Indice dei contenuti per December 6, 2021 in TIME Magazine

100 BEST INVENTIONS With the unveiling of TIME’s Nov. 22/Nov. 29 list of the 100 new inventions changing how we live our lives, fans of many of the products included took to social media to share their own recommendations. David Wells of Jacksonville, Fla., wrote to express his appreciation for the issue, and called for follow-up articles on the products listed, to help celebrate their impact on the world. Leaders in the business community, meanwhile, took the opportunity to step back and reflect on the wealth of creativity and determination the list represented, during a difficult year. “Groundbreaking inventions aren’t just discovered,” Mathai Mammen, global head of research and development at J&J’s Janssen Pharmaceutical Cos., wrote on LinkedIn. “They’re researched, developed, put through rigorous trials.” “From #AI to vaccines…

EMOTIONAL MATURITY TOPS THE list of what U.S. singles are looking for, beating out all other qualities, according to a new study by the dating site Match released on Nov. 9. It’s one of many recent shifts in dating trends that show that singles are reconsidering their relationship priorities in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to a move toward an interest in emotional maturity, the study found singles are less concerned with finding someone who is considered physically attractive. In 2020, 90% of singles ranked physical attractiveness as an important quality. This year, only 78% did. Being open-minded and accepting of differences was important to 83% of respondents; being a good communicator was a high priority for 84%. The effect of the pandemic on these cultural changes cannot…

At the COP26 conference, there was a lot of grumbling among activists that official venues served meat, even if it was locally sourced. Animal agriculture has an outsize impact on global warming—up to 14.5% of annual global CO2 emissions, but in Glasgow, the meal included a lesson in carbon-footprint economics by listing the emissions tally for each item. The meal carbon counts at COP26 were provided by Klimato, a Swedish startup that analyzes the carbon footprint of food items so food service facilities can display the climate impact of their food offerings. Making climate-conscious choices when figuring out what to have for dinner isn’t particularly difficult, says Anton Unger, Klimato’s CEO and co-founder. The problem is that most people have no idea what the carbon footprint of their meal is.…

I AM THE YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF A MAN WHO PAID his way through college working 50 hours a week, replacing sleep with sheer grit. He’s tough and intentional with a strong sense of personal responsibility. Our conversations on anything from health care reform to paid maternity leave rarely get far. “It would be wonderful if we could solve everyone’s problems, but life is hard,” he often says. “And hard doesn’t have to be a bad thing.” His words—life is hard—came back to me as my partner Micah and I prepared for our first plane ride with our toddler Otto. Because commercial airplanes and their bathrooms don’t accommodate wheelchairs, I generally prefer driving a longer distance to avoid even a short flight. But we couldn’t afford to take off work for…

POSSIBLY THE BEST MOMENT IN RIDLEY SCOTT'S rococo-a-go-go true-crime drama House of Gucci is the one in which the brash, ambitious young typist Patrizia Reggiani, in pursuit of Maurizio Gucci, the shy and charming heir to the old-money leather-goods empire, writes her phone number in bold strokes of lipstick on his motorbike’s windshield. That’s a pro move by itself, but what comes next is the killer gesture: she swipes the bullet across her lips and, without the benefit of a mirror, effects a tidy scarlet cupid’s bow in two seconds flat. Either gesture by itself would be memorable. But it’s the seamless linking of the two, the easy swing from the inventively practical to the seductively frivolous, that’s the real trapeze act. The greater part of acting is what happens…

What changed in your life after the Nobel? It feels like getting a magic wand that you don’t quite know how to use. In the first few days after the Nobel Committee made the announcement, we got bundles of letters asking us for help. Help for people with disabilities. Help for people unjustly imprisoned. In our country, many people have started to see us as a place to turn. What is the mood now among independent journalists in Russia? We see that a war is being waged against us. And as long as we’re at war, competition gives way to solidarity. That doesn’t mean we’ve stopped chasing scoops. But we don’t see each other as competitors anymore. We’ve banded together. Keeping your newspaper alive has often forced you to negotiate…

THE FIRST SUMMIT BETWEEN U.S. President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping showed that the recent climate-change talks could sprout green shoots in other parts of their relationship. The Nov. 15 meeting, which took place via video chat, came less than a week after Beijing and Washington made a surprise announcement at COP26 that they would work together on curbing methane emissions and other climate-related initiatives. OLD FRIENDS The tone of the meeting was cordial; Xi greeted the U.S. President as his “old friend.” Biden and Xi have spent considerable time together, including eating at a noodle shop in Beijing in 2011, when both were Vice Presidents. Still, Biden raised concerns about human-rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong—and about China’s “unfair trade and economic policies.” Xi, meanwhile, warned…

CAN YOU MIX AND MATCH YOUR COVID-19 BOOSTER SHOT? With COVID-19 boosters now authorized for all U.S. adults, many people are planning their next shots. Preliminary research is clear: mixing and matching vaccine boosters produces a safe immune response similar to or stronger than an additional dose of your original shot. Studies have not yet compared different combinations of vaccines, so it’s difficult to recommend one type of booster over another, but data does show that people who originally got the Johnson & Johnson shot produced more antibodies when boosted with a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. For people who got a two-dose vaccine to begin with, Jason Pogue, an infectious-disease clinical pharmacist at Michigan Medicine, says the choice is a bit less important. “If it’s more comfortable to get…

by Ian Bremmer IN RECENT WEEKS, Russia has advanced more than 100,000 soldiers to its border with Ukraine. The Ukrainian government, fearing an attack, has called on Europe and the U.S. for help. A Kremlin spokesperson says Russia poses no threat to anyone, but its 2014 invasion of Crimea and its ongoing material support for separatist rebels in Ukraine’s Donbas region (along with related denials of the same) have European and U.S. officials on alert. E.U. chief Ursula von der Leyen insists the E.U. and U.S. “fully support the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” and together they’re publicly discussing retaliatory steps, mainly sanctions, if Russia crosses the border. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that a Russian incursion would be a “serious mistake,” and the U.S. has reportedly shipped…

EVERYONE KNOWS EARTH ONLY HAS one moon—or not. In fact, there’s another sorta, kinda moon, found in 2016. And thanks to a new study in Communications Earth & Environment, we now know its origin story. The quasi moon—named Kamo‘oalewa, after a Hawaiian word for a moving celestial object—measures less than 50 m (164 ft.) across and orbits Earth in a corkscrew trajectory that ranges from 40 to 100 times the 384,000-km (239,000 mile) distance of our more familiar moon. Its odd flight path is caused by the competing gravitational pulls of Earth and the sun, which continually bend and torque the moonlet’s motions, preventing it from achieving a more conventional orbit. At first glance, the moonlet seems like nothing more than an asteroid. But asteroids tend to reflect brightly in…

SEVEN SAILORS POINT THEIR RIFLES SKYWARD and fire in unison, breaking the silence at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. For one family, the salute signifies the end of a mystery that traces back to the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II. Navy sailors Harold and William Trapp were presumed killed when their battleship, U.S.S. Oklahoma, was hit by Japanese torpedoes in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Their family waited for weeks, months, then years as the military worked to find their corpses. But there were few intact bodies left in the water that day, and as time went on, the remains within the Oklahoma mixed together. Eventually, the U.S. Navy declared the brothers dead despite never identifying their bodies, a fate shared by…

U.S. overdose deaths hit new high in 2020 The number of fatal overdoses recorded in the U.S. has risen steadily for years, but deaths rose 28.5% in the 12-month period after April 2020, compared with the year prior, surpassing 100,000 deaths for the first time. Experts note that the COVID-19 pandemic has harmed many people’s mental health and interrupted drug treatments. Nigerian army committed ‘massacre’ Nigerian soldiers who opened fire on a group of young people peacefully protesting police brutality in Lagos in October 2020 committed a massacre, a government panel concluded Nov. 15. The army killed at least 11 unarmed protesters and wounded dozens more, the panel said, calling the acts “atrocious.” IOC updates policies for trans athletes The International Olympic Committee (IOC) shared its new guidelines for trans…

In a report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Nov. 15, scientists described the case of a now 31-year-old woman from Argentina who was diagnosed with HIV in 2013 but never showed high levels of the virus. She took anti-HIV medications for six months during a pregnancy, to prevent transmitting the infection to her baby. But even after she stopped taking the drugs, multiple sophisticated tests looking for genetic evidence of HIV in her blood have showed no intact virus in her cells, says Dr. Xu Yu, principal investigator at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Harvard, who led the research team. The findings suggest that the patient’s immune system was able to apparently rid HIV from the body, without relying on medications—and that she…

THE RUSSIAN MILITARY CONDUCTED a missile test on Nov. 15 that obliterated a dead satellite and generated a cloud of debris in outer space that forced astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to temporarily take shelter. As thousands of pieces of the satellite began to spread, the U.S., German and Russian astronauts aboard were instructed to climb into their Soyuz and Dragon capsules in case they needed to evacuate. Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer and expert in space security at the Secure World Foundation, said the situation could have been “catastrophic” because of the high speeds involved. Objects in space tear through the cosmos at up to 17,500 m.p.h., which means that even a marble-size piece of debris poses a danger. “A collision with an object several…

IT’S BRUTALLY HARD FOR MOST musicians to make money in the streaming era. Artists get paid fractions of pennies per stream, with many struggling to find sizable audiences at all: data from 2019 and 2020 shows that 90% of streams go to the top 1% of artists. Even a moderately successful artist like Daniel Allan—whose songs got millions of plays in 2020—only received a few hundred bucks a month from streaming, requiring him to take on jobs like mixing and mastering to pay the bills. But over the past half year, Allan has turned to a different model that allows him both economic and creative freedom: NFTs. Allan has been selling digital copies of his electronic pop songs as NFTs—nonfungible tokens—for thousands of dollars each. He spent months cultivating relationships…