James' World 2

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Mystery solved? Not Yeti, but close.

A year ago, geneticists reported that RNA extracted from hair samples attributed to the Himalayan Yeti monster, a.k.a. “the Abominable Snowman,” were actually most similar to the 40,000-year-old genetic signature of a now-extinct breed of polar bear. They suggested there might be a yet-to-be-discovered bear species lurking in the remote Himalayan snows.

Now a different research team says the hairs were just as likely to come from a type of brown bear that’s common in the Himalayas.

The scientists behind the original study, led by Oxford University’s Bryan Sykes, are holding to their claims about the polar-bearish RNA. But Eliecer Gutierrez of the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald Pine, who’s associated with the University of Kansas’ Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, say there’s too much genetic overlap in the RNA results to rule out the Himalayan brown bear.

The analysis from Gutierrez and Pine was published online Monday by the open-access journal ZooKeys.

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The working woman’s problems in 9 to 5, the Jane Fonda-starring feminist comedy about three secretaries’ revolt against their chauvinistic boss, only seem distant at first.

Yes, the movie is four decades old. Female office workers and secretaries are no longer the largest sector of the American workforce; 20 million women don’t roll on pantyhose and sling on high heels every morning while staring down the barrel of another day of mind-numbing clerical work and coffee-fetching. The battle to end the gender pay gap and sexual harassment on the job still toils on. But the feminist movement of the 1970s organized resistance against male bosses who regarded the women around them at work as “office wives” and not fellow professionals. Female office workers took to the streets and brought their message to employers, legislatures, and pop culture.

Finally, women’s careers diversified; cultural attitudes changed. For many Americans, the oppressed secretary’s struggle for respect and recognition now seems frozen in time, stiff as the four-inch halo of hairspray curls around every woman’s head in 9 to 5.

But right at the end of the movie, just before we toast champagne with Fonda, Dolly Parton, and Lily Tomlin in their newly egalitarian office, 9 to 5 reveals a more radical vision of the workplace than the simple eradication of every “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” (Like their boss, who gets relocated to Brazil.) Tomlin rattles off new employee benefits and accommodations including an in-office daycare center, flexible hours, a job-sharing program, even resources for recovering alcoholics—on top of the basic things like robust health care, equal pay, and the catharsis of watching a serial sexual harasser shipped off the continent. Workers are happier and more productive, making higher-ups happy too. It’s a gleaming example of how functional and humane work can be.

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Last November in the cavernous Amazon Room of Las Vegas’s Rio casino, two dozen men dressed mostly in sweatshirts and baseball caps sat around three well-worn poker tables playing Texas Hold ’em. Occasionally a few passers-by stopped to watch the action, but otherwise the players pushed their chips back and forth in dingy obscurity. Except for the taut, electric stillness with which they held themselves during a hand, there was no outward sign that these were the greatest poker players in the world, nor that they were, as the poker saying goes, “playing for houses,” or at least hefty down payments. This was the first day of a three-day tournament whose official name was the World Series of Poker Super High Roller, though the participants simply called it “the 250K,” after the $250,000 each had put up to enter it.

At one table, a professional player named Seth Davies covertly peeled up the edges of his cards to consider the hand he had just been dealt: the six and seven of diamonds. Over several hours of play, Davies had managed to grow his starting stack of 1.5 million in tournament chips to well over two million, some of which he now slid forward as a raise. A 33-year-old former college baseball player with a trimmed light brown beard, Davies sat upright, intensely following the action as it moved around the table. Two men called his bet before Dan Smith, a fellow pro with a round face, mustache and whimsically worn cowboy hat, put in a hefty reraise. Only Davies called.

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Illustration by Patricia Doria

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In almost every regard, new cars are better than they’ve been at any time in their history. They’re safer than they used to be—though that is less true for women. Powertrains, particularly battery-electric ones, are more powerful and more efficient, which helps to compensate for the extra weight of that added safety equipment. Vehicles are far more reliable, at least for their first 100,000 miles, and even cheap cars come with standard equipment that would seem like science fiction to drivers from just a few decades ago.

They ride better; they stop better—so everything’s great, right? The problem is that modern cars almost invariably feel a bit boring to drive. The issue is more acute the longer you’ve been driving, as you might expect since the cause is technological progression—specifically, power steering.

What happened to steering feel?

For much of the car’s existence, steering was entirely unassisted. The driver turns the wheel connected to a steering column that, through links and pivots and usually a gear, turns the front wheels in either direction. That setup was marvelous for feedback, but it wasn’t great in terms of the effort required to turn the wheel, particularly at lower speeds.

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The Porsche Taycan is one of the few new cars to exhibit anything we might recognize as steering feel. That wasn’t always the case.

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If you’ve ever been tempted by a flutter, you’ll know how bookmakers and casinos stack the odds against you. The clearest example is roulette, where there are 36 red and black numbers plus the green numbers 0 and (in the U.S.) 00. So that’s 38 possibilities in total. When betting on red or black, the odds of choosing correctly are 18/38, and a fair payout for a $1 stake is $2.111. However, the house pays only $2 and keeps the difference. In that way, it guarantees itself a profit.

A similar bias occurs in bookmakers’ odds on horse races, soccer, and every other sporting event. The bookies always ensure that the odds are in their favor. But setting these odds is harder than those for roulette because the calculations are trickier.

And that raises a tantalizing possibility. Is it possible to come up with a better way to calculate the odds, and thus beat the bookies?

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Photo by humonia / Getty Images.

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