systems wherever the energy for their operation is cheapest, ecosystem impacts are lowest, and the economic activity would be welcome.

A solar microgrid, which generates, stores and distributes clean energy to homes and facilities in a local network, provides a strong answer to these needs and wants. It can integrate with the main electric grid or disconnect and operate autonomously if the main grid is stressed or goes down. The physical pieces—solar panels, batteries and inverters—have been improving for a while. What’s new and coming, though, is the ability to orchestrate these different pieces into agile electric grids.

If heat waves were as deadly as the press proclaims, Homo sapiens couldn’t have survived thousands of years without air conditioning. Yet here we are

Humans have shown remarkable resilience and adaptation—at least until modern times, when half of society lost its cool over climate change.

it’s alarmist stories about bad weather that are fueling mental derangements worthy of the DSM-5—not the warm summer air itself.

(CNN Business)Facebook-parent Meta on Monday said it would soon offer more transparency and information to researchers about how political and social ads are targeted to users on the platform, months before the US midterm elections.

The effort, dubbed the Facebook Open Research and Transparency project, was created to help qualified academic researchers study social media's impact on society with measures included to protect users' privacy, according to the company.

The data provided to researchers will include information such as the interest categories, which can include everything from "environmentalism" to "frequent travelers," chosen to help target each individual ad.

social media platforms—especially image-based platforms like Instagram—have very harmful effects on teen mental health, especially for teens struggling with body image, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

we know that Instagram, with its algorithmically-driven feeds of content tailored to each user’s engagement patterns, can draw vulnerable teens into a dangerous spiral of negative social comparison and hook them onto unrealistic ideals of appearance and body size and shape.

Keep in mind that this is not about just about putting teens in a bad mood. Over time, with exposure to harmful content on social media, the negative impacts add up. And we now have more cause for worry than ever, with the pandemic worsening mental health stressors and social isolation for teens, pushing millions of youth to increase their social media use. We are witnessing dramatic increases in clinical level depression, anxiety, and suicidality, and eating disorders cases have doubled or even tripled at children’s hospitals across the country.

Millions of students who participated in virtual learning during the Covid-19 pandemic had their personal data and online behaviors tracked by educational apps and websites without their consent and in many cases shared with third-party advertising technology companies, a new report has found.

Human Rights Watch found 146 (89%) appeared to engage in data practices that "risked or infringed on children's rights."

Han said the majority of the apps and websites examined by Human Rights Watch sent information about children to Google and Facebook, which collectively dominate the digital advertising market.

When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as the monk class, she wasn’t sure what to expect.

“You give up technology, and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.

Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.

as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.

“You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”

The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.

Twitter was an intoxicating window into my fascinating new assignment. Long suppressed groups found their voices and social media-driven revolutions began to unfold. Movements against corruption gained steam and brought real change. Outrage over a horrific gang rape in Delhi built a movement to fight an epidemic of sexual violence.

“What we didn’t realize — because we took it for granted for so long — is that most people spoke with a great deal of freedom, and completely unconscious freedom,” said Nilanjana Roy, a writer who was part of my initial group of Twitter friends in India. “You could criticize the government, debate certain religious practices. It seems unreal now.”

Soon enough, other kinds of underrepresented voices also started to appear on — and then dominate — the platform. As women, Muslims and people from lower castes spoke out, the inevitable backlash came. Supporters of the conservative opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and their right-wing religious allies felt that they had long been ignored by the mainstream press. Now they had the chance to grab the mic.

By Jaron LanierMr. Lanier is a computer scientist and an author of several books on technology’s impact on people.

I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot.

When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard. Maybe we should look at what social media has done to these men.

Over the next five years, the CHIPS Act will direct an estimated $67 billion, or roughly a quarter of its total funding, toward accelerating the growth of zero-carbon industries and conducting climate-relevant research, according to an analysis from RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank based in Colorado.

That means that the CHIPS Act is one of the largest climate bills ever passed by Congress. It exceeds the total amount of money that the government spent on renewable-energy tax credits from 2005 to 2019

And it’s more than half the size of the climate spending in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. That’s all the more remarkable because the CHIPS Act was passed by large bipartisan majorities, with 41 Republicans and nearly all Democrats supporting it in the House and the Senate.

I’ve sometimes described being on Twitter as like staying too late at a bad party full of people who hate you. I now think this was too generous to Twitter. I mean, even the worst parties end.

Twitter is more like an existentialist parable of a party, with disembodied souls trying and failing to be properly seen, forever. It’s not surprising that the platform’s most prolific users often refer to it as “this hellsite.”

Among other things, he’s promised to reinstate Donald Trump, whose account was suspended after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Other far-right figures may not be far behind, along with Russian propagandists, Covid deniers and the like. Given Twitter’s outsize influence on media and politics, this will probably make American public life even more fractious and deranged.

Exposure to saccharin and sucralose significantly impaired glycemic response, but this was not seen with the aspartame or stevia groups

None of the blood markers show real changes in any group except for insulin levels going up in the glucose and stevia groups (and since everyone was getting glucose as part of the dosing, that suggests a lowering of the glucose-driven insulin response overall).

what all of the sweetener patients showed, though, were significant changes in the gut microbiome, and these correlated with the glycemic response changes in the saccharin and sucralose groups. These changes were apparent at both the species distribution level and at the metabolome level.

Yuval Noah Harari, known for the acclaimed non-fiction book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, in his latest article in The Economist, has said that artificial intelligence has “hacked” the operating system of human civilization

he said that the newly emerged AI tools in recent years could threaten the survival of human civilization from an “unexpected direction.”

He demonstrated how AI could impact culture by talking about language, which is integral to human culture. “Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our DNA. Rather, they are cultural artifacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artifacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures,” wrote Harari.

CarynAI also shows how AI applications can increase the ability of a single person to reach an audience of thousands in a way that, for users, may feel distinctly personal.

The impact could be enormous for someone forming something resembling a personal relationship with thousands or millions of online followers. It could also show how thin and tenuous these simulations of human connection could become.

CarynAI also is a reminder that sex and romance are often the first realm in which technological progress becomes profitable. Marjorie acknowledges that some of the exchanges with CarynAI become sexually explicit

Highlighter

Proteins are the building blocks of life. Formed of chains of amino acids, folded up into complex shapes, their 3D structure largely determines their function. Once you know how a protein folds up, you can start to understand how it works, and how to change its behaviour

Although DNA provides the instructions for making the chain of amino acids, predicting how they interact to form a 3D shape was more tricky and, until recently, scientists had only deciphered a fraction of the 200m or so proteins known to science

Health care

Entertainment and shopping

Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.

According to the data company EDITED, average luxury prices are up by 25 percent since 2019. Many brands attribute their increases to everything from inflation and the balancing out of regional price disparities to the fallout of the pandemic and impact of the war in Ukraine. But for many luxury fashion brands, the uptick has been taking place over a longer timeline.

Take Chanel, where handbag prices have more than doubled since 2016. The auction house Sotheby’s found a classic 2.55 Chanel bag sold for around $1,650 in 2008. In 2023, that figure from Chanel is closer to $10,200. (If the cost had risen in line with inflation over the 15-year period, it would be expected to cost $2,359).

“Industrywide, the pricing has gotten truly absurd,” the influencer Bryan Yambao noted in an Instagram post this week when discussing a $6,000 woolen Miu Miu coat.