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Mr. Housel, 36 years old, is a blogger and venture capitalist who writes beautifully and wisely about a central truth: Money isn’t primarily a store of value. Money is a conduit of emotion and ego, carrying hopes and fears, dreams and heartbreak, confidence and surprise, envy and regret.

Investing isn’t an IQ test; it’s a test of character. Unlike the man who chucked coins into the sea, Mr. Read could defer gratification and had no need to spend big so other people wouldn’t think he was small. From such old-fashioned virtues great fortunes can be built.

Investors think of such volatility as a kind of “fine” for having made a mistake, says Mr. Housel. Instead, they should regard it as a “fee,” the unavoidable cost of participation. You never know how big the fee will be or when you will incur it, but patience can make it bearable.

and currently 322 million km (200 million mi.) from Earth

and currently 322 million km (200 million mi.) from Earth

collect a sample.

In the US, the sport of long-range weather prediction is dominated by two annual publications, the Farmer’s Almanac (founded in 1818) and the rival Old Farmer’s Almanac (1792).

Many interacting forces make for unpredictable outcomes, so they express their forecasts in broad probabilities.

The founders of the two almanacs developed their own systems from beliefs that were fashionable at the time, but are no longer scientifically accepted.

Equipped with super-tough body armour, the insect can survive being stamped on or even run over by a car.

Equipped with super-tough body armour, the insect can survive being stamped on or even run over by a car.

And the findings could give clues to building tougher materials for use in construction and aeronautics.

e’re often reluctant to credit our good fortune purely to luck. We’d much rather put a material gain or positive outcome down to our brilliant intelligence, smarts, skills or hard work.But if success is directly correlated to our ability, why do there seem to be so many rich people with mediocre talent? And why aren’t the smartest people in the world also the wealthiest?A new paper authored by a team of Italian researchers, physicists Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda and economist Alessio Biondo, used a computer simulation of success defined by financial wealth to show that the most successful people in the world aren’t necessarily the most talented. They are the luckiest.

“It’s hard to get people to think about external forces and events,” says Frank. “But we find that if you prompt them to think about it – by asking about a time when they were lucky, rather than telling them they were lucky – the more generous people become and more willing to contribute to the common good.”

What if this ritual of going after people like the weatherman actually reinforces racism and other "isms" instead of combating them?

What if this hyper-focus on an individual's wrong distracts us from directing our outrage at the most destructive forms of intolerance -- the kind that's baked so much into our everyday lives that we hardly notice them?

"We make these kind of superficial scapegoats that we can use to make ourselves feel better about racism, but we don't address policies, practices or structures," she says. "To the white people who are clutching their pearls, I really have to ask: How integrated is your life? Yeah, you voted for Obama twice, but do you have any black friends?"

Florida Citizens’ Alliance, a conservative, 20,000-member organization based in Naples that spearheaded a successful grassroots effort last year to pass the nation’s first state bill allowing residents to demand a public hearing on local school textbooks. With its passage, parents of students — as well as anyone living in a given district — can challenge the books a school is using to teach their community’s children. It was a seemingly parochial piece of civic legislation, but it was one with potentially great implications for science education in the United States.

Prominent on the group’s expanded menu of concerns was climate change, and humanity’s presumed role in driving it. The Alliance’s members began line-reading school textbooks for violations of their beliefs, creating carefully detailed reports on how many times, and in what context, elementary and high school students were learning about rising seas, or melting ice in Antarctica.

Vernon said, echoing a prevailing concern among members of the Alliance and likeminded conservatives everywhere: the unchecked power and control over social institutions by perceived liberal elites. “We’re really concerned,” he added, “that our kids are not being educated, [but] simply indoctrinated in the philosophy of the academic aristocracy.”

The larynx, also called the voice box, is where the trouble begins: Its location is, or was, supposed to be the key to language.

Scientists have agreed for a while that the organ is lower down the throat in humans than it is in any other primate, or was in our ancestors. And for decades, they thought that low-down larynx was a sort of secret ingredient to speech because it enabled its bearers to produce a variety of distinctive vowels, like the ones that make beet, bat, and boot sound like different words. That would mean that speech—and, therefore, language—couldn’t have evolved until the arrival of anatomically modern Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago

In fact, they propose that the necessary equipment—specifically, the throat shape and motor control that produce distinguishable vowels—has been around as long as 27 million years, when humans and Old World monkeys (baboons, mandrills, and the like) last shared a common ancestor.

Most recently, some researchers have found evidence that even some learned behaviors and physiological responses can be epigenetically inherited.

But in the 1950s, the botanist Royal Alexander Brink discovered that, under different environmental conditions, maize plants with identical genomes expressed different-colored kernels, and these colors were heritable. It was some of the first evidence for epigenetic inheritance. Since then, more examples of inheritance without a clear genetic basis have come to light, as have a variety of possible mechanisms for epigenetic inheritance.

C. elegans worms infected with viruses would defend themselves by generating small RNAs that targeted and neutralized the viruses. Moreover, the subsequent offspring of the roundworms also made these small protective RNAs, even though they had never been exposed to the viruses.

Aliens definitely exist, Britain's first astronaut has said -- and it's possible they're living among us on Earth but have gone undetected so far.

Then, in a tantalizing theory that should probably make you very suspicious of your colleagues, Sharman added: "It's possible they're here right now and we simply can't see them."

A former Pentagon official who led a secret government program to research potential UFOs, revealed in 2017, told CNN at the time that he believes there is evidence of alien life reaching Earth.

"Well it was a false report. I was down during the day and I was there for a tiny, little short period of time. And it was much more for an inspection. There was no problem during the day."

"I've gone down two or three times, all for inspection. And, you go there, some day you may need it. I went down. I looked at it. It was during the day, and it was not a problem. And I read about it, in like, a big thing. There was never a problem ... nobody ever came close to giving us a problem."

This re-framing of history is remarkable solely for the gall it takes to attempt it. After all, every single major media organization reported over the weekend -- with NO pushback from the White House -- that Trump had been taken into the bunker for his own protection, not to, uh, "inspect" it.

So the Mueller Report is finally out. President Trump has called it a “total exoneration,” but we don’t have to take his word for it. After special counsel Robert Mueller’s comprehensive, two-year investigation into serious allegations of Russian electoral interference, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, we’re free to read what the special counsel’s findings actually are, if we so choose—albeit with a number of careful redactions from William Barr that along with his four-page summary, framed public conversations about the report in important ways.

It can persuade us one way or another by using certain rhetorical or linguistic means. What’s more, a particular framing doesn’t just arise spontaneously to the top of the public consciousness from its own legitimate merits, because it happens to be the neutral truth. We would be naive to think so, yet many people do. When it comes to the power of states, in sociologist Christopher A. Bail’s view, it has to be knowingly crafted, with two realities. One is a front stage presentation for public consumption and the other a secret collective coordination behind the scenes. Their reality becomes your reality, one way or another.

To Dwight Bolinger, “literal truth—the kind one swears to tell on the witness stand—permits any amount of evasion.” He explains: “The most insidious of all concepts of truth is that of literalness. The California prune-growers tell us that prunes, pound for pound, offer several times more vitamins and minerals than fresh fruit; literally true. The oil industry advertises that no heat costs less than oil heat, which has to be true because no heat costs nothing at all.” Those savvy enough to see through it will simply eat fewer prunes and heat their homes differently to those who fall for it. But declaring that you didn’t lie but told the literal truth in this way seems a kind of hollow ethic, a careful weaselling around the words that some lawyers seem particularly adept at.

Though I thought disappearing from social media would be as simple as logging off, my refusal to post anything caused a bit of a stir among my small but loyal following. I began to receive emails from strangers asking me where I had gone and when I would return.

The truth is I have not gone anywhere. I am, in fact, more present than ever.

Twitter functions much like an echo chamber dependent on likes and retweets, and gaining notoriety is as easy as finding someone to agree with you.

we must guard our moral compasses. And some day, I think, future generations will look back at our mistreatment of livestock and poultry with pain and bafflement. They will wonder how we in the early 21st century could have been so oblivious to the cruelties that delivered $4.99 chickens to a Costco rotisserie.

Torture a single chicken in your backyard, and you risk arrest. Abuse tens of millions of them? Why, that’s agribusiness.

Those commendable savings have been achieved in part by developing chickens that effectively are bred to suffer. Scientists have created what are sometimes called “exploding chickens” that put on weight at a monstrous clip, about six times as fast as chickens in 1925. The journal Poultry Science once calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as these chickens, a 2-month-old baby would weigh 660 pounds.

Christian Petzold likes terrible, irreversible events: accidents, suicides, eternal separations. In his melodramas, Petzold has established a fascination with the trope of love lost at the hands of misrecognition. At the crossroads of historical circumstance and feelings of personal guilt and shame, his protagonists carry burdensome secrets, with devastating consequences.

His latest film at first appears to diverge from recent work. Set in contemporary seaside Germany, Afire takes a break from the backdrops of extreme repression and deprivation that the director has favored for at least a decade

fire is really a slow build to the disaster that Petzold does so well. Only by dint of calamitous events, it seems, can Leon awaken to the reality he resolutely shuts out. The arrival of a forest fire, suddenly overwhelming the plotless plot, seems to satisfy a perverse fantasy grounded in the belief that extremity is required for a life lived fully.

For centuries, people have witnessed unexplained lights in the sky and thought that perhaps they might be ghosts or angels. However, it was in the summer of 1947 when a different explanation became popular. Following a widely reported incident over Mt. Rainier in Washington state, people began to believe that these unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are actually alien spacecraft prowling the Earth.

Over the past 70 years, more than ten thousand similar reports have been made.

The problem is that many people jump directly from the “unidentified” in “UFO” to “flying saucer.” And that’s just too large a jump to be reasonable. There is simply no credible evidence that the Earth is being visited by aliens. There are no artifacts, no clear photographs, no captured aliens, no alien bodies – nothing.

At a talk on ethical artificial intelligence, the speaker brought up a variation on the famous trolley problem, which outlines a philosophical choice between two undesirable outcomes.

Say a self-driving car is traveling down a narrow alley with an elderly woman walking on one side and a small child on the other, and no way to thread between both without a fatality. Who should the car hit?

To get a sense of what this means, suppose that regulators require that any public health content — for example, on vaccines — not be vastly different for politically left- and right-leaning users. How should auditors check that a social media platform complies with this regulation? Can a platform be made to comply with the regulation without damaging its bottom line? And how does compliance affect the actual content that users do see?

Could technology companies have monitored ominous messages made by a gunman who Texas authorities say massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school? Could they have warned the authorities? Answers to these questions remain unclear

But if nothing else, the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, seems highly likely to focus additional attention on how social platforms monitor what users are saying to and showing each other.

Shortly thereafter, Facebook stepped in to note that the gunman sent one-to-one direct messages, not public posts, and that they weren’t discovered until “after the terrible tragedy”.