KEVIN HOWELL, RYDE Q Forget cardio, Guru. I need to gain mass A Guru’s got you, reader. Bulk is one of his many unkind middle names. And before we dig in, know that GaGu was incredibly tempted to facetiously offer 300 words of baking advice here, so you’re lucky he’s in a good mood – though, as a second preface, you’re also a fool if choose you follow his advice. First, refocus your training to follow Guru’s Three Musts of Gettin’ Buffed: eat, drink, and eat again. Frankly even that short list could be trimmed. You want to eat good things every three hours or so, meaning clean protein, fruits and vegetables, healthy fats and so on. Don’t avoid carbs, but do save them for an after-gym feed up. If you need help…

Once when I was a kid, my dad brought home a quadraphonic hi-fi system. It was this new format that was going to take over from stereo, but it never really took off. It’s amazing we haven’t really had a big shift in audio like we’ve had in video, so I’ve been waiting a long time for Spatial Audio. Sometimes new technologies are gimmicks. But this isn’t like that at all. It allows you to be in the room with the musicians actually performing right there. The first person to show me Spatial Audio was Adam Levine from Maroon 5. He called me up and said, “I’m going to send you something I want you to listen to. It’s a real gamechanger for music and it’s hard to imagine ever going back.” I think we’re…

WHEN OUR TEAM GETS TOGETHER TO CHOOSE the TIME100, we have one barometer: influence. Who shaped the year? Who stood up? Who stood out? Influence, of course, may be for good or for ill—a dichotomy never more visible than in this year’s TIME100, which includes both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. They are the poles of this list, and of this moment. The Russian dictator behind a brutal war, and his foe, the Ukrainian President, whose leadership has made him a rare heroic figure in our divisive time. Indeed, while so many crises of recent years—from COVID-19 to climate change—have seemed like calls to collective action, it was in many ways Putin who finally, unwittingly, pulled it off. “The nations of the free world,” writes President Joe Biden in a tribute…

Dab your foot as the front tyre washes out in a loose turn, or simply miss that step on the way to the toilet after one too many post-ride beers and it’s all too easy to roll your ankle. And if you like getting airborne, bailing a jump or even coming up short and casing the landing are two surefire ways to bruise your heels or blow your ankles up like balloons. Stronger feet and ankles are essential for riding, and not just injury prevention, as the power generated in your legs is ultimately delivered to the pedals through your feet and ankles. So if you want to ride faster, jump higher or simply smash through rock gardens, strong, flexible ankles are essential. And while sprains and strains are common, by improving…

Brian Brown, curator of entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, photographed all the insects in this article using a camera-and-microscope setup that was originally developed to examine flaws in computer chips. On a balmy January morning in Manaus, a Brazilian port city surrounded by rainforest, a group of entomologists and I scattered into a supermarket to stock up for an expedition. Twenty minutes later, in the checkout line, it became clear that we had different ideas about what that meant. I had peanuts, raisins, and bug repellent; the entomologists, all of whom were dipterists, or fly specialists, had heaps of bruised produce, nearly expired trays of chicken, and bits of peacock bass wrapped in cellophane. “I asked for the worst tomatoes they have, the most rotten potatoes and onions—that’s…

AT A STEEL PLANT IN LULEA, SWEDEN, WORKERS MAKE the world’s most essential construction material the old-fashioned way: piling iron ore and coke, a kind of coal-derived fuel, in a huge blast furnace, heating the mixture to enormous temperatures, and then “tapping” the cauldron of molten metal, which sends a stream of white-hot pig iron—and showers of sparks—spilling out along a sluiceway. But less than a mile away, the plant’s owner, SSAB, is piloting a less dramatic steelmaking process at a new facility. “It doesn’t look that spectacular,” says Martin Pei, executive vice president and chief technology officer at the Swedish steelmaker. “You don’t see very much either, because it’s all automatically controlled.” It’s spectacular in a different way, though. Traditional blast furnaces emit huge amounts of CO₂. But SSAB’s HYBRIT pilot…

The pandemic made China the world’s top exporter of Covid-19 vaccines, mostly to nations that haven’t been able to afford or procure more effective ones from the U.S. and Europe. Now the country is using that newfound leverage to make an aggressive overseas push for its vaccines against other diseases such as Japanese encephalitis and pneumonia, competing with giants including Pfizer Inc. and Merck & Co. Studies have found the Chinese Covid shots to be less effective than some Western ones, such as the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna Inc., and there have been repeated questions about the transparency and data standards of its vaccine makers. Even so, developing nations that have had little access to other coronavirus vaccines are poised to grow more dependent on Chinese companies for shots…

The P5 is the all-important third model from Chinese EV maker Xpeng and is aimed squarely at young families seeking a highly connected electric saloon. Already present in Norway, Xpeng is poised for major European expansion over the next year, and the P5 will be one of the cars spearheading that push. As the world’s first production car with built-in lidar, it expands on the autonomous features of the sportier P7 and, when the software is ready, will offer an inner-city self driving capability that’s likely to rival Tesla’s so-called Full Self-Driving system. Thankfully, the two lidar units sit well back within the front end, negating the risk of extremely expensive fender-benders. Sitting on the same platform as Xpeng’s first model, the G3 compact crossover, the P5 has quite a high stance…

Richard Branson has been to space. Jeff Bezos just visited, too. Rich people have done this sort of thing before, but Branson and Bezos didn’t just pay for a ticket—they paid for the spaceships. Individuals, if they’re wealthy enough, are no longer beholden to a government craft when they want to leave the planet for a little while. These two voyages have generated an awful lot of takes. Some have celebrated the engineering and persistence required to fly a bunch of humans into space and bring them back safely, or the wonder of pushing the boundaries of possibility. Mostly, though, they’ve proved an irresistible occasion to vent frustrations about billionaires doing billionaire things instead of focusing their resources on the pandemic, or climate change, or any of the other rolling crises…

“I don’t want to say, ‘The election is over,’” Donald Trump said on January 7, 2021. He’d been given a script for a video statement on the events of the previous day, when, at his prompting, a mob had assaulted the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt the electoral-vote tally. The video was meant to calm his supporters and to reassure the country that the election was, indeed, over. But, as indicated by outtakes from the filming which were shown last Thursday, at a hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the events of January 6th, Trump wasn’t ready to send that message. All he was willing to say was that “Congress has certified the results”; it had done so at close to four o’clock that morning, in a building…

THIS MONTH ED SELLEY EXPERTISE: REVIEWER Active in the industry since 1999, Ed’s first record was Boss Drum by The Shamen. He splits his time between reviewing and protecting hi-fi kit from his son Will. NEVILLE ROBERTS EXPERTISE: ENGINEER Neville has an eclectic taste for classical baroque and jazz. His wife was forced to marry his transmission line speakers in the eighties and he collects BBC test card music. JASON KENNEDY EXPERTISE: REVIEWER Editor of HFC from 1998 to 2001, Jason’s first turntable was Rega’s Planar 3 and Elvis’ 40 Greatest Hits was his first vinyl, so don’t go stepping on his blue suede shoes. DAVID PRICE EXPERTISE: REVIEWER DP two-finger typed his first hi-fi review 25 years ago. Since then he’s edited Hi-Fi World and HFC. He describes himself as an “unreconstructed analogue addict”. CHRIS WARD EXPERTISE: REVIEWER Like his first kiss, Chris will…

This is Vertere’s third cartridge, following the Mystic MC design that was launched last year. Designed with a view to being something that DG-1 Turntable (HFC 463) owners might consider as an update for the supplied Magneto cartridge as well as being an option for non Vertere users, the most unusual aspect of the Sabre is that it is a moving-magnet model, which at the £845 asking price is fairly rare. Vertere argues that having a cartridge that doesn’t require your phono stage to be changed makes the proportional upgrade cost lower. The stylus is a micro elliptical profile, bonded to an aluminium cantilever. Output is given as 4.0mV with frequency response quoted at an impressive 15Hz-25kHz. Vertere states that the Sabre is established engineering rather than a radical clean sheet, but…

CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY elites can picture an endgame to the Ukraine war that suits China very well. In Beijing, scholars and high-ranking government advisers predict that today’s shows of Western unity will fade sooner or later, as sanctions fail to break Russia and instead send energy prices soaring. In their telling the conflict will hasten America’s decline and slow retreat from the world. A crumbling of American-led alliances will then usher in a new global order, involving spheres of influence dominated by a few, iron-willed autocracies, China chief among them. As for liberal democracies that have taken the lead in writing global trade rules or defining universal values and human rights since the second world war, their sway is being ended by a form of majority rule, Chinese analysts boast. Western…

台灣生育率跌破「超低」門檻，已整整18年。 這段期間，「少子化」成為許多問題的癥結，政府接連推出的催生政策，卻無明顯成效。 每個不生小孩的決定，背後都有複雜糾結的因素。但《今周刊》的獨家調查，提供了明確努力目標：若增加價格親民的公共托育名額、創造能安心請假育嬰的職場環境大部分年輕人，將更有生育意願。 這是急欲擺脫低生育陷阱的台灣，不容錯過的改變契機。 理財達人郭莉芳， 是四個孩子的媽。她十八年前生第一胎時，唯一能領的補助是勞保生育給付；到了現年七歲的小女兒誕生那年，生育給付才從一個月投保薪資增加到兩個月，她設籍的台北市，則額外發放每胎兩萬元生育獎勵與每月二五○○元育兒津貼，「後來還有很多我錯過的友善生育政策不斷上路，但我身邊不敢生的人，還是不太敢生。」 「不敢生，不是這幾年才開始的，我就有很多同學是『頂客族』，就算有生的，通常也只生一個。」四十八歲的郭莉芳觀察，「原因，大概是我們這一代的集體焦慮吧⋯⋯，每個人都想給子女最好的資源，偏偏又覺得自己手上的資源有限，到了該生育的年齡，就會有很多顧慮。」 不敢生養的集體焦慮 今年人口估「自然負成長」五萬人…

At Apple’s recent record-breaking earnings call, CEO Tim Cook revealed that the Cupertino company had not only beaten sales expectations in today’s highly volatile market but that there were now more than one billion active iPhones. It not only demonstrates Apple’s brand power and continued growth but sets the firm on a new trajectory as we continue into 2021. ONE BILLION iPHONES As first reported by Reuters following Apple’s January earnings call, there are now more than one billion active iPhones in use around the world - the highest figure since records began. Combined, there are now more than 1.65 billion active Apple devices in use, ranging from iPads and Apple Watches to Apple TVs and MacBooks, demonstrating the company’s enormous reach and market penetration. Although Apple’s smartphone market share has fallen…

FAKARAVA, THE ISLANDS OF TAHITI The thought of escaping the reality of life is certainly intoxicating. But where to go to truly get away from it all and dwell in the bliss of nothing but blue skies, clear waters and friendly smiles? The Islands of Tahiti, a collection of 118 islands and atolls sprinkled like confetti across the impossible blue of the South Pacific, already have a lock on tropical bliss, but Fakarava takes it one step further. Having long played second fiddle to the likes of Moorea and Bora Bora, it is time for Fakarava’s unspoilt beauty to shine (it is a designated UNESCO Biosphere Reserve). Book into a guesthouse (big hotel chains are nowhere to be seen) to max out the island paradise vibes and prepare to do as…

whatcar@haymarket.com THE RENAULT MÉGANE E-Tech Electric is big news, both for Renault and for anyone considering a pure electric family hatchback. It’s big for Renault because this is the first of its cars to sit on a new, bespoke electric vehicle (EV) structure that will form the basis of many models in the years to come, including the upcoming Nissan Ariya SUV (Nissan and Renault being part of the same group). And it’s big news for anyone shopping for a family car because this all-new version is available only in fully electric form (albeit sold alongside the existing petrol and diesel Mégane until 2024). Plug-in just became the default, then. The Mégane EV comes with a choice of 40kWh and 60kWh batteries. The former is paired with a 129bhp electric motor and…

Суммарно 50 компаний рейтинга заработали за год 7,2 трлн рублей, на 2% больше, чем годом ранее. Четыре табачных гиганта, вошедших в рейтинг, заработали 939 млрд рублей — на 67,4 млрд рублей больше, чем в 2019 году Несмотря на усиливающееся со всех сторон давление, табачные гиганты растут и процветают. Пришедшая на российский рынок в 1992 году компания Philip Morris увеличила в 2020 году выручку почти на 8% и заняла первое место в рейтинге крупнейших иностранных компаний. Российское подразделение Japan Tobacco International выросло за год на 3,7% и переместилось с седьмого места на четвертое. Также входящая в Big Tobacco (пять крупнейших мировых производителей табачной продукции) British American Tobacco с ростом выручки на 13% улучшила свое положение на две позиции и заняла 14-е место. Суммарно 50 компаний рейтинга заработали за год 7,2 трлн рублей, на…

С электронными торговыми платформами, представляющими товары разных продавцов, знакомы все. Но маркетплейс бензина, дизельного и другого топлива — это, без преувеличения, новое явление на традиционном рынке. В августе 2020 года была создана компания «ОРГ-Маркет», которая является резидентом Технопарка «Сколково». Всего за полгода работы через разработанную ею программу org-market.com было продано более 40 000 тонн нефтепродуктов. О том, как создавалась и работает платформа, мы поговорили с генеральным директором группы компаний «Ойл Ресурс Групп» Сергеем Терешкиным. КАКОЙ КАТЕГОРИИ ПОКУПАТЕЛЕЙ АДРЕСОВАН ВАШ МАРКЕТПЛЕЙС? Наши клиенты — те предприятия, которые потребляют значительные объемы топлива, но не могут постоянно ездить за ним на АЗС. Для них предпочтительнее доставка прямо к месту производства работ. Например, это дорожники, строители, агропредприятия, шахты, угольные разрезы, котельные, независимые АЗС, месторождения, аэропорты, аэроклубы. Кроме того, некоторым клиентам нужно специальное топливо или другие нефтепродукты,…

THERE’S AN OLD JOKE AMONG TWITTER EMPLOYEES THAT being on the platform is like playing a huge online multiplayer game where every day there’s a different main character—meaning a person who’s critiqued, harassed, or otherwise shoved into the spotlight. According to the joke, you have just one goal: never become that main character yourself. One day in 2018, Twitter’s main character was Vernon Unsworth, a British diver who’d spent days assisting the rescue of Thai boys trapped in a flooded cave. After billionaire Elon Musk offered a minuscule submarine to the rescue divers, Unsworth told the media that Musk’s idea was just a useless PR stunt. Musk then took to Twitter, where (in tweets that he later deleted) he baselessly accused the man of being a “pedo guy,” or pedophile. The…

Willie Quan, a father in Massachusetts, spent hours driving to about a dozen stores in a day, getting down on his hands and knees to search for the last remaining bottles of baby formula on a bottom shelf. Saida Cardona, a mom of three in New Jersey, doesn’t have a car, so she’s spending $150 a week to take taxis back and forth to her local Walmart and other stores to hunt for the Enfamil her 6-month-old needs. Jennifer Villegas, a 19-year-old mother in Texas who doesn’t work so she can stay at home with her 5-month-old son, has lost more than $150 to scammers purporting to sell formula online. The US baby formula crisis has been getting worse. Out-of-stock rates spiked to 74% nationally for the week ended May 28,…

24 Fix the web Safari Extensions and content blockers can completely transform your online experience. Vinegar ($1.99) strips the ads from YouTube and gives you more control over how videos play. Adblock Plus (Free) gets rid of pop–ups and other irritations, Social Fixer makes Facebook less annoying and Stop The Madness, the only one here that’s a paid product ($9.99), stops sites from disabling key features such as copy and pasting, dragging and dropping and so on. It also gets rid of extra tracking bits from web links for easier and clearer sharing, and removes most of the privacy invaders you’ll find on commercial websites. All the extensions mentioned here are available from the Mac App Store. 25 Organise everything for a trip away tripit.com Say goodbye to travel-related stress such as trying to…

What’s Ferrari, and when did it start making cars? Ferrari is possibly the greatest, most storied fast carmaker of them all, not least according to Ferrari itself. It may rarely miss a chance to trumpet its own legendary status, but then Ferrari has plenty to trumpet. The Italian manufacturer isn’t just one of the most recognisable car brands in the world, but one of the most recognisable brands, full stop. That black-on-yellow horse is as iconic as the Olympic rings, the Nike swoosh or the Apple, um, apple – and it’s adorned some of the fastest, most beautiful, most significant, most expensive cars in history. That equine logo, incidentally, is officially titled the ‘cavallino rampante’, generally translated as ‘prancing horse’. But according to TopGear’s dog-eared Italian dictionary, ‘cavallino rampante’ could equally be rendered as…

JOHN FORD WANTED a whale’s-eye view. One summer day in 1978 a pod of killer whales raced toward a pebbled beach on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. The young biologist was waiting in a wet suit and snorkel. The ghostly black-and-white procession steamed in like a team of U-boats, low and fast. Ford pressed on his face mask and slipped into the sea. In waters barely 10 feet deep, the creatures slowed and rolled to their sides. Bodies partially submerged, the fans at the end of their tails—their flukes—wagging, the whales began to twist and shimmy. One by one, each scuffed its side and belly on the stones, like grizzlies scratching against the pines. Ford, age 66, has now studied killer whales, the largest dolphin and from the branch of the Cetacean…

The early 1990s could and should have been a golden age for new teams as Formula 1 bid adieu to the increasingly powerful, temperamental and costly turbocharged engines which had come to dominate the previous decade. Convinced that ‘new’ F1 was but a small step above Formula 3000, ambitious young teams jumped in feet first. Only one survived as the booming global economy of the 1980s slumped into a bust and, on the recession’s coat tails, the ‘haves’ of the F1 ecosystem marshalled advanced aerodynamic and electronic innovations which took them far beyond the reach of the have-nots. In 1989 the future looked different, brighter. F1 welcomed back naturally aspirated engines and the dream of a slightly more level playing field, after years of manufacturer R&D largesse had elevated the cutting…

A phrase that crops up a fair bit in turntable reviews is ‘stretch’ (I myself am particularly guilty of it). The idea is that, as well as judging the performance a deck offers out of the box, it is also useful to discuss how much scope it has for improvement – its stretch. This is usually a tricky thing to express within a conventional review, but Pro-Ject has provided an opportunity thanks to the upgrades available for its Debut Series. Consequently, a Debut Carbon Evo (HFC 468) is procured along with the bulk of the available upgrades that can be attached to it. Some of these are universal fitment items, while others are specific to the Debut range. None of them alter the basics of how it operates. It remains a…

九月十四日， 知名演員龍劭華猝逝，享壽六十八歲，相驗死因為「疾病因素」。龍劭華有逾十年糖尿病史，而糖尿病常見的併發症之一就是心血管疾病，他的猝逝是因病奪命的冰山一角，如一整座冰山般的慢性病風暴早已悄悄籠罩全台！ 台灣自五月爆發本土Covid-19疫情後，至九月二十一日累計死亡八四○例，死亡案例中，令人不安的現象就是高達九成有慢性病史，其中為數極少的三、四十歲年輕死亡個案，也有近七成是慢性病患者。 至今，台灣covid-19死亡率約五．二％，遠高於全球平均的二．○六％（九月二十一日數據）。雖然專家學者指出高死亡率的原因很複雜，但台灣如此「突出」的表現仍是一記警鐘，讓人意識到台灣慢性病問題之嚴重。 「台灣十大死因除了事故傷害外，大部分都是慢性病，像心血管、糖尿病、高血壓等。」台大醫院社區醫學科主任詹其峰解釋，只要是非傳染性疾病（NCD），而且需要持續一年以上的醫療照顧，或導致日常生活功能限制，就可稱為慢性病，也因此癌症也歸類在慢性病裡。 台慢性病早死率 高於韓日星 最後階段臥床長達8.5年…

West Adams Boulevard runs east and west through central Los Angeles. To the north rise the skyscrapers of Mid-Wilshire, California’s new Wall Street, and the malls and mansions of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. To the south, such communities as Watts, Compton, and Inglewood line LA’s vast interior grid, composed largely of low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods with steel bars on the doors and windows. West Adams marked the northern curfew line during the Watts Rebellion in 1965 and still bears burn scars in empty lots from the 1992 Rodney King uprising. Today the neighborhood centered on the boulevard, also known as West Adams, is being rebuilt. One of the nation’s largest real estate firms, LA’s CIM Group, is testing the notion that a single developer can turn around a chronically underfunded…

IN THIS SECTION Seed Bank Alarm The First Forest Take to the Trees Ghostly Redwoods ● VANCOUVER ISLAND, BRITISH COLUMBIA THE HOLLOWED-OUT TRUNK of the ancient yellow cedar felt like a cocoon with its soft floor of bark strips. A mother bear had molded this bed when she came each year to hibernate and to birth her cubs inside the 2,000-year-old tree. In the depth of winter, the shell of sapwood had protected them from the bone-chilling cold and blowing snow. A decade earlier, the mother likely had been born in this same den, near the headwaters of Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island, off the coast of British Columbia. She would have returned each fall, fattened on berries and salmon. I picked one of her hairs from the grain of the wood, the scent…

I measured the Pass Laboratories XP-32’s performance with my Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see the January 2008 “As We See It”1), repeating some tests with the magazine’s more-recent APx555 system. The maximum gain was a little higher than the specified 9.6dB for the balanced and unbalanced inputs to the balanced outputs, at 10.2dB. The gain from the unbalanced input to the unbalanced output was 6.5dB. The preamplifier preserved absolute polarity (ie, was noninverting) with both balanced and unbalanced inputs and outputs. (Its XLR jacks are wired with pin 2 hot, the AES convention.) The XP-32’s unbalanced input impedance was close to specification at 20Hz and 1kHz, at 20.3k ohms, but slightly lower at 20kHz, at 17.6k ohms. The balanced input impedance was to specification and twice the unbalanced, as expected. The…

Located in Osaka, Japan, Leben is a small company whose range is valve based and focuses mainly on the precise execution of established design ideas. The noble exception to this is one of the smaller amplifiers it makes. The CS-300F is a compact integrated that produces 15W with distortion at 10W quoted at a creditably low 0.7 percent THD. How it produces this power is rather unusual. The CS-300F is built around four General Electric JAN-6197 power pentodes, which are rarely seen in audio applications. The 6197 was designed primarily for use in Fifties’ era computers. It was made for stability and robustness at full output (as befits a device being used either on or off). On the original Fifties’ datasheet, though, was a diagram for a proposed amplifier application. This…

When Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius unveiled the EQS back in April, he described it as a “defining moment” for the world’s oldest car maker. Such statements are often heard in the car industry nowadays. In this case, though, it’s hard to argue against. Unlike the EQC, EQV, EQA and EQB that arrived before it, the EQS isn’t derived from an existing ICE-powered model, instead having Mercedes’ first dedicated EV platform to host a new high-density battery pack that promises a range of up to 485 miles and one of the most advanced interiors you will find in any car. The luxury liftback-style saloon has been conceived to provide buyers with an electric alternative to the traditionally powered S-Class. Positioned at the top of a growing list of electric Mercedes, it acts as a…

My mother is getting married,” my 13-year-old daughter, Domino, told her teacher. “How lovely, who is she marrying?” the teacher asked. “My father,” came the reply. After a bewildering 18 months, I felt a longing for something anchoring. Not only for me, but for my children, who, like everyone else, had been shaken by the pandemic. “Let’s get married,” I suggested to David one evening after supper with the kids, at home on an island in the Bahamas where we live and where we had spent the lockdown as a family. David asked me to marry him 25 years ago when I was pregnant with our son, Felix. Being in my independent-woman phase, I never accepted, but I felt strongly that Felix and our four children who would follow should carry…

Canon has announced the development of the EOS R3 – a camera aimed at professional sports and news photographers that boasts 30fps continuous shooting, a brand-new stacked backside illuminated (BSI) image sensor, “next generation Dual Pixel CMOS AF” and Eye Control Function autofocus. The R3 will sit between the flagship EOS-1D X Mark III DSLR and Canon’s current top-of-the-line mirrorless camera, the EOS R5. And its specs suggest it will take aim at the new Sony A1 – at least in the all-important speed stakes. Its headline feature, which matches the A1, is the 30fps burst shooting with full AF/AE tracking and minimal rolling shutter. This is made possible by the new stacked image sensor (the first ever in an EOS camera) that delivers blisteringly fast readout speeds while minimising distortion. The…

Long before herd immunity became humanity’s shared obsession, the phrase referred to sick cows. More than a century ago, veterinarians observed that outbreaks of a highly contagious bacterial infection menacing cattle died down once they’d burned through a certain percentage of a herd, so long as new animals weren’t introduced. Soon the concept was extended to a variety of human outbreaks, where it became a staple of epidemiology. Since the beginning of the pandemic, exactly when the U.S. might reach herd immunity for Covid-19 has been furiously debated in congressional hearings, on TV shows, and among the many armchair epidemiologists on Twitter. In the popular imagination, the phrase has become shorthand for the end of the pandemic—a finish line that will suddenly cause the virus to subside and allow maskless normalcy…

Most people view Microsoft’s Excel as a simple “spreadsheet program” that’s rapidly being eclipsed by free web-based apps that can run on any cheap laptop. Well, think again. Modern-day Excel is an advanced analytics tool that can push today’s fastest hardware to their limits, and it’s sexy enough that it rates its own esports coverage. No joke—thousands tuned in live to watch the Financial Modelling World Cup that was broadcast by ESPN. Intrigued by the interest of “gamers” and curious to see just how hard advanced Excel users are pushing the application, PCWorld decided to interview spreadsheet superstar Jason Moore. Moore is the head of analytics and data at an investment firm, and a semifinalist who won cold, hard cash in December’s Financial Modeling World Cup. Moore is also the same Excel…

Entering Farr West Taxidermy in Uvalde is similar to walking into most shops, as you’re greeted by a mass of antler storage, followed by interesting wildlife species being preserved from memorable events. The difference occurs when you meet the taxidermist, who happens to be a lady! Paula Farr’s story of how she got where she is today is anything but ordinary. Taxidermy has predominantly been performed by men in part because it required caping hides, removing guts and eyeballs, and otherwise handling dead animals, birds, or fish that may be quite malodorous. It was not something appealing to ladies, but as the old saying goes, “You’ve come a long way, baby!” Many in the taxidermy field followed family members, had a hunting history leading into it, or any number of reasons related…

Cryptocurrencies are inherently cryptic — it’s right there in the name. And if you follow Warren Buffett’s advice to never invest in businesses you can’t understand, it may be hard to justify investing in a currency made of math instead of gold. But it’s also hard to ignore some cryptocurrencies’ astounding performance: The price of one bitcoin jumped from just under $5,000 in March 2020 to over $60,000 as of this April. The excitement surrounding digital currency may leave some investors feeling like the lonely kid at the pool party, wanting to join their friends having fun in the deep end, but too nervous to jump in. For those investors who are cautiously curious, here are ways to gain exposure to cryptocurrency without buying it, and if you do decide to purchase, how…

The first thing you will notice about the watches this month is that they are a little, well, unusual looking. An analogue watch face has a number of essential elements. An hour hand and a minute hand are bog standard. Generally there’s a seconds hand too, and possibly a date. You might add a stopwatch, a calendar or even go crazy and add a little indicator that tells you what mood the moon is in. But you need an hour hand and the minute hand, as this is how the time has always been told, right? Wrong, actually. A quick glance at the ornate clock on the north tower of Westminster Abbey might tell you that it has two hands. But on closer inspection it in fact has just one long…

CHORD ELECTRONICS QUTEST D/A PROCESSOR I’ve met audiophiles who think all digital-to-analog converters sound the same. “If there’s a difference,” they declare, “it’s in the filters or output stage.” Some even believe that the whole “digital thing” was solved before we entered the 21st century. Not I. By 2005, I’d begun to think the whole digital thing would never be solved. Worse yet, I’d stopped caring. “Mechanical Sound Forever” was the song I sang. Then an old friend gave me an inexpensive D/A converter, a Halide Design DAC HD ($495, discontinued).1 I laughed when he handed me that diminutive black doodad, about the size of Zippo lighter, captured midway in the length of a nice Wireworld cable with a USB connector at one end and a pair of RCA plugs at the…

«У Дениса была антрепренерская жилка, и он все время придумывал какие-то проекты. Мы то газировку продавали, то машины мыли. На›первых курсах института он нашел книгу по трейдингу. И сказал, что вот оно, мы будем трейдерами» Основатели социальной сети и аналитической платформы для трейдеров TradingView ростовчане Константин Иванов и Денис Глоба долгое время жили по разные стороны Атлантики — Иванов в Нью-Йорке, а Глоба в Лондоне. Это не мешало им совместно руководить компанией, которую инвесторы оценили в $3 млрд. Сервисами TradingView ежемесячно пользуются 30 млн человек по всему миру. «Сейчас у нас есть пользователи почти в каждой стране мира, кто-то пользуется нами даже в Антарктиде, мы это видим, но не понимаем, кто это. Теперь компания по-настоящему глобальна», — с гордостью говорит Глоба. Партнеры основали компанию в 2011 году. По итогам 2021-го выручка TradingView,…

Dressed in patriotic shades of red, white and blue, the great and good of British society and showbiz were out in full force to toast the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee at a sparkling soirée hosted by Dame Joan Collins and HELLO! editor in chief Rosie Nixon. Lavish private members’ club Upstairs at Langan’s Brasserie, in London’s Mayfair, was abuzz with love, laughter and glamour as guests including lords, ladies, legends and dames gathered last Tuesday – much to the delight of the evening’s hostesses. “We had a fabulous time,” Dame Joan tells us. “It was a marvellous party. “So many of my friends came, which was wonderful. Langan’s did a fantastic job of decorating everything and I was thrilled Rosie asked me to be co-host. “It was a very happy atmosphere – I didn’t want…

FROM ITS INCEPTION, THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE Station (ISS) was an improbable machine. As big as a football field and made of 17 pressurized modules and a pair of massive solar wings, the $150 billion spacecraft has been an instrument of research, exploration, and politics, built and maintained by 15 nations, led by the U.S. and Russia. Even as the war in Ukraine rages, NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, continue to cooperate in space. But what politics cannot break, time and age can. The ISS is getting old. Its first component was launched nearly 24 years ago, and orbital hardware can last only so long before equipment breaks down, small air leaks appear, and the constant punishment both by micrometeorites and the continual thermal cycling the station goes through on…

Hiram Lodge, the manipulative crime lord who targets the fictional town of Riverdale, sits back in his office chair. After plotting his latest scheme with a cohort over submarine sandwiches, he takes a bite of a Doritos chip, holding the bag in clear view of the camera while looking away pensively. Frito-Lay, which got the snack on the CW Network’s teen drama Riverdale with the help of the No. 1 product placement company BEN, hopes audiences noticed enough to crave their own bag of Doritos, but not so much that they became annoyed. That’s the delicate balance companies strike when using product placement, which is becoming an even more popular form of advertising thanks to factors including increasingly sophisticated data collection and the rise of streaming and mobile video. Linear television, the…

On the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, where the remains of a 200-year-old canal built to connect Cleveland with Cincinnati snake around new warehouse parks, a modern tributary of the global economy widens a little more with each planeload of goods that roars down its runways. Rickenbacker International Airport was a bustling hub for air freight well before the pandemic—a day’s truck drive to half of the U.S. population, so the slogan goes. In the past two years, another role emerged: economic relief valve for auto parts, consumer products, and pharmaceuticals to flow around the more prominent but clogged arteries of U.S. trade. The former wartime airbase handled a record 1,655 international cargo arrivals in 2021, a 73% jump from 2019, and overall tonnage rose 18%. Freighters and reconfigured passenger jets fly in…

With representatives for operators of 29 West Coast ports and the 22,000 dockworkers who man them in talks, a familiar issue is looming over the bargaining table: automation. On one side, more than 70 terminal operators and ocean carriers represented by the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) have long pitched modernization as a cure for global trade frictions such as the ones that led to shortages of everything from hospital gloves to air-conditioner parts over the past two years. Facing off against them is the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), which claims that relying more on machines than on human workers will further boost companies’ profits while killing well-paying union jobs. The two sides have been having the human-vs.-machine debate for at least six decades. But the current negotiations are drawing…

ON A RURAL HIGHWAY in Northern California, a July traveler’s tire went flat. Metal rim scraped against pavement. The sparks ignited a fire that ripped through dry forest, whirled into flame tornadoes, and roared over tens of thousands of acres, making fuel of everything in its path. When it jumped the Sacramento River and headed for the city of Redding, Keith Bein prepped his new rig—a trailer holding two tiny electric cars, a lot of tubes and instrumentation, and a white contraption that looks like a miniature lighthouse. Bein works as an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Davis campus, about 150 miles south of Redding. By the time he hooked the loaded trailer to his truck and began driving upstate, the 2018 Carr Fire—those sparks ignited near a power…

CES 2022 is typically the single most important media event for the PC laptop industry. This year proved no different despite the sudden and unexpected shift to a largely virtually show (the major chipmakers all stayed remote, as did most laptop manufacturers). In fact, 2022 is shaping up to be an excellent year for Windows laptops. New CPUs and GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel promise to send laptop performance to the moon—and that’s just the start. Here’s 5 top laptop trends from CES 2022 that simply can’t be ignored. Expect to see some of these notebooks cracking our list of the best laptops sooner than later. 1. LAPTOPS GROW IN POWER (AND POWER CONSUMPTION) The PC laptop world was focused on large, heavy, and expensive laptops at CES 2022. While AMD, Intel, and…

1 IKEA FLOALT Sometimes you don’t want a bulb, you want a whole panel of light to control from your phone or through your smart speaker – and that’s exactly what you get with the Floalt, part of Ikea’s growing range of intelligent illumination products. Available in a variety of sizes, these panels really enable you to get creative with your lighting setup. From £65, ikea.com 2 PHILIPS HUE AMARANT One of the latest products from the smart lightning veterans at Philips Hue is the Amarant, an outdoor light bar that can blanket a wall or a particular part of your property with a white or coloured light. You can even connect several of them together, and they’re perfect for hedges, fences, and any other bit of outdoor furniture that you want to illuminate. £129.99,…

Sub-£1,000 PURE ELECTRIC PURE FLUX ONE The first electric bike from e-scooter specialist Pure Electric has three things going for it: a low price, unusually cool looks for an ebike, and really quite extreme simplicity. Rather than having gears, it has three assistance levels capped at 9mph, 12mph and 15.5mph so it’s easy to vary your pace if you hit traffic. Its disk brakes are mechanical rather than hydraulic – less stopping power, sure, but also less maintenance required – and a grease-free, theoretically unbreakable carbon belt is used instead of a chain. While it may have a max range of 25 miles, the Pure Flux One is a blast to ride and great value for money. ​£824.25, pureelectric.com XIAOMI MI SMART FOLDING ELECTRIC BIKE Brands are increasingly focused on delivering competitively priced ebikes, as…

IN response to the question “How do you make a 600-hp sports sedan?” BMW, Audi, and Mercedes have turned in answers so similar that if this were an exam, they’d be accused of cheating. The brands started with the bones of a buttoned-down sedan and crafted a version with a narrow-eyed performance-car glare, a dropped roofline, and a sloping tail. Each car has all-wheel drive, adaptive dampers, brake rotors the size of Saturn’s rings, and a twin-turbo V-8 of at least 4.0 liters making completely unbuttoned dyno numbers. Add up all three and you get 1838 horsepower. Presumably to enrage our readers, the marketing people advertise these things as four-door coupes. “Swoopy, saggy-assed sedans” could work, but that doesn’t quite capture the seriousness of this trio. The Audi RS7, the BMW M8 Competition…

“It will have performance to match the Mercedes-AMG GT and maybe the higher-end Porsche Taycans” DeLorean is back, and it’s gearing up to take on the world’s best-established premium brands with a comprehensive line-up of cars in different segments and an array of powertrain solutions. The brand is being revived by a US-based outfit whose CEO, Joost de Vries, was previously a high-ranking official at Tesla and Karma. He has taken the helm from Brit Stephen Wynne, who had run DeLorean as an aftermarket support service since 1995, when he acquired the brand rights following the high-profile demise of the original company. Spearheading the rebirth is a striking battery-electric coupé with rakish, sports car-style proportions, far removed from the wedge-shape silhouette and compact footprint of the 1981 DeLorean DMC. The EV will make its debut…

BULLETPR OF TRAINING Think suspension, and invariably it’s linkage systems, springs and damping that instantly come to mind. But as mountain bikers we know that our arms and legs have more “travel” than any frame or fork. There’s no CE testing or maintenance programme for our limbs and joints, however, even though the forces you experience when riding are extreme and repetitive. So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this combination can cause some funky issues in your joints. If you’ve been riding for some time, you’ve probably experienced an occasional niggle or soreness in your elbow joints. Not from impacts necessarily, but from the relentless bombardment of vibrations and muscular tension they undergo every ride. Compounded over time, without proper care, these small niggles can become larger…

‘Welcome to panther country,’ Brian Kelly says when I meet him at a busy intersection in East Naples, Florida, a stone’s throw from a gas station and an urgent care center. Kelly, a state panther biologist, points east into the sprawling subdivision where he lives. A panther was caught on camera just a quarter mile away, he says, and another one made it across the six-lane road we’re standing beside. Yet another panther, an eight-year-old female named FP224, lives nearby. She’s been hit by a car twice, breaking a leg each time. She was treated by veterinarians and released after both accidents. To look for signs of her, we drive to Kelly’s house, next to a patch of forest where she recently denned and birthed at least three kittens. It’s the wet…

English teachers are deciding which books to skip. History teachers are condensing units. Science teachers are often doing without experiments entirely. With instruction time reduced as much as half by the coronavirus pandemic, many of the nation’s middle school and high school teachers have given up on covering all the material normally included in their classes and instead are cutting lessons. Certain topics must be taught because they will appear on exit exams or Advanced Placement tests. But teachers are largely on their own to make difficult choices — what to prioritize and what to sacrifice to the pandemic. “I have to make decisions constantly about what material I’m not going to cover because it is impossible to get it all done,” said Leigh Foy, a chemistry and Advanced Placement biology teacher…

Hunters from around the world come to Texas to hunt the aoudad. Inhabiting rough and scenic country, the aoudad is very difficult to hunt, hard to kill, and as such is considered a game trophy of the first order. The benchmark for a trophy animal is 30 inches of curl in the sweeping horns. Trophies can be extremely hard to field judge, but old, battle-scarred rams with massive horns and long, hairy chaps stand out easily in a group. The aoudad, or Ammotragus lervia by its scientific name, is native to North Africa. These unique animals were one of many exotic ungulates (hooved animals) brought to the United States as zoo stock in the 1930s and ’40s. Many ended up on large, high-fenced ranches in Texas as game animals. Several high-fenced…

Of all the management strategies, culling remains the least understood and sometimes controversial management strategy. Recently, a well-produced video raced through social media, aimed at debunking current culling theory. It asserted there was no need to cull any buck, but to their credit, the producers noted that culling yearlings might not be wise. Deer management should be predicated on solid scientific facts. Yet, as with all biological phenomenon, seldom is there such a thing as a “fact.” Every rule has an exception, and ecological systems are not very predictable. In this column, I will discuss culling from a new perspective, one that has practical application. It always has been my position that culling free-ranging herds to produce larger antlered bucks was a waste of time. Our antler growth studies in South Texas…

SHANNON BREWER’S EYES DART TO A grid of grainy images on a wide, black screen above her desk at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization (JWHO). Live footage shows a large truck creeping into the clinic’s parking lot, its side emblazoned with a pair of blue, ghostly baby feet and the words WHERE ARE OUR CHILDREN? Brewer doesn’t recognize the driver. Her spine stiffens. As the director and de facto head of security at the last abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi, Brewer is not easily spooked. In her two decades there, she has seen bomb scares and stalking incidents, and protesters getting in fights with her staff. She keeps the number of an FBI contact amid a sea of sticky notes beside her desk. But this year, she says, everything…

Over the past several months, our lives have been upended as we’ve witnessed and endured loss, hardship, and injustice. This is a time of tremendous grief. The world’s eyes have been opened to the truth of more than 400 years of systemic racism, while we grapple with personal loss and social isolation. We are in a time of great transition, and what we do in this space matters. We need to stay awake to everything that arises, especially our sorrow. When we are weary from heartbreak, we must lie back and let the tamas (lethargy, inertia) of grief work on us in a different way—to get grounded and connected with the unconditional support of the earth. Yoga nidra can help us do this. As a technique, yoga nidra invites us to…

MOST OF THE crew aboard the RV Polarstern icebreaker was asleep when the Arctic Ocean ice they were frozen into fully dissolved in late July. Researchers had called the ship home for 10 months — and this was not part of the plan. The team of pilots, climatologists, oceanographers and others had deliberately frozen the ship into the ice floe north of Siberia in October 2019. Their mission: Drift for more than 365 days with the floe and surrounding sea ice to study the Arctic climate. With roughly 600 experts from around the globe, and a cost topping $150 million, the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) is the biggest, most elaborate Arctic expedition ever “Our mission is to observe and understand the climate processes of the Arctic…

The Left Bank and Right Bank are two Bordeaux winemaking regions separated by the Gironde estuary and two rivers – the Dordogne and the Garonne. The Right Bank is the area to the north of the Dordogne river, and the Left Bank is the area directly south of the Garonne river. The area in between is known as Entre-deux-Mers. However, it is not just geography that distinguishes Bordeaux’s two famous vineyard regions. Here’s a quick guide. Appellations The Left Bank encompasses the Médoc wine region north of Bordeaux city. Its four best-known appellations, north to south, are St-Estèphe, Pauillac, St-Julien and Margaux. South of Bordeaux city centre, the Left Bank includes Pessac-Léognan and Graves, along with Sauternes and Barsac, famed for their sweet wines. The Right Bank’s most famous appellations are St-Emilion…