Peril

Recently, a minor shortwave radio blackout over the Indian Ocean area due to a newly formed sunspot which exploded, spitting out an M3-class solar flare on April 6. The affected countries included India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even China, Japan, and South Korea. The Sun has gradually become violent due to its Solar Cycle 29 which is expected to hit its peak in July 2025. Therefore, Earth is in for a rough ride until then. Recently, the Sun spewed out C-class solar flare which could make its way towards Earth…

Concerns about further interest-rate hikes, a fizzling stock rally and a US crypto crackdown all suggest Bitcoin and other tokens should be beating a hasty retreat. Instead, they're extending their 2023 rebound.Bitcoin's year-to-date gain has now reached 50% after a further jump in February, contrasting with a retreat in global equities this month courtesy of a macroeconomic environment replete with growth and inflation concerns. This divergence has dented a positive correlation between shares and crypto that sprouted…

Help us make Essential California serve you better. Take this survey.Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Friday, Jan. 27.When you turn on your tap in Southern California, chances are some of that water came from the Colorado River.The waterway, which originates in the Rocky Mountains, is a key source of the water we and our crops drink. Seven Western states get a portion of their supply from the Colorado River — and California takes the biggest gulp. In 2020, 4.1 million acre-feet…

What do you know about bees? That they produce honey? That they live in a hive? That they swarm? Well, I have news: These characteristics don’t actually describe most bees in the US. Of the roughly 4,000 native species, not a single one produces true honey. Not one! Most of them live alone. Most of them have no queen. The bees that many people are familiar with are honey bees, Apis mellifera, a nonnative species that Americans brought over from Europe centuries ago. Beekeepers manage them like any other farm animal, to…

Belgian film-makers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have long been darlings of the Cannes film festival, with prizes including Palme d’Or wins for Rosetta (1999) and The Child (2005), best screenplay for The Silence of Lorna (2008), a Grand Prix for The Kid With a Bike (2011) and best director honours for Young Ahmed (2019). As for their most recent feature, Tori and Lokita, which once again finds these masters of humanist film-making addressing the plight of young people, it took the special 75th anniversary prize when it…

I meet Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie the day after she delivers and records her Reith Lecture for the BBC. She is a commanding presence: flawless to look at, serene in her confidence, vivid and trenchant in her quest to smash every point and win every argument. We meet at Broadcasting House a few hours before she leaves London for Lagos: the writer now splits her time between Nigeria and the US. In the former, she says, “life is louder, more raucous, more joyful, my cousins are there. People come into the house all the time.…

According to Meta, Galactica can “summarize academic papers, solve math problems, generate Wiki articles, write scientific code, annotate molecules and proteins, and more.” But soon after its launch, it was pretty easy for outsiders to prompt the model to provide “scientific research” on the benefits of homophobia, anti-Semitism, suicide, eating glass, being white, or being a man. Meanwhile, papers on AIDS or racism were blocked. Charming!   As my colleague Will Douglas Heaven writes in his story about the debacle:…

Hi, everyone. Life is good because the Phillies are in the World Series! (Disclosure: I’m from Philadelphia.) Uh-oh, they just got no-hit. Booooo!The Plain ViewIn May 1998, I visited Steve Jobs at Apple headquarters to hear his plans for reviving Apple. He had been its interim CEO for almost a year, after returning to the company that fired him over a decade earlier. Greeting me in the boardroom of his suite at One Infinite Loop, he went to the whiteboard and began scrawling out his solution to the company’s business…

Photo: Darren McCollester (Getty Images)This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.Peter Hanlon, a 68-year-old farmer from Boston, has been growing cranberries in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for decades. Cranberries are in Hanlon’s blood — his grandfather farmed them on the cape before him. But six weeks ago, Hanlon sold his farm in the town of Sandwich. None of his kids wanted to carry on the tradition, and Hanlon doesn’t blame them: Profit margins are incredibly tight, and…

Japan is worried that US plans to pour billions of dollars into chip manufacturing to fend off China could finish off what's left of a Japanese semiconductor industry that once dominated the world.After "three lost decades", according to Japan's industry ministry, the country's share of global chip manufacturing has fallen from a half to a tenth as it leaked customers to cheaper rivals and failed to maintain a lead in cutting edge production.As China and the United States, driven by a trade war and security concerns, ramp…