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Microtek, one of the leaders in the power product market of India has announced that it has supplied order of 7,500 oxygen concentrators (OCTs) of 10 liters per

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Subodh Gupta Says We plan to expand our portfolio of healthcare line of products with the manufacturing of blood glucose monitors.

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Subodh Gupta Says We plan to expand our portfolio of healthcare line of products with the manufacturing of blood glucose monitors.

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“We have set up a manufacturing plant for healthcare products in Vishakhapatnam and started producing oxygen concentrators in August 2021. The response from the market has been overwhelming. We are very proud to complete bulk order of 7,500 10LPM oxygen concentrators for ONGC in a record time of 15 days. We plan to expand our portfolio of healthcare line of products with the manufacturing of blood glucose monitors, nebulizers, dialysis machines, thermometers, and ultrasound monitors besides other products,” said Subodh Gupta, CMD, Microtek International Private Limited.

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New Delhi [India], March 15 (ANI): Microtek, one of the leaders in the power product market of India has announced that it has supplied order of 7,500 oxygen concentrators (OCTs) of 10 liters per minute (LPM) capacity each to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) recently under the PM CARES initiative.

ONGC, on behalf of the government of India, plans to send these OCTs to primary health centers to prepare them to combat COVID-19 waves that the country may witness in the future.

Microtek forayed into the healthcare segment last year at a time when the country's healthcare system had witnessed an unprecedented crisis in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Better known as Microtek OXYFLOW, these devices can supply a continuous stream of oxygen at flow rates of up to 10 liters per minute (LPM).

"We have set up a manufacturing plant for healthcare products in Vishakhapatnam and started producing oxygen concentrators in August 2021. The response from the market has been overwhelming. We are very proud to complete bulk order of 7,500 10LPM oxygen concentrators for ONGC in a record time of 15 days. We plan to expand our portfolio of healthcare line of products with the manufacturing of blood glucose monitors, nebulizers, dialysis machines, thermometers, and ultrasound monitors besides other products," said Subodh Gupta, CMD, Microtek International Private Limited.

The state-run and private firms have stepped in to help facilitate efforts to combat the further waves of the COVID 19 pandemic, which is raging across the country yet again.

An oxygen concentrator is a medical device that draws in ambient air, passes it through a molecular sieve to concentrate room oxygen to therapeutic levels, and delivers it to a patient with a breathing disorder. It provides the patient with supplemental or extra oxygen.

Saurabh Gupta, Deputy Managing Director, Microtek said, "A robust healthcare system is the backbone of any progressive country. The significance of the sector has grown manifolds post the outbreak of the pandemic. We are ready to play a critical role in the growth of the healthcare market. Our vision is to manufacture world-class healthcare products and to emerge as a dominant player in the healthcare products domain."

Microtek is expecting to cross a turnover of Rs 200 crore in the healthcare segment by the end of the current financial year. As per the industry estimates, the healthcare market in India is expected to reach USD 372 billion by 2022. (ANI)
This report is auto-generated from ANI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.

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Microtek supplies 7,500 oxygen concentrators to ONGC in record time of 15 days

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New Delhi [India], March 15 (ANI): Microtek, one of the leaders in the power product market of India has announced that it has supplied order of 7,500 oxygen concentrators (OCTs) of 10 liters per minute (LPM) capacity each to the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) recently under the PM CARES initiative.

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Ever wonder how Lincoln Logs or Sea Monkeys found their way into 20th-century toy stores? Here are the little-known origins of 10 classic toys.

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1. Lincoln Logs

John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, invented this classic building set. The original instructions included plans for a replica of Abraham Lincoln's cabin, obviously, but also directions for building Uncle Tom's cabin.

2. Tinkertoys

After a stonemason saw kids building things with pencils and spools of thread, he got the idea for Tinkertoys.

3. Hula Hoops

Hula Hoops have been around forever in various formats, but the official Wham-O toy was invented in 1958. The inventors promoted it by going around to playgrounds and parks, giving children samples and showing them how to use it. That marketing campaign probably wouldn't work today.

4. Sea Monkeys

These little critters are actual live animals called brine shrimp. They were "invented" in 1957 by Harold von Braunhut, the man who invented X-Ray Specs. Brine shrimp are ideal for packaging because they enter a natural (shippable) state of suspended animation in certain environments. When kids release the "monkeys" into the prepared water, they "hatch."

5. Play-Doh

The sculpting clay with the trademarked scent was first sold as a wallpaper cleaner. It was rolled on the walls to remove coal dust.

6. Troll dolls

These ugly-cute dolls were created in 1949 by a Danish fisherman who needed a cheap Christmas gift for his daughter. He used sheep's wool for the hair. Thomas Dam's dolls caught on, which is why the original dolls were called Dam Dolls.

7. Slinky

The Slinky was invented by naval engineer Richard James. While he was working to develop springs that could keep ship instruments stable in choppy waters, he knocked a metal coil off a shelf. The coil did what a Slinky does: It stepped down to a stack of books, then to the table, and then to the floor, where it righted itself into a cylinder. James knew it would be a great toy and tests by neighborhood kids proved him right.

8. LEGO

A precursor to the familiar LEGO brick, the plastic Self-Locking Building Brick was developed in the late 1930s by the British toy inventor Hilary Fisher Page. A decade later, a Danish master carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen examined the British bricks and designed a similar toy, sold in a set as LEGO Automatic Binding Bricks. LEGO comes from the Danish words leg and godt, which mean "play well." Christiansen later discovered that in Latin, LEGO means "I put together."

9. Raggedy Ann and Andy

The dolls were invented by writer and illustrator Johnny Gruelle. Raggedy Ann was created in 1915 for Gruelle's daughter. Gruelle reportedly named the doll after two poems from book by James Whitcomb Riley: The Raggedy Man and Little Orphan Annie. Ann inspired Gruelle to write stories about her adventures, and in 1918, Raggedy Ann Stories was released. Her brother, Andy, showed up in 1920.

10. Sock Monkeys

The sock monkeys that we have come to know and love today-the ones made with Rockford Red Heel socks-are thought to have come about in 1932. The distinctive red heel (the monkey's mouth) was given to the socks so customers would know they were getting authentic Rockford socks. When the Nelson Knitting Company discovered that their socks were being used across the country for this folk craft, they won the patent for the sock monkey pattern and started including it in the packaging of their socks.

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John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, invented this classic building set. The original instructions included plans for a replica of Abraham Lincoln's cabin, obviously, but also directions for building Uncle Tom's cabin. After a stonemason saw kids building things with pencils and spools of thread, he got the idea for Tinkertoys.

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It’s a Great Time to Hunt For Rare Fruit Online

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It’s a Great Time to Hunt For Rare Fruit Online

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It started with seven trees in the backyard of their Central New Jersey townhouse. It was the early 2000s, and Seema and Vivek Malik were infatuated with Japanese food. After falling hard for the cuisine in restaurants, the Maliks turned to home cooking to replicate their favorite foods from Hokkaido to Okinawa. They bought a copy of Nobu: The Cookbook by Nobu Matsuhisa and learned to simmer a perfect dashi, fry a crackling tempura, and purchase the best soy sauce and miso. But they got stuck when it came to whipping up a fresh yuzu-spiked ponzu.

"We started to look for [ yuzu], but we couldn't find it anywhere," says Vivek. After eventually tracking down a few golfball-size, exorbitantly priced yuzu at the Japanese grocery store Mitsuwa in Edgewater, New Jersey, they promptly planted the seeds in pots. As proud DINKs-dual income, no kids-they had the energy to nurture a serious hobby in yuzu agriculture. A few years later, the Maliks had more yuzu than they could put on their hamachi, and they began asking local chefs if they'd like to use the citrus. Most were stunned when they were told that these fruits were locally grown and just picked from the tree.

In 2017, the Maliks left their jobs in finance to focus full-time on Flavors by Bhumi, a specialty fruit grower and distributor. Today, they grow in an indoor facility in Bordentown, New Jersey, and they partner with dozens of farms in California and abroad to offer delicacies like Hana yuzu, Meiwa kumquats, sudachi, calamansi, Rangpur limes, green ume, and many more on a seasonal basis.

"Demand has skyrocketed," says Vivek. "We have calls from as far away as Alaska from people asking for all kinds of citrus."

The Maliks aren't alone in their fervor for rare and exciting fruit. In restaurants, chefs are wielding finger limes at the garnish station and arranging splashy fruit plates for dessert. In home kitchens, cooks are squeezing calamansi for cocktails or casually grating yuzu zest into cake batter. In addition to an increased presence of specialty, often tropical fruits in grocery stores, niche fruitmongers are popping up across the internet, from mom-and-pop indoor citrus orchards to next-day-delivery e-retailers and dry-ice-packed durian tasting menus in a box. (There is also a whole illicit underground of fruit importing, such as with fragrant mango varieties for homesick Pakistani Americans.) It all points to increased trade in fruits as esoteric as mangosteen or notorious as durian to this side of the Pacific. And it's boom time for anyone looking to access these fruity flavors.

"There's been a lot more curiosity since March 2020, because America was forced to cook at home," says Robert Schueller, director of public relations for Melissa's, the largest specialty produce distributor in the United States. "That got people interested in something beyond your common banana or apple."

Founded in 1984, Melissa's has seen steady double-digit growth for the last few years for several types of tropical fruit, including rambutan (12%), young coconut (13%), passionfruit (14%), Caribbean Red papaya (16%), and dragonfruit (20%). Even during the height of COVID-19, there was a stronger demand for many types of tropical fruit than ever before.

"The specialty produce industry has been growing by leaps and bounds ever since then," says Schueller. He expects the interest in tropical fruit varieties will only continue: "Once they start to catch on, it plants the seed for awareness and networks out from there."

Often, the yearning for hard-to-find fruit is tied up with nostalgia and family heritage.

"Every chef, especially one like me, gets lost in cool citrus ingredients," says Nico Russell, chef and co-owner of the celebrated restaurants Oxalis and Place des Fêtes in Brooklyn.

Growing up, Russell's grandfather always brought back calamansi juice from the Philippines in Ziploc bags whenever he visited his native country. He'd freeze the bags and thaw them occasionally throughout the year to make a refreshing calamansi drink to share. "It was just important to him," says Russell. Despite the frozen juice being a frequent presence in his childhood, Russell had rarely seen a fresh calamansi fruit-until he heard from some other chefs about Flavors by Bhumi. Now, he buys their calamansi to add to desserts and jams, or to squeeze over a recent tasting menu dumpling with tapioca and wood ear mushrooms-as well as Santa Teresa lemon, an Italian variety that he says reminds him of the wild lemons where he grew up in California. Last winter, he preserved 40 pounds of them whole and uses the peel and brine, like for a chermoula sauce with herbs and lemon brine over grilled mackerel.

"There's always a cult following behind some fruit," says Joe Boo, founder of Asian Veggies, a New York City-based online delivery service for Asian ingredients. The company launched in 2020, soon after the pandemic upended his father's wholesale produce business because so many of its customers were Chinese restaurants. Offering next-day delivery in New York City and parts of New Jersey, Asian Veggies provided a safe alternative for elders and others wary of shopping in physical stores due to the pandemic, as well as a new revenue stream for the family business.

"We have calls from as far away as Alaska from people asking for all kinds of citrus."

Early into its creation, Boo decided to focus on specialty fruit rather than peddling the same old apples and pears you can get at any grocer or bodega. Each morning, employees hustle to procure the best fruit from importers in Maspeth, Queens ("If you don't speak Chinese, good luck") to bring back to their 10,000-square-foot warehouse, also in Maspeth. Every so often, something rare and cultishly followed, like wax apples or mangosteen or cacao pods or custard apples, is available-and often sells quick. Customers can be especially emotional when they see a rare and favorite fruit on the site. "Someone wrote me, like, 'Oh my God, my mom teared up when she saw it was custard apple,'" says Boo, who often posts images and how-to videos of unique fruit drops on Asian Veggies's Instagram account.

He can understand the allure. Growing up in New York City, Boo spent a month each summer in Malaysia, and there, he became accustomed to enjoying starfruit, the crisp and juicy pointed fruit that resembles a star when sliced. Outside of Malaysia, they were hard to find. "You crave it even more because you're like, man, if I don't buy this now, I'm not gonna see it until next year, or else I gotta fly to Malaysia," he says.

The ability to view, click, and ship straight to your door fruit that one can't get elsewhere may also be creating new legions of specialty fruit fans. Hank Seltzer works in renewable energy in Nashville, Tennessee. Growing up in Appalachia, his family kept a home garden where they grew tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash. Always interested in food, he learned about Flavors by Bhumi by following chefs and restaurants on social media. "I'll go a month or two without ordering anything and then get eight or ten pounds of citrus," says Seltzer, who last ordered mandarinquats, a cross between mandarin oranges and kumquats, and Persian limes.

The fruit goes into gin and tonics, sauces for grilled steak, and in salads as supremes. He adds yuzu juice and zest to pancake batter (following a cue from a lemon-zested pancake recipe by Deborah Madison) that his kids love. Each order sates his curiosity for new flavors. His favorite discovery so far has been Oro Blanco grapefruit: "The aroma smacked me in the face-it was funky, floral, and had some earthiness to it," he recalls of receiving his first box.

When it comes to fruit superfandom, there are few cults as fiendish as that of durian, the "king of fruit," as it's known in Southeast Asia. Spiky on the outside, squishy on the inside, the fruit is better known for its polarizing stench in the West. But it has a rampant following in its native Southeast Asia, where there are festivals and restaurants devoted to durian. For the durian-loving diaspora in the United States, however, a truly formidable fresh durian can be hard to come by.

"They're being picked underripe, and they don't ripen properly," says Lindsay Gasik, founder of the blog, tour, and retail business Year of the Durian, of the durian available in the United States. As a result, the sugar content of fresh durians in the United States is only about half what it should be when picked ripe in Southeast Asia, she says. And the sulfur-producing proteins in the fruit are more likely to break down in ways that release off-flavors, or "go to fart," as Gasik puts it. It's similar to when a bottle of wine develops off-flavors like "barn" or "mushroom." "It's not a desirable trait-it means something has gone wrong in the way it's been handled," she says.

Gasik fell in love with durian at a vegan festival in her native Oregon in 2009, and she started Year of the Durian in 2012 as a blog while traveling in Southeast Asia. Soon she began giving durian-tasting tours to friends and family, and it gradually evolved into a business where she and her partner, Richard Koivusalo, offer durian tours in Southeast Asia to the public and sell boxes of frozen durian shipped with dry ice (to prevent off-flavors). It's all an effort to explore the diversity of flavors found in durian varieties, which can range from notes of burnt caramel and honey to almond and pistachio or blueberry and raspberry. The textures can be creamy, chewy, sticky, and syrupy. Year of the Durian provides cards describing the flavors in their boxes, which might feature varieties from different regions or a single country of origin.

Currently, the outfit sells approximately 2,000 boxes of durian per year to Europe, Australia, and the United States-with an average price around $100 per order. They also recently began selling other Southeast Asian fruits like jackfruit and cempedak. Many of their customers are Malaysian or Singaporean Americans or Canadians, who sometimes threw Zoom parties during the pandemic to eat durian together. Others have never tried durian and are simply curious, or they are considering signing up for a durian tour led by the team but want to have a primer on the fruit before going in blind. It can be tricky the first time you try durian, says Gasik. There's so much nuance that you have to focus your palate on something. She finds that when people new to the fruit are guided through the experience-whether on a tour or through a box-then they start to really like it.

Gasik predicts that consumer interest in durian will grow and change the durian trade for the better in the future. Currently, a lot of the good durian grown in Southeast Asia is sent to China, while the United States and other destinations get bottom-of-the-barrel scraps when it comes to quality. But this industry bias may also need immediate change, because COVID-related lockdowns in China are forcing distributors to seek other markets for their fruit. And, of course, there are those who've loved certain fruits all their lives and will stop at nothing to get them.

"There are some hardcore durian heads out there," says Gasik.
How to buy cool fruit online!

Flavors by Bhumi
This husband-and-wife operation specializes in citrus varieties from bergamot to yuzu-many of which are grown in its indoor farm in New Jersey. That gives the fruit a "local" stamp of approval for many tri-state area restaurants. But you can order and have it shipped to you anywhere.

Melissa's Produce
In business since 1984, this wholesaler offers more than 1,500 fruit and vegetable varieties that you can order from their online shop. From Pinkglow pineapples to Ojai Pixie tangerines to orange watermelon, they specialize in the special stuff. Says its director of public relations, "We're the place people look to for red bananas, not Cavendish."

Asian Veggies
The pandemic birthed this online marketplace for Asian produce-which has since grown to offer meats and seafood along with Asian pantry staples. It's an extension of Joe Boo's family wholesale business, where you can get Asian fruit like mangosteen or starfruit delivered to you the very next day-but only if you live in New York City or parts of New Jersey.

Year of the Durian
You can try over a dozen different varieties of durian, frozen and shipped with dry ice, from around Southeast Asia from this durian tour and educational blog. The fruit is picked, packaged, and shipped with exacting scrutiny so you can experience durian like it's meant to be-ripe-and comes with extensive descriptions and tasting notes.

explores the world of groceries, from the fluorescent-lit aisles to the nooks and crannies of your cupboard. We dive into why certain ingredients got pantry staple status, the connection between cookbooks and buying habits, the online-ification of grocery shopping, and what gets shelved along the way.

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It's a Great Time to Hunt For Rare Fruit Online

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It started with seven trees in the backyard of their Central New Jersey townhouse. It was the early 2000s, and Seema and Vivek Malik were infatuated with Japanese food. After falling hard for the cuisine in restaurants, the Maliks turned to home cooking to replicate their favorite foods from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

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The 5 Best Exercises To Lose Belly Fat and Slow Aging, Says Fitness Expert

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The 5 Best Exercises To Lose Belly Fat and Slow Aging, Says Fitness Expert

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Gear up to lose belly fat and slow aging with these productive moves.

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Killing two birds with one stone always sounds appealing when it comes to maintaining your physical fitness and leading an overall healthy lifestyle. You're likely aware of the benefits of staying fit as you age. Growing older brings on many changes, including the loss of muscle mass, and you can potentially experience health issues like osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and back pain. Getting in regular physical activity can help make your bones stronger and lessen muscle and joint pain. By keeping up with your exercise, you may also avoid the health risks associated with visceral fat, including type 2 diabetes, stroke, and heart disease. So, we've put together some pretty stellar exercises that'll help you lose belly fat and slow aging. What's better than that?

Let's first chat about strength training. This form of exercise should be at the very top of your mind, because it will help you sculpt and maintain muscle. Strength exercises will boost your metabolism, aid in fat loss, and help your body remain all-around youthful.

Next up, let's go over the key fundamental movement patterns you need to perform successfully. They consist of squat, hinge, push, pull, and lunge. The majority of your workouts should have movements from each one of these categories, as they will yield the results you're looking for.

So without further delay, let's get into the five exercises that will help you lose belly fat and slow aging. Add them to your routine, and get ready to reap the benefits. And next up, don't miss The 6 Best Exercises for Strong and Toned Arms in 2022, Trainer Says.

Begin your Dumbbell Goblet Squat by grasping one dumbbell in a vertical fashion in front of your chest. Make sure your core remains tight, push your hips back, and squat down until your thighs are parallel to the floor. Then, drive through your heels and hips to stand back up, flexing your quads and glutes to finish. Complete 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps.

Related: What Science Says About the Exercise Habits That Slow Aging

To perform this next movement, grab a barbell, and position it right in front of your body. Keeping your chest tall and knees soft, push your hips back while dragging the barbell down your thigh. Once you feel you're getting a solid hamstring stretch in, drive your hips forward, squeezing your glutes to finish. Complete 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps.

Related: The #1 Workout To Lead an Incredibly Healthy Lifestyle, Says Trainer

Begin the Incline Dumbbell Bench Press by lying on an incline bench with a dumbbell in each hand. Hold the weights straight up above you with your arms fully extended. Pull your shoulder blades back and down into the bench as you lower the weights down toward your chest. Get a solid chest stretch at the bottom, then press the weights back up to the starting position, squeezing your upper pecs and triceps at the top. Perform 3 sets of 8 to 10 reps.

For this next exercise, grab the attachment on a seated row machine, and place your feet firmly on the footpad. Pull the handle out, then completely straighten your legs. Make sure your chest remains tall as you drive your elbows back towards your hips, squeezing your back and lats hard to finish. Straighten out your arms, and get a solid stretch in your shoulder blades before performing another rep. Perform 3 sets of 10 to 12 reps.

Hold a dumbbell in each hand for this final exercise, Dumbbell Reverse Lunges. Then, take a long stride backward with one leg. Firmly plant your heel down into the floor, then lower yourself until your back knee touches the ground. Push through with your front leg to come back up, then repeat with the other side. Complete 3 sets of 10 reps for each leg.

Tim Liu, CSCS, is an online fitness and nutrition coach based in Los Angeles Read more about Tim

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The 5 Best Exercises To Lose Belly Fat and Slow Aging, Says Fitness Expert - Eat This Not That

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Killing two birds with one stone always sounds appealing when it comes to maintaining your physical fitness and leading an overall healthy lifestyle. You're likely aware of the benefits of staying fit as you age. Growing older brings on many changes, including the loss of muscle mass, and you can potentially experience health issues like osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and back pain.

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‘People who move together’: the social power of house dance

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‘People who move together’: the social power of house dance

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From TikTok tutorials to street protests and celebrations, house dance is having a moment. Experts explain its liberating appeal

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‘People who move together’: the social power of house dance

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From TikTok tutorials to street protests and celebrations, house dance is having a moment. Experts explain its liberating appeal

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PB Fintech Limited IPO (PolicyBazaar IPO) Detail

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PB Fintech Limited IPO (PolicyBazaar IPO) Detail

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PB Fintech is India's leading online platform for insurance and lending products. The company provides convenient access to insurance, credit, and other financial products and aims to create awareness in India about the financial impact of death, disease, and damage.

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It’s Bailout Season for Crypto Companies

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It’s Bailout Season for Crypto Companies

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Once seemingly swimming in cash, several of the largest companies in the crypto ecosystem, including BlockFi and Celsius, have been hit hard by declining coin prices.

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This post is republished from FIN, the best newsletter on fintech. Subscribe here.

It's staggering to think that a few short weeks ago, there was enough cash gushing around the crypto universe to blanket sports stadiums and build blockchain exchanges for the Coachella music festival.

Ever since the collapse of the Terra/LUNA stablecoin system in May, the crypto universe has been bleeding, to the point where several heavyweights find themselves in need of outside aid.

On June 21, Zac Prince, the CEO and founder of the crypto lending platform BlockFi, tweeted that his company had secured a $250 million credit line with FTX:

It's hard to think of any precedent for this, at a nine-figure scale. BlockFi is not some bit player in the crypto game; over several rounds it raised a whopping $1.3 billion in venture investment, with prominent backers including Peter Thiel and the Winklevoss twins. (In February, BlockFi also paid a $100 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and several states, the largest such fine ever paid by a crypto company.)

And the rescue squad-which is basically FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried-doesn't stop there. The Canada-based crypto platform Voyager Digital also accepted a bailout package of cash and various cryptocurrencies from Alameda Research, which is controlled by Bankman-Fried.

On June 24, Coindesk reported that Goldman Sachs "is looking to raise $2 billion from investors to buy up distressed assets from troubled crypto lender Celsius." Celsius's business is similar to BlockFi's, and it, too, has raised more than $1 billion in several rounds of venture funding, and last year was valued at more than $3 billion. Celsius has been hurting for a while. In November 2021, the company suspended its chief financial officer amid charges of fraud and sexual harassment. The following month, hackers stole a sizable amount of Bitcoin invested with the BadgerDAO protocol; Celsius lost $54 million in that hack. And despite the CEO's insistence that Celsius had "minimal" exposure to the Terra/LUNA catastrophe, Celsius had significant ties to it. Although the company recently filed a confidential S-1 in apparent preparation for an IPO, it has now hired an advisory firm to help it prepare for a potential bankrupcty filing.

Then there is Babel Finance, another crypto lender, which recently imposed a $1500 monthly limit on withdrawals, due to "unusual liquidity pressures." The Hong Kong-based company said this week that it had "communicated with major counterparties and relevant customers, and reached preliminary agreements on the repayment period of some debts," a kind of soft bailout.

And no list of distressed crypto companies would be complete without Three Arrows Capital, the heavily crypto-invested hedge fund which is trying to figure out how to sell assets and/or fetch a bailout.

The collective strain on the crypto system is so severe that there is intermittent chatter about whether governments should bail out crypto companies. At the end of May, the UK Treasury issued a consultation paper entitled "Managing the failure of systemic digital settlement asset (including stablecoin) firms." The paper proposed identifying certain firms as systemically important, and then using a "special administrative regime" to allow the Bank of England to protect financial stability in case such firms melt down.

At the moment, there seems to be little appetite in the US for applying this "too big to fail" approach to crypto companies. That's largely because the companies themselves are almost entirely unregulated; bailing them out would give US consumers and taxpayers the worst of both worlds.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce addressed the problem this week in a interview:

Crypto does not have a bailout mechanism. And that's been perceived as one of the strengths of that marketplace. I don't want to come in and say that we're going to try to figure out a way to bail you out if we don't have the authority to do it. But even if we did, I would, I would not want to use that authority, we really need to let these things play out.

Normally on crypto issues, Peirce is almost deliberately out of step with SEC chair Gary Gensler and with the Biden administration. On the issue of crypto bailouts, however, she's probably speaking for just about everyone in government. After years of inaction and mixed signals, regulators have their share of blame for the current crisis. But too many crypto companies resisted or ignored the rules for too long to deserve taxpayer support. We should be grateful, in a macro sense, that most of these companies seem to be small enough to fail.

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It's Bailout Season for Crypto Companies

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This post is republished from FIN, the best newsletter on fintech. Subscribe here. It's staggering to think that a few short weeks ago, there was enough cash gushing around the crypto universe to blanket sports stadiums and build blockchain exchanges for the Coachella music festival.

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AI Detects Autism Speech Patterns Across Different Languages

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AI Detects Autism Speech Patterns Across Different Languages

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Machine learning algorithms help researchers identify speech patterns in children on the autism spectrum that are consistent between different languages.

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Machine learning algorithms help researchers identify speech patterns in children on the autism spectrum that are consistent between different languages. A new study led by Northwestern University researchers used machine learning-a branch of artificial intelligence-to identify speech patterns in children with autism that were consistent between English and Cantonese, suggesting that features of speech might be a useful tool for diagnosing the condition.
Undertaken with collaborators in Hong Kong, the study yielded insights that could help scientists distinguish between genetic and environmental factors shaping the communication abilities of people with autism, potentially helping them learn more about the origin of the condition and develop new therapies.

Children with autism often talk more slowly than typically developing children, and exhibit other differences in pitch, intonation and rhythm. But those differences (called "prosodic differences'" by researchers) have been surprisingly difficult to characterize in a consistent, objective way, and their origins have remained unclear for decades.

However, a team of researchers led by Northwestern scientists Molly Losh and Joseph C.Y. Lau, along with Hong Kong-based collaborator Patrick Wong and his team, successfully used supervised machine learning to identify speech differences associated with autism.

The data used to train the algorithm were recordings of English- and Cantonese-speaking young people with and without autism telling their own version of the story depicted in a wordless children's picture book called "Frog, Where Are You?"

The results were published in the journal PLOS One on June 8, 2022.

"When you have languages that are so structurally different, any similarities in speech patterns seen in autism across both languages are likely to be traits that are strongly influenced by the genetic liability to autism," said Losh, who is the Jo Ann G. and Peter F. Dolle Professor of Learning Disabilities at Northwestern.

"But just as interesting is the variability we observed, which may point to features of speech that are more malleable, and potentially good targets for intervention."

Lau added that the use of machine learning to identify the key elements of speech that were predictive of autism represented a significant step forward for researchers, who have been limited by English language bias in autism research and humans' subjectivity when it came to classifying speech differences between people with autism and those without.

"Using this method, we were able to identify features of speech that can predict the diagnosis of autism," said Lau, a postdoctoral researcher working with Losh in the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern.

"The most prominent of those features is rhythm. We're hopeful that this study can be the foundation for future work on autism that leverages machine learning."

The researchers believe that their work has the potential to contribute to improved understanding of autism. Artificial intelligence has the potential to make diagnosing autism easier by helping to reduce the burden on healthcare professionals, making autism diagnosis accessible to more people, Lau said. It could also provide a tool that might one day transcend cultures, because of the computer's ability to analyze words and sounds in a quantitative way regardless of language.

The researchers believe their work could provide a tool that might one day transcend cultures, because of the computer's ability to analyze words and sounds in a quantitative way regardless of language. Image is in the public domain

Because the features of speech identified via machine learning include both those common to English and Cantonese and those specific to one language, Losh said, machine learning could be useful for developing tools that not only identify aspects of speech suitable for therapy interventions, but also measure the effect of those interventions by evaluating a speaker's progress over time.

Finally, the results of the study could inform efforts to identify and understand the role of specific genes and brain processing mechanisms implicated in genetic susceptibility to autism, the authors said. Ultimately, their goal is to create a more comprehensive picture of the factors that shape people with autism's speech differences.

"One brain network that is involved is the auditory pathway at the subcortical level, which is really robustly tied to differences in how speech sounds are processed in the brain by individuals with autism relative to those who are typically developing across cultures," Lau said.

"A next step will be to identify whether those processing differences in the brain lead to the behavioral speech patterns that we observe here, and their underlying neural genetics. We're excited about what's ahead."

About this AI and ASD research news

Author: Max Witynski
Source: Northwestern University
Contact: Max Witynski - Northwestern University
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.
" Cross-linguistic patterns of speech prosodic differences in autism: A machine learning study" by Joseph C. Y. Lau et al. PLOS ONE
Abstract Cross-linguistic patterns of speech prosodic differences in autism: A machine learning study
Differences in speech prosody are a widely observed feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, it is unclear how prosodic differences in ASD manifest across different languages that demonstrate cross-linguistic variability in prosody.

Using a supervised machine-learning analytic approach, we examined acoustic features relevant to rhythmic and intonational aspects of prosody derived from narrative samples elicited in English and Cantonese, two typologically and prosodically distinct languages.

Our models revealed successful classification of ASD diagnosis using rhythm-relative features within and across both languages. Classification with intonation-relevant features was significant for English but not Cantonese.

Results highlight differences in rhythm as a key prosodic feature impacted in ASD, and also demonstrate important variability in other prosodic properties that appear to be modulated by language-specific differences, such as intonation.

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AI Detects Autism Speech Patterns Across Different Languages - Neuroscience News

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Machine learning algorithms help researchers identify speech patterns in children on the autism spectrum that are consistent between different languages. A new study led by Northwestern University researchers used machine learning-a branch of artificial intelligence-to identify speech patterns in children with autism that were consistent between English and Cantonese, suggesting that features of speech might be a useful tool for diagnosing the condition.

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PB Fintech is India's leading online platform for insurance and lending products.

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PB Fintech is India's leading online platform for insurance and lending products.

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PB Fintech is India's leading online platform for insurance and lending products. The company provides convenient access to insurance, credit, and other financial products and aims to create awareness in India about the financial impact of death, disease, and damage.

In 2008, PB Fintech launched Policybazaar aimed at catering to consumers who need more information, choice, and transparency in insurance policies. Policybazaar is an online platform for consumers and insurer partners to buy and sell insurance products. 51 insurer partners offered over 340 term, health, motor, home, and travel insurance products on the policy bazaar platform, as of March 2021. Policybazaar offers its users with i) pre-purchase research, ii) purchase, including application, inspection, medical check-up, and payment; and iii) post-purchase policy management, including claims facilitation, renewals, cancellations, and refunds. The company's technology solutions are focused on automation and self-service-driven consumer experiences requiring minimal human intervention. According to Frost & Sullivan, Policybazaar was India's largest digital insurance marketplace with a 93.4% market share based on the number of policies sold in Fiscal 2020. Also, in the same year, 65.3% of all digital insurance sales in India by volume were transacted through Policybazaar.

PB Fintech also launched Paisabazaar in 2014 intending to provide ease, convenience, and transparency in selecting a variety of personal loans and credit cards for the consumers. The company has partnered with 54 large banks, NBFCs, and fintech lenders offering a wide choice of products to consumers across personal credit categories, including personal loans, business loans, credit cards, home loans, and loans against property. According to Frost & Sullivan, Paisabazaar was India's largest digital consumer credit marketplace with a 51.4% market share, based on disbursals in Fiscal 2020. During Fiscals 2019, 2020, and 2021, Paisabazaar enabled disbursals of ₹51,015 Mn, ₹65,496 Mn, and ₹29,168 Mn, respectively.

Competitive Strengths:

Providing a wide choice and transparency to customers to research and select insurance and personal credit products.

Proprietary Technology helps in superior data intelligence and customer service.

Collaborative partnership with various companies for insurance and lending products.

Strong network effects for Policybazaar and Paisabazaar platforms.

High renewal rates.

Capital efficient model with low operating costs.

Experienced Founders and management.

Objects of the Issue

The net proceed from the IPO will be utilized towards the following purposes;

For enhancing visibility and awareness of company's brands, including but not limited to "Policybazaar" and "Paisabazaar" - Rs.15,000 Million;

New opportunities to expand company's consumer base including offline presence - Rs.3,750 Million;

Funding strategic investments and acquisitions - Rs.6,000 Million;

Expanding presence outside India - Rs.3,750 Million; and

General corporate purposes.

PolicyBazaar IPO Review

Though the company is in operation for over a decade, it has not yet broken the ice to turn green. Based on all parameters, the issue is exorbitantly priced. No doubt recent madness for Unicorn and Tech IPOs following Zomato is still continuing and accepting fancy pricing of loss-making companies. Though the company has bright prospects going forward, its issue pricing discounts all near term positives. Hence, risk seeker/cash surplus investors may consider investment for the long term, others may avoid it. Read detail review...

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PolicyBazaar IPO Details - IPO Date, Price, GMP, Analysis & Review

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PB Fintech is India's leading online platform for insurance and lending products. The company provides convenient access to insurance, credit, and other financial products and aims to create awareness in India about the financial impact of death, disease, and damage.

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As the much awaited startup IPO season began, mutual funds invested the most in the public offerings of insurtech unicorn Policybazaar and fintech giant Paytm.

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Policybazaar & Paytm Are Top IPO Picks For Mutual Funds

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Policybazaar & Paytm Are Top IPO Picks For Mutual Funds

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A report by Edelweiss Alternative Research showed that mutual funds invested INR 4,050 Cr in initial public offerings (IPO) last month, out of which INR 1,350 Cr was invested in the Policybazaar IPO and INR 980 Cr was put into the mega offer of Paytm.

Major funds house Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund invested INR 469 Cr in One97 Communications (parent company of Paytm), and INR 152 Cr in PB Fintech (parent company of Policybazaar), Axis Mutual Fund invested INR 243 Cr into Policybazaar.

HDFC Mutual Fund infused INR 127 Cr in the INR 18,300 Cr Paytm IPO and INR 56 Cr into the Policybazaar’s offer.

Post a largely tepid response to India’s largest IPO of INR 18,300 Cr, Paytm made a weak debut on the stock exchanges on November 18 as it listed at a discount of around 9%.

Around 2.45 p.m, shares of Paytm on the BSE were trading at INR 1,351.50, lower by INR 47.80 or 3.42% from its previous close.

On Wednesday, the lock in period for anchor investors, which also included mutual fund houses, ended leading to a slump in the shares during the session. They, however, recovered from the lows on Wednesday.

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"Bay Capital has completed a secondary transaction, ahead of the insurance aggregator's plans to launch an IPO in the next 12-15 months," Bay Capital said on Wednesday.

NEW DELHI: Leading online insurance policy aggregator Policybazaar.com has got a capital boost from investment management firm Bay Capital, ahead of its initial public offering (IPO) in the next 12-15 months.

Bay Capital, which manages money on behalf of institutions and endowments from the US and the Europe, has infused an undisclosed sum into the parent company PB Fintech of Policybazaar.com.

"Bay Capital has completed a secondary transaction, ahead of the insurance aggregator's plans to launch an IPO in the next 12-15 months," Bay Capital said on Wednesday.

However, how much capital has been infused by Bay Capital could not be ascertained.

PB Fintech had attained the status of a unicorn in 2018 when it raised USD 200 million in a Series-F round led by Japan's Softbank.

Siddharth Mehta, founder and CIO of Bay Capital, said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

"Customer centricity has been the heart of their proposition and has helped them become the platform of choice for customers," he said.

Yashish Dahiya, founder and Group CEO of PB Fintech, said Bay Capital is a long-term investor and the company sees them playing a key role as Policybazaar heads towards the public markets in the next 12-15 months.

India focussed Bay Capital has invested in areas such as consumer, digital, finance, outsourcing and health.

Among others, Policybazaar.com has investors of the likes of Info Edge, Premji Invest, Temasek, Ribbit Capital, Chiratae, Inventus Capital Partners, True North, Tiger Global, Wellington and Steadview.

PB Fintech also holds Paisabazaar.com, which is an online credit comparison portal.

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Policybazaar.com IPO in 12-15 months; parent firm gets capital boost from Bay Capital

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NEW DELHI: Leading online insurance policy aggregator Policybazaar.com has got a capital boost from investment management firm Bay Capital, ahead of its initial public offering (IPO) in the next 12-15 months. Bay Capital, which manages money on behalf of institutions and endowments from the US and the Europe, has infused an undisclosed sum into the parent company PB Fintech of Policybazaar.com.

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The Best Ways to Play Vintage Games on Your Modern TV

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The Best Ways to Play Vintage Games on Your Modern TV

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Because there's never been a better time to go retro.

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So, you want to play retro video games? Excellent. Whether you're exploring old favorites or digging for new treasures, there's a huge library of titles out there waiting for you. Some retro enthusiasts (like your dear author) will fall down the rabbit hole of era-appropriate hardware- original consoles, game paks, and CRTs-but not everyone wants to deal with those hassles (or costs). Fortunately, playing retro games on your flatscreen can be just as beautiful and satisfying as lugging a 120-pound CRT up three flights of stairs to your apartment.

I'm going to break down your options-whether you're using an old 720p LCD or a 4K HDR OLED-to ensure you can get started gaming, no matter your setup or budget. There are all sorts of options, so I'll start with the most affordable (emulation) and move toward the more expensive "enthusiast" options. Whichever you choose, the only thing that matters is that you have fun.

Press start: How to retro game via software emulation

When it comes to playing old games on modern hardware, you have a few options.

Official subscription services

The easiest option for most people is playing old games on consoles already in your daily rotation. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft offer emulation-based backwards compatibility options for legacy consoles like the NES and PlayStation 3 through their subscription-based services: Nintendo Switch Online, PlayStation Plus, and Xbox Game Pass. These services come in at varying price points, but work instantly, provide adequate results, and give you access to a ton of games across various generations and platforms.

Pros: Easy, lots of games

Cons: Separate subscriptions required for each console maker, questionable emulation depending on the game/console

Mini consoles

Over the past several years, Nintendo, Sega, and Sony have also released "mini consoles" which sold like hotcakes, but have started to fade in popularity. Loaded with 20 or so games, these plug-and-play consoles are limited in scope unless you're willing to install homebrew software (but I'll let you figure that one out on your own), but offer an effortless way to dabble in old games. Most recently, Sega announced the Mega Drive Mini 2 for Japan, including cult classic Sega CD games like Popful Mail and Shining in the Darkness. They're usually affordable at release, but can be expensive to acquire on the secondhand market once out of production.

Pros: Easy setup, nostalgic hardware, supports custom firmware and fan hacks

Cons: Difficult to find and expensive on the secondhand market, limited game libraries

Open source emulators

Though emulation has the lowest barrier to entry, it also has potentially the highest ceiling for performance thanks to the brilliant fan community tirelessly improving emulators and old games to take advantage of modern technology and game design theory.

One on hand, there are ROM hacks that offer everything from fan translations of missing Super NES classics to quality of life improvements for legendary games and colorizations of original Game Boy games. These hacks are perfectly legal to download, assuming you have a legally acquired ROM to apply them to, and open up the world of retro gaming in so many ways.

On the other hand, you've got engineers using emulators to improve the graphics and sound in older games with things like widescreen versions of Super NES games, an orchestral soundtracks for Link's Awakening, and the potential to run older games at higher frame rates and resolutions. Particularly impressive is this recent emulator plugin that adds ray tracing to Nintendo 64 games, completely lapping anything Nintendo itself has accomplished via their Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pak service:

These fan projects can be played by either downloading emulators on their own, or accessing them via frontend tools like EmulationStation, , and on your computer, phone, hacked game console, or, well, almost anything you own with an operating system. Some popular single console emulators include:

Emulation has introduced players to retro games and hard-to-find titles for years, and is at the center of a vibrant and exciting community of retro gamers and preservationists alike. Though legally acquiring the ROM files needed to play games can be challenging, devices like Save The Hero's Open Source Cartridge Reader make it easy to create ROMs from your game cartridge collection.

Pros: Powerful, covers nearly every game and console ever released, highly customizable and extendable, huge open source community constantly updating software

Cons: Legally acquiring games is challenging, requires high end computer for cutting edge improvements like raytracing

Raspberry Pi

If you want to use emulators on your living room TV, the easiest option is acquiring a small, affordable device called Raspberry Pi. Running an OS like Linux or Android, Raspberry Pi can do a lot of things, but one of its best uses is as a plug-and-play emulation box. Download your favorite emulator, load it up with games, plug it into your TV, and away you go. Since it's basically a small computer, Raspberry Pi supports many controllers-including Xbox and PlayStation controllers, or the retro-inspired models sold by . A Raspberry Pi is affordable, but doesn't have nearly as much juice as a PC, so it can't access a lot of the high end features afforded by PC emulators. But it's a flexible and convenient starter device for people who just want to play games on their TV-and can be easily popped in your bag to bring on vacation or to a friend's house.

Pros: Cheap, easy to set up, portable

Cons: Lacks the high end features of PC emulators, can't emulate more modern game consoles

Level up: How to retro game with hardware emulation via FPGA

The hottest thing in retro gaming over the past few years has been FPGA hardware emulation. It might sound like a golf tour, but holds the potential to change how we think about playing retro games.

FPGA stands for "field-programmable gate array," and gives developers access to a chip that can be programmed to mimic the architecture of old game consoles. Instead of emulating software-like traditional game emulators-it emulates the hardware itself. When done properly, the game can't tell the difference between the FPGA chip and original hardware. This results in the most accurate experience of playing old games on modern hardware possible, whether you're using ROMs or original cartridges.

Analogue

Utilizing FPGA cores developed by an electrical engineer named Kevin "Kevtris" Horton, Analogue's game consoles play real cartridges and focus on one beloved game console at a time. Though they carry a premium price point, and supply issues can make it hard to get one in your hands, Analogue's consoles-including the , , , -are a perfect melding of retro games and modern hardware.

In this recent Lifehacker piece, Brendan Hesse summed up the appeal of these FPGA consoles, the quickest, easiest way to play old cartridges on your modern TV and have them look great. "While it's not as 'pure' as playing on the old consoles in your collection," Hesse wrote, "cloned consoles will play the game cartridges you already own, automatically upscaling the video signal so it looks good on your newer TV-no converters or special cables needed."

Analogue's most recent release is the handheld , which supports all sorts of handheld consoles, including Game Boy line, Game Gear, and Atari's Lynx. Plus, with the official dock, you can even play your game paks on your 4K. Though getting one without paying outrageous secondary market prices requires waiting until 2023 thanks to overwhelming demand and worldwide supply issues.

Pros: Gorgeous retro games right out of the box, high quality materials, major nostalgic appeal, lots of customization options/filters

Cons: Expensive and difficult to acquire, single console focus, officially requires real game cartridges

MiSTer

Analogue's devices are (officially) limited to specific consoles-but what if I told you there was a single device that could play everything from Commodore 64 to Super NES, TurboGrafx-16, and PlayStation with hardware accurate FPGA emulation? Say hello to the MiSTer.

Whether you order parts individually and construct the MiSTer yourself, or buy a prebuilt one from somewhere like MiSTer Addons, this highly customizable and scalable device runs on the impressive DE10-Nano chipset with a Cyclone V FPGA and supports an absurdly deep library of games and consoles. YouTubers My Life in Gaming have produced an extensive (like, we're talking two-and-a-half-hour) look at the MiSTer in 2022-including a how-to on assembling and setting up your device, recommended add-ons, and looks at the most popular console cores-that will tell you most of what you need to know.

Of everything I've covered, MiSTer has the highest crossover potential for satisfying enthusiasts and casual fans alike-its combination of scalability, flexibility, and breadth offers something for everybody. MiSTer boasts a vibrant FPGA development community that's only just beginning to tap into the technology's potential, and we're only going to see more consoles, more compatibility, and more customization as they expand on an already impressive feature set. You can plug one into your modern screen or your CRT, output almost any standard resolution/video signal you'd like, and access a ton of different features like scanline filters, black frame insertion for improved motion blur, robust controller support, and more.

Pros: Endlessly customizable, highly scalable, huge library of hardware and software support, regularly updated with new features

Cons: Expensive and complicated to set up, support for post-16 bit consoles still under development

Now you're playing with power: Original hardware + scalers

"But, Aidan, I've got a collection of retro consoles and games that rivals MetalJesusRocks, but CRTs are lame. I wanna play on my 70" 4K without the games looking like garbage." Well, you've got options...as long as you're willing to pony up for them.

The NTSC broadcast standard used in many non-European regions output 480i resolution (240 alternating lines spread top-to-bottom on the TV screen), but video games cleverly cut this in half to more efficiently use console processing power-resulting in a video standard called 240p. Trouble is, most modern TVs don't care about 240p video because it hasn't been used much since the '90s. This results in poor upscaling of retro game consoles, muddy looking games, and terrible controller lag.

Enter: upscalers. These devices take your game console's 240p (or 480i, for later consoles) signal and upscale it as cleanly as possible for display on an HD or 4K screen while introducing minimal input lag. They're kinda magic, honestly. The major downside to scalers is that even the older ones are expensive, and newer ones have been heavily impacted by supply chain issues and increasing component prices. So consider these a higher tier option for those serious about committing long term to original hardware and software-not an entry point.

Mike Chi's RetroTINK-5X Pro is the leading FPGA-powered upscaler on the market right now-truly impressive, since Chi's a one-man operation. The 5x in the name refers to the upscaler's ability to enlarge the video signal by five times (1200p) without quality loss, producing razor sharp pixels and a variety of scanline and retro filters. Similar devices like the , Framemeister, and RetroTINK-2X Pro offer similar functionality with fewer features at slightly more palatable price points. Chi is hard at work on a RetroTINK 4K, and other upcoming upscalers like the PixelFX Morph and look to push the technology even further.

(For a more in-depth look at upscalers and FPGA consoles, refer to Brendan Hesse's previously mentioned breakdown, which covers more options and optimal settings.)

Pros: So many options, broad console support, original hardware experience, gorgeous video quality

Cons: Expensive, requires access to original consoles and games

Scanlines or razor-sharp pixels?

There's an argument to be made that the best way to play retro games is on CRTs thanks to their unique look and feel. Others want the cleanest image possible-pixels cut right at the source with no distortion. These FPGA and scaling devices often come with a bunch of features that let you emulate the look of older TVs by including scanline and scaling options to soften up the image, with results pretty close to original CRTs. Twitter accounts like and do regular comparisons between sharp pixels, retro filters, and original CRTs, highlighting various options to get your games looking as good as possible.

Whether you're into filters or not is a matter of taste, and might even depend on the console or game, but having the option to produce various types of images is one of the most appealing reasons to use a MiSTer or upscaler compared to options like emulation on modern game consoles-especially when you've optimized the settings using a tool like 240p Test Suite.

Next level

However you choose to play your old games-on a flatscreen or CRT, with scanlines or raw pixels-there's no wrong answer. Experiment to find what looks best to you.

I started out with one of Nintendo's mini consoles and have upgraded to serious original hardware over time, but that doesn't mean I don't still have fun playing emulated games on my phone. My biggest piece of advice is to start small-grab a used mini console, check out ROM hacks of your favorite games, sign up for one of Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft's subscription service-and see if retro gaming is right for you. Whether you dabble or dive into the deep end, there's never been a better time to get into old games, and it's only going to get better from here.

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The Best Ways to Play Vintage Games on Your Modern TV

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So, you want to play retro video games? Excellent. Whether you're exploring old favorites or digging for new treasures, there's a huge library of titles out there waiting for you. Some retro enthusiasts (like your dear author) will fall down the rabbit hole of era-appropriate hardware- original consoles, game paks, and CRTs-but not everyone wants to deal with those hassles (or costs).

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The human sensory experience is limited. Journey into the world that animals know

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The human sensory experience is limited. Journey into the world that animals know

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A dolphin's sense of echolocation allows it to coordinate efforts to hunt prey, see "through" other creatures and form three-dimensional shapes using sound.

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There's a vast world around us that animals can perceive - but humans can't.

Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong uses the example of a dark room: Though it might seem that there would be little to detect in the darkness, a bird in the room would be able to pick up on the magnetic field of the earth and would know which direction to fly if it was time to migrate. A dog would be sniffing out various odors that a human would not be able to smell. A rattlesnake would detect the presence of humans in the room by sensing their infrared radiation.

"Each of these creatures, we could all be sharing exactly the same physical space and have a radically different experience of that space," Yong says.

In his new book, An Immense World, Yong explores the diversity of perception in the animal world and the limitations of our own perception. He notes that each animal has access to its own sensory environment - called an "umwelt" - which creates its own "bespoke sliver of reality."

"Umwelt was popularized by a German biologist named Jakob von Uexküll," Yong says. "The word comes from the German for 'environment,' but von Uexküll wasn't using it to mean the physical environment. He meant the sensory environment, the unique set of smells, sights, sounds and textures that each animal has access to."

Yong points out that humans can't sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can, or the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect. Our ears can't hear the ultrasonic call of rodents and hummingbirds, and our eyes can't see the ultraviolet light that the birds and the bees can sense. But, he says, imagining the world as animals perceive it opens up a new appreciation for the everyday wonders of nature.

"If you start thinking about the umwelt of other animals, you understand that nature's magnificence is all around us. It's in our backyards, it's in our gardens, it's in the bodies of some of the most familiar creatures around us, my dog, the pigeons on the street," Yong says. "It just makes things that felt very familiar feel newly wondrous."

Interview highlights

On what are we missing in human vision compared to insects
So flowers absolutely are extraordinarily beautiful, but if you had the ultraviolet vision that a bee has, you'll be able to see patterns on those flowers that we can't see. A sunflower, for example, far from looking just a matte uniform yellow, would have a stark ultraviolet bullseye at its center. A lot of flowers have these ultraviolet shapes like arrows and bullseyes to guide insects toward the pollen at their center. Some predators that eat pollinating insects, like crab spiders, blend in against the flowers to our eyes, but really stand out when viewed in ultraviolet, and that acts as a lure to insects. It draws them in toward the waiting spider.

One of my favorite things about the relationship between insect vision and flowers is that if you took all the colors in all the flowers that were out there, and you asked ... what kind of color vision is best at discriminating between these colors? What you get is an eye that's basically almost what a bee has, an eye that is maximally sensitive to blue, green and ultraviolet. And you might think then that the bee eye has evolved to see the colors of flowers really well. That's exactly the opposite of what happened, because the bee eye came first, the flowers evolved later. So the colors of flowers have evolved to ideally tickle the eyes of bees, and I think that's a truly wondrous result. It means that beauty, as we know it, is not only in the eye of the beholder, it arises because of that eye.
On echolocation
Echolocation is a very advanced form of hearing that a lot of animals, like bats and dolphins, use to perceive the world around them. So they make high pitched, ultrasonic calls beyond the range of human hearing, and they listen for the echoes of those calls after they've rebounded off objects around the animal. And by listening for those echoes and passing those echoes, they get a sense of the world around them. A bat in complete darkness can find, track and swoop upon a flying insect. It can navigate through the darkness of a cave. It can wend its way around obstacles - all by using this incredibly sophisticated type of hearing. ...

Bats and dolphins are the two masters of echolocation in the animal kingdom, and in some ways they use it for similar purposes. But the difference between them is mostly because dolphins are echolocating in the water. Their calls travel much further. And so for them, echolocation is a much longer-range sense than it is for bats, which can only really detect a small moth within several feet in front of [them.] A dolphin's echolocation can ... [allow them] to coordinate their movements, to coordinate their hunting strategies over the distance of an entire pod. Dolphins can also use echolocation kind of like a medical scanner. They can detect hard surfaces that exist inside other animals. A dolphin echolocating on a human could likely see your skeleton, could likely see your lungs. Dolphins can, through echolocation, detect the swim bladders inside the fish that they hunt. They can probably tell the difference between different kinds of prey by the shape of their swim bladders. So they have this incredible see-through ability. But except it's not really to do with vision, right? It's to do with sound.
On how dolphins experience sound as three-dimensional
When you think about sound, you don't think of creating this rich, three-dimensional representation of an object. If I heard a recording of someone playing a saxophone, I would appreciate it. But there's no way I could go from that to recreating the shape of a saxophone in my mind. But dolphins actually are doing that with sound. They can echolocate on an object. It seems as if they build a physical model of what that object looks like - its shape, maybe its texture, which they then can use as fodder for their other senses so they can recognize, say, on a screen, the shape of an object. And that is extraordinary. I think that speaks to not only their weird sensory worlds, but how those extraordinary senses can be deployed by an extremely intelligent animal.
On how some cephalopods experience pain
A really good example might be to turn to the cephalopods, octopuses, squid and other related animals. ... So a squid, for example, if you injure it on part of its body, it doesn't seem to understand where the pain is and it doesn't seem to have a local experience of pain. If I stub my toe, I know, "Oh, my toe hurts." For a squid. It seems that its entire body becomes hypersensitive. So it's not as if it's like, "Oh, my third arm hurts." And that might be because a squid's arms are short. It can't really explore a lot of its body. If it knew part of its body was injured, it might not be able to do anything about it.

That's not true for octopuses, which have much longer and dexterous arms. They do seem to have an experience of pain. They do seem to understand exactly which part of their body has been injured and they will cradle and tend to an injury, much like a human would. So even here, when you look at this one group of animals, you see very distinct kinds of pain. And I think that's really important. Often when we think about pain in the animal kingdom, we think of it as this yes or no thing. Animals experience pain exactly like humans do, or some people contend they don't experience pain at all. I think in most cases it's likely to be something in the middle, and their experience of pain is going to vary just as our experience of color or sound or other sensory information might.
On how cats sense vibration
So many animals have vibration-sensitive cells in their organs of touch. I have them in my fingertips, for example. It seems that cats have that on their bellies. And one scientist I spoke to had this hypothesis, like, if a cat is laying down in a crouch, is it also sensing the vibrations caused by possible prey? When we see a lion watching a herd of antelope in the distance, is it also getting information through the crouch about the footsteps of those prey? Now, I want to be very clear: We don't know the answer to that question, and it might be entirely far-fetched speculation. I write about [it] in the book specifically because I think it's the type of question we should be asking, because a lot of people, including scientists who work on the senses, neglect the world of vibrations, the world of seismic tremors that course through the ground and surfaces along us. We care when those vibrations move through the air; we call them sounds. But when they move through surfaces, we tend to ignore them, except a huge number of animals - scorpions, moles, elephants, many insects - seem to pay attention to that vibrational world. And I think if you really start thinking about it and looking at it, you learn incredible things about nature that you might otherwise have missed.
On how the light sculpture commemorating Sept. 11 and the attack on the World Trade Center disrupts bird migration

The light shines vertically into the heavens. It is beautiful. As an art installation, that's magnificent. But for migrating birds, it is a huge problem. The light draws them in, causes them to circle for a long time, depletes their energy, often distracts them and sends them hurtling into nearby buildings. Thousands of birds might be caught in these beams at any one time. If you're a migrating bird, you can't afford to get distracted. Migration is already an arduous process, and the birds need all the energy they can get. So for this reason, and because scientists have studied it, those lights are turned off for stretches of time if enough birds get caught in them.

There are many other examples of lights at night that confuse not only migrating birds, but also pollinating insects, hatchlings, sea turtles. All kinds of creatures get waylaid and disoriented and often fatally so by lights at night. This is a huge problem. And it's a recent one. For almost the entirety of life on Earth, animals have lived with these rhythms of light and darkness. It's really only in the last couple of centuries that those rhythms have been broken by the constant nighttime illumination that humans pour out. And we don't think of light as a problem, we think of it as a good thing, something we want, something that's safe. But it is a problem for the natural world. And the consequences can be devastating.
On how understanding umwelt has broadened the way he thinks of nature

I think that if we think of nature as something remote and distant, accessible only to someone who can go to a national park, we lose the impetus to save and to protect it.

I think that if we think of nature as something remote and distant, accessible only to someone who can go to a national park, we lose the impetus to save and to protect it. I think if you understand instead that nature is everywhere, then I can go on an adventure just by thinking about the sensory world of the sparrow that sits on the house opposite to me. I think then nature feels like something close to me, close to my heart and close to my life. And I feel like if that's the case, people will be more motivated to try and protect it. Protecting nature isn't just about saving whales or pandas or what have you. It's about protecting even things that are close to us ... because each of those things has a unique way of experiencing the world, that is worth learning about, worth cherishing and worth protecting.

Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Laurel Dalrymple adapted it for the web.

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The human sensory experience is limited. Journey into the world that animals know

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There's a vast world around us that animals can perceive - but humans can't. Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong uses the example of a dark room: Though it might seem that there would be little to detect in the darkness, a bird in the room would be able to pick up on the magnetic field of the earth and would know which direction to fly if it was time to migrate.

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Topworth Energy, a subsidiary of the Topworth Group, states on its website that it is "is presently developing in two phases a 1200 MW Coal fired Thermal Power Plant in Chattisgarh. We are also evaluating two additional projects of similar capacity."

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Topworth Energy, a subsidiary of the Topworth Group, states on its website that it is "is presently developing in two phases a 1200 MW Coal fired Thermal Power Plant in Chattisgarh. We are also evaluating two additional projects of similar capacity."

One of these projects is the 1260 megawatt Sapnai power station which the company proposes to build in Chhattisgarh, India.

Contact details

Topworth Energy Private Limited
G--4 Rahejja Centtrre,, 214,, Free Press Journal Marg
Nariman Point,, Mumbaii - 400 021
Website: http://www.topworthgroup.com/Business/Power.aspx

Resources and articles

Related GEM.wiki articles

References

External articles

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Topworth Energy, a subsidiary of the Topworth Group, states on its website that it is "is presently developing in two phases a 1200 MW Coal fired Thermal Power Plant in Chattisgarh. We are also evaluating two additional projects of similar capacity."

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But when am I going to find time to set aside time to stress?

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All day, every day: It's stress o'clock. While all you might want to do is push away your worries, if you really want to get a sense of control, you need to tackle them with intention. To accomplish this, set aside a designated time to do nothing but stress. Here's what to know about taking an effective "worry break," and why it might be the right technique for you.

Why you should designate time to worry

Sure, it sounds counterintuitive to lean into all the thoughts causing you strife. Isn't that a recipe for spiraling?

The idea behind a designated worry break is not to succumb to all the stress, but to concentrate your worrying time into a productive "session" of sorts. Stressful thoughts find a way to intrude and disrupt your daily life. By scheduling a separate chunk of time to address them all, you'll be able to focus on other things throughout your day.

It's all about stressing more effectively-like diving straight into cold water, rather than torturing yourself by wading in and out of it a little bit at a time

I want to emphasize that your worry break will not simply be a terrifying fifteen minutes when your anxiety takes over, and then you're expected to snap out of when the timer runs out. Instead, your goal will be to identify and attend to each of your worries, hopefully leading to some kind of action plan to help you regain control of your day.

How to set up your worry break

The first step is the easiest, so long as you actually stick to it: Choose your time to stress. Mark it in your calendar, set a reminder, and don't bail on yourself. To start out, carve out 15 or so minutes once a week.

When your scheduled worry break rolls around, it's time to stress. But the key is to stress constructively.

Try to get your worries down in words. Writing them down in list form is daunting, but an excellent practice in perspective. It helps to take abstract, overwhelming emotions surrounding each stress item, and then transforms them into what is bothering you on a more concrete (and manageable) level.

Next, dedicate time to each item on your list. Circle the ones that are ostensibly in your control. For instance, " my purpose in life" is a tad too abstract to tackle in this 15 minute session. However, something like " making time for my family" is a starting place for creating actionable solutions. For each stress item, try to brainstorm several potential solutions, e.g. " ask ____ for help" or " schedule a proper date night."

Not every source of stress has an actionable solution; in fact, a lack of obvious solutions is probably the source of a lot of your stress. In this case, coping strategies also count as a "solution." Look into ways to manage your stress, like the 15 ideas listed out here.

Questions to guide your worry break

As you get used to attending to your stressful thoughts, here are some guiding questions to ask yourself:

Is this worry within my control?

What aspects of this concern are in and/or out of my control?

What mental hang-ups are making this stress worse?

How would I approach this if I had unlimited time and resources?

What is getting in the way of me overcoming this hurdle?

How do I really feel about this stress?

What is the ideal outcome in this situation?

What is a first step I can take?

These questions are all launch points for brainstorming action items and coping strategies. It's important to reflect and address your thoughts, or else their power to intrude on your mind will only grow stronger.

Remember your goal is to stress constructively

The biggest mistakes you can make with your worry breaks are (1) not brainstorming an action plan and (2) not following through on your action plan. Remember that your goal is to transform abstract, overwhelming worries into bite-sized solutions. If you struggle to hold yourself accountable, loop in a trusted friend who can check in on the status of your action plan.

One final note: Once the time goes off, force yourself to switch gears. Unless you're really on a roll making your action plan, you don't want this minutes-long break to turn into an hours-long spiral. Remember that you've scheduled another worry break on the calendar, but that in the meantime, you're free to focus your energy on other things.

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All day, every day: It's stress o'clock. While all you might want to do is push away your worries, if you really want to get a sense of control, you need to tackle them with intention. To accomplish this, set aside a designated time to do nothing but stress.

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They both promised us that better consumer choices would spark change. They haven’t.

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Facts matter: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Support our nonprofit reporting. Subscribe to our print magazine.

About a decade ago, Silicon Valley cash began flowing into startups that promised hyper-realistic imitation meat-not your hippy uncle's tofu pup or garden burger, but facsimiles that taste (and " bleed") just like the real thing. Nearly from the start , one model for the project kept popping up: Tesla. Buoyed by a hefty dose of venture capital, the company had leapt past the hidebound auto industry and in 2012 began churning out all-electric vehicles that quickly became the toast of the luxury car market-embraced not just for their environmental friendliness, but mainly for their design and performance (a few pesky aside). In short, the argument went, Tesla broke through because its cutting-edge technology made a better car, not because it made a greener car. You didn't have to give a damn about climate change to covet one.

The faux meat upstarts vowed to to something similar with meat: They'd make burgers as delicious as the real thing, and lure in carnivores who don't care about industrial meat's environmental impacts, like greenhouse gas-spewing in 2016. A year later, Impossible cow burps and manure "lagoons," or its social flaws, such as gruesome working conditions in slaughterhouses. "We're changing the rules of game, let's build the Tesla of meat," Ethan Bown, CEO of Beyond Meat, told a trade journal in 2015. "It feels to me that what you're trying to do in meat is what Tesla did in electric cars," journalist Ezra Klein gushed to a clearly pleased Patrick Brown (no relation to Ethan), founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, on his declared an ambitious goal: "Impossible Foods wants to supply people with all the delicious, nutritious and affordable meat they want," the company's 2017 sustainability report states. "We want to replace a prehistoric means of food production with one that can sustainably feed 10 billion people by 2050."

The whole model of a consumer-led, tech-centered approach to climate change is looking tattered.

In both cases, the underlying idea was that better consumer choice-enticing us to buy a greener car or burger-could drive the kind of societal change needed to rein in global warming, if only entrepreneurs could hit upon the right technical breakthroughs.

Much has changed in the years since. Both Tesla and meat-that's-not-meat startups have experienced meteoric rises and come down to earth a bit. For all their achievements and market penetration, the incumbent industries they aimed to disrupt-Big Oil and Big Meat-are chugging along. And the whole model of a consumer-led, tech-centered approach to climate change is looking tattered.

To see what I mean, check out the trajectory of Beyond Meat. In 2015, it emerged as a media darling, typified by an Outside Magazine piece titled "This Top-Secret Food Will Change the Way You Eat." In it, writer Rowan Jacobsen reported he had gotten an early taste of the company's soon-to-debut Beast Burger and it had convinced him to give up meat. He described the experience:

I tossed one on the grill. It hit with a satisfying sizzle. Gobbets of lovely fat began to bubble out. A beefy smell filled the air. I browned a bun. Popped a pilsner. Mustard, ketchup, pickle, onions. I threw it all together with some chips on the side and took a bite. I chewed. I thought. I chewed some more. And then I began to get excited about the future.

Jacobsen reported that Beyond had achieved pea-burger nirvana by hiring Tim Geistlinger, a "biotech rock star who had been working with the Gates Foundation to develop antimalarial drugs and a yeast that makes clean jet fuel out of sugar." (Note: Jets still fly on fossil fuel). But Geistlinger couldn't quite describe to Jacobson the technological feat that had made that Beast Burger so tasty-because it was proprietary information. "Eventually, Geistlinger suggested trying something radical-the big Beast Burger secret, which involves a certain combination of temperature, pressure, timing, and chemistry that he could tell me about only in veiled terms," Jacobsen wrote.

That "certain combination of temperature, pressure, timing, and chemistry"-the burger's special sauce, so to speak-served the company well for a while. The Beast was a hit, and a year later, it gave rise to an even more-popular successor called the Beyond Burger, which the company hailed as "our new 'raw-beef' style burger that looks, cooks, and tastes so much like beef [that] it's being shelved in the meat sections at Whole Foods."

After that product, too, took off, Beyond took its shares public in May 2019-and Wall Street proved as ravenous for imitation meat as Silicon Valley. On the day of the initial public offering, Beyond shares surged 192 percent, the best-performing US IPO raising at least $200 million "since before the 2008 financial crisis," Bloomberg reported. By the end of its first day of trading, Beyond's market value stood at $3.8 billion-a heady level for a company that had never turned a profit. Riding a wave of hype, the company's shares tripled within three months.

But things have been rocky ever since, and in 2022, Beyond stock has plunged. At its current share price, the stock market values Beyond at $1.5 billion, just 10 percent of the all-time high it reached in 2019. And the giant companies Beyond hoped to topple are doing just fine. Over the past year, while Beyond shares were sliding 84 percent, the stock of its animal-based meat rival Tyson jumped 12 percent, outperforming the overall market. What happened?

While Beyond was riding high in 2019, the established food industry was taking note of its success and plotting its response. In a November 2019 piece, the Washington Post's Laura Reiley reported that meat-processing giants Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Smithfield, along with Kellogg's and other processed-food titans, had engaged their formidable flavor-engineering R&D teams to take on Beyond and other newcomers in a "headlong race to produce signature plant-based meats." The upstart had awakened the sleeping giant.

The upstart had awakened the sleeping giant.

As competition from those well-capitalized players heated up, plant-based meat sales boomed during the height of the pandemic in 2020. But over the past year, sales growth has flattened or even gone negative, according to various market-data firms. "Consumers aren't embracing [high-tech burger and other meat facsimiles] with the same level of enthusiasm they did a few years ago," Bloomberg's Deena Shanker reported in May, after Beyond disappointed Wall Street with lower-than-expected revenues. "Many no longer see the products as healthy, citing concerns over how processed they are. Others are turning away after trying one product they don't like."

Today, after all the bluster, Beyond owns a 20 percent share of the US plant-based meat market, second to Morningstar, an old school veggie-burger brand now owned by Kellogg's, which owns a 27 percent slice, reports CNBC. Apparently, Geistlinger's top-secret "combination of temperature, pressure, timing, and chemistry" wasn't quite the killer app Beyond and its boosters thought it would be seven years ago.

Impossible Foods clocks in at third, owning 12 percent of the plant-based meat market. It has a story similar to Beyond's: loads of investor and media adulation and a special-sauce technology (genetically modified " heme") said to make soy-protein patties taste just like beef. In 2019, the company announced what it called a "simple mission: to replace the need for animals as a food-production technology-globally, by 2035." While Impossible reports that sales are booming-it claimed in March that quarterly revenues had jumped 85 percent over the previous year's-it has yet to go through with its long-anticipated IPO. That hesitation is just another signal of Wall Street's lost appetite for high-tech faux meat players.

Ironically, Tesla, Impossible's and Beyond's role model, finds itself in a similar place. After early investor Elon Musk took the company's CEO position in 2008 (he now also serves as its " technoking"), Tesla rode a wave of hype-and generous public subsidies, despite Musk's avowed fiscal conservatism-to dizzying heights. While the entrenched automotive industry kept churning out gas-burning SUVs, along with hybrids for green cred, Tesla ramped up production of high-performing all-electric vehicles.

The media took note. In a 2013 profile typical of Musk's press from that era, The New Yorker's Tad Friend hailed Musk's "manifest determination to save the world-single-handedly, if necessary." Wall Street bought in, too. The company's stock rose steadily from 2013 to late 2019-at which point it took flight like a rocket from Space X, another Musk company. By October 2021, the stock market valued Tesla at an extraordinary $1 trillion-more than the combined valuation of five well-established competitors (Toyota, VW, Daimler, Ford Motor, and GM). And for a time, its CEO enjoyed status as the world's richest human.

Tesla shares have surrendered more than a third of their value over the past two months.

But simultaneously, Musk fixated on an even more ambitious goal than ending the internal-combustion car: creating ones that can drive themselves. Safe self-driving vehicles have proven much more elusive than Musk and other boosters claim, experts say. But that hasn't stopped Musk from declaring their imminent arrival. (In a San Francisco pilot project, Tesla rival Chevrolet has just begun running a small fleet of fully autonomous all-electric taxis, which can only operate when all of these conditions hold: good weather, nighttime, and low traffic.) Here's a supercut video of Musk promising autonomous Teslas "next year," every year between 2014 and 2021. And just two weeks ago, on a trip to Brazil, he extended that streak to 2022. Meanwhile, the company has insisted on offering features called "Autopilot" and "full self-driving," which despite their confident names, "are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment," the Tesla website states. The company hails the safety of Autopilot, but it has come under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for reportedly causing Teslas to crash into emergency vehicles and, more recently, for " allegations of unexpected brake activation " in recent-year models.

While Tesla keeps generating alarming headlines ("US has over 750 complaints of Teslas braking for no reason," AP reported on June 3), its old-line competitors are successfully rolling out their own all-electric cars, though they've been stymied this year by a chip shortage. In early June, Musk told Tesla executives in an email that he intended to lay off 10 percent of the company's salaried staff because of his "super bad feeling" about the economy, Reuters reported. Jostled by fast-emerging competition, safety issues, and the technoking's erratic lunge to buy Twitter, Tesla shares have surrendered more than a third of their value over the past two months.

The whole notion that replacing every gas-burning car on the road today with a nifty electric model is looking less and less like a planet-saving panacea. Just like oil, rising demand for minerals to power EVs is generating massive geopolitical tensions, and threatens to trigger a cold war with China. Here in the United States, the scramble for copper, largely to satisfy the EV boom, has given rise to a vast proposed mining project atop sacred Apache ground in Arizona that "threatens to deplete groundwater as the Southwest faces a historic megadrought," my colleague Maddie Oatman reported recently. Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist at Providence College, has documented the ill effects on mining lithium for EV batteries in places like Chile's Atacama salt flat, where extraction operations require "enormous quantities of water in an already parched environment," making freshwater "less accessible to the 18 indigenous Atacameño communities that live on the flat's perimeter," and disrupting the habitats of species such as Andean flamingos.

In short, as Riofrancos put it, a "transportation system based on individual electric vehicles...with landscapes dominated by highways and suburban sprawl, is much more resource- and energy-intensive than one that favours mass transit and alternatives such as walking and cycling." While many reporters were marveling at the wonder (and glitches) of Musk's cars, the US mass transit network has sunk ever deeper into decay. In its "2021 Report Card for America's Infrastructure," the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the the nation's transit system a "D-," finding that nearly half of Americans lack reliable access to transit service. (Musk's own answer to mass transit, getting cities to pay his Boring Company to dig tunnels and ferry people underground in Teslas, is absurd.)

And suburban sprawl, as American as a hulking Ford F150 (now available in an all-electric version), proceeds apace. "Between 2001 and 2019, the built-up landscape of America-buildings, roads and other structures-has expanded into previously undeveloped areas, adding more than 14,000 square miles of new development across the contiguous United States-an area over five times the size of Delaware," the Washington Post found last year. The phenomenon is most prominent in the Sun Belt stretching from Florida to Southern California-the very region with the least mass transit infrastructure.

Just as the rise of techy meat substitutes have so far failed to dent the US appetite for meat-currently near all-time highs-Musk's successes don't seem capable of stemming the mounting environmental wreckage of the Anthropocene. Maybe striving to build the "Tesla of meat"-or of anything-was always a wrong turn. Or at best it was a supplement to, but not a replacement for, the real political work of reining in the abuses of our lightly regulated, powerful meat and fossil fuel industries.

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of our annual funding cycle is fast approaching, on June 30, and we have a considerable $260,000-plus gap in our online fundraising budget.

If you value the nonprofit journalism you get from Mother Jones, and you can, right now is an important time to help us keep charging hard with a much-needed and much-appreciated donation.
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What Tesla and fake meat really have in common

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Facts matter: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter. Support our nonprofit reporting. Subscribe to our print magazine. About a decade ago, Silicon Valley cash began flowing into startups that promised hyper-realistic imitation meat-not your hippy uncle's tofu pup or garden burger, but facsimiles that taste (and " bleed") just like the real thing.

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A Reddit thread on entrepreneurship holds some key lessons business owners have learned from failing.

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Everybody fails. From Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to the small-business owner at your corner store, enduring failure is simply a fact of life for all entrepreneurs. The thing that separates the best founders from their peers is the ability to learn from that failure.

In a recently posted Reddit thread on the r/entrepreneur subreddit, dozens of users shared their perspectives on key lessons that can only be learned after failing. Here are some of the best takes about wisdom gained from failure:

1. Don't forget to focus on sales.

You can create an essential product that revolutionizes your industry, but it won't make a bit of difference if nobody knows about it. While focusing on the quality of your product is important, sales and marketing are essential to getting the word out about your business. "It's not 90 percent product and 10 percent sales," one redditor writes. "It's mostly sales."

2. Learn to spot signs of toxic personalities.

When selecting a business partner and hiring employees, make sure you don't get suckered in by, as one redditor calls them, "narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths." Toxic personalities can have a catastrophic impact on your business if not dealt with quickly. To spot the signs, look out for a lack of empathy for others and the use of intelligence or charm to manipulate peers.

3. Go with your gut.

Don't be afraid to strike out on your own path if you have an idea you believe in. The "this is the way it's always been done" mentality can lead to creative stagnation. Just because something has only ever been done one way doesn't mean it's the best way. Experiment with new ideas and business models, as you never know when you may hit upon something brilliant. "Sometimes everyone in your industry is doing it wrong," one redditor writes.

4. Take feedback seriously.

It can be demoralizing to receive negative feedback on a product or service you've poured your passion into, but don't ignore it. While going with your gut is important, leading with solid evidence rather than emotion is just as key. "Don't half-ass product feedback," one redditor writes. "My first couple apps failed because I didn't listen to my users."

5. Solve the problem, and then create the product.

The success of your business depends on your ability to solve a specific problem using the product or service you've developed. Make sure that you've truly found a way to solve the problem you're addressing before you begin creating the product and looking for funding.

6. Understand your service providers.

Your business will likely need to rely on third-party service providers, be it e-commerce, web services, or marketing solutions. Make sure you fully understand the terms and conditions of every service provider you work with before signing a contract.

7. Learn how to say no.

When starting your business, it can be tempting to accept any work offer that comes your way, but don't make deals to provide services outside of your expertise just to land some quick cash. Stick to the areas where you know you're strong, and focus on them.

8. Prioritize co-founder relationships.

As one redditor puts it, "co-founders need more effort, care, and caution than marriage." While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, it is absolutely vital that you and your co-founder are always on the same page. Presenting a united front to your employees, investors, and clients will do wonders for your reputation.

9. Learn to delegate.

As your business begins to grow, your schedule will become increasingly more complicated to keep track of. Work on training your employees to take on more senior-level tasks. It will save you time and brainpower and will show your employees that you trust them. "It feels great knowing I'm paying my employees VERY well and I trust them to do a great job," says one redditor.

Remember these words of wisdom the next time a deal doesn't go your way or you experience setbacks trying to grow your business. As Star Wars' Yoda once said, "The greatest teacher, failure is."

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Everybody fails. From Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to the small-business owner at your corner store, enduring failure is simply a fact of life for all entrepreneurs. The thing that separates the best founders from their peers is the ability to learn from that failure.

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 Can India have a four-day a week working model like the UK? 

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 Can India have a four-day a week working model like the UK? 

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After over two years of mayhem, the world is heaving a sigh of relief. Covid-19 seems to have lost its sting, and its spread has been contained. No one knows if it's the new normal or another wave will strike the world again.

But, in the meanwhile, life has returned to normal. A lot of people have resumed offices. Some joined willingly, while a lot of them were told to do so. The pandemic has also forced the companies to do a rethink on work culture. There seems to be no fit-for-all solution and a churn is going on.

Amid this churn and the struggle between employees and employers, news from Britain has caught everyone's attention.

The world's largest pilot scheme of four-day work week kicked off in the United Kingdom this Monday. Over 3,300 workers from 70 firms have signed up for this trial for six months. It is being organised by not-for-profit '4 Day Week Global' with the thinktank Autonomy and backed by researchers from Cambridge and Oxford universities and Boston College.

"More than 3,300 workers, based throughout the UK and representing more than 30 sectors, are receiving 100 per cent of the pay for 80 per cent of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain at least 100 per cent productivity," says '4 Day Week Global'.

It is not just Britain. Spain and Scotland are also planning to start four-day week trials later this year, and the initiative is being backed by the government. The organisers of the UK event claimed that a similar trial in Iceland was an "overwhelming success". The Philippines too is toying with this idea.

Calls for shortening the work week have been gaining ground worldwide for years. Pandemic gave it a little more urgency. Citing several examples, experts claim that it will improve the productivity of the employees.

Speaking to Business Standard, Ajoy Thomas, VP & Business Head, TeamLease Services says a proposal in the new labour code gives the option to shift to four-day work week. But 48-hour weekly cap will remain. Industries can't shift to this mode since they have eight-hour per day cap, he says.

So, will employees in India also see a similar work model in the days to come. The government has come up with new labour codes which it plans to implement in the next financial year. It may pave the way for a four-day work week.

A number of aspects related to work culture, including take-home salary of the employees, working hours and the number of weekdays will be changed. The government has already finalised the rules under these codes and now states are required to frame regulations on their part as labour is a concurrent subject.

The government has also said that if the proposal comes through, employees have to work 12 hours on four days -- as they meet a 48-hour weekly work requirement.

Varun Sachdeva, APAC Recruitment & Business Leader, NLB Services says four-day week is possible in tech, banking and financial sectors, but for manufacturing, agri and healthcare it's a distant dream. In future, we will move to an outcome-based working model, he says.

There will obviously be teething problems in the beginning. Like what a lot of companies witnessed during their shift from six days a week to five days. But there is no reason why Indians cannot enjoy the four-day work week model. The government has already proposed it to the industries in the labour codes. But different sectors have different requirements, and they will have to adjust it according to their needs.

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Can India have a four-day a week working model like the UK?

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After over two years of mayhem, the world is heaving a sigh of relief. Covid-19 seems to have lost its sting, and its spread has been contained. No one knows if it's the new normal or another wave will strike the world again. But, in the meanwhile, life has returned to normal.

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Growth Of Samco Ventures Impressed Bay Capital CIO Siddharth Mehta 

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Growth Of Samco Ventures Impressed Bay Capital CIO Siddharth Mehta 

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Siddharth Mehta Founder of bay Capital said we are also very impressed with the samco team and the innovation that they have brought to the plate in an otherwise cluttered market. He said "They understand the complex requirements of the market and have been successful in delivering unique solutions."

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We’re still waiting for the laptop’s big year

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We’re still waiting for the laptop’s big year

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After a long, long month of laptop releases, Computex 2022 is finally over. In some ways, it's the Computex that wasn't.

The early part of this year was an exciting time to be a laptop reporter. Every company and its mother announced that big ideas were on the way. Wacky products abounded, from monitors to phones. LG Display (which supplied the 13.3-inch panel for Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Fold) showed off a 17-inch foldable OLED screen. We saw RGB, OLEDs, and haptics galore. Chipmakers promised architectural innovations and performance gains. We were told that these were all coming soon.

At the end of May was Computex, the biggest laptop-specific show of the year. (Well, it really was all of May - since many global attendees couldn't get to Taiwan, most companies just did their own thing and dumped their releases whenever, but that's another story. I'm still recovering from this month of nonstop announcements; please don't text me.) This would've been the perfect time for some of these innovative releases to be, you know, released - or get a release date.

But we didn't get them at Computex 2022. The show was, in fact, aggressively unexciting. We got a heck of a lot of chip bumps. We got some higher refresh rate displays. We got an HP Spectre x360 with rounder corners. (To be clear, I am personally very excited about the rounder corners, but I may be the only person on the planet in this boat.)

Don't get me wrong: incremental upgrades, both to internal specs and external elements, are important. They will make a difference in people's lives. Companies do not need to reinvent the wheel with every single laptop they release. But it is still worth noting that a number of devices that truly seem poised to expand or redefine their categories are not yet here (or if they are, I cannot find them listed for sale).

The following are some highly anticipated products announced earlier this year that have still not made it to my desk:

Asus' Zenbook 17 Fold OLED was originally announced at CES for Q2 of 2022. There are 25 days left of Q2 as of this writing, and we don't even have a confirmed price yet. This is one of multiple rumored 17-inch foldable laptops that we've expected this year. (Samsung also showed one off at CES, and HP is rumored to have one in the works.) We didn't see either at Computex.

The XPS 13 2-in-1 is one of the most significant models in the convertible space. Okay, so this one hasn't actually been announced yet, but it's leaked - and according to the leaks, Dell is likely switching this product away from the traditional 2-in-1 form factor and into a Surface Pro-like device. No mention of that in May.

The non-enterprise version of the HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook is the single device that Verge staff have been most excited about this year. It's poised to be the first Chromebook to include a haptic trackpad and Intel vPro among other impressive new features. This was supposed to ship up in April when it was announced at CES. In early May, we got an update; it's now coming "this summer" but it's not currently in stock.

Speaking of HP, the also-exciting Dragonfly G3, which finally brings the 3:2 display to the high-end business line and which we saw a prototype of in January, was originally expected in March. Looking at HP's website, it looks like it's now not shipping until July.

Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 is the 2022 release that I've been most personally excited about. It's a 17-inch dual-screen device. While dual-screen devices that put the keyboard in the front of the deck can still be quite good, their positioning doesn't work for everyone. The ThinkBook Plus puts the screen on the side, keeping the keyboard at its usual position (albeit a bit far to the left) and the touchpad a usable size, an arrangement that could be more practical for many folks. It was legitimately very cool to use in Lenovo's CES demo area and could potentially be a useful imagining of the dual-screen form factor. This was supposed to ship in May but is still "coming soon," according to Lenovo's website.

There's also no sign yet of the ThinkPad Z-Series, a funky new ThinkPad line that targets Gen Z, includes a haptic touchpad and a vegan leather cover, and is potentially a new vision for who a business laptop can benefit. This was supposed to ship in May, but no dice so far. (The website, as of this writing, still says "coming spring 2022."

RDNA 3, AMD's next generation of Radeon GPUs, are rumored to bring bonkers performance improvements. The refreshes AMD did show off were still a big announcement, but the stated single-thread gains were underwhelming in comparison.

It's not all bad news. Some of the most anticipated devices of 2022 have been released on schedule, including a number of products on the gaming side like Asus' ROG Flow Z13. And, of course, companies deviate from plans all the time. But I did gut check my impression with Gartner research vice president Stephen Kleynhans, and it does appear to be true: across the board, we are seeing delays in PC shipments, which are in turn impacting releases. It's not a problem unique to the PC space, of course - industries across the board, including the automotive field, are being held up.

These delays, Kleynhans believes, are, unsurprisingly, "mostly supply chain issues," and a lot of it has to do with the current COVID situation in China, which has led to lockdowns in key tech hubs. Kleynhans told me that "until China really opens back up, which seems to be what we're seeing now, and it can catch up from the backlog that's been created, we're going to continue to see disruptions on top of the disruptions that were already there." He thinks PC availability could be disrupted "at least towards summer and towards the end of the year."

It's not only that companies are having trouble getting current-gen units into their hands. In Kleynhans's view, it has to do with the fulfillment of last-gen orders as well. "If you've got a customer who placed an order for 1,000 machines three or four months ago, and they still haven't received them, you don't want to release this year's model while those orders are outstanding," Kleynhans told me. We're certainly seeing delays on current models as well; many of Apple's most recent MacBook Pros are showing ship dates of late July or later. (Apple is heavily rumored to have a new MacBook Air in the pipeline, and it will be interesting to see whether the company is able to stick to its usual near-term availability timeline.)

"We're going to continue to see disruptions"

When it comes to supply chain delays, the PC market is hardly the worst-hit (or most important) industry. The world will continue to turn if 17-inch foldable PCs take longer than expected to ship. And laptop delays are hardly the most important or impactful consequence of this pandemic.

Still, this situation should serve as a reminder of a fact that is, frankly, always worth remembering: the PC space has so many moving parts. Many things had to go right to deliver the laptop you're typing on right now and the laptop I'm typing on right now (it's a Zephyrus G14, if you're curious) to our doorsteps. It's fun to live in a world full of haptics, foldables, and 2X performance gains in the early part of the year. But the real world is more complicated and boring, and even the coolest innovations require all kinds of logistical stars to align.

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We're still waiting for the laptop's big year

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After a long, long month of laptop releases, Computex 2022 is finally over. In some ways, it's the Computex that wasn't. The early part of this year was an exciting time to be a laptop reporter. Every company and its mother announced that big ideas were on the way.

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Guardians of the brain: how a special immune system protects our grey matter

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Guardians of the brain: how a special immune system protects our grey matter

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The brain is the body's sovereign, and receives protection in keeping with its high status. Its cells are long-lived and shelter inside a fearsome fortification called the blood-brain barrier. For a long time, scientists thought that the brain was completely cut off from the chaos of the rest of the body - especially its eager defence system, a mass of immune cells that battle infections and whose actions could threaten a ruler caught in the crossfire.

In the past decade, however, scientists have discovered that the job of protecting the brain isn't as straightforward as they thought. They've learnt that its fortifications have gateways and gaps, and that its borders are bustling with active immune cells.

A large body of evidence now shows that the brain and the immune system are tightly intertwined. Scientists already knew that the brain had its own resident immune cells, called microglia; recent discoveries are painting more-detailed pictures of their functions and revealing the characteristics of the other immune warriors housed in the regions around the brain. Some of these cells come from elsewhere in the body; others are produced locally, in the bone marrow of the skull. By studying these immune cells and mapping out how they interact with the brain, researchers are discovering that they play an important part in both healthy and diseased or damaged brains. Interest in the field has exploded: there were fewer than 2,000 papers per year on the subject in 2010, swelling to more than 10,000 per year in 2021, and researchers have made several major findings in the past few years.

No longer do scientists consider the brain to be a special, sealed-off zone. "This whole idea of immune privilege is quite outdated now," says Kiavash Movahedi, a neuroimmunologist at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). Although the brain is still seen as immunologically unique - its barriers prevent immune cells from coming and going at will - it's clear that the brain and immune system constantly interact, he adds (see 'The brain's immune defences').

This shift in attitude is widespread in the community, says Leonardo Tonelli, chief of the neuroendocrinology and neuroimmunology programme at the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In his experience, almost every neuroscientist who reviews grant proposals for the agency accepts the connection, he says, although many still need to catch up with the latest discoveries in neuroimmunology, which have started to reveal the underlying mechanisms.

The rush to understand how the brain and immune system knit together has prompted a wealth of questions, says Tony Wyss-Coray, a neuroimmunologist at Stanford University in California. "How important is this in normal brain function or disease? That is a very hard question to answer."

Privileged space

More than two decades ago, when neuroimmunologist Michal Schwartz had just set up her laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, she couldn't stop asking herself an unpopular question: could it really be true that the brain is completely cut off from immune protection? "It was completely axiomatic that the brain cannot tolerate any immune activity - everyone thought that if you have any immune activation, this was a sign of pathology," she says. "But it didn't make sense that tissue that is so indispensable, like the brain, cannot enjoy the benefit of being assisted by the immune system."

The idea that the brain was off limits to the immune system took root decades earlier. In the 1920s, the Japanese scientist Y. Shirai reported that when tumour cells were implanted in a rat's body, the immune response destroyed them, but when placed in the brain, they survived - indicating a feeble or absent immune response. Similar findings followed in the 1940s.

Most scientists also thought that the brain lacked a system for ferrying immune molecules in and out - the lymphatic drainage system that exists elsewhere in the body - even though such a system was first described in the brain more than two centuries ago. The prevailing view, then, was that the brain and the immune system lived largely separate lives. The two were thought to collide only under hostile circumstances: when immune cells went rogue, attacking the body's own cells in diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

So when, in the late 1990s, Schwartz and her team reported that after an acute injury to the central nervous system, two types of immune cells, macrophages and T cells, protected neurons from damage and supported their recovery, many scientists were sceptical. "Everyone told me, you're absolutely wrong," Schwartz recalls.

Since those early experiments, Schwartz's team and others have amassed a large body of evidence showing that immune cells do, indeed, have a significant role in the brain, even in the absence of autoimmune disease. Researchers have shown, for example, that in mice engineered to lack an immune system, neurodegenerative diseases such as motor neuron disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and Alzheimer's disease seemed to progress more rapidly, whereas restoring the immune system slowed their progression. Scientists have also revealed a potential role for microglia in Alzheimer's disease.

More recently, scientists have shown that immune cells at the brain's edges are active in neurodegenerative diseases. After examining the cerebrospinal fluid of people with Alzheimer's, Wyss-Coray and his colleagues found evidence of a rise in numbers of T cells in the brain's fluid-filled borders. The expansion of these immune-cell populations suggests that they might have a role in the disease, Wyss-Coray says.

But whether immune cells hurt or help the brain is an open question. In their studies of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative disorders, Wyss-Coray and his colleagues suggest that the immune system could be damaging neurons by releasing molecules that boost inflammation and trigger cell death. Others have suggested that T cells and other immune cells could instead be protective. For example, Schwartz's group has reported that in mouse models of Alzheimer's, boosting the immune response leads to a clearance of amyloid plaques - a pathological hallmark of the disease - and improves cognitive performance.

Busy borders

It's now becoming clear that the brain's margins are immunologically diverse: almost any type of immune cell in the body can also be found in the area surrounding the brain. The meninges - the fluid-filled membranes that wrap the brain - are an "immunological wonderland", says Movahedi, whose work focuses on macrophages in the brain's borders. "There's so much happening out there."

Some residents are exclusive to the frontiers. In 2021, Jonathan Kipnis, a neuroimmunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues reported that there is a local source of immune cells: the bone marrow of the skull.

When they explored how the bone marrow mobilizes these cells, Kipnis and his colleagues demonstrated that, in response to an injury to the central nervous system or in the presence of a pathogen, signals carried in the cerebrospinal fluid were delivered to the skull bone marrow, prompting it to produce and release these cells (see 'Private protectors').

What role these locally produced immune cells have remains to be seen, but Kipnis's group thinks that they might have a gentler role than immune cells from elsewhere in the body, regulating the immune response rather than being primed to fight. Kipnis says that this distinction, if true, has implications for treatment. In diseases such as multiple sclerosis, he says, symptoms could perhaps be improved by preventing immune cells from other parts of the body from coming in. By contrast, with a brain tumour, he adds, "you want the fighters".

His team has also detected a network of channels that snake and branch over the surface of the brain, and which swarm with immune cells, forming the brain's own lymphatic system. These vessels, which sit in the outermost part of the meninges, give immune cells a vantage point near the brain from where they can monitor any signs of infection or injury.

In sickness and in health

As evidence builds for the involvement of immune cells during brain injury and disease, researchers have been exploring their function in healthy brains. "I think the most exciting part of neuroimmunology is that it's relevant to so many different disorders and conditions and to normal physiology," says Beth Stevens, a neuroscientist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts.

Many groups, including Stevens's, have found microglia to be important to the brain's development. These cells are involved in pruning neuronal connections, and studies suggest that problems in the pruning process might contribute to neurodevelopmental conditions.

Border immune cells, too, have been shown to be essential in healthy brains. Kipnis, Schwartz and their colleagues, for example, have shown that mice that lack some of these cells display problems in learning and social behaviour. Others reported in 2020 that mice that develop without a specific population of T cells in both the brain and the rest of the body have defective microglia. Their microglia struggle to prune neuronal connections during development, leading to excessive numbers of synapses and abnormal behaviour. The authors propose that during this crucial period, T cells migrate into the brain and help microglia to mature.

One big mystery is how exactly immune cells - particularly those around the borders - talk to the brain. Although there is some evidence that they might occasionally cross into the organ, most studies so far suggest that these cells communicate by sending in molecular messengers known as cytokines. These, in turn, influence behaviour.

Researchers have been studying how cytokines affect behaviour for decades, finding, for example, that cytokines sent out by immune cells during infection can initiate 'sickness behaviours' such as increased sleep. They have also shown in animal models that alterations in cytokines - induced by depleting them throughout the body or knocking out specific cytokine receptors on neurons - can lead to alterations in memory, learning and social behaviours. How cytokines travel into the brain and exert their effects remains an area of active study.

Cytokines might also be a link between the immune system and neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism. When Gloria Choi, a neuroimmunologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and her colleagues boosted cytokine levels in pregnant mice, they saw brain changes and autism-like behaviours in the offspring.

Although these insights are tantalizing, much of the work on how immune cells, especially those in the borders, operate in the brain is still in its infancy. "We are very far away from understanding what's happening in healthy brains," Kipnis says.

A two-way street

Communication between the immune system and the brain also seems to go in the other direction: the brain can direct the immune system.

Some of these insights are decades old. In the 1970s, scientists conditioned rats to become immunosuppressed when they tasted saccharin, an artificial sweetener, by pairing it with an immunosuppressive drug for several days.

In more recent work, Asya Rolls, a neuroimmunologist at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, and her team explored the link between emotion, immunity and cancer in mice. They reported in 2018 that activating neurons in the ventral tegmental area, a brain region involved in positive emotions and motivation, boosted the immune response and, in turn, slowed tumour growth.

Then, in 2021, her group pinpointed neurons in the insular cortex - a part of the brain involved in processing emotion and bodily sensations, among other things - that were active during inflammation in the colon, a condition also known as colitis.

By activating these neurons artificially, the researchers were able to reawaken the intestinal immune response. Just as Pavlov's dogs learnt to associate the sound of a bell with food, causing the animals to salivate any time they heard the noise, these rodents' neurons had captured a 'memory' of the immunological response that could be rebooted. "This showed that there is very intense crosstalk between neurons and immune cells," says Movahedi, who wasn't involved with this work.

Rolls suspects that organisms evolved such immunological 'memories' because they are advantageous, gearing up the immune system in situations when the body might meet pathogens. She adds that in certain cases, they can instead be maladaptive - when the body anticipates an infection and mounts an unnecessary immune response, causing collateral damage. This pathway might help to explain how psychological states can influence the immune response, providing a potential mechanism for many psychosomatic disorders, according to Rolls.

It could also inspire therapies. Rolls and her team found that blocking the activity of those inflammation-associated neurons lessened inflammation in mice with colitis. Her group hopes to translate these findings to humans, and is examining whether inhibiting activity using non-invasive brain stimulation can help to alleviate symptoms in people with Crohn's disease and psoriasis - disorders that are mediated by the immune system. This work is in the early phases, Rolls says, "but it'll be really cool if it works".

Other groups are exploring how the brain controls the immune system. Choi's team is tracing out the specific neurons and circuits that modulate the immune response. One day, she hopes to be able to generate a comprehensive map of the interactions between the brain and immune system, outlining the cells, circuits and molecular messengers responsible for the communication in both directions - and connecting those to behavioural or physiological readouts.

One of the biggest challenges now is to tease apart which populations of cells are involved in these myriad functions. To tackle it, some researchers have been probing how these cells differ at the molecular level, by sequencing genes in single cells. This has revealed a subset of microglia associated with neurodegenerative disease, for example. Understanding how these microglia function differently from their healthy counterparts will be useful in developing treatments, Stevens says. They could also be used as markers to track the progression of a disease or the efficacy of therapies, she adds.

Researchers have already begun using these insights into the immune ecosystem in and around the brain. Schwartz's team, for example, is rejuvenating the immune system in the hope of fighting Alzheimer's disease. This work has opened up new avenues for therapeutics, particularly for neurodegenerative conditions, Schwartz says. "It's an exciting time in the history of brain research."
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01502-8

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Guardians of the brain: how a special immune system protects our grey matter

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The brain is the body's sovereign, and receives protection in keeping with its high status. Its cells are long-lived and shelter inside a fearsome fortification called the blood-brain barrier.

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The Pivot to Web3 Is Going to Get People Hurt

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The Pivot to Web3 Is Going to Get People Hurt

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(Photo illustration: Michelle Urra)

It can feel as if the entire world is bolting on crypto tokens and NFTs. Many in the industry worry the gold rush is akin to a "collective Theranos" that's warping the economy to the benefit of professional investors.

It can feel at times as if the entire world is pivoting into Web3, and the question is why. There are, suddenly, Web3 media companies, Web3 advertising firms, Web3 studios, Web3 marketing tactics, and Web3 publishing networks. LimeWire and MoviePass have risen from the dead, newly "powered"- as one of their CEOs put it-"by Web3 technology." Web3 apparently is not only " transforming gaming" and " re-engineering real estate," but also the future of the internet, and maybe the entire global economy as well.

"A lot of people are trying to get in on it, and a lot of people are more afraid of not getting in."

The pace of the pivots can feel almost frenetic. One Ottawa-based entrepreneur, worried the world was passing him by, surprised his employees on a company Zoom call by saying he was pivoting the entire company into Web3. "I said, 'Guys, this is the future and this is where everything is going,'" he said. "'If we miss this boat, I don't think we can ever get back on.'" (The company, which had been a print-on-demand platform, now helps creators build 3D NFTs to sell to fans in the metaverse.)

Like a lot of his fellow entrepreneurs, Nick Gerard, the CEO and co- founder of Norby, a startup focused on the creator economy, started to notice last year that one by one, his competitors were also diving headfirst into the world of crypto and Web3. Gerard said potential investors in Norby were pushing him to take the Web3 leap as well.

But Gerard couldn't help but feel confused by the whole thing. His customers, the people he thought mattered most, rarely showed much interest in Web3 technologies at all. "I can count on one hand the number of times I have actually heard 'NFTs' come out of one of these people's mouths," he told me. Even still, he and the rest of his team mulled over whether to make the switch, fearful that they were missing something everyone else could see.

"Nobody wants to be Paul Krugman," Gerard said, referring to an infamous 1998 quote in which the Nobel Prize-winning economist predicted that the internet would ultimately become no more consequential than the fax machine. (He's also famously anti-Bitcoin and crypto.)

Have you worked or invested in Web3? We want to hear from you. From a non-work device, contact our reporter at maxwell.strachan@vice.com or via Signal at 310-614-3752 for extra security.

The Web3 hysteria has continued this year even as the tech industry more broadly has struggled with rising interest rates and plummeting share prices. "In the last six months, it's gotten fairly ridiculous," said one partner at a crypto-focused investment firm. In the first three months of the year, the top 15 venture firms poured more money into Web3 and DeFi early- and seed-stage deals than any other area, the third straight quarter they have done so, according to the research firm Pitchbook. In total, the early- and seed-stage Web3 world nabbed $2 billion from top firms last quarter, more than double what the next-highest sector, biotechnology, received, and triple what traditional fintech got. Those figures understate the total level of interest-and money-in the space. Blockchain companies have raised at least $9.5 billion after receiving $18 billion in funding in 2021, according to numbers the research firm CrunchBase provided to Motherboard. And more firepower is on the way. In late May, amid plunging crypto prices, one of Web3's biggest institutional backers, the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, announced it had raised a monstrous $4.5 billion crypto fund following a series of high-profile investments into Web3 projects like play-to-earn game Axie Infinity and the parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

"It's a gold rush for sure," said Dayton Mills, the co-founder and CEO of Branch. Mills' company had been a struggling remote-work startup before he transformed it into a Web3 gaming platform. The moment he started talking about his Web3 vision, investor interest skyrocketed. "It was a tremendous difference," he said. "There were people who I didn't even meet with who were just committing over email without ever even talking to me." He had planned to raise $2 million, only to receive $20 million in commitments in two weeks. "We stopped because it just was incredibly overwhelming."

"Something big is happening," Mills added. "A lot of people are trying to get in on it, and a lot of people are more afraid of not getting in."

What exactly they are getting in on is harder to pin down. The term "Web3" is sometimes attributed to Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of the Ethereum blockchain, who, in 2014, described an idealized version of the web in which the system placed no trust in organizations but near-complete trust in blockchain technology. But it didn't enter the mainstream cultural vernacular until last year, when it started to serve as a catchall (and, coincidentally, a venture-led rebranding) for the collection of controversial financial-technology products that include cryptocurrencies, blockchains, non-fungible tokens, decentralized autonomous organizations (or "DAOs"), the metaverse, and decentralized financial (or DeFi) products.

"It's like a collective Theranos. A wildly unproven product with nobody at the helm," one venture capitalist said.

Such arguments are inarguably alluring. Very few people feel the financial and internet structures that underpin society could not be vastly improved. But they also belie the fact that professional investors do not push their money into the middle of the craps table solely in order to better the world. As Hilary J. Allen, a law professor at American University, succinctly put it: "The reason why venture capitalists are pushing all of this is to make money."

And in Web3, the venture class and other professional investors have found a uniquely appealing set of circumstances they believe will allow them to make a giant pile of money that does not rely on vast leaps in virtual reality or haptics technology-sometimes by pulling off an impressive degree of regulatory arbitrage, other times by taking advantage of a wholly new kind of internet marketplace.

"If there is any innovation in crypto assets, it's not in software engineering but in financial engineering," the London-based software engineer and crypto critic Stephen Diehl has written.

Allen, who studies financial regulation, sees the rhetoric around empowerment and inclusion as little more than a "cynical" ploy. She and others believe it masks the aspects of the Web3 apparatus that have made it appetizing to venture capitalists, billionaires, and other institutional players-so much so that they have moved aggressively to plant a foothold in spite of the industry's unmistakable propensity for scams, fraud, and regulatory scrutiny.

Here we have a largely unregulated marketplace ripe for exploitation and stuffed full of unclear valuation metrics, arguable unregistered securities, peculiar financial products, ways to cash out, and a public-facing ideological mission statement.

Of particular fascination has been the critical role in the Web3 ecosystem of the token, a new type of financial product that regulators are still struggling to get a handle on but that venture capitalists have realized allows them to cash out quickly and handsomely even if the company never goes public (and twice over if they do).

It is, at least for now, close to a perfect playing field for the professional money-making class, one that is leading to pressures to pivot or die, whatever the utility. One entrepreneur described with great frustration that he had recently spoken to a founder at a VC mixer who was building a "decentralized" dinner reservation system. When he asked why a reservation system needed to be on the blockchain, the founder simply said: "It's the future."

"It's like a collective Theranos," one venture capitalist said. "A wildly unproven product with nobody at the helm."

A great many Web3 entrepreneurs and investors appear sincerely passionate about their mission of creating a better version of the internet. To many of these people, Web3 is not an idyllic possibility but an all-out inevitability, spoken about with an almost religious fervor. "It really feels ideological to me, and it's weird, because VCs tend not to invest in ideologies," said Phil Libin, the former co-founder and CEO of Evernote. Indeed, soon after a recent string of crypto controversies, including the precipitous May crash of the Luna cryptocurrency and its sister "stablecoin" UST, Andreessen Horowitz said Web3 was just now entering its "golden era." The same week, it announced an investment in former WeWork CEO's Adam Neumann's Web3 climate venture selling "Goddess Nature Tokens."

Another such believer, Benjamin Cohen, who recently started a Web3-focused investment fund, told a crypto site in March that it was "inevitable that blockchain technology and smart contract technology will become implemented in every single facet of our life." That is not an isolated opinion. "Every single company that exists is going to exist in some form of Web3," Alexander Taub, the Miami-based co-founder of the DAO-creation tool Upstream, told Motherboard in a Zoom interview. (Taub, who wore a "Just DAO It" hat, added that "the potential market size for DAOs is, like, trillions.")

A lot of the believer class come across as "zealots" who are dismissive of those who question them, according to Jason Henrichs, the CEO of Alloy Labs Alliance, who has spoken to Web3 projects about potential investment (and moved forward with some). The technology writer and researcher Evgeny Morozov has gone so far as to compare them to "annoying vulgar Marxists who, for all the evidence to the contrary, kept [and keep] insisting that the objective developments within capitalism favor the inevitable transition to socialism."

Some wonder if the Web3 hype is justified at all. Libin had been initially drawn to the "beautiful" and "elegant" concepts of Web3, he said. The CEO of the startup studio All Turtles and the virtual camera application mmhmm, as well as a former VC at General Catalyst, Libin has made a career out of searching out companies that solve real problems with clear business models. But as he started hearing from more and more Web3 companies, he found himself unable to understand what benefit came from developing certain projects on the blockchain as opposed to, for example, using an internal database. When he started to challenge some of the pitches he received, he didn't like the answers he got. Using such technologies often seemed needlessly expensive and prone to exploitation by hackers and scammers.

"Web3 proponents are trying to solve real problems that need solving. I just don't think that Web3 is the solution," he said. "It doesn't make sense to me as a programmer."

The common pro-Web3 counterargument-often repeated by VCs-is that proponents are simply early, like with the internet of the 1990s. Such unbridled optimism is not novel to Web3, but instead core to the venture and technology industries' model, according to Martin Kenney, a professor at the University of California, Davis who studies the industry. The investors' goal is always to sell the company, and they have an incentive to target hot sectors and then aid in raising interest in them.

"Whatever the new thing is, it's absolutely in the VC's interest to hype it. You'd be a fool not to," said Kenney. "So you feed it to the press. You tell everyone it's going to change the world, that it is the best thing since sliced bread, whatever it is that will convince the investors that they need to have it."

It can be convincing, and was famously so in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, during which time companies that added a ".com" to their name experienced a "dramatic" and "permanent" rise in valuation immediately after the rebrand, "regardless of the firm's level of involvement with the Internet," according to a study on the so-called "dotcom" effect. The researchers determined this so-called "dotcom" effect was attributable to a desire to be "associated with the Internet at all costs" even if the companies were "at best, only loosely, if at all, connected" to it. Eventually, the boom turned to a bust, but not before many venture capitalists cashed out.

"Web3 proponents are trying to solve real problems that need solving. I just don't think that Web3 is the solution."

Slava Rubin, an early-stage investor who founded Indiegogo and an alternative asset investing search engine, said the enthusiasm reminded him of the e-commerce boom of the 1990s. "Whenever there's change, there's opportunity to displace the legacy players and potentially make a lot of money on investments," he said.

This time, however, the world's most well-known brands are diving in too, in order to avoid falling behind. Starbucks, ESPN, Spotify, and GameStop are developing NFT plans; Fidelity Investment, the nation's largest 401(k) provider, is allowing people to shove their retirement savings into Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs is offering crypto-backed loans. JPMorgan Chase, Gucci, and Miller Lite are hunkering down in the metaverse. Google has a dedicated Web3 team. Facebook is Meta.

Over the last century, venture capitalists have backed industries that have changed the world and created millions of jobs, most famously during those early years of the internet. Less talked about is the fact that the venture class has gotten it wrong as well, said Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner, who also studies the venture industry. As an example, Lerner cited the VC-funded cleantech boom and bust at the end of the 2000s as a recent example.

"It turned out that not only was the technology a lot harder than they thought, but many of the businesses were just extremely poorly run, and some of the best firms in the business were just blinded by their enthusiasm into burning huge amounts of investor money," Lerner said.

Tomasz Tunguz didn't become interested in Web3 because of its ideological underpinnings. Like a lot of investors, he saw a chance to make a lot of money because of the economic particularities of the Web3 ecosystem.

"That really opened up a lot of people's eyes to the size of these companies," Tunguz said. "The scale compels you to figure out what's going on."

The closer he looked, the greater the investment opportunity seemed. For one thing, the businesses did not have clear metrics by which they could be valued. Over the last 20 years, investors and entrepreneurs have together developed fairly reliable, standardized financial models that allow them to confidently place values on traditional software businesses after comparing them to similar older ones. "Most software businesses are really well understood. A startup walks in, and the venture capitalist just as much as the private market investors know exactly what it ought to be worth," said Tunguz.

"In Web3, that's not the case," he added. "Nobody has any idea how to value these businesses." He doesn't see that as a bad thing but rather as indicative that the Web3 industry is in a period of "broad invention as opposed to optimization."

"Nobody has any idea how to value these businesses ... It's so new that people aren't worried about unit economics," one venture capitalist said.

"I haven't walked into a single pitch with a Web3 company where the words 'cost of customer acquisition' or 'payback period' has been uttered. It's so new that people aren't worried about unit economics," Tunguz said. (Raghavendra Rau, a Cambridge finance professor who helped discover the "dotcom" effect, agreed the Web3 industry's underlying fundamentals were "tough to decipher," as did others.)

Tunguz knows that lack of focus on economic fundamentals will sound "crazy" to some people, and he does believe that a "significantly higher" percentage of Web3 ventures will fail than the typical crop of startups found in a venture fund's portfolio. But he also sees Web3's unclear valuation metrics as a financial opportunity compared to the world of Web 2.0, which has become so well understood that it has proven harder for investors to gain an edge.

"One of the ways of making lots of money is to have information asymmetry," Tunguz said. "If you know something I don't about a company and you trade on that information, you're gonna make a bunch of money, right? In the stock market, it's illegal. It's called MNPI-material nonpublic information. You can't do that. In the private markets, you can."

"You can think of the mechanisms by which these tokens capture value to be comparable to the equity of a startup," Samani told Motherboard. "Many of these assets capture revenue directly in the same way that a startup would have revenue. And if an asset captured revenue, then you can model the valuation using a discounted cash-flow model." Such descriptions are the reason many believe tokens should be regulated like an investment contract, or a security, since people invest in them " with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others "-the legal criteria for qualifying as a security.

"The entirety of most web3 epiphanies is 'what if instead of selling products we sold shares instead?'" Meta product manager and frequent crypto cynic Dare Obasanjo has written.

"You can think of the mechanisms by which these tokens capture value to be comparable to the equity of a startup," said a partner at a crypto-focused investment firm.

Andreessen Horowitz, in its recent " State of Crypto " report, argued that the token-focused structure of Web3 companies aligned the incentives of users, creators, builders, and investors in a way untokenized companies could not. "Web3 aligns network participants to work together toward a common goal-the growth of the network," the report stated. Together, so the line of thinking goes, they all can theoretically make it.

But Tunguz (and others) saw opportunities for professional Web3 investors that those stuck in the earlier iteration of the web could not access. He realized the sector was broadly well suited for "regulatory arbitrage," a practice in which businesses move to jurisdictions with more favorable laws or position themselves as one type of company rather than another in order avoid regulatory oversight (say, a ride-sharing company that positions itself as an app startup instead of a cab company). As Tunguz put it, the "the regulation doesn't exist" yet in Web3, which allows the companies to access funds not available to more-traditional companies.

Traditionally, venture capitalists have had to wait years before they can receive a payout for their investments, usually during an initial public offering. Since tokens could be sold at any time, Tunguz realized Web3 investors in them had access to an asset with "immediate liquidity" instead, which can lead to a return even if the company never goes public. If they do, all the better: the equity investor can then cash out twice.

One other token-related process-known as "staking"-proved particularly enticing to Tunguz. To him, it seemed as sure of a thing as they come in finance. With staking, the owner of the token hands them over for a project to use as liquidity-for crypto loans, to take one example-and in exchange earns " a percentage-rate reward over time," as the crypto exchange Coinbase puts it. This, Tunguz realized, meant he could make money from a token regardless of whether its price went up or down. Soon enough, he was actively staking tokens in order to generate what he viewed as a remarkably high "interest rate." ("Tokens can generate somewhere between like 15 to, let's say, 100 percent in fixed income," Tunguz said.)

The discovery of such enormous fixed income in the Web3 space proved of financial interest to VCs, but Tunguz expects it will prove exceedingly exciting to institutional investors who have been focused on the bond market-"the people who buy mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, collateralized debt obligations, basically the stuff that caused the 2008 financial crisis," he told me. "Those are the big institutional pools of capital that really want to get into DeFi because they can generate those yields."

"These big institutions are looking at these crypto tokens and saying if I can isolate myself from whether or not the price of the token goes up or down, but if I can capture the yield on a consistent basis, then I can generate maybe 10 times what I could on a bond," he continued.

Within days, it was reported that one of Terraform Labs' early and biggest investors, the crypto-focused hedge fund Pantera Capital, had quietly cashed out "roughly" four-fifths of its investment ahead of UST's collapse, a little under $170 million on a $1.7 million investment. The news infuriated many retail investors, who saw it as proof of what many in crypto suspected: professional investors gaining an early edge, loudly pumping up the project, quietly cashing out-the dump-and then moving on to the next token.

Newton made the comments following the release of ApeCoin token, all but officially associated with Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, or BAYC. ApeCoin's organizing body, ApeCoin DAO, had dedicated nearly a fourth of all tokens to BAYC's co-founders and "the companies and people that helped make this project a reality," which reportedly included venture capitalists.

This sort of insidery dealmaking is why many in the crypto sphere have become suspicious of the professional investor class. Web3 projects have started requiring VCs to lock up their holding to avoid a professional pump-and-dump, and VCs have been reduced to writing about why people should take their money. ("There are many alternatives to venture capital these days, particularly in web3, but there are few, if any, alternatives that stick with you, when times are tough," the investor Fred Wilson wrote in December.)

And yet, the VCs' influence over the startup system remains unquestionable. A " VC friend " recently told Newton "they are hearing about startups being pressured to offer tokens." Gerard, the Norby CEO, similarly started to hear of companies getting pressure to mint tokens.

"They've failed to find incentives in their Web2 companies. So building something in Web3, it's almost like a cop-out for some people. They're like, 'Oh, we're just gonna ping a token on top of it.'"

But the more he learned about them, the more skeptical he became. He started to believe that tokens, rather than the ideological "future of a fully decentralized internet," were behind a lot of the investor interest in Web3, he told me. As he sees it, an investment firm could invest in a startup in exchange for equity and inside information and then negotiate a hoard of early tokens. "What I have now is asymmetric access to information," Gerard said. "I have a direct line to a founder that every single person in the Discord doesn't have. I have access to financial information. I know if user adoption is tanking. I know if usage is skyrocketing. I know if the founder is depressed or hooked on Adderall or is spiraling out of control."

Then, at the first internal sign of trouble, the investor can dump the token on the "quote-unquote community," Gerard said.

"That is a radical change in the way this industry works," he said. "Some of them are quite transparent about it, but they're still able to couch all of this in language that revolves around ownership and the community."

Last summer, as Gerard weighed his own pivot, he kept hearing about founders who were making the switch simply because doing so made it easier to raise money.

A venture capitalist who asked that I not use his name so he could speak freely about his firm's investments, admitted with concern that one of his own portfolio companies did the same, and other founders and CEOs similarly said they'd noticed startups cynically bolting on Web3 elements after running out of other options and needing more funding to survive.

"They've failed to find incentives in their Web2 companies," said Mills, the CEO who himself pivoted to start a Web3 gaming platform, said of such companies. "So building something in Web3, it's almost like a cop-out for some people. They're like, 'Oh, we're just gonna ping a token on top of it.'"

"We see so many of these," agreed Jeff Clavier, the founder of the venture firm Uncork Capital. "Web3 is the new trend, and a lot of entrepreneurs add that as an afterthought." Tiny Rebel Games CEO Susan Cummings said attempting to superficially "jerry-rig" an element to raise money can be a dangerous bet for a startup. Who is doing that in Web3 is difficult to decipher. An investor accused Cummings herself of bolting on an unnecessary Web3 element when she pitched him on the Petaverse Network, a Web3 project in which people build digital pets that can then live with them in various metaverses. "He turned us down, saying I don't see why you need blockchain," she said. "That's true. You could store it in a database." She contended that the potential interoperability and ownership of the Web3-based idea "made it better" and went on to raise $7 million, double what she set out to raise.

What everyone can seem to agree on is that the boom has created a lot of vaporware and useless entrepreneurial attempts to get rich quick, even if no one wants to name names on the record.

"Tack on Web3, and investors will throw money blindly and inflate valuations 2-3x."

Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists alike described companies that bolt on a Web3 element in order to raise a few more bucks as "grifters." Venture capitalists say such companies are easy to spot. Even if that's true for the most part, a founder told me he's noticed bolting on a Web3 element adds investor interest, whatever its relevance. "Tack on Web3," the founder said, "and investors will throw money blindly and inflate valuations 2-3x."

Gerard, the Norby CEO, dealt with real periods of "self-doubt" as he decided whether to pivot into Web3. Sometimes, he worried he was being stupid. But ultimately, he decided, if his customers weren't clamoring for it, he didn't see a reason to pivot.

"If that's something that we start to hear from our customers, then it's absolutely something that we are going to take a look at and figure out what version of it makes sense for us," he told me. But for now, he added, "We can't force people to want something that they don't want."

The question for now is how long the regulatory-arbitrage party will last. The regulators are encircling what many see as illegal financial activity. Repeatedly in recent months, SEC chairman Gary Gensler has reiterated that he believes many crypto tokens should be regulated as securities. "Let's not risk undermining 90 years of securities laws and create some regulatory arbitrage or loopholes," he said at the University of Pennsylvania's April law conference.

"What we have with tokens is another way of creating leverage. Now, it's the asset itself that is synthetic," said a law professor comparing crypto tokens to credit default swaps.

Hilary J. Allen, the law professor who studies financial regulation, has spent much of her time recently studying the similarities between financial products that make up Web3 and the collection of instruments that led to the Great Recession. In tokens, Allen sees an innovation that is at its core comparable to the credit default swap. The two are different-credit default swaps allow numerous people to make a bet on a bond's future performance-but at the end of the day, both help greatly increase potential leverage in the financial system, she said.

"Leverage is great in good times, because it allows you to multiply your profits. But it means that the system is very much more fragile, because even small amounts of losses on your investments will wipe you out," she said. "What we have with tokens is another way of creating leverage. But now, it's not about lots of contracts referencing the bonds; now, it's the asset itself that is synthetic-there's no limit on the number of tokens that we can create."

Allen doesn't mince words when she discusses her worst-case future scenario: "major systemic implosion." Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the crypto industry is not yet at the scale to pose " financial stability concerns," and President Joe Biden has expressed support for "responsible" crypto innovation, but the rhetoric of financial democratization nevertheless reminds Allen of before the subprime housing bubble burst, when a collection of complex financial innovations like mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations were seen as avenues through which new swaths of people could have access to wealth. And now, Allen and others hope the Web3 system will be placed under regulatory control before history repeats itself.

Tunguz, the pro-Web3 venture capitalist, is ready for such a day, but reaping the rewards until then.

"There will be a Securities Act of 2033, whatever the year is," said Tunguz. "Whenever the regulation comes out, we will respond to it. But I think there's definitely an opportunity here to make money in a way that benefits everybody within the ecosystem."

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The Pivot to Web3 Is Going to Get People Hurt

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(Photo illustration: Michelle Urra) It can feel as if the entire world is bolting on crypto tokens and NFTs. Many in the industry worry the gold rush is akin to a "collective Theranos" that's warping the economy to the benefit of professional investors.

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Bay Capital Founder, Siddharth Mehta Impressed By The Growth Of Samco

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Bay Capital Founder, Siddharth Mehta Impressed By The Growth Of Samco

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Siddharth Mehta, founder of Bay Capital, said. “They understand the complex requirements of the market and have been successful in delivering unique solutions.”“Samco has had an impressive growth trajectory since its inception in 2015. We are also very impressed with the Samco team and the innovation that they have brought to the plate in an otherwise cluttered market,”

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The brokerage, which competes with the likes of Bengaluru-based Zerodha, will use the proceeds towards building a mutual fund distribution platform.

NEW DELHI: Samco Ventures, which owns and operates online discount broker Samco Securities and mobile trading platform StockNote, has raised $7.5 million (Rs 49 crore) in a fresh round of funding.

The Series-B round of equity financing is an internal round that was led by the company existing investor, mid-market private equity firm Bay Capital Investments, with the promoters of the Mumbai-headquartered company also participating. The brokerage, which competes with the likes of Bengaluru-based Zerodha, will use the proceeds towards building a mutual fund distribution platform, lending capabilities, as well as its research and advisory businesses.

"Samco has had an impressive growth trajectory since its inception in 2015. We are also very impressed with the Samco team and the innovation that they have brought to the plate in an otherwise cluttered market," Siddharth Mehta, founder of Bay Capital, said. "They understand the complex requirements of the market and have been successful in delivering unique solutions."

The latest round of funding, which also saw participation from company's other existing backers, including the Modi family and other high-net-worth individuals, including Indian cricketing legend Kapil Dev, comes about two years after it raised its previous round of $3 million in fiscal 2016.

"(We) look forward towards addressing the problems that the trading and investing industry is plagued with, and ensure low-cost access to capital markets is available for every Indian," Jimeet Modi, chief executive of SAMCO Securities and StockNote, said.

The company, which claims to service over 75,000 customers, also recently launched StockNote, a content streaming and trading platform that aggregates and delivers news and information about stocks and sectors across India.

Founded by Siddharth Mehta and Puneet Saraogi, Bay Capital operates, both, a private equity, as well a long-only public markets investment practice.

The investment firm's portfolio includes Sterling Holiday Resorts, Vini Cosmetics, IL&FS Energy, Intellivate Capital Ventures and the South and West India franchisee for McDonald's Westlife Leisure Resorts, according to VCCEdge.

More recently, the investment firm also reported to be picking up a controlling stake in the Malvinder and Shivinder Singh-promoted Religare Enterprises, in which it held a 10% stake. Post the ouster of the Singh brothers, in February earlier this year, Mehta was named as a non-executive, non-independent director of the beleaguered financial services company.

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Samco Ventures raises Rs 49 crore in Series-B

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NEW DELHI: Samco Ventures, which owns and operates online discount broker Samco Securities and mobile trading platform StockNote, has raised $7.5 million (Rs 49 crore) in a fresh round of funding. The Series-B round of equity financing is an internal round that was led by the company existing investor, mid-market private equity firm Bay Capital Investments, with the promoters of the Mumbai-headquartered company also participating.

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Here’s the Best Way to Answer the Dreaded “Tell Me About Yourself” Question During a Job Interview

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Here’s the Best Way to Answer the Dreaded “Tell Me About Yourself” Question During a Job Interview

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Hearing “tell me about yourself” is an intimidating way to start a job interview, but there is a right way to answer the question.

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There are few interview questions job candidates fear more than the infamous "tell me about yourself" prompt. Though you've likely had to answer this question before, it's easy to panic when asked to summarize yourself in a succinct, presentable package. To conquer the "tell me about yourself" question, it helps to know what exactly employers are looking for and how to give it to them.

When an employer asks this vague question at the top of an interview, they aren't really interested in hearing your life story. According to The Cut, the prompt is a way for employers to set the tone of the interview and get an idea of how candidates view themselves. If someone's answer focuses on their struggle to find and keep a job, that could communicate a lack of confidence. A candidate who uses the question as an excuse to ramble about their childhood and personal life risks coming off as unfocused.

The "tell me about yourself" question may feel intimidating, but interviewees can use the open-endedness to their advantage. It's the perfect opportunity to pitch yourself and bring up any selling points you may not get a chance to later in the interview. When an interviewer asks to hear more about you, tell a brief, engaging story about your professional life. This shouldn't just be a summary of your resume. You can mention the passion that got you into the field, the challenges that have helped you grow in your career, and what attracted you to the role in the first place. Indeed recommends following one of two formulas when answering this question: present, past, future or past, present, future. Either way, every part of your story should build up to your professional goals, which should be reflected in the job you're applying for.

Employers sometimes use this question as an icebreaker, so don't be afraid to show some humor and personality in your answer. But don't overthink it: The important thing to remember is that the "tell me about yourself" prompt isn't as tricky as it seems. Other common interview questions, like "what are your weaknesses?", are a lot harder to crack. Here are the best ways to answer four notorious interview questions.

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Here's the Best Way to Answer the Dreaded "Tell Me About Yourself" Question During a Job Interview

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There are few interview questions job candidates fear more than the infamous "tell me about yourself" prompt. Though you've likely had to answer this question before, it's easy to panic when asked to summarize yourself in a succinct, presentable package.

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Policybazaar.com has got a capital boost from investment management firm Bay Capital

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Policybazaar.com has got a capital boost from investment management firm Bay Capital

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"Bay Capital has completed a secondary transaction, ahead of the insurance aggregator's plans to launch an IPO in the next 12-15 months," Bay Capital said on Wednesday.

PB Fintech had attained the status of a unicorn in 2018 when it raised USD 200 million in a Series-F round led by Japan's Softbank.

Siddharth Mehta, founder and CIO of Bay Capital, said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

"Customer centricity has been the heart of their proposition and has helped them become the platform of choice for customers," he said.

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"Bay Capital has completed a secondary transaction, ahead of the insurance aggregator's plans to launch an IPO in the next 12-15 months," Bay Capital said on Wednesday.

NEW DELHI: Leading online insurance policy aggregator Policybazaar.com has got a capital boost from investment management firm Bay Capital, ahead of its initial public offering (IPO) in the next 12-15 months.

Bay Capital, which manages money on behalf of institutions and endowments from the US and the Europe, has infused an undisclosed sum into the parent company PB Fintech of Policybazaar.com.

"Bay Capital has completed a secondary transaction, ahead of the insurance aggregator's plans to launch an IPO in the next 12-15 months," Bay Capital said on Wednesday.

However, how much capital has been infused by Bay Capital could not be ascertained.

PB Fintech had attained the status of a unicorn in 2018 when it raised USD 200 million in a Series-F round led by Japan's Softbank.

Siddharth Mehta, founder and CIO of Bay Capital, said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

"Customer centricity has been the heart of their proposition and has helped them become the platform of choice for customers," he said.

Yashish Dahiya, founder and Group CEO of PB Fintech, said Bay Capital is a long-term investor and the company sees them playing a key role as Policybazaar heads towards the public markets in the next 12-15 months.

India focussed Bay Capital has invested in areas such as consumer, digital, finance, outsourcing and health.

Among others, Policybazaar.com has investors of the likes of Info Edge, Premji Invest, Temasek, Ribbit Capital, Chiratae, Inventus Capital Partners, True North, Tiger Global, Wellington and Steadview.

PB Fintech also holds Paisabazaar.com, which is an online credit comparison portal.

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Policybazaar.com IPO in 12-15 months; parent firm gets capital boost from Bay Capital

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NEW DELHI: Leading online insurance policy aggregator Policybazaar.com has got a capital boost from investment management firm Bay Capital, ahead of its initial public offering (IPO) in the next 12-15 months. Bay Capital, which manages money on behalf of institutions and endowments from the US and the Europe, has infused an undisclosed sum into the parent company PB Fintech of Policybazaar.com.

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In Search of the Authentic Ernest Hemingway

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In Search of the Authentic Ernest Hemingway

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Delving into Hemingway’s legacy and challenges understandings of the man as writer and as artist.

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Ernest Hemingway had a version of himself that he wanted us to see-the avid fisher and outdoorsman, the hyper-masculine writer, the man whosefriendscalled him "Papa." Then, there was the hidden Hemingway-vulnerable, sensitive and longing for connection. The two were not mutually exclusive, and in his work and his life, they often intersected.

More than anything, Hemingway's external legacy is connected to his revolutionary writing. His declarative writing style was innovative, getting to the truth of the matter in as few words as possible. But his life attracted almost as much attention as his work. The legend came of age in 1920s Paris, a time where a salon gathering might attract such giants as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, and he later took up notable residence at homes in Key West and Cuba. Hemingway published more than nine novels and collections of short stories in his lifetime, many of them examinations of war set in Europe. Among the most famous are For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises and To Have and Have Not. He won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, one of his last works to be published while still living. The following year, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his entire body of work. In 2020 a three-part documentary series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, which delves into Hemingway's legacy and challenges understandings of the man as writer and as artist, aired on PBS. His stark prose, his outdoorsy and adventurous lifestyle and his journalistic and wartime beginnings all helped Hemingway come to represent a kind of orchestrated masculine ideal.

The acclaimed writer "published a string of novels and stories that made readers see the world, because of him, as a different place, more vibrant, more alive, more elemental, and at the same time, more romantic," wrote his biographer Mary V. Dearborn. "Yet something began to go wrong. ... Ernest seemed to find it difficult to give and receive love, to be a faithful friend, and, perhaps most tragically, to tell the truth, even to himself."

An intimate 1928 photograph of a 28-year-old Hemingway, taken by the artist Man Ray in Paris and held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, is one of only a few depictions following a serious injury that occurred early in the morning of March 4, 1928. The skylight accident, as it became known, left a permanent scar on the writer's face, and on his psyche.

In the portrait, Hemingway scans the distance; his tie and collar gape at the neck. His face is clean shaven and his alpine hat is perched precariously at the side of his head, as if in the next scene, it might topple off. Man Ray was one of a cast of elite icons who socialized with Hemingway in 1920s Paris. In fact, this photograph was not the only one that Man Ray took of the writer-he captured a number of portraits, including an image of Hemingway in 1926 with his son. In the portrait, a bandage can be seen beneath the clownish hat. Hemingway had returned home at 2 a.m. after a night out drinking with writer Archie MacLeish . He went to the bathroom and found the cord meant to raise the skylight dangling . The writer claims in a March 17 letter to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's, that it was someone else's fault-a friend had previously pulled the cord of the skylight, instead of the toilet chain, and cracked the glass . So when Hemingway adjusted the cord, the glass of the skylight shattered on top of his head.

Nearly two weeks after the incident, Hemingway wrote in a letter to Perkins that it had taken "30 thicknesses of toilet paper... and a tourniquet of kitchen towel and a stick of kindling wood" to staunch the flow of blood. The skylight accident was so severe that the Brooklyn Eagle reported Hemingway "spent an hour and a half on the operating table while surgeons tied the ends of four arteries."

Ezra Pound sent Hemingway a note: "How the hellsufferin tomcats did you git drunk enough to fall upwards through the blithering skylight!"

At the time of the accident, the writer was at a crossroads, according to Frederick Voss, now retired from the National Portrait Gallery after serving as senior historian and curator of the museum's Time magazine collection. "He was struggling with a novel about a professional revolutionist," Voss says. "He was in one of his several very dry periods, and he wasn't making any headway."

"All of a sudden, he dropped the novel that he was working on that he couldn't make any headway on, and started writing A Farewell to Arms, which many critics consider his greatest achievement," Voss says.

Some scholars postulate that the severe injury reminded him of his time in World War I, when his first concussion took place. There, Hemingway These formative events became the inspiration for volunteered with the American Red Cross as an ambulance driver. While delivering chocolate and cigarettes to the front, he was struck by an Austrian mortar shell . Sent to the hospital to recover, the writer fell in love with an American nurse , Agnes von Kurowsky, likely his first great love. Although she seemed to return his advances, when he came home from the war, she toldhim in a letter that she planned to marry another. , which begins in the Italian World War I battlefront and focuses on a great love between a nurse and an ambulance driver. A Farewell to Arms

Psychiatrist Andrew Farah, who wrote Hemingway's Brain, a complex medical diagnosis of the literary legend, indicated that Hemingway's second severe injury may have reminded him of his first. "He was in a post-concussive state where he was confused in delirium and just rambling," Farah wrote, describing the scene after the skylight fell on his head. "But he remembered what his blood tasted like, his own blood. It reminded him of being in the mud in Italy and what that blood tasted like. And that just unleashed this force."

In the same March 17 letter to Perkins, Hemingway discussed his two projects-one that would go on to great success and one that he would never complete. His words are prophetic.

"But I would like to write a really damned good novel," he wrote just as he and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, were boarding a ship in France so Pfeiffer could return to the United States to have their first child.

And if the one I have 22 chaps and 45,000 words of done doesn't go I will after I get to America I will drop it and put it away and go on with the other one I am writing since two weeks that I thought was only a story but that goes on and goes on wonderfully.

The first one was supposed to be a sort of modern Tom Jones. (Never mention that because I do not invite comparison) but only to name the sort of book) But there is a very very good chance that I don't know enough to write that yet and whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about-

He would finish the first draft of A Farewell to Arms within six months, according to Voss.

For their documentary series, Burns and Novick relied heavily on a trove of the writer's many letters, which are being published in a series of books edited in part by Pennsylvania State University's Sandra Spanier and associate editor Verna Kale. Hemingway's letters are vibrant, effusive, rapid fire and rarely as meticulously edited as his fiction. They are remarkably unrestrained for a writer acclaimed for his use of restraint. "The prose is so superior and so a reflection of his extraordinary discipline and his own merciless self-editing that the letters provide the relief," Burns says. "They give you a sense of the real person, filled with anxiety and doubt and vulnerability and anger."

Getting to the heart of who Hemingway was-and not simply dealing with his mythology and mystique-was the principal challenge of the film, says Burns. It's one of the reasons why Burns and Novick's team decided not to use the Man Ray photograph in the film. The skylight accident is introduced as part of a larger narrative: Hemingway had played contact sports and had suffered other major concussions. The injury was one of as many as nine major brain events, including a plane crash and a car accident where his head went through the windshield.

Hemingway may have suffered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the same condition that affects football players after experiencing numerous concussions. Burns and Novick wanted to treat the injury as serious to show the man's vulnerability; but this photograph of the writer in his Alpine hat gave it too much of a comical air. This is part of the artful selection the filmmakers made in their use of the visuals for the sweeping documentary project-it's about taking things away, not adding them in, Burns says.

"At any given time, you're wrestling with what a photograph is saying quite beyond what we may be seeing in the narration or a person reading Hemingway," he says. "We have to understand the complex psychology of that image. It was a conscious decision to reject it because it lacks the seriousness with which we wanted to treat this second major concussion."

Still, Burns can recall the photograph from memory. It's a portrait for which he has an audible fondness, a photograph he calls "fabulous." The bandage is almost an afterthought to the image's whimsical, haphazard nature.

Although the photo was taken not long before the 1929 publication of A Farewell to Arms, Scribner's, the book's publisher, never used the image as publicity, Voss says. And he suspects that Man Ray, a renowned Dada and Surrealist artist and photographer known for his experimental rayographs, didn't publicize the photograph either.

Yet, to Voss, who curated a 1999 exhibition "Picturing Hemingway" on what would have been the writer's 100th birthday, the portrait perfectly symbolizes the major theme of the wounded warrior in A Farewell to Arms.

At the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, tour guides use the photograph to touch on the writer's accident-prone nature. People often ask why the writer had so many six-toed cats, according to museum director Andrew Morawski. The answer is succinct: because of how unfortunate he was. Polydactyl, or six-toed cats, are thought to bring luck.

"He's pretty much right next to a mortar shell in World War I, volunteering for the Red Cross, and 250 pieces of shrapnel go into him," says Morawski. "He survives two plane crashes, as well as the skylight falling on top of him and the countless other concussions that happen to him over his life."

In his March 17 letter to Perkins, Hemingway even joked about his susceptibility to injury. "Maybe this will be the last," he wrote to Perkins of the accident. "Scribner's could have made money this year insuring me."

It's tempting to classify Hemingway's tendency towards injury the way Pound does, as retribution for a drunken night of debauchery. But the writer's injuries and brushes with death-until his eventual death by suicide in 1961-have an odd connection to his work. "My wife says that she will see that I'm bled just as often I can't write," Hemingway wrote in the March letter to Perkins, speaking of Pfeiffer, " judging by the way it's been going this last week."

It's clear to Burns that suffering is material for art, and Hemingway embodies that. There's tragedy on display in his experiences as a reporter for the Kansas City Star, as an ambulance driver during World War I, as a man married four times.

"Whenever he gets into a kind of placid domestic situation, whether it's in Paris or Key West, he finds a way to roil the waters," Burns says. "That's the person realizing in a kind of interesting way that tragedy, that suffering, that friction offers the possibility of art."

The Man Ray portrait is one of a few Hemingway images in the National Portrait Gallery's collection. Another is a Waldo Peirce drawing of Hemingway also from 1928, which Burns says he regrets not using in the film. A third is the stirring and iconic Yousuf Karsh portrait of Hemingway from 1957-what Voss calls the post-Nobel Prize, The Old Man and the Sea photograph.

When Karsh went to meet Hemingway in Cuba in 1957, he "expected to meet in the author a composite of the heroes of his novels." But that's not what he saw. "I found a man of peculiar gentleness, the shyest man I ever photographed-a man cruelly battered by life, but seemingly invincible."
Elizabeth Djinis is a writer and journalist based in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her work has been published in Poynter, The Dallas Morning News, the Tampa Bay Times, The Penny Hoarder and Sarasota Magazine, among others.

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In Search of the Authentic Ernest Hemingway

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Ernest Hemingway had a version of himself that he wanted us to see-the avid fisher and outdoorsman, the hyper-masculine writer, the man whosefriendscalled him "Papa." Then, there was the hidden Hemingway-vulnerable, sensitive and longing for connection. The two were not mutually exclusive, and in his work and his life, they often intersected.

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Siddharth Mehta Bay Capital Founder Said About impressive growth Of Samco Ventures

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Siddharth Mehta Bay Capital Founder Said About impressive growth Of Samco Ventures

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“Samco has had an impressive growth trajectory since its inception in 2015. We are also very impressed with the Samco team and the innovation that they have brought to the plate in an otherwise cluttered market,” Siddharth Mehta, founder of Bay Capital, said. “They understand the complex requirements of the market and have been successful in delivering unique solutions.”

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Samco Ventures raises Rs 49 crore in Series-B05

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Bay Capital has infused an undisclosed sum into the parent company PB Fintech of Policybazaar.com.

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Bay Capital has infused an undisclosed sum into the parent company PB Fintech of Policybazaar.com.

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"Bay Capital has completed a secondary transaction, ahead of the insurance aggregator's plans to launch an IPO in the next 12-15 months," Bay Capital said on Wednesday.

However, how much capital has been infused by Bay Capital could not be ascertained.

PB Fintech had attained the status of a unicorn in 2018 when it raised USD 200 million in a Series-F round led by Japan's Softbank.

Siddharth Mehta, founder and CIO of Bay Capital, said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

"Customer centricity has been the heart of their proposition and has helped them become the platform of choice for customers," he said.

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Policybazaar.com IPO in 12-15 months parent firm gets capital boost from Bay Capital

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The idea of working in the office, all day, every day? No thanks, say workers

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The idea of working in the office, all day, every day? No thanks, say workers

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More than two years into a pandemic that has no clear end, the debate over remote work has only intensified. Working from home isn't possible in many jobs. But for those who have the option, it's now evident that it is feasible, even beneficial.

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To Jonathan Pruiett, it just didn't make sense.

A geospatial analyst who updates Google maps for a living, Pruiett had been called back to his company's offices in Bothell, Washington, five days a week, starting June 6.

Like many on his team, Pruiett had only worked remotely, having started the job in the pandemic. He'd adapted well to it, finding efficiencies such as multitasking during virtual meetings, using the time to process data.

And yet, now he was being told to report to office. Anyone who failed to report within three days of the return date would be processed as having abandoned their job.

"Nothing will change other than having a couple snacks in our office and having an in-person meeting," Pruiett said. "We're kind of starting to think that this job isn't worth it."

Source of tension between workers and bosses

More than two years into a pandemic that has no clear end, the debate over remote work has only intensified. Working from home isn't possible in many jobs. But for those who have the option, it's now evident that it is feasible, even beneficial.

But how beneficial is a point of contention between workers and their bosses. Some bosses are deciding too much is lost when people aren't in the office and it's time to come back.

Tesla boss Elon Musk is one of them. He recently emailed his employees with the subject line "Remote work is no longer acceptable." He reasoned that Tesla creates and makes "the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in."

Musk told them anyone wishing to do remote work "must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week."

Apple too wanted to bring people back to the office three days a week. But just last month the company decided to postpone its plan after more than 1,000 current and former employees signed an open letter called the plan inefficient, inflexible and a waste of time.

"Stop treating us like school kids who need to be told when to be where and what homework to do," they wrote.

It was yet more evidence of the shift in the balance of power between management and rank and file, as demand for workers has hit record highs in the past year. Companies are finding it hard to enforce unpopular policies and mandates when they fear their workers could just walk away.

Google maps workers win a temporary reprieve

The Google maps workers, who are employed by the tech company Cognizant, also decided to fight back. They connected with the Alphabet Workers Union and signed a petition citing COVID fears, the costs of commuting amid $5 gas, and the increase in productivity and morale that employees have experienced while working from home.

With just days to go before the June 6 return to office deadline, Pruiett said he wasn't sure whether he and others would show up in the office on June 6. Members of his team started preparing for a strike vote.

Hours later, Cognizant did what other companies have done in recent weeks: Granted a reprieve.

"Our first day back to the Bothell office full-time will now be September 6," the company said in a statement released on Thursday.

Pruiett called it a 90-day Band-Aid and vowed to continue the fight.

Conference rooms with fancy names like the Kennedy Center sit empty

Even as some companies seek to bring back some semblance of office life, others are asking: What is the office for anyway?

At the management consulting firm Eagle Hill Consulting in Arlington, Virginia, the offices have been open since the fall of 2021, but on most days, there are just a smattering of employees on site - mostly from IT and human resources.

No one has been ordered back full-time or even close to it. Desks and conference rooms, named after Washington, D.C., landmarks such as the Kennedy Center and Navy Yard, sit empty.

It's a dramatic contrast from pre-pandemic times, when every seat would be full - despite the fact that flexible work was offered then, too.

"Could I have worked from home four days a week before the pandemic? I think I easily could have. It just wasn't the environment," says Jason Carrier, a senior associate who used to spend four days a week in the office and one day at a client site.

Although he lives just a few minutes' walk from the office, he now comes in just once a week, which is more than most of his coworkers, he says.

Working from the office, all day, every day is probably a "deal breaker"

The workforce at Eagle Hill is young, mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings. Before the pandemic, people liked being in the office together. They liked the energy. They stayed late for office happy hours at the end of the day.

Now off-site happy hours are becoming a regular thing alongside virtual bingo nights, thanks in part to Carrier who leads the workplace fun team. So the idea of working from the office, all day, every day?

"Probably very close to a deal breaker at this point," he says.

Eagle Hill's chief marketing officer Susan Nealon says she'd like to see people in the office when it makes sense. She recently took advantage of an in-person event - a photo shoot her team had organized - to gather a few members of her team for their first face-to-face meeting in more than two years.

"I view the office changing," says Nealon. "It'll be less about the individual work getting done, and more about the group work getting done."

She believes workers may be happier and more productive doing their individual work in the quiet of their homes and only coming into the office for team meetings at optimal times. Instead of fighting rush-hour traffic to sit in the office from 9 to 5, you might just pop in from 11 to 1, she says.

It's an idea that would have been unthinkable just a couple years ago. But already, it's proving to be a selling point for new hires at Eagle Hill.

"It's hard to even fathom going into the office 100%," says Fara John-Williams, who started in human resources in May. "I don't think I could do it ever again."

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The idea of working in the office, all day, every day? No thanks, say workers

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To Jonathan Pruiett, it just didn't make sense. A geospatial analyst who updates Google maps for a living, Pruiett had been called back to his company's offices in Bothell, Washington, five days a week, starting June 6. Like many on his team, Pruiett had only worked remotely, having started the job in the pandemic.

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Why are kangaroos being spotted in India?

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Why are kangaroos being spotted in India?

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When villagers walking along a road on the edge of a forested village in eastern India first saw three confused, weak and hungry animals, they couldn't believe what they were witnessing.

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By Andrew Clarance
BBC News, Delhi

Image source, Bengal Safari Park

Image caption,
Wildlife officials say kangaroos are among the exotic animals smuggled into India

When villagers walking along a road on the edge of a forested village in eastern India first saw three confused, weak and hungry animals, they couldn't believe what they were witnessing.

The animals looked nothing like anything they had seen before. They alerted West Bengal state's forest officials, who told them that the animals were kangaroos - native to Australia but not found in India.

The animals were rescued and sent to a wildlife park to be treated. One died later. The villagers were still confused and surprised with what they had seen. Soon, videos of the kangaroos in India went viral.

"How on Earth are kangaroos turning up in West Bengal," a Twitter user asked.

Debal Ray, the chief wildlife warden of West Bengal, tells the BBC that the animals were most likely left in the open during an anti-smuggling operation by his team.

When he received a tip-off that some exotic animals were being smuggled into the state, he immediately alerted his team. Acting quickly, the officers started checking vehicles along one of the main routes to enter the state.

"The smugglers probably got wind of it, and abandoned the animals on the highway," Mr Ray said.

"They probably ended up here from private breeding farms in southeast Asia," Agni Mitra, deputy director of the regional Wildlife Control Bureau, told the BBC, adding that smugglers often bring non-native, exotic animals to India's border states through Myanmar.

Hours after two injured kangaroos were rescued from near Gajoldoba in West Bengal’s Jalpaiguri district Friday night, two more were spotted at the Farabari Nepali area in the Dabgram forest range Saturday, sending forest officials into a tizzy. pic.twitter.com/akAVfTvK6I
— Forests And Wildlife Protection Society-FAWPS (@FawpsIndia) April 2, 2022

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. View original tweet on Twitter

India's anti-smuggling intelligence agency, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), said that the country has seen a rise in demand for exotic animals.

Animals from Bangkok, Malaysia and other "top tourist destinations in South East Asia" are smuggled into the country and make their way to cities across India, it added.

Indian wildlife officials often find that they can't prosecute these smugglers or traders because India's Wildlife Protection Act doesn't protect non-native, exotic animals.

Customs officials have the authority to stop people from transporting wild animals if they don't have proper permits. But they find it difficult to track illegal trade through porous borders.

The DRI said that since there is a ban on trade of native animal species, smugglers have shifted to "exotic species, which has led to disastrous global environmental consequences".

Wildlife activists say owning an exotic pet is considered prestigious - a trend that has only become more popular in recent years.

"A little while back, Zebras were seized in Bangladesh which were destined for a private zoo in India," Shubhobroto Ghosh, an activist with the group World Animal Protection said. "People are doing crazy things."

Indians have long had a liking for exotic animals.

It said pet owners without proper documentation would not be prosecuted. The government wanted to "develop an inventory of exotic live species" in the country and streamline import procedures.

By early 2021, the government received 32,645 disclosure applications which listed exotic animals such as critically endangered lemurs, iguanas, macaws and even kangaroos, reported IndiaSpend, a data analysis website.

Wildlife officials said that despite an uptick in the number of exotic animals being brought into the country as pets, there was still no effective legislation to monitor the trade.

In 1976, India adopted the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITIES), an agreement ratified by 183 countries, which protects and monitors the trade of endangered plants and animals.

But the country has still not given the multilateral treaty any teeth - it can't be implemented under Indian law.

Lawmakers are reviewing an amendment to India's Wildlife Protection Act which would bring exotic flora and fauna, and other species protected by CITES provisions under wildlife authorities.

But Mr Ghosh is sceptical of its impact.

"Say I am a forest warden and I am your friend, and you have some rare primates from Brazil that you want to keep in your private zoo, you could very well just bribe your way through and get your permit," he explains.

Image source, Shubhobroto Ghosh

Image caption,
There has been a rise in demand for exotic pets like this cockatoo, India's anti-smuggling agency says

"A lot of zoos unfortunately are becoming a part of this network - where traders and breeders work together to buy animals, sometimes non-native, exotic ones," Mr Ghosh added.

In April, two men were arrested when a red kangaroo was found in their truck during a routine police check on a highway close to West Bengal's border with the north-eastern state of Assam.

The men told forest officials that they had been handed these kangaroos at a farm in Mizoram, another state in the north-east, to be taken to a zoo in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

"They produced a supply order from the zoo, and the zoo even confirmed it," Mr Mitra said.

The zoo's curator told a news website that they had been "offered the consignment as a gift".

"Clearly this is a case of smuggling - the supply order was in the name of a farm in Mizoram, which does not even exist," Mr Ghosh said, explaining that under CITES provisions, protected animals have to be declared on a government website.

"There is no declaration of any kangaroos from any farm in Mizoram in government records," Mr Mitra said.

Meanwhile, the two kangaroos - Alex and Xavier - rescued by forest officials are being treated in the Bengal Safari Park, and are making good progress.

"They have some muscle atrophy, which is common in kangaroos when they are squeezed into small spaces while being smuggled," Mr Ray explained.

"If they feel at home, maybe we can display them [to the zoo-going public]. But they have to spend their life in a zoo. We cannot release them into the wild as India is not their natural habitat."

More on this story

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Why are kangaroos being spotted in India?

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The sighting has raised alarms over networks that smuggle exotic animals to India.

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Why India is a leader among digital democracies

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Why India is a leader among digital democracies

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A country with size & complexity of India can showcase not only how tech can be used but also how to effectively curb its adverse impact & misuse. Therefore this is one area where it is natural leader

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For long, international affairs have had groupings of democracies, a democracy being a fundamental pillar of the world order after the Second World War and the end of colonialism.

This essay argues that there is an additional grouping emerging now-digital democracies-and India is a natural leader of this group. As is evident from the name, it is the practice of democracy, both at the level of the nation state and the citizen, using digital tools.

Digital democracy is, in a sense, the next phase of democracy as it encompasses all the opportunities and challenges of asserting sovereignty for nation states. It is important to understand that countries must now cooperate not only in politics, trade and humanitarian issues, but a vital aspect of cooperation is transborder technological cooperation to assert sovereignty, including to multinational tech giants.

The most important task in such an era is the construction of technological architecture as a public good-which is owned not by any one private entity. In building and deploying such architecture at scale (for more than a billion people), India has shown unique innovation skills and achieved unprecedented success.

According to recent independent research reports, digital transactions in India could rise to $10 trillion in value by 2026. Two out of five transactions in India are estimated to be using digital tools, and it is set to rise exponentially in the next few years.

Whether in financial technology or identity architecture, India is today building bigger and better digital public infrastructure at scale than any other democracy in the world.

It, therefore, is the natural leader of the world of digital or digitising democracies. India is not only building such technologies and infrastructure at home, but is also pitching to deploy it around the world. The India pitch is mass-use digital technology that can be utilised as public infrastructure by countries to digitise their governance processes and public goods delivery mechanisms.

There is an underlying logic to this-democracies must cooperate both non-digitally and digitally to take on the challenges of the so-called decentralised Web3 world of blockchain and artificial intelligence that is emerging. India can and should lead such cooperation. It has both the size and the cutting-edge technology and can offer both expertise and scale.

The use of digital technology among democracies is one of the most important platforms for public diplomacy today and this will become more necessary in the near future.

A country with the size and complexity of India can showcase not only how technology can be used but also how to effectively curb its adverse impact and misuse. Therefore, this is one area where India is a natural leader. It can bring to the table the full weight of its enormous expertise in running programmes like Aadhaar, direct-benefit transfer, and ongoing efforts to improve digital health and education. Apart from this, India has innovations like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) (which powers fintech and has created a unique level playing field) and is working towards creating a unified digital platform for commerce.

This leadership role for India, already apparent, is set to expand considerably in the years to come as democracies that extensively use digital tools come together to boost ease of living for their citizens and tackle crises that require worldwide collaboration.
Chief Economic Research Officer at Invest India, national investment promotion agency of GoI

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Why India is a leader among digital democracies

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For long, international affairs have had groupings of democracies, a democracy being a fundamental pillar of the world order after the Second World War and the end of colonialism. This essay argues that there is an additional grouping emerging now-digital democracies-and India is a natural leader of this group.

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There’s a general sense that it’s bad for society—which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers.

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There's a general sense that it's bad for society-which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers.

In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece's title had it, "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid." Anyone familiar with Haidt's work in the past half decade could have anticipated his answer: social media. Although Haidt concedes that political polarization and factional enmity long predate the rise of the platforms, and that there are plenty of other factors involved, he believes that the tools of virality-Facebook's Like and Share buttons, Twitter's Retweet function-have algorithmically and irrevocably corroded public life. He has determined that a great historical discontinuity can be dated with some precision to the period between 2010 and 2014, when these features became widely available on phones.

"What changed in the 2010s?" Haidt asks, reminding his audience that a former Twitter developer had once compared the Retweet button to the provision of a four-year-old with a loaded weapon. "A mean tweet doesn't kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one's own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It's more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly a billion dart guns globally. We've been shooting one another ever since." While the right has thrived on conspiracy-mongering and misinformation, the left has turned punitive: "When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And, unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country." Haidt's prevailing metaphor of thoroughgoing fragmentation is the story of the Tower of Babel: the rise of social media has "unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together."

These are, needless to say, common concerns. Chief among Haidt's worries is that use of social media has left us particularly vulnerable to confirmation bias, or the propensity to fix upon evidence that shores up our prior beliefs. Haidt acknowledges that the extant literature on social media's effects is large and complex, and that there is something in it for everyone. On January 6, 2021, he was on the phone with Chris Bail, a sociologist at Duke and the author of the recent book " Breaking the Social Media Prism," when Bail urged him to turn on the television. Two weeks later, Haidt wrote to Bail, expressing his frustration at the way Facebook officials consistently cited the same handful of studies in their defense. He suggested that the two of them collaborate on a comprehensive literature review that they could share, as a Google Doc, with other researchers. (Haidt had experimented with such a model before.) Bail was cautious. He told me, "What I said to him was, 'Well, you know, I'm not sure the research is going to bear out your version of the story,' and he said, 'Why don't we see?' "

Bail emphasized that he is not a "platform-basher." He added, "In my book, my main take is, Yes, the platforms play a role, but we are greatly exaggerating what it's possible for them to do-how much they could change things no matter who's at the helm at these companies-and we're profoundly underestimating the human element, the motivation of users." He found Haidt's idea of a Google Doc appealing, in the way that it would produce a kind of living document that existed "somewhere between scholarship and public writing." Haidt was eager for a forum to test his ideas. "I decided that if I was going to be writing about this-what changed in the universe, around 2014, when things got weird on campus and elsewhere-once again, I'd better be confident I'm right," he said. "I can't just go off my feelings and my readings of the biased literature. We all suffer from confirmation bias, and the only cure is other people who don't share your own."

Haidt and Bail, along with a research assistant, populated the document over the course of several weeks last year, and in November they invited about two dozen scholars to contribute. Haidt told me, of the difficulties of social-scientific methodology, "When you first approach a question, you don't even know what it is. 'Is social media destroying democracy, yes or no?' That's not a good question. You can't answer that question. So what can you ask and answer?" As the document took on a life of its own, tractable rubrics emerged-Does social media make people angrier or more affectively polarized? Does it create political echo chambers? Does it increase the probability of violence? Does it enable foreign governments to increase political dysfunction in the United States and other democracies? Haidt continued, "It's only after you break it up into lots of answerable questions that you see where the complexity lies."

Haidt came away with the sense, on balance, that social media was in fact pretty bad. He was disappointed, but not surprised, that Facebook's response to his article relied on the same three studies they've been reciting for years. "This is something you see with breakfast cereals," he said, noting that a cereal company "might say, 'Did you know we have twenty-five per cent more riboflavin than the leading brand?' They'll point to features where the evidence is in their favor, which distracts you from the over-all fact that your cereal tastes worse and is less healthy."

After Haidt's piece was published, the Google Doc-"Social Media and Political Dysfunction: A Collaborative Review"-was made available to the public. Comments piled up, and a new section was added, at the end, to include a miscellany of Twitter threads and Substack essays that appeared in response to Haidt's interpretation of the evidence. Some colleagues and kibbitzers agreed with Haidt. But others, though they might have shared his basic intuition that something in our experience of social media was amiss, drew upon the same data set to reach less definitive conclusions, or even mildly contradictory ones. Even after the initial flurry of responses to Haidt's article disappeared into social-media memory, the document, insofar as it captured the state of the social-media debate, remained a lively artifact.

Near the end of the collaborative project's introduction, the authors warn, "We caution readers not to simply add up the number of studies on each side and declare one side the winner." The document runs to more than a hundred and fifty pages, and for each question there are affirmative and dissenting studies, as well as some that indicate mixed results. According to one paper, "Political expressions on social media and the online forum were found to (a) reinforce the expressers' partisan thought process and (b) harden their pre-existing political preferences," but, according to another, which used data collected during the 2016 election, "Over the course of the campaign, we found media use and attitudes remained relatively stable. Our results also showed that Facebook news use was related to modest over-time spiral of depolarization. Furthermore, we found that people who use Facebook for news were more likely to view both pro- and counter-attitudinal news in each wave. Our results indicated that counter-attitudinal exposure increased over time, which resulted in depolarization." If results like these seem incompatible, a perplexed reader is given recourse to a study that says, "Our findings indicate that political polarization on social media cannot be conceptualized as a unified phenomenon, as there are significant cross-platform differences."

Interested in echo chambers? "Our results show that the aggregation of users in homophilic clusters dominate online interactions on Facebook and Twitter," which seems convincing-except that, as another team has it, "We do not find evidence supporting a strong characterization of 'echo chambers' in which the majority of people's sources of news are mutually exclusive and from opposite poles." By the end of the file, the vaguely patronizing top-line recommendation against simple summation begins to make more sense. A document that originated as a bulwark against confirmation bias could, as it turned out, just as easily function as a kind of generative device to support anybody's pet conviction. The only sane response, it seemed, was simply to throw one's hands in the air.

When I spoke to some of the researchers whose work had been included, I found a combination of broad, visceral unease with the current situation-with the banefulness of harassment and trolling; with the opacity of the platforms; with, well, the widespread presentiment that of course social media is in many ways bad-and a contrastive sense that it might not be catastrophically bad in some of the specific ways that many of us have come to take for granted as true. This was not mere contrarianism, and there was no trace of gleeful mythbusting; the issue was important enough to get right. When I told Bail that the upshot seemed to me to be that exactly nothing was unambiguously clear, he suggested that there was at least some firm ground. He sounded a bit less apocalyptic than Haidt.

"A lot of the stories out there are just wrong," he told me. "The political echo chamber has been massively overstated. Maybe it's three to five per cent of people who are properly in an echo chamber." Echo chambers, as hotboxes of confirmation bias, are counterproductive for democracy. But research indicates that most of us are actually exposed to a wider range of views on social media than we are in real life, where our social networks-in the original use of the term-are rarely heterogeneous. (Haidt told me that this was an issue on which the Google Doc changed his mind; he became convinced that echo chambers probably aren't as widespread a problem as he'd once imagined.) And too much of a focus on our intuitions about social media's echo-chamber effect could obscure the relevant counterfactual: a conservative might abandon Twitter only to watch more Fox News. "Stepping outside your echo chamber is supposed to make you moderate, but maybe it makes you more extreme," Bail said. The research is inchoate and ongoing, and it's difficult to say anything on the topic with absolute certainty. But this was, in part, Bail's point: we ought to be less sure about the particular impacts of social media.

Bail went on, "The second story is foreign misinformation." It's not that misinformation doesn't exist, or that it hasn't had indirect effects, especially when it creates perverse incentives for the mainstream media to cover stories circulating online. Haidt also draws convincingly upon the work of Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, to sketch out a potential future in which the work of shitposting has been outsourced to artificial intelligence, further polluting the informational environment. But, at least so far, very few Americans seem to suffer from consistent exposure to fake news-"probably less than two per cent of Twitter users, maybe fewer now, and for those who were it didn't change their opinions," Bail said. This was probably because the people likeliest to consume such spectacles were the sort of people primed to believe them in the first place. "In fact," he said, "echo chambers might have done something to quarantine that misinformation."

The final story that Bail wanted to discuss was the "proverbial rabbit hole, the path to algorithmic radicalization," by which YouTube might serve a viewer increasingly extreme videos. There is some anecdotal evidence to suggest that this does happen, at least on occasion, and such anecdotes are alarming to hear. But a new working paper led by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, found that almost all extremist content is either consumed by subscribers to the relevant channels-a sign of actual demand rather than manipulation or preference falsification-or encountered via links from external sites. It's easy to see why we might prefer if this were not the case: algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. "These are the three stories-echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms-but, when you look at the literature, they've all been overstated." He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering. He explained, "Part of my interest in getting this research out there is to demonstrate that everybody is waiting for an Elon Musk to ride in and save us with an algorithm"-or, presumably, the reverse-"and it's just not going to happen."

When I spoke with Nyhan, he told me much the same thing: "The most credible research is way out of line with the takes." He noted, of extremist content and misinformation, that reliable research that "measures exposure to these things finds that the people consuming this content are small minorities who have extreme views already." The problem with the bulk of the earlier research, Nyhan told me, is that it's almost all correlational. "Many of these studies will find polarization on social media," he said. "But that might just be the society we live in reflected on social media!" He hastened to add, "Not that this is untroubling, and none of this is to let these companies, which are exercising a lot of power with very little scrutiny, off the hook. But a lot of the criticisms of them are very poorly founded. . . . The expansion of Internet access coincides with fifteen other trends over time, and separating them is very difficult. The lack of good data is a huge problem insofar as it lets people project their own fears into this area." He told me, "It's hard to weigh in on the side of 'We don't know, the evidence is weak,' because those points are always going to be drowned out in our discourse. But these arguments are systematically underprovided in the public domain."

In his Atlantic article, Haidt leans on a working paper by two social scientists, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, who took on a comprehensive meta-analysis of about five hundred papers and concluded that "the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy." Haidt writes, "The literature is complex-some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies-but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation." Nyhan was less convinced that the meta-analysis supported such categorical verdicts, especially once you bracketed the kinds of correlational findings that might simply mirror social and political dynamics. He told me, "If you look at their summary of studies that allow for causal inferences-it's very mixed."

As for the studies Nyhan considered most methodologically sound, he pointed to a 2020 article called "The Welfare Effects of Social Media," by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow. For four weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections, the authors randomly divided a group of volunteers into two cohorts-one that continued to use Facebook as usual, and another that was paid to deactivate their accounts for that period. They found that deactivation "(i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use." But Gentzkow reminded me that his conclusions, including that Facebook may slightly increase polarization, had to be heavily qualified: "From other kinds of evidence, I think there's reason to think social media is not the main driver of increasing polarization over the long haul in the United States."

In the book " Why We're Polarized," for example, Ezra Klein invokes the work of such scholars as Lilliana Mason to argue that the roots of polarization might be found in, among other factors, the political realignment and nationalization that began in the sixties, and were then sacralized, on the right, by the rise of talk radio and cable news. These dynamics have served to flatten our political identities, weakening our ability or inclination to find compromise. Insofar as some forms of social media encourage the hardening of connections between our identities and a narrow set of opinions, we might increasingly self-select into mutually incomprehensible and hostile groups; Haidt plausibly suggests that these processes are accelerated by the coalescence of social-media tribes around figures of fearful online charisma. "Social media might be more of an amplifier of other things going on rather than a major driver independently," Gentzkow argued. "I think it takes some gymnastics to tell a story where it's all primarily driven by social media, especially when you're looking at different countries, and across different groups."

Another study, led by Nejla Asimovic and Joshua Tucker, replicated Gentzkow's approach in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they found almost precisely the opposite results: the people who stayed on Facebook were, by the end of the study, more positively disposed to their historic out-groups. The authors' interpretation was that ethnic groups have so little contact in Bosnia that, for some people, social media is essentially the only place where they can form positive images of one another. "To have a replication and have the signs flip like that, it's pretty stunning," Bail told me. "It's a different conversation in every part of the world."

Nyhan argued that, at least in wealthy Western countries, we might be too heavily discounting the degree to which platforms have responded to criticism: "Everyone is still operating under the view that algorithms simply maximize engagement in a short-term way" with minimal attention to potential externalities. "That might've been true when Zuckerberg had seven people working for him, but there are a lot of considerations that go into these rankings now." He added, "There's some evidence that, with reverse-chronological feeds"-streams of unwashed content, which some critics argue are less manipulative than algorithmic curation-"people get exposed to more low-quality content, so it's another case where a very simple notion of 'algorithms are bad' doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't mean they're good, it's just that we don't know."

Bail told me that, over all, he was less confident than Haidt that the available evidence lines up clearly against the platforms. "Maybe there's a slight majority of studies that say that social media is a net negative, at least in the West, and maybe it's doing some good in the rest of the world." But, he noted, "Jon will say that science has this expectation of rigor that can't keep up with the need in the real world-that even if we don't have the definitive study that creates the historical counterfactual that Facebook is largely responsible for polarization in the U.S., there's still a lot pointing in that direction, and I think that's a fair point." He paused. "It can't all be randomized control trials."

Haidt comes across in conversation as searching and sincere, and, during our exchange, he paused several times to suggest that I include a quote from John Stuart Mill on the importance of good-faith debate to moral progress. In that spirit, I asked him what he thought of the argument, elaborated by some of Haidt's critics, that the problems he described are fundamentally political, social, and economic, and that to blame social media is to search for lost keys under the streetlamp, where the light is better. He agreed that this was the steelman opponent: there were predecessors for cancel culture in de Tocqueville, and anxiety about new media that went back to the time of the printing press. "This is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, and it's absolutely up to the prosecution-people like me-to argue that, no, this time it's different. But it's a civil case! The evidential standard is not 'beyond a reasonable doubt,' as in a criminal case. It's just a preponderance of the evidence."

The way scholars weigh the testimony is subject to their disciplinary orientations. Economists and political scientists tend to believe that you can't even begin to talk about causal dynamics without a randomized controlled trial, whereas sociologists and psychologists are more comfortable drawing inferences on a correlational basis. Haidt believes that conditions are too dire to take the hardheaded, no-reasonable-doubt view. "The preponderance of the evidence is what we use in public health. If there's an epidemic-when COVID started, suppose all the scientists had said, 'No, we gotta be so certain before you do anything'? We have to think about what's actually happening, what's likeliest to pay off." He continued, "We have the largest epidemic ever of teen mental health, and there is no other explanation," he said. "It is a raging public-health epidemic, and the kids themselves say Instagram did it, and we have some evidence, so is it appropriate to say, 'Nah, you haven't proven it'?"

This was his attitude across the board. He argued that social media seemed to aggrandize inflammatory posts and to be correlated with a rise in violence; even if only small groups were exposed to fake news, such beliefs might still proliferate in ways that were hard to measure. "In the post-Babel era, what matters is not the average but the dynamics, the contagion, the exponential amplification," he said. "Small things can grow very quickly, so arguments that Russian disinformation didn't matter are like COVID arguments that people coming in from China didn't have contact with a lot of people." Given the transformative effects of social media, Haidt insisted, it was important to act now, even in the absence of dispositive evidence. "Academic debates play out over decades and are often never resolved, whereas the social-media environment changes year by year," he said. "We don't have the luxury of waiting around five or ten years for literature reviews."

Haidt could be accused of question-begging-of assuming the existence of a crisis that the research might or might not ultimately underwrite. Still, the gap between the two sides in this case might not be quite as wide as Haidt thinks. Skeptics of his strongest claims are not saying that there's no there there. Just because the average YouTube user is unlikely to be led to Stormfront videos, Nyhan told me, doesn't mean we shouldn't worry that some people are watching Stormfront videos; just because echo chambers and foreign misinformation seem to have had effects only at the margins, Gentzkow said, doesn't mean they're entirely irrelevant. "There are many questions here where the thing we as researchers are interested in is how social media affects the average person," Gentzkow told me. "There's a different set of questions where all you need is a small number of people to change-questions about ethnic violence in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, people on YouTube mobilized to do mass shootings. Much of the evidence broadly makes me skeptical that the average effects are as big as the public discussion thinks they are, but I also think there are cases where a small number of people with very extreme views are able to find each other and connect and act." He added, "That's where many of the things I'd be most concerned about lie."

The same might be said about any phenomenon where the base rate is very low but the stakes are very high, such as teen suicide. "It's another case where those rare edge cases in terms of total social harm may be enormous. You don't need many teen-age kids to decide to kill themselves or have serious mental-health outcomes in order for the social harm to be really big." He added, "Almost none of this work is able to get at those edge-case effects, and we have to be careful that if we do establish that the average effect of something is zero, or small, that it doesn't mean we shouldn't be worried about it-because we might be missing those extremes." Jaime Settle, a scholar of political behavior at the College of William & Mary and the author of the book " Frenemies: How Social Media Polarizes America," noted that Haidt is "farther along the spectrum of what most academics who study this stuff are going to say we have strong evidence for." But she understood his impulse: "We do have serious problems, and I'm glad Jon wrote the piece, and down the road I wouldn't be surprised if we got a fuller handle on the role of social media in all of this-there are definitely ways in which social media has changed our politics for the worse."

It's tempting to sidestep the question of diagnosis entirely, and to evaluate Haidt's essay not on the basis of predictive accuracy-whether social media will lead to the destruction of American democracy-but as a set of proposals for what we might do better. If he is wrong, how much damage are his prescriptions likely to do? Haidt, to his great credit, does not indulge in any wishful thinking, and if his diagnosis is largely technological his prescriptions are sociopolitical. Two of his three major suggestions seem useful and have nothing to do with social media: he thinks that we should end closed primaries and that children should be given wide latitude for unsupervised play. His recommendations for social-media reform are, for the most part, uncontroversial: he believes that preteens shouldn't be on Instagram and that platforms should share their data with outside researchers-proposals that are both likely to be beneficial and not very costly.

It remains possible, however, that the true costs of social-media anxieties are harder to tabulate. Gentzkow told me that, for the period between 2016 and 2020, the direct effects of misinformation were difficult to discern. "But it might have had a much larger effect because we got so worried about it-a broader impact on trust," he said. "Even if not that many people were exposed, the narrative that the world is full of fake news, and you can't trust anything, and other people are being misled about it-well, that might have had a bigger impact than the content itself." Nyhan had a similar reaction. "There are genuine questions that are really important, but there's a kind of opportunity cost that is missed here. There's so much focus on sweeping claims that aren't actionable, or unfounded claims we can contradict with data, that are crowding out the harms we can demonstrate, and the things we can test, that could make social media better." He added, "We're years into this, and we're still having an uninformed conversation about social media. It's totally wild."

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There's a general sense that it's bad for society-which may be right. But studies offer surprisingly few easy answers. In April, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic in which he sought to explain, as the piece's title had it, "Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid."

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7 Brutal Truths About Leadership Not Too Many People Want to Hear

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7 Brutal Truths About Leadership Not Too Many People Want to Hear

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If you’ve ever experienced great leadership, you probably remember how that person -- your boss -- made you feel. Because true leadership, at its core, is a matter of the heart.

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If you've ever experienced great leadership, you probably remember how that person -- your boss -- made you feel.Because true leadership, at its core, is a matter of the heart.

Poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou famously stated, "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Starting on the journey toward great leadership demands having to face some brutal truths about what truly defines leadership success. However, it may not be what you want to hear (or read).

1. Leaders must face conflict to solve problems.

Conflict is unavoidable when human beings are involved. Rather than being passive-aggressive, true leaders are aware that cutting through conflict with active listening skills to understand a situation from all angles is a much faster solution to resolving an issue than running away from conflict and avoiding people.

2. Leaders must grow people.

Leaders with a high degree of integrity make it a top priority to know their people in order to grow their people. They spend considerable time pouring into the lives of others through mentoring and by exposing them to new responsibilities that will stretch their development. Leaders who fall short with their commitments to growing and improving their people will likely fail at forming lasting relationships that lead to results.

3. Leaders must put employees ahead of customers.

Every leader's role should be about serving the employees -- those who are closest to the customer experience, first. Great leaders realize that their No. 1 customer is their employees. If they take care of their people, train them, and empower them, those people will become fully engaged about what they do. In turn, they will reach out and take care of their second most important customer--the people who buy their products or services.

4. Leaders must make the workplace safe.

Research on psychological safety by Amy Edmondson of Harvard indicates that when leaders foster a culture of safety -- meaning employees are free to speak up, experiment, give feedback, and ask for help -- it leads to better learning and performance outcomes. When psychological safety is absent, fear is present. And fear is detrimental to achieving a company's full potential.

5. Leaders must be willing to listen to feedback.

Many leaders don't want to listen to ideas, opinions, and constructive feedback from others about their own leadership. For such leaders, cutting themselves off means that they operate in an ego-system, not an ecosystem. A true leader who listens well is open and accountable; he probes and asks questions and listens to understand--with a focus on the future, not on a rehash of the past.

6. Leaders must apply the strength of vulnerability.

Some might say vulnerability is too touchy-feely for business. Others may say they're just not wired for it -- it's not in their personality makeup. Neither is true. Vulnerability is about trust -- the backbone of successful leadership. Employees and leaders who trust one another learn to be comfortable being open to one another around their failures, weaknesses, even fears. Vulnerability-based trust is predicated on the simple--and practical idea -- that people who aren't afraid to admit the truth are not going to engage in the kind of political drama that sucks away everyone's time and energy and, more important, gets in the way of accomplishing goals and results.

7. Leaders must act with love and care.

In a world of empty promises, manipulation, and deception, a true leader cares for the well-being of others; she shows commitment to advancing the best interests of those around her. The word "love," in a leadership-at-work sense, is not a feeling -- it's a verb; it's packed with action. It shows up in meeting the needs of others to get results, clearing obstacles from people's path, and empowering others to succeed as workers and human beings. It has intrinsic value for both leader and employee. Ultimately, it's this kind of love that defines the best CEOs on the planet.

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7 Brutal Truths About Leadership Not Too Many People Want to Hear

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If you've ever experienced great leadership, you probably remember how that person -- your boss -- made you feel.Because true leadership, at its core, is a matter of the heart. Poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou famously stated, "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

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3 Surprising Ways To Cope With Climate Change

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3 Surprising Ways To Cope With Climate Change

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A few years ago, Britt Wray felt overwhelmed by eco-anxiety. Fielding questions from family about whether she and her husband would have children, Wray contemplated the bleak future they might inherit. At the time, Wray was a science communicator and couldn't ignore the projections of species extinction, crop failure, and increasingly disastrous weather events. Wray, who now studies the mental health effects of living through the planetary crisis caused by climate change, was stricken by a "profound sense of hopelessness" and found herself openly weeping on a train ride home one evening. Of course, Wray is not alone. In the U.S., one survey conducted by the American Psychiatric Association found that more than two-thirds of Americans are somewhat or extremely anxious about climate change. Last year, the Lancet polled 10,000 youth between the ages of 16 and 25 from around the world and found that more than half reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty. (Wray was a member of the research team that published those findings.)

The trouble with eco-anxiety, a blanket term typically used to describe distress associated with climate change, is that there's no easy fix. As Wray points out, anguish is a normal responses to the circumstances, and yet that despair can be so debilitating that someone experiencing it might need professional mental health help. If high-quality treatment is even available, it still doesn't change the reality that the planet continues to tilt toward ecological chaos as politicians and corporations fail to meaningfully act.

In her new book, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, Wray attempts to chart a path forward for those who feel uneasy or even stuck when it comes to eco-anxiety. Wray's approach is holistic, weaving together various strands of thought from psychology and public health to help readers cultivate the resilience and emotional intelligence they'll need to fight for the planet - and to survive the calamities that might come.

These skills are critical not just for people's long-term wellbeing but also as a bulwark against forms of extremism like ecofascism, which view the threat of environmental collapse as a problem caused by growing populations of racial and ethnic groups. The shooter who targeted and killed several Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, cited ecofascism in a manifesto.

"People are feeling unsafe and scared, because of what's going on," Wray told me in an interview. "While some, because of their environmental values, are deeply oriented toward compassion for other people and other species and wild places, some will interpret this through their own values and beliefs, and will enact violence as a way to make them feel more safe."

While Wray covers numerous, often overlapping coping strategies in Generation Dread, she spoke with me about three tactics that people might find surprisingly helpful.

Eco-anxiety as "super fuel"

Climate changes prompts people to feel more than just difficult emotions. Existential in nature, it forces people to consider their mortality, the prospect of widespread deprivation and upheaval, and the possibility that many won't survive. It's no wonder, then, that some might first try to suppress their anxiety and grief. But Wray proposes a different, counter-intuitive approach.

"If you can have some self-compassion, if you can allow [those feelings] to be there, and then start doing the deep uncomfortable work of confronting the grief related to loss and mortality, or anxiety about how bad this is going to get, it teaches us things," says Wray. "The torment becomes a way of tapping into existential meaning."

Instead of a paralyzing burden, eco-anxiety can become "super fuel" that helps people learn how to cope and respond to climate change, perhaps through activism, community building, and making different consumer choices, like driving less and using less energy. But first, Wray says that wrestling with painful emotions related to climate change could, for example, prompt someone to imagine their deathbed and consider what really mattered to them. Would they be happy having spent a lifetime chasing money instead of purpose? Did their everyday actions match their values?

Wray says this "massively clarifying exercise" can help people step into a "climate journey." What that looks like depends on the person, but Wray describes it as using one's talents, skills, and passion to respond to the crisis, which in turn helps them remain excited about the work while giving them opportunities to make meaning and live with purpose.

Don't skip "internal activism"

Some eager to start their climate journey might want to shift all their efforts to activism, but Wray says that can be a mistake without also undertaking "psychological and emotional resiliency training" that helps alleviate despair and burnout. Wray calls this "internal activism," a term coined by climate-aware psychotherapist Caroline Hickman to describe the work of being with difficult emotions, without self-judgment, and learning to integrate them into one's life instead of trying to avoid or bury them. When that is done in tandem with self-care, it can lead to more flexible thinking, which is also critical to responding to the challenges that climate change will bring.

Critics of this approach might call it navel-gazing, or insist there's no time to do anything but organize politically, but Wray describes such complaints as a "tired binary."

"We can be much better external activists when we're good at doing the internal part of self-care, too."

Wray argues that people need to develop skills like binocular vision, a concept she adapted from psychoanalyst Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Wray describes this skill as focusing on on the "worst forms of climate change chaos" while opening an eye toward the "imaginative possibilities for a better future." With that ability, people can hold what feel like two opposing ideas at once, a form of flexible thinking that can make it easier to find strength and take action.

Wray also advocates for stretching one's " window of tolerance," a psychological space in which life feels manageable and fulfilling. That window shrinks when people feel hyper- or under-aroused, which can happen as a result of trauma, anxiety, and depression, among other experiences. Despair can set in when people lose their capacity to cope, making it much harder to fight climate change.

On the other hand, that window expands with resilience-building practices that help regulate difficult emotions, says Wray. Such strategies include mindfulness, meditation, gratitude journaling, yoga, quality sleep, and spending time with loved ones - basically anything that soothes the nervous system.

"We can be much better external activists when we're good at doing the internal part of self-care, too," says Wray.

Prioritize social connections

Coping with eco-anxiety can feel very individualistic. People focus on their consumer choices, perhaps buying an electric car and avoiding single-use plastic products. Or they might work through their emotions with a therapist. While these aren't bad strategies, Wray says there's much to be gained through social connectedness. Of course, being part of collective efforts to pressure governments and corporations can be rewarding. But relationships also make a difference when climate change brings any number of disasters, including extreme weather events.

Wray points to studies on how communities with high levels of social connectedness and social trust cope following a crisis. That research suggests that strong relationships and the ability to achieve shared goals together lead to more positive outcomes than in communities where social capital is low. When people come to each other's aid, it can provide degrees of immediate and sometimes lasting psychological relief. That's possibly why people with high connectedness may be less likely to develop mental health disorders following a disaster.

Wray challenges people to imagine a future in which people can leverage strong social relationships and mutual aid to rebuild faster after destruction and, as a result, potentially experience post-traumatic growth instead of persistent or chronic stress. That might look like using community and religious centers, schools, and civic spaces to bring people together to tackle problems like how to protect the vulnerable in a heat wave.

"If we continue to override or just ignore this aspect we will not be serving ourselves well," says Wray. "We can go back to the old ways of living in community, living rooted with others, and doing what's needed to be reciprocal and mutualistic in the way that we organize our social lives."
If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, Crisis Text Line provides free, confidential support 24/7. Text CRISIS to 741741 to be connected to a crisis counselor. Contact the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m. ET, or email info@nami.org. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Here is a list of international resources.

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3 Surprising Ways To Cope With Climate Change

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A few years ago, Britt Wray felt overwhelmed by eco-anxiety. Fielding questions from family about whether she and her husband would have children, Wray contemplated the bleak future they might inherit. At the time, Wray was a science communicator and couldn't ignore the projections of species extinction, crop failure, and increasingly disastrous weather events.

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Samco Ventures raises Rs 49 crore in Series-B

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Samco Ventures raises Rs 49 crore in Series-B

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“Samco has had an impressive growth trajectory since its inception in 2015. We are also very impressed with the Samco team and the innovation that they have brought to the plate in an otherwise cluttered market,” Siddharth Mehta, founder of Bay Capital, said. “They understand the complex requirements of the market and have been successful in delivering unique solutions.”

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The brokerage, which competes with the likes of Bengaluru-based Zerodha, will use the proceeds towards building a mutual fund distribution platform.

NEW DELHI: Samco Ventures, which owns and operates online discount broker Samco Securities and mobile trading platform StockNote, has raised $7.5 million (Rs 49 crore) in a fresh round of funding.

The Series-B round of equity financing is an internal round that was led by the company existing investor, mid-market private equity firm Bay Capital Investments, with the promoters of the Mumbai-headquartered company also participating. The brokerage, which competes with the likes of Bengaluru-based Zerodha, will use the proceeds towards building a mutual fund distribution platform, lending capabilities, as well as its research and advisory businesses.

"Samco has had an impressive growth trajectory since its inception in 2015. We are also very impressed with the Samco team and the innovation that they have brought to the plate in an otherwise cluttered market," Siddharth Mehta, founder of Bay Capital, said. "They understand the complex requirements of the market and have been successful in delivering unique solutions."

The latest round of funding, which also saw participation from company's other existing backers, including the Modi family and other high-net-worth individuals, including Indian cricketing legend Kapil Dev, comes about two years after it raised its previous round of $3 million in fiscal 2016.

"(We) look forward towards addressing the problems that the trading and investing industry is plagued with, and ensure low-cost access to capital markets is available for every Indian," Jimeet Modi, chief executive of SAMCO Securities and StockNote, said.

The company, which claims to service over 75,000 customers, also recently launched StockNote, a content streaming and trading platform that aggregates and delivers news and information about stocks and sectors across India.

Founded by Siddharth Mehta and Puneet Saraogi, Bay Capital operates, both, a private equity, as well a long-only public markets investment practice.

The investment firm's portfolio includes Sterling Holiday Resorts, Vini Cosmetics, IL&FS Energy, Intellivate Capital Ventures and the South and West India franchisee for McDonald's Westlife Leisure Resorts, according to VCCEdge.

More recently, the investment firm also reported to be picking up a controlling stake in the Malvinder and Shivinder Singh-promoted Religare Enterprises, in which it held a 10% stake. Post the ouster of the Singh brothers, in February earlier this year, Mehta was named as a non-executive, non-independent director of the beleaguered financial services company.

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Samco Ventures raises Rs 49 crore in Series-B

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NEW DELHI: Samco Ventures, which owns and operates online discount broker Samco Securities and mobile trading platform StockNote, has raised $7.5 million (Rs 49 crore) in a fresh round of funding. The Series-B round of equity financing is an internal round that was led by the company existing investor, mid-market private equity firm Bay Capital Investments, with the promoters of the Mumbai-headquartered company also participating.

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How Levi’s boosted sales during the pandemic and tackled global supply chain troubles

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How Levi’s boosted sales during the pandemic and tackled global supply chain troubles

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Harmit Singh, CFO at Levi Strauss & Co, says traditional industries bogged down in legacy systems are playing catch-up with nimbler companies. The jeans brand has embraced AI and ML to stay ahead of the curve.

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Diversification also helped the company during the supply chain crisis. Levi's ships products through 20 countries.

One of the hardest hit sectors in the pandemic was retail. With indefinite lockdowns all over the world, the retail sector saw plunging footfalls and sales. On top of it, the global supply chain crisis has exacerbated the problem for businesses. However, one brand's sales reports defied the trend seen by its peers in the period: Levi Strauss.

In the last quarter, the denim major earned a revenue of $1.59 billion against an expected $1.55 billion. Harmit Singh, Executive Vice-President and Chief Financial Officer at Levi Strauss & Co, credited the success to diversification and the company's heavy investment in technology over the years.

In its latest earnings call Levi Strauss said it now sees annual revenue growing at about 6-8% through 2027, which is higher than its previous five-year targets of 4-6 percent%. If Levi's can achieve such growth, it would push its revenue closer to about $10 billion compared to $5.8 billion in fiscal 2021. For the San Francisco-based company, its direct business contributed about 36% of total sales last fiscal and clocked 22% of revenue through digital means.

Talking about how the company emerged stronger during this crisis, Singh said they led with innovation. Just before the pandemic, the brand introduced its loose fit or baggy jeans. "The comfortable work status with people working from home and the hybrid work culture, which is here to stay, drove casualisation. And just before the pandemic, we introduced the baggie or looser fit, and that just caught on. It's now 50% of our total volume," he said, speaking at Tiecon 2022 held recently.

Levi's got into the activewear segment after acquiring fitness and activewear brand Beyond Yoga in 2021. Diversification in this manner helped the company.

Diversification also helped the company during the supply chain crisis. Levi's ships products through 20 countries. "For example, when there continues to be congestion in the (US) west coast, but at its peak, we were able to divert supply and get it through the (US) east coast. When tariffs were being discussed with China and we were importing a lot into the US from China, we were able to cross that. And today, we import less than 1% from China. So, we have a diversified supply chain and we continue to diversify and be agile," he said.

t the same time, Levi's doubled down on its technology investment in sales and supply chain. Singh pointed out that earlier, the pandemic supply chain was largely a manual function. However, back in 2015-16, Levi's implemented a SaaS-based technology to automate supply planning. Today, algorithms decide if it is better to ship the product from a store near the customer or from the warehouse.

"We've also been implementing a cloud-based ERP system. When I joined the company, I realised we had about 11 different ERP platforms and systems and they were not connected to everything else that was going on. We started down that track about a couple of years ago. We continue to invest and we have now gone live in a hybrid, cloud-based system," he said.

The company's journey with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) started three years ago. Today, these techs are used in two broad areas. One is to determine assortments at a store level. Second is to allow fans to upload images of products they like on its website. "It will automatically throw up products that are very similar so you can have your choices. We have personalised offers to our loyal consumers. We launched a loyalty programme during the pandemic and we got about 8 million loyal consumers. I think for a brand like ours, we need 100 million loyal consumers."

In other uses, the company is leveraging AI and algorithms to do financial forecasting and store-site selection. "We thought we'd cracked all the variables. The one variable that we didn't think of was the pandemic when all our stores were shut down and it was difficult to forecast. We use it for margin management," he said.

He agrees with the fact that traditional industries like Levi's, because of their legacy systems, were playing catch-up with the nimbler companies. This is why the company is trying to connect with younger consumers and quickly launched online payment gateways PayPal and Venmo and connected them with TikTok and Snap.

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How Levi's boosted sales during the pandemic and tackled global supply chain troubles

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One of the hardest hit sectors in the pandemic was retail. With indefinite lockdowns all over the world, the retail sector saw plunging footfalls and sales. On top of it, the global supply chain crisis has exacerbated the problem for businesses. However, one brand's sales reports defied the trend seen by its peers in the period: Levi Strauss.

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The Series-B round of equity financing is an internal round that was led by the company existing investor, mid-market private equity firm Bay Capital Investments.

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The Series-B round of equity financing is an internal round that was led by the company existing investor, mid-market private equity firm Bay Capital Investments.

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Samco Ventures, which owns and operates online discount broker Samco Securities and mobile trading platform StockNote, has raised $7.5 million (Rs 49 crore) in a fresh round of funding.

“Samco has had an impressive growth trajectory since its inception in 2015. We are also very impressed with the Samco team and the innovation that they have brought to the plate in an otherwise cluttered market,” Siddharth Mehta Bay Capital CIO, said. “They understand the complex requirements of the market and have been successful in delivering unique solutions.”

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The brokerage, which competes with the likes of Bengaluru-based Zerodha, will use the proceeds towards building a mutual fund distribution platform.

NEW DELHI: Samco Ventures, which owns and operates online discount broker Samco Securities and mobile trading platform StockNote, has raised $7.5 million (Rs 49 crore) in a fresh round of funding.

The Series-B round of equity financing is an internal round that was led by the company existing investor, mid-market private equity firm Bay Capital Investments, with the promoters of the Mumbai-headquartered company also participating. The brokerage, which competes with the likes of Bengaluru-based Zerodha, will use the proceeds towards building a mutual fund distribution platform, lending capabilities, as well as its research and advisory businesses.

"Samco has had an impressive growth trajectory since its inception in 2015. We are also very impressed with the Samco team and the innovation that they have brought to the plate in an otherwise cluttered market," Siddharth Mehta, founder of Bay Capital, said. "They understand the complex requirements of the market and have been successful in delivering unique solutions."

The latest round of funding, which also saw participation from company's other existing backers, including the Modi family and other high-net-worth individuals, including Indian cricketing legend Kapil Dev, comes about two years after it raised its previous round of $3 million in fiscal 2016.

"(We) look forward towards addressing the problems that the trading and investing industry is plagued with, and ensure low-cost access to capital markets is available for every Indian," Jimeet Modi, chief executive of SAMCO Securities and StockNote, said.

The company, which claims to service over 75,000 customers, also recently launched StockNote, a content streaming and trading platform that aggregates and delivers news and information about stocks and sectors across India.

Founded by Siddharth Mehta and Puneet Saraogi, Bay Capital operates, both, a private equity, as well a long-only public markets investment practice.

The investment firm's portfolio includes Sterling Holiday Resorts, Vini Cosmetics, IL&FS Energy, Intellivate Capital Ventures and the South and West India franchisee for McDonald's Westlife Leisure Resorts, according to VCCEdge.

More recently, the investment firm also reported to be picking up a controlling stake in the Malvinder and Shivinder Singh-promoted Religare Enterprises, in which it held a 10% stake. Post the ouster of the Singh brothers, in February earlier this year, Mehta was named as a non-executive, non-independent director of the beleaguered financial services company.

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Samco Ventures raises Rs 49 crore in Series-B

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NEW DELHI: Samco Ventures, which owns and operates online discount broker Samco Securities and mobile trading platform StockNote, has raised $7.5 million (Rs 49 crore) in a fresh round of funding. The Series-B round of equity financing is an internal round that was led by the company existing investor, mid-market private equity firm Bay Capital Investments, with the promoters of the Mumbai-headquartered company also participating.

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India Stack: Can ‘Digital India’ be exported?

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India Stack: Can ‘Digital India’ be exported?

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The need to be tech-savvy has always been a talking point in India and the world. This became clearer during the Covid outbreak when the world came to a standstill and everyone turned to their phones for everything from vaccine information to ordering medicines and groceries online.

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India Stack: Can ‘Digital India’ be exported?

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The need to be tech-savvy has always been a talking point in India and the world. This became clearer during the Covid outbreak when the world came to a standstill and everyone turned to their phones for everything from vaccine information to ordering medicines and groceries online.

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Govt approves 8.1 per cent as interest rate on provident fund deposits for 2021-2022

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Govt approves 8.1 per cent as interest rate on provident fund deposits for 2021-2022

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The interest rate of 8.1% for 2021-22 is the lowest in more than four decades and is a significant cut from 8.5% credited in 2020-21 and 2019-20. EPFO had credited 8.0% as interest rate in 1977-78. Since then, it has been either 8.25% or more.

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Govt approves 8.1 per cent as interest rate on provident fund deposits for 2021-2022

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The interest rate of 8.1% for 2021-22 is the lowest in more than four decades and is a significant cut from 8.5% credited in 2020-21 and 2019-20. EPFO had credited 8.0% as interest rate in 1977-78. Since then, it has been either 8.25% or more.

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Mukesh Ambani replaces Gautam Adani to become India’s richest man

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Mukesh Ambani replaces Gautam Adani to become India’s richest man

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For the past few months, Gautam Adani had been enjoying the position due to accelerated prices of stocks of the Adani group. However, with a total net worth of $99.7B, Mukesh Ambani has pushed Adani (with net worth of $98.7B) to second position as per a report published by Bloomberg.

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Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) chairman Mukesh Ambani becomes India's richest man.

Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) chairman Mukesh Ambani has replaced Gautam Adani, chairman of the Adani Group, to become Asia and India 's richest man owing to a surge in the stock prices of

.

According to Forbes Real-time billionaire list, Ambani has bagged the sixth position with a 6.21% increase of $6.1 billion taking the overall net worth to $104.3 billion. Meanwhile Adani's net worth grew by 0.66% to $99.9 billion taking him to the ninth position.

The RIL stock has gained over 6% in the last five trading days with its market capitalization hitting Rs 19 lakh crore landmark. The company also continues with its acquisition spree. ET on Friday reported that RIL and US buyout firm Apollo Global Management have joined hands to acquire Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc's International chemist and drugstore units, known as Boots.

Apart from recent investments in organisations like Hamleys, Clovia, MilkBasket, Urban Ladder and Haptik, the brand has also decided to acquire 40% stake in Dream Plast, an Italy-based Plastic Legno's toy manufacturing business in India, and invest in an ed-tech startup Lido Learning.

Alternatively, as per the Bloomberg Billionaire's Index consisting the daily ranking of the world's richest people, Ambani- with a total net worth of $99.7 billion- has pushed Adani (with net worth of $98.7 billion) to second position. Adani had been enjoying the first position for the past few months due to accelerated stock prices of the Adani group

With an established and diverse empire consisting of the energy, telecom and FMCG sectors, Ambani has been focusing on businesses concerning tech innovations and transformations.

Adani might have lost the position but he continues to enjoy a surge in wealth as compared to the last two years.

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Mukesh Ambani | Gautam Adani: Mukesh Ambani replaces Gautam Adani to become India's richest man

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For the past few months, Gautam Adani had been enjoying the position due to accelerated prices of stocks of the Adani group. However, with a total net worth of $99.7B, Mukesh Ambani has pushed Adani (with net worth of $98.7B) to second position as per a report published by Bloomberg.

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Siddharth Mehta Bay Capital CIO And Founder Said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

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Siddharth Mehta Bay Capital CIO And Founder Said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

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Siddharth Mehta Bay Capital founder and CIO, said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

"Customer centricity has been the heart of their proposition and has helped them become the platform of choice for customers," he said.

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PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in india

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PB Fintech had attained the status of a unicorn in 2018

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PB Fintech had attained the status of a unicorn in 2018

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PB Fintech had attained the status of a unicorn in 2018 when it raised USD 200 million in a Series-F round led by Japan's Softbank.

Siddharth Mehta, founder and CIO of Bay Capital, said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

"Customer centricity has been the heart of their proposition and has helped them become the platform of choice for customers," he said.

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"Bay Capital has completed a secondary transaction, ahead of the insurance aggregator's plans to launch an IPO in the next 12-15 months," Bay Capital said on Wednesday.

NEW DELHI: Leading online insurance policy aggregator Policybazaar.com has got a capital boost from investment management firm Bay Capital, ahead of its initial public offering (IPO) in the next 12-15 months.

Bay Capital, which manages money on behalf of institutions and endowments from the US and the Europe, has infused an undisclosed sum into the parent company PB Fintech of Policybazaar.com.

"Bay Capital has completed a secondary transaction, ahead of the insurance aggregator's plans to launch an IPO in the next 12-15 months," Bay Capital said on Wednesday.

However, how much capital has been infused by Bay Capital could not be ascertained.

PB Fintech had attained the status of a unicorn in 2018 when it raised USD 200 million in a Series-F round led by Japan's Softbank.

Siddharth Mehta, founder and CIO of Bay Capital, said PB Fintech has transformed the way insurance is bought in India.

"Customer centricity has been the heart of their proposition and has helped them become the platform of choice for customers," he said.

Yashish Dahiya, founder and Group CEO of PB Fintech, said Bay Capital is a long-term investor and the company sees them playing a key role as Policybazaar heads towards the public markets in the next 12-15 months.

India focussed Bay Capital has invested in areas such as consumer, digital, finance, outsourcing and health.

Among others, Policybazaar.com has investors of the likes of Info Edge, Premji Invest, Temasek, Ribbit Capital, Chiratae, Inventus Capital Partners, True North, Tiger Global, Wellington and Steadview.

PB Fintech also holds Paisabazaar.com, which is an online credit comparison portal.

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Policybazaar.com IPO in 12-15 months; parent firm gets capital boost from Bay Capital

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NEW DELHI: Leading online insurance policy aggregator Policybazaar.com has got a capital boost from investment management firm Bay Capital, ahead of its initial public offering (IPO) in the next 12-15 months. Bay Capital, which manages money on behalf of institutions and endowments from the US and the Europe, has infused an undisclosed sum into the parent company PB Fintech of Policybazaar.com.