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The rise of hybrid work models has brought undeniable flexibility, but it also presents unique challenges for team collaboration. How do you bridge the gap between in-office and remote colleagues, ensuring everyone feels connected, engaged, and contributing effectively? The answer, in large part, lies in embracing the power of visual collaboration tools. Forget static documents and endless email threads (that leave potential for so much to be overlooked!) – it's time to tap into the dynamic potential of virtual whiteboards and a wealth of other visual platforms that can transform the way your hybrid team works together. View the full article

America’s 47th president plays unwitting ally to non-populists everywhere except at homeView the full article

Former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg launched Meeno less than two years ago with the intention of it being an AI chatbot that helped users through relationship issues. Now, the company is pivoting to focus on teaching predominantly male users how to connect romantically with women through interactions with voice-based AI characters. “[Male loneliness] is a problem that’s been getting worse for 30 years,” Nyborg tells Fast Company. “I never thought that this was something we could just go and snap our fingers and [fix].” The first iteration of Meeno, Nyborg says, allowed the company to prove that it could build something that appealed to men. She says the original platform, which will still be available on the Meeno app, attracted over half of its 100,000-user makeup as men. But they wanted it to yield faster results, and rapid developments to OpenAI’s Whisper API and other technologies in the past few months meant it could rapidly decrease the amount of time its AI needed to offer insights. Users, she says, could get benefits within minutes instead of over three to four weeks thanks to the OpenAI advancements. The new Meeno is entirely web based, meaning it’s not going to be hosted on an app store. Users will go to the site, take a brief voice survey, and then get insights into how they present themselves. They’ll then make an account and go through fake scenarios, such as being prompted to talk to a woman while waiting in line at a pizza place. Users who want to go through more scenarios each day can pay $19 a month for a premium subscription. Think of it, she says, like Duolingo for dating. As part of its pivot, Meeno is raising a seed extension, with $2.7 million committed in the past few weeks. (The name, by the way, is a nod to Plato’s Meno writings.) The key to the platform, Nyborg says, was making it audio based so that it shows a clear intention of getting out of the house and interacting with people in the real world. A Pew Research Center survey from January found that while men and women report roughly equal rates of feeling lonely all or most of the time, men aren’t reaching out to their networks for help as much as women are. Nyborg says she and her investors have been testing out the product in the mornings, often feeling more confident in their conversations later in the day because they were warmed up. “Maybe someone pays you a surprise compliment, based on the band T-shirt that you’re wearing, which has happened to me, and what I’ve realized about myself is because I’m an introvert, if I’ve just left the house and I haven’t spoken to anyone, I’ve realized I can be a bit standoffish or aggressive,” Nyborg says. “And again, people are usually just trying to be nice and it can really make someone’s day doing that.” View the full article

There are so many ways to die. You could fall off a cliff. A monk could light you on fire. A bat the size of a yacht could kick your head in. You’ve only just begun the game, and yet here you are, stranded on some strange mountaintop, surrounded by ruins. If you’re a newcomer, you’ll be dead within moments. If you’re a hardcore gamer, you’ll probably be dead a few moments later. But death isn’t the end. Death is the beginning. You’ll respawn in a graveyard, and that graveyard will lead you to a vast chasm—a pitchblack pit of certain doom. Taking the plunge down into that pit will surely lead you to more death. If the fall doesn’t kill you, it’s reasonable to assume that the monsters lurking down there will. You can bypass this chasm if you want to—the game will let you keep exploring and playing for hours and hours and hours. In fact, as far as the game’s concerned, you need never take the plunge at all. And if you were a reasonable human being, you wouldn’t. But you aren’t a reasonable human being. You’re a gamer. You choose the plunge. You jump down into the crevasse, and it’s a good thing you do. Because in Elden Ring, the only way to access the built-in tutorial is by taking that leap. It’s there, in that graveyard, down that pitch-black pit of certain doom, that your learning begins. The drop-out Stacey Haffner dropped out in her senior year of high school. She had enough credits to graduate, but “life just kind of pulled me away,” she says. In years to come, she would return to schooling three more times, and each time, life would pull her away before she finished. She did eventually get a high school diploma, but that was it. She never got a two-year degree. She never got a four-year degree. And she certainly never got a graduate degree. Where did this dropout life lead her? To Microsoft, where she worked on a Windows product serving hundreds of millions of users. To Xbox, where she launched the Xbox Live Creators program, democratizing console game development. And then to Unity, where she became the director of product working on DevOps and eventually transitioning to AI and machine learning. Her role focused on guiding large, multidisciplinary teams with the goal of launching new products within the company. “Basically, I ran a mini startup within the company,” she explains. “My collaborator and I built the whole strategy and vision, from org[anization] culture to final product.” Stacey didn’t get where she is today by studying like an A-plus student. She got there by studying like an A-plus gamer, leveling up the way every gamer levels up: you see something scary, you take the plunge. That’s how she learns new software (“I kind of just jump into it.”). It’s how she learned to overcome her fear of public speaking (“I just started putting myself on stage.”). And it’s how she navigated every step of her career—just following the next challenge wherever it led. After dropping out of high school, she says, “I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I really had no clue. So I just tried things that sounded interesting.” With each job, she got inquisitive about what she loved and what she hated, and then she used those insights to guide her next cycle around the loop. Eventually that process would lead her into game development, where she’d go toe-to-toe with the NBA in a virtual duel to the death. But not until she’d tried a string of dead-end jobs. The career game loop First she answered phones at a staffing agency. She found that work unbearably mundane, but loved learning new skills every time she got to fill in for recruiters who played hooky. So she switched to human resources (HR) and recruiting. Working in HR and recruiting, Stacey realized that her role was pretty adversarial. She was tasked with protecting her company rather than its people. And its people feared her. That wasn’t going to fly for Stacey, but she did love playing analyst every now and then—crunching the data on employee performance, turnover rates, recruitment metrics, and so on. So she became an analyst next. It turned out that analyst work was only fun in short bursts, not as a full-time job. When Stacey told her staffing agency that she wanted something new, they offered her a project management role at Microsoft. And it turned out that project management was the perfect fit. About a decade later, she manages the managers. Stacey’s cycled the Core Career Game Loop many, many times, and each time, she’s had to level up. She’s used all kinds of strategies along the way, always evaluating what skill she needs to learn, what learning opportunities are available to her, and which methods will support her best. She’s used booths at conferences, classes at a local college, company-provided training, coaching from bosses and peers, and the most reliable tactic of all: taking the plunge and figuring things out on the fly. “I’ll watch tutorials, or read a book, or do whatever,” she says. “And then at some point, I’ll get bored of the tutorial, and I’ll just go try, and play around, and do a thing.” That’s how she’s learned everything she’s learned. It’s how she’s achieved everything that she’s achieved. And it’s how she eventually beat the NBA at its own game. Nothin’ but net When Stacey isn’t handling AI for Unity, she creates games for her studio, What Up Games. She’s the CEO, and her husband, Ben, is the CTO. About 10 years ago, she went to a conference where she tried virtual reality (VR) for the first time. For Stacey, it was love at first sight, and she raced home to tell Ben about it. Ben hadn’t experienced VR yet, but what he had experienced was sticker shock: the developer equipment was outlandishly expensive. Stacey insisted he give it a try anyway, and Ben was willing. So they got some goggles and, as Stacey puts it, “Two hours later, Ben finally took off the headset, and he was like ‘Let’s go make a game.’” Before doing anything else, Ben wanted to get his head around the virtual physics of VR experiences. So the two of them got to work on a basketball simulation. Basketball seemed like a fun way to figure out the mechanics of VR gravity, but the duo didn’t actually know anything about sports. They didn’t care much either. And, again, they were entirely new to VR technology. I’m reiterating this because I really want to emphasize: these two could not possibly have been worse prepared to go up against a multibillion-dollar pro-ball brand. But did that stop them? Of course not. We already covered this. Gamers are not reasonable human beings. Once they’d nailed the basic physics, Stacey and Ben figured they might as well introduce some competition. So they built their first game mode: a VR version of H.O.R.S.E—the schoolyard basketball game where players compete to out-aim each other. Then came multiplayer mode, and before they knew it, What Up Games had a fully operational basketball experience on its hands. They called it Nothin’ But Net. The next time a major games conference hit their calendars, Stacey and Ben brought the game with them. And it absolutely killed. The pair had to lay down duct tape to accommodate the unexpected queue of enthusiastic players, which grew and grew as the day went on. Then came the official release date. And then came the weeping. “We were devastated,” Stacey says. “I cried so hard!” Completely unbeknownst to Stacey and Ben, a major studio with official NBA licensing had also been developing their own VR basketball game all this time. By some cruel twist of fate, that blockbuster game dropped on precisely the same day as Nothin’ But Net. In an instant, years of development were made completely moot. Everything Stacey and Ben had worked for. Every innovation they’d pursued. “When we saw that game release, we thought that no one would even look at ours,” Stacey says. They were about to be blown out of the water by a gaming goliath. Except, when Stacey stopped crying and checked the industry news a few days later, it turned out that this goliath couldn’t reach the net. The official NBA game had tanked. “Hard pass. Avoid it,” read one review. Excerpted from The Career Game Loop: Learn to Earn in the New Economy by Jessica Lindl. Read more at www.careergameloop.com. Published by Wiley, 2025. View the full article

Some places are simply nicer to walk through than others. Compare a tree-lined path along the Seine in Paris to the side of a six-lane highway in Tallahassee, Florida, and the differences are obvious. But what exactly makes a place walkable is a matter of some debate. Those of the urbanist persuasion might point to a place’s density or mix of land uses. Platforms like Walk Score might favor accessibility, proximity, and travel times. One person might want to have a café within walking distance, while another might want the safety of working streetlights. Conditions are varied, and uneven. To better understand what exactly makes a place walkable, the architecture firm Perkins Eastman turned to a novel form of data analysis. In a new study, the firm combined qualitative pedestrian preference surveys, visual streetscape imagery from Google Street View, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to identify the specific type and mix of urban design elements that most influence people’s walking habits. Focusing specifically on older adults, the study is a window into the ways cities enable pedestrian activity, and how they can encourage more. What the walkability study found is that people prefer to walk in places with a higher proportion of several basic streetscape elements, including benches, shade trees, sidewalks, and crosswalks. When those elements are provided in combination with one another—plentiful benches and crosswalks, for example—people are likely to walk even more. The study was based in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, where a decennial survey collects detailed information from more than 100,000 pedestrians about the experience of walking through this part of the city. This survey data was analyzed alongside Google Street View imagery of the district to see what streetscape elements were predominant in places people reported being most likely to walk. This analysis led to a set of urban design guidelines that suggest ways of making more spaces more walkable. The resulting study, “Are these streets made for walking?: How visual AI can inform urban walkability for older adults,” was led by Haozhou Yang, a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who was a design and wellness research fellow at Perkins Eastman from 2023 to 2024. He says most previous walkability studies rely on zoomed-out data from geographic information systems (GIS), inferring walkability from data points like the existence of sidewalks or a neighborhood’s proximity to retail. “They’re not from the human perspective,” Yang says. “This [study] really puts the elements people encounter every day at the front.” Google Street View offered Yang a deep pool of data about the real world conditions experienced by pedestrians in Hong Kong. His study used 32,512 images from Google Street View, separated throughout the district at 10-meter intervals. Machine learning techniques then broke each image down to identify individual streetscape objects within the frame and how much space they accounted for. One image might show tree canopy covering roughly half the image and sidewalk making up about a quarter. Other images show benches and walls. Still others highlight crosswalks and how much space is dedicated to car traffic. “With new AI computer vision, we can really understand the quantifiable amount of those elements in the open environment,” Yang says. By focusing in on seven categories of streetscape elements—sidewalks, streetlights, trees, crosswalks, benches, walls, and windows—Yang and collaborators from Perkins Eastman were able to draw correlations between the presence and combination of those elements in places with high rates of pedestrian activity. These correlations then informed a set of urban design guidelines developed by Perkins Eastman’s senior living team. These guidelines include combining street furniture with greenery and open space, pairing crosswalks with improved street lighting, and increasing the social interactivity of a space by having more benches in areas with a higher amount of street-facing windows, balconies, and patios. The study draws these connections through the lens of improving walking conditions for older adults, with the health and social benefits that come from being more mobile and independent. But the implications of the research are much broader, according to Perkins Eastman senior living principal Alejandro Giraldo. “These are things that are universal design,” Giraldo says. “It’s not just addressing the seniors. It absolutely will, but it’s also addressing people with mobility issues or children.” Yang says that even though the data in this study is from Hong Kong, AI enables the model to be tuned or tweaked to the conditions in other cities, informing what might improve the walkability of that stretch along the Seine River or the side of that highway in Tallahassee. “Although there might be some cultural differences and context-related differences, the model can be applied to other cities,” Yang says. For Perkins Eastman, which has designed senior living projects for more than 40 years, the designers are already looking at ways of integrating these findings into current and future projects and improving conditions for older adults. “You want to find the differentiator—as a community, as a developer group, as a resident—of what is making me live here,” Giraldo says. “To change the perception of aging is very critical for us. Demonstrating these tools allow us to create a more sensitive communities.” View the full article

One of the core theories of the office market circa 2025 is the flight to quality. Workers, either hybrid staff who spend ample time at home or those prodded back into traditional five-day workweeks, have grown used to the comforts of home and bored with drab, standard office spaces. They need something spectacular to justify a commute or keep them happy, so companies increasingly seek out top-flight offices—Class A or Trophy assets, as a broker would say—which has pushed landlords and developers to spend millions on office renovations and solely focus on building new, top-of-the-line workspaces. That same dynamic, where the top-of-the-market bustles with activity while less desirable, Class B spaces sit largely vacant, has also been reshaping how coworking company WeWork manages and thinks about its portfolio of offices. In March, the company announced that it was increasing the cost of its All Access product in three cities, San Francisco, New York, and London; the $299 basic version of the service, a pandemic-era creation that allows for desk access across the company’s network of spaces, has been eliminated, leaving users to upgrade to the $339 Plus version. A significant driver of the change, according to Luke Robinson, the company’s regional president for North America, is that the same dynamic has hit the coworking world. In these three cities, the company plans to invest $90 million in refurbishing its top-performing locations with newer finishes and amenities because a sizable portion of the desk demand has migrated to these top-tier locations. “You can go get cheap space, but you’re likely in a less desirable building that’s likely dead, that doesn’t have energy,” Robinson says. “At the end of the day, people that are coming to the office aren’t just coming to sit at a desk. They want the experience that goes along with that, right, somewhat of a vibe.” This does sound a bit like the original WeWork marketing message; it’s just missing the free beer. But it’s a reality that can be found across urban office markets. Data from office analytics firm CompStak has shown that across the big U.S office markets, rents for Class B (functional space in a good location) and C office (typically older and basic) space barely budged from 2019 to today, rising from $42.45 to $43.50 a square foot. Even rents for regular Class A space, full-service offices in sought-after locations, saw a slight bump during the same time period, from $45.90 to $54.68 a square foot. The story is much different for Prime Class A space, or trophy space, which started at $60.85 in 2019 and, beginning at the end of 2021, began to skyrocket, hitting $91.41 by the end of last year. WeWork’s shifting space utilization mirrors that demand, with newer stock in preferred locations garnering more attention and booking. In New York City, locations at 134 N. 4th Street in Williamsburg, 33 Irving Plaza, and 154 W. 14th Street near Union Square are the company’s busiest in New York City. Bookings are up 11% year-over-year, and the locations typically fill up by the time the doors open in the morning (citywide, occupancy is above 80% overall). In San Francisco, locations at 650 California Street, 44 Montgomery Street, and the Salesforce Tower—with a 7% jump in bookings in March—have been packed. The company’s space at 201 Spear, which opened in August, also tends to fill up, with roughly half the members of that space belonging to a group of AI startups. And in London, 123 Buckingham Palace Road, 30 Churchill Place, and 10 York Road—which has seen bookings skyrocket 29% this March compared to last year—have been slammed. The massive shock of instability and uncertainty that has hit the economy in the past few months has pushed more workers, entrepreneurs, and even companies to embrace more coworking, says Robinson. WeWork’s internal survey of clients found that 72% of companies plan to expand their workforce in the next two years, with the majority choosing coworking and flex. A recent report from brokerage Cushman & Wakefield also found the coworking inventory in the U.S increased by 13% year-over-year, with strong growth in markets like Nashville and Indianapolis. And the $400 million acquisition of competitor Industrious by real estate firm CBRE earlier this year shows continued confidence in flexibility. “If companies are going to act fast, it’ll probably be with us, because you can’t make that big of a mistake,” says Robsinon. “Sign a 10-year deal too early, then you’ve got a problem.” View the full article

Raymond Ward wants to see solar panels draped over every balcony in the United States and doesn’t understand why that isn’t happening. The technology couldn’t be easier to use—simply hang one or two panels over a railing and plug them into an outlet. The devices provide up to 800 watts, enough to charge a laptop or power a small fridge. They’re popular in Germany, where everyone from renters to climate activists to gadget enthusiasts hail them as a cheap and easy way to generate electricity. Germans had registered more than 780,000 of the devices with the country’s utility regulator as of December. They’ve installed millions more without telling the government. Here in the U.S., though, there is no market for balcony solar. Ward, a Republican state representative in Utah who learned about the tech last year, wants that to change. The way he sees it, this is an obvious solution to surging power demand. “You look over there and say, ‘Well, that’s working,’” he told Grist. “So what is it that stops us from having it here?” His colleagues agree. Last month, the Legislature unanimously passed a bill he sponsored to boost the tech, and Republican Governor Spencer Cox signed it. H.B. 340 exempts portable solar devices from state regulations that require owners of rooftop solar arrays and other power-generating systems to sign an interconnection agreement with their local utility. These deals, and other “soft costs” like permits, can nearly double the price of going solar. Utah’s law marks the nation’s first significant step to remove barriers to balcony solar—but bigger obstacles remain. Regulations and standards governing electrical devices haven’t kept pace with development of the technology, and it lacks essential approvals required for adoption—including compliance with the National Electrical Code and a product safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories. Nothing about the bill Ward wrote changes that: Utahans still can’t install balcony solar because none of the systems have been nationally certified. These challenges will take time and effort to overcome, but they’re not insurmountable, advocates of the technology said. Even now, a team of entrepreneurs and research scientists, backed by federal funding, are creating these standards. Their work mirrors what happened in Germany nearly a decade ago, when clean energy advocates and companies began lobbying the country’s electrical certification body to amend safety regulations to legalize balcony solar. In 2017, Verband der Elektrotechnik, or VDE, a German certification body that issues product and safety standards for electrical products, released the first guideline that allowed for balcony solar systems. While such systems existed before VDE took this step, the benchmark it established allowed manufacturers to sell them widely, creating a booming industry. “Relentless individuals” were key to making that happen, said Christian Ofenheusle, the founder of EmpowerSource, a Berlin-based company that promotes balcony solar. Members of a German solar industry association spent years advocating for the technology and worked with VDE to carve a path toward standardizing balcony solar systems. The initial standard was followed by revised versions in 2018 and 2019 that further outlined technical requirements. The regulatory structure has continued to evolve. Ofenheusle has worked with other advocates to amend grid safety standards, create simple online registration for plug-in devices, and enshrine renters’ right to balcony solar. Politicians supported such efforts because they see the tech easing the nation’s reliance on Russian natural gas. Cities like Berlin and Munich have provided millions of euros in subsidies to help households buy these systems, and the country is creating a safety standard for batteries that can store the energy for later use. Meanwhile, the United States has yet to take the first step of creating a safety standard for the technology. U.S. electrical guidelines don’t account for the possibility of plugging a power-generating device into a household outlet. The nation also operates on a different system that precludes simply copying and pasting Germany’s rules. The U.S. grid, for example, operates at 120 volts, while that country’s grid operates at 230 volts. Without proper standards, a balcony solar system could pose several hazards. One concern is a phenomenon called “breaker masking.” Within a home, a single circuit can provide power to several outlets. Each circuit is equipped with a circuit breaker, a safety device within the electrical panel that shuts off power if that circuit is overloaded, which happens when too many appliances try to draw too much electricity at the same time. That prevents overheating or a fire. When a balcony solar device sends power into a circuit while other appliances are drawing power from the circuit, the breaker can’t detect that added power supply. If the circuit becomes overloaded—imagine turning on your TV while a space heater is running and you’re charging your laptop, all in the same room—the circuit breaker might fail to activate. This was a concern in Germany, so it developed standards that limit balcony solar units to just 800 watts, about half the amount used by a hairdryer. That threshold is considered low enough that even in the country’s oldest homes, the wiring can withstand the heating that occurs in even the worst of worst-case scenarios, said Sebastian Müller, chair of the German Balcony Solar Association, a consumer education and advocacy group. As a result, Ofenheusle said there haven’t been any cases of breaker masking causing harm. In fact, with millions of the devices installed nationwide, Germany has yet to see any safety issues beyond a few cases where someone tampered with the devices to add a car battery or other unsuitable hardware, he said. Another issue in the U.S. is the lack of a compatible safety device called a ground fault circuit interrupter, or a GFCI. They are typically built into outlets installed near water sources, like a sink, washing machine, or bathtub. They’re designed to minimize the risk of electric shock by cutting off power when, for example, a hairdryer falls into a sink. Yet there are no certified GFCI outlets in the U.S. designed for use with devices that consume power, like a blender, and those that generate it, like a balcony solar setup. Germany’s equivalent of a GFCI, called a residual current device, can detect bidirectional power flows, said Andreas Schmitz, a mechanical engineer and YouTuber in Germany who makes videos about balcony solar. Some people have raised concerns about the shock risk of touching the metal prongs of a plug after unplugging a balcony solar device. German regulators accounted for that by requiring the microinverter—which converts currents from the panel into electricity fed into the home—shut down immediately in an outage or when it is suddenly unplugged. Most of them already have this feature, but any U.S. standard will likely need to formalize that requirement. The lack of an Underwriters Laboratories, or UL, standard is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the adoption of balcony solar. The company certifies the safety of thousands of household electrical products; according to Iowa State University, “Every light bulb, lamp, or outlet purchased in the U.S. usually has a UL symbol and says UL Listed.” This assures customers that the product follows nationally recognized guidelines and can be used without the risk of a fire or shock. While some companies have sold plug-in solar devices in the U.S. without a UL listing, the company’s seal of approval typically is a prerequisite for selling products on the wider market. Consumers might be wary of using something that lacks its approval. Utah’s new balcony solar policy, for example, specifies that the law applies only to UL-listed products. Achim Ginsberg-Klemmt, vice president of engineering at the plug-in solar startup GismoPower, has been working on creating such a standard for more than a year and a half. In 2023, the Department of Energy awarded his company a grant to work with UL to develop a standard. GismoPower sells a mobile carport with a roof of solar panels and an integrated electric vehicle charger. Unlike rooftop solar, the system doesn’t need to be mounted in place but can be rolled onto a driveway and plugged in, generating electricity for the car, house, and the grid. “We’re basically taking rooftop solar to the next level” by making it portable and accessible for renters, Ginsberg-Klemmt said. The product is in use at pilot sites nationwide, though a lack of standardized rules for plug-in solar has forced the company to negotiate interconnection agreements with local utilities—a time-consuming and sometimes costly process. GismoPower’s product avoids one of the biggest technical challenges with balcony solar by plugging into a dedicated 240-volt outlet, the kind typically used for dryers. Such an outlet serves a single appliance and uses a dedicated circuit, sidestepping the risk of overloading. But it runs headlong into the same obstacle of lacking a compatible UL standard. Ginsberg-Klemmt is working with researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, other entrepreneurs, and engineers at Underwriters Laboratories to develop such a standard, but it hasn’t been easy. “We have found so many roadblocks,” he told Grist. One major sticking point is that any standard must comply with the National Electrical Code, a set of guidelines for electrical wiring in buildings that does not allow for the installation of plug-in energy systems like balcony solar. The rules are issued by the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit trade association, and adopted on a state-by-state basis. The code is updated every three years, with the next iteration due later this year for the 2026 edition. Ginsberg-Klemmt and his working group submitted recommendations for amending the code to allow plug-in solar—and every one of them was rejected in October. Jeff Sargent, the National Fire Protection Association’s staff liaison to the National Electrical Code committee, told Grist that this is the first time the organization had received public comments about plug-in solar systems. For now, it cannot consider amendments to allow their use until a compatible ground fault circuit interrupter exists, he said. Once that’s available, he said, the association can ensure that outdoor outlets can be safely used for balcony solar. Electrical standards are constantly evolving, and it often takes more than one cycle of code changes to allow for new products, said Sargent. Ginsberg-Klemmt said his group will continue to pursue other avenues to amend the codes. Until that happens, a UL standard for plug-in solar is unlikely to go anywhere. But interest in plug-in energy solutions isn’t going away, and decision-makers will have to adjust to that reality eventually, Ward said. It happened in Germany, where people across the political spectrum have embraced the technology. Ward believes the same thing will happen here. The way he sees it, “It’s just a good thing if you set up a system so people have a way to take care of as much of their own problems as they can.” This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here. View the full article

When The President first landed in the White House in 2016, even he seemed surprised to be there. Without a transition staff in place, the Obama administration team helped shepherd in the new president while positions sat unfilled. Whereas Hillary Clinton had a complete digital site built to usher in her new presidency that would never be seen, The President had none. But for his second term, The President’s team was more prepared. On the first day of his presidency, he appeared on WhiteHouse.gov with a hero’s welcome. In a video worthy of Michael Bay, helicopters fly through the mountains before delivering The President to the White House lawn to herald a new age. Fighter jets thunder overhead. The President squints into the distance. A bald eagle flies by. The 100 days that have followed have proven blindsiding to anyone who thought The President’s second term would constitute little more than a few tax cuts to the rich. In this brief window, The President has rewritten the propaganda playbook for the modern political age by marrying well-proven tactics from decades past with a savvy approach to our current media landscape. His approach to governing is as much a practice of world-building as it is policy building. He has woven together imagery, rhetoric, and technology to create an unnervingly convincing (if in large part illegal!) vision of the world he wants to sell (or force upon) his constituents. The President has leveraged craftily designed aesthetics to position his destructive policies as necessary and his self-concerned personality as heroic, all while he dismantles the institutions in place to question him. A playbook from the past—and present From the earliest days of the presidency, we’ve witnessed a mass erasure of both the topics and people that the administration doesn’t support. It happened in the digital world with the deletion of trans rights pages from WhiteHouse.gov and stories about Navajo Code Talkers removed from the pages of the Department of Defense. In the physical world, the erasure shows up as The President eliminates civil rights artifacts from Smithsonian institutions and scrubs the Black Lives Matter mural from 16th Street in Washington, D.C. Many of these deletions are part of an executive order around “restoring truth in American history.” Fascists routinely erase history to write a new one. And when it comes to this, and all of The President’s other communication tricks, there’s not much that’s original about them. “All the techniques he uses are techniques of the past. The aesthetics are aesthetics of the present,” says Barbie Zelizer, the Raymond Williams professor of communication and director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also co-editor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism. Zelizer believes that the entire ethos of The President’s messaging is anchored in the early Cold War when, in the name of national security, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy declared an all-out war on communism and anyone suspected to be supportive of it. Zelizer points out that The President’s statement from 2016—“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters”—has historical precedent from this era. In 1954, pollster George Gallup described McCarthy’s unchecked appeal to the public with a similar framing: “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, [voters] would probably still go along with him.” The key word uniting the messaging of The President and McCarthy? Enmity. “It’s us versus them. When he is able to claim accolades for himself or for his administration, it is always based on an assumption that his administration is winning out over the enemy,” says Zelizer, who notes there is always an enemy beyond (like China) and an enemy within (like student protestors or the judges upholding our legal system). “And whomever the enemy is at any point—if that’s democratic leaders, or the media, or universities, take your pick—they’re all substitutes in a rotation.” Where Zelizer sees Cold War influence, Edel Rodriguez—the Cuban-born illustrator and leading visual critic of The President—sees the influence of the UFC and WWE. Without a hint of irony, Rodriguez points to the machismo-laden, fight-first mentality of this programming as parallel to both power-assertive fascist leadership and the greater The President media strategy. He also admits to their strange appeal. “I watch Ultimate Fighting videos because they’re nuts. But it’s drama. It’s something,” he says. “And on the other side, you have the Democrats doing nothing.” Donald The PresidentElon Musk The enemies that The President has targeted pair perfectly with another The President messaging technique Zelizer says is straight out of the Cold War (but also fits fine within a WWE ring rant): that assertions can be made without evidence. “In order to get people to understand what he’s about and to support him, he doesn’t need evidence. He can just make the claim,” she says. Wave after wave of unbridled fabrications—The President was recorded making 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first presidency alone—contribute to The President’s undermining of fact-based institutions in journalism and research. The President’s team is throwing a one-two punch of despot-born propaganda while simultaneously dismantling the country’s system of checks and balances. The dizzying presentation of official misinformation Under the Obama administration, WhiteHouse.gov became an extension of the presidential brand—a tradition carried on by Joe Biden—full of largely apolitical resources for American citizens. The President, too, uses this channel to look downright presidential when he wants to, creating a stark contrast to something like The President’s sickening “ASMR” deportation video. Yet even on WhiteHouse.gov, The President’s almost surreal, salesman-y moments crop up. In April, the The President team replaced WhiteHouse.gov’s former COVID-19 resources site with a new page it calls Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19. It features a bold typographic header that could be a poster for an Apple TV+ original. Below that, there’s a perfectly executed presentation of unsubstantiated claims—like that COVID-19 was born in a Wuhan lab, or that public health officials “often mislead” the populace and “demonized alternative [COVID-19] treatments . . . in a shameful effort to coerce and control.” Classic information hierarchy organizes this page with bullet points, a map, and even the option to download the official House subcommittee report (that ignores the official Democratic subcommittee debunking). It’s official-looking enough that most people won’t notice that the site replaces vaccine guidance, or that it fails to mention The President’s crucial work in funding a COVID-19 vaccine during his first term. “It’s distrust wrapped in credibility,” says an award-winning information designer who preferred to remain anonymous. “The power of this design isn’t in what it says but how it mimics the visual codes of accountability. It looks like a government report, but it’s a story engineered to look like a discovery.” A similar approach is taken on the Department of Government Efficiency website, which keeps a running receipt of the “savings” generated by its cost-cutting programs. At a glance, this is government transparency at its finest. In practice, The New York Times has found multiple, significant errors—the largest of which miscalculated $8 million in savings as $8 billion in savings (which, at the time, represented half of the $16 billion DOGE had claimed to save). After being called out for the errors, the DOGE site was redesigned to make the accounting more difficult to parse, claiming the updates were for “security.” “I’m trying to unpack it in an intelligent way, and it’s tough, because in some ways the ploy is just so obvious, right?” says Dino Citraro, cofounder of the “do good with data” visualization firm Periscopic, which has created projects for groups including UNICEF and the Gates Foundation. “It’s disingenuous messaging, or just falsified stuff wrapped up in stuff that looks very official.” False transparency is particularly disarming in a world where foundational facts—like the safety and efficacy of vaccines, or impact of CO2 emissions on our planet—have been recast as lies. But the truth is, even to professionals in data presentation, actually getting an engaged audience to explore information in order to understand its sourcing and veracity is incredibly difficult. The public’s waning attention span is working in The President’s favor. “There was always this sort of uncomfortable idea that you could manipulate the data to say whatever you wanted,” says Citraro of his own field. “For us, it meant [creating] a deep, interactive exploration so you could verify and find your own insights . . . but it felt like that became a burden.” Indeed, even for those willing to take the time to do the research—few of us, for sure—data often only reinforces prior held beliefs. The messy distraction of hate In the place of information, we get propaganda—a dramatic editorialization of history and current events alike. For instance: Despite court orders challenging the legality of The President’s deportations, a dramatic one-minute film promoted the deportation of 17 men. In what could be a Netflix trailer produced by El Salvador with support of the U.S. government, soldiers are shown in slow motion escorting the “violent criminals” off the plane toward a prison, where their heads are shaved and they are locked up in a cellblock. Despite a war raging in Gaza, The President shared an AI-generated clip on Truth Social featuring him lounging poolside while gilded The President branding takes over the skyline. No matter that this video was actually made in satire; it fit fine within The President’s stomach-wrenching media plan. The President’s messaging is not just anti-presidential, it’s anti-humanist. It’s somehow both vindictive and thoughtless at the same time, much like it’s both impactful and potentially irrelevant to a country already divided down the middle. Yet despite such gross tactics behind the tweets, Rodriguez is not kept up at night by these social media plays, even though they so effectively build and expand the The President brand with his base. Nor is he bothered much by the tweaks to DoD pages or anything written or erased on WhiteHouse.gov, which undermines history with its official stamp. “When was the last time you started your day on WhiteHouse.gov?” he asks with a practical tone. He’s more worried about the consequences that we’re already seeing from this erosion of truth: The President removing the Associated Press’s access to the official White House briefings, or promoting insurrection, or discrediting the judicial system meant to keep our laws in check, or erasing billions of dollars from the budgets of universities conducting critical research. “I don’t have an issue with you making goofy videos about Gaza. . . . My issue is the same as in Cuba where there hasn’t been an election in 60 years,” he says. “My problem is dictatorships, not free elections.” And on this topic, The President’s design team appears to be looking ahead. Because now you can buy a The President 2028 hat from his official store. View the full article

Google updated the Googlebot-News documentation to remove wrong information The post Google Clarifies Googlebot-News Crawler Documentation appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Prime minister’s attempt to fire Ronen Bar pushed country to brink of constitutional crisisView the full article

Election hands victory to centrist leader who vowed to defy the US presidentView the full article

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has torn through Washington at breakneck speed. During the first 100 days of President Donald The President’s second term, DOGE has played a central role in cutting more than 200,000 federal jobs. The organization has over that same time implemented aggressive cost-cutting measures (including to foreign food aid and medical research), overhauled longtime government cybersecurity systems, and targeted federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for elimination. Most of these changes have been driven, in part, by AI tools—a move that has sparked serious concerns among experts. Critics say the rushed, untested use of artificial intelligence could lead to wrongful firings, mishandling of sensitive data, and lasting damage to core public services. “It’s misguided for us to think that people who control technology and the associated power levers are naive about AI’s capabilities,” says Julia Stoyanovich, director of the Center for Responsible AI at New York University. “And their goal is not to do things better, or to make it so that everything is more efficient; rather, their goal is just to reduce the size of government, to reduce government spending, and to do this in a way that is just disorienting to everybody in society.” Musk, who said earlier this month he would step back from DOGE to focus more on Tesla after the EV maker posted a dismal quarterly earnings report, has advocated for deploying AI to boost government efficiency. In practice, that has meant feeding sensitive Department of Education data into AI systems to identify programs for elimination; pushing to use AI to reassess benefits programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs; creating a chatbot for the U.S. General Services Administration to analyze contract data; and deploying AI tools—including Grok, the chatbot developed by xAI, which Musk owns—to monitor federal employee communications for critical sentiment toward Musk or The President. According to one anonymous government official who spoke to The Washington Post in February, the end goal is something even more drastic: the replacement of “the human workforce with machines.” (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to Fast Company’s requests for comment.) To critics, such efforts represent a reckless and dangerous gamble. Experts warn that AI-driven government downsizing risks violating civil rights, mishandling some of the most sensitive personnel data in the country, and introducing hidden biases (even if accidentally) into critical decisions. As CNN reports, federal agencies, with their aging systems and complex missions, are ill-suited to abrupt automation, and without deep understanding of the underlying data, AI systems could misfire—cutting essential staffers and services based on flawed outputs. David Evan Harris, a chancellor’s public scholar with the University of California, Berkeley, tells Fast Company there’s also a massive alarm bell going off around the question of data protection and whether DOGE is safeguarding the information it is plugging into outsize AI systems supplied by companies like Anthropic and Musk’s xAI. “It’s very unclear what kinds of security protocols the DOGE team is using,” he says, “and if they are taking any steps to make sure that private data of government employees and U.S. citizens, and even confidential data about U.S. government programs is not being turned into training data or retained improperly by any of these AI companies that they’re working with.” Perhaps even more concerning, as Harvard researchers Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders argued in The Atlantic in February, replacing federal civil servants with AI could fundamentally weaken democratic governance by concentrating executive power. As they see it, with fewer human workers exercising independent judgment, future leaders could reshape government agencies at the push of a button—sidestepping traditional checks and balances designed to prevent abuses of power. Still, there are signs the momentum around DOGE may be shifting. This month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against DOGE, seeking records about the agency’s use of AI across federal programs, citing concerns about mass surveillance and “politically motivated misuse.” Meanwhile, a group of Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, demanding more information on DOGE’s AI practices. And despite Musk’s sweeping promises, analyses suggest the agency’s impact has been overstated: According to recent estimates published by The New York Times, DOGE’s touted cost savings might not actually amount to much, given that all the agency-related firings, rehirings, and lost productivity will cost some $135 billion this fiscal year. Public sentiment appears to be souring as well: A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 57% of Americans disapprove of Musk’s efforts with DOGE—a significant uptick over February, when 49% disapproved. These factors might force a reckoning for DOGE, but time is short. Once AI is entrenched in government operations, undoing the damage could be even harder than preventing it. “The AI industry is famous right now for being locked in a race to the bottom and throwing caution to the wind so that they can launch products as fast as possible,” says Harris. “Combining that race to the bottom with DOGE’s race to use AI for anything they can possibly think of is really concerning.” View the full article

I find myself wanting to buy a new product I’ve seen on Instagram at least once a week. (Right now, I’ve got my eye on a gorgeous set of coffee mugs from Studio 13.) Instagram makes those “I need this” moments easy to act on — people see something they like, and they can buy it in just a few taps. What started out as a simple photo-sharing app has evolved into a powerful social commerce platform where you can show off your products, find new customers, and even make direct sales. With 130 million people tapping on Instagram shopping posts each month, it’s clear that casual scrolling can easily turn into active shopping. That’s a big opportunity for businesses and creators who want to reach people where they’re already spending time — an average of 33 minutes a day on Instagram, to be exact. If you’re a business owner or creator with products to sell, Instagram can help you get them in front of the right people. In this guide, I’ll cover how to sell on Instagram — from setting up your shop to exploring different selling options and tips to help you grow. 4 approaches to selling on InstagramThere’s no single “right” way to sell on Instagram. What works best depends on whether you’re a business or creator, the types of products you sell, and where you want people to complete their purchase. 1. Use Instagram shoppable postsYou can sell products on Instagram using a shop that lives on the app, making it easy for people to browse and buy your products while they’re scrolling. Instagram shopping lets you tag products in your posts and link them directly to your product catalog. This makes your posts shoppable — people discover your products while they’re scrolling, and when something catches their eye, they can just tap the icon to see product details and prices. You’ll spot these shoppable posts by a small white shopping bag icon in the corner of an image. On your profile grid, it appears in the top right corner of a shoppable post thumbnail, and in the bottom left when the post shows up in people’s feeds. Apart from that icon, shoppable posts look just like any other. check out You need an Instagram shopping account to sell products directly from the app. To be eligible for Instagram shopping, your business must: Be located in a supported market where Instagram shopping is available (that includes the U.S., much of Europe, and Asia-Pacific).Use an Instagram business account.Keep your account on-brand, and feature products that people can buy from your website.Sell physical products that aren’t on Instagram’s prohibited items list.Comply with all of the Meta-owned platform’s policies.Show signs of trustworthiness. This includes things like having an active website, a consistent presence on Instagram, and how many followers you have.Share accurate product information and avoid anything misleading, such as incorrect pricing and availability. You should also make your refund and return policies easy for people to find on your website, Facebook, or Instagram accounts.If you have a creator account and want to sell physical products, you’ll need to switch to a business account first. It’s quick to do: head to your profile in the Instagram app and tap the menu in the top right corner. From there, go to Creators tools and controls, and scroll down to Switch account type. Clicking on that will bring up the option to switch to an Instagram business profile. If you have a personal profile, follow the steps here to switch your profile to a business account. If you want to sell digital products or don’t have your own website yet, you can still sell through Instagram without using Instagram shopping — it’ll just look a little different. I’ll show you how later in this article. For those using Instagram shopping, the next step is to build a product catalog. If you already have a Facebook Shops catalog, you can connect it to your Instagram account to save yourself some time. Give the catalog a look over before you connect it to Instagram. Once set up, it will automatically create your Instagram shopping catalog, and you can't change it later. To add products manually, use Commerce Manager to upload product photos and information. You can speed up the process by uploading products in bulk with a spreadsheet, or using a Meta pixel to import products from your website. Here’s a handy video that walks you through how to set up your catalog in Commerce Manager. You can also use one of the certified third-party ecommerce platforms: Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix, Adobe Commerce, or OpenCart. Once your catalog is set up, you can create an Instagram post and add up to 20 products per photo or carousel. Simply tap on products in the photo, and then tag products from your catalog. Instagram recommends tagging fewer than five products per image to help people focus on your top picks. If you have more than five items to share, you can spread them across the slides in a carousel. Scheduling tools like Buffer let you add product tags to your Instagram feed posts and carousels just like you would when posting directly through the app. You can also tag products on Instagram stories. Add a product sticker to tag items — you can use one sticker per story and tag up to five products in it. For Instagram Reels, you have more flexibility, with the option to add up to 30 product tags in a single video. Starting April 24, 2024, US-based Instagram shops must set up Instagram Checkouts. This means that customers will complete their purchases from your shop directly in the app. To use this feature, you’ll need a US bank account and business address. If your shop is located outside the US, your product tags will link people back to your website to check out instead. 2. Try Buffer Instagram GridBuffer’s Instagram Grid feature turns your Instagram profile into a shop page. Think of your grid like your store’s window display — a curated collection of your must-have products. This option works well for businesses and creators who: Want to sell digital products, such as ebooks, presets, templates, or checklistsAre in a location where Instagram shops aren’t supportedDon’t have an Instagram business accountWant an alternative to Instagram shops that you can manage without using Commerce ManagerHere’s how it works. In Buffer, you can see a preview of what your Instagram profile page looks like. On this preview page, you’ll get: A public URL for your Buffer Instagram Grid page. This is what you’ll add to the “link in bio” field on your profile.The option to add up to three custom links to the top of your Instagram Grid page. You can use this space to share your website’s homepage, send people straight to a new collection, or spotlight your star product.The option to add URLs to your Instagram posts. You can use these fields to link directly to the page from where people can buy that product, whether it’s on your website or a third-party platform like Gumroad, Patreon, or Etsy.Once people click on your Instagram Grid link in your profile, they'll see clickable versions of your posts that take them directly to that product’s page. ⚡Start selling on Instagram with Instagram Grid. Sign up for free.3. Use Buffer Start PageBuffer Start Page turns your link in bio into a mini landing page. After someone taps your profile link, they’re taken to a page where they can see photos, embedded videos, updates, and even an email signup form. If Instagram Grid is your store’s window display, think of Start Page as its lobby. It’s where you welcome people in and guide them to where they want to go — a product page, your newest launch, or your newsletter. Here’s how to use Start Page to sell: Add button links that take visitors straight to your website or product pages, whether they’re physical or digital.Highlight photos or graphics of your best items and link each one to its product page, so people can buy directly from that image.Embed videos for product demos, to announce a product launch, or share a personal message.Add an email signup form to build your list and let customers know about new drops, special offers, or upcoming sales.Start Page also gives you statistics on which links get the most clicks. You can see what products or deals interest visitors the most, and use this information to adjust what you feature, change photos, or tweak the text. Source: huel.start.page 4. Sell through comments and direct messagesIf you’re wondering how to sell on Instagram without a website or online store, comments and direct messages (DMs) offer a direct way to chat with your customers and complete a sale. Start by sharing a product photo, and use the caption to let people know what to comment to buy — “Comment ‘SOLD [your size]’ to buy” or “Comment ‘I WANT THIS’ to buy.” Then, follow up on each comment to arrange payment and shipping, and to answer any questions. Tools like Manychat or Comment Sold can help with this. You can set them up to automatically reply to comments and send purchase links via DM. If you’re using an Instagram business account, you can use Buffer’s engagement features to keep all your comments in one place. That way, you can manually handle each message if you prefer, and make sure nothing slips through the cracks — whether it’s a misspelled “SOLD” request, a question, or comment on another post altogether. You can also invite buyers to message you on Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to complete their purchase rather than use comments. Tools like Manychat can jump in and automate your replies there too, helping take on some of the manual work needed to complete the sale. If you’re just starting out or growing your business and still building your website or product catalog, comments and DMs are a great way to begin selling on Instagram — even before your site and catalog are up and running. 5 ways to improve your Instagram sales strategyWhen you’re selling on Instagram, that moment your post catches a user’s eye is already a win. Here are some ideas that encourage customers to turn that first look into a purchase. 1. Create a signature style for your photos, and stick to itThink about the stores you love to shop in. Each one probably has a distinct vibe that makes it immediately stand out. Great Instagram business profiles can use a signature visual style to replicate this distinctiveness online. Jewelry brand waekura uses cream, beige, and brown tones in all its posts. This creates a minimalist, aesthetic appearance that followers instantly recognize when a post shows up in their feed. 2. Keep an eye on your metricsInstagram analytics tools let you drill down into individual posts and step back to see how your account is performing overall. Use Instagram’s built-in analytics, Instagram Insights, to track how far a post reaches, whether people find it on your profile or in their feed, and how they interact — liking, commenting, sharing, or saving. Noticing which post styles and products get the most attention helps you refine your content strategy around what your target audience responds to — both followers and potential customers who find your posts through Instagram’s algorithm. You can also bring in Buffer’s analytics tools to work alongside Instagram’s insights. Buffer spots patterns in your data to tell you the best day to post, which post formats get the most engagement, and how often you should post. With this data, you can adjust your Instagram strategy so your posts reach more of the right people and lead to more sales. 3. Encourage word-of-mouth marketingWhen I'm looking for a new... well, anything really, I usually ask my friends or family for suggestions before I search online. It turns out I’m not alone — 88% of people trust recommendations from people they know more than any other form of marketing. On Instagram, that kind of word-of-mouth often shows up when someone tags a friend in the comments, shares your post in their stories or in DMs, or mentions your product in their own content. Tap into word-of-mouth marketing by sharing user-generated content. When a customer shares a post or story because they loved your soy candles or budget tracker, it’s a personal endorsement to their audience. Sharing those posts in your Instagram feed or stories shows the customer you appreciate the love, and it shows others how real people use your products. You can also add friendly prompts like “Tag someone who’d love this!” in your captions to encourage people to spread the word. Every tag, share, or mention introduces your product to potential customers straight from someone they already trust. Giveaways are another way to encourage people to share. You can ask people to tag friends in the comments for a chance to win the product. That simple action can set off a chain reaction. The friend gets a notification, decides to enter too, and tags more friends to keep the momentum going. When custom pin manufacturer WizardPins got started on Instagram, they knew driving sales from a brand-new account would be a challenge. But a series of pin giveaways on Instagram helped get more eyes on their pins — it took them from 0 to 30K followers in 18 months, drove 100K visitors to their website, and turned the pin winners into brand ambassadors. Those giveaways helped the company generate $25,000 in revenue, a reminder that word-of-mouth marketing can lead to real sales. 4. Partner with influencersGen Z is changing how people discover new brands and products. In 2024, 69% of Gen Z shoppers said they’ve found something new through social media influencers, up from 45% just a year earlier. And when it comes to influencer marketing, Instagram is the go-to platform, with nine out of 10 brands and 86% of creators planning to focus their efforts there. Not every influencer needs to have a huge following to make an impact. Nano-influencers — those with 1,000 to 10K followers — actually drive more engagement than celebrity stars who can reach millions. Their audiences are smaller but more invested, so when they share a recommendation, it carries extra weight and leads to more interest in your product. But you don’t have to choose one over the other. Skin care and beauty brand Glossier uses a mix of nano-influencers and those with larger followings to share how real people use their products. Glossier’s recent Instagram posts featured mega-influencer Quenlin Blackwell (left), who has 3.3 million Instagram followers, and nano-influencer Nydia (right), who has 6,160 followers.⚡If you’re new to influencer marketing and don’t know where to start, here’s a guide on how to set a strategy for your influencer marketing campaigns.5. Don’t always be sellingThis advice might sound a little contradictory. I’ve just spent a few thousand words sharing tips on how to sell on Instagram, and now I’m saying “don’t always be selling.” I promise, it’s not. People don’t come to social media to be sold to. They come to scroll, see what their friends are up to, find a reel that makes them laugh, and share something relatable with their friends. That’s why it helps to show up in ways that are authentic instead of transactional. Reply to comments, even if they aren’t about buying. Share behind-the-scenes content from your day. Add a poll to your stories just to ask a fun question or get people talking. These actions might not lead to an immediate sale, but they do something just as valuable — build trust with your followers, which is one of the top three reasons people choose to buy from a brand. Selling on Instagram is only getting biggerSocial commerce sales have been on a steady rise, and they’re expected to keep growing. More and more people are shopping directly through the apps they use, which makes Instagram an even more valuable place to show up and reach your customers. Buffer can help. You can use Buffer to plan, schedule, and analyze your Instagram content, engage with customers, and create a digital shopfront to sell to them directly. Get started today for free. View the full article

When the Vietnam War finally ended on April 30, 1975, it left behind a landscape scarred with environmental damage. Vast stretches of coastal mangroves, once housing rich stocks of fish and birds, lay in ruins. Forests that had boasted hundreds of species were reduced to dried-out fragments, overgrown with invasive grasses. The term ecocide had been coined in the late 1960s to describe the U.S. military’s use of herbicides like Agent Orange and incendiary weapons like napalm to battle guerrilla forces that used jungles and marshes for cover. Fifty years later, Vietnam’s degraded ecosystems and dioxin-contaminated soils and waters still reflect the long-term ecological consequences of the war. Efforts to restore these damaged landscapes and even to assess the long-term harm have been limited. As an environmental scientist and anthropologist who has worked in Vietnam since the 1990s, I find the neglect and slow recovery efforts deeply troubling. Although the war spurred new international treaties aimed at protecting the environment during wartime, these efforts failed to compel post-war restoration for Vietnam. Current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East show these laws and treaties still aren’t effective. Agent Orange and daisy cutters The U.S. first sent ground troops to Vietnam in March 1965 to support South Vietnam against revolutionary forces and North Vietnamese troops, but the war had been going on for years before then. To fight an elusive enemy operating clandestinely at night and from hideouts deep in swamps and jungles, the U.S. military turned to environmental modification technologies. The most well-known of these was Operation Ranch Hand, which sprayed at least 19 million gallons of herbicides over approximately 6.4 million acres of South Vietnam. The chemicals fell on forests, and also on rivers, rice paddies, and villages, exposing civilians and troops. More than half of that spraying involved the dioxin-contaminated defoliant Agent Orange. Herbicides were used to strip the leaf cover from forests, increase visibility along transportation routes, and destroy crops suspected of supplying guerrilla forces. As news of the damage from these tactics made it back to the U.S., scientists raised concerns about the campaign’s environmental impacts to President Lyndon Johnson, calling for a review of whether the U.S. was intentionally using chemical weapons. American military leaders’ position was that herbicides did not constitute chemical weapons under the Geneva Protocol, which the U.S. had yet to ratify. Scientific organizations also initiated studies within Vietnam during the war, finding widespread destruction of mangroves, economic losses of rubber and timber plantations, and harm to lakes and waterways. In 1969, evidence linked a chemical in Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T, to birth defects and stillbirths in mice because it contained TCDD, a particularly harmful dioxin. That led to a ban on domestic use and suspension of Agent Orange use by the military in April 1970, with the last mission flown in early 1971. Incendiary weapons and the clearing of forests also ravaged rich ecosystems in Vietnam. The U.S. Forest Service tested large-scale incineration of jungles by igniting barrels of fuel oil dropped from planes. Particularly feared by civilians was the use of napalm bombs, with more than 400,000 tons of the thickened petroleum used during the war. After these infernos, invasive grasses often took over in hardened, infertile soils. “Rome Plows,” massive bulldozers with an armor-fortified cutting blade, could clear 1,000 acres a day. Enormous concussive bombs, known as “daisy cutters”, flattened forests and set off shock waves killing everything within a 3,000-foot radius, down to earthworms in the soil. The U.S. also engaged in weather modification through Project Popeye, a secret program from 1967 to 1972 that seeded clouds with silver iodide to prolong the monsoon season in an attempt to cut the flow of fighters and supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam. Congress eventually passed a bipartisan resolution in 1973 urging an international treaty to prohibit the use of weather modification as a weapon of war. That treaty came into effect in 1978. The U.S. military contended that all these tactics were operationally successful as a trade of trees for American lives. Despite Congress’s concerns, there was little scrutiny of the environmental impacts of U.S. military operations and technologies. Research sites were hard to access, and there was no regular environmental monitoring. Recovery efforts have been slow After the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese troops on April 30, 1975, the U.S. imposed a trade and economic embargo on all of Vietnam, leaving the country both war-damaged and cash-strapped. Vietnamese scientists told me they cobbled together small-scale studies. One found a dramatic drop in bird and mammal diversity in forests. In the A Lưới valley of central Vietnam, 80% of forests subjected to herbicides had not recovered by the early 1980s. Biologists found only 24 bird and five mammal species in those areas, far below normal in unsprayed forests. Only a handful of ecosystem restoration projects were attempted, hampered by shoestring budgets. The most notable began in 1978, when foresters began hand-replanting mangroves at the mouth of the Saigon River in Cần Giờ forest, an area that had been completely denuded. In inland areas, widespread tree-planting programs in the late 1980s and 1990s finally took root, but they focused on planting exotic trees like acacia, which did not restore the original diversity of the natural forests. Chemical cleanup is still underway For years, the U.S. also denied responsibility for Agent Orange cleanup, despite the recognition of dioxin-associated illnesses among U.S. veterans and testing that revealed continuing dioxin exposure among potentially tens of thousands of Vietnamese. The first remediation agreement between the two countries only occurred in 2006, after persistent advocacy by veterans, scientists, and nongovernmental organizations led Congress to appropriate $3 million for the remediation of the Da Nang airport. That project, completed in 2018, treated 150,000 cubic meters of dioxin-laden soil at an eventual cost of over $115 million, paid mostly by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The cleanup required lakes to be drained and contaminated soil, which had seeped more than 9 feet deeper than expected, to be piled and heated to break down the dioxin molecules. Another major hot spot is the heavily contaminated Biên Hoà airbase, where local residents continue to ingest high levels of dioxin through fish, chicken, and ducks. Agent Orange barrels were stored at the base, which leaked large amounts of the toxin into soil and water, where it continues to accumulate in animal tissue as it moves up the food chain. Remediation began in 2019; however, further work is at risk with the The President administration’s near elimination of USAID, leaving it unclear if there will be any American experts in Vietnam in charge of administering this complex project. Laws to prevent future ecocide are complicated While Agent Orange’s health effects have understandably drawn scrutiny, its long-term ecological consequences have not been well studied. Current-day scientists have far more options than those 50 years ago, including satellite imagery, which is being used in Ukraine to identify fires, flooding, and pollution. However, these tools cannot replace on-the-ground monitoring, which often is restricted or dangerous during wartime. The legal situation is similarly complex. In 1977, the Geneva Conventions governing conduct during wartime were revised to prohibit “widespread, long term, and severe damage to the natural environment.” A 1980 protocol restricted incendiary weapons. Yet oil fires set by Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991, and recent environmental damage in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, and Syria indicate the limits of relying on treaties when there are no strong mechanisms to ensure compliance. An international campaign currently underway calls for an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to add ecocide as a fifth prosecutable crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. Some countries have adopted their own ecocide laws. Vietnam was the first to legally state in its penal code that “Ecocide, destroying the natural environment, whether committed in time of peace or war, constitutes a crime against humanity.” Yet the law has resulted in no prosecutions, despite several large pollution cases. Both Russia and Ukraine also have ecocide laws, but these have not prevented harm or held anyone accountable for damage during the ongoing conflict. Lessons for the future The Vietnam War is a reminder that failure to address ecological consequences, both during war and after, will have long-term effects. What remains in short supply is the political will to ensure that these impacts are neither ignored nor repeated. Pamela McElwee is a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

The cutting edge of zipper technology involves zippers that work remotely. Japanese zipper maker YKK says it has developed a prototype for a self-propelled zipper that zips up with just the push of a button. These self-propelled zippers aren’t meant for your jeans or jackets, but rather for industrial uses, like tall tents that can’t be zipped up without using a ladder. That’s the mostly likely place you’ve seen YKK’s logo (it has 40% global market share). The company says the tech will save time and be safer than putting workers high up in the air to zip and unzip in hard-to-reach use cases. YKK conducted experiments with the zippers in February. It says that in one trial, the self-propelled zipper was able to zip up a 16-foot membrane in 40 seconds; in another, it zipped two arched shelter tents together in 50 seconds. The secret to the tech is a motorized screw that hooks the teeth of the zipper behind it as it moves forward. Video of the prototype shows the zipper and the button pushed to turn it on both connected to a cable, and the zipper itself is encased in a clear, transparent shell. YKK isn’t releasing the self-propelled zipper yet, but says it will continue to develop the prototype for practical use. If the company can get the tech off the ground, its wide adoption could push tents, temporary shelters, and partition dividers higher than they already go without any human-ladder limitations in the way. View the full article

Middle management can be exhausting—particularly at the beginning of a managerial career. On the one hand, these employees have to get down into the weeds and help members of their team do their jobs in the most effective ways. They may have some inexperienced reports who need help and development to work effectively and independently. On the other hand, their daily work is governed by layers of leadership above that restrict their autonomy and require them to convince others that new things they would like to try are worth the effort. This combination creates a situation in which middle managers can feel locked in. They are constantly solving problems from their direct reports while determining how to carry out new orders from above. A heavy workload combined with a lack of autonomy can lead to burnout. If you oversee middle managers, here are some things you can do to help detect whether there is a problem and intervene quickly: Tap into your network One significant problem middle managers have is that they may lack a good peer group. Frontline employees often band together and create a social group that creates camaraderie at work and may also extend to lunch outings or happy hour gatherings. Middle managers (particularly when they first ascend into a supervisor role) often lose that social connection. With their promotion, they go from being one of the frontline staff to being one of “them.” Yet they may not be embraced immediately by other managers. So they not only struggle with the difficulties of the tasks they are given, but they may face that struggle alone. It’s important to create a good social network that middle managers can plug into. This gives them the benefit of a community to talk to, and members of that team can alert other leaders if they see a colleague struggling. Watch for defections When managers start to burn out, they lose resilience. Resilience enables people to maintain a calm and even disposition, even when things go wrong. It enables managers to work closely with team members who need more training or who have made a mistake. As emotional resilience breaks down, managers are more likely to react to mistakes and requests for assistance with anger and annoyance. They may be more likely to punish mistakes rather than use them as learning opportunities. These reactions are likely to create frustration among this manager’s direct reports. As a result, members of this supervisor’s team may look for other jobs, either by transferring elsewhere in the company or leaving altogether. Exit interviews with frontline employees can help to detect this problem by gathering information about why people are leaving. If a manager is burning out, it will be more effective to work with them to help reestablish their resilience rather than putting them on a punitive performance improvement plan that does not address the emotional component of the problem. Ask better questions When you meet with your direct reports, you might expect to get information from them that would help you to see whether they are exhibiting signs of burnout. Unfortunately, most leaders often ask generic questions like “How are you doing?” While some workplaces create enough psychological safety to allow employees to feel comfortable talking about fatigue with the job, most new managers will put on a brave face and say they are fine. To address this, it’s important to ask a few questions that require longer answers; these can provide you with insight into how your middle managers are handling the strain. One valuable approach is to ask your reports how they handled a particular situation, rather than how are they doing. This question gets your them to relive the situation in front of you, to describe what happened and how they addressed it. A lot of what you’re listening for in this response is the emotion behind it. If you see anger or frustration on the part of your supervisee, that’s a signal that they are having difficulty with the stress of the job. If they talk about losing patience with particular employees, that may also be a warning sign. Use these conversations as a way to encourage middle managers you work with to talk with you when they are feeling overwhelmed. One of the best ways to help your team feel better about their work is for them to know that they are not dealing with stresses alone, and that you are available if they need help. View the full article

Beijing hardens rhetoric as it rolls out social media videos portraying itself as standing up to American ‘bullying’ View the full article

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Since assuming office, the The President administration has upended diversity, equity, and inclusion programs with startling efficiency. Over his first 100 days, President Donald The President has taken a multipronged approach to derailing DEI initiatives across the federal government, academic institutions, and even the private sector. Through an array of executive actions, The President has targeted federal anti-discrimination measures that date back 60 years and threatened to withhold funding from public schools and universities that maintain DEI programs. By explicitly directing federal agencies to investigate private employers, The President’s orders have also had a chilling effect across corporate America—leading a number of companies to cut back on DEI initiatives or at least create the illusion of doing so. As each day seems to bring a new DEI-related action or court ruling, it’s clear that undoing the progress many employers and federal institutions have made on equity and inclusion continues to be a core priority for this government. Here’s a closer look at how The President has chipped away at DEI programs during just his first few months in office: The federal workforce The President has moved swiftly to eliminate DEI programs that are squarely within his purview—namely, reversing the equity requirements that President Joe Biden had put in place during his term. One of The President’s first edicts was an executive order that forced agencies to eliminate all “illegal DEI” efforts. The order explicitly noted that DEI offices would have to be disbanded and roles like chief diversity officer would have to be terminated. The The President administration also told federal workers they were required to report anyone who tried to continue DEI work under a different name—or risk “adverse consequences.” Since The President handed down this order in January, federal agencies have cut at least 428 DEI roles and put those workers on administrative leave, according to The New York Times. (That figure only includes data from the agencies that have publicly reported those job cuts.) Some federal workers who were affected by the cuts claimed their roles had little to do with DEI. Others have said that even their employee resource groups were affected as agencies cracked down on DEI to comply with the executive order. Through other executive actions, The President reiterated the importance of merit-based hiring across the federal government, and that it “should not be based on impermissible factors, such as one’s commitment to illegal racial discrimination under the guise of ‘equity,’ or one’s commitment to the invented concept of ‘gender identity’ over sex.” By rescinding an executive order that dates back to 1965, The President also took aim at a key policy that has been critical to promoting racial equity and curtailing discriminatory hiring practices among federal contractors. For decades, this order has forced the hand of companies that do business with the federal government, compelling them to adopt affirmative action plans that diversified the workforce. With The President’s action, some of the largest employers in the country are no longer subject to those requirements. The education system In recent weeks, The President has ramped up pressure on the education system, fixing his sights on some of the most elite universities in the country. The administration is currently in the midst of a very public fight with Harvard University, stripping the school of billions of dollars in federal funding, in part because of its refusal to amend its DEI policies and admissions practices. (A number of other universities have also been singled out by The President over DEI-related issues and face similar threats to their funding.) Last week, The President pushed through an executive action aimed at college accreditors, who he argues have helped impose DEI requirements on universities. The President’s actions have already pushed many colleges to revise their DEI programs, regardless of whether they have been explicitly targeted: A recent Politico analysis found that more than 30 public universities have either closed their DEI offices or restructured them over the past few years—including the University of Michigan, which was once known for its robust DEI program. While The President’s ongoing battle with higher education has garnered more attention, other academic institutions have not escaped scrutiny over their DEI efforts. In a memo earlier this month, the The President administration ordered all public schools to eliminate DEI programs, again threatening to rescind federal funding. For now, this directive has been blocked by federal judges—and a coalition of attorneys general in Democratic states have brought a lawsuit against the The President administration. Since taking office, The President has also mounted investigations into the public school systems in California, Colorado, and Maine over DEI-related concerns like gender-neutral bathrooms and the rights of transgender students. The private sector Beyond the executive order targeting federal contractors, the The President administration has attempted to exert its influence over the private sector in other ways. In the same action, The President clearly directed federal agencies to investigate private-sector companies over any DEI programs that “constitute illegal discrimination or preferences.” This edict has sparked fear and confusion among corporate leaders, with many executives reportedly losing sleep over the threat of federal investigations. Experts say that a major source of concern has been the lack of clarity around what might be considered “illegal DEI.” The President’s orders have accelerated a shift in corporate America that had already been underway for some time. In the years since the racial reckoning of 2020, many companies have quietly backed away from the DEI initiatives they had seemingly embraced at the time. Since the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in 2023, however, employers have taken more drastic action in response to conservative activists like Robby Starbuck, who has waged social media campaigns to pressure companies into cutting their DEI programs. Companies like Walmart and McDonald’s have eliminated certain DEI policies and pulled out of the Human Rights Commission’s Corporate Equality Index, an annual benchmarking survey that measures workplace inclusion for LGBTQ+ workers and is often touted by employers. Even tech giants like Meta and Google have made notable changes to representation goals, which had become common practice across the industry. Some DEI experts argue that not all of these changes should be seen as a full-throated rebuke of diversity work. In some cases, employers are merely folding DEI work into other teams or tweaking programs to ensure they are legally sound—not to mention evaluating whether they continue to be effective. “If you see that there’s no longer a DEI title at this company, I think that could be bad news,” Joelle Emerson, the cofounder and CEO of culture and inclusion platform Paradigm, previously told Fast Company. “Or it could be that the company is actually very strategically embedding some of this expertise in ways that are going to have more impact on the business.” In fact, a survey recently conducted by Paradigm found that only a fraction of companies—19%—had actually reduced funding for DEI programs. Still, plenty of companies are now operating from a place of fear, carefully calibrating their external messaging on DEI and in some cases overcorrecting to avoid litigation or excessive scrutiny from The President. The administration’s anti-DEI agenda also seems to be shaping the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s priorities under new acting chair Andrea Lucas, who has issued guidance on what the agency considers “unlawful DEI-related discrimination.” In March, Lucas made a controversial decision to send letters to 20 prominent law firms requesting details on their DEI-related practices—four of which have already reached settlement agreements with the EEOC and agreed to drop the term DEI. View the full article

The first 100 days of The President’s second presidential term have included a surprising player that doesn’t seem likely to go away anytime soon: Signal. The encrypted messaging platform wasn’t necessarily in the public conscious until last month when top government officials discussed details of an impending military attack in Yemen in a group chat on the platform that inadvertently included The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg. The editor-in-chief published a piece called “The The President Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” about his shocking inclusion, and quickly set off national interest in Signal. Signal subsequently told Wired that the incident led to a huge uptick in downloads of the app on top of what had already been a “banner year.” Critics argued that if the nation’s top officials were talking about war plans in one chat, there must be other unreported chats. And just a few weeks later, another chat was revealed by The New York Times. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was on that original Signal thread, also was reported to have shared detailed information about those same forthcoming strikes in another Signal chat that—for some reason—included his wife, brother, and personal lawyer. Signal itself collects virtually no user data on its 30 million monthly users. But it’s still an unsecured consumer platform, often operated on a user’s personal phone, that’s vulnerable to hacks and surveillance. The Associated Press reported last week that Hegseth had an unsecured internet connection set up in his office so that he could use the Signal app on his computer. The app has a feature that allows users to set messages to automatically delete after a set period of time. That’s given some a false sense of security, but this week’s Semafor report on the massive right-leaning Signal group that’s attracted billionaires has reiterated that people can leak messages, and phones can always take screenshots. Turns out, what happens on Signal doesn’t always stay on Signal. View the full article

Cancer research in the U.S. doesn’t rely on a single institution or funding stream—it’s a complex ecosystem made up of interdependent parts: academia, pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology startups, federal agencies, and private foundations. As a cancer biologist who has worked in each of these sectors over the past three decades, I’ve seen firsthand how each piece supports the others. When one falters, the whole system becomes vulnerable. The United States has long led the world in cancer research. It has spent more on cancer research than any other country, including more than US$7.2 billion annually through the National Cancer Institute alone. Since the 1971 National Cancer Act, this sustained public investment has helped drive dramatic declines in cancer mortality, with death rates falling by 34% since 1991. In the past five years, the Food and Drug Administration has approved over 100 new cancer drugs, and the U.S. has brought more cancer drugs to the global market than any other nation. But that legacy is under threat. Funding delays, political shifts and instability across sectors have created an environment where basic research into the fundamentals of cancer biology is struggling to keep traction and the drug development pipeline is showing signs of stress. These disruptions go far beyond uncertainty and have real consequences. Early-career scientists faced with unstable funding and limited job prospects may leave academia altogether. Mid-career researchers often spend more time chasing scarce funding than conducting research. Interrupted research budgets and shifting policy priorities can unravel multiyear collaborations. I, along with many other researchers, believe these setbacks will slow progress, break training pipelines, and drain expertise from critical areas of cancer research—delays that ultimately hurt patients waiting for new treatments. A 50-year foundation of federal investment The modern era of U.S. cancer research began with the signing of the National Cancer Act in 1971. That law dramatically expanded the National Cancer Institute, an agency within the National Institutes of Health focusing on cancer research and education. The NCI laid the groundwork for a robust national infrastructure for cancer science, funding everything from early research in the lab to large-scale clinical trials and supporting the training of a generation of cancer researchers. This federal support has driven advances leading to higher survival rates and the transformation of some cancers into a manageable chronic or curable condition. Progress in screening, diagnostics and targeted therapies—and the patients who have benefited from them—owe much to decades of NIH support. But federal funding has always been vulnerable to political headwinds. During the first The President administration, deep cuts to biomedical science budgets threatened to stall the progress made under initiatives such as the 2016 Cancer Moonshot. The rationale given for these cuts was to slash overall spending, despite facing strong bipartisan opposition in Congress. Lawmakers ultimately rejected the administration’s proposal and instead increased NIH funding. In 2022, the Biden administration worked to relaunch the Cancer Moonshot. This uncertainty has worsened in 2025 as the second The President administration has cut or canceled many NIH grants. Labs that relied on these awards are suddenly facing funding cliffs, forcing them to lay off staff, pause experiments, or shutter entirely. Deliberate delays in communication from the Department of Health and Human Services have stalled new NIH grant reviews and funding decisions, putting many promising research proposals already in the pipeline at risk. Philanthropy’s support is powerful—but limited While federal agencies remain the backbone of cancer research funding, philanthropic organizations provide the critical support for breakthroughs—especially for new ideas and riskier projects. Groups such as the American Cancer Society, Stand Up To Cancer, and major hospital foundations have filled important gaps in support, often funding pilot studies or supporting early-career investigators before they secure federal grants. By supporting bold ideas and providing seed funding, they help launch innovative research that may later attract large-scale support from the NIH. Without the bureaucratic constraints of federal agencies, philanthropy is more nimble and flexible. It can move faster to support work in emerging areas, such as immunotherapy and precision oncology. For example, the American Cancer Society grant review process typically takes about four months from submission, while the NIH grant review process takes an average of eight months. But philanthropic funds are smaller in scale and often disease-specific. Many foundations are created around a specific cause, such as advancing cures for pancreatic, breast, or pediatric cancers. Their urgency to make an impact allows them to fund bold approaches that federal funders may see as too preliminary or speculative. Their giving also fluctuates. For instance, the American Cancer Society awarded nearly $60 million less in research grants in 2020 compared with 2019. While private foundations are vital partners for cancer research, they cannot replace the scale and consistency of federal funding. Total U.S. philanthropic funding for cancer research is estimated at a few billion dollars per year, spread across hundreds of organizations. In comparison, the federal government has typically contributed roughly five to eight times more than philanthropy to cancer research each year. Industry innovation—and its priorities Private-sector innovation is essential for translating discoveries into treatments. In 2021, nearly 80% of the roughly $57 billion the U.S. spent on cancer drugs came from pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Many of the treatments used in oncology today, including immunotherapies and targeted therapies, emerged from collaborations between academic labs and industry partners. But commercial priorities don’t always align with public health needs. Companies naturally focus on areas with strong financial returns: common cancers, projects that qualify for fast-track regulatory approval, and high-priced drugs. Rare cancers, pediatric cancers, and basic science often receive less attention. Industry is also saddled with uncertainty. Rising R&D costs, tough regulatory requirements, and investor wariness have created a challenging environment to bring new drugs to market. Several biotech startups have folded or downsized in the past year, leaving promising new drugs stranded in limbo in the lab before they can reach clinical trials. Without federal or philanthropic entities to pick up the slack, these discoveries may never reach the patients who need them. A system under strain Cancer is not going away. As the U.S. population ages, the burden of cancer on society will only grow. Disparities in treatment access and outcomes persist across race, income, and geography. And factors such as environmental exposures and infectious diseases continue to intersect with cancer risk in new and complex ways. Addressing these challenges requires a strong, stable, and well-coordinated research system. But that system is under strain. National Cancer Institute grant paylines, or funding cutoffs, remain highly competitive. Early-career researchers face precarious job prospects. Labs are losing technicians and postdoctoral researchers to higher-paying roles in industry or to burnout. And patients, especially those hoping to enroll in clinical trials, face delays, disruptions and dwindling options This is not just a funding issue. It’s a coordination issue between the federal government, academia, and industry. There are currently no long-term policy solutions that ensure sustained federal investment, foster collaboration between academia and industry, or make room for philanthropy to drive innovation instead of just filling gaps. I believe that for the U.S. to remain a global leader in cancer research, it will need to recommit to the model that made success possible: a balanced ecosystem of public funding, private investment, and nonprofit support. Up until recently, that meant fully funding the NIH and NCI with predictable, long-term budgets that allow labs to plan for the future; incentivizing partnerships that move discoveries from bench to bedside without compromising academic freedom; supporting career pathways for young scientists so talent doesn’t leave the field; and creating mechanisms for equity to ensure that research includes and benefits all communities. Cancer research and science have come a long way, saving about 4.5 million lives in the U.S. from cancer from 1991 to 2022. Today, patients are living longer and better because of decades of hard-won discoveries made by thousands of researchers. But science doesn’t run on good intentions alone. It needs universities. It needs philanthropy. It needs industry. It needs vision. And it requires continued support from the federal government. Jeffrey MacKeigan is a professor of pediatrics and human development at Michigan State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Whatever else Donald The President intends with his assault on the federal workforce, labor unions, and the National Labor Relations Board, one potential effect is clear: a devastating blow to Black Americans who for decades have used public-sector jobs to move up from subsistence living and toward the middle class. “Federal employment has been a pathway to the middle class for African American workers and their families since Reconstruction, including postal work and other occupations,” explained Danielle Mahones, director of the leadership development program at the University of California, Berkeley, Labor Center. “[Now y]ou’re going to see Black workers lose their federal jobs.” Black people are the only racial or ethnic group to be “overrepresented” in government jobs. Data analysis by the Pew Research Foundation shows that while Black people make up 12.8% of the nation’s population, they account for 18.6% of the federal workforce. At the U.S. Postal Service, Black workers comprised 30% of the total workforce in fiscal year 2022. Although the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that African Americans are still underrepresented in executive positions within the postal service, the overall numbers reflect a robust history of Blacks seeking out USPS jobs to move their lives forward. California has the second-largest population of federal workers outside the Washington, D.C., area. Deep federal job cuts will affect the state’s roughly 150,000 workers, and Black employees make up more than 10% of that total. Historically, Black workers have used federal positions, many of them union represented, as “pathways to homeownership, higher education for their children, and retirement savings—opportunities that were not widely available to previous generations,” said Andrea Slater, director of the Center for the Advancement of Racial Equity at Work at the University of California, Los Angeles, Labor Center. Those opportunities didn’t insulate Black families from the decades-old practices of redlining housing policies, wage theft, and other inequities, Slater said, but a government job usually meant dependable employment and some form of pension. “Federal jobs and government contracts have helped build and establish cohesive Black middle-class communities from the Bay Area to San Diego,” Slater added. * * * Postal workers nationwide have publicly protested a proposed cut of 10,000 jobs, which they consider a step toward an Elon Musk-led attempt to privatize the postal service. At a Los Angeles rally in March, Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, told the crowd, “We had an election in November, and some people voted for President The President, and some people voted for Vice President Harris, some people voted for other candidates. But you know what none of them voted for? To dismantle the Postal Service.” Still, a sense of unease hangs over the process. Asked for comment this week, a union representative in Northern California, who said the situation had their colleagues worried about losing jobs and civil service careers, refused to be quoted or identified. The President’s true motives for clear-cutting federal jobs and going after the unions aren’t known, but his animus toward union labor is no secret. During his first term, the president’s policymakers acted to weaken or abandon regulations that protected workers’ pay and safety, and The President directed particular force against federal workers, more than a third of whom are covered by union contracts. Many workers and their unions were caught flat-footed by the scale and intensity of The President 2.0’s effort to decimate their ranks. “Nobody was ready for this,” UC Berkeley’s Mahones said. “This is part of a long-term project to eliminate the labor movement and unions. What is new, though, is the acceleration—doing something so massive, so quickly and chaotically, with no regard to the law nor humanity.” The President signed an order in March directing 18 departments to terminate contracts it had already signed with unions representing federal workers, and to shutter the process through which employees could file job-related grievances. The President cited a 1978 law that makes exceptions from collective bargaining for departments that have national security missions. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 820,000 federal and D.C. government workers, said The President has abused that narrow cutout in the law to go after multiple departments that are heavily unionized—and an accompanying fact sheet distributed by the White House all but confirmed that. The release claimed that “certain federal unions have declared war on President The President’s agenda,” adding that The President “refuses to let union obstruction interfere with his efforts to protect Americans and our national interests.” The AFGE and several other unions filed suit in federal district court in Northern California seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent The President’s mandate from taking effect. Caught in the middle, meanwhile, are hundreds of thousands of federal employees whose jobs are on the line, including Black workers who may have spent their entire careers in a single area of public-sector service. “The specific requirements of government sector positions will likely require Black displaced workers to acquire new job skills—and ageism and racism continue to influence hiring practices, even in California,” Slater said. This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. View the full article

Dive into the exhilarating world of innovation with FC Explains, a video series that spotlights the game changers and visionaries from Fast Company’s prestigious Most Innovative Companies list. This annual ranking celebrates the trailblazers who are reshaping industries and cultures, pushing boundaries, and transforming the world. First up is Bluesky. View the full article

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