On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Energy is scheduled to announce a massive development in the search for a clean, renewable energy source.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California bombarded a pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world's largest laser to trigger a nuclear fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain, according to a report in the Financial Times.

This would be the first time scientists have been able to create a fusion reaction that produces more energy than it consumes.

This month, we’re five years into building Contrary. Along the way, we’ve raised hundreds of millions from some of the world’s top institutions and have been fortunate to back startups like Ramp, Anduril and many others.

But just like the stories of the startups we back, the journey has taught us a number of lessons the hard way.

Sweden's Eco Wave Power has been proving its relatively simple, jetty-mounted wave energy devices for at least 10 years now, and has now inked a conditional deal for a 77-megawatt installation in Turkey - the world's largest wave power plant.

Image: Eco Wave Power's grid-connected demonstration plant ran in Gibraltar for six yearsEco Wave Power

Nasa’s 25-day Artemis I mission came to a dramatic close on Sunday morning, as an unmanned Orion capsule returned from its trip around the moon to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico. A US Navy craft, the USS Portland, was on hand with a team of divers using a special winch to recover the ship. The arrival marked an important step in the Artemis programme, an ambitious initiative to get human astronauts back on the moon by 2024. Sign up to our breaking news email alerts here

Image: https://flipboard.com

Today, many (but not all) Christians celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25. But given that the birth date of Jesus Christ is not known with certainty, why was this day selected?

There are two major theories as to why Christmas is celebrated on Dec. 25. One, sometimes called the "history of religion" hypothesis, suggests that Christmas supplanted one or more pagan holidays. The other theory, often called the "computation" or "calculation" hypothesis, suggests that early Christians used some form of calculation to arrive at Dec. 25 as Jesus' birthday.

A new technology developed by UZH researchers enables the body to produce therapeutic agents on demand at the exact location where they are needed. The innovation could reduce the side effects of cancer therapy and may hold the solution to better delivery of Covid-related therapies directly to the lungs.

Image: 3D medical animation still showing secretion of cytokines. (CREDIT: Creative Commons)

Northern California has some of the strongest offshore winds in the U.S., with immense potential to produce clean energy. But it also has a problem. Its continental shelf drops off quickly, making building traditional wind turbines directly on the seafloor costly if not impossible.

Once water gets more than about 200 feet deep – roughly the height of an 18-story building – these “monopile” structures are pretty much out of the question.

A solution has emerged that’s being tested in several locations around the world: wind turbines that float.

Imagine getting through your day without using a single battery. Could you do it? Whether it’s smartphones, laptops, electric vehicles or other gadgets, batteries not only store energy for future use, they enable our tools and playthings to be mobile. And as economies around the world try to wean themselves from fossil fuels amid global warming, batteries have the potential to play an even greater role in powering our societies.

An international team of scientists eyeing next-generation energy storage solutions have demonstrated an eco-friendly and low-cost battery with some exciting potential. The group’s novel sodium-sulfur battery design offers a fourfold increase on energy capacity compared to a typical lithium-ion battery, and shapes as a promising technology for future grid-scale energy storage.

Just about everyone agrees that how you start and end your days has an outsized impact on your mindset and productivity. Which is why the internet is jammed packed with complex morning routine prescriptions and tales of A-listers' superhuman start-of-day rituals.

Far be it from me to criticize Tony Robbins morning ice baths or Time Cook's 3:45 am wake-up time if these extreme routines work for them, but wouldn't it be nice if there was an impactful routine out there that was also both easy and pleasant?

Since the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the traditional workplace, affecting nearly every industry. The tech sector, which has been ahead of the curve in terms of flexible work policy, has been on the roller coaster as well but has remained remarkably resilient.

Deloitte’s 14th annual Tech Trends report, released on Wednesday, takes a look at the current state of enterprises when it comes to IT. The Deloitte report focuses on the experience of global organizations, across industries, in order to ascertain what tech trends are on the horizon.

According to the 2019 Nobel Prize winner in economics, Daniel Kahneman, all decisions are made with partial information due to the systemic cognitive biases people bring to the decision-making process. However, decisions don't require perfection to be effective. For corporate leaders bearing the pressure to make tough calls, asking the right questions is a systematic approach to gathering information that avoids the pitfalls in pursuit of perfection.

I recently asked LinkedIn followers two questions:

• "If someone has good news and bad news, do you want to hear the good news first, or the bad?"
• "If you have good news and bad news to share, do you tend to start with the good news, or the bad?"

Oddly enough, most people said they want to hear the bad news first -- even though most people say they tend to share the good news first.

Or maybe not so oddly. A 2013 study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that most people prefer to share the good news first, a news-order delivery approach the researchers call "priming emotion-protection." (Or in non researcher-speak, "This will probably go badly... so I better ease into it."

Innovation can be a buzzword associated with anything deemed “new,” yet in the world of travel, this can often apply to simple twists on existing features or slightly modified takes on a popular concept.

Then, there are changes that truly mark a brand-new approach. At this year’s TPG Awards, we took the opportunity to recognize several brands that have done just that over the last year.

Image: https://thepointsguy.com

Start-up businesses are at best the ultimate fertile ground for fearless blue-sky thinking, free from the shackles of heavy processes or calcified policies. But successful innovation also benefits from experience and requires investment that a young business may lack. Is this an impossible circle to square?

Image: Pexels/Pixabay

There’s a lot of weird and wonderful uses for AI applications. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen AI powering better marketing emails, more smartly understanding the context of video content, and getting the most from customer feedback. It shows no sign of slowing: OpenAI announced it is pouring $10 million into the ecosystem to accelerate things further. Now, Kirill Zubovsky is taking on the challenge of picking the perfect domain name, with a service he calls Smartynames.com.

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT, a free, open-source AI tool that allows you to use natural language chat with a friendly robot who will find information for you, write content and more. Some are calling it a Google killer; others say it could bring an end to the student essay.

But what can this tool do in the world of PR?

Writing an article

I asked the chat bot to perform two common tasks. First, I asked it to write an article on a common topic that comes up all the time here on PR Daily: how to pitch the media.

Spreadsheets are widely used by organizations of all sizes for all kinds of basic and complex tasks.

While simple calculations and graphs have long been part of the spreadsheet experience, machine learning (ML) has not. ML is often seen as being too complex to use, while spreadsheet usage is intended to be accessible to any type of user. Google is now trying to change that paradigm for its Google Sheets online spreadsheet program.

Image: Screenshot

Today, the U.S. economy is largely driven by intangible innovations. From content creators on TikTok to the metaverse and artificial intelligence, the value that is being generated by individuals and companies does not exist in a fixed form. Who will end up profiting from it? Those who develop a keen understanding of how to use intellectual property to establish and maintain ownership over what they invent and build have a distinct advantage.

Generative AI is among the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) trends in 2022, introducing users around the world to new capabilities such as automated text and image generation.

London-based startup Qatalog is taking a different approach to emerging technology. The company uses Generative AI to help build and enable business collaboration applications. Qatalog emerged from stealth in October 2020 with a goal of helping organizations unify enterprise tools and projects.

Image: https://venturebeat.com