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 The Preston's Richest Men Arif Patel Son's Has Bought Into Preston North End. | Asian Image

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 The Preston's Richest Men Arif Patel Son's Has Bought Into Preston North End. | Asian Image

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Arif Patel Son Buys Stake In PNE UK (Preston North End).

Hussain Patel, the son of multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the Preston city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

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The 18-year-old son of one of Lancashire's richest men has bought into Preston North End.

Hussain Patel, the son of multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

The deal makes the Lancaster Royal Grammar School student, the club's fourth-largest shareholder.

Chairman Derek Shaw, said: "We welcome the Patel family.

"I have know Arif for 30 years as a shareholder, and he has many successful local businesses.

However, he ruled out the possibility of new investment in the club.

He added: "At this stage there will be no new investment in Preston North End.

"The shares have been purchased off Steve Jackson, and the funds from the purchase will go to him."

The Patel family, own a number of properties and businesses across the country and have an estimated fortune of £105m.

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The 18-year-old son of one of Lancashire's richest men has bought into Preston North End. Hussain Patel, the son of multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

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While the term “quiet quitting” may be new, what’s happening is just the latest expression of a fundamental aspect of human nature: In the face of persistent and inescapable stressors, people often respond by simply giving up. When nothing is in your control, why even try? Scientists have traditionally called this response “learned helplessness,” but more recent research suggests passivity is our default hardwired response to prolonged adversity. Organizations can reverse passivity among employees by giving them a direct experience of autonomy — the feeling of having control over their life and choices.

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The world increasingly feels like it's spiraling out of control, with a daily onslaught of grim news and economic anxiety. It's no wonder that 31% of Americans are experiencing depression and anxiety - three times as many as before the pandemic - and nearly 50% of the workforce say they aren't going to go above and beyond for their jobs.

And while some say so-called "quiet quitting" is about drawing healthy boundaries between work and personal time, actions such as withdrawing from your team, limiting communication only to what's strictly required, and staying silent rather than contributing in meetings are " classic indicators of diminished motivation and low engagement."

While the term may be new, what's happening here really is just the latest expression of a fundamental aspect of human nature: In the face of persistent and inescapable stressors, people often respond by simply giving up. When nothing is in your control, why even try?

Scientists call this " learned helplessness." After you've endured an aversive situation in which nothing you do matters, you tend to remain passive and despondent - even in new situations in which you do have control.

One study shows how this bears out. Researchers gave students a sheet of paper with three anagrams to solve. Unbeknownst to the students, there were two different versions of the sheet. On one, the first two anagrams were easy; on the other, they were unsolvable. The third anagram on both sheets was the same easily solvable word.

Students who easily unscrambled the first two words on the first sheet also readily solved the third one. But students who encountered an unwinnable situation - staring at two anagrams with no possible solution - were stuck and frustrated, and they didn't even attempt the third one. As one student put it: "Nothing worked, so why try?"

What Drives Learned Helplessness?

Learned helplessness was originally identified in the 1960s in a famous psychological experiment that wouldn't be permitted in a modern lab. Martin Seligman - the psychologist whose later work launched the subfield known as positive psychology - restrained dogs on an electrified platform where they received electric shocks to their hind legs. Over time, learning they were powerless to free themselves, the dogs gave up trying.

When Seligman changed the conditions, moving the dogs onto an electrified metal plate they could easily have escaped, the dogs didn't even try to get away. Assuming they were still powerless, they curled up on the floor, whimpered, and passively accepted their fate. They never discovered that escape was within their grasp.

Seligman concluded that humans respond the same way dogs do. Assuming nothing we do matters, we stop trying to improve our circumstances.

More recent research, however, caused Seligman to do an about-face on his initial interpretation. Steven Maier, a researcher involved with Seligman's original experiment, later switched fields and became a neuroscientist. And his research suggests that helplessness isn't just a response to enduring misfortunes beyond our control. Rather, passivity is our default hardwired response to prolonged adversity. When subjected to sustained negative experiences, the brain assumes control isn't present - an innate response Maier and Seligman renamed "default passivity."

The implication is profound because it means that learned helplessness really isn't learned. Instead, shutting down and passively accepting the status quo is the normal human response to prolonged aversive events. Like a pandemic that never ends. Or a job you hate but are unable to leave.

Default passivity offers an explanation for the quiet quitting phenomenon. People have been stressed for years, but they don't have the freedom to just up and quit. Feeling powerless to escape a stressful situation, they respond in a way we now know is normal and predictable: by becoming passive. They don't contribute ideas in meetings. They don't take the initiative to switch teams or proactively seek out more meaningful work. They do only what they need to do to not get fired.

Combatting Default Passivity in the Workplace

Fortunately, passivity doesn't have to be a permanent condition. The original studies found that helplessness can be reversed. To test this, Seligman and his colleagues dragged the helpless dogs off the electrified platform and onto the other side where they were safe. After a few rounds of being moved to the other side, the dogs snapped out of their passivity and began responding entirely on their own. This intervention successfully reversed helplessness in 100% of dogs - and their recovery was "complete and lasting."

So how can organizations reverse passivity among employees to reduce quiet quitting? By giving employees a direct experience of autonomy - the feeling of having control over their life and choices. Managers can do this in two ways.

First, you can look for opportunities to give employees more autonomy. When possible, let them choose their own schedules and deadlines, and whether to work from home or the office. Let them make their own decisions about who to collaborate with, how to allocate their time, and how to approach getting their work done. Ask for their input on goals and strategies, and give them a voice in how decisions get made.

In addition to giving employees additional autonomy, encourage them to exercise the autonomy they already have by making their own decisions whenever possible to develop what psychologists call an " internal locus of control." The brain craves choices, and studies show that even just the expectation of getting to make a choice activates the ventral striatum, a brain region associated with anticipation and excitement. Encourage employees to switch things up, take on work that interests them, and focus on learning. Maybe that means choosing their own assignments or taking on more challenging work in order to learn new skills.

Whatever an employee's role, let them know you welcome their ideas on how they can make their work more meaningful in ways that still serve the needs of the team and the organization. That way, when things get stressful and employees feel bleak and hopeless, they'll take action to improve their situation instead of suffering in silence.

Remember that quiet quitting happens when employees feel trapped. The more freedom you can give them, the less they'll feel the need to respond in unproductive ways.

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While the term "quiet quitting" may be new, what's happening is just the latest expression of a fundamental aspect of human nature: In the face of persistent and inescapable stressors, people often respond by simply giving up. When nothing is in your control, why even try?

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I’ve Cried for Nearly 1,000 Days Straight. So I Hatched a Radical (and Very Embarrassing) Plan to Stop.

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I’ve Cried for Nearly 1,000 Days Straight. So I Hatched a Radical (and Very Embarrassing) Plan to Stop.

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The produce aisle, my local bar, and seat 15C on a recent flight had no idea what hit them.

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19 Best Skills to Put On a Resume That Employers Will Love

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19 Best Skills to Put On a Resume That Employers Will Love

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How do you make your resume stand out during job interviews? Check out the 19 best skills to include in your resume in this detailed breakdown.

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The best resumes have comprehensive lists of desirable key skills to make employers look twice and choose one candidate over another.

If you want to ace your next job interview and make your job application stand out from other candidates, you need to put the best details possible on your resume to impress a prospective employer right from the get-go.

But what job skills should you write down? This article will break down 19 of the best skills for a resume that any hiring manager will love.

Soft skills employers love to see

So-called "soft skills" are usually people-focused, generalized or applicable to various industries and situations. Nevertheless, employers like to see plenty of soft skills in their candidates.
Related: How to Make a Resume That Gets You the Job
Leadership skills

Leadership skills have always been in demand, and that's even truer today. Anyone can be a good worker, but only a few employees can successfully run and manage teams, especially when the time comes to knock out complex projects.

If you have successfully led teams in the past, note those experiences on your resume and explain what exactly you did, your responsibilities and other relevant factors.

The more leadership skills you can mark down on your resume in the skills section, the more attractive a candidate you will be, even if you aren't expected to lead anyone soon. This is true even if a job description requests more technical skills.

Leadership skills make you a better choice for potential management positions or promotions in the future. Because many companies hire long-term candidates, not just short-term workers, listing leadership skills can make you stand out relative to your competition in a big way.

Communication skills

Communication skills are also critical. You need to be able to communicate with your fellow team members and workers to get along well at your new company. This might seem like a waste of space to put down, but don't discount it.

You are confident about your ability to be a team player, which says a lot about your personality.

You know that employers are looking for this skill, which means it's something you think about.

Noting that you have communication skills tells your employer two things:

Both can indicate that you are an excellent potential hire for an open position. Good interpersonal skills, like demonstrated emotional intelligence or active listening skills, are even more critical if you apply for an administrative or management job posting.

Sometimes, they're better than computer skills or other specific skills, such as graphic design.

Writing skills

Writing skills are an essential subcategory of communication skills, which are in demand for many new jobs.

Specific jobs in marketing and communications value writing skills highly, and (an added plus) you can explicitly demonstrate your capabilities in your resume writing. Using polished, engaging and succinct language in your resume will support your inclusion of writing in your list of skills.

Problem-solving experience

General problem-solving skills can also be good to put down on any resume. In most jobs, you'll need to solve complex problems at one point or another, either because you run into an unexpected situation or because employer policies and procedures don't cover all possibilities.

Good problem-solving, therefore, is seen as a must-have skill for many organizations and industries. Be sure to put this on your resume no matter the job or industry you apply.

It shows that you can think critically (and critical thinking skills are just as essential) and that you're not afraid to face a challenge. It's also an indicator of adaptability: another relevant skill ideal for any job search.

Try not to put down problem-solving and critical thinking skills simultaneously. There's a lot of overlap between these two types of skill sets, so just put one or the other.

Organizational skills

Organizational skills reflect your ability to handle lots of resources and moving pieces. It's an important skill to put on your resume when applying for a leadership or management position, but it's good to put it down regardless just because it shows you are a hard worker and won't be overwhelmed by many things on your plate.

Time management skills

Time management skills are wise to put on your resume, whether you are applying for an entry-level or management position.

Good time management is a much rarer skill than you may think, particularly in this day and age where there are ample digital distractions in people's pockets at all times.

By them noting that you have good time management skills, your employer will feel more confident about letting you work on your own and unsupervised. This is important since it means they can focus on other aspects of running a business instead of worrying about your productivity.

Teamwork skills

Solid teamwork skills are must-haves for most positions and workers these days. Being able to work with others is crucial if you are to become a part of any new team, so be sure to note that you have strong teamwork skills regardless of your prior work experiences.

If you need to be specific, write down some anecdotes about how you were an excellent team member on your cover letter. You should tie that experience into a moment when you overcame a challenge or solved a problem.

Add people skills to your resume skills section, and you'll be a more successful job seeker overall.

Customer service skills

Good customer service skills are necessary for any industry - especially if you apply to a service industry or entry-level position. Basically, if your job requires you to interact with the general public frequently, you must have good customer service skills.

Mention any specific skills or tools you may have used to this effect.

For instance, if you previously worked at a call center, note that your customer service skills came from learning to speak to dozens or hundreds of people over the phone and provide meaningful assistance, no matter their problems.

Marketing skills

It is also wise to put down any marketing skills on your resume. Good marketing skills are highly desirable for specific marketing positions and general employees.

Marketing skills can involve using particular tools or tactics or just understanding how to phrase things to make products seem more appealing to customers.
Related: 5 Skills Every Marketer Should Have on Their Resume When Applying to Startups
This is closely related to sales experience; put down either sales experience or marketing experience if you are applying to a sales or commission-based job.

Hard skills employers seek

Hard skills are technical, specific and usually related to a specific skill or talent instead of being generalized. Here are some of the most in-demand hard skills to consider putting on your resume.

Project management skills

Project management skills are incredibly in demand and closely tied to leadership skills. Many organizations have complex projects they need to be headed by talented individuals.

If you can accurately claim that you have successfully led other projects through your management style, you'll be well-positioned to take open job positions from other candidates.

Project management skills can be particular and reflect proficiency in specific programs and processes. For instance, scrum project management may make you a perfect choice for an IT company.

Data analysis skills

Data analysis skills are also highly in demand these days and for good reason. Many companies must analyze the data they collect from their customers and clients.

You'll be a desirable candidate for many industries and companies if you can do this, both generally and with specific programs and equations.

Be sure to reference specific data analysis experience and techniques you are familiar with when listing this on your resume. The more specific you can get, the better; most hirers and recruiters will know what exactly to look for if they are trying to fill a data management or data analyst spot.

Enterprise resource planning skills

Enterprise resource planning skills, or ESP skills, are good to put on any resume, especially if you're applying for a closely related position. ERP is crucial for large-scale organizations to not waste valuable equipment, time, people or other resources.

As with many other hard skills, be specific regarding your prior work experience and whether you know certain tactics, tools or techniques.

Computer proficiency

Programming proficiency

Computer repair or hardware maintenance proficiency

Generalized computer proficiency is now expected in a majority of positions. After all, everyone should know how to use computers to a basic degree.

However, you can take this a step further and break down other types of computer proficiencies, such as

This skill can be beneficial both in non-computer-related industries and in the computer industry itself.

However, keep in mind that mere computer proficiency will only be desirable to employers in the IT industry if you can get more specific about what exactly you do and the value you can provide to a company.

Program proficiency

Program proficiency is any proficiency you can list with a specific program. Don't be humble or think too little of yourself; even proficiency with Microsoft Office 365 is valuable, particularly when many people don't know how to use those collected programs to their maximum effectiveness.

If you are applying to a job that requires the use of specific programs, such as AWS, mention that. Be clear about your proficiency and mention times when you have used the tool or program effectively for business goals.

Programming language proficiency

Also nice to put on your resume are programming language proficiencies in languages like C++, CSS, Python and HTML.

The more language proficiencies you can list, the better positioned you'll be to take a job in the IT or programming and web development industries. It may be wise to research what programming languages are most in demand for a specific position before listing them on your resume.

SEO proficiency
Related: 7 Reasons Why SEO Matters for Every Startup
SEO or search engine optimization proficiency is highly valued in many professions, especially social media and marketing managers.

Note that this proficiency doesn't just mean you understand what SEO is or how it works. It also means you know how to use related SEM tools, like SEMrush, to research keywords and understand how to leverage them for maximum content effectiveness.

CRM proficiency

Customer relationship management (CRM) software proficiency means you're proficient in using popular CRM software platforms like Salesforce. This skill is most desirable and essential for marketing and customer relationship positions or fields.

Budgeting experience

If you have experience using budgeting software or running budget teams - mention it, and, as always, be specific about the kinds of tools or software platforms you previously used to get the job done.
Related: Why Skills Shouldn't Be Just a P.S. on a Resume
Bookkeeping skills

Like the above, if you have bookkeeping skills using programs like FreshBooks, QuickBooks and similar platforms, mention that on your resume.

Note any educational accounting experience or licenses you may have acquired, like certificates or degrees. You can list these experiences and certifications in a dedicated section, usually toward the bottom of your resume. This is most important if you apply for a financial or accounting-related position.

Web development skills
Check out Entrepreneur's other articles to present yourself as effectively as possible the next time you sit for an interview
Specific web development skills, such as using web development tools to outline pages, make frames and place widgets, are vital for many jobs in the IT sector.

However, it's desirable in any field because most companies have online sites. They may want to know whether you can help them improve those websites and experiences for their customers.

Summary

Now you have 19 top skills to put on your resume, provided you have the real-life aptitude to back them up. Remember to tweak the description of each skill based on the job or industry you're applying for to make them seem as relevant as possible.

Entrepreneur Editors' Picks

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19 Best Skills to Put On a Resume That Employers Will Love

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The best resumes have comprehensive lists of desirable key skills to make employers look twice and choose one candidate over another. If you want to ace your next job interview and make your job application stand out from other candidates, you need to put the best details possible on your resume to impress a prospective employer right from the get-go.

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Food is amazing, fresh and good quality. The biggest advantage for me is the fact that we don't waste anything now, at the end of the week I don't have to throw away anything Also, the choice of meals is bigger than anywhere else.

Based on customer reviews on

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Meal Kit Delivery Plans & Food Boxes | HelloFresh

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Food is amazing, fresh and good quality. The biggest advantage for me is the fact that we don't waste anything now, at the end of the week I don't have to throw away anything Also, the choice of meals is bigger than anywhere else. Based on customer reviews on

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Though carrying off pig butchering scams takes a lot of communication and relationship building with victims over time, researchers say that crime syndicates in China developed scripts and playbooks that allowed them to offload the work at scale onto inexperienced scammers or even forced laborers who are victims of human trafficking.

"We can already see the damage and the human cost both to scam victims and to forced laborers," says Michael Roberts, founder of Rexxfield Cyber Investigations, who has been working with victims of pig butchering attacks. "That's why we need to start educating people about this threat so we can disrupt the cycle and reduce the demand for these kidnappings and forced labor."

The concept is similar to that of ransomware attacks and digital extortion in which law enforcement encourages victims not to pay hackers' ransom demands so they will be disincentivized to keep trying.

The Chinese government cracked down on cryptocurrency scams beginning in 2021, but criminals have been able to move their pig butchering operations to Southeast Asian countries including Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Governments around the world have increasingly been warning about the threat. In 2021, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 4,300 submissions related to pig butchering scams, totaling more than $429 million in losses. And at the end of November, the US Department of Justice announced that it had seized seven domain names used in pig butchering scams in 2022.

"In this scheme, fraudsters, posing as highly successful traders in cryptocurrency, entice victims to make purported investments in cryptocurrency providing fictitious returns to encourage additional investments," the FBI said in an October alert.

Government officials and researchers emphasize that public education is a key component of helping people avoid becoming the victim of a pig butchering scheme. If people know the telltale signs and understand the concepts underlying the scams, they are less likely to be ensnared. The challenge, they say, is reaching the wider public and getting people who learn about pig butchering to pass on the information to others in their families and social circles.

As with romance scams and other highly personal and exploitative attacks, researchers say that pig butchering scams take an enormous psychological toll on victims in addition to their financial toll. And the use of forced labor to carry out pig butchering schemes adds yet another layer of trauma and creates even more urgency to addressing the threat.

"Some of the stories you hear from victims-it eats you up," says Ronnie Tokazowski, a longtime business email compromise and pig butchering researcher and principal threat advisor at the cybersecurity firm Cofense. "It eats you up really freaking bad."

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Though carrying off pig butchering scams takes a lot of communication and relationship building with victims over time, researchers say that crime syndicates in China developed scripts and playbooks that allowed them to offload the work at scale onto inexperienced scammers or even forced laborers who are victims of human trafficking.

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The 18-year-old son of one of Preston's richest men Arif Patel has bought into Preston North End. 

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The 18-year-old son of one of Preston's richest men Arif Patel has bought into Preston North End. 

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Hussain Patel, the son of multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the Preston city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

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The 18-year-old son of one of Lancashire's richest men has bought into Preston North End.

Hussain Patel, the son of multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

The deal makes the Lancaster Royal Grammar School student, the club's fourth-largest shareholder.

Chairman Derek Shaw, said: "We welcome the Patel family.

"I have know Arif for 30 years as a shareholder, and he has many successful local businesses.

However, he ruled out the possibility of new investment in the club.

He added: "At this stage there will be no new investment in Preston North End.

"The shares have been purchased off Steve Jackson, and the funds from the purchase will go to him."

The Patel family, own a number of properties and businesses across the country and have an estimated fortune of £105m.

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The 18-year-old son of one of Lancashire's richest men has bought into Preston North End. Hussain Patel, the son of multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

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Why the multiverse is the movie fantasy for our times

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Why the multiverse is the movie fantasy for our times

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Published 7th October 2022

The struggle between art and commerce has found a new battleground. This time the landscape is larger and more amorphous than ever before - bursting with creative potential but vulnerable to exploitation too. It's a place where new art is born and old art is resurrected. It's expanding, it's proliferating and it's coming to a screen near you.

Yes, we're talking about the multiverse.

The multiverse has been gathering steam for some time, but in 2022 it asserted its dominance in the film industry, surfacing in indie movies and superhero blockbusters alike. In late July, Marvel Studios announced a five-year "Multiverse Saga" - comprising 16 films and multiple shows - bound together by the idea. Highly-disputed quantum physics theories rarely receive this kind of airtime.

For anyone in need of a refresher, the multiverse is the concept that multiple, perhaps infinite universes exist side by side, overlapping or linked and containing endless permutations of everything, including us. The word "multiverse" is well over 100 years old, with philosophical roots stretching back to the Ancient Greeks, as well as in both Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. Yet we've arrived at a moment ripe for the idea to take hold in film - where both consumer and capital have played a role in its newfound popularity.

Bringing an 'egg-headed' idea to the masses

Christopher Miller and Phil Lord produced, and the latter co-wrote, the Oscar-winning animated movie "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." The 2018 film features Miles Morales, an Afro Latino teenage Spider-Man, who teams up with other alternate "Spider-people" - including Peter B. Parker and Gwen Stacy's Spider-Woman - when the villain Kingpin opens a portal into the multiverse.

Lord was initially anxious that the multiverse might be "too egg-headed an idea" and wrote an explanatory scene into the movie - one that was eventually cut after test screenings. "All of the marketing and studio executives were baffled, but basically everyone under 45 was like, 'Yeah, of course there's multiple variants of worlds and whatever,'" Miller added on a video call.

Lord believes our fractured real lives may factor into why the idea is so easily accepted. "I think we're living multiple lives in parallel dimensions sort of all the time," he said. "We're living an online life - or lives. Then we're living a work life that's on a screen ... Then there's a home life, and then one with your friends. Trying to resolve those things is going to be something we're all thinking about all the time."

He added that the concept is also intuitive. "In terms of storytelling, it's about imagining possible outcomes of our lives. The whole reason we have narrative brains is in order to imagine future outcomes of our actions."

"Sliding Doors" is a prime example of how this concept plays out on screen. In Peter Howitt's 1998 romcom, we watch Gwyneth Paltrow's character Helen live two lives in parallel, depending on whether she catches - or misses - a London Underground train. It's a temperate take on the multiverse (the two Helens never meet, for example) but it pushed the idea toward the mainstream. Recent films have built on that concept in more grandiose fashion, adding more alternate lives, more sci-fi and more byzantine plotting - in a nutshell,more spectacle.

In 2022's "Everything Everywhere All At Once," written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (known collectively as Daniels), Michelle Yeoh's protagonist Evelyn Wang laments her life choices and what might have been had she made different ones. She then experiences just that, cycling through dozens of fantastical parallel lives after she enters the multiverse.

Stylistically, the film's various universes draw on cinematic pastiches, from a tribute to Wong Kar Wai's "In the Mood for Love" to Pixar's "Ratatouille," creating a visual shorthand to help audiences keep track. Costume designer Shirley Kurata created 36 looks for Evelyn, along with a flamboyant wardrobe for the film's supposed villain, an alternate universe's version of Evelyn's daughter Joy, called Jobu Tupaki. But despite their wild variety and abundant flair, the costumes subtly tie the multiverse together, Kurata explained to CNN, with outfits appearing in different colorways and matching patterns across different storylines. The film's multiverse is very big in some ways, and, in others, very small.

In Marvel sequel "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," also released this year, "Sliding Doors" moments have Earth-shattering implications, as multiple versions of our planet, from the utopian-but-autocratic to the outright apocalyptic, are colored by the decisions ofmultiple Stranges' choices. It's "Sliding Doors" by way of Nietzsche's übermensch.

Michael Waldron wrote "Multiverse of Madness." He was also showrunner for the 2021 Disney+ series "Loki," and before that was a writer and producer on "Rick and Morty," the Adult Swim animated series that has dabbled in the multiverse since 2013. Few people in TV and film have engaged with the concept more.

"What about the present moment doesn't make you yearn for an alternate reality?" he said in an email. "Exploring the multiverse allows characters to physically realize and confront those fantasies ... for better or for worse."

The dizzying potential of infinity

The head-trip of infinity poses a significant obstacle to storytelling, however. "To play in the playground of infinity is not as satisfying as following a story that has a beginning, middle and end," said "Into the Spider-Verse" producer Miller. The very concept that piques our storytelling brain can also break it.

"The idea of an infinite number of other universes - that is scary. That's non-narrative. That's crazy stuff," said Scheinert, who co-directed and co-wrote "Everything Everywhere All at Once".

"For every choice you go down, the other choice also exists. It starts to water down everything in a way that is incredibly frustrating," explained Daniels' other half, Kwan. "The audience detaches. There's no connection to it, because it doesn't feel like any of it mattered in the end."

However, Marvel Studios made the case that storylines in the multiverse do have consequences in Disney+ series "Loki," starring Tom Hiddleston. In a painstaking process that involved "a lot of squiggly lines on whiteboards and Advil" in the writers' room, according to Waldron, "Loki" maps out alternate timelines and variations of the titular god of mischief (who also appears in different forms). We're told that keeping parallel universes separate is key to maintaining the existing world order, and that universes coming into contact with one another could spark multiversal war, threatening the characters we've been watching for well over a decade. It's become the blueprint for future storytelling in the MCU.

Daniels took a different path in "Everything Everywhere All at Once," leaning into the disillusioning nature of infinity. "We wanted to explore that," said Kwan. "Can we send our character through so many different iterations of herself that she literally loses all meaning and all purpose, and the hero's journey basically stops?"

Yeoh's Evelyn questions the consequences of every choice, whereas her daughter Joy can't see any way to affect change - and thus sees few consequences for her actions. The multiverse supercharges these feelings. "They're each reacting to an overwhelming world in opposite ways," said Scheinert. "Neither is a good way to live your life, and the whole movie was a dialogue and exploration, where we wanted to land somewhere in between."

In Kwan and Scheinert's hands, the multiverse possesses potent symbolism. "Everything Everywhere All at Once" became a Rorschach test of contemporary anxieties: it's been read as a commentary on social media, ADHD, depression, determinism, code switching, family dynamics, the immigrant Asian American experience, the American Dream and the philosophy of optimistic nihilism. There's enough room for all that and more to be true.

The film has grossed $100 million worldwide, a record for production company A24 and evidence that Daniels' big swings in the multiverse have resonated with audiences.

Other studios have targeted the multiverse precisely because it's a useful way to create lucrative crossovers with valuable intellectual property. Fan favorites meeting up on screen "is as old as Dickens," said Lord, pointing out Universal Pictures did so with films like "Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy" back in 1955. But it's never been this profitable.

In the latest Doctor Strange installment, the titular character meets The Illuminati, a secret society of superheroes working together in one of the multiverse's universes. Featuring an alternate Sorcerer Supreme and Captain Marvel, and Captain Carter instead of Captain America, among others, The Illuminati also includes Mr. Fantastic and Professor Charles Xavier - characters from the Fantastic Four and X-Men franchises, which Marvel Studios acquired when Disney purchased Fox in 2019. Extraordinary hype was built around who might feature in The Illuminati ahead of the film's release, no doubt contributing to its $955 million worldwide gross.

Continuing this pattern, the recently announced "Deadpool 3" will bring together fan-favorite superheroes Deadpool and Wolverine, played by Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, respectively. For now, however, the high watermark remains 2021's "Spider-Man: No Way Home." In what was largely an open secret, Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire reprised their past turns as the superhero alongside the MCU's current Spider-Man, Tom Holland. The film made $1.9 billion worldwide - and is currently the sixth highest grossing film of all time, proving also just how profitable re-introducing old incarnations of characters could be.

While Miller praised "No Way Home," he has reservations about how the multiverse has been used by some.

"A lot of places are going, 'Well, now we can raid our catalog and show everyone all of the various versions of the things, and they all are valid and everything is real, and look at how fun and what nostalgia catnip this is for everyone,'" Miller said.

"I think in a very cynical way, that may be part of why it has sort of exploded... But I think that it's kind of the wrong reason to do a multiverse story."

Kwan and Scheinert were similarly candid while acknowledging audience appetite. "We both loved 'Super Smash Bros.' when it came out. Suddenly all your favorite characters were in the same place," said Scheinert, namechecking the 1990s Nintendo crossover game. "But the inspiring part is when (the multiverse) goes somewhere philosophically interesting or emotionally interesting. That's rare - and always has been."

By the end of "Everything Everywhere All at Once," Evelyn and Joy's newfound acceptance of each other's perspectives provides resolution; a far cry from the zero-sum game often laid out in multiverse narratives. The film is already being talked about as both a possible Best Actress and Best Picture contender at the Oscars, and Kwan and Scheinert have received plenty of praise for their approach - including from fellow multiverse filmmakers.

"They confronted the staggering smallness of our being - the ultimate stake-lessness of life itself. But their resolution argued that the pull of that existential abyss could be defeated by love. That's a very powerful, beautiful idea," said Waldron.

The future of the multiverse

So what should be expected of the multiverse going forward? The forecast is an ever-more crowded marketplace - and one still largely dominated by superheroes.

Lord and Miller have teamed up again for two "Spider-Verse" sequels, coming in 2023 and 2024. The filmmakers are understandably tight-lipped about the plot. ("All things are possible in the multiverse," mused Miller when probed.)

Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN's parent company) willexpand the DC Extended Universe into its own multiverse with "The Flash" in 2023. Director Andy Muschietti told Vanity Fair next year's film "implies a unified universe where all the cinematic iterations that we've seen before are valid." At least two Batmans reportedly feature, played by Ben Affleck (who last appeared as the character in 2021's "Justice League: The Snyder Cut") and Michael Keaton (who last donned the Batsuit in "Batman Returns" in 1992).

DC and Sony will be hoping their movies won't be overshadowed by Marvel Studios' aforementioned plan. "The Multiverse Saga" will culminate in "Avengers: Secret Wars" in 2025 - which, if it draws on the plot from Marvel Comics' 2015 series "Secret Wars," could involve the multiverse collapsing.

Superheroes don't hold a monopoly on the multiverse, though. Upcoming Blake Crouch novel adaptation "Dark Matter" on AppleTV+ will see Joel Edgerton play a professor abducted into an alternate life and fighting through the multiverse to return, and Matt Haig novel "The Midnight Library," in which a woman experiences the millions of lives she might have led, has been optioned for a potential film adaptation.

"It's certainly a multiverse moment," said Miller, but in the long term he sees it as becoming another "tool in the toolbox" for storytellers.

Waldron, who has reportedly been hired to write the forthcoming "Avengers: Secret Wars," added: "I hope we'll treat the multiverse in storytelling the same way we use space - as an opportunity to explore fascinating worlds that reflect our own lives back at us."

It will require constant reinvention from filmmakers to keep audiences engaged. Because ultimately, the multiverse doesn't make a movie compelling. People do.

"You have to keep the characters and their relationships front and center the whole time," said Lord. "Essentially, write the story like the multiverse is boring."
Top image: Leah Abucayan/Adobe Stock/A24. Looping videos courtesy Sony Pictures Animation, A24 and Marvel Studios.

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from spider-man to doctor strange: why the multiverse is the movie fantasy for our times - cnn

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Why the multiverse is the movie fantasy for our times

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Published 7th October 2022 The struggle between art and commerce has found a new battleground. This time the landscape is larger and more amorphous than ever before - bursting with creative potential but vulnerable to exploitation too. It's a place where new art is born and old art is resurrected.

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Dear Electric Vehicle Owners: You Don't Need That Giant Battery

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Dear Electric Vehicle Owners: You Don't Need That Giant Battery

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EV batteries take up lots of space and resources. But most drivers won’t actually use all that power.

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"People just don't want to get stuck," Melin says. Understandable. And in that case, those people have plenty of options for long-range electric cars, if they're willing to pay for it. But within the climate movement, fears of those kinds of reactions have grown intense. Some prefer to instead offer a message of low-carbon abundance-that clean energy technology can do everything we do now, and more. By that theory, the electrification of the Ford F-150, the best-selling automobile in America, stands above criticism. (One analyst, who did not want to be named, said he thinks the truck is "evil," whether it's electric or not.)

Yet even a truck could be much more efficient in terms of materials if it did not promise trips that went as far. Long trips are "drastically overrepresented in people's minds," says Tobias Brosch, a psychologist at the University of Geneva who has studied why people don't buy EVs. The trick is how to convince them otherwise. Information about where and how to charge remains confusingly abstract to people who have only previously used a gas station. They just don't quite believe it can be convenient. One solution is careful counseling tied to drivers' individual behaviors-effectively simulating how an EV would work in their current lives.

The good news is that this year buyers started wising up. Tal, who conducts annual surveys of EV buyers, has noticed that as more people buy a second EV, or take a trip in their cousin's car, they become savvier. They realize that, actually, those occasional trips aren't deal breakers, that they can stop for a few minutes, use the bathroom, get some fro-yo, and it all feels quite normal. They have more confidence that few trips require extensive planning and that things will get easier in the future as charging infrastructure expands. They enter a new reality, one in which the rhythms of charge and discharge are regular, habitual.

At the same time, companies, pushed by government policies and supply chain pressures, are easing on the quest for "more." Volkswagen and Tesla are bringing lithium-iron-phosphate, or LFP batteries, long popular in China, where cars tend to be smaller and charging stations are more plentiful, to the US. CATL, the world's largest producer of batteries, has said it will soon bring sodium-based cells to cars alongside those made of lithium. Both involve reducing demand for some of the most scarce and destructive minerals-in the case of LFP, that's cobalt, and for sodium batteries, it's lithium-and translate into lower costs for consumers. But as a trade-off, they also typically promise shorter range.

Those developments are important, says Riofrancos. It's a good thing if savvier EV buyers, watching their wallets, make the choice to go for the smaller battery option. That will reduce demand for materials. And it's also a strong signal "that consumer preferences are not set in stone," she says-that tropes like "range anxiety" are surmountable, or maybe not such a problem after all. It gets us away from that "choiceless" paradigm.

There's a long way to go, though. There's much more that Americans could do to get more out of each EV battery, like sharing cars or adopting new technologies that let drivers swap different-sized batteries based on their needs. Both are popular approaches in China, Melin notes. And choosing a smaller battery is less of a big deal than swapping a truck for a car, or giving up car ownership entirely in favor of a bus or ebike-options that would get us to a decarbonized future much faster. Despite localized experiments like fare-free mass transit or tax incentives to go car-free, this year of climate investments has still ultimately tipped in the favor of private vehicles, even as urban sprawl expands and major public systems are trapped in a pandemic-induced death spiral. Is it possible to have more electric cars on the road and fewer cars at the same time? "This will be much harder to change," Tal says. "We are losing the fight."

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Dear Electric Vehicle Owners: You Don't Need That Giant Battery

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"People just don't want to get stuck," Melin says. Understandable. And in that case, those people have plenty of options for long-range electric cars, if they're willing to pay for it. But within the climate movement, fears of those kinds of reactions have grown intense.

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Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback

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Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback

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Across four experiments — including a field experiment conducted in an executive education classroom — researchers found that people received more effective input when they asked for advice rather than feedback.

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Why Asking for Advice Is More Effective Than Asking for Feedback

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Across four experiments — including a field experiment conducted in an executive education classroom — researchers found that people received more effective input when they asked for advice rather than feedback.

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Why do the rich get richer - even during global crises?

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Why do the rich get richer - even during global crises?

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Every 30 hours, the pandemic spawned a new billionaire, while pushing a million people into poverty. Here’s why.

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[Nataliia Shulga/Al Jazeera]

Death and devastation are not the only calling cards COVID-19 will be remembered by. The pandemic has also drastically widened inequalities across the globe over the past three years.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, 131 billionaires more than doubled their net worth during the pandemic. The world's richest person, Louis Vuitton chief Bernard Arnault, was worth $159bn on December 27, 2022, up by around $60bn compared with early 2020. Elon Musk, the planet's second-wealthiest man, boasted a $139bn fortune - it was less than $50bn before the pandemic. And India's Gautam Adani, third on the index, has seen his wealth increase more than tenfold in this period, from approximately $10bn at the start of 2020 to $110bn at the end of 2022.

Keep reading

At the same time, close to 97 million people - more than the population of any European nation - were pushed into extreme poverty in just 2020, earning less than $1.90 a day (the World Bank-defined poverty line). The global poverty rate is estimated to have gone up from 7.8 percent to 9.1 percent by late 2021. Now, skyrocketing inflation is affecting real wage growth, eating into the disposable incomes of people around the world.

To curb rising prices, central banks are reducing the flow of money into the economy by increasing interest rates and withdrawing excess liquidity. But that has again boomeranged on workers, with companies - from tech firms like Amazon, Twitter and Meta to banks like Goldman Sachs - announcing layoffs at the end of an already tumultuous 2022.

Al Jazeera spoke to economists to understand why the rich keep getting richer even amid crises and whether that is inevitable each time there is an economic slowdown.

The short answer: Many countries adopt policies such as tax breaks and financial incentives for businesses to boost economies amid crises like the pandemic. Central banks flood the economy with money to make it easier to lend and spend. This helps the wealthy grow their money through financial market investments. But widening inequality is not unavoidable.

Stock market boom

When the pandemic began, central banks across the world swung into action to protect financial markets that took a severe beating as governments started imposing lockdown restrictions.

To save the economy from collapsing, central banks slashed interest rates, thereby lowering borrowing costs and increasing the supply of money. They also pumped trillions of dollars into financial markets with the aim of encouraging companies to invest in the economy. Major central banks have infused more than $11 trillion into the global economy since 2020.

These interventions triggered a boom in the value of stocks, bonds and other financial instruments - but the rise in asset prices wasn't accompanied by an increase in economic production.

"Instead of leading to more economic output, a bulk of the sudden infusion of money into the financial system led to a dramatic rise in asset prices, including stocks, which benefitted the rich," Francisco Ferreira, director of the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE), told Al Jazeera.

A year into the pandemic, capital markets had risen $14 trillion, with 25 companies - mostly in the technology, electric vehicles and semiconductors segment - accounting for 40 percent of the total gains, according to an analysis of stock performance of 5,000 companies by consulting firm McKinsey.

"The result is that this pandemic period has seen the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since the records began," Oxfam America's Director of Economic Justice Nabil Ahmed told Al Jazeera. "And we are still coming to terms about how extraordinary that rise has been."

Billionaires saw their fortunes increase as much in 24 months as they did in 23 years, according to Oxfam 's "Profiting from Pain" report released in May this year. Every 30 hours, while COVID-19 and rising food prices are pushing nearly one million more people into extreme poverty, the global economy is also spawning a new billionaire.

Pre-pandemic factors

To be sure, both income and wealth inequalities have been on the rise since the 1980s when governments across the world began deregulating and liberalising the economy to allow more private sector participation. Income inequality refers to the gulf in the disposable income of the rich and the poor whereas wealth inequality deals with the distribution of financial and real assets, such as stocks or housing, between the two groups.

Among other things, the post-liberalisation period also resulted in declining bargaining power of workers. At the same time, companies increasingly started turning to financial markets to borrow money for their investments, Yannis Dafermos, a senior lecturer in economics at SOAS University of London, told Al Jazeera.

"It is the financialisation of the economy in particular that generated a lot of income for the rich, who invest in financial assets," Dafermos said. "And whenever an economic crisis strikes, the central banks' response is to save the financial market from collapsing because it is so much interlinked with the real economy. This helps stock and bond markets to thrive creating more wealth and inequality."

This is what major central banks did during the global financial crisis in 2008-09 - injecting liquidity into the market through various tools and lowering interest rates to encourage companies to borrow and invest.

"The easy money policy that began after the global financial crisis led to really low to negative interest rates and big liquidity in the financial system," Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told Al Jazeera. "So, in the past 15 years, corporations chose to reinvest the money into buying more financial assets chasing high returns, rather than increasing their production."

The pandemic accelerated those structures of inequality - be it liberalisation of the labour market, surge in monopoly power or erosion of public taxation - Oxfam's Ahmed said. One example is that 143 of 161 countries analysed by Oxfam froze tax rates for the rich during the pandemic, and 11 countries reduced them.

Inflation hits lower-income nations worst

As countries started easing COVID-19 restrictions, a sharp rise in consumer demand coupled with supply shocks contributed to global inflation touching record levels.

That has forced central banks to wind up their policies of allowing access to easy money. They have also announced sharp interest rate rises. Their aim now is to reduce demand so that prices soften and, in advanced economies like the United States, to also cool down the jobs market.

To preserve their earnings in the wake of this policy shift, major companies have now started announcing job cuts, even as inflation bites the poor with low savings.

"Even when inflation has increased, the profit margins of firms have not declined," Dafermos said. Large companies are retaining profits to give dividends to their shareholders rather than increasing wage incomes, even as smaller companies suffer due to a lack of investments by bigger firms, he said.

Interest rate increases have increased borrowing costs, also affecting the ability of low-income and developing countries to spend more on welfare schemes as they have high levels of public and private debt.

"Because of the way the global financial system works, there will be a lot of pressure on developing countries to implement austerity measures," Dafermos said. "That can create more inequalities and for me, this is perhaps more significant because it limits their capacity to provide social protection to the poor."

According to Oxfam, lower-income countries spent approximately 27 percent of their budgets in repaying their debts - twice the money spent on education and four times that on health.

Inequality is a political choice

After World War II, countries started following progressive taxation policies and took steps to address monopoly power, Ahmed said. And while many nations reversed that approach during the pandemic, a few bucked the trend. Costa Rica increased its highest tax rate by 10 percent and New Zealand by 6 percent in order to redistribute wealth.

"There are examples of countries doing the right thing. And it reminds us that inequality is not inevitable. It's a policy and a political choice," Ahmed said.

If left unaddressed, on the other hand, wealth inequality gives power to the rich to influence policies in their favour, which can further deepen the income divide, independent of the boom-and-bust nature of economic cycles. "Higher wealth tends to be associated with capture of government and state institutions by the elite," Ferreira at the London School of Economics said.

This, he said, can take different forms in different democratic contexts. But the result is the same. "The bargaining power of the rich increases due to various tools they use such as lobbying," he said. "Policies end up benefitting the wealthy and that again creates a cycle. But, this time, it's a political cycle."

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Why do the rich get richer - even during global crises?

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Every 30 hours, the pandemic spawned a new billionaire, while pushing a million people into poverty. Here's why.

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Arif Patel Preston Dubai UK - Estate Agent | mirror.co.uk 

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Arif Patel Preston Dubai UK - Estate Agent | mirror.co.uk 

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Details for Arif Patel (Dubai/Preston/UK) Estate Agent in fishergate shopping centre, Preston, PR1 8HJ, fishergate shopping centre, Preston, UK, PR1 8HJ - Mirror

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Details for Arif Patel (Dubai/Preston/UK) Estate Agent in fishergate shopping centre, Preston, PR1 8HJ, fishergate shopping centre, Preston, UK, PR1 8HJ - Mirror

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Details for Arif Patel (Dubai/Preston/UK) Estate Agent in fishergate shopping centre, Preston, PR1 8HJ, fishergate shopping centre, Preston, UK, PR1 8HJ

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Son of Preston multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the Preston city's football club | asianimage.co.uk 

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Son of Preston multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the Preston city's football club | asianimage.co.uk 

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Hussain Patel, the son of Preston multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the Preston city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

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The 18-year-old son of one of Lancashire's richest men has bought into Preston North End.

Hussain Patel, the son of multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

The deal makes the Lancaster Royal Grammar School student, the club's fourth-largest shareholder.

Chairman Derek Shaw, said: "We welcome the Patel family.

"I have know Arif for 30 years as a shareholder, and he has many successful local businesses.

However, he ruled out the possibility of new investment in the club.

He added: "At this stage there will be no new investment in Preston North End.

"The shares have been purchased off Steve Jackson, and the funds from the purchase will go to him."

The Patel family, own a number of properties and businesses across the country and have an estimated fortune of £105m.

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The 18-year-old son of one of Lancashire's richest men has bought into Preston North End. Hussain Patel, the son of multi-millionaire Arif Patel, bought the 6.53% stake in the city's football club, from former chief executive Steve Jackson in a deal worth more than £300,000.

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The history of chocolate: when money really did grow on trees

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The history of chocolate: when money really did grow on trees

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Advent calendars with hidden chocolatey treats, huge tins of Quality Street and steaming cups of hot chocolate festooned with whipped cream and marshmallows are all much-loved wintry staples at Christmastime. But how many of us stop to think about where chocolate actually comes from and how it made its way into our culinary culture?

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Advent calendars with hidden chocolatey treats, huge tins of Quality Street and steaming cups of hot chocolate festooned with whipped cream and marshmallows are all much-loved wintry staples at Christmastime. But how many of us stop to think about where chocolate actually comes from and how it made its way into our culinary culture?

The story of chocolate has a compelling, rich history that academics like me are learning more about every day.

Chocolate is made by fermenting, drying, roasting and grinding the seeds of a small, tropical tree of the genus Theobroma. Most chocolate sold today is made from the species Theobroma cacao, but Indigenous peoples in South America, Central America and Mexico make food, drink and medicine with many other Theobroma species.

Philippe Sylvestre Dufour / John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Author provided

Cacao was domesticated at least 4,000 years ago, first in the Amazon basin and then in Central America. The oldest archaeological evidence of cacao, possibly as old as 3,500 BCE, comes from Ecuador. In Mexico and Central America, vessels with cacao residues date to as early as 1,900 BCE.

Cacao is the name in many languages of Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) for both the tree, the seed and the preparations that come from it; people who use this word give a nod to that ancient, Indigenous past. Cacao is a convenient catch-all term, the way "bread" in English describes a baked food made of flour, water and yeast.

For thousands of years, Mesoamericans have used cacao for many purposes: as a ritual offering, a medicine, and a key ingredient in both special occasion and everyday food and drink - each of which had different names. One of these special, local cacao concoctions was called "chocolat".

Colonialists and currency

How did chocolate take off like wildfire when its birthplace has been long neglected? The most popular initial use of cacao in the 16th century, by colonists from Europe and Africa in Latin America, was as currency rather than something to eat or drink.

My research on cacao as money shows its steady development in the crucial role of small coin, as one of several commodity monies in pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. The Rio Ceniza valley in what is now western El Salvador was an extraordinary producer, among only four high-volume farming centres that greatly expanded the cacao money supply in the 13th century.

Spanish colonists quickly made the convenient and reliable cacao money legal tender for all kinds of transactions. However, they were initially dubious about ingesting the substance, debating its health effects and flavour. The Rio Ceniza valley, known then by the Indigenous name Izalcos, became famous as the place where money grew on trees and newly arrived colonists could make a fortune. Their local, unique cacao drink was "chocolat".

Crossing the world

Despite a hesitant start, chocolate had become hugely popular in Europe by the late 16th century. Among a host of new flavours from the Americas, chocolate was especially captivating. Most importantly, drinking chocolate became a way to socialise.

It also became increasingly associated with luxury and indulgence, to the point of sinfulness, as well as healthful properties that particularly enhanced beauty and fertility. By the 1600s, Europeans were using the word chocolate to describe cacao-flavoured sweets, drinks and sauces.

Chocolate soon began to change the way people did things. As Spanish literature scholar Carolyn Nadeau points out: "Prior to chocolate, breakfast was not a communal event as lunch and dinner were." As chocolate became increasingly popular in Spain, so too did breakfast. It was also fashionable as a mid-afternoon or late-night snack, taken with bread rolls or even fried bread - the ancestor of today's breakfast-time churros.

By the 18th century, a variety of recipes using chocolate filled the pages of European cookbooks, demonstrating how important it had become at all levels of society. Far from its Indigenous Central American origins, enslaved Africans, labouring on new plantations in Latin America and later in west Africa, grew much of the cacao that fed the expanding global market. For makers and consumers, chocolate developed vivid connections to class, gender and race. Chocolate became an evocative shorthand for blackness.

Steep inequalities have become entrenched ever more deeply with the globalisation of chocolate. For example, 75% of chocolate consumption takes place in Europe, the US and Canada, yet 100% of the world's cocoa is produced by Black, Indigenous, Latin American and Asian people - areas that consume only 25% of the world's finished chocolate, with Africans consuming the least at 4%.

It is largely produced by hand and is a source of livelihood for up to 50m people in mostly developing countries. The COVID-19 pandemic made things even worse. Reduction in movement, limitations on gatherings, supply chain interruptions and poor access to healthcare hit producing communities hard.

Meanwhile large cocoa buyers and traders reduced or paused their cocoa purchasing for as long as two years to weather the storm of uncertain consumer demand throughout the pandemic.

Inequality, fair trade and farmers

Current trends have deep roots in chocolate's past. Chocolate consumption continues to grow. Europeans are today's largest consumers of chocolate and the UK is among the highest in Europe, with a per capita consumption of 8.1kg per year and the largest market for fair trade chocolate.

As the chocolate market grows, so too do problems of social inequality and ecological disruption. Carla Martin, founder and director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute, and I have explained that a path towards economic, social and environmental sustainability will require a range of significant investments.

The University of Reading has already made vital efforts with the Cocoa Germplasm Database to help farmers identify and access cacao's genetic diversity, and to understand how genetic profiles relate to greater crop resilience and productivity.

Innovative social enterprises such as Cocoa360 are incubators for addressing the big challenges that cacao farmers face, and charting a more hopeful future for chocolate and those who produce it. Food for thought as you unwrap another Ferrero Rocher this Christmas.

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The history of chocolate: when money really did grow on trees

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Advent calendars with hidden chocolatey treats, huge tins of Quality Street and steaming cups of hot chocolate festooned with whipped cream and marshmallows are all much-loved wintry staples at Christmastime. But how many of us stop to think about where chocolate actually comes from and how it made its way into our culinary culture?

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The brief history of artificial intelligence: The world has changed fast - what might be next?

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The brief history of artificial intelligence: The world has changed fast - what might be next?

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Despite their brief history, computers and AI have fundamentally changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. Little is as important for the future of the world, and our own lives, as how this history continues.

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Despite their brief history, computers and AI have fundamentally changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. Little is as important for the future of the world, and our own lives, as how this history continues.

To see what the future might look like it is often helpful to study our history. This is what I will do in this article. I retrace the brief history of computers and artificial intelligence to see what we can expect for the future.

How rapidly the world has changed becomes clear by how even quite recent computer technology feels ancient to us today. Mobile phones in the '90s were big bricks with tiny green displays. Two decades before that the main storage for computers was punch cards.

In a short period computers evolved so quickly and became such an integral part of our daily lives that it is easy to forget how recent this technology is. The first digital computers were only invented about eight decades ago, as the timeline shows.

Since the early days of this history, some computer scientists have strived to make machines as intelligent as humans. The next timeline shows some of the notable artificial intelligence (AI) systems and describes what they were capable of.

The first system I mention is the Theseus. It was built by Claude Shannon in 1950 and was a remote-controlled mouse that was able to find its way out of a labyrinth and could remember its course.¹ In seven decades the abilities of artificial intelligence have come a long way.

The language and image recognition capabilities of AI systems have developed very rapidly.

The chart shows how we got here by zooming into the last two decades of AI development. The plotted data stems from a number of tests in which human and AI performance were evaluated in five different domains, from handwriting recognition to language understanding.

Within each of the five domains the initial performance of the AI system is set to -100, and human performance in these tests is used as a baseline that is set to zero. This means that when the model's performance crosses the zero line is when the AI system scored more points in the relevant test than the humans who did the same test.²

Just 10 years ago, no machine could reliably provide language or image recognition at a human level. But, as the chart shows, AI systems have become steadily more capable and are now beating humans in tests in all these domains.

Outside of these standardized tests the performance of these AIs is mixed. In some real-world cases these systems are still performing much worse than humans. On the other hand, some implementations of such AI systems are already so cheap that they are available on the phone in your pocket: image recognition categorizes your photos and speech recognition transcribes what you dictate.

The previous chart showed the rapid advances in the perceptive abilities of artificial intelligence. AI systems have also become much more capable of generating images.

This series of nine images shows the development over the last nine years. None of the people in these images exist; all of them were generated by an AI system.

The series begins with an image from 2014 in the top left, a primitive image of a pixelated face in black and white. As the first image in the second row shows, just three years later AI systems were already able to generate images that were hard to differentiate from a photograph.

In recent years, the capability of AI systems has become much more impressive still. While the early systems focused on generating images of faces, these newer models broadened their capabilities to text-to-image generation based on almost any prompt. The image in the bottom right shows that even the most challenging prompts - such as "A Pomeranian is sitting on the King's throne wearing a crown. Two tiger soldiers are standing next to the throne" - are turned into photorealistic images within seconds.⁴

Just as striking as the advances of image-generating AIs is the rapid development of systems that parse and respond to human language.

Shown in the image are examples from an AI system developed by Google called PaLM. In these six examples, the system was asked to explain six different jokes. I find the explanation in the bottom right particularly remarkable: the AI explains an anti-joke that is specifically meant to confuse the listener.

AIs that produce language have entered our world in many ways over the last few years. Emails get auto-completed, massive amounts of online texts get translated, videos get automatically transcribed, school children use language models to do their homework, reports get auto-generated, and media outlets publish AI-generated journalism.

AI systems are not yet able to produce long, coherent texts. In the future, we will see whether the recent developments will slow down - or even end - or whether we will one day read a bestselling novel written by an AI.

Where we are now: AI is here

These rapid advances in AI capabilities have made it possible to use machines in a wide range of new domains:

When you book a flight, it is often an artificial intelligence, and no longer a human, that decides what you pay. When you get to the airport, it is an AI system that monitors what you do at the airport. And once you are on the plane, an AI system assists the pilot in flying you to your destination.

AI systems also increasingly determine whether you get a loan, are eligible for welfare, or get hired for a particular job. Increasingly they help determine who gets released from jail.

Several governments are purchasing autonomous weapons systems for warfare, and some are using AI systems for surveillance and oppression.

AI systems help to program the software you use and translate the texts you read. Virtual assistants, operated by speech recognition, have entered many households over the last decade. Now self-driving cars are becoming a reality.

In the last few years, AI systems helped to make progress on some of the hardest problems in science.

Large AIs called recommender systems determine what you see on social media, which products are shown to you in online shops, and what gets recommended to you on YouTube. Increasingly they are not just recommending the media we consume, but based on their capacity to generate images and texts, they are also creating the media we consume.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology of the future; AI is here, and much of what is reality now would have looked like sci-fi just recently. It is a technology that already impacts all of us, and the list above includes just a few of its many applications.

The wide range of listed applications makes clear that this is a very general technology that can be used by people for some extremely good goals - and some extraordinarily bad ones, too. For such 'dual use technologies', it is important that all of us develop an understanding of what is happening and how we want the technology to be used.

Just two decades ago the world was very different. What might AI technology be capable of in the future?

What is next?

The AI systems that we just considered are the result of decades of steady advances in AI technology.

The big chart below brings this history over the last eight decades into perspective. It is based on the dataset produced by Jaime Sevilla and colleagues.⁷

Each small circle in this chart represents one AI system. The circle's position on the horizontal axis indicates when the AI system was built, and its position on the vertical axis shows the amount of computation that was used to train the particular AI system.

Training computation is measured in floating point operations, or FLOP for short. One FLOP is equivalent to one addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division of two decimal numbers.

All AI systems that rely on machine learning need to be trained, and in these systems training computation is one of the three fundamental factors that are driving the capabilities of the system. The other two factors are the algorithms and the input data used for the training. The visualization shows that as training computation has increased, AI systems have become more and more powerful.

The timeline goes back to the 1940s, the very beginning of electronic computers. The first shown AI system is 'Theseus', Claude Shannon's robotic mouse from 1950 that I mentioned at the beginning. Towards the other end of the timeline you find AI systems like DALL-E and PaLM, whose abilities to produce photorealistic images and interpret and generate language we have just seen. They are among the AI systems that used the largest amount of training computation to date.

The training computation is plotted on a logarithmic scale, so that from each grid-line to the next it shows a 100-fold increase. This long-run perspective shows a continuous increase. For the first six decades, training computation increased in line with Moore's Law, doubling roughly every 20 months. Since about 2010 this exponential growth has sped up further, to a doubling time of just about 6 months. That is an astonishingly fast rate of growth.⁸

The fast doubling times have accrued to large increases. PaLM's training computation was 2.5 billion petaFLOP, more than 5 million times larger than that of AlexNet, the AI with the largest training computation just 10 years earlier.⁹

Scale-up was already exponential and has sped up substantially over the past decade. What can we learn from this historical development for the future of AI?

AI researchers study these long-term trends to see what is possible in the future.¹¹

Perhaps the most widely discussed study of this kind was published by AI researcher Ajeya Cotra. She studied the increase in training computation to ask at what point in time the computation to train an AI system could match that of the human brain. The idea is that at this point the AI system would match the capabilities of a human brain. In her latest update, Cotra estimated a 50% probability that such "transformative AI" will be developed by the year 2040, less than two decades from now.¹²

In a related article, I discuss what transformative AI would mean for the world. In short, the idea is that such an AI system would be powerful enough to bring the world into a 'qualitatively different future'. It could lead to a change at the scale of the two earlier major transformations in human history, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It would certainly represent the most important global change in our lifetimes.

Cotra's work is particularly relevant in this context as she based her forecast on the kind of historical long-run trend of training computation that we just studied. But it is worth noting that other forecasters who rely on different considerations arrive at broadly similar conclusions. As I show in my article on AI timelines, many AI experts believe that there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, and some believe that it will exist much sooner.

Computers and artificial intelligence have changed our world immensely, but we are still at the early stages of this history. Because this technology feels so familiar, it is easy to forget that all of these technologies that we interact with are very recent innovations, and that most profound changes are yet to come.

Artificial intelligence has already changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. And this is despite the fact that this technology has had only a brief history.

There are no signs that these trends are hitting any limits anytime soon. To the contrary, particularly over the course of the last decade, the fundamental trends have accelerated: investments in AI technology have rapidly increased, and the doubling time of training computation has shortened to just six months.

All major technological innovations lead to a range of positive and negative consequences. This is already true of artificial intelligence. As this technology becomes more and more powerful, we should expect its impact to become greater still.

Because of the importance of AI, we should all be able to form an opinion on where this technology is heading and to understand how this development is changing our world. For this purpose, we are building a repository of AI-related metrics, which you can find on OurWorldinData.org/artificial-intelligence.

We are still in the early stages of this history and much of what will become possible is yet to come. A technological development as powerful as this should be at the center of our attention. Little might be as important for how the future of our world - and the future of our lives - will play out.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my colleagues Natasha Ahuja, Daniel Bachler, Julia Broden, Charlie Giattino, Bastian Herre, Edouard Mathieu, and Ike Saunders for their helpful comments to drafts of this essay and their contributions in preparing the visualizations.

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The brief history of artificial intelligence: The world has changed fast - what might be next?

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Despite their brief history, computers and AI have fundamentally changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. Little is as important for the future of the world, and our own lives, as how this history continues. To see what the future might look like it is often helpful to study our history.

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Procrastination: The Cognitive Biases That Enable It-and Why It's Sometimes Useful

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Procrastination: The Cognitive Biases That Enable It-and Why It's Sometimes Useful

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Psychologically, we perceive the impact of an event—or the value of a reward—as dampened if it is further away in the future.

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Are you procrastinating? I am. I have been delaying writing this article for the last few days even though I knew I had a deadline. I have scrolled through social media, and I have gone down a rabbit hole looking up houses on Rightmove - even though I do not need a new house.

I have also re-watched the video Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator by Tim Urban, one of the best Ted Talks I have seen. I found it especially comforting to learn that even pigeons procrastinate.

Procrastination is an interesting form of delay which is irrational in the sense that we do it despite knowing it can have negative consequences. These can range from penalties or fines for a late bill to a lower grade and even a dropout in the academic context. I know on some subconscious level that if I delay finishing the draft of my book, it will cause me stress when I have to complete it in a much shorter amount of time instead.

Given that procrastination causes stress and anxiety, why are most of us still prone to it? As research shows, it is related to a number of cognitive biases.

Present bias

Researchers have defined procrastination as the "present bias in preferences, on account of which agents delay doing unpleasant tasks that they themselves wish they would do sooner". Present bias (or "hyperbolic discounting") is the tendency, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to give more importance to the one which happens sooner.

For example, we may disregard the future consequences of an action. This comes into play when I give in to temptation and eat yet another chocolate biscuit even though I know I need to cut down on sugar. My willpower does not hold up to this inherent bias where I focus on instant pleasure.

Psychologically, we perceive the impact of an event - or the value of a reward - as dampened if it is further away in the future. This means we perceive a desired result in the future as less valuable than one in the present. This can also cause a disconnect from our future selves where we may perceive the positive consequences of completing a task successfully as happening to someone else, rather than a future version of ourselves.

When we're procrastinating, we are choosing a positive activity in the present (such as watching cat videos or socialising) over a positive consequence later on - such as the satisfaction of completing a task or getting a good grade on an assignment. This normally also involves thinking about the negative consequence of procrastinating at the same time. This is also the reason why people might delay saving for retirement.

In one study, when a group of students were offered two choices - US$150 (£122) now or US$200 in six months - a significant majority chose the US$150 being offered to them in the present. And when offered the choice between US$50 now and US$100 a year from now, many chose the immediate US$50. Our preference for things and our choices can be distorted by our relative temporal distance to these options.

We are hardwired to choose a smaller gain today than a larger gain tomorrow. That said, we all differ in our ability to fight this urge - some people are more biased towards the future or the past.

Status quo bias

As I have shown in my book Sway, another cognitive bias that is likely to come into play is status quo bias. Our brains are lazy and we want to avoid cognitive load as much as possible. So we are hardwired to avoid tasks that cause us to change our mindset or that lead to cognitive burden - we'd rather just stick with the relaxed mind state we have at the minute than engage in something new and exhausting.

It essentially makes us resistant to change, as we fear we'll regret actively making choices (when doing nothing is also a "choice"). The status quo bias can, for example, lead to "loss aversion bias" - compelling us to focus on not losing. When in doubt, we essentially tell ourselves to do nothing.

Losses are be almost twice as psychologically harmful as gains are beneficial. In other words, most people feel twice as much psychological pain from losing US$100 (£82) as pleasure from gaining US$100. This bias means that people are reluctant to take risks by giving away what they possess in favour of something that "might" be more profitable to them in the future.

Some personality traits could influence your propensity to stick with the status quo. If you are open and curious about new things, less averse to taking risks and have a strong sense of duty (conscientiousness) you may be slightly less affected by this bias.

Pros and cons

Procrastination is a universal experience, irrespective of cultural differences. In my view, it is not a sign of laziness as it is often labelled to be. It is not always bad to delay tasks. I believe sometimes it gives us an opportunity to mull over uncertainties. And research shows it can help us navigate difficult emotions - potentially leading to better work in the end.

Saying this, sometimes procrastination can be a real barrier. This may be due to an underlying mental health problem that needs support and treatment. If procrastination is seriously interfering with your life, you may want to start chopping tasks into smaller pieces and set rewards after each step.

But perhaps more importantly, forgive yourself for procrastinating. The more we internalise the shame and guilt, the more we are likely to procrastinate in the future, and this can be an additional trigger that can compel us to procrastinate even more.

Ultimately, we all have different perceptions of time. Understanding individual differences may also help us better understand neurodiverse people. For example, some people have been found to parcel time differently, and more inconsistently - time might not work linearly for them but rather in a cyclical manner, which I can relate to.

That reminds me I should really do my tax returns now. No time like now. Or maybe after I've had another cup of coffee.
Pragya Agarwal is a Visiting Professor of Social Inequities and Injustice, Loughborough University.

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Procrastination: The Cognitive Biases That Enable It-and Why It's Sometimes Useful

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Are you procrastinating? I am. I have been delaying writing this article for the last few days even though I knew I had a deadline. I have scrolled through social media, and I have gone down a rabbit hole looking up houses on Rightmove - even though I do not need a new house.

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Yes, You Need to Clean Your Artificial Christmas Tree

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Yes, You Need to Clean Your Artificial Christmas Tree

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It's still much easier than dealing with the needles from a real tree.

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What artificial Christmas trees lack in fresh evergreen scent, they make up for with ease of maintenance. Unlike the live versions, faux firs don't shed, or need to be watered, then disposed of at the end of the holiday season. But that doesn't mean that they're completely maintenance-free.

Given that artificial Christmas trees spend a few weeks living with us in our home, and rest of the year tucked away in storage, they do accumulate some dirt and dust, and would benefit from an annual cleaning. Here's what to do.

How to clean an artificial Christmas tree

To prolong the life of your artificial tree, experts recommend cleaning it before putting it away, and then again when it comes out of storage at the beginning of the holiday season, before you decorate it.

Even if you don't care about the tree itself, those prickly fake branches are dust magnets, so if anyone in your household has dust mite allergies, it's a good idea to clean the tree at least before putting it up.

Here, we'll cover a few different cleaning methods, and you can pick the one that works best for you, based on whether or not your tree is pre-lit, and how dirty it managed to get.

Basic dry cleaning

Pre-lit fake Christmas trees are delicate and can't get wet, so this is really the only safe way to clean them. It's also the least-involved, so if your tree in't pre-lit and not that dirty-or you don't have the time to invest in a more thorough cleaning-this the way to go.

Ideally, you'll want to do this outside, or in a garage or basement, so the dust and dirt from the tree doesn't spread around the inside of your home. If that's not possible, put down an old sheet or tarp to keep the mess at least somewhat contained. If your tree is pre-lit, make sure that it's unplugged. Throw on a face mask so you don't inhale the dust, and some goggles wouldn't hurt either.

Then, starting at the top of the tree, use a soft-bristled brush or dry microfiber cloth to brush or wipe the dirt and dust off each branch, working from the inside of the tree out. It's also possible to use a handheld vacuum, or a vacuum with a brush attachment-just be gentle if your tree is pre-lit.

Salt and shake

Artificial Christmas trees that aren't pre-lit-and can be broken down into smaller sections-can be freshened using a bit of salt. Again, this is best done outside, or at least over a sheet or tarp.

Place the separated sections into a large, heavy-duty trash bag with two cups of Kosher salt, tie the bag, and then give it a good shake for a few minutes. As you're shaking, the salt will act as a mild abrasive cleaner, ridding the branches of a decent amount of dust and other grime.

Then, remove one section of the tree at a time, and shake it out, ideally outside (or at least over the sheet or tarp). When all the sections are done, assemble the tree, then go over it with a vacuum, using the method described above.

Spray and wipe

Again, this is only an option for trees that aren't pre-lit, but if yours is still a little grimy-or you have someone in your household with allergies-this is the next step.

First, mix a solution of warm water and a few drops of liquid dish soap in a clean, empty spray bottle. Then, working from the top-down and inside-out, lightly spritz each branch with the solution, and wipe it off with a clean, dry microfiber cloth.

Give it a shower

Start by breaking down your not-pre-lit artificial Christmas tree into sections. Take each section, spray it with the soap and water mixture described above, then, using warm water, gently rinse it off in the shower from top to bottom (handheld shower heads are easiest).

If the tree doesn't come apart, you can take it outside and use a garden hose instead. Either way, leave the tree to drip-dry either in the shower or bathtub, or outside. Allow it to air dry completely before you start decorating it-especially if you're putting on lights.

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Yes, You Need to Clean Your Artificial Christmas Tree

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What artificial Christmas trees lack in fresh evergreen scent, they make up for with ease of maintenance. Unlike the live versions, faux firs don't shed, or need to be watered, then disposed of at the end of the holiday season. But that doesn't mean that they're completely maintenance-free.

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Would You Want to Know if You're Going to Get Alzheimer's Disease?

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Would You Want to Know if You're Going to Get Alzheimer's Disease?

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Advances in genetic research mean predicting who develops the condition is becoming more accurate, but that’s not necessarily a comfort.

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Long before she became a neurogeneticist at Cardiff University, Dr Rebecca Sims was acutely aware of the pain Alzheimer's disease can wreak on families.

"My grandfather had Alzheimer's, so I've seen the devastation of somebody living with the disease," she says. "I've got friends as well whose family members have had other dementias."

Sims herself has completed the largest ever genetic study of Alzheimer's, an international collaboration which reported in April 2022. The Cardiff research mined the genomes of more than 100,000 people around the globe - who either have the disease or had a parent who suffered from it - for tell-tale clues which point to why they were susceptible.

All of which makes Sims perfectly placed to answer a particularly thought-provoking question - if there was a test which could tell you whether you were going to develop Alzheimer's or not, would you take it?

Her own answer is a resounding no. This is largely because the disease remains incurable, despite many decades and billions of pounds of research investment. "It's been in my family, but I don't think I'd want to know," she says. "At the moment, I wouldn't see the benefit, if I'm honest. There's nothing in place which would help me with that, so I think it's better to just live your life and not worry about that too much."

But as the population ages, the question is becoming more pressing. Our growing understanding of the genetic and environmental risk factors for Alzheimer's is making it increasingly viable to predict whether someone will develop the disease.

Alzheimer's experts say that research has more than doubled the number of gene variants known to be associated with the disease, improving the accuracy of so-called polygenic risk scores which can be used to inform people about their potential of developing Alzheimer's.

There are currently no predictive tests for Alzheimer's available on the NHS. But private tests are available, including saliva tests offered by the genetic testing company 23andMe. These attempt to provide a percentage likelihood by looking at whether individuals possess certain variants of gene called APOE, which has been heavily linked with the disease.

However, the new information discovered in research such as Sims's could make such forecasts far more accurate in years to come, though scientists are wary about giving a timeframe.

"We now have a total of 94 validated Alzheimer's disease genes," says Rudolph Tanzi, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "We and others are trying to use all the Alzheimer's disease genes as well as whole genome sequencing data from Alzheimer's patients and family, with the goal of developing a reliable polygenic risk score for Alzheimer's, beyond just APOE."

Some people, who have had to care for close family members with the disease, feel that knowing such information could be beneficial as it would make it far easier to make certain life decisions at an earlier stage.

"I had to spend the best years of my life with both parents suffering from dementia, which was hell," says Cheryl Gearhart, a 56-year-old designer. "They had no plan for retirement, care or wills. If such a test was available for everyone, it would help them plan their future."

Medical ethicists draw some parallels between knowing you are at high risk of Alzheimer's and Huntingdon's disease, an incurable neurological disorder caused by a single gene defect which can be diagnosed even before birth. Individuals with Huntingdon's begin to develop symptoms between the ages of 30 and 50.

"If somebody has the gene for Huntington's disease, they have a similar or worse prognosis than for Alzheimer's," says Dominic Wilkinson, professor of medical ethics at the University of Oxford. "What we know from that is that there are some people who do want to know that information for planning their life. Do they save up for a pension or spend their savings on travelling the world? But it's important that people are aware of what they're letting themselves in for before taking a test that might reveal such information. Some might want to live their life without having a Sword of Damocles hanging over them."

One of the additional complexities of Alzheimer's is that genetic factors only represent 60-80 per cent of the risk for the disease. This means that no genetic test could ever be 100 per cent accurate. Environmental components such as whether someone remains sufficiently cognitively stimulated into old age, as well as diet, smoking, exercise and even loneliness, represent significant contributing factors towards the disease.

"It's a complicated picture," says Sims. "If you've got a high genetic risk of the disease, does that mean you're going to get Alzheimer's? The answer is no, because if you've got environmental factors that protect you, they can alleviate the cumulative effect of the genes. And vice versa: you can be at low risk genetically, but have some really high environmental risk factors in your life."

At the moment, our understanding of the genetic landscape of the disease is predominantly based on white Caucasians, meaning that such tests could be less accurate in people of different ethnicities. However, scientists like Sims and Tanzi are working on developing gender-specific and ethnicity-specific tests which also incorporate environmental data, for example whether a person is a lifelong smoker or not.

Sims believes that this additional information, combined with the levels of certain protein biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid - the colourless liquid in your brain and spinal cord - could one day lead to a test which can predict Alzheimer's risk with an accuracy of more than 90 per cent.

"If we get to the point where we're combining those different datasets, we might well be able to be more certain in our accuracy with regards to predicting who's going to get the disease," she says.

But whether such a test became available on the NHS would depend on whether it could provide clinical benefit, enabling doctors to begin treatment to prevent or slow the progression of the disease.

Many Alzheimer's experts argue that one of the reasons scientists have struggled to find medicines for the disease is because it is typically treated too late, once neurodegeneration has already set in. If tests can enable us to identify at-risk patients many decades earlier, treatments which attempt to prevent the accumulation of toxic proteins in the brain may well be far more effective.

"I believe that viable treatments are coming and then widespread testing will take off," says Colin Masters, an Alzheimer's researcher at the University of Melbourne. "We are looking to use an antibody therapy called aducanumab in patients with preclinical Alzheimer's to try to prevent the onset of symptoms."

The new genetic variants identified in Sims's study have also provided a number of new potential treatment targets for the disease which may have been overlooked in the past. Immune cells called microglia, which are involved in the structuring and wiring of the brain, as well as how the brain handles inflammation, appear to be more heavily implicated in Alzheimer's than previously thought.

"What the study showed us is that Alzheimer's is not just about problems with toxic proteins accumulating in the brain, it is also a lot to do with how the brain fights inflammation and attack," she says.

If some of these discoveries can be used to develop treatments for the disease, Sims says she might reconsider taking an Alzheimer's test herself.

"If things changed and we got to a point where there were treatment options, I would take the test and I'd potentially take preventative medicines before getting symptoms," she says. "But we're not there yet."

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Would You Want to Know if You're Going to Get Alzheimer's Disease?

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Long before she became a neurogeneticist at Cardiff University, Dr Rebecca Sims was acutely aware of the pain Alzheimer's disease can wreak on families. "My grandfather had Alzheimer's, so I've seen the devastation of somebody living with the disease," she says. "I've got friends as well whose family members have had other dementias."

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Why 21 cm is the magic length for the Universe

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Why 21 cm is the magic length for the Universe

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Photons come in every wavelength you can imagine. But one particular quantum transition makes light at precisely 21 cm, and it's magical.

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In our Universe, quantum transitions are the governing rule behind every nuclear, atomic, and molecular phenomenon. Unlike the planets in our Solar System, which could stably orbit the Sun at any distance if they possessed the right speed, the protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up all the conventional matter we know of can only bind together in a specific set of configurations. These possibilities, although numerous, are finite in number, as the quantum rules that govern electromagnetism and the nuclear forces restrict how atomic nuclei and the electrons that orbit them can arrange themselves.

In all the Universe, the most common atom of all is hydrogen, with just one proton and one electron. Wherever new stars form, hydrogen atoms become ionized, becoming neutral again if those free electrons can find their way back to a free proton. Although the electrons will typically cascade down the allowed energy levels into the ground state, that normally produces only a specific set of infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light. But more importantly, a special transition occurs in hydrogen that produces light of about the size of your hand: 21 centimeters (about 8¼") in wavelength. That's a magic length, and it just might someday unlock the darkest secrets hiding out in the recesses of the Universe.

When it comes to the light in the Universe, wavelength is the one property that you can count on to reveal how that light was created. Even though light comes to us in the form of photons - individual quanta that, collectively, make up the phenomenon we know as light - there are two very different classes of quantum process that create the light that surrounds us: continuous ones and discrete ones.

A continuous process is something like the light emitted by the photosphere of the Sun. It's a dark object that's been heated up to a certain temperature, and it radiates light of all different, continuous wavelengths as dictated by that temperature: what physicists know as blackbody radiation.

A discrete process, however, doesn't emit light of a continuous set of wavelengths, but rather only at extremely specific wavelengths. A good example of that is the light absorbed by the neutral atoms present within the extreme outer layers of the Sun. As the blackbody radiation strikes those neutral atoms, a few of those photons will have just the right wavelengths to be absorbed by the electrons within the neutral atoms they encounter. When we break sunlight up into its individual wavelengths, the various absorption lines present against the backdrop of continuous, blackbody radiation reveal both of these processes to us.

Each individual atom has its properties primarily defined by its nucleus, made up of protons (which determine its charge) and neutrons (which, combined with protons, determine its mass). Atoms also have electrons, which orbit the nucleus and occupy a specific set of energy levels. In isolation, each atom will come to exist in the ground state: where the electrons cascade down until they occupy the lowest allowable energy levels, limited only by the quantum rules that determine the various properties that electrons are and aren't allowed to possess.

Electrons can occupy the ground state - the 1s orbital - of an atom until it's full, which can hold two electrons. The next energy level up consists of spherical (the 2s) and perpendicular (the 2p) orbitals, which can hold two and six electrons, respectively, for a total of eight. The third energy level can hold 18 electrons: 3s (with two), 3p (with six), and 3d (with ten), and the pattern continues on upward. In general, the "upward" transitions rely on the absorption of a photon of particular wavelengths, while the "downward" transitions result in the emission of photons of the exact same wavelengths.

That's the basic structure of an atom, sometimes referred to as "coarse structure." When you transition from the third energy level to the second energy level in a hydrogen atom, for example, you produce a photon that's red in color, with a wavelength of precisely 656.3 nanometers: right in the visible light range of human eyes.

But there are very, very slight differences between the exact, precise wavelength of a photon that gets emitted if you transition from:

the third energy level down to either the 2s or the 2p orbital,

an energy level where the spin angular momentum and the orbital angular momentum are aligned to one where they're anti-aligned,

or one where the nuclear spin and the electron spin are aligned versus anti-aligned.

There are rules as to what's allowed versus what's forbidden in quantum mechanics as well, such as the fact that you can transition an electron from a d-orbital to either an s-orbital or a p-orbital, and from an s-orbital to a p-orbital, but not from an s-orbital to another s-orbital.

The slight differences in energy between different types of orbital within the same energy level is known as an atom's fine-structure, arising from the interaction between the spin of each particle within an atom and the orbital angular momentum of the electrons around the nucleus. It causes a shift in wavelength of less than 0.1%: small but measurable and significant.

But in quantum mechanics, even "forbidden" transitions can sometimes occur, owing to the phenomenon of quantum tunneling. Sure, you might not be able to transition from an s-orbital to another s-orbital directly, but if you can:

transition from an s-orbital to a p-orbital and then back to an s-orbital,

transition from an s-orbital to a d-orbital and then back to an s-orbital,

or, more generally, transition from an s-orbital to any other allowable state and then back to an s-orbital,

then that transition can occur. The only thing weird about quantum tunneling is that you don't have to have a "real" transition occur with enough energy to make it happen to the intermediate state; it can happen virtually, so that you only see the final state emerge from the initial state: something that would be forbidden without the invocation of quantum tunneling.

This allows us to go beyond mere "fine structure" and onto hyperfine structure, where the spin of the atomic nucleus and one of the electrons that orbit it begin in an "aligned" state, where the spins are both in the same direction even though the electron is in the lowest-energy, ground (1s) state, to an anti-aligned state, where the spins are reversed.

The most famous of these transitions occurs in the simplest type of atom of all: hydrogen. With just one proton and one electron, every time you form a neutral hydrogen atom and the electron cascades down to the ground (lowest-energy) state, there's a 50% chance that the spins of the central proton and the electron will be aligned, with a 50% chance that the spins will be anti-aligned.

If the spins are anti-aligned, that's truly the lowest-energy state; there's nowhere to go via transition that will result in the emission of energy at all. But if the spins are aligned, it becomes possible to quantum tunnel to the anti-aligned state: even though the direct transition process is forbidden, tunneling allows you to go straight from the starting point to the ending point, emitting a photon in the process.

This transition, because of its "forbidden" nature, takes an extremely long time to occur: approximately 10 million years for the average atom. However, this long lifetime of the slightly excited, aligned case for a hydrogen atom has an upside to it: the photon that gets emitted, at 21 centimeters in wavelength and with a frequency of 1420 megahertz, is intrinsically, extremely narrow. In fact, it's the narrowest, most precise transition line known in all of atomic and nuclear physics!

If you were to go all the way back to the early stages of the hot Big Bang, before any stars had formed, you'd discover that a whopping 92% of the atoms in the Universe were exactly this species of hydrogen: with one proton and one electron in them. As soon as neutral atoms stably form - just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang - these neutral hydrogen atoms form with a 50/50 chance of having aligned versus anti-aligned spins. The ones that form anti-aligned will remain so; the ones that form with their spins aligned will undergo this spin-flip transition, emitting radiation of 21 centimeters in wavelength.

Although it's never yet been done, this gives us a tremendously provocative way to measure the early Universe: by finding a cloud of hydrogen-rich gas, even one that's never formed stars, we could look for this spin-flip signal - accounting for the expansion of the Universe and the corresponding redshift of the light - to measure the atoms in the Universe from the earliest times ever seen. The only "broadening" to the line we'd expect to see would come from thermal and kinetic effects: from the non-zero temperature and the gravitationally-induced motion of the atoms that emit those 21 centimeter signals.

In addition to those primordial signals, 21 centimeter radiation arises as a consequence whenever new stars are produced. Every time that a star-forming event occurs, the more massive newborn stars produce large amounts of ultraviolet radiation: radiation that's energetic enough to ionize hydrogen atoms. All of a sudden, space that was once filled with neutral hydrogen atoms is now filled with free protons and free electrons.

But those electrons are going to eventually be captured, once again, by those protons, and when there's no longer enough ultraviolet radiation to ionize them over and over again, the electrons will once again sink down to the ground state, where they'll have a 50/50 chance of being aligned or anti-aligned with the spin of the atomic nucleus.

Again, that same radiation - of 21 centimeters in wavelength - gets produced, and every time we measure that 21 centimeter wavelength localized in a specific region of space, even if it gets redshifted by the expansion of the Universe, what we're seeing is evidence of recent star-formation. Wherever star-formation occurs, hydrogen gets ionized, and whenever those atoms become neutral and de-excite again, this specific-wavelength radiation persists for tens of millions of years.

If we had the capability of sensitively mapping this 21 centimeter emission in all directions and at all redshifts (i.e., distances) in space, we could literally uncover the star-formation history of the entire Universe, as well as the de-excitation of the hydrogen atoms first formed in the aftermath of the hot Big Bang. With sensitive enough observations, we could answer questions like:

Are there stars present in dark voids in space below the threshold of what we can observe, waiting to be revealed by their de-exciting hydrogen atoms?

In galaxies where no new star-formation is observed, is star-formation truly over, or are there low-levels of new stars being born, just waiting to be discovered from this telltale signature of hydrogen atoms?

Are there any events that heat up and lead to hydrogen ionization prior to the formation of the first stars, and are there star-formation bursts that exist beyond the capabilities of even our most powerful infrared observatories to observe directly?

By measuring light of precisely the needed wavelength - 21.106114053 centimeters, plus whatever lengthening effects arise from the cosmic expansion of the Universe - we could reveal the answers to all of these questions and more. In fact, this is one of the main science goals of LOFAR: the low-frequency array, and it presents a strong science case for putting an upscaled version of this array on the radio-shielded far side of the Moon.

Of course, there's another possibility that takes us far beyond astronomy when it comes to making use of this important length: creating and measuring enough spin-aligned hydrogen atoms in the lab to detect this spin-flip transition directly, in a controlled fashion. The transition takes about ~10 million years to "flip" on average, which means we'd need around a quadrillion (10 ¹⁵) prepared atoms, kept still and cooled to cryogenic temperatures, to measure not only the emission line, but the width of it. If there are phenomena that cause an intrinsic line-broadening, such as a primordial gravitational wave signal, such an experiment would, quite remarkably, be able to uncover its existence and magnitude.

In all the Universe, there are only a few known quantum transitions with the precision inherent to the hyperfine spin-flip transition of hydrogen, resulting in the emission of radiation that's 21 centimeters in wavelength. If we want to identify ongoing and recent star-formation across the Universe, the first atomic signals even before the first stars were formed, or the relic strength of yet-undetected gravitational waves left over from cosmic inflation, it becomes clear that the 21 centimeter transition is the most important probe we have in all the cosmos. In many ways, it's the "magic length" for uncovering some of nature's greatest secrets.

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Why 21 cm is the magic length for the Universe

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In our Universe, quantum transitions are the governing rule behind every nuclear, atomic, and molecular phenomenon. Unlike the planets in our Solar System, which could stably orbit the Sun at any distance if they possessed the right speed, the protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up all the conventional matter we know of can only bind together in a specific set of configurations.

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indiankanoon.org - Arif Birya, Dilip J. Patel, N.R. Doshi & Co, Dubai

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indiankanoon.org - Arif Birya, Dilip J. Patel, N.R. Doshi & Co, Dubai

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indiankanoon.org - Arif Birya, Dilip J. Patel, N.R. Doshi & Co, Dubai

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Mohamed Arif Birya,
Dilip J. Patel,
M/s. N.R. Doshi & Co.,
P.O. Box No.13742, Dubai, U.A.E.
Suryakant Ambalal Patel,
Post Box No.7350, Dubai, U.A.E.
Jyotsnaben Suryakant Patel,
P.O. Box 7350, Dubai, U.A.E.
Mayankumar Ambalal Patel,
Post Box No.7350, Dubai, U.A.E.
Shweta Mayankumar Ambalal Patel,
Post Box No.7350, Dubai, U.A.E.

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A year of staggering breadth and blurry genres

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It's becoming increasingly difficult, as the years go by, to describe my favorite video games. Simple terms like "open world" and "first-person shooter" have lost much of their original meaning. "Turn-based strategy" isn't doing all that much work anymore. Even "Metroidvania," a portmanteau created specifically to denote a certain set of design tenets, often comes with a cascade of asterisks, caveats, and parentheticals.

But of course, video games' stubborn refusal to be pinned down is part of what makes them so damn fun. Like any worthy art form, they require constant categorization, re-categorization, and re-re-categorization, just to keep track of every twist and turn in their labyrinthine evolution. And in 2022, more so than any other year, I threw up my hands and allowed myself to revel in the chaos.

Some of the best games of the last 12 months: a two-button roguelite about the meta strategy of character progression; a dungeon-crawler-meets-management-sim about organized religion and echo chambers; a dice-based paean to the power of community that's also a visual-novel lament to the things we lose in pursuit of wealth.

For me, it's this erasure, reinterpretation, and reinforcement of genres that defines the list below. Sure, a clear winner emerged as Polygon staffers' votes began to trickle in - a surefire indication of the one game we collectively predict will, looking back from some point in the future, be the video game of 2022. But still: I'm amazed at how many other games have equally strong arguments for that top slot. As studios splinter, ideas disperse, and developer talent strides off toward new horizons, it's undeniably apparent that the medium's best work is still only a seed in some creator's imagination - and if the pattern holds, it will take a fair number of asterisks, caveats, and parentheticals to describe it.

Until then, these 50 games will more than suffice. -Mike Mahardy, Senior Editor, Reviews

How the Polygon top 50 list works

Over the past month, the Polygon staff voted, debated, and resigned itself to the series of compromises that is our top 50 games of 2022. Any video games that were released in 2022, updated in 2022, or achieved renewed cultural relevance in 2022 are eligible for this list. Also, we treated Nov. 30 as the cutoff for consideration, meaning that Warhammer 40K: Darktide was eligible (and is indeed present on the list) but Marvel's Midnight Suns, which we very much enjoyed, and Dwarf Fortress' Steam version, which makes one of the most important video games more approachable, were not. They will be eligible for inclusion in our end-of-year rankings for 2023.

50. Immortality

Immortality is best experienced with only a vague understanding of what you're in for beyond its central mystery: What happened to the infamous actress Marissa Marcel?

Players unravel this mystery by watching movie clips, rehearsals, and other pieces of cinematic ephemera from her three fictional films. Scrolling back and forth through the footage is intentionally made to echo the feeling of working with film in an old flatbed editor (this is best experienced with a controller's force feedback), which gives the superbly acted clips an even more tactile feel. Immortality's truly impressive technical achievement is that players can hop between clips by quite literally clicking on just about anything in the camera's focus to be almost instantly brought to another clip containing that object. It's magical moving between clips this way, and you'll immediately start using it to track down cast and crew and any props that give off a Chekhovian vibe.

49. Poinpy

Created by Downwell developer Ojiro Fumoto, is a non-serious action-platformer where you slingshot a little green bird upward in an effort to collect fruit for a hungry monster. A mobile game that's free for Netflix subscribers, Poinpy comes from a long line of endless mobile platformers, like Papi Jump or Doodle Jump. It exudes a polish well beyond anything else I've played in the genre, and boasts some of the best platforming in a game this year. It's a delightful and smooth experience and one of my go-to recommendations to people looking for an approachable but challenging game. -Ana Diaz

48. Tinykin

47. Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak

Last year's Monster Hunter Rise was an excellent addition to the long-running franchise, and this summer's expansion, Sunbreak, built upon its solid foundation to bring new, more varied monsters to the title, alongside some truly beautiful locations.

In our review, we criticized Sunbreakfor hiding too much of its new stuff behind old, familiar monsters. But that flaw doesn't take away from the incredible gameplay added with Sunbreak 's variety of new moves and bosses. Rise's incredible Wirebug gets some major upgrades in the expansion, making mobility an even more important part of combat.

There are also some fun additions, like co-op hunts with AI, where some story-specific characters can occasionally join you on a hunt. For solo players, this helps bring the social aspect of the game out - even if you're "socializing" with a computer. And it's a real blast when your AI disappears for a moment only to return riding a giant beast to help you take down your target.

The ways that Sunbreak can be a slog are seriously outweighed by some of the spectacle seen while fighting the game's cast of new monsters. Using my Wirebug to wrangle a giant rock orangutan so I could ride it into the Dracula dragon is a gameplay highlight for me, in a year packed with incredible gaming moments. -Ryan Gilliam

46. Serial Cleaners

Serial Cleaners hones in on my favorite aspect of stealth games: the gratification of moving unseen through a space in which you don't belong, but nonetheless command power over. Players assume the role of a crew of misfit crime-scene cleaners celebrating the new year and reminiscing over their decade together disposing of bodies for the mob. Draw Distance's sequel to its 2017 stealth-action game Serial Cleaner is an improvement on the original in every way, trading the simplified pop-art aesthetic and obtuse mechanics for a 3D third-person perspective and art style influenced by the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the counterculture of the '90s.

45. Ghostwire: Tokyo

As a rare open-world first-person action game out of Japan, Ghostwire: Tokyo 's structure feels a bit familiar, but its combat and environmental design give it an identity few games can match.

Rarely has it been so fun to walk around Tokyo, looking at the world around you and pulling the cores out of enemies while flailing your hands around in unique poses. It's been more than six months since I've played the game, and I can still feel the "snap" effect when grabbing a core. It was a bit worrying when the game's director left partway through production, and a bit strange when the game ended up being released as a Microsoft-published PlayStation exclusive, but Ghostwire: Tokyo makes a strong case for distracting you from all that with a unique style and plenty of confidence. -Matt Leone

44. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

43. I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

This coming-of-age game meshes excellent writing with responsive deck-builder gameplay and a stellar Groundhog Day mechanic. You play as a colonist on a foreign planet, growing up from age 10 to 20. Your choices - from what to focus on, whether it be studies or exploration, to who you befriend and romance - inexorably change the arc of the story. You'll face harrowing challenges, like volatile wildlife and other existential threats. Each future playthrough gives you a chance to change outcomes big and small, like who you befriend, and even who lives and dies.

While the deck-building mechanic was fun, I was drawn in most of all by the game's storytelling and wonderful cast of characters. Each playthrough brought me a little closer to cracking the mystery of why the planet was under the spell of a time loop. The game is also unabashedly queer, with numerous romance options, including a number of poly characters - and I imagine I'll keep playing until I've romanced each and every one of them. -Nicole Clark

42. Rollerdrome

Set in a fascist police state, Rollerdrome can be billed as an arena shooter set on roller skates. Others have called it " Tony Hawk's Pro Skater with guns." I'm here to tell you that firing off a grenade launcher while coming down from a 360-rotational backflip is fun as hell, no matter what you call it.

Our eight-wheeled protagonist, Kara Hassan, is the most recent focus of a blood-sport reality show, in which skaters are tossed into arenas full of ramps, towers, and gun-toting security guards. You do tricks to gain more bullets; you spend your bullets to kill more bad guys; you enjoy the newly vacated space by doing more tricks. It's an exciting loop that, appropriately, is meant to distract you from the wider message of it all: that entertainment, deployed effectively, can distract us from just about anything. -Mike Mahardy

41. Dorfromantik

40. Horizon Forbidden West

39. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet

They're buggy. They're broken. They certainly didn't do as much to evolve the franchise as that other Pokémon game that came out this year. And yet, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have proven irresistible. The full open world - a first for the series - is a delight to get lost in. The array of available Pokémon is exquisitely curated, a mix of favorites from past games alongside some truly inspired newcomers. Leveling those Pokémon up is more of a breeze than ever, thanks to a slew of quality-of-life improvements that make it easy to shut off your brain and grind. For all their faults, Scarlet and Violet are ultimately emblematic of a truth as old as video games: Something can make you want to put your head through a wall and still be fun AF. -Ari Notis

38. Metal: Hellsinger

Come on, it's Doom plus Guitar Hero! What's not to like? The rhythm-based first-person shooter gives you a sword and a ton of loud guns, then tasks you with killing a bunch of demons. Fundamentally, it plays a lot like the recent Doom reboots, in that survival is contingent on constant movement. If you want to deal any meaningful damage to foes, though, you'll need to line up your shots with the beat. Metal: Hellsinger only works thanks to a head-banging OST stacked with heavy metal royalty, including Alissa White-Gluz (Arch Enemy), Matt Heafy (Trivium), Randy Blythe (Lamb of God), and Serj Tankian (System of a Down). -Ari Notis

37. Rogue Legacy 2

Rogue Legacy 2 is a celebration of heroes and their differences. Every new heir brings a unique flavor to their roguelite run, ensuring that no two outings are ever the same: One Valkyrie might utilize a pizza boomerang to slice (lol) their way through enemies, while their Ranger descendant propels itself between platforms with flatulent intensity.

In this way, Rogue Legacy 2 is unusually fresh for a roguelite, putting it among the greats like Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, and Hades. In a genre that usually asks players to follow a discrete path or develop a consistent skill, Rogue Legacy 2 encourages you to find the joy in playing as unlikely heroes against uncertain odds. It's just as good in short bursts as it is in marathon sessions, and it never stops surprising. - Ryan Gilliam

36. Perfect Tides

Gran treats main character Mara's unwieldy emotions, often dramatic, with humor and sincerity, even in Perfect Tides' darkest moments. The point-and-click pixel game doesn't necessarily have an end goal. It's more a matter of inhabiting Mara's shoes as she parses the physical world from her digital one - any teen in the 2000s will understand just how formative AIM or AOL chat rooms could be. - Nicole Carpenter

35. League of Legends (Season 12)

The enduring appeal of League of Legends is one of the most impressive long-term storylines in gaming, and one that goes under-discussed just because of how reliable it is. But more than a decade on, League is still going strong as a competitive game to play by yourself or (even better) with friends, and Season 12 has been one of the strongest efforts yet.

The game has added five new champions - Zeri, Renata Glasc, Bel'Veth, Nilah, and K'Sante - and updated a whole host of others (including the long-awaited revamped Udyr). But what stood out to me about this season is how consistently flexible it was, at every position. More than in previous seasons, this year in League felt like just about every play style and champion was a viable path to victory, and that made it all the more fun.

There are now 162 playable champions in League. In many past seasons, the meta was so rigidly defined it felt like you had to play the right champion (or type of champion) or risk being at a disadvantage. But this year, it was different. The game was balanced in a way that made many play styles and champions viable, leading to an extremely fun season and arguably the best World Championship ever, shattering the record for the most unique champions played at the event and culminating in an outrageously fun final series. Also, Lil Nas X was made the president of League of Legends. What's not to like about that? - Pete Volk

34. Gran Turismo 7

33. Splatoon 3

32. A Plague Tale: Requiem

As promised, Requiem has more rats than ever, and Amicia must use her wits to solve the game's environmental puzzles. Rather than a traditional perk tree, the game responds to the way you play, adding points toward "prudence," "aggression," or "opportunism," which unlock relevant skills. Most of all, Requiem's folk horror is terrifying and evocative - beyond the rats or the horrors of human suffering. This year I played Elden Ring, which pitted my character against terrifying monsters but allowed me to grow stronger, and God of War Ragnarök, which put me in the shoes of a god with a powerful ax. Amicia is just a girl with a sling and righteous rage facing down the violence of a militia. I was drawn to her fear and her cause through to the end. - Nicole Clark

31. Stray

That BlueTwelve Studio could successfully capture the essence of our most baffling family of pets is a towering achievement of its own. That the developer could also wrestle catness into a dystopian adventure in a vivid, forgotten city is another thing entirely. Stray could have worked with any protagonist. But with the year's breakout tabby star, it soars.

30. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is a game that's always buzzing.

When Foot Clan soldiers aren't barreling by on motorbikes or in cars, they're manning the cash register at a pizza joint before flinging themselves into the action while wielding shopping bags as deadly weapons. Shredder's Revenge is loud and chaotic, but never so much that it's distracting, making it an absolute blast of an homage to a series of classic games. It's relatively short, but with seven different characters - the four turtles plus April O'Neil, Splinter, and Casey Jones - there's a lot of value in replaying the levels and mastering each character's moves. And while it's faithful to its predecessors, it's decidedly modern, with more satisfying combat against hordes of enemy soldiers and character upgrades to boot. Nostalgia may be its vehicle, but pure fun is its fuel. - Nicole Carpenter

29. Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker

Endwalker continues to make Final Fantasy 14 a perplexing game. I want to keep recommending it to people because the expansions (especially the recent ones) are so good and pay off so well, but nobody wants to be recommended a game that takes 100 hours to beat. However, if you are somebody who does have lots of time to spare, I can't recommend Final Fantasy 14 enough, especially with Endwalker factoring in. -Julia Lee

28. Raft

In a world where I'm semi-regularly served videos about giant rigs that attempt to remove at least some of the endless trash from our oceans, piqued my interest. In this survival sandbox game, you ride a rudimentary raft across the ocean and upgrade it. Instead of solely venturing out to get resources, you can fish the trash out of the ocean as you float by and turn it into useful items. The game strikes a pleasant balance between all sorts of gameplay beyond the core loop of hooking trash and crafting it. You can dock your raft on islands and explore them. There's regular, non-trash-related fishing, and you can even unlock scuba diving. All the while, you have to fend off regular attacks from cartoonish sharks. It can be a lot to manage at times, so your journey will be well served by sharing it with friends, but it's a naval journey well worth your time. -Ana Diaz

27. The Quarry

Developer Supermassive Games has carved out a space for itself by trading on horror tropes - its breakout hit Until Dawn put a group of vacationing teenagers through the wringer in a remote mountain cabin, a decaying sanatorium, and an abandoned mine shaft, before the Dark Pictures anthology jumped from a boat at sea to a creepy Midwestern ghost town to a desert tomb. And now we have The Quarry, a terrifying wilderness romp that touches on all of the corny traditions of one of America's original horror settings: the sleep-away camp.

In keeping with Supermassive's previous games, The Quarry puts you in control of a group of characters - in this case, nine camp counselors who are stuck at the camp an extra night - as they explore the scenery and do their best to survive when things get hairy (read: potentially lethal).

While player input is limited almost entirely to walking, binary character choices, and basic quick-time events, it's a testament to Supermassive's craft that it can make a search for duffel bags as compelling as a horrifying encounter with otherworldly creatures, an innocent kiss as momentous a decision as pulling a trigger. The Quarry exists somewhere between the worlds of movies and video games, and it's remarkable for how much gold it mines from both. -Mike Mahardy

26. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide pits players against the endless forces of Chaos in the hive city of Tertium. The heroes are a band of rejects - a Veteran, Ogryn, Psyker, and Zealot - who just barely escaped execution by the skin of their teeth, and now have to run through a series of Left 4 Dead-style missions to secure ammunition, restart smelters, or fix the God-Emperor's Wi-Fi.

Darktide's biggest strength is its frenetic combat, with waves of cultists and Chaos beasties swarming the squad while elite snipers and shooters apply additional pressure from afar. The levels are also blessed with the immense scale and world-building of the Warhammer 40,000 setting. It's awe-inspiring to move through the hive city of Tertium, built to house billions of citizens. The Rejects start as minuscule cogs in a massive machine, but soon the power fantasy of popping heretic skulls and clearing waves of Chaos kicks in. Add in a soundtrack of absolute bangers, and Darktide is one of the most delightful surprises of the year. -Cass Marshall

25. NBA 2K23

NBA 2K23 is a landmark work in sports video gaming, the culmination of a 20-year ideal that Visual Concepts' veteran developers have long held: Let players go back in time, rewrite it, and play their favorite franchise in days long ago. It sets a new standard for other sports developers, who have offered their leagues' histories only in very limited ways, and certainly none as immersive as the new MyNBA Eras mode. The control players have there - whether an expansion franchise enters the league in 1988 or Karl Malone wins the MVP in 1997, both can be wiped from memory - is something you'd expect to see in a PC management simulation, not a licensed console title. And for every memory you create anew in MyNBA Eras, there is one to be relived in the museum-quality Jordan Challenge mode. -Owen Good

24. PlateUp!

A co-op roguelite about running a restaurant is a home-run premise, and PlateUp! lives up to the pitch. The first dozen or so restaurants feel like absolute chaos as you fight actual fires and clean up after sloppy customers, all as you and your friends joyously shout orders and directions over one another.

But PlateUp!'s real obsessive joy comes from chasing the perfection of a self-run restaurant once you realize how many tasks can be automated with careful and expensive upgrades. After that, restaurants become temples to efficiency and high-end machines, and the best runs turn into hilarious hours-long affairs that few games can match. -Austen Goslin

23. Tunic

Some games thrive on meaningful obfuscation. Tunic is one of them.

There are echoes of Myst, The Witness, and the original Legend of Zelda in developer Andrew Shouldice's action-adventure outing. It has also drawn myriad comparisons to 2012's Fez, a game that also deployed its own unique written language to confuse, entice, and ultimately steer players toward its largest overarching secrets. Its combat can become cloying - especially during later boss fights - and its level design doesn't always allow for the most leisurely backtracking. But its willingness to trust the player's intelligence, patience, and most of all, thirst for discovery make it a masterful adventure in its own right. -Mike Mahardy

22. Total War: Warhammer 3

There are ambitious games, and there are ambitious games. Total War: Warhammer 3 is the latter. Its map is bigger than those of its predecessors combined, and it launched with eight fantasy factions, each stranger and more grandiose than the last. It's also exceedingly weird, and refuses to rest on its laurels as the strategy trilogy wraps up, instead pushing the envelope wherever it can.

And now, it's also introduced us to one of the grandest, most ambitious projects in all of video games (I'm not joking) with Immortal Empires, an expansion that combines all three maps and every playable faction from the entire trilogy. It all but redefines what it means to be a "sandbox" video game, with emergent storytelling that sees nations clash, leaders betray one another, and a massive world unfold, even outside of the player's gaze. - Mike Mahardy

21. Disney Dreamlight Valley

Does any game from 2022 have a more cynical elevator pitch than Disney Dreamlight Valley? "Blend Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, replace all the townspeople with beloved animated characters, and hire a major mobile game publisher to incorporate microtransactions." So why can't we stop ourselves from mining, fishing, and farming in a feverish effort to keep Mickey and friends happy?

20. Xenoblade Chronicles 3

19. Nobody Saves the World

18. Cult of the Lamb

In a banner year for management sims, Cult of the Lamb stands out among the pack - with a blend of roguelite dungeon-crawling, religious ambiguity, and a puerile art style that gives way to monstrous acts. It's one of those games that, on paper, shouldn't work. But in practice, it's entrancingly propulsive.

As a lamb sent back from death by a captive demon-spirit-thing, you're tasked with building, improving, and leading a cult out in the woods, with the goal of exacting revenge on the four gods who ordered your execution. You sow fields of crops, cook meals for your followers, bless said followers to gain their undivided favor, and in some cases, sacrifice them in displays of glorious violence. Between it all, you head into the wilderness on combat runs that grant you new followers, abilities, and boons to augment your cult. The result is an ouroboros-like flow of roguelite excitement and zenlike village management, all aimed at showing you what kind of leader you might ostensibly become if granted absolute power. -Mike Mahardy

17. Kirby and the Forgotten Land

According to my Switch, I've devoted around 60 hours to the latest Kirby game. I spent roughly 10 of those hours actually playing. The other 50 hours have been spread across the past eight months by my 4-year-old, who found in this adorable apocalypse his first favorite game. I enjoyed Kirby well enough on my own playthrough, but watching my son gradually learn its world revealed that I had zipped past so much the game has to offer. The dozens of adorable, collectible knickknacks. Kirby's home sanctuary, with its interactive cafe, boutiques, and movie theater. The lovingly crafted detail in every level, crucial when making a game for children who will play the same stage over and over and over again. As an adult, it's too easy to overlook the artistry and handiwork that goes into designing games for children and families. Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a reminder that while Nintendo is best known for Animal Crossing and Zelda taking over grown-up popular culture, the publisher remains better than anybody else at making stuff for its original target audience: kids. -Chris Plante

16. Return to Monkey Island

15. Norco

Norco stands out for a lot of reasons: It's a beautiful, honest portrayal of southern Louisiana, an inventive and dystopian science fiction story, and a sharp criticism of the oil industry's blight. Created by Geography of Robots, Norco is an interpretation of Norco, Louisiana - the real town whose name stands for the New Orleans Refining Company, home to Shell's manufacturing complex. As a point-and-click adventure, Norco unravels slowly as the main character, Kay, returns to her childhood home following her mother's death. It's all at once a magical realism story with mystery elements, yet still firmly rooted in a sense of reality - not an easy blend of genres to balance. The writing and simple environmental puzzles, together with a unique mind-map mechanic that acts as a character list and mental notebook, lend themselves to a fast-paced story that still leaves room to stop and take in all of the poignant weirdness. -Nicole Carpenter

14. Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope

The Mario + Rabbids series could've easily been a phoned-in cash grab. Instead, they're tactical masterpieces that go toe-to-toe with XCOM, Fire Emblem, and other titans of the genre. This year's Sparks of Hope - the sequel to 2017's Kingdom Battle - proves it. Sparks of Hope's core gimmick ("What if Mario but guns") remains the same as its forebear, but it adds a number of improvements. Key here is the introduction of sentient accessories called Sparks, which bring an impressive level of depth to the game's toolkit. Fluid movement options make it feel like you're controlling legitimate Mario characters, rather than XCOM soldiers wearing Mushroom Kingdom cosmetics. Best of all, the script is genuinely funny. There's really only one drawback: The Rabbids talk. And no, it never stops being weird. - Ari Notis

13. Neon White

If you're furious with a friend, colleague, or significant other, there's a chance it's because of this game. Neon White has reinvigorated the chase for top leaderboard spots, and reinforced the importance of milliseconds, because sometimes, a millisecond is all it takes to climb one spot higher than your friend.

Developer Ben Esposito of Angel Matrix has called Neon White a " smoothie" of inspirations, one that pulls as much from friction-defying Counter-Strike surf maps as it does from gravity-defying Half-Life and Quake jump maps. Neon White is also, in a small but important way, a deck-building card game. If this is a smoothie, then it is equal parts sweet, tangy, satisfying, and also dripping down your face, because in the time it took you to read this paragraph, your friend has just beaten your score again. That Neon White can be so elegant and simple, while also imparting such strong grudges and woefully cramped wrists, is quite the achievement for a game about jumping from one platform to another. Video games are dumb as hell. Let's go get smoothies. -Mike Mahardy

12. Signalis

Spiritual successors to the likes of Silent Hill and Resident Evil are a dime a dozen. It's rare when one manages to not only hone in on the core principles of those lauded survival horror classics, but to ultimately transcend those comparisons altogether to tell a story all its own. Signalis is that all-too-rare outlier: a third-person cyberpunk survival horror game packed with challenging puzzles, terrifying enemies, and yet more terrifying revelations buried deep beneath its snow-laden surface.

As Polygon's review noted, the game draws inspiration from the likes of classic survival games, acclaimed anime like Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and even the paintings of Arnold Böcklin and Eugen Bracht, synthesizing these reference points into an exquisite corpse of shambling horror and yawning existential dread. Elster's downward journey into the bowels of an abandoned interplanetary mining facility in search of a lost friend is a perilous one, pitting the player against a macabre otherworld teeming with frightening creatures that occasionally refuse to die and questions that defy answers at every turn. Signalis proves itself, time and time again, to be more than the sum of its influences, and a survival horror masterpiece in its own right. - Toussaint Egan

11. Strange Horticulture

10. God of War Ragnarök

God of War Ragnarök had some tough shoes to fill. God of War (2018) reinvented one of the biggest meatheads in video games, turning him into an emotionally compelling character that helped propel the game to win Polygon's Game of the Year four years ago. It catapulted over the bar of excellence, making it one of the best games of the decade, and indeed, of all time.

The game's writing occasionally stumbles - especially with its humor - but it never botches the genuine moments between parent and child. It's a dynamic that AAA games have been trying to capture for years now, and God of War (2018) has been the shining example since its release. In most ways it still is.

Still, Ragnarök takes on so much - including stories from the original game as well as brand-new adventures - that a lesser studio would easily choke on its ambition. And yet, Santa Monica Studio still created a worthy sequel to one of the best games ever made, and that's a feat that's worth celebrating on its own. -Ryan Gilliam

9. PowerWash Simulator

For years, I obsessively watched satisfying internet clips of people power-washing cars, sidewalks, outdoor furniture - all the while certain I would never know such peace, as a power-wash-less apartment dweller. My life changed forever when PowerWash Simulator came on the scene. I immediately forced some of my friends to join me in scrubbing virtual environments with violently propulsive jets of water. My life has been better ever since.

Have you ever sought refuge from the horrible doomscrolling of everyday life? Have you wanted to smooth those pesky wrinkles in your brain? This game is for you, and also everyone you know. (Up to six people can play multiplayer, and who has more friends than that anyway?) Clean off dirty cars, backyards with sheds and swingsets, whole-ass houses, a helicopter, a monster truck, and so much more. Relax those shoulders. Let the pain leave your body with a good power-wash. -Nicole Clark

8. Pokémon Legends: Arceus

With a franchise history as grand and storied as Pokémon, it can be hard to make a big splash. The video games have been around for roughly 25 years, and the mainline RPGs have more or less stayed true to the standard formula of a turn-based game where we explore and catch a colorful cast of monsters. WithPokémon Legends: Arceus, Game Freak took the franchise in a bold and refreshing direction that changed up the way we battle and catch. It also questions what it means to be a Pokémon trainer.

At the beginning of any Pokémon game, or even in the movies, we always get to learn about the world of Pokémon. We're told that these powerful creatures live alongside humans as partners, and compete against each other in battles that further hone the relationships between Pokémon and trainers. Legends: Arceus completely departs from this concept by taking place in an in-universe historical period where Pokémon have not yet integrated with the general population, and where the average person is scared of Pokémon. We, the player, have time traveled from the future, and it's up to us to be one of the first bridges between the apprehensive townspeople and the monsters that lurk beyond their fences.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus isn't just interesting; it also presents a fantastic template for an open-world game. In it, you can pick and choose various regions to explore. It blends exploration with rigorous monster catching by allowing us to sneak up and catch Pokémon with the toss of a single Poké Ball. Beyond that, the game is filled with flourishes that have their own way of prompting us to think about the Pokémon in different ways. Whether it was getting our asses kicked, seeing Pokémon live in their natural environments, or the simple act of crouching down to truly meet one of your partners eye-to-eye, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is one of the best Pokémon games ever, and that's why it's on this list today. -Ana Diaz

7. Marvel Snap

6. Pentiment

Pentiment is warmer, funnier, and more fulfilling than its intimidating elevator pitch suggests. I warn you in advance because I fear I might lose you. See, you play as traveling artist Andreas Maler in the 16th century. You establish shop in a Bavarian monastery and spend the next 10-15 hours (spread across 25 years in the story) making friends and enemies, along with a slew of decisions that will change the lives of everyone in your vicinity. There's no voice acting, no combat, and no real way to "win." You just talk.

Pentiment can sound a bit like homework, and fair warning, the first few hours are dense - one of the game's few mechanics is the option to read footnotes. But whatever you give this game, it rewards you tenfold. The characters in its beautiful town, illustrated in the style of the time, are contradictory, just like real people. They can be compassionate and helpful, but in the same conversation, self-interested and malicious. Their allegiances and needs shift, and their behavior impacts those around them, most obviously their loved ones. Because the game stretches across generations, we get to see how the villagers' lives become history, and how history so often gets distorted or outright forgotten.

Layered atop these people is a conversation of faith I've never seen in a game, and very rarely in any popular art. Religion is beautiful and prone to corruption, a service of the state and its most powerful cudgel. Or to put it simply: Faith is what we make of it. Fittingly, so is Pentiment. - Chris Plante

5. Fortnite

4. Vampire Survivors

Of all the games this year, big and small, Vampire Survivors defined my 2022.

In the early parts of the year, before it started nearing its final release date, Vampire Survivors updated almost every week with new content. Every Saturday or Sunday, I'd roll up to my PC, hoping there were a few more achievements to collect, a new secret to find, or a new weapon to evolve. In a year where normalcy is finally seeming to return - but not quite there yet - Vampire Survivors became a ritual to help mark the weeks.

But I didn't manage to log 100 hours in the PC version of Vampire Survivors by only playing for achievements. Of all the games on this list, Vampire Survivors is one of the only ones I would turn on just to play for fun, to see what ridiculous builds I could create long after I'd exhausted all the content. In games like God of War, Elden Ring, and even Tinykin, all my playtime was goal-oriented. But the joy of Vampire Survivors is pure and infectious.

Over the year, I watched in delight as the game caught on by word of mouth between friends and co-workers. Seemingly each week, a new pal popped up on my Steam friends list showing that they'd finally jumped into Vampire Survivors. And over the following weeks, I'd watch their hour count skyrocket.

In one of the best gaming years we've had in a very long time, packed with games people will remember for decades, it's astounding that this tiny little project has proved to be my most memorable of all. - Ryan Gilliam

3. The Case of the Golden Idol

It's easy to compare The Case of the Golden Idol with Return of the Obra Dinn. Each mystery game is set in a sinister alternate history dominated by occult happenings. Their art styles are both inspired by retro games from the start of computing, and each uses a fill-in-the-blank system to unwrap a complex web of mysterious deaths.

But the comparisons, while made in praise, don't let Golden Idol shine for its own merits. Its mysteries at first seem far less connected than Obra Dinn 's, playing out over 11 chapters with no shortage of brutal deaths. But there's a lightbulb moment upon realizing how all the pieces fit that made me want to revisit every name and clue, just like in the best whodunit fiction. And while the game doesn't hide that there's a powerful ancient artifact at play, the revelations on how its myriad owners choose to use it are incredibly unnerving when it all finally falls into place.

2. Citizen Sleeper

You face the new day as a Sleeper, with your consciousness ported into a robotic body owned by a corporation called Essen-Arp. You're low on the "medication" you require to survive, built as you were for "planned obsolescence." This is how the corporation forces you into a life of indentured servitude - you can never truly outrun the body that is falling apart on you.

In Citizen Sleeper, you find a new life on Erlin's Eye, meeting people, taking odd jobs, and finding ways to survive. Each morning kicks off with the roll of a handful of dice - these rolls dictate the probability of success for the actions you take. Spend your dice wisely.

As with so much masterful science fiction, Citizen Sleeper's story is an elegant metaphor for contemporary life. Playing Citizen Sleeper reminded me of the obscene pricing of insulin. It made me think about working through the pandemic, as a matter of course, even as the people around me became sick while clocking in day in, day out. It made sense out of years living paycheck to paycheck. In Citizen Sleeper, as in life, scarcity affects choice. When you need to survive, can you really be picky about which offers you turn down? It's also about finding a way to make a good life, no matter the challenge. Who will you invest in? Will you stay or leave?

It's as much a game of chance as it is a game about simply how to be. And it is one of 2022's very best. -Nicole Clark

1. Elden Ring

Elden Ring is the rare game that feels perfectly fit for its moment. When it arrived in February 2022, it had been five years since the release of Breath of the Wild, six years since the last Dark Souls game seemed to position the series one step away from mainstream success, and what's more, we were right in the middle of the biggest mainstream fantasy drought we may ever experience. And in that perfect cultural moment, with a mountain of hype behind it, FromSoftware managed to release a game that was worthy of every inch of it.

But to limit Elden Ring to just comparisons would be a disservice to the game and its own merits. Its combat is excellent, precise, and demanding, all of which it maintains through each of its half-dozen weapon options and play styles. Its meticulously designed open world offers players almost no instruction, but succeeds by virtue of how enticing it is to explore. Whether it's stunning and carefully created vistas to stumble across organically, unique rewards (and the bosses that guard them) tucked away in hidden cellars, or a far-too-tough enemy that serves as a preview of your future power, every moment in the Lands Between feels like it was placed with the utmost intention. And every new lesson or gift feels like the perfect excuse to spend another dozen hours exploring and fighting.

2022 was an unmistakably great year for games. But in a year of great games, Elden Ring still stands above its competition as something truly special. After all, what else could you call it when a game this bleak, massive, opaque, and challenging also happened to be one of the year's biggest pop culture phenomena, and one of the best games released in recent memory? -Austen Goslin

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It's becoming increasingly difficult, as the years go by, to describe my favorite video games. Simple terms like "open world" and "first-person shooter" have lost much of their original meaning. "Turn-based strategy" isn't doing all that much work anymore.

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Seven of the Wildest and Weirdest Attempts to Curb Animal Pests

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Seven of the Wildest and Weirdest Attempts to Curb Animal Pests

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Why use fences or traps, when you can use deadly viruses or lustful snakes?

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For as long as humans have claimed ownership to things around us-our crops, homes and environments-we've been annoyed by other animals. They munch on our plants, creep into our houses and eat creatures that add to an environment's native biodiversity. The animals we call pests can make the difference between a successful crop and a failure that leads to a hungry winter. They can spread disease, hunt our livestock or simply poop on our statuary. No matter what, we want them gone. As I found during my research for my book, Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, people have tried many wacky ways to get rid of the animals that bother us. From elephant repellant to poisoned toad butts, here's a list of some amusing methods humans have employed to control pests.

An inventor created a mousetrap to blow them away

Humans have had mice since we've had houses. The first evidence of the house mouse ( Mus musculus) invading our homes came from teeth recovered from an archaeological site of semi-permanent human structures in the Levant-which were occupied 15,000 years ago. The first documented mousetraps were found in the ancient cities of Mundigak, Mohenjo-Daro and Bampur from the Indus Valley civilization, which flourished in what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran 4,500 years ago. The small pottery boxes had a sliding door that released to trap a mouse inside. Over time, humans have continued to make mousetraps out of buckets, boxes, pottery, rocks, jars and pretty much everything else.

J.A. Williams went one step further than other inventors. His spring-loaded trap included a cocked pistol on a wooden platform. A mouse approaching the bait on the trap would end up in front of the muzzle, and the gun would fire when the critter took the bait. Certainly the contraption fired a potent message, but it was largely ignored when the snap trap was patented in 1894. The snap trap, after all, was less messy-and less of a sacrifice than dedicating a valuable pistol to the cause.

Scientists release horny snakes to catch other snakes

Capturing invasive Burmese pythons ( Python bivittatus) in the Everglades is a tall order. They're cryptic, can slither quickly away and are well suited to the vast wetland. Current efforts to curb their numbers include a yearly python challenge, where hundreds of hunters take to the levies, trying to spot and catch snakes at night.

While some hunters rack up impressive catches, tens of thousands of pythons remain. So some scientists are trying to catch snakes where they are weakest. They go for their, er, hearts. In an adaptation of a method called the " Judas technique, " which uses a tagged social animal like a sheep, goat or pig to locate other members of the species, scientists release pythons equipped with tracking devices into the wetlands at the beginning of the mating season. When the horny snake stops moving-a possible sign it has found a lover-scientists take off in pursuit. Pythons often mate in groups, with several males forming mating balls around one female. So one enamored snake attracted to a female can betray several more. Thus far, the effort hasn't made a dent in the number of pythons in the Everglades-but the method is slightly more effective than trying to hunt them down one by one in the dark.

Farmers cook up elephant repellants

In places like East Africa, African bush elephants ( Loxodonta africana) frequently try to snack on corn or sugar cane in farmer's fields. In Africa, hundreds of people die each year defending their homes from elephants. Elephants die, too; some are shot as "problem" animals, while others are poached. But the elephants are also endangered, so farmers try hard to protect their crops while leaving the pachyderms unharmed. Electric fences can work but are expensive to maintain. Driving the animals off with torches and drums can get people injured and killed. Some farmers keep bees near the crops, which scare away elephants with their threatening buzz and painful sting, but the bees are expensive and require careful handling, especially if a farmer has children.

So some farmers and conservationists have created a cheaper option- elephant repellant. Save the Elephants is experimenting with a recipe in which garlic, chili, ginger and neem oil are boiled in water. Cooks then steep and add elephant and cow dung, rotten eggs and cooking oil, before leaving the concoction to ferment. (Some other local farmers just combine engine oil and chilis.) Pierced plastic bottles filled with the gag-inducing brew are hung on wires around a farmer's fields right before harvest. As elephants approach the crops, they wiggle the wire, and the repellant sloshes around, spreading the scent. Preliminary studies show that when elephants encounter the stink, they decide that nothing that smells that awful can possibly be worth eating, and they leave. But once they get used to the smell, it might not be much of a deterrent.

Scientists shoot dead baby mice stuffed with painkillers out of helicopters

Brown tree snakes ( Boiga irregularis) invaded the island of Guam after World War II, courtesy of accidental transport by the United States military. The slender, tree-dwelling snakes swiftly multiplied and caused crashes in native bird populations-and sometimes also crashes in the local electric grid when they hung out on wires.

After a wide-ranging hunt to find what might kill the snakes, scientists discovered that 80 milligrams of acetaminophen, about half the amount in a pill of children's Tylenol, did the trick.

But scientists had to figure out a way to get the snakes to snack on the poison. They came up with an ingenious plan. They stuff the painkillers into dead baby mice, put the mice into cardboard tubes, attach the tubes to streamers that will get tangled in tree branches, and shoot them out of a custom-built gun while flying in a helicopter over the forest. With any luck, the bait will land in front of a starving snake. Some sampling studies suggest the reptile snacks reduce local snake populations by about 40 percent. Scientists are also trying to come up with another meaty option to make the snakes take their medicine-one that doesn't involve dead baby mice. They've created a substitute that looks like off-label Spam, but they need more research to test whether snakes will take the bait.

Australians released plagues to combat invasive rabbits

When Thomas Austin brought the first European rabbits ( Oryctolagus cuniculus) to Australia in 1859, he mostly intended them for gentlemanly target practice. Unfortunately, the bunnies escaped, bred and swept across Australia. Their numbers rose so much during the Great Depression that their voracious appetites helped drive farmers from their land. Eating them and turning them into hats did little to dent the numbers.

In 1950, scientists deployed a virus called Myxomato destroy the rascally rabbits. Carried by mosquitoes, the virus caused huge swellings on bunny faces and ears before leading to death. Over time, the rabbits began to develop resistance, and Myxoma itself became less virulent. So scientists moved to a deadlier disease in 1996. This virus, called calicivirus, was a hemorrhagic fever. It killed much faster and more effectively than Myxoma, but rabbits eventually began to adapt to this disease, too. So scientists developed a newer calicivirus strain in 2015 and knocked populations down again. But the bunnies keep bouncing back. From a height of 600 million rabbits, an estimated 300 million are still hippity-hopping across Australia.

Pest control operators deploy fake fire to deter perching pigeons

Pigeons ( Columba livia) love to perch on decorated buildings, which are an architectural substitute for the cliffs they roost on in the wild. Unfortunately, where pigeons perch, pigeons poop. So humans are constantly looking for ways to stop them from loafing on our limestone. Most methods are pretty prosaic: slides that make ledges too angled for perching, spikes to stop nesting. But pigeons have ways to deal with these defenses. For example, the birds will sometimes pile up trash on the spikes to nest anyway. Some pest managers deploy ultrasonic speakers that play bird distress calls. Unfortunately for them, pigeons do not have distress calls, and they can't hear ultrasonic frequencies, either.

So pest control operators have turned to something called "Bird Fire." These small plastic dishes full of gel are stuck on stone surfaces. The gel doesn't look like much of anything to the human eye. But while pigeons do not hear ultrasonically, they do see into the ultraviolet spectrum, and to them, the gel glows, making it look like the statue or stone face is on fire. Initially, the birds may flee, but unfortunately they will probably be back once they realize the fire packs no heat. And at least one study suggested the gels may also cause problems for other birds.

Scientists have tried trapping poisonous tadpoles

Scientists introduced cane toads ( Rhinella marina) to Australia in the 1930s. The amphibians were supposed to combat the cane grubs threatening the sugar cane crop. Unfortunately, the toads bred to massive numbers and commenced hopping south and west. Native predators saw a new, tasty meal. But the toads hide a nasty surprise-poison packed into pads on their shoulders. The toxic toads left the bodies of predators in their wake-up to 90 percent of predators exposed to the toads died. The Australian public has gone on toad hunts and tried trapping tadpoles in a box filled with their own toxins as a lure. Nothing has worked

Now, as the toad continues its travel, scientists are trying to prepare naive predators for their coming-for example, by flinging poisoned toad butts at native freshwater crocodiles. The rears of the toads are not poisonous themselves. Instead, scientists lace them with lithium chloride, a harmless chemical that produces extreme nausea. The crocodiles eat the poisoned meat, get sick, and hopefully learn to never touch a toad again. Currently, studies have shown crocodiles and other predators exposed to cane toad meat only fall for the poisoned animals half of the time. The efforts will help native animals adapt to their new toad neighbors, but it looks like Australia is still stuck with the amphibians for the time being.

This list was created based on material taken from Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, Ecco, Copyright 2022 by Bethany Brookshire.

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Seven of the Wildest and Weirdest Attempts to Curb Animal Pests

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For as long as humans have claimed ownership to things around us-our crops, homes and environments-we've been annoyed by other animals. They munch on our plants, creep into our houses and eat creatures that add to an environment's native biodiversity.

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The Psychology Behind Over- (and Under-) Packing

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The Psychology Behind Over- (and Under-) Packing

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Trip destination, previous travel experiences, and luggage type are some of the factors that influence how we pack.

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The Psychology Behind Over- (and Under-) Packing

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Trip destination, previous travel experiences, and luggage type are some of the factors that influence how we pack.

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Support our expert medical teams in conflict zones

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Support our expert medical teams working in conflict zones around the world

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lancashiretelegraph.co.uk - Arif Patel Preston Dubai UK Conrats 

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lancashiretelegraph.co.uk - Arif Patel Preston Dubai UK Conrats 

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Congratulations to Arif Patel Preston Dubai UK and EP Properties for Acquiring Blackburn Innovation Center...

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Arif Patel (UK/Preston/Dubai) - Congratulations to Arif Patel and EP Properties for Acquiring Blackburn Innovation Center and Fusion House at...

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Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site

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Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site

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Nothing is produced at Sellafield anymore. But making safe what is left behind is an almost unimaginably expensive and complex task that requires us to think not on a human timescale, but a planetary one

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And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the folds of its crust. Within reach, so to speak, of the humans who eventually came along circa 300,000BC, and who mined the uranium beginning in the 1500s, learned about its radioactivity in 1896 and started feeding it into their nuclear reactors 70-odd years ago, making electricity that could be relayed to their houses to run toasters and light up Christmas trees.

Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans - some fleeting, some cosmic - drift in and out of view. Laid out over six square kilometres, Sellafield is like a small town, with nearly a thousand buildings, its own roads and even a rail siding - all owned by the government, and requiring security clearance to visit. Sellafield's presence, at the end of a road on the Cumbrian coast, is almost hallucinatory. One moment you're passing cows drowsing in pastures, with the sea winking just beyond. Then, having driven through a high-security gate, you're surrounded by towering chimneys, pipework, chugging cooling plants, everything dressed in steampunk. The sun bounces off metal everywhere. In some spots, the air shakes with the noise of machinery. It feels like the most manmade place in the world.

Since it began operating in 1950, Sellafield has had different duties. First it manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons. Then it generated electricity for the National Grid, until 2003. It also carried out years of fuel reprocessing: extracting uranium and plutonium from nuclear fuel rods after they'd ended their life cycles. The very day before I visited Sellafield, in mid-July, the reprocessing came to an end as well. It was a historic occasion. From an operational nuclear facility, Sellafield turned into a full-time storage depot - but an uncanny, precarious one, filled with toxic nuclear waste that has to be kept contained at any cost.

Nothing is produced at Sellafield any more. Which was just as well, because I'd gone to Sellafield not to observe how it lived but to understand how it is preparing for its end. Sellafield's waste - spent fuel rods, scraps of metal, radioactive liquids, a miscellany of other debris - is parked in concrete silos, artificial ponds and sealed buildings. Some of these structures are growing, in the industry's parlance, "intolerable", atrophied by the sea air, radiation and time itself. If they degrade too much, waste will seep out of them, poisoning the Cumbrian soil and water.

To prevent that disaster, the waste must be hauled out, the silos destroyed and the ponds filled in with soil and paved over. The salvaged waste will then be transferred to more secure buildings that will be erected on site. But even that will be only a provisional arrangement, lasting a few decades. Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.

Compared to the longevity of nuclear waste, Sellafield has only been around for roughly the span of a single lunch break within a human life. Still, it has lasted almost the entirety of the atomic age, witnessing both its earliest follies and its continuing confusions. In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity "too cheap to meter". That forecast has aged poorly. The main reason power companies and governments aren't keener on nuclear power is not that activists are holding them back or that uranium is difficult to find, but that producing it safely is just proving too expensive.

Strauss was, like many others, held captive by one measure of time and unable to truly fathom another. The short-termism of policymaking neglected any plans that had to be made for the abominably lengthy, costly life of radioactive waste. I kept being told, at Sellafield, that science is still trying to rectify the decisions made in undue haste three-quarters of a century ago. Many of the earliest structures here, said Dan Bowman, the head of operations at one of Sellafield's two waste storage ponds, "weren't even built with decommissioning in mind".

As a result, Bowman admitted, Sellafield's scientists are having to invent, mid-marathon, the process of winding the site down - and they're finding that they still don't know enough about it. They don't know exactly what they'll find in the silos and ponds. They don't know how much time they'll need to mop up all the waste, or how long they'll have to store it, or what Sellafield will look like afterwards. The decommissioning programme is laden "with assumptions and best guesses", Bowman told me. It will be finished a century or so from now. Until then, Bowman and others will bend their ingenuity to a seemingly self-contradictory exercise: dismantling Sellafield while keeping it from falling apart along the way.

Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. But at Sellafield, with all its caches of radioactivity, the thought of catastrophe is so ever-present that you feel your surroundings with a heightened keenness. At one point, when we were walking through the site, a member of the Sellafield team pointed out three different waste storage facilities within a 500-metre radius. The spot where we stood on the road, he said, "is probably the most hazardous place in Europe".

Sellafield's waste comes in different forms and potencies. Spent fuel rods and radioactive pieces of metal rest in skips, which in turn are submerged in open, rectangular ponds, where water cools them and absorbs their radiation. The skips have held radioactive material for so long that they themselves count as waste. The pond beds are layered with nuclear sludge: degraded metal wisps, radioactive dust and debris. Discarded cladding, peeled off fuel rods like banana-skins, fills a cluster of 16-metre-deep concrete silos partially sunk into the earth. More dangerous still are the 20 tonnes of melted fuel inside a reactor that caught fire in 1957 and has been sealed off and left alone ever since. Somewhere on the premises, Sellafield has also stored the 140 tonnes of plutonium it has purified over the decades. It's the largest such hoard of plutonium in the world, but it, too, is a kind of waste, simply because nobody wants it for weapons any more, or knows what else to do with it.

It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. They'd become inordinately expensive to build and maintain, in any case, especially compared to solar and wind installations. In the UK, the fraction of electricity generated by nuclear plants has slid steadily downwards, from 25% in the 1990s to 16% in 2020. Of the five nuclear stations still producing power, only one will run beyond 2028. Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear plant in a generation, is being built in Somerset, but its cost has bloated to more than £25bn.

This year, though, governments felt the pressure to redo their sums when sanctions on Russia abruptly choked off supplies of oil and gas. Wealthy nations suddenly found themselves worrying about winter blackouts. In this crisis, governments are returning to the habit they were trying to break. Germany had planned to abandon nuclear fuel by the end of this year, but in October, it extended that deadline to next spring. The US allocated $6bn to save struggling plants; the UK pressed ahead with plans for Sizewell C, a nuclear power station to be built in Suffolk. Japan, its Fukushima trauma just a decade old, announced that it will commission new plants. Even as Sellafield is cleaning up after the first round of nuclear enthusiasm, another is getting under way.

The day I visited Sellafield was the UK's hottest ever. We sweltered even before we put on heavy boots and overalls to visit the reprocessing plant, where, until the previous day, technicians had culled uranium and plutonium out of spent fuel. Every second, on each of the plant's four floors, I heard a beep - a regular pulse, reminding everyone that nothing is amiss. "We've got folks here who joined at 18 and have been here more than 40 years, working only in this building," said Lisa Dixon, an operations manager. Dixon's father had been a welder here, and her husband is one of the firefighters stationed permanently on site. She meets aunts and cousins on her shifts all the time. When she says Sellafield is one big family, she isn't just being metaphorical.

I only ever saw a dummy of a spent fuel rod; the real thing would have been a metre long, weighed 10-12kg, and, when it emerged from a reactor, run to temperatures of 2,800C, half as hot as the surface of the sun. In a reactor, hundreds of rods of fresh uranium fuel slide into a pile of graphite blocks. Then a stream of neutrons, usually emitted by an even more radioactive metal such as californium, is directed into the pile. Those neutrons generate more neutrons out of uranium atoms, which generate still more neutrons out of other uranium atoms, and so on, the whole process begetting vast quantities of heat that can turn water into steam and drive turbines.

During this process, some of the uranium atoms, randomly but very usefully, absorb darting neutrons, yielding heavier atoms of plutonium: the stuff of nuclear weapons. The UK's earliest reactors - a type called Magnox - were set up to harvest plutonium for bombs; the electricity was a happy byproduct. The government built 26 such reactors across the country. They're all being decommissioned now, or awaiting demolition. It turned out that if you weren't looking to make plutonium nukes to blow up cities, Magnox was a pretty inefficient way to light up homes and power factories.

For most of the latter half of the 20th century, one of Sellafield's chief tasks was reprocessing. Once uranium and plutonium were extracted from used fuel rods, it was thought, they could be stored safely - and perhaps eventually resold, to make money on the side. Beginning in 1956, spent rods came to Cumbria from plants across the UK, but also by sea from customers in Italy and Japan. Sellafield has taken in nearly 60,000 tonnes of spent fuel, more than half of all such fuel reprocessed anywhere in the world. The rods arrived at Sellafield by train, stored in cuboid "flasks" with corrugated sides, each weighing about 50 tonnes and standing 1.5 metres tall. The flasks were cast from single ingots of stainless steel, their walls a third of a metre thick. Responding to worries about how robust these containers were, the government, in 1984, arranged to have a speeding train collide head-on with a flask. The video is spectacular. At 100mph, a part of the locomotive exploded and the train derailed. But the flask, a few scratches and dents aside, stayed intact.

At Sellafield, the rods were first cooled in ponds of water for between 90 and 250 days. Then they were skinned of their cladding and dissolved in boiling nitric acid. From that liquor, technicians separated out uranium and plutonium, powdery like cumin. This cycle, from acid to powder, lasted up to 36 hours, Dixon said - and it hadn't improved a jot in efficiency in the years she'd been there. The only change was the dwindling number of rods coming in, as Magnox reactors closed everywhere.

The day before I met Dixon, technicians had fed one final batch of spent fuel into acid - and that was that, the end of reprocessing. It marked Sellafield's transition from an operational facility to a depot devoted purely to storage and containment. The rods went in late in the evening, after hours of technical hitches, so the moment itself was anticlimactic. "They just dropped through, and you heard nothing. So it was like: 'OK, that's it? Let's go home,'" Dixon said. But the following morning, when I met her, she felt sombre, she admitted. "Everybody's thinking: 'What do we do? There's no fuel coming in.' I don't think it's really hit the team just yet."

The reprocessing plant's end was always coming. The pipes and steam lines, many from the 1960s, kept fracturing. Dixon's team was running out of spare parts that aren't manufactured any more. "Since December 2019," Dixon said, "I've only had 16 straight days of running the plant at any one time." Best to close it down - to conduct repairs, clean the machines and take them apart. Then, at last, the reprocessing plant will be placed on "fire watch", visited periodically to ensure nothing in the building is going up in flames, but otherwise left alone for decades for its radioactivity to dwindle, particle by particle.

On the other hand, high-level waste - the byproduct of reprocessing - is so radioactive that its containers will give off heat for thousands of years. It, too, will become harmless over time, but the scale of that time is planetary, not human. The number of radioactive atoms in the kind of iodine found in nuclear waste byproducts halves every 16m years. In comparison, consider how different the world looked a mere 7,000 years ago, when a determined pedestrian could set out from the Humber estuary, in northern England, and walk across to the Netherlands and then to Norway. Planning for the disposal of high-level waste has to take into account the drift of continents and the next ice age.

All radioactivity is a search for stability. Most of the atoms in our daily lives - the carbon in the wood of a desk, the oxygen in the air, the silicon in window glass - have stable nuclei. But in the atoms of some elements like uranium or plutonium, protons and neutrons are crammed into their nuclei in ways that make them unsteady - make them radioactive. These atoms decay, throwing off particles and energy over years or millennia until they become lighter and more stable. Nuclear fuel is radioactive, of course, but so is nuclear waste, and the only thing that can render such waste harmless is time.

Waste can travel incognito, to fatal effect: radioactive atoms carried by the wind or water, entering living bodies, riddling them with cancer, ruining them inside out. During the 1957 reactor fire at Sellafield, a radioactive plume of particles poured from the top of a 400-foot chimney. A few days later, some of these particles were detected as far away as Germany and Norway. Near Sellafield, radioactive iodine found its way into the grass of the meadows where dairy cows grazed, so that samples of milk taken in the weeks after the fire showed 10 times the permissible level. The government had to buy up milk from farmers living in 500 sq km around Sellafield and dump it in the Irish Sea.

From the outset, authorities hedged and fibbed. For three days, no one living in the area was told about the gravity of the accident, or even advised to stay indoors and shut their windows. Workers at Sellafield, reporting their alarming radiation exposure to their managers, were persuaded that they'd "walk [it] off on the way home", the Daily Mirror reported at the time. A government inquiry was then held, but its report was not released in full until 1988. For nearly 30 years, few people knew that the fire dispersed not just radioactive iodine but also polonium, far more deadly. The estimated toll of cancer cases has been revised upwards continuously, from 33 to 200 to 240. Sellafield took its present name only in 1981, in part to erase the old name, Windscale, and the associated memories of the fire.

The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. Sellafield hasn't suffered an accident of equivalent scale since the 1957 fire, but the niggling fear that some radioactivity is leaking out of the facility in some fashion has never entirely vanished. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined £10,000. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas. A government study concluded that radiation from Sellafield wasn't to blame. Perhaps, the study suggested, the leukaemia had an undetected, infectious cause.

It was no secret that Sellafield kept on site huge stashes of spent fuel rods, waiting to be reprocessed. This was lucrative work. An older reprocessing plant on site earned £9bn over its lifetime, half of it from customers overseas. But the pursuit of commercial reprocessing turned Sellafield and a similar French site into "de facto waste dumps", the journalist Stephanie Cooke found in her book In Mortal Hands. Sellafield now requires £2bn a year to maintain. What looked like a smart line of business back in the 1950s has now turned out to be anything but. With every passing year, maintaining the world's costliest rubbish dump becomes more and more commercially calamitous.

The expenditure rises because structures age, growing more rickety, more prone to mishap. In 2005, in an older reprocessing plant at Sellafield, 83,000 litres of radioactive acid - enough to fill a few hundred bathtubs - dripped out of a ruptured pipe. The plant had to be shut down for two years; the cleanup cost at least £300m. The year before the pandemic, a sump tank attached to a waste pond sprang a leak and had to be grouted shut. Around the same time, an old crack in a waste silo opened up again. It posed no health risk, Sellafield determined, so it was still dripping liquid into the ground when I visited. The silos are rudimentary concrete bins, built for waste to be tipped in, but for no other kind of access. Their further degradation is a sure thing. It all put me in mind of a man who'd made a house of ice in deepest winter but now senses spring around the corner, and must move his furniture out before it all melts and collapses around him.

Six years ago, the snake's creators put it to work in a demo at Sellafield. A 10-storey building called B204 had been Sellafield's first reprocessing facility, but in 1973, a rogue chemical reaction filled the premises with radioactive gas. Thirty-four workers were contaminated, and the building was promptly closed down. Gas, fuel rods and radioactive equipment were all left in place, in sealed rooms known as cells, which turned so lethal that humans haven't entered them since. The snake, though, could slither right in - through a hole drilled into a cell wall, and right up to a two-metre-high, double-walled steel vat once used to dissolve fuel in acid. Like so much else in B204, the vat was radioactive waste. It had to be disposed of, but it was too big to remove in one piece.

For six weeks, Sellafield's engineers prepared for the task, rehearsing on a 3D model, ventilating the cell, setting up a stream of air to blow away the molten metal, ensuring that nothing caught fire from the laser's sparks. Once in action, the snake took mere minutes to cut up the vat. But then the pieces were left in the cell. No one had figured out yet how to remove them. The snake hasn't been deployed since 2015, because other, more urgent tasks lie at hand.

As a project, tackling Sellafield's nuclear waste is a curious mix of sophistication and what one employee called the "poky stick" approach. On the one hand, it calls for ingenious machines like the laser snake, conceived especially for Sellafield. But the years-long process of scooping waste out can also feel crude and time-consuming - "like emptying a wheelie bin with a teaspoon", Phil Atherton, a manager working with the silo team, told me. New forms of storage have to be devised for the waste, once it's removed. These have to be secure and robust - but they can't be irretrievably secure and robust, because scientists may yet develop better ways to deal with waste. "You don't want to do anything that forecloses any prospective solutions," Atherton said. No possible version of the future can be discounted.

We walked on the roof of the silos, atop their heavy concrete caps. Below us, submerged in water, lay decades' worth of intermediate-level waste - not quite as radioactive as spent fuel rods, but more harmful than low-level paper towels. Most of it was swarf - the cladding skinned off fuel rods, broken into chunks three or four inches long. What Atherton really wanted to show off, though, was a new waste retrieval system: a machine as big as a studio apartment, designed from scratch over two decades and built at a cost of £100m. Its 13,500 working parts together weigh 350 tonnes. It perched on rails running the length of the building, so that it could be moved and positioned above an uncapped silo.

An operator sits inside the machine, reaching long, mechanical arms into the silo to fish out waste. In the water's gloom, cameras offer little help, he said: "You're mostly playing by feel." In the two preceding months, the team had pulled out enough waste to fill four skips. Eventually there will be two more retrieval machines in the silos, their arms poking and clasping like the megafauna cousins of those fairground soft-toy grabbers. Even so, it will take until 2050 to empty all the silos. The skips of extricated waste will be compacted to a third of their volume, grouted and moved into another Sellafield warehouse; at some point, they will be sequestered in the ground, in the GDF that is, at present, hypothetical.

Not far from the silos, I met John Cassidy, who has helped manage one of Sellafield's waste storage ponds for more than three decades - so long that a colleague called him "the Oracle". Cassidy's pond, which holds 14,000 cubic metres of water, resembles an extra-giant, extra-filthy lido planted in the middle of an industrial park. In the water, the skips full of used fuel rods were sometimes stacked three deep, and when one was placed in or pulled out, rods tended to tumble out on to the floor of the pond.

We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. On one floor, we stopped to look at a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV - a steamer trunk-sized thing with a yellow carapace, floating in the algal-green water. "You see the little arm at the end of it?" Cassidy said. "So it'll float down to the bottom of the pond, pick up a nuclear rod that has fallen out of a skip, and put it back into the skip." Sometimes, though, a human touch is required. This winter, Sellafield will hire professional divers from the US. Nuclear plants keep so much water on hand - to cool fuel, moderate the reactor's heat, or generate steam - that a class of specialist divers works only in the ponds and tanks at these plants, inspecting and repairing them. In Sellafield, these nuclear divers will put on radiation-proof wetsuits and tidy up the pond floor, reaching the places where robotic arms cannot go.

Two floors above, a young Sellafield employee sat in a gaming chair, working at a laptop with a joystick. He was manoeuvring an ROV fitted with a toilet brush - "a regular brush, bought at the store," he said, "just kind of reinforced with a bit of plastic tube". With a delicacy not ordinarily required of it, the toilet brush wiped debris and algae off a skip until the digits "9738", painted in black, appeared on the skip's flank. When they arrived over the years, during the heyday of reprocessing, the skips were unloaded into pools so haphazardly that Sellafield is now having to build an underwater map of what is where, just to know best how to get it all out. Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafield's knowledge of itself.

Instead, there have been only interim solutions, although to a layperson, even these seem to have been conceived in some scientist's intricate delirium. High-level waste, like the syrupy liquor formed during reprocessing, has to be cooled first, in giant tanks. Then it is vitrified: mixed with three parts glass beads and a little sugar, until it turns into a hot block of dirty-brown glass. (The sugar reduces the waste's volatility. "We like to get ours from Tate & Lyle," Eva Watson-Graham, a Sellafield information officer, said.) Since 1991, stainless steel containers full of vitrified waste, each as tall as a human, have been stacked 10-high in a warehouse. If you stand on the floor above them, Watson-Graham said, you can still sense a murmuring warmth on the soles of your shoes.

Even this elaborate vitrification is insufficient in the long, long, long run. Fire or flood could destroy Sellafield's infrastructure. Terrorists could try to get at the nuclear material. Governments change, companies fold, money runs out. Nations dissolve. Glass degrades. The ground sinks and rises, so that land becomes sea and sea becomes land. The contingency planning that scientists do today - the kind that wasn't done when the industry was in its infancy - contends with yawning stretches of time. Hence the GDF: a terrestrial cavity to hold waste until its dangers have dried up and it becomes as benign as the surrounding rock.

A glimpse of such an endeavour is available already, beneath Finland. From Helsinki, if you drive 250km west, then head another half-km down, you will come to a warren of tunnels called Onkalo. Other underground vaults have been built to store intermediate waste, but for briefer periods; one that opened in a salt cavern in New Mexico in 1999 will last merely 10,000 years. If Onkalo begins operating on schedule, in 2025, it will be the world's first GDF for spent fuel and high-level reactor waste - 6,500 tonnes of the stuff, all from Finnish nuclear stations. It will cost €5.5bn and is designed to be safe for a million years. The species that is building it, Homo sapiens, has only been around for a third of that time.

Constructed by a firm named Posiva, Onkalo has been hewn into the island of Olkiluoto, a brief bridge's length off Finland's south-west coast. When I visited in October, the birches on Olkiluoto had turned to a hot blush. The air was pure Baltic brine. In a van, we went down a steep, dark ramp for a quarter of an hour until we reached Onkalo's lowest level, and here I caught the acrid odour of a closed space in which heavy machinery has run for a long time. Up close, the walls were pimpled and jagged, like stucco, but at a distance, the rock's surface undulated like soft butter. Twice, we followed a feebly lit tunnel only to turn around and drive back up. "I still get lost sometimes here," said Sanna Mustonen, a geologist with Posiva, "even after all these years." After Onkalo takes in all its waste, these caverns will be sealed up to the surface with bentonite, a kind of clay that absorbs water, and that is often found in cat litter.

It took four decades just to decide the location of Finland's GDF. So much had to be considered, Mustonen said. How easy would it be to drill and blast through the 1.9bn-year-old bedrock below the site? How dry is it below ground? How stable will the waste be amidst the fracture zones in these rocks? What are the odds of tsunamis and earthquakes? How high will the sea rise? How will the rock bear up if, in the next ice age, tens of thousands of years from today, a kilometre or two of ice forms on the surface? Accidents had to be modelled. Fifteen years after the New Mexico site opened, a drum of waste burst open, leaking radiation up an exhaust shaft and then for a kilometre or so above ground. (The cause was human error: someone had added a wheat-based cat litter into the drum instead of bentonite.) In late 2021, Posiva submitted all its studies and contingency plans to the Finnish government to seek an operating license. The document ran to 17,000 pages.

In the 2120s, once it has been filled, Onkalo will be sealed and turned over to the state. Other countries also plan to banish their nuclear waste into GDFs. Sweden has already selected its spot, Switzerland and France are trying to finalise theirs. The UK's plans are at an earlier stage. A government agency, Nuclear Waste Services, is studying locations and talking to the people living there, but already the ballpark expenditure is staggering. "If the geology is simple, and we're disposing of just high- and intermediate-level waste, then we're thinking £20bn," said Jonathan Turner, a geologist with Nuclear Waste Services. The ceiling - for now - is £53bn. "It's a major project," Turner said, "like the Chunnel or the Olympics."

At the moment, Nuclear Waste Services is in discussions with four communities about the potential to host a GDF. Three are in Cumbria, and if the GDF does wind up in this neighbourhood, the Sellafield enterprise would have come full circle. The GDF will effectively entomb not just decades of nuclear waste but also the decades-old idea that atomic energy will be both easy and cheap - the very idea that drove the creation of Sellafield, where the world's earliest nuclear aspirations began.

On one of my afternoons in Sellafield, I was shown around a half-made building: a £1bn factory that would pack all the purified plutonium into canisters to be sent to a GDF. We ducked through half-constructed corridors and emerged into the main, as-yet-roofless hall. Eventually, the plant will be taller than Westminster Abbey - and as part of the decommissioning process, this structure too will be torn down once it has finished its task, decades from now. I stood there for a while, transfixed by the sight of a building going up even as its demolition was already foretold, feeling the water-filled coolness of the fresh, metre-thick concrete walls, and trying to imagine the distant, dreamy future in which all of Sellafield would be returned to fields and meadows again.

This article was amended on 16 December 2022. An earlier version said the number of cancer deaths caused by the Windscale fire had been revised upwards to 240 over time. It should have been cancer cases, not deaths. This has been corrected.

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Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site

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And here, over roughly 20m years, the uranium and other bits of space dust and debris cohered to form our planet in such a way that the violent tectonics of the young Earth pushed the uranium not towards its hot core but up into the folds of its crust.

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When Magdalena Perrotte arrived in the U.S. from France in 1982, she had a secret stashed in her purse—a large jar, filled with a precious golden liquid. “I had it carefully wrapped in a scarf, as well as some raw milk cheeses and cured saucisson—French ingredients you couldn’t buy in Florida,” Perotte, a former owner of Orlando institution Le Coq au Vin, recalls. “I became an expert at hiding food from customs officials.”

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When Magdalena Perrotte arrived in the U.S. from France in 1982, she had a secret stashed in her purse-a large jar, filled with a precious golden liquid. "I had it carefully wrapped in a scarf, as well as some raw milk cheeses and cured saucisson-French ingredients you couldn't buy in Florida," Perotte, a former owner of Orlando institution Le Coq au Vin, recalls. "I became an expert at hiding food from customs officials."

Four decades later, Perrotte still uses the same smuggled broth in her cooking. She boasts that this magical elixir, lovingly concocted by her mother in her Normandy kitchen, "is older than Taylor Swift."

"It just keeps giving, adding depth and richness to my cooking," Perrotte says. Sherry makers use old sherry to add character to newer wines, and Perrotte has extended her broth's lifespan over the years in a similar manner. "Once you achieve a certain magic in the pot, you keep it going by adding a little water, a little stock, some aromatic vegetables, herbs and spices," she says. "My mother's bouillon de Normandie is my secret weapon, but its taste would probably be unfamiliar to her now, because I've infused some Caribbean flavors over the decades."

When Perrotte makes her famous pot-au-feu ("pot on fire" or hot pot) for guests, does she tell them they're eating a broth that is almost middle-aged? "Of course not. Americans can be so naive about cuisine. They would refuse to eat it. So I tell them after," she admits with a laugh.

Pot-au-feu-also known as perpetual stew, forever soup, hunter's pot, bottomless broth, master stock, or mother broth-is a culinary tradition that is practiced around the world. Food historians zero into two global regions for the origins of soups simmered for years or even decades. The first is China, and more specifically in the cuisines of Canton and Fujian, where there's a rich tradition of making lou mei, or master stock, which is used to braise and poach meats. These master stocks are never discarded. They're handed down from one generation to the next, with some lasting several centuries.

The other likely source for this technique is France, where decades-old soups like Perrotte's have been satiating hungry peasants since time immemorial. "It's classic poor people food," says British food historian Annie Gray. "That may be why there's still a stigma attached to it."

Pot-au-feu is peppered in medieval texts as being popular in the dining rooms of European inns. British food historian Reay Tannahill described this culinary practice in her book Food in History: "Bread, water or ale, and a companaticum ('that which goes with the bread') from the cauldron, that provided an ever-changing broth enriched daily with whatever was available. The cauldron was rarely emptied except in preparation for the meatless weeks of Lent, so that while a hare, hen, or pigeon would give it a fine, meaty flavor, the taste of salted pork or cabbage would linger for days, even weeks."

She also describes rumors about long-simmering pots in France, such as one particular batch in Normandy that simmered constantly for over 300 years, while an even older pot, in Perpignan, had been bubbling since the 1400s until it finally met its demise in 1945 during World War II bombing raids.

On the other side of the world, a star of perpetual cuisine lives in a cauldron at Wattana Panich, a multi-generational family owned restaurant in Bangkok's Ekkamai neighborhood. Most customers come for the restaurant's rich beef noodle soup, made with stewed and raw beef, tripe, meatballs, organs, and spices. But the most important ingredient is the broth, which has been simmering for over 45 years. At the end of business each day, third-generation chef Nattapong Kaweenuntawong, assisted by his wife and mother, carefully strains and stores it to be used as the base for the next day's batch of soup. Its flavor is said to have an almost ethereal depth and richness.

Another famous batch of soup lives at Otafuku, a restaurant located in Tokyo's historic Asakusa quarter. This broth has been reheated every day since 1945, with cooks adding more water to it as it evaporates. The broth is the base of their oden, a traditional Japanese stew that can contain all sorts of ingredients, from eggs, tofu, and vegetables to shark meat, beef, fish balls, and whale tongue. The broth would be going on 100 today, but the previous batch was lost in 1945 during World War II bombing.

Perpetual broths are still being created today. Chef David Santos, who made his name cooking Portuguese-influenced cuisine at Louro in New York City and currently hosts the Um Segredo supper club, made his own after researching starter recipes for sourdough and kimchi. His version started with a basic bone broth and has evolved to use whatever ingredients he had. "It's been fed vegetables, roasted bones, meats and trimmings," says Santos. "The whole premise is to use what we have on hand. It gets fed something different every day, so the base is always kind of changing."

Santos believes that his broth also imparts health benefits. "The vitamins and collagens that come out of the bones and minerals from vegetables help fight off colds," he says. Santos drinks a pint of his perpetual soup each day-not just to reap the health benefits, he says, but to taste its flavor evolution.

But not everyone believes the perpetual broth hype. Food historian Ken Albala of Pacific University in Hawai'i is skeptical. "It seems that at a certain point you want to strain it and use it. I don't think its flavor would intensify or improve either," he says. "If it were reduced too much, it would get gluey and too intense. So really what's the point?"

Michael Colameco, former executive chef at the Ritz Carlton Central Park South and host of the show Mike Colameco's Real Food, disagrees, insisting the umami richness and complexity of aged broths has to be tasted to be believed. "It's more than bone broth. It's the base note of intensely complex dishes," he says. According to Colameco, the ultimate achievement in a perpetual broth is a distinct spicy-sour flavor, which indicates that some fermentation has occurred. "But this is where you start losing your average American diner," he says. They think fermented food equals rancid."

Gray concurs. "Thinking it's weird to keep a stock going for ages is very much a symptom of our disconnect with food and where it comes from," she says. The complexity and messiness of keeping a burbling pot of broth simmering for ages, she points out, is also directly at odds with current housekeeping practices. But we may be sacrificing flavor and tradition in favor of sterility.

For those who want to maintain their own perpetual broth, here's how to play it safe. "There's a fine line between fermented and spoiled," says Adaeze Okafor, a food safety expert at the Institute of Food Science and Technology in Cambridge, England. She says a broth should simmer at a temperature of 200°F at all times. Any lower, and bacteria may be able to survive, which is why a stock or broth should be promptly cooled and stored in the fridge when not on the stove. "Freezing it after is safer still," says Okafor "But it's not difficult to keep it safe for consumption."

Properly maintained, a broth, stock, or soup can become part of the family, similar to sourdough starters passed down through generations. "I have fond memories of a cassoulet that I enjoyed in Languedoc when I was a girl," says Perrotte. "That pot of bean stew had been simmering since 1948, my mother said. I marvel at the fact that I could still go there and enjoy a bowl from the same cauldron. What history!"
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The 'Perpetual Broths' That Simmer For Decades

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When Magdalena Perrotte arrived in the U.S. from France in 1982, she had a secret stashed in her purse-a large jar, filled with a precious golden liquid. "I had it carefully wrapped in a scarf, as well as some raw milk cheeses and cured saucisson-French ingredients you couldn't buy in Florida," Perotte, a former owner of Orlando institution Le Coq au Vin, recalls.

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7 facts you need to remember about Avatar before seeing The Way of Water

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7 facts you need to remember about Avatar before seeing The Way of Water

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We’ve waited 13 years for this: James Cameron's stereoscopic revolution, Avatar, is finally soaring back to theaters with a second splashy installment. In the sequel, which takes place more than a decade after the battle between Na’vi warriors and human soldiers that concluded the first film, Jake and his lifemate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have formed a family with four children — and one adopted teen — on Pandora. They’re trying their hardest to stay together, but new and ancient threats against their civilization loom on the horizon, forcing their family to migrate from the forest to the reefs.

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We've waited 13 years for this: James Cameron's stereoscopic revolution, Avatar, is finally soaring back to theaters with a second splashy installment. In the sequel, which takes place more than a decade after the battle between Na'vi warriors and human soldiers that concluded the first film, Jake and his lifemate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have formed a family with four children - and one adopted teen - on Pandora. They're trying their hardest to stay together, but new and ancient threats against their civilization loom on the horizon, forcing their family to migrate from the forest to the reefs.

It's understandable if some of that sounded like gibberish given how long ago the first movie came out. Here's everything you need to know to get back up to speed just in time for The Way of Water.

What is Pandora?

Pandora is a fictional extrasolar moon in the very real Alpha Centauri star system, the closest one to our own Solar System. The fifth moon of a fictional Saturn-sized gas giant dubbed Polyphemus, Pandora is rich in wild scenery and bioluminescent beings (and unobtanium, a rare and valuable compound). Discovered by humans at some point between 2050 and 2077, the most curious element is that all its vivid and exotic species - the Na'vi included - are connected by an electrochemical flow, effectively acting as a neural network. Pandora's gravity is 20% less than Earth's, and its atmosphere is deadly to humans thanks to its high concentration of carbon dioxide.

When did Avatar 1 take place?

Avatar 1 takes place between 2148 to 2154. Humans only became advanced enough to start the avatar program and conduct interstellar travel by the 22nd century, a little less than a hundred years after Pandora was first spotted in telescopes. Avatar 2 takes place 14 years after the events of the franchise starter.

What is the Avatar Program?

The Avatar Program, steered by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), allowed humans to live and breathe as Na'vi on Pandora. It used artificially created human-Na'vi hybrid bodies called avatars, which could be linked to the minds of their designated hosts and operated remotely.

Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) was a rare exception- because his DNA was nearly identical to his twin brother's, he could claim Tom's avatar as his own. Like normal Na'vi bodies, avatars are tall, slim, and blue, and can form electrochemical bonds with the flora and fauna of Pandora. The Program was set up to enhance the flow of information between humans and Na'vi: Some Na'vi attended an English language school, while humans like Jake, while in their avatar forms, were able to study Na'vi customs up close.

Why is Jake Sully important?

Every fairytale - even science fiction ones with slinky, blue aliens - needs a Chosen One, and Jake is that messianic savior of Na'vi who peacefully bridges the divide between humans and Pandora's indigenous people. Jake starts as an impetuous jock, a paraplegic renegade Marine veteran who winds up in the Avatar Program after his twin brother's death. Jake takes advantage of his renewed ability to walk in his brother's avatar body and gets to know the Omaticaya Na'vi clan because he's been promised the restoration of his human legs in exchange for giving intel to the bloodthirsty Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang).

But after spending time with the Na'vi, appreciating their way of life, and falling in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), Jake rebels. He turns against the Resources Development Administration (RDA) and leads the Na'vi into battle to drive the humans from Pandora. Jake is also the first known human to successfully transfer his consciousness into his avatar body permanently.

What happened to Sigourney Weaver's character?

Dr. Augustine, a xenobotanist and linguist at the helm of the Avatar program, respects the Na'vi and is less consumed by greed than those who fund her research. Instead, she wants to learn about the Na'vi's spiritual and scientific connection to their home, and earn their trust in the process.

Quaritch kills Grace's physical body, but her consciousness was salvaged by the Omaticaya Na'vi clan, who transferred her spirit over to the Tree of Souls. The neural link between Grace and the divine tree allowed her memories to be uploaded to Pandora's ecosystem. In a sense, Grace lives on after Avatar, although her human body is dead.

What happened to Stephen Lang's character?

Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch in Avatar. Lightstorm Entertainment/Disney

During the clash between the RDA and Na'vi, Quaritch and Jake fight an epic battle. Jake makes a final attempt at diplomacy, but Quaritch lunges at Jake's avatar body with a knife. Just before he strikes, Neytiri comes to her soulmate's aid and kills Quaritch with her bow.

However, Quaritch and his soldiers have their DNA embedded in their dog tags. Just a little piece of Avatar trivia to keep in mind.

Why and how were the humans defeated?

The Na'vi win the battle, albeit at a heavy cost, shortly after Quaritch's demise. The RDA surrender and return to Earth, while xenoanthropologist Norm Spellman (Joel David Moore) and civilian scientist Max Patel (Dileep Rao) stay on Pandora with Jake and his new Na'vi family.

Of course, as we know from the Avatar 2 trailer, this wasn't the end of the conflict. You can find out more about what happens to Jake and his impossibly tall, blue-hued pals in theaters soon.
Avatar 2: The Way of Water hits theaters on December 16.

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7 facts you need to remember about 'Avatar' before seeing 'The Way of Water'

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We've waited 13 years for this: James Cameron's stereoscopic revolution, Avatar, is finally soaring back to theaters with a second splashy installment. In the sequel, which takes place more than a decade after the battle between Na'vi warriors and human soldiers that concluded the first film, Jake and his lifemate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) have formed a family with four children - and one adopted teen - on Pandora.

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I knew ahead of time—how could I not? —that reading my own obituary would be unsettling. 

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The Alarming Deceptions at the Heart of an Astounding New Chatbot

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The Alarming Deceptions at the Heart of an Astounding New Chatbot

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It wasn’t my manner of death. In fact, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out how I died; the obituary didn’t give any details beyond saying that I had passed away in April of last year. (Asking the writer about my cause of death didn’t help. “Charles Seife’s cause of death has not been released.”) Nor did I find the attempt to summarize my entire life and personality into couple of sentences particularly disturbing. I was even amused by the way my legacy was transformed into a cliché. (“Charles Seife will be fondly remembered by his friends and family for his wit, intelligence, and enthusiasm for life.”) No—the real problem had to do more with how the obituary was written than what it contained.

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I knew ahead of time-how could I not? -that reading my own obituary would be unsettling. What I didn't anticipate was just why it would be so disturbing.

It wasn't my manner of death. In fact, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't figure out how I died; the obituary didn't give any details beyond saying that I had passed away in April of last year. (Asking the writer about my cause of death didn't help. "Charles Seife's cause of death has not been released.") Nor did I find the attempt to summarize my entire life and personality into couple of sentences particularly disturbing. I was even amused by the way my legacy was transformed into a cliché. ("Charles Seife will be fondly remembered by his friends and family for his wit, intelligence, and enthusiasm for life.") No-the real problem had to do more with how the obituary was written than what it contained.

Given the recent headlines, it's probably not too much of a surprise that the obituary was written by a computer program: specifically, it was drafted by Davinci-003, one of OpenAI 's artificial intelligence text generators. Since the nonprofit group made ChatGPT readily available to the public in late November, the media has been marveling at its ability to generate humanlike text. ChatGPT is optimized for back-and-forth chats; Davinci-003 is a sibling of ChatGPT, and its specialty is writing texts. ChatGPT and OpenAI's other bots are chatting away so convincingly that pundits are already beginning to speculate about the obsolescence of everything from traditional search engines to high-school essay assignments.

The hype is well deserved. For my first experiment, I had the A.I. write a villanelle, a rather difficult poetic form, about the death of a pet gerbil. And I'll be damned if it didn't deliver. ("He was so loving and never did offend/ I'd give him treats and he'd squeak with joy/ And now I must find a way to mend.") It was maudlin and silly, and the scansion wasn't always perfect, but it was definitely a passable villanelle, and one that would probably beat, say, a typical Rod McKuen offering in a slam-off. If you ever played around with classic chat bot like Eliza, you know how many leagues ahead this program is, not just in its ability to understand a query and respond to it appropriately, but also to generate something so seemingly creative on demand-well, that little poem impressed me far more than the time I witnessed an IBM computer cause then-world-chess-champion Garry Kasparov to blow a gasket. And that's with the full awareness that the chatbot, on some level, is little more than a souped-up version of the autocomplete feature on your phone.

After a few more pet elegies-in haiku; in ersatz 15 th-century French-I turned to something a bit more practical. The online buzz from fellow academics that the bot was good enough to get passing grades on assigned essays. So I gave it a question from a midterm I gave my Journalism 101 class this semester. Its answer would've probably earned a C or C-. It had a few serious misunderstandings of the material, but it wasn't totally off the mark. The program had inputted the question, parsed it, extracted the desired task, and output a poor-quality but appropriate answer-the sort of stuff that wouldn't be out of place in a pile of test papers that unprepared undergraduates would produce. In other words, it would've had a decent shot of passing the Turing test.

In 1950, mathematician Alan Turing set out to determine whether machines can think, and his resulting paper set the goalposts for artificial-intelligence researchers ever since. The idea was that if a machine could imitate a human so well that nobody could tell the difference-that an observer couldn't reliably figure out whether the being communicating with him was natural or artificial-that the difference was essentially moot. Being able to imitate consciousness with a high enough degree of accuracy was tantamount to having consciousness. Not all philosophers and scientists agreed with Turing. Philosopher John Searle made a fairly convincing argument that mere simulacra of understanding language can exist without real comprehension. But the Turing test became the goal of chat-bot designers all around the world: If you can imitate a human well enough, you will in some sense have made a machine think.

When I asked Davinci-003 to write my obituary, I wasn't thinking of the Turing test at first; it was more a bit of whimsy than a real attempt to understand the innards of the AI machine spitting output in response to my commands. But as I read, I became more and more uncomfortable-and aware that it was telling me something interesting about its innards. It had to do with mistakes in the obituary-that is, mistakes beyond the fact that I am obviously still alive. After introducing me as a "renowned author, professor, and mathematician," (arguably true) the obituary went on to state that I was born on Dec. 27, 1966, in Cincinnati. (Wrong date, wrong year, wrong city.) It's not too surprising that the program would make up information to fill in gaps in its knowledge-but it did more than just that. It embellished with abandon, even when it didn't have to. The program declared that I had graduated from Princeton University in 1988 (right school, wrong year) and went on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from Berkeley (this has no basis in reality). The obituary correctly identified me as the author of the books and Decoding the Universe, but I certainly didn't write From E=mc2 to Schrodinger's Cat, even though I have written extensively about quantum mechanics and relativity. (As far as I can tell, no such book exists.) It listed the names of courses I taught at NYU-all not just wrong, but subjects from the wrong department.

The bot clearly knew something about me-it had gotten quite a bit right-and I was puzzled about why it was doing so much fabrication. So I asked it where it got its information from: "For each sentence in the above obituary, please indicate whether the information came from an external source (and cite the source); if none is found, so indicate."

With almost no hesitation, the A.I. spit out a bunch of references. It declared that my Wikipedia page was its source for the courses I teach (the Wikipedia page doesn't have, and never has had, such a list.) My education at Berkeley, it said, came from my New York Times obituary, which it cited with a URL that looked like it had come from the Times website: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/books/charles-seife-dead.html. Of course, no such obituary ever existed. The A.I. was making up BS references to back up its BS facts.

This wasn't because of the lie at the heart of the obituary-I'm still alive, after all, and maybe that could have given the machine the idea to fabricate, say, my love of soccer. But even when I tried to get the A.I. to do purely non-creative tasks (such as detecting plagiarism in a piece of prose), it would-for lack of a better word-lie. When I gave it a passage that I had written a number of years ago about the NSA, it flagged one sentence as having come from an ACLU webpage entitled "NSA Surveillance: What You Need to Know" and another as being cribbed from "The Impossibly Large Dataset Behind Everything We Do," which appeared in Wired magazine. The ACLU and Wiredwould be natural places to find articles about the NSA, but both references are entirely made up.

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What I find so creepy about OpenAI's bots is not that they seem to exhibit creativity; computers have been doing creative tasks such as generating original proofs in Euclidean geometry since the 1950s. It's that I grew up with the idea of a computer as an automaton bound by its nature to follow its instructions precisely; barring a malfunction, it does exactly what its operator - and its program-tell it to do. On some level, this is still true; the bot is following its program and the instructions of its operator. But the way the program interprets the operator's instructions are not the way the operator thinks. Computer programs are optimized not to solve problems, but instead to convince its operator that it has solved those problems. It was written on the package of the Turing test-it's a game of imitation, of deception. For the first time, we're forced to confront the consequences of that deception.

Now we've got a computer program that would be sociopathic if it were alive. Even when it's not supposed to, even when it has a way out, even when the truth is known to the computer and it's easier to spit it out rather than fabricate something-the computer still lies. The implicit effort that's put in to create a believable facsimile of a source is every bit as deep as the effort to generate an answer in the first place. It's BS, but it's exquisite in its detail, a Potemkin village where all the tiniest details are thought of. It's not that the computer can't fulfill my request properly-it would have been trivial to program the bot to say that it couldn't find an external reference for what it was saying-but it simply won't. This isn't the unthinking computer servant of old, but something different, something that's been so optimized for deception that it can't do anything but deceive its operator.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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The Alarming Deceptions at the Heart of an Astounding New Chatbot

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I knew ahead of time-how could I not? -that reading my own obituary would be unsettling. What I didn't anticipate was just why it would be so disturbing. It wasn't my manner of death.

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asianimage.co.uk - announcements | arif patel preston dubai uk.

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asianimage.co.uk - announcements | arif patel preston dubai uk.

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Congratulations to Arif Patel Preston Dubai UK and EP Properties for Acquiring Blackburn Innovation Center...

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Arif Patel (UK/Preston/Dubai) - Congratulations to Arif Patel and EP Properties for Acquiring Blackburn Innovation Center and Fusion House at...

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When should you eat? It’s just as important as what you eat.

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When should you eat? It’s just as important as what you eat.

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We crave food at night—which made sense back when humans only cared about surviving the day. But science shows that to live longer, healthier lives, we need to override our instincts.

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By Michael Crupain, Michael Croizen, Ted Spiker

Many of us may crave midnight snacks, but our bodies function better when we eat earlier.

Photograph by Jan Nevidal, Getty Images

Heading into the winter holidays, 'tis the time for eating-and plenty of it. But food can affect your body differently throughout the day, so let's take a closer look at that internal timepiece.

Understanding your biological clock is the key to shifting your body to optimal function. Here's how it works: All energy sources originate with the sun. But for times when light is scarce, plants and animals had to develop ways to store energy and reduce energy consumption to survive.

The biological clock is your body's automated energy conservation system, influencing behaviour on a cellular level from sunset to sunset. It achieves this by sending messages throughout your body via hormones. The signals tell us the best time to sleep and eat on a relatively consistent basis day after day so that you follow the natural cues efficiently. This cycle is your circadian rhythm.

Food and drink affects the human body differently at various times during the day.

Photograph by Gilaxia, Getty Images

Living out of sync

Some people live in opposition to their bodies' natural instincts-and this is an important example of how food plays a role in the rhythm of life. Take shift workers, who work nights and sleep during the day. Studies examining the health of these populations find that they have increased rates of both sleep issues and obesity. People who work the night shift tend to gain more weight than people with normal nine-to-five schedules.

One study of nurses found that when they switched to a night shift, they actually burned fewer calories than they did when working days, even though they were engaging in the same activities. Other studies determined that shift workers have a 40 percent increased risk of cardiovascular disease as well as heart attacks, strokes, and abnormal heartbeats, compared with those working daytime hours.

Although we don't completely understand the cause, the main suspect behind the disturbances in the health and metabolism of shift workers is that they are fighting their natural circadian rhythms-and their body's instinctual notions of when to eat.

Shift workers may be going against their circadian rhythms when it comes to eating, but those who eat an earlier lunch benefit in the long term.

Photograph by Getty Images

Circadian rhythm and your food clock

Our body clock and our food clock have a natural tension point: We crave food at night, but we function better when we eat earlier. Research has shown that in the absence of normal light and time cues, people are naturally the hungriest around the time that would correspond to 8 p.m. and least hungry at the time that would correspond to 8 a.m.

That basic instinct was an advantage in the early days of human existence, but in modern times it may be hurting us. One of the body's most important hormones for dealing with food is insulin, which regulates the amount of glucose in the blood.

Studies of animals have demonstrated that the body's secretion of and response to insulin follows a circadian rhythm. Scientists have examined the time of day mammals are the most sensitive and resistant to the effects of insulin; they found that sensitivity is highest during active phases (when they are awake). When a mouse is active, its muscles are moving and it needs energy (in the form of glucose) to perform optimally. Insulin helps move glucose into the muscle cells.

On the other hand, animals are normally the most insulin resistant during their typical sleeping hours. Studies suggest the same phenomena occur in humans. It turns out that mealtime has a big effect on what happens to your blood sugar levels. If you eat the same meal in the morning and at night, your blood sugar will increase more in the evening than in the morning.

Eating the same meal early, like for breakfast, and at night can affect blood sugar levels differently.

Photograph by Getty Images

Fat cells also appear the most insulin sensitive early in the day, with a peak at noon; they are about 50 percent more sensitive midday than they are at midnight. This means that your body is primed to eat at certain times. In fact, eating at the "wrong" time can throw off everything. In a study of mice, those given access to food at the "wrong" time, when they typically sleep, ate more when food first became available-10 percent more total calories during a day-and gained more weight.

Research is starting to show the same effects in humans. One study on weight loss that compared the times of eating among participants over a 20-week period revealed that those who ate lunch earlier lost more weight than those who ate it later. A related study found that those who ate later burned less energy than those who ate earlier.

A gutsy rhythm

Your gut has more to do with your eating habits than just the hungry roar that comes from it. In fact, it's manipulated by an ecosystem of bacteria-called a microbiome-that influence many, many parts and systems of your body. The bacterial species that inhabit your microbiome can change-and that's a good thing; people with more diversity of bacteria in their gut seem to be healthier than people with less.

You can influence that diversity by not only what you put in your mouth but also when you eat. In studies of mice, it has been found that many types of gut bacteria populations fluctuate throughout the day on a rhythmic cycle. In one study that analysed mice faeces, researchers found that when the mice were active, they saw more signs of cellular activity that promoted metabolism, cell growth, and repair. When the mice were resting, the researchers found more genes related to activities like detoxification.

Gut health, and by association brain health, is affected by what you eat.

Photograph by Photographs By Getty Images

Earlier is better

Research has shown that our body's natural rhythm is to want food later, even though it has a negative effect on our overall health. Why are our body's food cravings out of sync with our circadian rhythm? During periods when we didn't know when our next meals would come, the human body may have evolved the need for a food-storage mechanism. In that era, humans didn't live long enough to experience the harms of late-night eating-and in any case, the body only cared about surviving the next day, not the next decade.

Today, we no longer need that extensive storage ability because food is plentiful. We have to consciously override our ancient instincts and make smart choices about when to eat-and that means more in the morning, less later on.

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When should you eat? It's just as important as what you eat.

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By Michael Crupain, Michael Croizen, Ted Spiker Many of us may crave midnight snacks, but our bodies function better when we eat earlier. Photograph by Jan Nevidal, Getty Images Heading into the winter holidays, 'tis the time for eating-and plenty of it.

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Vegan Cheese Is Ready to Compete With Dairy. Is the World Ready to Eat It?

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Vegan Cheese Is Ready to Compete With Dairy. Is the World Ready to Eat It?

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Long considered a punchline, vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves.

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Vegan Cheese Is Ready to Compete With Dairy. Is the World Ready to Eat It?

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Long considered a punchline, vegan cheese has quietly but steadily infiltrated mainstream supermarket shelves.

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What is 'Shrinkflation'? And how can shoppers avoid it?

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If it feels like there are fewer chips in your Doritos bag these days, you're not imagining things. There are, and it's all thanks to a pesky and enduring business practice known as "shrinkflation." Here's everything you need to know:

What is 'shrinkflation'?

When the cost of doing business goes up, one way companies compensate is by shrinking package and product sizes without actually lowering prices - meaning consumers are paying the same or more but getting less. It's a phenomenon dubbed "shrinkflation," and it's essentially "the inflation you're not supposed to see," per The Associated Press. While the practice is usually common in times of rising prices, "we happen to be in a tidal wave at the moment," shrinkflation expert Edgar Dworsky told AP, as manufacturers work to "balance" the increased costs of gas, labor, and supplies against sales and profit, he added in a separate conversation with The New York Times.

Companies know the average consumer is likely to notice a price hike. What shoppers are less likely to notice is a change in a product's net weight, or a tiny cost-saving alteration to its contents. "If the orange juice container goes from 64 ounces to 59 ounces, they're probably not going to notice," Dworsky told NPR in 2021.

After downsizing in the name of their bottom lines, companies might distract shoppers with new, colorful packages or bright labels in an attempt to prevent them wising up to the sneaky change. Once a product falls victim to shrinkflation, a return to the larger, pre-inflation sizing is "kind of rare," Dworsky said.

Is this legal?

It might seem shady, but "companies can change prices of their products however they want," University of Texas at El Paso economics professor Tom Fullerton told El Paso's KFOX. Shrinkflation is legal so long as products are clearly labeled and the business itself isn't up to anything unfair or deceptive.

What are some examples?

Toilet paper is a common offender. "Virtually every brand ... has been downsized over the years," Dworsky wrote in a recent report published on mouseprint.org, his dedicated shrinkflation-tracking website. A post from September 2022 highlighted how Charmin recently downsized the number of sheets in its Mega toilet paper rolls of the ultra-strong variety - 264 sheets to 242 - while the price, in typical shrinkflation fashion, stayed the same (at least per Dworsky's analysis). Dworsky has chronicled sneaky downsizing in packs of diapers, shampoo bottles, Miracle-Gro plant food containers, and tissue boxes, among a number of other products. In July 2022, for instance, one dedicated Mouse Print reader discovered how Quaker Oats Company had shrunk boxes of Cap'n Crunch peanut butter cereal from 12.5 ounces to 11.4, while the price remained unchanged.

The r/shrinkflation subreddit is also a helpful tracking resource for the eagle-eyed shopper.

How can I quickly identify shrinkflation myself?

Dworsky keeps an eye out for common shrinkflation calling cards, like the phrases "new and improved" or "family size." These can signal deceptive packaging techniques or even what Dworsky refers to as "skimpflation" - when companies pass on a price increase by reformulating a product with cheaper ingredients. Most important, though, is to keep an eye on a product's weight.

"Look at the products you buy all the time, note what the net weight is," Dworsky told the . "When you go back to the store, double check that it's still the same as your last bag, box or bottle." (For paper goods, watch the net count.)

How can I avoid it?

Switching between brands, or to a more generic product, is a good way to circumvent shrinkflation, CNBC suggests. Consumers can also try and submit a complaint with the manufacturer, which may be enough to score some coupons and save some money (though not enough to stop shrinkflation in its tracks, of course), Dworsky told CNBC. Financial advice website SmartAsset recommends planning your meals, avoiding impulse purchases, shopping the sale items, and using credit card rewards to save money while shrinkflation is rampant.

Shoppers should also do some research before heading to the store, suggests Tamara Szames, a Canadian retail industry adviser, at The Canadian Press. That way, you avoid getting taken for a ride, and can identify a good deal when you see one. "When we're talking about fashion, the closest thing to an ingredient in food is fabric," Szames said. "If your favorite sweater used to be 100 percent cashmere, you should look closely at the label before you buy it again. It's now maybe 90 percent cashmere and 10 percent polyester."

But in some ways, for some people, shrinkflation could also represent an opportunity, posits. Think of it as a chance "to wean yourself off packaged foods," the outlet writes. "Retailers might be able to make cereal boxes and granola bars smaller, but they can't shrink a pound of apples."

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If it feels like there are fewer chips in your Doritos bag these days, you're not imagining things. There are, and it's all thanks to a pesky and enduring business practice known as "shrinkflation."

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In Chris Herring’s recent history of the New York basketball team, we get a behind-the-scenes look at the sports commentariat’s fixation on grit and toughness.

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The Miami Heat are the hardest-working team in today's NBA. If you pay attention to the league, you will consistently hear this message. It's an identity sold by the team, its players, and the media in and outside of Miami. The organization gets the best out of its players because of a militaristic approach to conditioning and a team-first attitude and tireless work ethic. This is "Heat Culture." It's not for everyone, only those willing to put in the work. BOOKS IN REVIEW

In Heat Culture, players are held accountable by their coaches and teammates, and vice versa. In March of this year, Jimmy Butler-the perfect avatar for Heat Culture-got into a public spat with head coach Erik Spoelstra and Heat lifer Udonis Haslem.

The Heat were losing to the Golden State Warriors, who were playing without Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green. After a 19-0 run by the Warriors, Butler began yelling at Spoelstra in the huddle. Haslem, backing up Spoelstra, threatened to fight Butler. In the postgame interview, Spoelstra explained the altercation by saying,"We have a competitive, gnarly group and we were getting our asses kicked."

For any other team, such an incident would seem like a public fracturing, but for the Heat, it was framed as a positive consequence of their identity. By the next game, all three were smiling and joking together again.

Reading Chris Herring's book Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks is a good way to understand where the current iteration of Heat Culture comes from, and how the general worship, by commentators and fans, of toughness, grit, and other sports clichés emerged.

Pat Riley, the former Showtime Lakers coach, Knicks coach, and current Miami Heat president, made the New York Knicks into one of the premier teams of the 1990s by instituting a similar atmosphere of hard work, physicality, and a defense-first mentality. There was also an abiding element of violence and retribution, back when bare-knuckle aggression was still permitted in the league.

In the book, Riley and the Knicks are portrayed as almost mythical characters. They are giants among men whose failures and successes were born from their innate character. Herring's history is supposed to be a moral tale about the way basketball used to be played, and the virtues that its commentators still hold up. But it also paints an image of a bygone time that is both romantic and archaic. It's a time that is easy to look back on fondly because there has thankfully been tremendous progress made in terms of the care and protection of players-of their health, mental and physical.

Current Issue

Herring's history of the 1990s Knicks begins with the team's architect, Pat Riley. The explanation of his personality, his so-called toughness, begins with a story of him at 9 years old, hiding in the garage at home for hours after being chased by a bully who was wielding a knife. At the dinner table that evening, Riley's father told the young boy's older brothers to take him back to the park the next day. The father had seen enough of his son being bullied and wanted him taken back to the park in order for the boy to confront his bullies and learn to face his tormentors head-on. Forever after, he saw himself as a fighter.

Riley, being a tough guy, was attracted to others with the same moxie. He decided to marry his former girlfriend Chris Rodstrom two years after taking her to a boxing match. She wore a white dress to the match, and during the fight, blood from the combatants splattered on the dress. When Rodstrom remained unfazed by the incident, Riley told himself, "This is my kind of girl."

Though he was the conductor behind one of the most entertaining dynasties in NBA history with the Lakers of the 1980s, Riley's inspiration for his philosophy with the Knicks came from that team's antithesis: the hardscrabble and dirty-playing "Bad Boys" Detroit Pistons, who won championships through brutality as much as skill. So the mythology of Riley depended less on something original than something borrowed, in effect the desire to take violent ambitions that had been successful somewhere else and give them his own personal sheen.

From the start, the Knicks players learned how demanding Riley could be. He wasn't "a coach who concerned himself with pacing. Rest days weren't a consideration. Every game was a battle, and every battle had to be won."

Herring describes the scene after the first 15 minutes of Riley's first training camp experience with the team:

Each Knick would take part in "17s," which meant seventeen sideline-to-sideline runs in under a minute's time, briefly resting, then repeating the process over and over until the coach saw fit. A few players grew light-headed from the exertion and sweltering conditions in the gym, which left the floor so wet that the team was forced to move to another court during practice.

So much of the book is, understandably, focused on Riley and his mystique, but he is only part of the story. Along with detailing the behind-the-scenes drama, Blood in the Garden examines pivotal games and series during the Knicks' run, and stars like Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, John Starks, Mark Jackson, Doc Rivers, Charles Smith, and Derek Harper all get their own heroic stories. While they don't stand as tall as Riley in the book, they do receive similar grandstanding treatment of their unique characters and their individual successes and failures.

John Starks's impulsive nature is traced back to his childhood and showcased through an encounter with a white classmate when he was a sixth grader in Tulsa. The classmate knocked Starks's books out of his hands, and when Starks told him to pick them up, the boy called Starks the n-word. Starks fought back and beat him up. He was suspended for his reaction and told to leave school, but on his way home, he took the wrong bus. When he realized his error, he used the last bit of money he had to go in the opposite direction. He eventually found his way home by using landmarks that he recognized.

This memory reveals that Starks "was someone who often dug his heels in and doubled down on things, even in moments when he appeared to be totally lost." The story is used as the prologue for why an ice-cold Starks kept shooting against the Houston Rockets in Game 1 of the 1994 NBA Finals. Houston won the game and Starks finished three for 18, with 10 straight misses.

Like Riley and others, Starks had a personality that accounted for both his successes and his failures. He went ​​six for 11 in the next game, which New York won. More importantly, because his shooting ran hot and cold from game to game and quarter to quarter, Riley, who was loyal, kept his mercurial shooting guard in the games and allowed him to keep shooting even when he struggled-sometimes to the ultimate detriment of the team.

Although Anthony Mason wasn't the biggest name on the team, at least in the beginning, none of the players are given a bigger heroic treatment in the book than he is-mainly because out of everyone, Mason has the most mythical and tragic story to tell and is representative of what those New York Knicks were. He was their avatar.

Mason is shown as both the symbol of all of Riley's principles and also his most consistent enemy outside of management and Riley's own paranoia. Mason began as a relatively unknown training camp invitee but turned into a central figure for the Knicks on offense and defense especially. But where Riley was tough and controlled, Mason was tough and explosive. The first chapter of the book begins with Riley looking ruffled during his first practice because Mason was trading blows with Xavier McDaniel.

More fights would ensue. Mason fought with teammates, with coaches, and with Riley, who suspended him several times. In a chapter titled "The Enigmatic Life of Anthony Mason," Herring goes through a history of Mason's life, in and outside of basketball, and relates how his reckless behavior was also accompanied by sensitivity.

When he was in college, Mason cussed out his coach at Tennessee State for subbing him out after a careless turnover. When he sat down on the bench, tears filled his eyes. He was sad, not because he was angry but because it was his last game with the school and his mother had made the trip from New York to see him play in person for the first time.

He got in constant trouble at school, was bailed out from jail several times, borrowed and crashed a teammate's car, and generally was a handful for coaches, teammates, and friends. He fought people at bars, flattened his own son when the young boy challenged him to a basketball game, and was arrested on charges of statutory rape-which were ultimately dismissed when DNA evidence failed to link him to the crime.

In the most serious incident in the book, Mason almost died in a car accident and almost killed several others when he totaled his white 560 Mercedes-Benz after drinking and driving at over 100 miles per hour on the highway. There were five people in the car, all of whom miraculously survived. Mason was saved from imprisonment by some friends who were in a car behind him: They loaded him up into their car and drove away before the police arrived.

On the other hand, after college teammate Cordell Johnson shared his ties and dress slacks with Mason, who didn't own any because he grew up poor, Mason shared everything he had with Johnson as an act of gratitude. He was a womanizer, but he was also the consummate wingman. One of his teammates married the woman Mason introduced him to.

He could be stern with his children but loved them deeply. He was very religious and went to church regularly, often ending his days in prayer. He was dedicated to his mother and would make late-night stops to leave thousands of dollars on her dresser. He made time for beat reporters and sometimes bought them drinks. He always had time for children, especially those less fortunate, whom he saw as a reflection of himself and his childhood. Patrick Ewing famously refused to sign autographs for kids in public, and Mason is reportedly still mad about that, well into retirement.

Reading Blood in the Garden was similar to watching Michael Jordan's Last Dance, in the sense that it is a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most iconic basketball players and teams in NBA history, but it is also an exercise in burnishing a legacy-making a legend out of what was much less glamorous, much more ordinary. It's a process that is almost unavoidable in sports, and history can remain so stagnant and sacred that any accusation of something being "less than" is likely to incite ire, or at least a fresh round of screaming matches on ESPN. That is another way of saying that it is hard to look back at different eras of sports with fresh eyes, because so much of its history is written through rose-tinted lenses.

Mason and Riley are the great embodiments of this problem. As the book is written in reflection, it begins with the premise that these men were almost supernatural, men unlike other men, larger than life, and then uses their character and personality to explain what happened to them and the team. It could very well be an ancient Greek epic poem.

This problem isn't necessarily a bad one. It's unavoidable in sports discourse because sports are an arena for mythmaking, and considering the power that individual players and coaches can have over the fate of a team, it makes sense that the storytelling follows the emotion of witnessing great players and coaches take a middling team and transform it into one of the best in the league over a handful of years. Heroic stories, tales of individuals bending the world to their will and overcoming their station through their unique genius and perseverance, especially as a man, are one of the most consistent narratives that human beings exchange, and sports present endless opportunities involving content and characters for that.

It can't be dismissed that the brutality and violence of the 1990s NBA, and of the Knicks in particular, appeal to a certain idea of masculinity. They were men playing like men, beating each other and outdueling their opponents rather than shying away and complaining. If one isn't careful while reading the book, it is possible to come away repeating the mantra of many retired NBA players these days, saying that they just don't make players like that anymore.

Looking at the consequences of that kind of play, and that view of being a man, in terms of shortening the physical careers of many players and the mental health issues that they suffered in silence-or suffered while others looked at their reckless behavior as just personality quirks-it feels like a great thing for the league and for the world that we have moved beyond that time.

Still, the bootstrapping story of the Knicks remains appealing to a certain sort of fan. In the current era of NBA basketball fandom, everything has been reduced to a question of "rings." It is an extreme way of looking at the world of sports, which champions ultimate glory, because everyone dreams of winning but knows that ultimate glory is often beside the point. It would only take a few minutes of conversation with an NBA fan of a team that doesn't win often for someone to realize what people truly want from sports.

What people want from their team, at least if the team isn't going to be a perennial winner, is a great story. They want characters who can win them over, and a team that has an identity a person can aspire to and embed themselves in-an identity that can make them feel part of something great, something representative, something with purpose.

The Knicks were failures in the sense that they never reached the ultimate glory they aspired to. But failures are often important. The underdog, the hero, doesn't always have to succeed to end up immortalized. An underdog can become a symbol-a symbol that endures through the changing times.

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The Miami Heat are the hardest-working team in today's NBA. If you pay attention to the league, you will consistently hear this message. It's an identity sold by the team, its players, and the media in and outside of Miami.