Things No One Ever Tells You About Retirement

Things No One Ever Tells You About Retirement
Many of us look forward to retirement as the reward for a lifetime of hard work. While the post-work years can truly be golden for those who plan for them, many retirees are caught off guard by the facts of their new life. Here are six things you should know about before you leave the working world for good.

Required minimum distributions can seriously raise your costs

Once you reach age 70 1/2, you’re typically required to take money out of your traditional IRA and your traditional 401(k) plan each year. While those distributions start relatively small, they increase as a percentage of your account balance each year after that until you reach age 115.

Withdrawals from these account types are treated as taxable income, which means you’ll owe income tax on the amount distributed. This increase in your taxable income may expose your Social Security benefits to taxation as well. As if that weren’t enough, your Medicare Part B premium also rises along with your income. If your income is high enough, Part B can cost you as much as $428.60 per month.

Medicare premiums can eat up your Social Security increase

Most retirees are relieved to find out that their Social Security benefit can receive an inflation adjustment every year to help keep pace with rising costs. What few realize, however, is that rising Medicare Part B premiums may wind up chewing through most, if not all, of that entire increase. Thanks to the “hold harmless” provision, hikes in Medicare Part B premiums can eat up all — but not more than — the increase in a recipient’s Social Security check.

The table below shows how that has worked in recent years. Standard Medicare Part B premiums increased from $104.90 per month in 2015 to as much as $134 per month in 2017. They’re expected to remain at $134 in 2018, but that’s cold comfort to a retiree whose net monthly Social Security check has gone up by less than $8 since 2015 because of Medicare Part B premium hikes.

It gets substantially harder to wait out a bad market once you retire

While you’re working and adding money to your retirement accounts, your salary covers your costs of living. That makes it much easier for you to power through a nasty bear market and wait for the ensuing recovery. Indeed, in many respects, while you’re still working, you can look forward to bear markets as an opportunity to buy great companies’ stocks on sale.

Once you retire and start pulling money from your portfolio to cover your costs of living, however, a down market takes on an entirely different meaning. If you need to sell stocks to pay your bills, a market slump may leave you with no choice but to sell at a low point and rapidly deplete your retirement assets. That’s why you should structure your retirement finances so that you have at least a five-year buffer of bonds and cash to see you through bad spells. Then you won’t be forced to sell during a typical downturn.

You could finish retirement with a larger nest egg than you had when you started it

A common guideline for retirement spending is known as the 4% rule. This rule indicates that with a diversified stock and bond portfolio, you can spend 4% of the initial value of your nest egg in the first year of your retirement and then increase your withdrawals annually based on inflation. Following that strategy, over the course of a 30-year retirement, you’ll be very unlikely to run out of money.

The benefit of following the 4% rule is that it has been back-tested and shown to survive some pretty tough market conditions. The potential downside, however, is that because the rule was designed to withstand tough market conditions, you may end retirement with more money than you had when you started it — especially if you’re invested primarily in stocks, which have far outpaced inflation over the long term.

Michael Kitces of Pinnacle Advisory Group analyzed models of the 4% rule over various 30-year periods all the way back to the late 19th century, and he found that the median follower of the 4% rule would end up with about 2.8 times their starting balance at the end of those 30 years.

So what’s wrong with ending retirement with more than you started with? Well, as the old saying goes, you can’t take it with you. If that money is available to you at the end of your retirement, it means you didn’t spend as much as you could have earlier in your retirement, when you may have been able to enjoy it more.

Other than health-related costs, your expenses may actually go down in retirement

For instance, Americans’ annual household spending tends to decrease once a family is headed by a person aged 55 or older, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s partly because they have paid off their mortgages, and their adult children are self-sufficient. They also enjoy various tax benefits like a larger standard deduction, greater medical-expense deductions, and freedom from the Social Security and Medicare payroll tax.

There’s also the fact that people generally slow down as they age. While early retirement may be marked by periods of frequent travel, older retirees tend to stay put more and thus spend less. Keep that in mind as you plan out your retirement, because you’ll want to be able to spend more while you’re young enough to enjoy that spending to the fullest.

You still have 24 hours in your day and seven days in your week

Depression is a widespread issue among retirees. When you leave the workplace, you lose the regular socialization that goes with it, along with the daily mental and physical activity. The deaths of aging friends and family members are also a contributing factor. The happiest retirees find meaningful ways to fill their days. Caring for family members, charitable volunteer work, or even a low-stress job can keep them active and provide them with purpose, stimulation, and social support.

Working late in life is not a sign of failure. Even Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, chooses to keep working despite the fact that he’s well into his 80s. His secret is doing work that he loves, finds meaning in, and can continue to do despite his age. While you may never be CEO of a multibillion-dollar business, you can certainly use him as inspiration to keep active and engaged well into your golden years.

This article originally appeared in The Motley Fool.

Scammer ‘Nigerian Prince’ Lands In More Trouble.

Most people with an email address have likely heard of or been targeted by this scam or some variations of it.

A person claiming to be a Nigerian prince tells you that you’re the beneficiary in someone’s will. All you need to do is provide your financial information to prove your identity, and you will receive your sizable inheritance. Or there’s this version: A purported surviving spouse of a Nigerian official tells you their funds are tied up somewhere, and with your bank account information they can pay fees and taxes to get their money — which they will be more than happy to share with you in exchange.

In Louisiana, a man is accused of engaging in such a scam.

Police say 67-year-old Michael Neu, who lives outside New Orleans, served as a middle man in hundreds of fraudulent financial transactions and wired money to co-conspirators in Nigeria. Neu has been charged with 269 counts of wire fraud and money laundering after an 18-month investigation, the Slidell Police Department said Thursday.

Records show Neu is in custody in the St. Tammany Parish Jail. It was not immediately clear if he has an attorney. His brother David Neu did not return a call seeking comment Saturday.

Public records show that Neu held different positions, including vice president and treasurer, for an organization called Blessings of the Spirit Ministries, which is based in Grand Prairie, Tex., near Dallas. State records show the organization was registered with the Texas secretary of state in 1985.

Karl Owen, the ministry’s president, said Michael Neu had not been affiliated with the organization in at least 10 years and that he hadn’t talked to Neu since Neu left Texas to move to Louisiana a decade ago. Still, Owen said, the allegations were not characteristic of the man he had known since childhood.

“If somebody had told Mike 10 or 11 years ago that in 10 or 11 years, he’d be charged with 269 counts of money laundering, I think we both would’ve just laughed,” Owen told The Washington Post. “It’s a sad thing. I really just don’t understand that.”

Owen said he learned about the allegations from Neu’s brother, who called him about a month ago. “David was shocked about finding it out. I don’t think David had any idea,” Owen said. “I know people change over the years. I don’t know exactly how he got involved in something like that.

He added: “It’s not the Mike Neu that we knew when he was living here in Texas. It’s quite a surprise, an unpleasant surprise.”

Owen said he did not have any problems with Neu when he worked for the ministry, which received donations to help the homeless and published a magazine. Neu was hard-working, Owen said, and “very good” with computers.

Investigators have released few details about the investigation other than that it is still ongoing and involves individuals outside the United States. Police did not say what led them to Neu or how he became connected with co-conspirators in Nigeria. Police also did not say exactly how many people were victimized or how much money was involved. A spokesman for the police department did not return a call or an email from The Post.


Slidell Police Chief Randy Fandal said he hopes the arrest serves as a warning to people targeted by such scams. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Never give out personal information over the phone, through email, cash checks for other individuals, or wire large amounts of money to someone you don’t know. 99.9 percent of the time, it’s a scam,” Fandal said in the statement.


Authorities say thousands of people fall for online scams every year — and that the losses to victims have skyrocketed to millions annually.


Nigerian email scams, also known as 419 scams because they violate Section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, bait people with “convincing sob stories, unfailingly polite language, and promises of a big payoff,” according to the Federal Trade Commission. “Inevitably, emergencies come up, requiring more of your money and delaying the ‘transfer’ of funds to your account. In the end, there aren’t any profits for you, and your money is gone along with the thief who stole it,” the commission said.


According to the FBI, some victims had been lured to Nigeria, where they were extorted and held against their will.


“The Nigerian government is not sympathetic to victims of these schemes, since the victim actually conspires to remove funds from Nigeria in a manner that is contrary to Nigerian law,” the FBI said.


The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which monitors Internet scams, has received about 3.7 million complaints since it was created in 2000. It receives an average of 280,000 complaints annually over the past five years alone. Losses to victims have reached $4.6 billion since 2012.


Victims run the gamut from teenagers to senior citizens. According to the center’s report last year, people in their 30s and those older than 60 each make up about 20 percent of the more than 266,000 reported victims in 2016.


Apple apologizes after outcry over slowed iPhones


Facing lawsuits and consumer outrage after it said it slowed older iPhones with flagging batteries, Apple Inc (AAPL.O) is slashing prices for battery replacements and will change its software to show users whether their phone battery is good.

In a posting on its website Thursday, Apple apologized over its handling of the battery issue and said it would make a number of changes for customers “to recognize their loyalty and to regain the trust of anyone who may have doubted Apple’s intentions.”

Apple made the move to address concerns about the quality and durability of its products at a time when it is charging $999 for its newest flagship model, the iPhone X.

The company said it would cut the price of an out-of-warranty battery replacement from $79 to $29 for an iPhone 6 or later, starting next month. The company also will update its iOS operating system to let users see whether their battery is in poor health and is affecting the phone’s performance.

“We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down,” Apple said in its posting. “We apologize.”

On Dec. 20, Apple acknowledged that iPhone software has the effect of slowing down some phones with battery problems. Apple said the problem was that aging lithium batteries delivered power unevenly, which could cause iPhones to shutdown unexpectedly to protect the delicate circuits inside.

That disclosure played on a common belief among consumers that Apple purposely slows down older phones to encourage customers to buy newer iPhone models. While no credible evidence has ever emerged that Apple engaged in such conduct, the battery disclosure struck a nerve on social media and elsewhere.

Apple on Thursday denied that it has ever done anything to intentionally shorten the life of a product.

At least eight lawsuits have been filed in California, New York and Illinois alleging that the company defrauded users by slowing devices down without warning them. The company also faces a legal complaint in France, where so-called “planned obsolesce” is against the law.

The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.

Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. This newspaper has argued against such drastic action in the past. Size alone is not a crime. The giants’ success has benefited consumers. Few want to live without Google’s search engine, Amazon’s one-day delivery or Facebook’s newsfeed. Nor do these firms raise the alarm when standard antitrust tests are applied. Far from gouging consumers, many of their services are free (users pay, in effect, by handing over yet more data). Take account of offline rivals, and their market shares look less worrying. And the emergence of upstarts like Snapchat suggests that new entrants can still make waves.

But there is cause for concern. Internet companies’ control of data gives them enormous power. Old ways of thinking about competition, devised in the era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the “data economy” (see Briefing). A new approach is needed.

Quantity has a quality all its own
What has changed? Smartphones and the internet have made data abundant, ubiquitous and far more valuable. Whether you are going for a run, watching TV or even just sitting in traffic, virtually every activity creates a digital trace—more raw material for the data distilleries. As devices from watches to cars connect to the internet, the volume is increasing: some estimate that a self-driving car will generate 100 gigabytes per second. Meanwhile, artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques such as machine learning extract more value from data. Algorithms can predict when a customer is ready to buy, a jet-engine needs servicing or a person is at risk of a disease. Industrial giants such as GE and Siemens now sell themselves as data firms.

This abundance of data changes the nature of competition. Technology giants have always benefited from network effects: the more users Facebook signs up, the more attractive signing up becomes for others. With data there are extra network effects. By collecting more data, a firm has more scope to improve its products, which attracts more users, generating even more data, and so on. The more data Tesla gathers from its self-driving cars, the better it can make them at driving themselves—part of the reason the firm, which sold only 25,000 cars in the first quarter, is now worth more than GM, which sold 2.3m. Vast pools of data can thus act as protective moats.

Access to data also protects companies from rivals in another way. The case for being sanguine about competition in the tech industry rests on the potential for incumbents to be blindsided by a startup in a garage or an unexpected technological shift. But both are less likely in the data age. The giants’ surveillance systems span the entire economy: Google can see what people search for, Facebook what they share, Amazon what they buy. They own app stores and operating systems, and rent out computing power to startups. They have a “God’s eye view” of activities in their own markets and beyond. They can see when a new product or service gains traction, allowing them to copy it or simply buy the upstart before it becomes too great a threat. Many think Facebook’s $22bn purchase in 2014 of WhatsApp, a messaging app with fewer than 60 employees, falls into this category of “shoot-out acquisitions” that eliminate potential rivals. By providing barriers to entry and early-warning systems, data can stifle competition.

Who ya gonna call, trustbusters?
The nature of data makes the antitrust remedies of the past less useful. Breaking up a firm like Google into five Googlets would not stop network effects from reasserting themselves: in time, one of them would become dominant again. A radical rethink is required—and as the outlines of a new approach start to become apparent, two ideas stand out.

The first is that antitrust authorities need to move from the industrial era into the 21st century. When considering a merger, for example, they have traditionally used size to determine when to intervene. They now need to take into account the extent of firms’ data assets when assessing the impact of deals. The purchase price could also be a signal that an incumbent is buying a nascent threat. On these measures, Facebook’s willingness to pay so much for WhatsApp, which had no revenue to speak of, would have raised red flags. Trustbusters must also become more data-savvy in their analysis of market dynamics, for example by using simulations to hunt for algorithms colluding over prices or to determine how best to promote competition (see Free exchange).

The second principle is to loosen the grip that providers of online services have over data and give more control to those who supply them. More transparency would help: companies could be forced to reveal to consumers what information they hold and how much money they make from it. Governments could encourage the emergence of new services by opening up more of their own data vaults or managing crucial parts of the data economy as public infrastructure, as India does with its digital-identity system, Aadhaar. They could also mandate the sharing of certain kinds of data, with users’ consent—an approach Europe is taking in financial services by requiring banks to make customers’ data accessible to third parties.

Rebooting antitrust for the information age will not be easy. It will entail new risks: more data sharing, for instance, could threaten privacy. But if governments don’t want a data economy dominated by a few giants, they will need to act soon.

The 7 Types Of Power If You Want To Succeed

Ambitious employees and aspiring leaders often ask me “How do I develop power?” and “Where does power come from?”

Back in the late 1950s, psychologists John R. P. French and Bertram Raven identified five major sources of power. That number has since evolved to seven power sources, but the core idea remains; there are many different ways to get power.




Titular Power

First, there’s legitimate power, also known as titular or formal power. It’s power that comes from having a title. It generally comes from a place in a hierarchy, so I have more power as a VP than I did as a director. I have more power as a director than I did as a manager, and so forth. But this power gets overused. If you constantly have to say “do it because I’m the boss” the people you’re trying to influence will get turned off pretty quickly.

Coercive And Reward Power

Two other powers are related to legitimate power; coercive and reward power. Coercive power is the power that comes from being able to punish people; ‘If you don’t do this thing by Friday you will be fired.’ Reward power is the flip side of that; ‘If you do this by Friday, then you can take Monday off.’

Reward power and coercive power are not always inexorably linked to titular power, but that’s typically where they show up. And like titular power, threats and punishments only go so far. And one of the limitations of this type of power is that it’s very extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation does work in the short term, but it just doesn’t reach deep enough into your followers’ psyches to inspire them to scale mountains.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is said to have once remarked, “Do I have to go down to the front office and get that sign that says I’m the CEO for you to stop arguing with me?” From time to time you can pull that off. But somebody like Jeff Bezos does not live and die by legitimate ‘I’m the CEO’ power. He tends to utilize other sources of power that are much more powerful.

Referent And Connection Power

Referent power comes from being really well liked (and can imply lots of charisma). Somewhat related to that is connection power. Think of a Hollywood agent who has power because of whom they can get access to. When you can call up somebody who’s powerful and say, ‘yeah, I can probably get Brad Pitt to show up for that video shoot’ you have connection power. You may not have legitimate, coercive or reward power, but the fact that you have Brad Pitt’s cell phone number gives a certain amount of power.

Problems With These Traditional Power Sources

When we traditionally think about power, those five sources are the ones that typically pop into our minds. And they can absolutely work, especially for the right people. The problem is first that they’re tougher to acquire (not everyone has a corner office from which to employ titular power). And second is that not everyone is predisposed to want or handle those types of power.

More than 5,700 leaders have taken the online test “Are You Motivated By Power Or Achievement?” And based on the results of the test, we know that about 41% of leaders have a very strong desire for power, especially the traditional titular, coercive, reward, referent and connection powers. So, what if you’re in the 59% of people who are more motivated by achievement than power? (You can test yourself to find out). What if you’re not predisposed to titles and charisma? Can you still have power? The answer is a resounding Yes!

The Best Sources: Informational And Expert Power

Informational power is power that comes from having insight or information that others don’t have access to. When you’ve read something that other people haven’t read, when you’re more in touch with what’s happening in your industry, you have informational power. When people say, ‘let’s ask Mark, Mark knows what’s going on with this new regulation…’ you have informational power.

Expert power is when you can do things better than other people, when you have a particular area of expertise. This power might sound like: “I don’t know how to work XYZ software. Who’s our expert at that? Bob’s the expert, Sally’s the expert. Let’s go ask them because they know how to do it.”

What’s great about informational and expert power is that they’re the most accessible and useful sources of power.

Don’t we call our current age “the information age”? Well, in the information age, information and expertise tend to be the power. How do we have companies with billion dollar market valuations that are run by people in their twenties? Is it because they’re so well loved? Is it because they have Brad Pitt’s phone number? Is it because they took some path through an organizational hierarchy? No way.

It happens because they had informational power and expert power. Those are the pieces of power that people have been able to leverage, and it’s shaken our traditional notions of power.

We have informational sources all around us. They’re available and they’re free. All we have to do is avail ourselves of them and we’re going to find a tremendous source of untapped power. You don’t need to be the senior vice president of whatever with the big corner office to have power. Information in this day and age gives you an amazing source of power.

Israel to build 'Trump station' near Western Wall

Israel wants to name a train station after Donald Trump to thank him for recognizing Jerusalem as its capital, but the site of the planned building could be as divisive as the U.S. president’s declaration.

Transport Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday he had chosen a proposed subway stop near the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City - right in the middle of the area that the Palestinians want as their own future capital.

“I have decided to name the Western Wall station ... after U.S. President Donald Trump for his courageous and historic decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” Katz said in a statement.

The envisaged underground extension of a high-speed rail link between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is still on the drawing board and a transport ministry spokeswoman said other departments still needed to approve it.

The announcement was quickly condemned by Palestinian leaders already angered by Trump’s Dec. 6 decision to overturn decades of U.S. policy on the city.

“The Israeli extremist government is trying to race against time to impose facts on the ground in the city of Jerusalem,” Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee.

Trump has said he was simply acknowledged the reality on the ground by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital - but the Palestinians and most world powers have said he undermined the long-held position that Jerusalem’s status must be settled by future negotiations.

A ministry spokeswoman said the proposed station and underground extension still required the approval of various governmental planning committees, and gave no date for when a final go-ahead might be given. She said she did not know where funds for the estimated $700-million rail add-on would come from.

Israel considers all of Jerusalem its capital. Palestinians want East Jerusalem - among whose shrines is Islam’s third-holiest mosque, Al-Aqsa - as the capital of a state they seek in the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.

2017 World’s Cheapest Places to Buy Drugs, Alcohol and Cigarettes

Indulging in a weekly habit of drugs, booze and cigarettes can cost you as little as $41.40 in Laos and a whopping $1,441.50 in Japan, according to the Bloomberg Vice Index.

As compared by Bloomberg the price of a basket of goods — tobacco, alcohol, amphetamine, cannabis, cocaine and opioids — in more than 100 countries relative to the U.S., where your fix of the vices adds up to almost $400, or about a third of the weekly income.

In terms of absolute costs, the cheapest prices can be found in Congo, Honduras and Laos. On the other end of the scale, Japan is the most expensive with New Zealand and Australia right behind. A market basket runs below $100 in 18 countries, all of which are emerging or frontier markets from Peru to Cambodia. Many of these places are in proximity to the source, such as the Golden Triangle of opium-producing region of Asia.

"It's all about distribution costs," said Peter Reuter, a professor in the School of Public Policy and the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. "Being closer to the producer lowers costs."

Here is what we put in the basket: a pack of cigarettes, most popular and premium brands; a bottle of alcoholic beverages, including beer, wine and spirits; a gram of amphetamine-type stimulants, including amphetamine, methamphetamine and/or ecstasy; a gram of cannabis, including marijuana herb, hashish resin and/or cannabis oil; a gram of cocaine, regardless of salts, paste or base forms; a gram of opioids, including heroin and/or opium.

For a look at the top 50 most affordable places to feed your vices, check this out.



How You Dress May Affect Your Productivity

You roll out of bed in the morning and stare into your closet. A voice calls from the back of the rack. "Pick me!" You reach in and pull out that blue shirt you bought on sale at the mall in 2012. It's not all that comfortable, but it meets the minimum workplace requirement for whatever's considered "professional."

As you sit at your desk with that collar digging into your neck, you think about how you wish you could be at home in a T-shirt and sweatpants. And while that old blue shirt isn't making you all that happy, it's also sending signals to your coworkers and everyone you pass on the street. Our wardrobe may not seem important, but it has a huge impact on how we feel and how the world perceives us.

Mind Over Material
How does our dress affect us? Formal clothes make us think of ourselves as competent and rational. And dressing better than those around us makes us think more abstractly, so you can focus on the big picture. That's good, right? Not entirely. That tie around your neck may be choking off your relationships with your team.

According to a 2015 study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, dressing up for work triggers "psychological formality and social distance, whereas casual clothing is related to intimacy and familiarity." The researchers found that being around people in fancy clothes made others alter their vocabulary. They were more polite. While politeness is nice in some settings, it also creates a social barrier that could interfere with open, honest teamwork. That's where comfort is key.

"No matter how often you wear formal clothing, if you are wearing formal clothing, then you are likely in a context that's not the intimate, comfortable, and more socially close setting with no dress code," said Michael Slepian, one of the study's authors.

Crowdfund Your Closet
If you want to look professional (triggering big picture thinking) while remaining comfortable (opening your social bonds), you need to find just the right piece of clothing, and it's probably not hanging in your closet just yet. A retailer called Betabrand is taking a creative new approach to fashion, generating clothes that look as good as formal wear while giving you the comfort you'd expect from your Saturday morning sweats. And the best part is that everything is crowdfunded: You decide the future of fashion.

Imagine dress pants that are also yoga pants. Done. A blouse that gives you the stretchable comfort of Spandex. Check. How about a women's blazer that might as well feel like a hoodie? Got it.

For men, you've got your dress pants that are actually secret sweatpants. To cover your top half, pick up the ultimate office shirt, which is soft, sharp, and can even wick up that sweat you're cranking out during an important meeting. And then there's something called a hoodigan, which looks crazy comfortable, intensely stylish, and futuristic all at once. (If you're in a super-hurry each morning, we recommend the suitsy, a business suit onesie. It's 2017. Why isn't every outfit a onesie?)

When you vote for aspiring designs you'd want to see in your closet, you'll get a discount on the eventual purchase when they get produced. It's like Kickstarter became a cool wizard tailor who creates new fashions out of thin air and displays them on the intertubes. (And yes, you can submit designs, too.)


COMPETING IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Until recently, artificial intelligence (AI) was similar to nuclear fusion in unfulfilled promise. It had been around a long time but had not reached the spectacular heights foreseen in its infancy. Now, however, AI is realizing its potential in achieving human-like capabilities, so it is time to ask: How can business leaders harness AI to take advantage of the specific strengths of man and machine?

AI is swiftly becoming the foundational technology in areas as diverse as self-driving cars and financial trading. Self-learning algorithms are now routinely embedded in mobile and online services. Researchers have leveraged massive gains in processing power and the data streaming from digital devices and connected sensors to improve AI performance. And machines have essentially cracked speech and vision specifically and human communication generally. The implications are profound:

Because they know how to speak, read text, and absorb and retain encyclopedic knowledge, machines can interact with people intuitively and naturally on a wide range of topics at considerable depth.
Because they can identify objects and recognize optical patterns, machines can leave the virtual and join the real world.
A field that once disappointed its proponents is now striking remarkably close to home as it expands into activities commonly performed by humans. (See the exhibit and the sidebar.) AI programs, for example, have diagnosed specific cancers more accurately than radiologists. No wonder that traditional companies in finance, retail, health care, and other industries have started to pour billions of dollars into the field.


HOW MACHINES THINK AND ACT
Three milestone events made the general public aware of AI. Each one illustrates key aspects of the technology.

Because AI systems think and interact, they are invariably compared to people. But while humans are fast at parallel processing (pattern recognition) and slow at sequential processing (logical reasoning), computers have mastered the former in narrow fields and are superfast in the latter. Just as submarines don’t swim, machines solve problems and accomplish tasks in their own way.

"IT IS CRITICAL FOR COMPANIES TO FIGURE OUT HOW HUMANS AND COMPUTERS CAN PLAY OFF EACH OTHER’S STRENGTHS AS INTERTWINED ACTORS TO CREATE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE."

Without further quantum leaps in processing power, machines will not reach artificial general intelligence (AGI): the combination of vastly different types of problem-solving capabilities—the hallmark of human intelligence. Today’s robo-car, for example, doesn’t exhibit what we would consider common sense, such as abandoning an excursion to assist a child who has fallen off her bicycle. But when properly applied, AI excels at performing many business tasks quickly, intelligently, and thoroughly.

Artificial intelligence is no longer an elective. It is critical for companies to figure out how humans and computers can play off each other’s strengths as intertwined actors to create competitive advantage.

THE EVOLUTION OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

In simpler times, a technology tool, such as Walmart’s logistics tracking system in the 1980s, could serve as a source of advantage. AI is different. The naked algorithms themselves are unlikely to provide an edge. Many of them are in the public domain, and businesses can access open-source software platforms, such as Google’s TensorFlow. OpenAI, a nonprofit organization started by Elon Musk and others, is making AI tools and research widely available. And many prominent AI researchers have insisted on retaining the right to publish their results when joining companies such as Baidu, Facebook, and Google.

Rather than scrap traditional sources of competitive advantage, such as position and capability, AI reframes them. (See the exhibit.) Companies, then, need a fluid and dynamic view of their strengths. Positional advantage, for example, generally focuses on relatively static aspects that allow a company to win market share: proprietary assets, distribution networks, access to customers, and scale. These articles of faith have to be reimagined in the AI world.

Let’s look at three examples of how AI shifts traditional notions of competitive advantage.

1. Data -  AI’s strongest applications are data-hungry. Pioneers in the field, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, have each secured a “privileged zone” by gaining access to current and future data, the raw material of AI, from their users and others in ways that go far beyond traditional data harvesting. Their scale gives them the ability to run more training data through their algorithms and thus improve performance. In the race to leverage fully functional self-driving cars, for example, Uber has the advantage of collecting 100 million miles of fleet data daily from its drivers. This data will eventually inform the company’s mobility services. Facebook and Google take advantage of their scale and depth to hone their ad targeting. 

Not all companies can realistically aspire to be Facebook, Google, or Uber. But they do not need to. By building, accessing, and leveraging shared, rented, or complementary data sets, even if that means collaborating with competitors, companies can complement their proprietary assets to create their own privileged zone. Sharing is not a dirty word. The key is to build an unassailable and advantaged collection of open and closed data sources.
2. Customer Access -  AI also changes the parameters of customer access. Well-placed physical stores and high-traffic online outlets give way to customer insights generated through AI. Major retailers, for example, can run loyalty, point-of-sale, weather, and location data through their AI engines to create personalized marketing and promotion offers. They can predict your route and appetite—before you are aware of them—and conveniently provide familiar, complementary, or entirely new purchasing options. The suggestive power of many of these offers has generated fresh revenue at negligible marginal cost.
3. Capabilities -  Capabilities traditionally have been segmented into discrete sources of advantage, such as knowledge, skills, and processes. AI-driven automation merges these areas in a continual cycle of execution, exploration, and learning. As an algorithm incorporates more data, the quality of its output improves. Similarly, on the human side, agile ways of working blur distinctions between traditional capabilities as cross-functional teams build quick prototypes and improve them on the basis of fast feedback from customers and end users.

AI and agile are inherently iterative. In both, offerings and processes become continuous cycles. Algorithms learn from experience, allowing companies to merge the broad and fast exploration of new opportunities with the exploitation of known ones. This helps companies thrive under conditions of high uncertainty and rapid change.

In addition to re-framing specific sources of competitive advantage, AI helps increase the rate and quality of decision making. For specific tasks, the number of inputs and the speed of processing for machines can be millions of times higher than they are for humans. Predictive analytics and objective data replace gut feel and experience as a central driver of many decisions. Stock trading, online advertising, and supply chain management and pricing in retail have all moved sharply in this direction.

To be clear, humans will not become obsolete, even if there will be dislocations similar to (but arguably more rapid than) those during the Industrial Revolution. First, you need people to build the systems. Uber, for instance, has hired hundreds of self-driving vehicle experts, about 50 of whom are from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. And AI experts are the most in-demand hires on Wall Street. Second, humans can provide the common sense, social skills, and intuition that machines currently lack. Even if routine tasks are delegated to computers, people will stay in the loop for a long time to ensure quality.

In this new AI-inspired world, where the sources of advantage have been transformed, strategic issues morph into organizational, technological, and knowledge issues, and vice versa. Structural flexibility and agility—for both man and machine—become imperative to address the rate and degree of change.

Scalable hardware and adaptive software provide the foundation for AI systems to take advantage of scale and flexibility. One common approach is to build a central intelligence engine and decentralized semiautonomous agents. Tesla’s self-driving cars, for example, feed data into a central unit that periodically updates the decentralized software.

Winning strategies put a premium on agility, flexible employment, and continual training and education. AI-focused companies rarely have an army of traditional employees on their payroll. Open innovation and contracting agreements proliferate. As the chief operating officer of an innovative mobile bank admitted, his biggest struggle was to transform members of his leadership team into skilled managers of both people and robots.


GETTING STARTED

COMPANIES NEED TO EMBRACE THE ADAPTIVE AND AGILE WAYS OF WORKING AND SETTING STRATEGY THAT ARE COMMON AT STARTUPS AND AI PIONEERS.

Companies looking to achieve a competitive edge through AI need to work through the implications of machines that can learn, conduct human interactions, and engage in other high-level functions—at unmatched scale and speed. They need to identify what machines do better than humans and vice versa, develop complementary roles and responsibilities for each, and redesign processes accordingly. AI often requires, for example, a new structure, of both centralized and decentralized activities, that can be challenging to implement. Finally, companies need to embrace the adaptive and agile ways of working and setting strategy that are common at startups and AI pioneers. All companies might benefit from this approach, but it is mandatory for AI-enabled processes, which undergo constant learning and adaptation for both man and machine.

Executives need to identify where AI can create the most significant and durable advantage. At the highest level, AI is well suited to areas with huge amounts of data, such as retail, and to routine tasks, such as pricing. But that heuristic oversimplifies the playing field. Increasingly, all corporate activities are awash in data and capable of being broken down into simple tasks. (See the exhibit.) We advocate looking at AI through four lenses:


  • Customer needs
  • Technological advances
  • Data sources
  • Decomposition of processes



First, define the needs of your customers. AI may be a sexy field, but it always makes sense to return to the basics in building a business. Where do your current or potential customers have explicit or implicit unmet needs? Even the most disruptive recent business ideas, such as Uber and Airbnb, address people’s fundamental requirements.

Second, incorporate technological advances. The most significant developments in AI generally involve assembling and processing new sources of data and making partially autonomous decisions. Numerous services and platforms can capture incoming data from databases, optical signals, text, and speech. You will probably not have to build such systems yourself. The same is true on the back end as a result of the increasing availability of output technologies such as digital agents and robots. Consider how you can use such technologies to transform your processes and offerings.

Third, create a holistic architecture that combines existing data with new or novel sources, even if they come from outside. The stack of AI services has become reasonably standardized and is increasingly accessible through intuitive tools. Even nonexperts can use large data sets.

Finally, break down processes and offerings into relatively routinized and isolated elements that can be automated, taking advantage of technological advances and data sources. Then, reassemble them to better meet your customers’ needs.

For many organizations, these steps can be challenging. To apply the four lenses systematically, companies need to be familiar with the current and emerging capabilities of the technology and the required infrastructure. A center for excellence can serve as a place to incubate technical and business acumen and disseminate AI expertise throughout the organization. But ultimately, AI belongs in and belongs to the businesses and functions that must put it to use.

Only when humans and machines solve problems together—and learn from each other—can the full potential of AI be achieved.

 

The Top-Earning Dead Celebrities Of 2017

This past weekend, audiences were treated to the debut of CBS special Michael Jackson’s Halloween, an hourlong magical adventure in which the King of Pop comes to life in animated forms, including that of a dancing pumpkin, an arachnid security guard and a feline scientist, set to a soundtrack of Jackson’s music.

“Michael's songs are very important to people,” says Mark Dippé, the program’s director. “We just wanted to sort of tell a story that was based around the world that Michael had created with his music, and his dancing, and his performances.”

That level of continued interest is precisely why Jackson tops our Halloween-spooky list of the 13 highest-paid dead celebrities for the fifth year in a row--with earnings of $75 million. His postmortem empire is going strong, boosted by the Halloween special and new album Scream joining a list of ventures that include a Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas and a stake in the EMI music-publishing catalogue.

Golf legend Arnold Palmer claims the No. 2 spot with $40 million. Barely a year after his death, more than 400 stores still sell Palmer-branded apparel in Asia, and AriZona Beverages produces 400 million cans of its Arnold Palmer line annually. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz ranks third with income of $38 million—MetLife recently retired Snoopy and Charlie Brown from its ad campaigns, but the cartoonist’s contract does not expire until 2019.

Elvis Presley finishes fourth with $35 million, up from last year’s $27 million sum thanks to the new $45 million Elvis Presley’s Memphis entertainment complex and recently opened hotel The Guesthouse at Graceland. Bob Marley rounds out the top five with $23 million, boosted by sustainability-focused House of Marley audio products and the Marley Beverage Co.

“When we decided to start that movement, it was [to] add relevancy to who we are as a family,” says Marley’s son Rohan. “We started that to really home in on our legacy and protect what our father has given us.”

Our list measures pretax income from October 15, 2016 through October 15, 2017 before deducting cuts for agents, managers and lawyers. Sources include Nielsen SoundScan, IMDB, Pollstar Pro and interviews with celebrity estate experts.

Some names on the list passed just before the end of our scoring period—namely, rocker Tom Petty, who died on October 3. His inclusion on the list (No. 6, $20 million) reflects earnings from the past year on the road, where his band was grossing north of $1 million per night. Petty and fellow musicians Prince (No. 7, $18 million) and David Bowie (No. 11, $9.5 million) also got a boost from increased music consumption in the wake of their relatively recent passing.

There are more ways than ever to earn money from beyond the grave, as our list members can attest. Elizabeth Taylor (No. 12, $8 million) lives on through top-selling fragrances such as White Diamonds, while Albert Einstein (No. 10, $10 million) lends his name and likeness to products ranging from dorm-room posters to tablets designed by Israeli tech company Fourier Systems.

Frank Zappa didn’t make the list, but perhaps he will soon. His son Ahmet recently announced plans to bring the rock star back in the form of a hologram-like illusion. The phantom Zappa will hit the road, most likely in 2018, in partnership with the firm Eyellusion. The goal is to make “the bizarre world of Frank come to life,” says the younger Zappa. “And I wake up every single day excited.”

To be fair, Frank Zappa won’t be the first celebrity to perform in such a manner. Tupac Shakur started the trend at Coachella in 2012, and Jackson currently appears in similar style in the grand finale of his Vegas show.

As for the King of Pop, his 2017 earnings pale in comparison with last year’s $825 million haul—the highest annual total for any entertainer dead or alive—mostly from the sale of his half of the Sony/ATV catalogue. But his $75 million tally this year still places him on par with the seventeenth-best-paid living entertainer, Bruce Springsteen.

Allah Found Embroidered into Viking Burial Cloth

Discovered during World War II, this set of Viking burial clothes has hidden a secret for more than 70 years. While textile archaeologist Annika Larsson was preparing it for a "Viking Couture" exhibit at Enköping Museum, she made a startling discovery when the fabric was placed in front of a mirror. Seen backward, a geometric pattern that resembled runes became the word "Allah" in Kufic script.

It's not the first piece concrete piece of evidence that Vikings interacted with the Arabic world (more on that in a minute), but it does make a compelling case for the exact nature of that interaction.

If Vikings in Sweden were burying their dead with reverent references to Allah, that suggests that the relationship that spanned the European continent was far from acrimonious. The Vikings didn't appear to have ransacked an Arabic treasure hoard for its valuables — they had taken a sacred tradition and integrated it into their own.

It's actually not exactly news that Viking and Arabic cultures interacted at different points in history. Written accounts from 10th-century ambassador Ahmad ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas' character in the movie) tell of meeting Vikings sailing the Volga, but for many years there was a question about how reliable that written record was.

At some point, though, you've got to just accept it. In 2008, a cache of Viking era silver coins from Baghdad and Damascus was found near the site of Stockholm's Arlanda airport. And in 2015, a silver ring was found in a Scandanavian site bearing an inscription reading "or to Allah". Other research has shown a link between Arabic and Viking metal-smithing techniques as well — Vikings almost certainly learned certain methods from their trading partners on the southern end of the Volga. It all makes the ancient world seem a lot smaller, doesn't it?

Want some sci-fi in your historical epic? Check out "Eaters of the Dead", or find the real story of Arab and Viking interactions in "Ibn Fadlan in the Land of Darkness: Arab Travelers in the Far North". Any purchase you make from that link will help support Curiosity.

Types of Meditation Do Different Things to Your Brain

When you think about meditation, you probably imagine someone splayed cross-legged with their eyes closed, perhaps while chanting. If you've tried your hand at meditation, you might even think about sitting quietly while focusing on your breath and the way your body feels. But just like there are many ways to exercise, there are many ways to meditate. And just like different exercises target different body parts, every technique targets something different in your brain.


Train Your Brain
In 2017, two studies from the ReSource Project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany were published in Science Advances. For the studies, researchers trained 300 volunteers in three meditation techniques. Then, they analyzed the effects of each technique as the volunteers practiced them regularly for three months apiece, one three-month period after the other.

Here's a rundown of how each technique works, and what it did to the volunteers' brains.

Mindfulness Meditation
For this technique, which the researchers called "presence" meditation, people focused their attention simply on how it felt to breathe, gently guiding their focus back whenever it wandered. They also performed a "body scan" exercise, where they focused on the sensation and presence of each part of the body, one after the other, from the tips of the toes to the top of the head. They used these same mindfulness techniques in various other activities, such as focusing on how it felt to walk or zeroing in on sights, smells, and tastes.

One of the studies used MRI to assess the differences in brain structures after the training. Mindfulness meditation was associated with a thicker prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe, both of which are linked to attention control.

Compassion Meditation
The researchers called this technique "loving-kindness" meditation. Compassion meditation is all about connecting with the feeling of love and care for something or someone else. In each session, volunteers began by imagining themselves and then a "benefactor" — someone who does them good, like a parent or a romantic partner — and extend feelings of love, kindness, and good wishes to both themselves and that benefactor.

Over the next several sessions, they extended those feelings to someone they felt neutral about, then to someone they had "difficulties" with, and finally to all beings on Earth. "To stabilize and foster experiences of loving-kindness," the researchers wrote, "we instructed participants to mentally repeat phrases such as 'May you be happy,' 'May you be healthy,' 'May you be safe,' and 'May you live with ease.'" They also focused on accepting their emotions and practicing forgiveness and self-compassion.

This portion also included a partner exercise. In the exercise, one person would tell the other person about something they experienced that day that was either difficult or made them feel grateful. The storyteller focused on how they felt at the time without interpreting the situation, and the listener listened attentively without giving any feedback. Then the roles were reversed.

After it was all over, the volunteers' brains showed increases in the limbic system, which processes emotions. They also had a boost to their anterior insula, which helps you consciously identify your emotions.


Perspective-Taking Training
In the "perspective module," volunteers performed a solo exercise designed to help them observe their own thoughts as mental events instead of representations of reality. In the first phase, they trained to give their thoughts labels like "me" or "other," "past" or "future," or "positive" or "negative." As they became more experienced, they eventually just observed the comings and goings of thoughts without involving themselves in them.

The perspective module also had a partner exercise. First, all of these volunteers learned about the Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach, which divides the mind into subpersonalities or "inner parts," — for example, "managers" are parts that try to keep you in control of every situation, "exiles" are parts that try to protect you from pain, and "firefighters" are parts that react when exiles are activated in order to extinguish bad feelings.

After that, the partner exercise was a lot like the one used for compassion except that the stories were told from the perspective of one of these "inner parts" without telling the listener which one — the listener had to figure it out from the story. That helped the storyteller take a bird's-eye view of their own experiences, and the listener to infer the perspective of the storyteller.

This perspective-taking training was associated with thickening in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the left occipital region, and the middle temporal gyrus — all of which are linked to Theory of Mind, the ability to understand that others have beliefs, intentions, and perspectives that are different from yours and to infer what they might be.

Different Exercises For Different Strengths
Lead researcher Tania Singer laments the fact that people put all of these cognitive exercises into a big bucket labeled "meditation." "It's like asking a sport expert 'what does sport do to your body'. The expert would say, do you mean swimming or horse-riding? You can imagine mental training being as complex," she told New Scientist. So if you're considering starting a meditation regimen, don't just try any old technique. Think about what you want to accomplish, then find a meditation method designed to build those skills.

To give meditation a try, check out Udemy's Master Your Mind Meditation Course taught by Giovanni Dienstmann. All Udemy courses are just $10 through December 21 when you use the code DECAFF3D10.

5 Most Addictive Substances on Earth, According to Addiction Experts

Addiction is no joke. Though we've all joked about being addicted to "Stranger Things" or pumpkin spice or, obviously, the wonderful Curiosity app, those things aren't out to ruin anyone's lives. Entering the realm of the world's most addictive substances will do just that. Research from 2007 identified the top five most addictive things on Earth.

A group of addiction experts came together in 2007 to publish a study in the Lancet about the most addictive substances in existence. To do this, they developed a rational scale that could measure the harm of different drugs and their potential misuse. They averaged three factors: pleasure, psychological dependence (cravings, irritability from withdrawal, etc.), and physical dependence (symptoms like headache, nausea, etc.). They scored each drug on a scale from 0-3, where 3 was the most addictive and 0 the least. Here are the top five most addictive substances:

Heroin. Rank: 3 out of 3.
Cocaine. Rank: 2.4 out of 3.
Nicotine. Rank: 2.2 out of 3.
Barbiturates. Rank: 2 out of 3.
Alcohol. Rank: 1.9 out of 3.

A 2010 study in the Lancet looked at the most addictive drugs and ranked them in a different way: which harm users and those close to the users most.

Members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs and a few specialists met in a to score 20 drugs on 16 criteria: nine related to the harms that a drug produces in the individual and seven indicating the harms to others. The drugs were scored out of 100 points, and the criteria were weighted to indicate their relative importance.

The study results showed that heroin (score of 34), crack cocaine (37), and methamphetamine (32) were the most harmful to individuals. On the other side, alcohol (score of 46), heroin (21), and crack cocaine (17) were the most harmful to others. Perhaps surprisingly, the study concluded that, overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug (overall harm score 72), with heroin (55) and crack cocaine (54) following. Beware the bottle, kids.

Check out the book "Rewire: Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Addictions, Conquer Self-Destructive Behavior." The audiobook is free with a trial of Audible. If you make a purchase through that link, Curiosity will get a share of the sale, which helps support the work that we do.

The Science of Addiction


Breaking: Following Trump, Guatemala to move embassy to Jerusalem

Guatemala has announced plans to relocate its embassy to Jerusalem, following in Washington's footsteps.

President Jimmy Morales confirmed the move from Tel Aviv on Sunday, days after Guatemala voted with the US against a non-binding United Nations General Assembly resolution on the matter.

"Today I spoke with the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. We are talking about the excellent relations that we have had as nations since Guatemala supported the creation of the state of Israel," Morales said in a Facebook post on Sunday.

"One of the most important topics was the return of the embassy of Guatemala to Jerusalem.

"So I inform you that I have instructed the chancellor to initiate the respective coordination so that it may be."

Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon welcomed the move and expressed gratitude, describing the move as an "important decision" in a Twitter post.


On Thursday, Guatemala, the US, Israel, and six other countries voted against the resolution at an emergency UN General Assembly meeting, which declared Washington's move as "null and void".

Previously, Morales told local news outlets that his country has historically been "pro-Israel".

"For 70 years we have maintained relations with Israel, which has always been our ally," he had said.

Despite threats by the US, a majority of UN member states – 128 members - voted in favour of Thursday's resolution.

On December 6, US President Donald Trump announced that the US recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and said his administration would be moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City, prompting international condemnation and widespread protests across the world.

Currently, there are no embassies in Jerusalem.

The status of Jerusalem is extremely sensitive and is one of the main sticking points in efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Palestinian leaders want occupied East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state, while Israel says the city cannot be divided.

In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, demonstrations have been met with violence by Israeli forces, who fire live ammunition, disperse tear gas canisters, and carry out a wave of arrests against protesters.

More than 2,900 people have been left injured and more than 500 have been jailed.

In the Gaza Strip, several Israeli air raids killed at least six people, and injured many others.

In total, at least 15 people have been killed across the occupied Palestinian territories in the last three weeks.

On December 13, Muslim leaders from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) declared that that East Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.

The pan-Muslim body called on the international community to follow its example by rejecting the US stance on Jerusalem as "dangerous", and called on the UN to "end the Israeli occupation" of Palestine.

Researchers Have Identified Words That Will Help Save Lives

Researchers Have Identified Words That Will Help Save Lives
Suicide is not an easy subject to broach. In fact, we're struggling to introduce it right now. But this article isn't meant to be dark or somber; it's actually the opposite. A 2017 study may offer some hope for individuals teetering on the decision to end their lives. Help may be on the way in the form of a mental health practitioner, an fMRI, and six simple words.

Help Me Help You

It's standard practice for a doctor to ask a patient if they've had or are having thoughts of suicide, but according to a 2003 study, we don't have a great way to intervene unless the patient outright answers "yes." 80 percent of patients who committed suicide denied having suicidal thoughts in their last contact with a mental health professional. The first way to help these individuals is to improve our ability to assess risk.

A 2017 study published in Nature Human Behaviour offers what could be a life-saving solution to the verbal denial of suicidal ideation in patients. Technology to the rescue! The researchers put volunteers in an fMRI brain scan and asked them to consider each of 30 positive, negative, and neutral words, one after the other, while their brain activity was analyzed. With this method, the researchers were able to identify suicidal individuals with 91 percent accuracy by using their brains' responses to six words: death, cruelty, trouble, carefree, good, and praise.

In the study, there were 17 control subjects and 17 participants who admitted to having suicidal thoughts. For the volunteers who had thought about suicide, words like death and cruelty activated the left superior medial frontal area and the medial frontal/anterior cingulate: areas associated with self-referential thought. Using a machine-learning algorithm, the researchers correctly identified 15 of the 17 brains of those with suicidal ideation and 16 of the 17 controls.

Get Out of My Head!

This research offers promise and hope, but it's not perfect. Using huge, heavy, expensive equipment like fMRIs isn't exactly discreet or practical, for one. "It would be nice to see if we could possibly do this using EEG, if we could assess the thought alterations with EEG," said Dr. Marcel Just, the lead author of the study. "It would be enormously cheaper. More widely used."

The mind-reading of the fMRI is far from perfect, too. "If somebody didn't want others to know what they are thinking, they can certainly block that method. They can not cooperate," said Just. "I don't think we have a way to get at people's thoughts against their will." fMRI itself even has its critics. That being said, understanding that there are differences in the brains of suicidal individuals and controls is a big step in the direction of saving more lives.

Pregnant Women Can Be Meat-Free and Healthy

Despite what your grandmother (or your bro-y neighbor who is a little into bodybuilding) may have told you, a vegetarian or vegan diet can be as nutritionally balanced as any omnivorous way of eating. Still, even among longtime proponents of plant-based eating, there can be hesitation about totally eliminating animal products during pregnancy due to concerns about the health of the child. Now, research suggests that for most healthy pregnant women, those worries could be totally unfounded.

The Pregnancy Balancing Act
Over the course of a pregnancy, a woman's body goes through an incredible amount of physical and hormonal changes. These, in turn, impact her nutritional needs while she is "eating for two." A woman will eat more calories and experience a higher demand for vitamins and nutrients such as calcium, folate, and iron.

If she doesn't meet those needs, she risks her own health in terms of vitamin deficiencies, gestational diabetes, and anemia. On top of that, a poor diet could result in a premature labor, low birth weight, and increased potential for birth defects and health concerns like diabetes later in life.

Though these needs and risks are widely known, the way to meet them has been subject for debate. And many pregnant women develop new food aversions or cravings (pickles and ice cream, anyone?). In Western countries, vegetarian and vegan diets have particularly been called into question over their ability to provide adequate amounts of vitamin B12, iron, and other vital nutrients in pregnancy. However, a review of 22 studies on vegan and vegetarian pregnancies published in 2015 in the BJOG laid some of those fears to rest. It concluded that healthy pregnant women who reduced or eliminated animal products faced no higher risks of major health problems than their dairy and meat-eating counterparts.

Know Your Sources
According to the BJOG report, as long as nutritional needs (particularly iron and B12) are met, it does not matter whether they come from animals or plants. Foods like tofu or nutritional yeast could provide essential B vitamins for a vegetarian or vegan. Spinach, kale, and lentils could add a boost of iron. And supplements such as folic acid and vitamin D could further support health throughout pregnancy. If iron absorption is an issue, soaking beans and whole grains before eating could help, and has the added bonus of reducing cooking time.

The authors stressed that these studies were conducted on "healthy" women only, and that more research was needed to determine whether vegetarian and vegan diets are suitable for pregnant women with prior health conditions. Until further information is available, any pregnant woman with concerns should consult her doctor to determine the best eating plan for her body and her baby.

The Untouched Tomb of Santa Claus.

Santa is dead. The spirit of Christmas sure isn't, but the real-life saint that inspired the jolly holiday man is very much no longer living. This shouldn't be a shock to you. What is shocking is the claim that archaeologists may have found his untouched sarcophagus. Stay tuned to see if the tomb contains a red suit.

Turkish archaeologists are apparently trying to ruin Christmas. Jokes aside, this team claims to have uncovered a huge find: the untouched burial site of Saint Nicholas, the Christian bishop who inspired the Santa Claus character. Digital scans of St. Nicholas Church in Antalya, Turkey revealed a completely intact temple and burial site underground. This region is where the saint is believed to have been born. North Pole who?

"We have obtained very good results but the real work starts now," Cemil Karabayram, the director of surveying and monuments in Antalya, told The Guardian, referring to the sizeable job of removing the tiles on the floor. "We will reach the ground and maybe we will find the untouched body of Saint Nicholas." If these archaeologists are right, they just stumbled upon the sarcophagus of a celebrity that has gone undisturbed since year 343 A.D.

This, of course, isn't the first time anyone has gone on a Santa search. It was generally assumed, until now, that Saint Nicholas was buried in a tomb under the Antalya church. However, as legend had it, some sneaky merchants weaseled their way in and stole the saint's bones in 1087 to bring them to Bari, Italy, where a basilica was built to house the remains. In 2014, forensic experts reconstructed the face of the man in the Bari crypt, revealing what they said was the true face of Santa. If the Turkish archaeologists are correct, the real Santa's tomb has never been tampered with. That face is just that of some random priest.

As reported by Gizmodo, the clergy collects a clear liquid that seeps from the tomb in Bari every year on December 6th. As the tale goes, the stuff has miraculous powers (it's likely just seawater, as the tomb is below sea level). What a downer if it's not even nasty juice from the right dead guy, right? But, who knows, it could be reindeer drool. The only way to know if the real Santa is buried in Bari or is truly resting in peace in Antalya is to wait for December 24th and see where the sleigh pulls up.


Red Wine vs White Wine

There's one bottle in the world that we'll probably never know if it lives up to its one-of-a-kind vintage. The Speyer bottle is at least 1,650 years old, and what's more, its contents are still sloshing around inside (you might not want to drink it, though).

So where did this wine come from, and how has it survived for so long? The part of the story that we know for sure starts in Speyer, Germany, in the year 1867. While excavating a Roman tomb dating back to 325–350 C.E., archaeologists discovered two sarcophagi containing the remains of a man and a woman respectively, and an assortment of glass bottles that were likely meant to accompany the couple on their journey to the afterlife.

Though most of the bottles had been cracked or emptied, one remained unbroken and filled with liquid. And it proved that when it came to traveling to the halls of Elysium, the Romans weren't averse to taking some road brews. An analysis of the outside of the Speyer bottle showed that its contents were alcoholic, if not particularly appetizing. Because although there was a fair amount of liquid still contained inside, about two-thirds had congealed into a hard, resinous substance thanks to the Roman preservation method of sealing off the wine with a layer of olive oil. A blend of herbs likely finished off the process for additional flavor. All in all, it's probably not the most appealing beverage at this point — especially since it's no longer alcoholic.

Yes, sadly, the Speyer bottle will no longer get you drunk, though perhaps the spirit of that, er, spirit provided some comfort to the tomb's occupants. If you can convince the caretakers of the Pfalz History Museum, which has been home to the bottle for more than a century, you technically could drink it, though. According to wine professor Monika Christmann, "Micro-biologically it is probably not spoiled, but [as you can tell based on its appearance] it would not bring joy to the palate."

You'd have a hard time getting inside the bottle, though. Although some scientists have petitioned to be able to open the bottle and analyze the contents chemically, Ludger Tekampe, the department head in charge of storing the bottle, is adamant. "We are not sure whether or not it could stand the shock to the air. It is still liquid, and there are some who believe it should be subjected to new scientific analysis, but we are not sure." But the bottle is a treasure in and of itself — we don't really feel the need to get inside it any more than we felt the need to get into the half-drunk Coors scattered around our college dorm on a Saturday morning.


A Cabernet A Day Keeps The Doctor Away

Maybe you've heard of the French paradox: Why do heart attack rates appear lower than expected in France when the French eat so much saturated fat and cholesterol? This has been partially attributed to the fact that Frenchies love red wine.

While we know that the moderate consumption of alcohol (we said moderate, frat boys) has its health benefits, a 1993 study suggests the non-alcohol stuff in red wine is hard at work, too. Moderate red wine consumption has also been shown to help prevent heart attacks, increase the amount of HDL "good" cholesterol, and decrease the chances of blood clotting. The stuff also has anti-inflammatory properties, and flavonoids — the antioxidant found in red wine — can help protect against cancer.

Long Live The Lungs
Good news, pinot grigio lovers. While red wine typically gets all the glory, studies show we shouldn't be so scrupulous with which bottle we're pouring into our glasses. White wine has been shown to provide significant health benefits too. Nice!

In a 2015 study, researchers found that white wine can provide heart- and metabolism-related improvements (so can red wine, by the way). White wine can also help improve cholesterol levels just as much as red wine can, according to a 2014 study.

But here is where, finally, white wine has the edge over red wine. Research from the University of Buffalo conducted in 2002 suggests that drinking white wine ― more so than red ― can help keep your lungs healthy. "This finding may indicate that nutrients in wine are responsible for the positive effect of alcoholic beverages on lung function," said Holger Schunemann, a University of Buffalo professor and study author. "Red wine in moderation has been shown to be beneficial for the heart, but in this case, the relationship was stronger for white wine."

But wait, there's more! According to a 1999 study from the University of Barcelona, white wines may have a higher antioxidant capacity than red wines. Rub that in those Merlot lovers' faces, sauvignon blancsters.

At this point, we must remind you to always drink in moderation. And although white wine takes the win from red wine in terms of keeping lungs healthy, whites typically have more sugar than reds. Jury's out on the effects of meteorite wine, though.

Thirsty yet? Services like Winc Wine Delivery can bring you delicious vino from around the world, straight to your door for less than $7 a bottle. This is an affiliate partner, which means if you purchase or sign up, Curiosity may get something in return. Thank you for supporting our advertisers.

Fire in Philippine shopping mall kills 37

Fire swept through a shopping mall in the Philippines killing at least 37 people, most of them workers at a call center, city government officials said on Sunday.

The vice mayor of the southern city of Davao, Paolo Duterte, said the chance of survival for any of the 37 people missing at the NCC Mall was “zero”.

“Let us pray for them,” said Duterte, the eldest son of President Rodrigo Duterte.

The fire broke out on Saturday at a furniture store on the mall’s third level and quickly engulfed an outsourcing business on the upper floor, said a spokeswoman for the city government, Ma. Teresita Gaspan,

The cause was not known but an investigation was being launched, she said.

President Duterte and his daughter, Sara Duterte, who is mayor of the city, visited the scene late on Saturday to meet anxious relatives of the missing and survivors.

Six people were rescued and taken to hospital.

You Really Should Not Drink Coffee on an Empty Stomach


Coffee is a wonderful, beloved, near-holy, miracle liquid that fuels all of our hopes and dreams. Just make sure you get a snack before your first cup. We're (definitely) not telling you to give up coffee in any way, but we do want to make sure you don't go HAM with the caffeine on an empty stomach.

Chew Before You Brew
"Wake up and smell the coffee" is a bit misleading. Sure, you can take a whiff of the fresh brew as you roll out of bed, but you should nibble on a bagel before getting too close to the coffee cup. Coffee takes quite the toll on your digestive system. Because coffee ramps up your production of stomach acid, having food in your tum will prevent the extra acid from eating at your insides. If you drink coffee on an empty stomach too often, the hydrochloric acid your body produces will damage your stomach lining. That goes for decaffeinated coffee too.

In addition to the stomach lining damage, drinking coffee on an empty stomach can give you some other unpleasant side effects. It "can give you jitters, shakes, and other withdrawal effects, including mood changes," Dr. Adam Simon, chief medical officer at PushDoctor.co.uk, told Express. It might also increase symptoms of anxiety, boost your heart rate, make you irritable, and make it harder to focus.

The Waiting Game
A first-thing cup of coffee isn't even the best plan for waking you up properly in the morning. Every morning, your body gets a jolt of cortisol (a hormone that makes you alert) just by waking up. Drinking coffee to get things going in the morning when your cortisol levels are already at a high point can actually backfire. Go for a cup of coffee in the mid-morning or afternoon when your cortisol levels begin to dip. It'll be much more effective!

Although science doesn't support drinking coffee first thing in the morning, find comfort in the fact that science does give the thumbs up to pairing the beverage with a donut.

Are You Consuming Your Coffee Correctly?

Top 6 movies of 2017

Moonlight — a marvellous poem of light and colour

Barry Jenkins’ film follows the growing-up of a shy gay African-American boy. When young Chiron eats as a guest he is seen holding his fork differently than the adult Chiron in the diner at the end of the movie.

A chronicle of the childhood, adolescence and burgeoning adulthood of a young, African-American, gay man growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami.

What is remarkable about Moonlight is that Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney have crafted a film which has this place so deep in its bones that it strikes me as impossible to separate any aspect of its form from the context

A Ghost Story — unique supernatural fable

Rooney Mara and a bedsheet-draped Casey Affleck star in David Lowery’s radical and poetic tale. I rarely see a movie so original that I want to tell people to just see it without reading any reviews beforehand, , David Lowery's “A Ghost Story” is one of those movies. So I'm urging you to just see it.

Some will say it's pretentious, obtuse, and masturbatory, and they'd be able to find plenty of evidence. But there's so much to love here, largely because the film is something of an inkblot.

Call Me by Your Name is a bewitching story of gay love

Set in Lombardy in a 1980s summer, Luca Guadagnino’s film is truthful and vivid. Call Me by Your Name is a 2017 romantic coming-of-age drama film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by James Ivory, based on the 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman, in a place so enchanted, with its bright green gardens, that it belongs in a fairy tale. The location, the opening credits tell us, is “Somewhere in Northern Italy.”


Manchester by the Sea — ‘Tragical-magical’

Kenneth Lonergan’s new movie is a marvellous drama of rage and grief. After the death of his older brother Joe, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is shocked that Joe has made him sole guardian of his teenage nephew Patrick. Taking leave of his job as a janitor in Boston, Lee reluctantly returns to Manchester-by-the-Sea, the fishing village where his working-class family has lived for generations. 

There, he is forced to deal with a past that separated him from his wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), and the community where he was born and raised.


Get Out — a brilliantly mischievous, unsettling movie

Jordan Peele’s debut feature blends horror, comedy and racism allegory, It stars Daniel Kaluuya as Chris, a black man who visits the family of his white girlfriend (Allison Williams); at their home, the servants are black and act strangely. 

It's time for a young African American to meet with his white girlfriend's parents for a weekend in their secluded estate in the woods, but before long, the friendly and polite ambience will give way to a nightmare.


Jackie: a piercingly intelligent film

Natalie Portman catches every tic and trick in Pablo Larraín’s portrait of the first lady. A disturbingly intimate portrayal of Jacqueline Kennedy, 'Jackie' is a film that unmasks her in such a tender yet objective manner; you feel like an intruder who is tailing the first lady of America and a widow in her most trying time.

A movie which portrays the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination from the eyes of JFK's wife.  The movie, starring Natalie Portman and directed by Pablo Larrain, shows how the then First Lady dealt with the huge responsibilities thrust on her, during and after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy.