You are at a networking event, or a conference. You don’t know anyone. You’ve already done the thing where you kill a few minutes replying to texts and emails, maybe even while frowning slightly at your phone to suggest that you’re engaged in Serious Business Work. It’s mingling time and you are not, by nature, a mingler. What to do?
The best way to choose a profile picture, new research shows, is to let someone else do it.
How close is too close to stand next to a stranger in Malaysia? Or to a colleague in the Czech Republic?
At the expense of share price, corporate reputation, and its passengers’ safety, United Airlines has spent the last few weeks offering a master class in how not to manage public relations. CEO Oscar Munoz’s evolving apologies to the disturbing April 9 incident in which a fare-paying passenger was violently dragged from an overbooked plane are the latest example.
As the maxim goes, it’s easier to get a job when you already have one. New research shows just how much harder unemployed people have to work to land open positions than their employed competitors—and offers clues on how they can leverage that disparity to their advantage.
The music site Radiooooo is an addictive pleasure. Scroll over a map of the world hand-drawn by founder Benjamin Moreau and his partner Noemi Ferst, select a decade, and a curated selection of music from that time and place spills from your speakers like speakeasy gin, or a strong Cuba Libre, or a smooth Cabernet. Playing with the site or the Radiooooo app makes a listener feel “like a time-travelling d.j. in pursuit of the universe’s vibe,” writes E.P. Lecursi at the New Yorker, untethered by the algorithms of streaming sites. Radiooooo doesn’t try to give you what it thinks you want—but it does let you hear what someone else once danced to in a world unlike your own.
Hey! Psst? Wanna know what the cool teens are thinking these days? What hip slang they use? What multinational brands they enjoy? Then check out “It’s Lit: A guide to what teens think is cool,” a research publication by the people you think of when you think of cool: the Brand Team for Consumer Apps at Google!
Synagen IQ, according to parts of the internet, is a truly spectacular drug. The Harvard scientist who created the pill believes it can “help everyone on the planet, and take us to the next stage of evolution.” It gave Donald Trump the energy and stamina to win the US presidential election. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking owes his prodigious intellectual abilities to the stuff, which can be purchased for as low as $29.99 a bottle online.
On the chopping block in US president Donald Trump’s proposed budget is the Sea Grant program, a 51-year-old project of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that supports research affecting coastal communities.
Black Insomnia, a coffee with roughly three to five times the caffeine of a normal brew, went on sale this week in the US. A single cup of the stuff Grub Street describes as “a bag of caffeine…under the guise of being coffee” contains 702 milligrams of caffeine, the daily limit recommended by the US Food and Drug Administration is 400 mg.
Cats.com is for sale.
Thousands of people took to the streets on March 26 in anti-corruption protests in 100 cities across Russia. While largely peaceful, the demonstrations resulted in the arrest and detention of hundreds, including opposition figure and protest organizer Alexey Navalny. Police shoved Navalny into a van as his supporters shouted “This is our city,” according to the New York Times (paywall).
Lorne Grabher of Nova Scotia, Canada is proud of his personalized license plate. He registered it as a gift to his father in 1991. Since then, three generations of Grabhers have driven cars bearing plates emblazoned with their last name. It’s seven letters long. It fits perfectly on a license plate.
This post has been updated.
The UK home secretary on Sunday told the BBC it’s “completely unacceptable” that intelligence agencies can’t access WhatsApp messages.
Since British astronaut Tim Peake took up residency on the International Space Station (ISS) in December 2015, NASA and the nonprofit Institute for Research in Schools have made ISS data available to UK students for data analysis experiments.
Editors are the gatekeepers of academic journals. They decide if studies are worthy of peer review and if papers are published or rejected. Editor roles are typically reserved for experts in the field. Yet many scientists find their inboxes filled with invitations to edit dubious journals in subjects well outside their area of study. These “predatory journals,” as they are known, are little more than money-making schemes that publish the work of unwitting or unethical scientists in exchange for payment.
Seth Shostak knows there’s a current of suspicion and hostility toward science in public discourse today. As senior astronomer at the SETI Institute—the California non-profit dedicated to the search for intelligent life in the universe—he is also better acquainted than most with the depths of public ignorance about science and its aims. (Shostak gets a lot of calls and emails from people offering half-baked theories involving aliens and pyramids.)
Plunk that box of condoms on the counter and look the cashier in the eye with pride—today is the 45th anniversary of legal access to birth control for single people in the US!
It is virtually impossible kill a tardigrade. You can freeze it, boil it, crush it, zap it with radiation, and deprive it of food and water—for years!—and it will wiggle back to life.
In high-mobility sectors like government, academia, and the military there is a phenomenon known as the “trailing spouse”: a person who moves to a new place, often without work or connections of their own, to support a spouse’s new job.
If you’re ever listening to British radio and the music suddenly turns calm—very calm, soothingly calm, eerily bland and inoffensive calm—it may be time to worry.
In 1974, Erno Rubik was a 29-year-old design professor who started fiddling around with a set of wooden blocks in the Budapest apartment he shared with his mother. In some accounts, Rubik has said he was working on a model for his students; according to other accounts, he was amusing himself with an experiment in structural design.
The Vikings aren’t very special on paper. Their weapons and armor were similar to other European armies’ of the time. Their helmets were basic iron or leather (those iconic horned outfits were invented in 1870 by an opera costumer). So what made these medieval Norseman such legendary warriors?
