They studied my recycling and found it means nothing

🔥 Most Enraging

Companies keep blaming AI for the layoffs, and investors are not buying it

Twenty-one companies have blamed AI for their layoffs this year, cutting people by the thousand and pointing at the software as the reason. The market has caught on, though, because the ones that pin the firings on the robot tend to slide afterward, once everybody can smell the excuse. AI did not fire anybody. A person did, and then reached for the robot to hold the blame.

😩 Most Exhausting

The best way to save giant sequoias may be more fire

It turns out the best way to save the giant sequoias, the oldest living things we have, is to set more fires near them on purpose. The ones that had already been through a controlled burn were four times likelier to survive the big wildfires. They evolved for fire, and we spent a century stamping every fire out, trying to help, which is how we nearly cooked the oldest trees on earth. The road to a dead sequoia was paved with caution.

😤 Unreasonably Annoying

Your AI calorie-tracking app may be off by 345 calories a meal

Somebody tested the phone apps that photograph your dinner and tell you how many calories are in it, and they were off by two to three hundred and fifty a meal, always low, always missing the fat. So the little app that has been congratulating me on my restraint has been lying to me in the exact direction I wanted to hear. It is the most supportive thing in my life and it is wrong about all of it.

🤷 Somehow Also Happening

A man buried himself in snow for over two hours to set a world record

A man in Poland had himself buried in snow for two hours and twelve minutes to set a world record, and he already held the one for sitting in ice for five hours, so this is a whole area of expertise for him. There is a person who looked at a snowbank and saw a career. I put on a second sweater to walk to the mailbox and treat it as a hard day spent outdoors.

▸ Hidden genetic diversity helped inbred brown tree snakes conquer Guam — Scientists worked out how a handful of brown tree snakes that hitched a ride to Guam after the war turned into thirty thousand snakes a square mile, despite starting so inbred they should have fizzled out. The answer was buried in their DNA, thousands of hidden rearrangements that let them adapt anyway. So the most successful invaders on the island are all closely related and doing fine. I have a large family and can confirm this is possible.

▸ A heatwave revealed a lost 17th-century garden under a scorched lawn — The heatwave in England scorched the lawn at a great estate down to the dirt and revealed the ghost of a formal garden that had been buried under the grass since about 1699, a huge ornate thing nobody had laid eyes on in three hundred years. The drought did the archaeology for free. It took a historic disaster to show them what used to be there. That is usually the only way anyone finds out anything.

▸ Scientists trace the origin of human eyes to an ancient one-eyed sea creature — Scientists traced our two eyes back to a little worm that drifted in the sea six hundred million years ago with a single light-sensor on top of its head, just enough to tell day from night. Everything we can see now grew out of that one dim spot. All of it, from a creature with one eye and no particular plans. I have far more equipment than it did, and I still cannot find my keys.

Fine. Julie, the last circus elephant in Portugal, was taken from the wild as a baby in the late eighties and spent forty years doing tricks under a tent, and now, because the country finally banned the whole business, she has been walked onto a thousand-acre sanctuary to do nothing at all for the rest of her life. Forty years of performing on command, and her first real day off came in her forties. She is going to stand in a field now, one that is hers, with nothing asked of her. I have been working toward that exact retirement myself. Good for the elephant. I mean it, and it costs me something to say so.