The south-western black rhinoceros is a subspecies of the black rhinoceros, living in southwestern Africa. It is currently listed as vulnerable by the IUCN.The biggest threat towards the subspecies Diceros bicornis occidentalis is illegal poaching.
For a few days this summer, Alexa, the voice assistant who speaks to me through my Amazon Echo Dot, took to ending our interactions with a whisper: Sweet dreams. Every time it happened, I was startled, although I thought I understood why she was doing it, insofar as I understand anything that goes on inside that squat slice of black tube.I had gone onto Amazon.com and activated a third-party “skill”—an applike program that enables Alexa to perform a service or do a trick—called “Baby Lullaby.” It plays an instrumental version of a nursery song (yes, I still listen to lullabies to get to sleep), then signs off softly with the nighttime benediction. My conjecture is that the last string of code somehow went astray and attached itself to other “skills.” But even though my adult self knew perfectly well that Sweet dreams was a glitch, a part of me wanted to believe that Alexa meant it. Who doesn’t crave a motherly goodnight, even in mid-afternoon? Proust would have understood.
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The voice revolution has only just begun. Today, Alexa is a humble servant. Very soon, she could be much more—a teacher, a therapist, a confidant, an informant.
It was Christmas Eve 1994, and James P. Allison was testing his theory that T cells, a type of white blood cell that fights viral and bacterial infections, could help the immune system fight cancer. That week, he was covering for a postdoc aide on a European trip, who’d injected cancerous mice with an antibody to activate T cells to go after tumors. The results were stunning: All of those given the antibody became cancer-free, while the mice not provided with the antibody saw their tumors grow until they eventually died.
Allison ran back the experiment. But this time, the cancer didn’t respond. Allison grew frustrated. “I was being told, ‘You’re just foolish, this is never gonna work,’ ” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “That was one that really pissed me off.”
But when he returned four days later to check on his furry subjects, the tumors in the mice injected with the antibody had totally disappeared. “I went, ‘Wow,’ ” said Allison, 70. “That was a real turning point. I said, ‘Okay, we’re onto something here.’ I never expected that to happen. I did have a notion that if we could figure that out, then we might have a shot at cancer.”
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Scientists like Jim Allison and Barbara McClintock faced harsh criticism for their discoveries. Independently, they both later won the Nobel Prize.(Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos announced Thursday that they have agreed to divorce terms, with MacKenzie Bezos set to hold on to a chunk of Amazon stock.
In a tweet Thursday, MacKenzie Bezos said she would keep 25% of the couple’s Amazon stock, which should give her a 4% stake in the company. Jeff Bezos will retain voting control over all her shares and will also maintain all his interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, a private space company.
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Amazon confirmed in a filing Thursday that MacKenzie Bezos is expected to hold 4% of the company’s outstanding common stock pending a court approval of their divorce decree. Based on Amazon’s current market value, that amount would be worth roughly $35 billion.
Lighthouses of the United States: Southern California. … Interest in lighthouses is certainly high in California and new lighthouses have been built recently in Santa Cruz and Long Beach.
As the Bible tells it, the first crime committed was a lapse of self-control. Eve was forbidden from tasting the fruit on the tree of knowledge. But the temptation was too much. The fruit was just so “pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom,” Genesis reads. Who wouldn’t want that? Humanity was just days old, but already we were succumbing to a vice.
The takeaway from this story was clear: when temptation overcomes willpower, it’s a moral failing, worthy of punishment.
Modern-day psychologists might not blame Eve for her errant ways at all. Because what’s true today was also true at the beginning of time (regardless of what story you believe in): Human beings are horrible at resisting temptation.
As a specialist in Alzheimer’s prevention, Jessica Langbaum knows that exercising her mental muscles can help keep her brain sharp.
But Langbaum, who holds a doctorate in psychiatric epidemiology, has no formal mental fitness program. She doesn’t do crossword puzzles or play computer brain games.
“Just sitting down and doing Sudoku isn’t probably going to be the one key thing that’s going to prevent you from developing Alzheimer’s disease,” she says.
Instead of using a formal brain training program, she simply goes to work.
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If you like sudoku, go ahead and play. But staying sharp means using many parts of your brain.
In 1937, Orson Welles had a strange run-in with Ernest Hemingway. The future director of “Citizen Kane,” who was then twenty-two, was recording voice-over for the documentary “The Spanish Earth,” a Spanish Civil War film for which Hemingway and John Dos Passos had supplied a text. When Welles proposed some changes, Hemingway rasped, “Some damn faggot who runs an art theatre thinks he can tell me how to write narration.” Welles responded by assuming a fey voice and saying, “Oh, Mr. Hemingway, how strong you are and how big you are!” A physical altercation ensued. Then the two men burst out laughing, and got drunk. Or so Welles claimed.
The incident lingered in Welles’s mind. He was probably aware of the sexual ambiguities that lay behind Hemingway’s macho façade. In the nineteen-sixties, Welles wrote a script entitled “The Sacred Beasts,” about a movie director who attends bullfights and becomes enchanted by a charismatic toreador. In a subsequent script, titled “The Other Side of the Wind,” the bullfighter becomes a young actor, whom the director, Jake Hannaford, has discovered, tormented, and driven away. The main action takes place at Hannaford’s seventieth-birthday party, where portions of his latest picture, a cryptic exercise in art-house psychedelia, are being screened. Hannaford drinks himself into oblivion and dies the next morning in a car crash. Welles shot the script in stages between 1970 and 1976, with John Huston in the principal role. About forty minutes of film had been edited when the project became hopelessly mired in financial and legal difficulties. It was unfinished at the time of Welles’s death, in 1985.
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Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston star in Orson Welles’s “The Other Side of the Wind,” which will play at New York Film Festival on Saturday, forty-eight years after shooting began.
The events of May 5, 2018, would eventually cast Phillip Zolper as an international symbol of racism in Donald Trump’s America.
But if he was worried about anything when he woke up that morning, it was dancing at his junior prom.
Like a lot of 17-year-old boys, Zolper wondered if he would embarrass himself in front of his date, a friend. And there were so many things to take care of first. Zolper had to buy a corsage. But he didn’t like any of the precut ones, so he bought untrimmed flowers instead. Then, there were the pictures. Around 10 in the morning, Zolper, his date, and the prom group met at a house in the bluffs west of town, where they posed for each other.
Afterward, Zolper, his friends, and their dates caravanned down the county trunk highway to the center of Baraboo, the small, middle-class Wisconsin city where most of them attended high school. When they arrived, the lawn in front of the Sauk County Courthouse was already mobbed. Promgoers had been coming here for years the day of the dance for big class photos; today it seemed like everyone’s families had turned out too.
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The intentions behind the Nazi salute photograph seen around the world were hardly as sinister as they first appeared. But in Trump and Twitter’s America, as one small Midwestern town discovered, image is everything.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.