Mastodon will issue their long-awaited new album, "Marrow Deep", on August 28 via Loma Vista Recordings.
The news is paired with the release of a new single, "Snakes For Dinner", featuring a guest vocal appearance by Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, who also appears in the accompanying music video.
Five years on from the expansive "Hushed And Grim", "Marrow Deep" documents founding
Anthrax are sharing a behind the scenes look at the making of the official music video for "The Edge Of Perfection", the latest single from the band's forthcoming studio album, "Cursum Perficio."
The tune follows “It’s For The Kids” as the second preview of the project, which will be released September 18 via Nuclear Blast Records and Megaforce Records (North America).
More than four decades after the release of his iconic 1982 anthem "White Wedding" and 1984 hit "Eyes Without A Face," Billy Idol delivers powerful new reimagined versions live from Apple Music Studios in Los Angeles as the latest guest on Apple Music's Rediscovered series.
The series sees artists perform new renditions of their most beloved and enduring songs in their catalog. Each session is
The rocker will extend the "Alice's Attic” series with a new North American leg that will launch in Clearwater, FL on October 27.
The new production was introduced last fall during Cooper's co-headline trek with Judas Priest and will now be witnessed by fans in a swath of new cities
Presale tickets are available now – register for Artist
1. Well, yesterday I was still coughing and was hoping it was just continued throat/lung irritation from the weekend but then in the evening I suddenly got mega congested, so I've officially got a cold, yay. I couldn't get any sleep last night due to the congestion, so between that and my nose running non-stop I decided it was best to work from home today. I am actually not feeling that bad, though, aside from being super tired from not getting any sleep. I'm going to work from home again tomorrow and we'll see about Friday.
2. I rode my bike to Shake Shack for lunch. They're pretty much my favorite burger place these days.
3. In the afternoon/early evening I was feeling super hungry but had no energy to make anything so I ordered dinner. I decided to get from Sweetgreen, which I've never had before. Being pretty much all salads, it's not something Carla would be that interested in, so I figured now was a good time to try them. I got their super green goddess salad, which has roasted sweet potatoes and was very tasty.
4. I perked up quite a bit after dinner and decided to walk over to the nearby ice cream place for dessert. Haven't been there in a while and it was perfect for a hot evening.
If your partner's family expected you to cover every meal, open your home for months at a time, and never question the arrangement, would you go along with it? After years of footing the bill, one wife decided it was finally time to set some boundaries, but her husband thinks she's the one being unreasonable.
Can an event really keep your money after canceling on you?
You buy tickets, make plans, and get ready for a three-day food and music festival, only to find out the entire event is canceled just 36 hours before it begins. But instead of offering refunds, this organizer is pointing to a tiny clause in the terms and saying a future ticket should be enough. Would you accept that, or would you fight to get your money back?
💬 Artificial intelligence and big data are flooding discovery pipelines with high-potential drug candidates, but this rapid innovation has created a new challenge. Simply put, our capability to design miracle molecules is vastly outstripping our technology to mass-manufacture them safely for the global public. Moving drug making from the scale of lab flasks to commercial bioreactors introduces non-linear biological and engineering shifts that can undermine tasks like purification.
⚡In this New Scientist CoLab podcast, experts from global life sciences leader Cytiva explain the hidden, high-stakes science of purification that is required to close the gap between drug discovery and the pharmacy shelf.
Our guests are:
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Henrik Ihre, Distinguished Fellow, Cytiva
Paul Belcher, Business Leader, Cytiva
🎧 Stay tuned to learn about:
➡ The process of taking a drug from theoretical to the shop shelf
➡ How the drug purification works
➡ The human cost when purification goes wrong
➡ The challenges of keeping pace in manufacturing as AI supercharges drug discovery
Chapters:
(00:00) Intro – How drugs go from discovery to reality
(03:49) The purification process
(10:05) Why small scale success doesn’t mean industrial scale success
(13:00) The challenge of the expanding drug pipeline
(21:39) Understanding the molecules that are being purified
(23:20) What is a chromatography resin?
(25:24) Why purification gets more difficult later in the process
(27:15) The human impact when purification goes wrong
(32:59) The future of AI drug discovery
(37:52) Is AI helping with purification?
(40:32) How it feels to be advancing drug discovery
A wedding drama that takes place before the wedding. Having a job that consists of dealing with people can be super stressful.
This long Reddit story is about a photographer who gets hired for a destination wedding only to later discover that the couple didn't exactly plan the accommodations for her and ended up creating a huge misunderstanding and a hostile environment for the photographer. This got me thinking about those jobs that aren't really in customer service or part of the servicing industry, but nonetheless, they do require the employee to deal with people all the time. We always have stories about entitled people in restaurants, hotels, bars, and even theme parks. But I never consider how many stories like this a photographer may have, and many other workers who aren't exactly expected because of their line of work.
This story not only showcases that entitled people are in every kind of job and can make your life incredibly stressful, but also really easy. But it also proves that photographers need to be prepared for everything. Most freelance jobs have some parts of the job always be in a verbal contract. They can't always have everything written in a contract. But I do think that they should always have one nonetheless. Even if not everything got written up, you need some kind of proof that shows that you were hired for a destination wedding, that you charge x amount for your services, and that you will do this, this, and that. Just trusting the customer, even if you know them, is a huge mistake that can get you in trouble.
I have to admit that the photographer really tried to have all the information in writing, but the couple wasn't cooperating. But the truth is, she should have provided a contract the second they hired her. If she had that, she would have been able to know everything that this job entailed, as well as how the accommodation for the trip would work and how much she would be paid for it. For someone who has been a photographer for almost 10 years, she should have known better than to trust the customers just because she knew them.
We all know it: through Instagram, we find out about too much. When I say too much, I mean too much. I'm not saying it's 'a lot'; I'm saying it's more than we should know. We shouldn't know the exact day that our ex-partners fell in love with their new boyfriends; we shouldn't find out about every party we weren't invited to. Sometimes, truly, ignorance is bliss. With this type of information bombarding us, we're left to process and assume large quantities of data that might be hard to swallow, data that we wouldn't even know of hadn't we signed up to that insane platform. Of course, in this case, I think that sooner or later this Redditor would've found out that the person she considered her best friend wasn't her best friend at all, or that she didn't invite her to her wedding; but hearing about it is not the same as actually watching it in real time, seeing the faces, the smiling, the dancing. Not to get too crazy here, but I think precisely that is what keeps us hooked, the idea that somehow, by knowing, we participate.
Dave Brown, departing AWS executive, in 2023. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Dave Brown, who joined Amazon Web Services as one of its earliest EC2 engineers and rose to lead its compute, AI and machine learning services, is leaving after nearly 19 years.
AWS CEO Matt Garman told employees in a memo posted publicly Wednesday that Brown will depart at the end of July for an unspecified “new role outside of the company.” Amazon exec Dave Treadwell, who joined the company in 2016 after 27 years at Microsoft, will take over the group Aug. 1.
Dave Treadwell. (Amazon Photo)
Brown’s exit comes about three months after Amazon promoted him to senior vice president. Brown had been on the company’s senior leadership team since 2023.
His tenure stretched back to the early days of the cloud. He joined AWS in 2007 in Cape Town, South Africa, where Amazon based part of its early EC2 engineering, before relocating to the Seattle area.
In an interview with GeekWire earlier this year, as the company marked the AWS 20th anniversary, Brown recalled Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, then the company’s top cloud executive, gathering the small Cape Town team in those days and telling them the business could one day be worth a billion dollars.
Brown said he could barely grasp the figure at a time when the service was bringing in tens of dollars a day: “I couldn’t even imagine how much a billion dollars was. It sounded like a lot of money.”
AWS today runs at roughly $150 billion in annualized revenue, and grew 28% in its most recent quarter — its fastest pace in nearly four years.
Brown’s role grew with the business. After starting as an engineer on EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, he went on to lead its broader compute organization, including close collaborations with the executives running Amazon’s custom silicon business. His purview also expanded to include the machine learning and AI services now central to AWS, such as the Bedrock and SageMaker platforms.
Treadwell has run Amazon’s eCommerce Foundation, the technical backbone of the company’s online retail operations, since joining in 2016. Before that he spent 27 years at Microsoft, where as a corporate vice president he worked on Windows, Xbox, and the .NET software framework.
In his memo, Garman described Treadwell — known internally as “Tread” — as one of AWS’s largest and most vocal internal customers, someone who pushed the cloud group to innovate and will now lead it.
Brown will remain through the end of July to help with the transition. In his own farewell note, he said it felt like the right time to begin a new chapter. “I’ll be cheering you all on from the sidelines,” he wrote.
It's July, summer is at its peak, and heatwaves are almost a regular occurrence across the world. Unless you live in Australia, where people are currently enjoying a chilly winter, or other places where summer is basically a myth, you must be sitting under the AC and finding ways to fight the heat.
Welcome to planet Earth.
As Europe has learned in recent weeks, surviving summer without air-conditioning infrastructure is basically impossible. Some days during this dreadful season cannot be lived through without some way to keep cool, and an AC is the best possible solution.
The fact that the company below decided to start saving money by shutting off the AC every day at 3 pm should definitely be illegal. What are employees supposed to do until they finish their workday at 6 pm? Sit at their desks and suffer in silence? How can a company be allowed to put its employees through this in the middle of summer?
If that's not enough, recently employees learned that on management floors, the AC is still up and running way past 3 pm. Apparently, management doesn't need to suffer like lesser workers. Their floor is freezing while employees below are forced to buy themselves fans to put on their desks.
If my company decided to do something like that, I would have helped them save even more money by quitting my job and never looking back. I am not going to sit in a boiling office while my boss is comfortably sitting upstairs, probably laughing at my expense. No AC = No work. It might be time for the employees to actually implement this rule at their office. I bet management is going to cave real fast if everyone simply stops working, or even floods the management floor and starts working from there…
Closure is a funny thing; it's never entirely clear to us what we are trying to find when we're looking for it. Oftentimes we want to express our side of the story before we let go of the other person completely; other times, we're secretly hoping to reignite a friendship or a past love affair; but every time it's about something deeper than just 'closing'. Some people say that looking for closure is futile, but I differ. I think the important thing about closure is the act itself, aside from the content of the message: if it's polite, if it's not aggressive, if it's about saying goodbye or saying something you never dared to say, I think one should always try to reach out and send it. Having said all that, when one sends one of those long, feared paragraphs, one should know that the answer might never come, or that it might be frustrating, incomplete, or invalidating. The ideal situation would be to send the message only to express ourselves and say our goodbyes, regardless of the answer.
A request is something you ask for as a favor that may or may not be done. A guarantee, on the other hand, is something that is promised to you and needs to be done.
Some guests that front desk employees have to deal with are comparable to little children that just started to attend kindergarten. They need everything to be repeated a thousand times with a calm voice. They don't know the difference between some words, and they throw tantrums when they don't get what they want. So maybe when these employees use gentle parenting to calm them down and educate them is not so bad.
At a previous job that I had, I remember that our trainer usually told us that we had to educate the customer. As if they were children and we were some kind of teacher. I always hated that because it meant that most customers usually didn't know anything about the way we work and didn't even want to learn beforehand. Which led to uncomfortable situations where they expected to be right or at least get their way just because, and we would have to act like a first-grade teacher that is educating children on the meaning of the word no.
The fact that managers and higher-ups expect things like these to happen and so they train their employees to deal with that just shows the poor perception they have of the clients, that they have to be treated as kids. This Reddit story got me thinking about the two kinds of customers that exist when you, as an employee, say no. On one side, we have the understanding one that says it's fine and moves on. And on the other, we have a childish adult who makes a scene over everything that doesn't go their way. Be more like the first kind. The employees that serve you are going to appreciate it deeply.
Microglial immune cells (round) ingesting specialised cells called oligodendrocytes (branched) that maintain the myelin sheaths around nerves. This process is thought to occur in multiple sclerosis
Science Photo Library
The best treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS) might be antivirals that target the Epstein-Barr virus. Pharmaceutical companies are now being called on to develop such drugs after researchers studied the immune responses of people with and without the condition.
“There aren’t good Epstein-Barr virus drugs currently available, but they can be developed,” says Michael Levy at Harvard Medical School. “That might be the most useful specific therapy for MS in the future.”
MS is caused by an immune attack on myelin, a fatty sleeve that wraps around nerves. The loss of myelin reduces their ability to transmit signals and can cause a wide range of symptoms, including muscle weakness. Drugs that suppress the immune system can slow the progression of the condition.
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There is strong evidence that the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), which causes mononucleosis, or glandular fever, is also the cause of MS. “I think most MS researchers now would agree that EBV plays a major role in the development of the disease,” says team member Kjetil Bjornevik at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
But exactly how remains a mystery. Almost everyone is infected with EBV during their childhood or teen years. It mainly infects immune cells known as B-cells, where it can remain dormantfor the rest of a person’s life. But in some cells, the virus can reactivate.
The big question is why only around 1 in 1000 people develop MS when nearly everyone gets EBV. This suggests there is something different about the immune response to EBV in people who go on to develop MS, says team member Natalia Drosu at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Our question for this study was: in people with MS, what parts of EBV does the immune system respond to? And do those responses look different from people who don’t have MS?”
The team focused on immune cells known as CD4 T-cells, which circulate in the body. Although these aren’t the cells that directly attack myelin, there are multiple lines of evidence suggesting they play a role in MS, says Drosu.
The team found that, in 30 people with MS, most of the CD4 T-cells targeting EBV were specifically targeting viral proteins produced when the virus is actively replicating, rather than the proteins associated with its dormant stage. What’s more, people with MS produced twice as many of these cells, on average, as 30 people without the condition.
The researchers then looked at T-cells in 60 people with MS before and after they began drug treatments that reduce their number of B-cells. They found these treatments reduced the T-cell response to EBV almost to the levels seen in people without MS.
In addition, the team found low levels of EBV in the saliva of these people before they were treated to reduce their number of B-cells, which shows that the virus was replicating in their bodies. After treatment, viral levels dropped below detectable levels in most people.
The thinking has been that B-cells help drive the harmful immune response in people with MS, says Levy, and this is why drugs that reduce B-cell levels are effective. But the results suggest these drugs also work by eliminating B-cells infected with EBV, he says, thereby reducing the immune response caused by active viral replication. “We’re thinking that depleting B-cells is also depleting the reservoir of the Epstein-Barr virus.”
If so, targeting EBV directly with antivirals might be just as effective as B-cell-depleting drugs, but without the undesirable side effects of treatments that weaken the immune system, such as an increased risk of infections. “I think a lot of patients would prefer a specific drug,” says Bjornevik. “If we can show that an antiviral had a similar effect as the most effective MS drugs, I think there will be a big market for that drug.”
Another approach already being trialled for treating MS is using modified immune cells called CAR T-cells. While existing drugs merely reduce B-cell levels, CAR T-cells can temporarily eliminate them altogether. Dozens of people with MS have gone into remission after CAR-T treatment, says Levy.
But EBV might linger in some other cell types and reinfect B-cells as they slowly recover in the years after the CAR T-cell treatment, he says. “Then we would need the antivirals… so we just have to wait and see.” CAR T-cells can also have serious side effects, says Bjornevik, so antivirals could be safer as well.
There are also vaccines against EBV under development. “If people don’t get infected with EBV, their risk of MS would be virtually zero,” says Drosu. “So I think vaccines are [a] very promising strategy to eradicate MS.”
But 1000 people would have to be vaccinated to prevent just one case of MS, Levy points out, so it isn’t clear if EBV would be justified for preventing MS alone. However, EBV causes many other problems, including a number of cancers, and has also been linked to other autoimmune conditions, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
The newly recognised monkey species Colobus congoensis
Daniel Rosengren
A monkey with a distinctive mask-like face, found in a remote part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been declared a new species – only the fifth new species of monkey documented from Africa in the past 75 years.
The monkey is known as likweli to local people who hunt it for bushmeat, and it has been given the scientific name Colobus congoensis. It lives in one of the most inaccessible parts of Africa, without paved roads or infrastructure.
“A typical expedition involves multiple modes of transportation: a flight, followed by a motorcycle ride, two days of hiking on foot and finally travel by dugout canoe to reach the monkey’s range,” says Kate Detwiler at Florida Atlantic University.
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One of the most intriguing features of likweli is its facial appearance, says Detwiler. The light-coloured skin around the mouth and beneath the nose is unlike that of any other African colobus species, but resembles the facial pattern seen in some Asian colobine monkeys.
Detwiler and her colleagues believe the species’ mask-like face may represent ancestral traits that were present before the African and Asian colobine lineages diverged over 8 million years ago. “If so, likweli may have retained characteristics that were subsequently modified or lost in the other African colobus species,” says Detwiler.
Like other colobus monkeys, likweli also has a distinctive body odour that defies description, she says.
Scientists first became aware of the species in 2008 when a team surveying on the banks of the Lomami river, in what is now Lomami National Park, took a photo that showed only a part of a monkey that had not been seen before, high in the canopy.
Then, in November 2018, another group again spotted the monkey, which is about 1.3 metres long and weighs around 7 kilograms. Between 2018 and 2022, there were 114 recorded observations of the new species, 25 of which were from vocalisations.
In 2021, several monkeys that had been killed by hunters for bushmeat were confiscated and handed over to researchers. Detailed morphological and genetic analysis confirmed they were indeed a wholly separate species. Genetic tests and recordings of their vocalisations also added to the evidence of their uniqueness.
“The genetic analyses revealed that likweli is a deeply divergent lineage that split from its closest known relative, Colobus satanas, approximately 4 to 5 million years ago,” says Detwiler. “That was much older than we expected and provided strong evidence that likweli represents a distinct species.”
Likweli is isolated from C. satanas by more than 1200 kilometres and several major river barriers. Unlike most other members of the genus, which have habitats exceeding 60,000 square kilometres, likweli is only known to exist in 1700 square kilometres of rainforest.
“Hunting is one of the primary threats facing likweli, particularly because the species has such a small known range and appears to occur at low densities,” says Detwiler.
Because of the risk of poaching and the monkey’s small population and home range, the team is proposing that the species should be listed as endangered. “Now that likweli has been recognised as a distinct species, another important step would be to grant it protected status under national law,” says Detwiler. “This would make it illegal to hunt the species, including in the buffer zone surrounding the park.”
There is much to like in Janet Jones's look at horse "language" and the equine mind, A Horse's World, but beware unexpected issues, says Christa Lesté-Lasserre
I started my colleague Karmela Padavic-Callaghan’s first book, Entangled States, with trepidation. How could they deliver on its subtitle, “a life according to quantum physics”? I finished it with both a better understanding of all things quantum and a deeper desire to understand myself after reading Karmela’s own thoughtful journey as a queer, millennial immigrant.
This is a unique blend of memoir and science writing, in which Karmela interweaves growing up in Croatia, moving to New York, doing a physics PhD, teaching in high school and working as a New Scientist reporter with big physics concepts.
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So, how do you make links between, say, indefinite causality and a life-threatening tooth infection, or wave-particle duality and the realisation that you are queer? Somehow, Karmela does, and it all works to create a book that is clear and friendly on a scientific level, and candid and insightful on a personal one.
When the final of the 2026 men’s football World Cup kicks off in New Jersey this weekend, players can expect temperatures of over 30°C (86°F). Indeed, much of the tournament has been played in challenging conditions – like the high elevation and thin air of Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca – giving pundits plenty to chew over.
But one factor has been less discussed: humidity. High temperatures may be uncomfortable, but it is really the combination of heat and high humidity that can make a football match – indeed, any activity – physiologically unbearable. Humid conditions make it harder for our bodies to benefit from sweating, as the air is already laden with moisture, hampering our ability to cool down.
This impact of humidity is still underappreciated. One way of taking both humidity and heat into account is the wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT), a measure of heat stress used by sports organisations. As New Scientist went to press, the most extreme match of this World Cup (Uruguay vs Cape Verde) had an estimated WBGT of over 33°C (91°F) – a level at which people are advised to suspend all outdoor activity. Most of us simply aren’t prepared for such conditions, as we explore here.
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It is really the combination of heat and humidity that can make activities unbearable
Yet, if we understand the dangers of humidity, we can start to grasp the advantages of dry heat. We detail the many ways in which saunas and heat therapy can keep you healthy, from cardiovascular benefits to protection against Alzheimer’s disease. The key is that saunas operate at extremely low humidity, allowing us to sweat comfortably while reaping the benefits of getting decidedly hot.
Saunas aside, we should still be wary of extreme heat. With European heatwaves on the rise, the 2030 men’s football World Cup – to be played across Portugal, Spain and Morocco – is likely to see low humidity but temperatures of up to 40°C (104°F). With no sign of us cutting carbon emissions, the World Cups of the early 21st century may one day be fondly remembered as nice and cool.
Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
Imagining things
Late last year, between one news event and another (honestly, who can remember?), Feedback was delighted to discover the Journal of Imaginary Research. This is an online magazine publishing “short works of fiction”, but only if they take the form of “imaginary research abstracts”. In other words, it’s a collection of summaries of (entirely fictional) research studies, each of which is a little short story in disguise.
It’s the creation of two academics in the UK: Kay Guccione at the University of Glasgow and Matthew Cheeseman at the University of Derby. It grew out of a workshop intended “to introduce creative writing concepts to researchers”, especially those “who felt tense, anxious, about writing, or had fallen into a negative relationship with their writing” – in other words, an aid for professionals with writer’s block. But, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it has grown beyond all expectations and is now a venue for rather lateral short stories.
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The 2026 issue came out in late June. Reader Alex Gough alerted us to it, having published in it himself “after strenuous peer review”. Alex’s piece is titled “Seven new examples of adaptive radiation and insular dwarfism in etapods”. He begins by explaining that “Insular dwarfism is a process in which species isolated on islands evolve to become smaller than their mainland counterparts, eg Lemerle’s hippopotamus.” From there he goes on to describe seven miniature species from a fictional archipelago, each of which has “developed behavioural traits suited to [its] unique environment”.
For instance, “Etapodus malevolus is notably belligerent”, in response to “the high prevalence of predators on its island”. In contrast, “Etapodus somnolentus undergoes prolonged periods of hibernation to cope with its irregular food supply.”
However, not all the species could be explained in this kind of adaptive evolutionary language. “Etapodus jucundus is habitually carefree and contented, for reasons we have not yet discovered.”
We assume readers have got the joke by now. If not, go sweep the floor and whistle while you work, maybe it’ll become clear.
Elsewhere in the issue, we find “Move fast and break everything: Deflecting anxiety in a tech-forward world”. It explains: “For unclear reasons, the rapid-fire continuous release of life-altering and world-transforming technological developments in artificial intelligence, without oversight of any kind, has caused an increase in anxiety, with some people even proving inexplicably resistant to emerging technologies.”
Fortunately, a solution is at hand. “The use of AI technologies reduces prefrontal cortex activity and critical thinking”, which may lead to “brain atrophy, and therefore a reduction in distracting ethical questions”. The problem solves itself!
Etymological issues
Feedback is on a mission to get the word “nonomatopoeia” added to the dictionary. Attentive readers will recall that the neologism was proposed by Neil McKay and means the opposite of onomatopoeia, i.e. it is a word that doesn’t sound at all like the thing it describes.
Several readers have submitted additional examples of nonomatopoeia, bolstering the evidence that the word would be a valuable addition to the language because it describes a widespread phenomenon. Elaine Coates says she has always struggled with “pedagogy”. It refers to the method and practice of teaching, but, she says, “it sounds like some sort of foot fetish”.
Likewise, Bob Munro nominates “valetudinarian”. It sounds like a religious order, but actually refers to “a person who is chronically sick, or believes themselves to be”. These two alternative meanings, incidentally, are so radically distinct they render the word effectively useless.
In a nicely meta twist, Sue Tudor says that “onomatopoeia” is itself an example of nonomatopoeia. She describes “onomatopoeia” as “surely one of the most non-onomaterwhatsit words in existence”, because the sequence of syllables suggests “standing or sitting on a mat on a pier”.
There is, we should say, a question about the etymology of nonomatopoeia, which computer scientist Julian Bradfield has flagged. “May I be the 94th reader to point out that onomatopoeia is Greek, so its negation is anonomatopoeia, not nonomatopoeia,” he writes. “The opposite, rather than the negation, is antonomatopoeia.”
We regret to inform Julian that he is so far the only reader to point this out, but if another 93 would care to write in making this same argument, we will place all this correspondence in one of our special folders.
Simon Goodman reports having found “a lovely example” in Siem Reap, Cambodia, which is the jumping-off point to visit the Angkor temple complex. There he found a visitor centre for the charity APOPO, which uses trained African giant pouched rats to detect landmines. “This is a must-see place,” says Simon. “The highlight is seeing how the rats are trained and search out mines, which the carers show you live.”
If that weren’t enough, if you agree to remove potentially toxic substances like sun cream from your skin, “You are even allowed to cuddle the rats.” They are cat-sized and “delightful”, Simon reports.
Why don’t dogs look up when a low-flying plane or helicopter passes overhead? I’ve never seen one do this. And what changes will occur on Earth as the moon moves further away from us?
After the British ship Endurance (pictured above) became stuck in an ice sheet in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica in January 1915, the expedition’s official photographer, Frank Hurley, made a brave decision. He waded into the icy water filling the lower deck to rescue hundreds of his precious glass-plate photo negatives.
To Hurley’s dismay, Ernest Shackleton, the expedition leader, informed him he would have to abandon most of the negatives because they would weigh down their escape lifeboats. Hurley went through the plates one by one and smashed 400 of them on the ice before he could change his mind and risk his life to return for them, salvaging 120.
Hurley also had to relinquish most of his photography equipment and rely on a pocket camera and a few rolls of film to capture the crew’s fight for survival as they camped on the ice near their trapped ship for months. “It is beyond conception, even to us, that we are dwelling on a colossal ice raft, with but five feet of ice separating us from 2,000 fathoms of ocean, and drifting along under the caprices of wind and tides, to heaven knows where,” wrote Hurley in his diary.
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The expedition’s sledge dogs are given their first exercise in a month on 6 January 1915, after the Endurance manages to anchor to a large floe
Royal Geographical Society
The Endurance sank for good in November 1915. After months camped on the ice, in April 1916, Hurley and the rest of the crew took his fragile photo negatives and remaining supplies on lifeboats to the uninhabited Elephant Island. From there, realising there was little chance of rescue, Shackleton and five men took the James Caird lifeboat (pictured below) on a perilous journey of 1200 kilometres across the Southern Ocean to seek rescue in South Georgia, eventually rescuing the men (including Hurley) who had remained on Elephant Island in August 1916.
Ernest Shackleton and five men leave Elephant Island on the James Caird, aiming to travel 1200 kilometres to South Georgia
Royal Geographical Society
While stranded on the ice sheet in the Weddell Sea, Hurley proved to be a hardy survivor, fashioning a blubber stove from an old drum and eating the expedition’s sledge dogs when food supplies ran short. Pictured below is Leonard Hussey lifting the largest sledge dog, Samson.
Expedition member Leonard Hussey with sledge dog Samson
Royal Geographical Society
Hurley, an Australian photographer, was recruited for the expedition to Antarctica after Shackleton saw a film he had made of Douglas Mawson’s earlier Australasian Antarctic Expedition, for which he was also the official photographer. Unfortunately, the Shackleton expedition never succeeded in crossing the Antarctic continent.
Now, the UK’s Royal Geographical Society, in collaboration with Shackleton’s granddaughter and others, has published The Endurance Photographs, a compilation of Hurley’s images that survived. It features the original glass-plate negatives alongside new, high-definition scans that uncover previously hidden faces and details, such as in the image below. Digitisation of the negative revealed a sixth crew member, hidden behind the smoke from the stove.
A sixth crew member appeared behind the smoke when this negative of Hurley’s was digitised in 2015
Royal Geographical Society
“The survival of these negatives through such a journey in such conditions to reach the safety of the Royal Geographical Society’s collections is extraordinary,” says the society’s president, Jane Francis, in the book. “[Hurley’s] images are an example of documentary photography at its finest. He was committed to his craft and would often put himself in danger to create the perfect image. Each of his negatives is not just a visual record of a particular moment, but a beautifully composed, carefully considered piece of art.”
The crew was rescued after the close call. Meanwhile, blazes in Canada have left Toronto under a haze and smoke heading towards several major US cities.
Lori Beer, JPMorgan Chase’s global chief information officer, at the JPMorganChase Center in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
JPMorgan Chase is building out a new AI software infrastructure team, anchored in Seattle, focused on running AI across its data centers and outside providers in a way that controls costs, protects its intellectual property, and avoids tying its fortunes to any one vendor.
Lori Beer, the bank’s global CIO, discussed the effort as part of a broader interview Tuesday during a stop in Seattle. She said the bank is being “careful about lock-in, strategic risk, financial risk, all those things.”
The move comes as business and tech leaders — including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Palantir CEO Alex Karp — publicly warn about the risks of letting a small number of AI vendors accumulate control over costs, data, and the choice of which AI tools businesses can use.
Beer described the new group as an AI infrastructure team but said it works at the software level, separate from JPMorgan groups that build data centers or procure hardware.
She said the group will, for example, develop systems to determine when to route different types of AI workloads to JPMorgan’s own data centers, when to tap into public cloud providers, and when to use newer specialty computing suppliers.
AI agents are one example of where the bank is drawing a line.
Beer said JPMorgan will build and own the software that runs its agents, while treating the underlying AI models as interchangeable. The agentic layer is specific to JPMorgan’s business, whereas the underlying models are general-purpose, and JPMorgan wants to be able to switch among them as the market changes.
Cost is another focus. Given the option, Beer said, engineers naturally reach for the newest and most powerful model, even when a cheaper one works as well. Systems built by the new team will route specific workloads to different types of models.
The new AI infrastructure team will be spread across multiple JPMorgan locations, but Beer said the Seattle area offers a high concentration of the required skills, including engineers who built cloud infrastructure at Amazon, Microsoft, and other tech platforms before joining JPMorgan.
It’s part of a broader focus on AI at JPMorgan’s Seattle Tech Center, which has grown to about 400 people since opening in 2018, with a heavy emphasis on cybersecurity.
JPMorgan said this week that it has named Ture Armas, the bank’s CTO for Commercial Bank Lending Technology, to lead the Seattle Tech Center. Armas will continue in his existing role while adding oversight of the tech center’s strategy, talent, and community engagement. He replaces Mamtha Banerjee, who left in March.
The Seattle Tech Center is preparing to move next month into an expanded space at the JPMorganChase Center, the skyscraper that was renamed from the Russell Investments Center in January. The tech center is currently located in a smaller space in a nearby building. The move will put engineers closer to business teams, which Beer called critical as AI accelerates the pace of product development.
Beer, who started her career as a software engineer at a nuclear facility, joined JPMorgan in 2014 from health insurer WellPoint. In 2017, she became the first CIO to sit on the bank’s Operating Committee. She oversees a technology division of about 70,000 people, including 45,000 engineers, with a $20 billion annual budget.
JPMorgan reported record second-quarter results Tuesday morning, topping Wall Street expectations. On the earnings call, CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank has almost 1,000 AI use cases across the business, with about 50 he described as the most important, in areas including risk, fraud, marketing, note-taking, and document reading.
In what turned out to be a preview of Beer’s comments later in the day, CFO Jeremy Barnum described the bank’s AI priorities: “Use the right model for the right purpose, be smart about open source where appropriate, and ensure that you’re getting value out of it ultimately.”
Mixing friendship and office politics is basically like combining ice with boiling water. Nothing good comes out of it, and both lose purpose. Only difference is, in the first case, definitely getting boiled and/or put on ice.
Getting talked about behind your back by someone you helped introduce to your entire social circle isn't betrayal exactly, it's more like handing someone the keys to your house and coming home to find they've rearranged the furniture and told the neighbors you're a mess. She had a whole group chat dedicated to trashing you, using mutual friends you provided as the audience. That's not friendship, that's running a smear campaign using your own contact list against you.
Getting fired is hard, but it would be lying to assume that some of these stories weren't funny!
Being unemployed is no one's desire during the state of the job market, taking into account how much it costs to live and take care of a family. But that doesn't mean that getting fired is always bad. Of course, no one wants it, but sometimes it can also be the only way to fully get rid of that awful boss that always speaks down to you. Or to stop seeing that coworker that love to spread unconstructive criticism about every single thing you did. Getting fired can mean being free from an unbearable work environment that was consuming you. In this Reddit thread, there are a lot of those kinds of stories that make us realize that sometimes something bad can be good.
I don't see myself as someone very positive, but it is true that there are some bad things from which we can get a positive outcome. Not only when getting fired, but this also applies to getting dumped by your girlfriend or stopping being friends with someone. No matter how bad the situation seems right now, it may have something positive attached to it. There is no need to only focus on the bad side. Because, of course, it is bad, but it is not THAT bad. You may have gotten laid off at a job, but maybe that motivated you to apply to a better one and you git. Maybe your girlfriend dumped you after 5 years, but that makes you realize that you have put your interests in stop to focus on the couple, and this is the time to change it, to give your dreams the importance they deserve. The friendship may be over, but that's the way you realize which of your friends are actually loyal and are going to be by your side and the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Not everything that we lose is an actual loss. Sometimes it is a door that appears, and now we are forced to open it. And on the other side, there is something good waiting for us that we would have never discovered if it wasn't for that bad thing that occurred. Not everything is the end of the world. Sometimes there is something positive we can take away from it.
How long can an employee last in a workplace without getting a raise?
With the state of the world today, a pay raise has become a necessity that is almost a must for every employee. Prices go up, gas, rent, and groceries are more expensive every day, and your salary needs to rise at least in line with the rest of the world in order for you to keep up. But does that actually happen? Do employers give their workers raises every time the price of eggs goes up?
In our dreams, maybe.
Instead, employees find themselves stuck in the same workplaces, working the same jobs, with the same salary for years and years. Every few months, they go to their boss's office and ask for what they earned, and every time, they leave disappointed. Until, at least, they realized they can proabably do better somewhere else. Why stay somewhere that offers you nothing in return?
That is what led the employee below to look for another job. For three years, they have worked in the same company, and for three years, they didn't get a single raise. No matter how many times they asked, and no matter how many times their boss promised that she was working on it, nothing changed. So, the employee decided to turn their efforts into looking for another job, and after a search, they found a better-paying job and decided to resign.
What they didn't expect when they handed in their resignation letter was for their boss to act so surprised. Not only did she claim that the resignation was unexpected, but she actually felt offended that the employee didn't share that they were looking for a new job in the first place. According to her, if she had known, she would have pushed for a raise even harder.
Who thinks about telling their boss that they are looking for a new job? Why would anyone do that? Those are the questions the employee is now left with. To help them find answers, read the full story below.
Meagan Breidert, Slalom’s senior director of sustainability and impact, taking a break outdoors. (Photo courtesy of Breidert)
While working for PwC in Jamaica early in her career, Meagan Breidert focused on international development clients. There, she learned about a Caribbean-wide initiative to make the region’s communities more resilient to climate change — adapting infrastructure and building warning systems to withstand stronger storms and rising sea levels.
Breidert left Jamaica with a new direction: a career in sustainability where she could tackle “big, challenging, complex problems,” she said.
Now senior director of sustainability and impact at Seattle-based Slalom, Breidert works out of the Washington, D.C.-area office for the global business and technology consulting firm. In her role, she leads Slalom’s internal climate programs and shapes how the company engages with community members and supports its employees.
Keep reading to learn more about Breidert’s sustainability journey. Her quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
What’s your biggest concern when it comes to addressing climate change?
I worry that the discussion and the divide are being driven by the language we use. If we speak in plain language, we’ll see we all want the same things. We want clean air, we want clean water, we want our kids to grow up healthy. We don’t want toxins in our backyard. It doesn’t matter where you fall on a political spectrum, we as humans want the same things for our families.
What gives you the most hope for the planet?
I’m going to paraphrase the convener and architect of the Paris Agreement, Christiana Figueres. She says, “I focus on the signals, not the noise,” and I really took that to heart. There’s this incredible economic benefit to supporting climate-positive practices and a more sustainable way of living. Renewable energy is more economical, new jobs are being created with the green economy. Companies are actually saving money, the air is cleaner, quality of life improves.
There’s just an abundance of upside, no matter what the motivation is. We’re seeing more and more renewable energy being used, and I think that’s a signal versus the noise.
Meagan Breidert, far right, speaking at the Trellis Impact 26 conference in June. (Slalom Photo)
What is a habit you’ve changed personally because of climate concerns?
My home has solar panels and I can cover my family’s energy load with them. Regardless of my beliefs, economically it’s beneficial and my bills have decreased. My kitchen and home goods are plastic-free to the extent possible, so all glass. And my family’s clothes are sustainable. My son is younger, so he has more churn on clothes — but my clothes are generally natural fibers and secondhand or vintage where possible. And we eat an abundance of beans and tofu.
If you could wave a wand and invent one climate solution, what would it be?
I would love to have ready-made, at-scale solutions for plastic pollution and single-use plastics. At Slalom, we have a plastics commitment on removing problematic and single-use plastics from our operations, especially in our kitchens and break rooms, but for me personally, plastic is a visual, physical problem. People see it on vacation, when they go to the beach, or in daily life, walking down the street.
I would love solutions — whether it’s better recycling mechanisms or advances with bacteria, enzymes, fungi, that are able to break down plastics, or plastics made from less harmful components like seaweed or sugarcane — I would love to see those things come to the market tomorrow.
If you could have coffee with any climate leader, past or present, who would you pick?
I would love to have coffee with the chief sustainability officer at Mars, Alastair Child. M&M’s, particularly peanut, are my favorite candy. But I think the interesting intersection is chocolate, coffee and vanilla grow together in tropical locations that are being the most affected by climate change and extreme weather. What is the plan to secure those supply chains and work with local and Indigenous communities on some of the traditional knowledge for growing those?
We all need to eat, and the planet is changing, and how our food grows, the price of commodities, the quality of those things are going to change. I would love to have this very deep-dive conversation around how my chocolate is going to continue, and my coffee and vanilla!
How do you approach this work and not get overwhelmed?
I really chip away at problems and usually start on the data side, start with the stakeholders and just chip away. My team is great because we like to celebrate the little things, like, “Hey, that stakeholder answered the phone today, that vendor that we’ve been asking for data got us this information.” Before you know it, you look up and you’re like, “Oh, I just talked to 50% of our supply chain and now they’re providing us data.” Those small pieces add up to a lot. We can’t do it alone. It’s an entire ecosystem issue, so one at a time, chipping away.
What impact do you hope your work has in 20 years?
I don’t want to say working myself out of a job because I need a job, we all need jobs, but I would say I look forward to sustainability no longer having to prove its business case. It’s on the checklist. It’s already in there. Nobody has to say, “We’re making a business decision — oh, did somebody check with the sustainability people?” It should just be, “Here’s a business decision. It’s all in here, it’s all embedded, and there’s no question about the sustainability pieces.” Once that happens, then we’ll start to see some of the real gains.
Nicotine pouches aren't typically associated with the same health harms as similar products that also contain tobacco, but they have now been linked to receding gums and oral irritation
A spate of new studies is revealing the lifelong impact of being marked as exceptional during childhood – and the results suggest we may need to revise how we view giftedness
A pregnant naked mole rat queen (left) and worker (right) sniff each other
Felix Petermann, Max Delbrück Center
There’s one scent to rule them all – and we now know what it is. A series of experiments has shown that a single molecule released by the queen of naked mole rat colonies prevents all the other females in a colony from breeding.
“It’s a super-contraceptive, if you’re a mole rat,” says Gary Lewin at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin.
“The theory was that the queen is larger and more aggressive than the other animals, exerting her dominance through pushing and shoving,” says Lewin. “But we never found that very satisfying as an explanation.”
So team member Mohammed Khallaf, also at the Max Delbrück Center, proposed identifying the mole rat bouquet – the molecules in the air around them that create their scent. Comparing the scents of hundreds of animals revealed that only the queens produce a molecule called isopropyl myristate.
“It’s made in the reproductive organs, basically the vagina of the reproductive female,” says Lewin.
When the team sprayed isopropyl myristate daily into cages containing male and female pairs, none of the females became pregnant. Without it, almost all the females became pregnant.
Next, the team removed a queen from a colony and applied isopropyl myristate daily. There were no fights for succession and no females started breeding during the three months this was done. “We produced peacefulness,” says Lewin. “That’s probably the most dramatic experiment.”
When the team stopped applying isopropyl myristate, the high-ranking females started fighting within a week. After around three weeks one became pregnant: the new queen.
The team also showed that exposure to isopropyl myristate changes the levels of the hormones progesterone and prolactin. But they haven’t found out exactly how the molecule is detected and leads to these changes – that’s the next project, says Lewin.
The evidence for isopropyl myristate influencing reproduction is compelling, says Markus Zöttl at Linnaeus University in Sweden. “I think it’s an impressive and important study. And convincing.”
Chris Faulkes at Queen Mary University of London is also convinced. “But the paper raises many questions, like any interesting research,” says Faulkes. These include how animals detect it, and how behavioural interactions and queen dominance interact with the scent, he says.
There is something special about isopropyl myristate, says Lewin. Isopropyl myristate is volatile, meaning it can evaporate into the air, but it’s not highly volatile, so any traces left by the queen take time to evaporate and the scent persists for at least a day.
It’s known that a queen will patrol every part of her colony, which in the wild might extend underground for 3 kilometres. “We think the reason she does that is to deposit this molecule around the colony,” says Lewin. “To make sure that every member of her colony is exposed to her scent.”
Other experiments by the team suggest the animals can consciously detect the smell. For instance, highly ranked females with a chance of becoming queen try to avoid places where isopropyl myristate is present, whereas lower-ranked animals aren’t bothered.
The team also tested a number of other species of mole rat. They didn’t find isopropyl myristate in any solitary species but they did find it in a few species whose social structure is more like that of naked mole rats. “But I would be cautious about assuming that the same pathway has a comparable function across social mole rats without direct experimental evidence,” says Zöttl.
Isopropyl myristate is also widely used in cosmetics. It is described as odourless but Lewin says some women at his lab thought they could smell something when exposed to it. A 2008 study also reported that it is released from the nipples or areolas of women during pregnancy and after childbirth.
A financial choice made years ago by a family member can be interpreted as a generous favor, an obligation, or a complete surprise for a person who is now being asked to pay for it. That's why conversations about college debt need more than good intentions. They require clear terms, consent, and an honest understanding of who is taking the risk.
An old family decision about money can become a present-day argument. A 37-year-old woman applied for college loans around 20 years ago. She understood she was borrowing money and paid the student loans she knew were hers. But what she didn't know was that her father had also taken out a Parent PLUS loan. He never made payments on that particular debt, and interests kept accumulating until it grew to nearly $40,000. Now, he want her to pay for it.
She can't add a payment of almost $400 a month to her existing responsibilities, so she refused to refinance the loan on her name. Her sister accused her of being selfish and insisted that she find a way to deal with it, but the truth is, she never signed for that loan. It was the dad's financial decision and she was never aware of it. Why should she be responsible for that?
There are disagreements about what's fair and what's not fair within a family's decisions, but this is a conversation that never happened. I understand the topic might be uncomfortable to talk about, but it should have been addressed earlier. Her father signed for the loan, had years to address it, and never explained the arrangement to his daughter when it could have been discussed in a responsible way. Now, everyone feels cornered, the situation is still uncomfortable to talk about, AND there's also a $40K debt.
I've read this kind of story many times from different angles, but something seems to happen around the quiet workers, or the quiet team members in general. I think it gets especially difficult in places like work because there are many employees, and managers often can't keep track of everyone. The ones who get noticed are the ones who make themselves noticeable. That's just how things go, but what I like most about this story is that this manager is actively trying not to make the same mistake again, and commenters have a lot to say about it.
Some managers act like your resignation letter personally cheated on them, when really, you just filled out a form and moved on with your life
Waiting seven months for a raise while getting told "we're working on it" is basically the corporate version of a doctor's office saying "the doctor will see you shortly" for two hours straight. Eventually, you stop believing anyone's coming and you just leave.
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