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“Entry number 123!” The resonant words of Larry Mellinger, a senior attorney at the U.S. Department of the Interior, were followed by murmurs from the assembled crowd. An official from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) moved slowly across the stage, holding up a seven-by-10-inch painting before each of five expert judges. Behind the judges, a screen displayed the same image writ large: a pair of bizarre yet beautiful ducks. With its bright orange bill, dense green feathers behind the nostril, and round patch of silvery-white feathers surrounding the eye, the Spectacled Eider is unlikely to be confused with any of the other four species that were eligible for this year’s contest. The colorful drake was pictured next to its brown-feathered mate in the early morning light, snowcapped Alaskan mountains rising in the far background.

This was the scene at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., on September 20, when the judging of the 2024 Federal Duck Stamp Contest was poised to reach its climax. Over the previous two days, the auditorium had been packed with artists and spectators—a melting pot of flannel-clad veterans, aspiring young artists barely out of high school, curious onlookers, and even an adorable Seeing Eye puppy-in-training. The Duck Stamp Contest defies stereotypes: one is just as likely to spot a gray beard or a shock of bright blue hair in the audience. Additional thousands had been watching online, the live chat of the FWS YouTube channel bubbling with comments such as “I love the lighting on the neck here,” “eiders always look a little bit suspicious,” and even “Something about that Brant [goose] cheek is giving IDGAF brat energy.”

In the first round of judging, a field of 239 artworks was winnowed to 85. In the second round, 15 finalists were selected. Now everything was on the line. One of these paintings would appear on the 2025 Duck Stamp. The winner receives a sheet of 25 stamps signed by the Secretary of the Interior. It is a modest prize, to be sure, but victory conveys instant stature in the field of wildlife art. And print sales are so lucrative that the winning painting is often called “The Million-Dollar Duck.”

For the 338th time at the event, Mellinger intoned, “Please vote.” One by one, judges raised their numbered placard in an old-school process reminiscent of the judging for cold war–era Olympic figure skating. Four judges held up a 5, and one raised a 4. The audience gasped—the painting of the Spectacled Eiders had scored 24 out of a maximum of 25 possible points! Six more paintings were judged, but none surpassed that score.

For two days, the artists had been anonymous, but now it was revealed that the Spectacled Eiders were the work of Adam Grimm. This is Grimm’s third win, and his previous winning paintings of a Mottled Duck and a pair of Canvasbacks are currently on display in a gallery upstairs from where the competition was held, in an exhibition titled “Conservation Through the Arts: Celebrating the Federal Duck Stamp,” on view through February 9, 2025.

Duck Stamp Art on Display

As I stood in the back of the auditorium, listening to the thunderous applause fade away, I took a moment to reflect on my personal journey into the universe of the Duck Stamp. As recently as 2021, my familiarity with the Duck Stamp was limited to a vague awareness that its purchase is required to hunt waterfowl. Then I met Richie Prager. A conservationist and former Duck Stamp judge, he spent many years assembling a world-class collection of Duck Stamps before turning to a much more difficult task: tracking down the original art behind each stamp. Prager managed to acquire an astonishing 61 original artworks, along with many associated preliminary drawings and prints. Ultimately, he decided to donate them to the Bruce Museum, and Duck Stamp history became my life for the next three years. As science curator at the museum, I worked to organize an exhibition that showcases the art and artists behind the stamp.

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[Photos: Alex Knight/Pexels; Tara Winstead/Pexels]

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It’s a conversation that Marian Betz admits can feel awkward at first. Broaching it might even be viewed as questioning the adequacy of someone else’s parenting. But Betz, the mother of two teenage girls in Denver, Colo., says that because of the ubiquitous nature of firearms in American homes, she regularly asks other parents about securing guns. In fact, she has done so since her kids started having playdates and sleepovers a decade ago.

Many parents either don’t realize they should ask about guns or feel too embarrassed to do so. A study released last month in Pediatrics found that more than 60 percent of the Illinois parents that the researchers surveyed had never asked another parent whether there was an unlocked firearm in that person’s home before allowing their child to visit for a playdate. It’s a startling statistic when you consider that, among children aged 14 and under, almost 20 percent of unintentional firearm-related deaths occur at a friend’s home.

Betz, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and an expert in the prevention of firearm injury and suicide, has seen firsthand the harm that guns can do when they’re left unlocked in the home. In all, 2,526 kids and teens died from gunshots wounds in the U.S. in 2022, according to a report released in September from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

A simple conversation can go a long way in preventing accidental deaths. Betz frames questions about guns as one of several safety topics parents should discuss with one another before playdates, including everything from food allergies to unsupervised pool access, marijuana, alcohol and adult supervision. But the most important discussion is about access to unlocked firearms. Betz taught herself to have these conversations because she contends that you can’t accurately predict who might be a gun owner. “Our stereotypes about gun owners can be wrong,” Betz says. “In a country where up to 40 percent of adults live in a house with a gun, you can’t just go by the political yard sign or their chosen TV news station.”

While non-gun owners might think that asking about guns feels overbearing, research, perhaps surprisingly, shows that gun owners welcome the conversation, says Nick Buttrick, a psychologist who studies the symbolism of gun ownership at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. People in focus groups who own guns say that talking about gun safety is actually really important to them. “The anticipated friction stops people from having the conversation,” Buttrick says, “but when they actually have it, they’re received with a lot more positivity than they might have imagined.”

Non-gun owners, he adds, may feel out of their depth when it comes to asking about safe gun storage because they might not know what it entails. The ideal practice is called triple-safe storage: a gun that is locked up and unloaded with ammunition stowed away separately. Knowing what you’re looking for before you ask can ease preconversation anxiety, Buttrick says.

Additionally, a study published in PNAS on April 8 found that within the gun-owning community, there is widespread discomfort with insecure firearm storage. In the study, even Republican gun owners didn’t want their neighbors

to have quick access to unlocked, loaded firearms. And that if a person knew someone living close by didn’t store their gun in a safe or at least with a chamber lock on a pistol, they were less likely to be willing to socialize with that neighbor, says Justin Sola, lead study author and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This consensus held true for both “red” and “blue” voters, whether or not they were gun owners themselves. “There’s a penalty that people assess toward their neighbors if they don’t store their guns safely,” Sola says. He contends that there’s a universal aversion to unsafe storage that both gun owners and non-gun owners can agree on, all of which can make these conversations between parents easier.

Another good strategy is not to ask whether an individual has a gun but to assume they do and go straight to asking whether that gun is locked up, says Paul Nestadt, an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, whose research focuses on gun death and suicide prevention. The question isn’t whether you should judge someone for owning guns; it’s whether those guns are locked up in a way that keeps kids from having any access to them. “Asking something more innocuous like ‘How do you store your gun?’ makes people feel less defensive, so they’re more likely to be honest,” Nestadt says. If they don’t have a gun, they can just say so—and if they do, the data show that they’re more likely than you might expect to want to talk about how they store it, he adds.

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While AI is lauded by some as the biggest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution, enterprises — arguably the tech’s biggest potential customer base — have been slow to adopt AI.

While some investors predicted that 2024 would be the year we’d start to see more AI adoption by enterprises, that didn’t play out as budgets remained constrained and AI tech often remained in the “experimental” category.

Will that all start to change in 2025? Depends on who you ask.

TechCrunch talked to 20 venture capitalists who back startups looking to sell to enterprises about their predictions for 2025. They told us what they anticipate regarding enterprise budgets, trends worth following, and what it will take to raise a Series A in 2025, among other things. Here’s what they said.

What enterprise-related trends will you be paying attention to the most in 2025?

SC Moatti, managing partner, Mighty Capital: I’m really looking into this theme — AI adoption hinges on better data. As enterprises transition from AI experiments to large-scale deployment, the demand for high-quality data intensifies.

Aaron Jacobson, partner, NEA: Code agents for app development modernization are underhyped. Expect to see AI being used to re-platform mainframe apps to the cloud and upgrade older codebases.

Molly Alter, partner, Northzone: A key focus of mine is on spaces that were historically untouchable by venture funds because their business models demanded high COGS or OpEx. We’re seeing AI automate so much behind-the-scenes work that sectors like accounting services, or revenue cycle management, or white-glove legal services can now command software-like margins.

Marell Evans, founder and general partner, Exceptional Capital: Understanding trends in enterprise sales cycles — what is the duration certain organizations are trialing tools for before making decisions about internal adoption? In addition, understanding the different pricing models of AI [in relation to] traditional SaaS, consumption-based and/or outcome-based.

Mike Hayes, managing director, Insight Partners: An unappreciated metric and something that I think will gain traction in 2025 is TTFV, or time-to-first-value. I see this as a proxy for ease-of-implementation, so faster TTFV solutions should have a bigger advantage going into [the] new year.

What areas are you looking to invest in?

Liran Grinberg, co-founder, and managing partner, Team8: Enterprise resilience, whether in front of operational faults or malicious insider or outsider threats. The CrowdStrike software update incident demonstrated how fragile our digital world is, not only due to cyberattackers but also just mistakes.

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Many Many More!

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As a comparative psychologist, I’m used to assaults from my experimental subjects. I’ve been stung by bees, pinched by crayfish and battered by indignant pigeons. But, somehow, with Squirt it felt different. As he eyed us with his W-shaped pupils, he seemed clearly to be plotting against us.

Of course, I’m being anthropomorphic. Science does not yet have the tools to confirm whether cuttlefish have emotional states, or whether they are capable of conscious experience, much less sinister plots. But there’s undeniably something special about cephalopods – the class of ocean-dwelling invertebrates that includes cuttlefish, squid, and octopus.

As researchers learn more about cehpalopods’ cognitive skills, there are calls to treat them in ways better aligned with their level of intelligence. California and Washington state both approved bans on octopus farming in 2024. Hawaii is considering similar action, and a ban on farming octopus or importing farmed octopus meat has been introduced in Congress. A planned octopus farm in Spain’s Canary Islands is attracting opposition from scientists and animal welfare advocates.

Some of these species live alone in the nearly featureless darkness of the deep ocean; others live socially on active, sunny coral reefs. Many are skilled hunters, but some feed passively on floating debris. Because of this enormous diversity, the size and complexity of cephalopod brains and behaviors also varies tremendously.

Almost everything that’s known about cephalopod cognition comes from intensive study of just a few species. When considering the welfare of a designated species of captive octopus, it’s important to be careful about using data collected from a distant evolutionary relative.

Can we even measure alien intelligence?

Intelligence is fiendishly hard to define and measure, even in humans. The challenge grows exponentially in studying animals with sensory, motivational, and problem-solving skills that differ profoundly from ours.

Historically, researchers have tended to focus on whether animals think like humans, ignoring the abilities that animals may have that humans lack. To avoid this problem, scientists have tried to find more objective measures of cognitive abilities.

One option is a relative measure of brain to body size. The best-studied species of octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has about 500 million neurons; that’s relatively large for its small body size and similar to a starling, rabbit or turkey.

More accurate measures may include the size, neuron count or surface area of specific brain structures thought to be important for learning. While this is useful in mammals, the nervous system of an octopus is built completely differently.

Over half of the neurons in Octopus vulgaris, about 300 million, are not in the brain at all, but distributed in “mini-brains,” or ganglia, in the arms. Within the central brain, most of the remaining neurons are dedicated to visual processing, leaving less than a quarter of its neurons for other processes such as learning and memory.

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If you ask Nandan Nilekani, the key to being successful in today’s ever-changing job landscape is simpler than you think.

Nilekani co-founded Infosys, an information technology (IT) and consulting firm, in 1981, serving as CEO from 2002 to 2007 before creating Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identification system, in 2009. His contributions to the tech landscape helped him reach billionaire status, with a current net worth of $3.6 billion, according to Forbes.

As tech and AI changes workflows, and anxiety around the future of work looms, Nilekani says people should focus on building the soft skills that artificial intelligence can’t replicate.

“Be curious, connected and relevant,” he told LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky in a recent episode of “The Path” newsletter. “I get up every morning wanting to learn new things, and I keep my mind open.”

It’s a mantra that’s propelled Nilekani throughout his career. The 69-year-old grew up in India in the ’60s and early ‘70s, where parents had

strict rules for their kids’ careers, he said: either be a doctor or an engineer.

Nilekani chose engineering, but went to a college his father didn’t approve of, and chose electrical over chemical engineering, again, to his father’s dismay. He graduated from IIT Bombay in 1978 and became obsessed with a new technology, mini computers, shortly after.

He got a job at Putney Computer Systems, the company developing the new tech, under N.R. Narayana Murthy, who would later call on him to co-found Infosys, where Nilekani currently serves as a non-executive chairman.

Nilekani credits most of his success to his hunger for information and the excitement that learning new things brought him, insisting that curiosity made him successful, not a love for business. 

“I’m an accidental entrepreneur,” he told Roslansky. “It’s not that I set out my life to be an entrepreneur, but once I got into it, I realized this was my calling.”

Be inquisitive or be ‘stagnant’

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For several years after World War II ended, the British government continued to ration certain foodstuffs, including eggs, dairy products and sugar. This not only popularized resourceful recipes such as the vinegar-based “Wacky cake”; it also kept the average diet within what we now recognize as modern guidelines for daily sugar consumption. Now a study shows this restriction conferred lifelong health benefits on people who were infants during rationing.

Scientists have long wondered how sugar affects the developing body and brain. But observational studies of families who consume less or more sugar can struggle to disentangle diet’s effects from those of related factors such as income or geographic location. “This type of experiment helps to remove some of that noise,” says Juliana Cohen, a nutrition researcher at Merrimack College and the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved in the work.

The study authors used the medical database U.K. BioBank to compare disease incidence in about 60,000 people born in the years before or after sugar rationing ended in September 1953. The transition sharply altered sugar intake without affecting other dietary factors—rationing of other ingredients ended on different dates—allowing the researchers to probe the effects of reduced sugar within the developmentally crucial first 1,000 days of life.

Infants conceived in the years before sugar rationing ended had a 35 percent lower risk of diabetes and a 20 percent lower risk of hypertension in their 50s and 60s compared with those conceived after, the team reported in Science. For ration-era kids who ultimately did develop these conditions, onset was four and two years later, respectively. The longer a person lived under rationing, the greater the benefit they saw—but the strongest effects came while in utero and past the first six months of life, when babies begin eating solid foods.

Many mechanisms could explain the results, says lead author Tadeja Gračner, an economist at the University of Southern California. People who consume excessive sugar might gain an unhealthy amount of weight or develop diabetes during pregnancy, putting their children at risk for obesity and insulin resistance. High sugar intake could also prompt a growing fetus to express different genes to similar effect. And children raised on sugary diets may simply come to prefer sweeter foods; in a separate study, Gračner’s team found that people exposed to rationing consumed less daily added sugar as adults than those who weren’t.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that kids younger than two avoid added sugar and that everyone else keep their daily intake to less than 10 percent of their total calories. But today’s American toddlers average far more (nearly six teaspoons of added sugar a day), and many pregnant people consume triple the recommended amount for adults. Cohen notes dietary change is difficult because our nutritional environment isn’t set up to support it—yet any reduction helps, and there’s no need to avoid sugar entirely.

“It’s all about moderation,” Gračner says. “A birthday cake, candy, a cookie here and there—these are all treats we need to enjoy.”

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Well, it finally happened. My 2021 Kindle Paperwhite, which I’ve had for years and still use on a nightly basis, started showing its age and slowing down. Not only was it slow to boot up, but it was also slow to respond to my swipes and taps. Fortunately, after doing some research, I was able to speed up my sluggish Kindle with a few simple troubleshooting tricks.

So if you’re a voracious reader like me and your e-reader is having trouble keeping up with your pace, don’t sweat it, I’ll show you what to do. I’ll also include step-by-step instructions for the latest Kindle Paperwhite.

Be mindful of storage space

I’ll be the first one to tell you that I’ve got an embarrassing number of books on my 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite. I’m always on the hunt for a tale that’s weird yet compelling, which led to me accumulating lots of random books and short stories over the years. So, the first thing I did to speed up my Kindle was remove any books I’m not currently reading.

To do this on an 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite (as well as a 2024 Kindle Paperwhite), navigate to your personal library and press and hold the cover of the book you want to remove. Next, you’ll want to select Remove from Device. If you’re looking to remove multiple books at once, navigate to Settings (from the three vertical dots in the upper right hand corner) > Device Options > Storage Management > Manual Removal > Books. Here you can tick off the books you want to remove and then tap the Remove button at the bottom of the screen.

My real problem is that I download every single book I buy, which isn’t a great habit to develop because they eat up a good amount of storage space, thus impacting overall performance. I tend to only read one or two books at a time, so there’s no reason to download every single book on my device. If you’d like to remove all of your downloaded books at once, the easiest way to do that is with a factory reset.

Wiping the slate clean

If you’re not committed to any books at the present time, you can always reset the Kindle back to its factory settings, which automatically removes all downloaded content. I ended up doing this with my own Kindle and it really improved the boot up speed and touch navigation. Just be aware that this step will also reset the brightness and color temperature. Personally, I like using warmth mode, but the overall speed boost from resetting the device was worth setting up those preferences again.

To reset an 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite back to its factory settings and remove all downloaded books, navigate to Settings > Device Options > Factory Reset. Confirm the factory reset and let your Kindle do the work. This feature will remove your personal data, downloaded content, and unsynced content. Don’t have an 11th-generation Kindle Paperwhite? No problem! Below you’ll find instructions on how to factory reset the 2024 Kindle Paperwhite.

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