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Try this cryptic chemistry crossword puzzle on for size today!
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Author: chemistadmin
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Cryptic chemistry crossword #066
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Eight healthy habits could slow the ageing of your brain
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Exercise has many health benefits
Jane Williams/Alamy
Getting a good night’s sleep and other healthy habits could slow the biological ageing of your brain, potentially protecting against conditions like dementia.
These habits, known as the Life’s Essential 8 checklist, were originally intended to help people boost their cardiovascular health. They include getting the equivalent of at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, per week and eating a healthy diet rich in nuts, fruits, vegetables and whole foods.
The…
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Use Android’s Built-In Settings to Cut Your Phone Usage Time in Half
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“There’s something wrong with my phone.”
I was talking to a friend about how the battery life on a Google Pixel 9 Pro was degrading slowly over time. Normally, my phone lasts all day, but by mid-evening, I was having to recharge. That’s when it dawned on me: I’m the problem. Between doomscrolling on Instagram and obsessively checking my email, I was using my phone way too much.
Android has some built-in tools grouped under the banner Digital Wellbeing, including a bedtime mode, a notification manager, and timers that let you set limits on how long you’re allowed to have each app open. I’ve known about this feature set for years; after all, it was first announced way back in 2018. Was I using this stuff consistently? Not really.
For years, I practiced a few productivity hacks. I deleted the Facebook app on my phone and now only use that service on my laptop. I also charge my phone in the kitchen, which helps me avoid using it in bed. Yet, these methods weren’t enough. My phone was still dying around 8 pm each day because of too much mindless scrolling. I needed to take control of my usage. Here’s how I finally broke the spell.
Set Timers on Your Most-Used Apps
Google includes app usage timers on all Android phones which allow you to set hard limits on individual apps. To access the timers, just go to Settings, then look for Digital Wellbeing. The features look a bit different on a Samsung Galaxy phone than they do on Pixels and other Android handsets, but everything works the same. I usually check at night to see my daily stats. On the main settings screen, there’s a dashboard showing you total usage time for the day and which apps are the main culprits. You’ll also see the total number of phone unlocks and the total count notifications received for the day.
To reduce your usage time, start with app timers. Setting hard time limits might seem a bit Draconian at first, but the timers work because they automatically close the app for us and knock us out of our stupor. We realize we’re doomscrolling on TikTok all day long or browsing the web too much. In his book Hooked, productivity expert Nir Eyal says we’re not actually addicted to our phones. That’s a clinical term that should be reserved for more serious problems. Instead, we are obsessed. The dopamine hit we receive from almost every “like” or comment on social media fuels our obsession.
I started with an app timer on Google Chrome and, to be honest, it was painful. I set the time limit at 45 minutes and seemed to reach that threshold by lunchtime each day. With one minute to spare, the screen turns gray as a warning that the app is about to close. I bumped the timer up to 90 minutes and that seemed to work better. When you reach the limit, you have to reset the timer or use a browser on a different device. It works to curb your usage because you have to exert effort to overcome a limitation you imposed and have to live with. I also set limits on the Gmail app, Messages, Instagram, and TikTok.
Low and behold, setting time limits meant my total usage time went from four hours and 30 minutes per day down to three hours and 30 minutes. I got an hour of my life back each day. That’s not bad, but I wanted to reduce my screen time even more, so I turned to a few radical techniques.
Take a Few Radical Steps
Google includes some other settings that make your phone less appealing. For example, Android’s bedtime mode dims the screen and turns everything black and white. To find this option, go into the Digital Wellbeing settings, look for Bedtime mode and set the usage period to start around 8 pm. This also disables notifications until the next morning. For me, bedtime mode helped because it was a visual reminder to put the phone down and stop scrolling. I reduced my usage by another hour.
Sadly, I was still using my phone too much. For me, there’s always the allure of notifications about new text messages, Discord chats, and emails. Who’s contacting me? What do they need? Again, we crave the dopamine hit that comes when we hear those dings. We feel useful and productive when we respond, but the downside is that we’re glued to our screens even more.
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The Download: Society’s techlash, and Android XR
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The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for the Economist, he warned of the coming “techlash,” a revolt against Silicon Valley’s rich and powerful fueled by the public’s growing realization that these “sovereigns of cyberspace” weren’t the benevolent bright-future bringers they claimed to be.
While Wooldridge didn’t say precisely when this techlash would arrive, it’s clear today that a dramatic shift in public opinion toward Big Tech and its leaders did in fact happen—and is arguably still happening.
Two new books serve as excellent reminders of why it started in the first place. Together, they chronicle the rise of an industry that is increasingly using its unprecedented wealth and power to undermine democracy, and they outline what we can do to start taking some of that power back. Read the full story.
—Bryan Gardiner
This story is from the forthcoming magazine edition of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on January 6—it’s all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world right now. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive a copy.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Google has unveiled a new headset and smart glasses OS
Android XR gives wearers hands-free control thanks to the firm’s Gemini chatbot. (The Verge)
+ It also revealed a new Samsung-build headset called Project Moohan. (WP $)
+ Google’s hoping to learn from mistakes it made with Google Glass a decade ago. (Wired $)
+ Its new Project Astra could be generative AI’s killer app. (MIT Technology Review)[ad_2]
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Wayve’s AI Self-Driving System Is Here to Drive Like a Human and Take On Waymo and Tesla
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As I arrive, he’s laying out an impressive lunch spread of salads and carved ham and huge blocks of good cheese. There are already 385 mouths to feed in London alone, and almost 450 staff in total now, including at the new US headquarters and testing base Wayve has just opened in Sunnyvale, California: Its first public use of the Softbank cash. It might have flown under the radar until that headline-making funding round in May, but this start-up started up in 2017, and like most overnight successes has been a long time in the making.
That investment was seen as a clear sign that self-driving cars are emerging from the “trough of disillusionment” so common in tech when hype has to translate into application. Some of the biggest and best-funded companies admitted that autonomy was the toughest problem they were working on. Too tough, in some cases: Among many others, Apple, Uber and Volkswagen have quit AV programs in recent years.
But there’s a new optimism around autonomy. In addition to the Wayve deal, Alphabet’s Waymo is now giving 150,000 driverless rides each week in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix, and has just announced its expansion to Austin and Atlanta from early next year. Autonomous trucking service Aurora will make its first driverless trips soon in Texas. Tesla has finally shown the Cybercab, even if its half-hour launch event was disappointingly light on detail. Mate Rimac’s autonomous ride-hailing service Verne, which uses pretty, bespoke two-seat coupes with no steering wheel or pedals launches in Zagreb next year, with at least a dozen more cities already signed up.
Wayve may not have anything like Waymo’s scale, budget, or miles driven. But it does have Alex Kendall, who has that same early-Elon combination of messianic vision, drive, and an ability to “get into the weeds” of the problem himself. And Wayve takes a fundamentally different, purely AI approach to autonomy compared to Waymo, one which which might allow it to scale up far faster and roll out more widely than its rivals.
“In 2017, when we started Wayve, we were at peak hype cycle for autonomous cars,” Kendall tells me. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, this is a year away, and it’s going to be magical’. But I could see that the technological approach that most were taking just wasn’t going to give us this future of intelligent machines that we all dream of. They thought of self-driving as an infrastructure and a hand-coded robotics problem. I thought of it as an AI problem.”
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Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be
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If you dwell in certain internet neighborhoods long enough, the rules of governing, however absurd or toxic, become second nature.
On X, the site formerly known as Twitter, harassment, racism, and hate speech had become so uniquely poisonous under the ownership of Elon Musk, that if you identified as Black, a woman, queer, trans, or disabled you were all but guaranteed to have a target on your back. The combative environment engendered a grim sort of gallows humor. Even fans of the platform would refer to it as “the hellsite.” But people stayed, largely because there didn’t seem to be a viable alternative. Threads was weird. Mastodon was complicated. For a long time, Bluesky was too quiet—until something flipped, as the US election came and went, and people had had enough.
Millions of users have decamped to Bluesky over the past couple of months. And while the platform isn’t perfect, many new arrivals are mystified by the platform’s disarmingly upbeat atmosphere. “Trying to find my niche subset of humor on here,” @lvteef posted on December 3, “because as of right now it’s very millennial happy go lucky on this app.”
“I’m like where’s the misery? the sick jokes? the hateration in this dancery?” responded @knoxdotmp3.
Clearly, some of us are struggling to shrug off the traumas of X. At the same time, longtime users of Bluesky also have questions about the future of the platform, and whether the environment they’ve created can withstand the influx of new people. It feels like social media is turning a page, and opening a new chapter. Only, this time, the architects of that not-so-faraway future are determined to get it right.
One of those vanguards is Rudy Fraser, a 30-year-old New York technologist with a background in enterprise IT and community organizing. He’s the creator of Blacksky, the custom feed and moderation service that is slowly turning into the main avenue for many Black users on Bluesky. If the phenomenon sounds familiar, that’s because it is. From the first flickers of internet exploration, Black people have searched for their own online oasis. It was true of NetNoir in 1996 and, more recently, of Black Twitter, the epicenter and engine of internet culture during the 2010s. And where those experiments failed—NetNoir fizzled out and Black Twitter, while still very active, lost any semblance of protection when Musk bought Twitter—Fraser wants to succeed. “Moderation,” he told me on a recent video call, “is a key piece of it.”
Fraser has a knack for bringing people together. In addition to IT consulting, he’s worked as a lead organizer with We The People NYC, a grassroots mutual aid organization, since 2022, and also created Papertree, a digital mutual aid tool that allows large groups of people to share money. “I wanted to set up a community bank account for all of Bed-Stuy,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he grew up. When that didn’t pan out, Fraser reassessed.
It was the spring of 2023, not long after Bluesky invites started going out, and Fraser snagged one during its beta testing (he was user 51,921). He was already involved in some Web3-adjacent projects, and interested in questions around data ownership. Bluesky’s mission—to be a decentralized social media platform, and truly make the social internet a self-governing ecosystem—appealed to him for similar reasons. “The whole idea of AT protocol and the promise of an algorithmic custom feed seemed like a cool thing to jump into,” he said.
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Why AI must learn to admit ignorance and say 'I don't know'
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The ability to admit ignorance could be a sign of truly intelligent AI, and a new quiz of unsolved or perhaps even unsolvable questions aims to put this idea to the test
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What Billionaire Frank McCourt Would Actually Do With TikTok
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People don’t know what they don’t have until you sell it to them, right? And I’m very convinced that when people see that there’s a version of TikTok 2.0, where they curate their algorithm, they’re in charge, and they own themselves and parse out their data and get value for it, people will clamor for that. They’ll rush to that. It’s a much better model.
We could debate this all day long, but we’d be the one taking the risk. We are the ones putting up the money and saying that this will work. ByteDance can shut it down, or they can get the money for the platform and wish us luck.
Right now, TikTok is associated with specific types of content, such as dances, silly videos, and a younger audience. Do you intend for the new version of TikTok to maintain that focus?
Well, I think that the Gen Z user base is critical to keep it engaged, because young people create culture. And TikTok is a culture creator, if there ever was one. But I do want to add that recent surveys show that for 47 percent of Gen Zs, although they use it multiple hours a day, they wish it had never been invented. Because of the highly addictive nature, and how they feel sometimes right after spending so much time. So let’s create a healthier version, where it’s a super polished app, is easy to use, and looks very similar to the way it looks now. But the users are in charge.
Do you believe that giving teenagers full control without a manipulative algorithm will help them reduce their screen time?
I think once you put control in the hands of individuals, people will make choices for themselves. Some will make good choices, some will make bad choices. What’s really important, though, is when you’re talking about very young people, parents need to have some ability to be a parent. Young people need to be mentored. They need to be parented, and it’s very difficult now for parents to compete [with the algorithm].
So we need to step back. TikTok is awesome. We want to keep it alive. Let’s build a better version of it. But you know what: Healthy teenagers are awesome, too. Being a good parent is awesome, too. Human individual rights and protecting them are awesome, too. Protecting American citizens is awesome, too.
If TikTok’s Supreme Court appeal takes some time, will you still want to buy the app, even if that is months or years from now?
Yeah, we’re lined up to do this whenever it happens. What’s just great serendipity to me here is that this legislation happened and TikTok may be up for grabs. Because moving 170 million people over to a new stack will catalyze this alternative upgraded internet very quickly. Right now, one of the big problems we have is that we debate things about this internet, but until there’s another choice, people are kind of stuck.
I compare this to large scale, human physical migration. There’re people that live in very difficult places—in the case of my ancestors, there was a famine—they really want to go somewhere else. But there’s a second condition required, and that is you need a place to go. Right now, people are getting wise to the harms of the current Internet, and the fact that they’re being taken advantage of and not being rewarded properly or fairly. But nothing’s gonna happen unless there’s an alternative and a place for them to go.
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23 Gifts for Dads Who Don’t Need Anything (2024)
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Dads don’t need gifts. Just ask the dad in your life and he’ll tell you the same. However, as we all know you should gift him something anyway. I am not only a dad and a gear reviewer, but also someone with a specific philosophy about what makes a good gift for middle-aged men like me.
The best gifts for a dad are things that not only are relevant to his interests but also can be fairly described as “overkill.” Dads tend to like things that are overbuilt but useful. You can rarely go wrong by giving an expensive but excellent version of a thing we use anyway.
Alternately, you can just buy him anything with the logo of his favorite sports team on it. Oh, a set of Cleveland Browns corn-on-the-cob holders! Better buy some sweet corn and fire up the grill!
Below you’ll find gifts that I as a dad have personally used and enjoyed. This is the final gift guide to debut this Christmas season, which is appropriate as no one shops for dads early.
Updated December 2024: We’ve refreshed this guide with tons of new picks, including slippers, a Golden Tee arcade machine, and a leather belt.
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EVgo secures $1.25bn to expand fast EV charging across US
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In a significant boost to the nation’s electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) has announced a $1.25bn loan guarantee to EVgo Swift Borrower LLC.
This major initiative aims to deploy around 7,500 high-powered fast EV charging stations at approximately 1,100 locations across the United States over the next five years.
By enabling drivers to charge their vehicles quickly and conveniently, this technology is vital to addressing range anxiety and supporting widespread EV adoption.
Revolutionising EV charging accessibility
The first wave of deployments will feature state-of-the-art 350kW direct current (DC) fast chargers. These units can charge two vehicles simultaneously, offering an 80% battery recharge in just 20 minutes, depending on the EV model and battery conditions.
Such advancements address a critical barrier to EV adoption: the lack of reliable and fast EV charging options.
This initiative also incorporates dynamic power-sharing technology, which maximises charging efficiency by redistributing unused power between vehicles.
The rollout will include advanced features like Autocharge+, simplifying the payment process by enabling users to plug in and charge without using a phone or credit card.
Driving toward a clean energy future
EVgo’s expansion aligns with the US’ goal to build a national EV charging network. Since President Biden took office, the number of publicly available chargers has doubled, with nearly 1,000 new chargers added weekly.
Currently, over 204,000 public charging ports are operational nationwide, and EVgo’s efforts will further amplify this growth.
These EV charging stations will serve various high-traffic locations, including retail centers and grocery stores, ensuring accessibility for drivers in metropolitan areas and multi-family housing communities.
Notably, more than 40% of the new chargers will be installed in disadvantaged communities, advancing equitable access to clean transportation options.
Economic and environmental benefits
This project is expected to create over 180 construction jobs and 550 maintenance and support roles, fostering a robust EV ecosystem while promoting economic growth.
The chargers will enable an annual reduction of 284,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to removing 61,000 gasoline-powered vehicles from the road.
EVgo’s use of prefabrication techniques at its Jacksonville, Florida facility will expedite deployments while supporting domestic manufacturing.
The chargers will also comply with universal standards, such as SAE J3400 and CCS connectors, ensuring compatibility with all fast-charging-capable EVs.
Supporting disadvantaged communities
EVgo plans to install nearly half of its new EV chargers in locations eligible for the Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Tax Credit (30C).
These areas, often economically disadvantaged, will benefit from improved access to public charging, ensuring an equitable distribution of EV infrastructure.
To further enhance community engagement, EVgo is implementing a comprehensive Community Benefits Plan (CBP).
This plan emphasises workforce development, including training programmes and scholarships for electricians to earn EV Infrastructure Training Program (EVITP) certification.
Such initiatives are vital as EV charging projects increasingly require skilled labour to meet state and federal standards.
Catalysing the EV revolution
Fast EV charging is critical to meeting the growing demand for electrified transportation. With automakers expanding their EV portfolios, accessible and efficient public charging is vital for consumer confidence.
While homeowners with garages can rely on Level 1 or Level 2 chargers, public fast chargers are indispensable for those living in multi-family dwellings.
EVgo’s ambitious project, supported by the DOE’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), demonstrates a firm commitment to building a clean energy future.
By addressing infrastructure gaps, fostering economic growth, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this initiative positions the US as a global leader in EV adoption and sustainability.
The DOE’s $1.25bn loan guarantee marks a pivotal step toward nationwide fast EV charging availability.
As EVgo accelerates the deployment of cutting-edge chargers across the country, this investment not only supports the nation’s clean energy goals but also underscores the importance of equitable access to EV infrastructure.
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