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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

#RSLOVE “A solo 4½-mile stand-up paddleboard trip on Lake Mead to Hoover Dam. Since then I’ve logged several solo paddles on big bodies of water, including a recent 6.7-mile loop.” @NEESYD2003 For sharing this photo with us, @neesyd2003 will receive our special edition, The Power of Sleep. If you want your picture to be considered, tag photos on Instagram with #rslove. “I went to Iceland by myself and hitchhiked across the country on my 25th birthday. I didn’t tell anyone at home till I got back!” @AMELIA.AFOLAYAN “New sports! Every decade, I go all in and learn a new sport. At age 30, it was running (I’m still at it); at age 40, golf (humbling!); at age 50, sculling (challenging!). With each sport, I’ve met new people and had tons of adventures. I still have time…

It’s been a busy year for the Shark Research Center, with the publication of several key papers that point to the complex and highly tuned functioning of sharks. Among these is a study indicating that the fully sequenced white shark genome is much larger than our human genome. It also shows some interesting results of potential biomedical value. As part of the Shark Research Center’s ongoing work in the field of comparative genomics of sharks, the complete set of white shark Carcharodon carcharias genes – known as the genome – have been sequenced and the findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research paper, titled ‘White shark genome reveals ancient elasmobranch adaptations associated with wound healing and the maintenance of genome stability’, gives new…

Bushmills Single Malt 21 80 proof, $200 Bushmills is the outlier in Irish whiskey because it’s made in Northern Ireland, not the Republic. Overlook the geographical distinction. This 21-year-old melds Sherry- and Bourbon-aged whiskeys and then finishes the combination in Madeira casks. The result teems with vanilla, caramel, maple syrup, toffee and raisins. Connemara Single Malt 80 proof, $43 Connemara sets itself apart from most Irish whiskey in being not only double distilled, but also peated. The product of the Cooley Distillery, which spearheaded the island’s expansion of production, not only plumes with peat smoke, but follows up with notes of cinnamon, hard candy, bread dough, caramel and salt spray. Green Spot Single Pot Still 80 proof, $75 Made by New Midleton for a wine merchant, Green Spot only recently arrived in the United States—and in very limited…

L’assurance vie pèse lourd. Très lourd même: 1 795 milliards d’euros à la fin de février 2021, un montant record. Ce succès n’est pas volé, s’agissant aujourd’hui du seul « placement à tout faire » du marché. Pêle-mêle, citons une fiscalité toujours avantageuse, une souplesse d’utilisation remarquable et un accès aux places financières du monde entier. Sans oublier l’inclusion d’un support à capital garanti, le fonds en euros qui, malgré la baisse de son rendement depuis dix ans, capte encore les deux tiers de la collecte. Mais l’épargnant ne doit pas être dupe. « Assurance vie » est un terme générique. Sous sa cape, au moins 200 contrats au contenu différent sont distribués par les établissements. Sans compter les centaines de produits sortis des linéaires commerciaux mais toujours détenus par de…

Stewed berries Here is the perfect recipe for fresh berries in season, or for when you have frozen berries in the freezer that need eating. Granted, the three ways of using them make more than two servings because baking dishes aren’t small enough for two, probably a good thing, because recipes like these deserve to be made for more people to enjoy. SERVES 4 600g (1lb 3oz) mixed berries, fresh or frozen6 tbsp maple syrup, or sweetener of your choicefreshly grated lemon zest 1 Place the berries in a deep saucepan over a low heat. Stir in the maple syrup and a touch of lemon zest. Simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. 2 The stewed berries are now ready to be used in the recipes, or will keep in the fridge for up to 5…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

EIV LOA 160ft. 1in. (48.8 m) BEAM 29ft 2in. (8.9m) DRAFT (full load) 7ft. 6in. (2.29m) CONSTRUCTION aluminum GROSS TONNAGE less than 500 SPEED (max./cruise) 19/15 knots RANGE 3,600 nm @ 10 knots NAVAL ARCHITECTURE Arrabito Naval Architects EXTERIOR DESIGN Team for Design Enrico Gobbi INTERIOR DESIGN Team for Design Enrico Gobbi BUILDER Rossinavi Last year was a bumper year for Rossinavi. EIV (pronounced Eve) was one of three superyachts the custom builder launched in the space of five months, all of them around the 160-foot (50-meter) mark. The racy trideck designed by Enrico Gobbi of Team for Design represented a challenge for the company as it seeks to respond to growing demand from the U.S. for its one-off yachts. “This boat is a step change for Rossinavi,” Federico Rossi, COO of the family-run shipyard, said after the launch of EIV. “With the increasing and significant interest the shipyard is receiving from the American market, we…

KING OF THE HUNT When the first buds burgeon, the air fills with molecules of fragrance that a red fox (Vulpes vulpes) detects weeks before we can. Red foxes have more than 200 million scent receptors in their nose, compared with only 5 million in humans. Their acute sense of smell enables foxes to locate prey in dense grass, under several feet of snow, or in an underground burrow. TEMPERATURE SCANNER WITH A TRIGGER The U.S. is home to an estimated 228 billion trees. They have built-in sensors that respond to the shorter nights and rising springtime temperatures with an imperative command: “Grow, grow, grow!” Plants compete with one another for every second of sunlight and every ounce of water and other resources such as room to grow. When spring returns trees get…

Made with just six ingredients! Oatmeal cookies with blueberries & white chocolate SERVES 15 115g (4oz) Stork margarine (Original Tub) 225g (8oz) soft brown sugar ½ tsp vanilla extract 1 medium free-range egg 150g (5½ oz) self-raising flour ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda 100g (3½ oz) rolled oats 150g (5½ oz) dried or fresh blueberries 100g (3½ oz) white chocolate 1 Preheat the oven to 200°C/Gas Mark 6. Line a baking tray with baking paper. 2 Mix the Stork margarine with the brown sugar and the vanilla until fluffy. Add the egg and mix until smooth. 3 Sift the flour and the bicarbonate of soda, then add to the biscuit mixture with the oats. 4 When the ingredients are combined, add the blueberries and gently mix in. 5 Using a teaspoon, place spoonfuls of mixture onto the prepared…

BIG BERG BEAUTY Ian explored passes in the Central Drakensberg with Warren Manson and Roy Arouca on the first weekend of September. They were based at Bannerman Hut. Their adventure started up Bannerman Pass, then headed down Judge Pass, climbed Gypaetus Pass, descended South Hlubi Pass, climbed North Hlubi Pass, and in this photo they are ascending The Thumb. Phew! But wait! There’s more… to complete their adventure, they tackled the vertical kilometre from Bannerman Hut up the pass to Sanquebethu and back. And then, finally, they were done. Finished and klaar. Ian Hendry, Johannesburg WINTER MEMORIES The first weekend of September was crisp, after Antarctica pushed a supercold front at us. It was time to play! 1. Shane Murray and Wolfpack buddies at Mont Rochelle Nature Reserve. “Rule #1 of our Wolfpack is kortbroek or no…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

‘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…

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…

…It comes down to the fact that, in Einstein’s theory, time is not absolute, ticked off by a universal clock with which everyone agrees, but instead is relative. “I can’t talk to you in terms of time – your time and my time are different,” wrote the English novelist Graham Greene. According to Einstein, the rate at which time flows for someone depends on how fast they’re moving relative to you and the strength of the gravity they’re experiencing. If you can find a way to jump from a region where time flows at one rate to a region where it flows at a slower rate, you can go back in time – you’ll have made a time machine. The recognition that time is not what you think it is goes back…

Grandparents often leave a vibrant legacy in the memories of their offspring. Sometimes the memories are worth preserving and bringing back into the present in a fun way. In the middle of the last century New Zealand designer Richard Hartley and his team worked away quietly penning comfortable sea-kindly boats for a generation with a strong streak of do-it-yourself work ethic. The designs ranged from solid workboats to elegant yachts, from trailer-sailers to surf skis – and they were built in backyards, garages and behind fish and chip shops around the world. One of these DIY builders was Hamilton businessman Jim Roberts. Back in 1975 he launched Mistral – his 22ft, Hartley Voyager. It took him a few years to build her – kauri frames and mahogany plywood held together with resorcinol…

Pour améliorer votre future retraite, inutile de chercher un mode d’emploi générique. A chaque situation, ses solutions. Nous en avons répertorié ci-après trente, qui visent à exploiter les mécanismes du système ou à épargner avec discernement. Piochez dans cette boîte les outils propices à votre cas et approfondissez par la suite, si nécessaire. En matière de retraite, la précipitation est mauvaise conseillère. Mais la procrastination aussi. Trouvez donc le juste milieu. Concernant les solutions propres aux différents régimes, par exemple le rachat de trimestres, mesurez toujours le retour sur investissement, c’est-à-dire l’impact sur votre future pension en regard des sommes engagées aujourd’hui. Certains placements peuvent aussi vous aider à améliorer l’existant. Mais si l’épargne est indispensable pour préparer son avenir, donc sa retraite, votre investissement devra toujours être diversifié et…

Ajoutez deux lettres à Paris : c’est le paradis, énonçait Jules Renard il y a un peu plus d’un siècle. Ce trait d’esprit, l’écrivain aurait bien du mal à le réitérer aujourd’hui, tant la pandémie a miné l’attractivité de la Ville Lumière. Le « Paris bashing » est en vogue. Pire, les Parisiens sont nombreux à souhaiter quitter la capitale pour gagner en surface habitable, s’offrir de la verdure et profiter d’une vie plus sereine. Des projets facilités par l’essor du télétravail. Les prémisses d’un exode urbain? Pas vraiment. Les statistiques montrent plutôt un déplacement de la demande immobilière vers les autres départements d’Ile-de-France, où les prix au mètre carré sont plus accessibles et les biens avec extérieur plus nombreux. « Depuis un an, nous enregistrons des bonds d’activité spectaculaires sur…

Roy Halston Frowick was a boy raised in Indiana who became a soaring fashion legend and an international household name that defined the heady Studio 54 era—until he burned out from drugs, poor business decisions, and, ultimately, AIDS. Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series Halston, subtly directed by Daniel Minahan, casts a compelling Ewan McGregor as the complex designer. Hamish Bowles talks with Murphy and Tom Ford about Halston, those extraordinary years, and the crushing demands of design at the top. Hamish Bowles: Ryan, what excited you about Halston and his story and made you feel this could be developed into a series? Ryan Murphy: I grew up in Indiana—where Halston is from—surrounded by cornfields and churches, and I always heard about two people who had gotten out and gone on to bigger,…