Table of Contents Table of Contents Why ChatGPT just doesn’t work for me 1. It’s terrible at listening to instructions 2. It has a bad habit of taking things too far 3. Incorrect or irrelevant information sneaks into the copy quite often 4. Its “writing style” gets repetitive and cliche very quickly 5. It’s near impossible to get the LLM to revise or correct its output successfully The result: I gave up I remember when ChatGPT first appeared, and the first thing everyone started saying was “Writers are done for.” People started speculating about news sites, blogs, and pretty much all written internet content becoming AI-generated — and while those predictions seemed extreme to me, I was also pretty impressed by the text GPT could produce. Naturally, I had to try out the fancy new tool for myself but I quickly discovered that the results weren’t quite as impressive as they seemed. Fast forward more than two years, and as far as my experience and my use cases go, nothing has changed: whenever I use ChatGPT to help with my writing, all it does is slow me down and leave me frustrated. Recommended Videos ChatGPT can generate some really good stuff. It can produce language that’s natural, coherent, even witty and interesting. But most of the prime examples you tend to see come from extremely simple prompts — the “write a poem about shopping at Walmart but in the style of William Shakespeare” kind of prompts that everyone was doing back in 2023. Related I’m sorry, I simply cannot be cynical about a technology that can accomplish this. pic.twitter.com/yjlY72eZ0m— Thomas H. Ptacek (@tqbf) December 2, 2022 When you ask for something like that, part of what makes the result great is that it’s unexpected. You’ve essentially asked it to surprise you, and in most cases, it will succeed. When you’re trying to use ChatGPT for boring old writing work, on the other hand, it’s a whole different story. First of all, for pieces like this, it’s useless. Everything I’m writing now is about my own experiences and opinions — AI can’t write those for me. Some people might argue that it could help you plan, brainstorm, or refine arguments — but I’ve never wanted help with that kind of thing anyway. The kind of work I actually tried to use ChatGPT for was company blogs. You know the type — explainers, how-tos, and recommendation posts covering topics related to the company and its products (with some subtle self-promotion thrown in as well). When you write this kind of thing, you’re often given a lot of requirements: a style guide for language and grammar, keywords to insert, sources to include, sources to avoid, and a content outline with the headings, structure, and key points all pre-decided. If I wanted to get some usable copy, I couldn’t just feed GPT a one-line prompt and let it run wild. So I tried a structure that looked like this: A preliminary “context” prompt explaining what I was writing and what kind of things I was going to ask for, along with an example paragraph to show it the style of language I wanted. Subsequent prompts with “content outlines” that provided a heading or two along with bullet points on what to cover. I would never ask for too much at once and since I didn’t trust it to add stats and sources, I’d leave all that out with the intention of doing it myself afterward. But as much as I tried to split the work into small chunks and give abundantly clear instructions, I would always run into the same problems: ChatGPT is terrible at listening to instructions. It has a bad habit of taking things too far. Incorrect or irrelevant information sneaks into the copy quite often. Its “writing style” gets repetitive and cliche very quickly. When any of the above problems occur, it’s near impossible to get the LLM to revise or correct its output successfully. Let me show you what I mean. When you’re trying to get very specific output from ChatGPT, you have to give specific instructions. Unfortunately, it feels like the more things you ask for, the more likely GPT is to ignore some of them. My prompts would have headings, content bullet points, word counts, formatting instructions, and the chatbot had to remember the style instructions from the start of the session too. I tried lots of different approaches to simplify things but it always felt like ChatGPT just couldn’t handle this many instructions. Two specific things I would have problems with frequently were word counts and bullet points. The LLM rarely gave me the number of words I asked for (usually giving me something way under rather than way over), and it never listened to me when I said I did or didn’t want any bullet points. Sometimes this is fixable — say I wanted 200 words with bullet points but I got 300 words without bullet points. It’s fairly quick to cut a few words and shove some bullet points in there. Unfortunately, it always felt like I got the harder-to-fix mistakes. When you ask for 500 words with no bullet points and get 200 words with bullet points — you basically have to do most the work yourself. When you tell ChatGPT you want something specific, such as friendly language or second person point of view, it tends to latch onto these concepts and go crazy with them. Friendly language turns into full-on text chat language with emoji, and second-person perspective somehow turns into excessive questions and references to the reader so it can use the pronoun “you” as often as possible. You’re also a bit stuck if you want a lot of something like examples or quotes. If you simply tell GPT you want “lots,” “plenty,” or “many” of something, it will probably give you double or triple the amount you want. If you give it a specific number, it’s likely to ignore it completely and give you something random. In other words, you can barely control the output. We all know that AI “hallucinates” and gets its facts wrong at random times — it happens enough that you have to check every single thing it says, which takes a long time and affects how much time you can save by using it. To combat this, I basically never asked for facts or figures. I did try a few times right at the beginning but the fact-checking process really is a slog, and I quickly stopped bothering. The problem is, GPT will throw random inaccuracies into its responses whether you ask for facts and figures or not. This means you can’t just check how well the copy reads or whether you’re happy with the points it’s trying to make — you have to check and consider the validity of everything it says. It’s such a drag. And since I’m talking about mistakes and hallucinations here, I might as well mention the “worst-case scenario” too. Sometimes the LLM just goes off the rails, and while this doesn’t happen all the time, when it does — you’ve got to throw that session in the bin and spend time pasting your prompts into a new chat and starting all over. I’ve never really seen ChatGPT go crazy in a particularly funny way personally, but my friend did get this gem once: Willow Roberts / Digital Trends At first, it seems insane just how “human” ChatGPT can sound. But as you use it more and more, you realize it doesn’t just sound human, it sounds like “the average human.” OpenAI’s data sets include most of the internet — millions of internet articles, Reddit threads, and personal blogs. And I’m sorry to say, a lot of this content is utter garbage. But because ChatGPT is trained on it, it picks up all of the most common bad habits. So when you generate a lot of text with ChatGPT, you’ll start noticing that certain sentence structures and phrases get repeated a lot. The two worst culprits for me were these two sentence structures: “From A and B to C and D, blah blah blah.” (Example: In the world of TikTok, there’s a place for everyone — from DIY enthusiasts and beauty gurus to pet lovers and educators.) “Whether you’re A or B, blah blah blah.” (Example: Whether you’re just starting or looking to level up your channel, using smart strategies to build authentic engagement is the key to standing out.) ChatGPT likes these two sentence structures so much that I was pretty much guaranteed to get three or four of them in every single session. Those two examples even came from the same paragraph of one of its responses. And that “In the world of…” phrase in the first example is another way it really loves to start a sentence. All of it is boring, cliche, and ridiculously overused (which is, of course, the very reason ChatGPT ends up generating them so much). I even tried expressly banning certain phrases and sentence types, starting each prompt with this little list: Willow Roberts / Digital Trends People say it’s almost impossible to tell AI-generated text from human-written text nowadays — but I kind of disagree. If you’ve tried to use these AI tools yourself and experienced all of the problems and bad habits, you get to know a lot of tell-tale signs. When people mix AI content with human-written stuff and heavily edit the majority of ChatGPT’s output, you can hide it completely. But content that’s just come straight from the language model and published practically as is — you can tell. You can tell quite easily. The real deal breaker with all of this is when a problem occurs, ChatGPT can rarely fix it alone. Whenever things went wrong, I would try once or twice to explain the problem and ask for revisions, but it just didn’t work. If I asked for the right word count, most of the time I would just get the same word count again. If I asked it to get rid of the bullet points, it would say “Of course!” and then give me more bullet points. If I asked it to adjust the tone or the style, it would struggle to apply the change across the board, and I’d end up with a weird mix of both. Maybe if you just kept reprompting and regenerating ChatGPT’s responses, you would get pretty close to what you wanted eventually. The problem for me is that I’m a writer — and using ChatGPT forces me to fill the editor role instead. This probably isn’t a problem for everyone — plenty of writers also do a bit of editing as part of their work, but it really bothers me. I hate editing other people’s work and I hate editing GPT’s output. As for how often things went wrong — when every session is multiple hours long with 30+ prompts, you nearly always hit a snag somewhere. I did try for a good few months to learn how to get some use out of ChatGPT back in 2023 and I went back to it after major updates over the next two years — but my experience never changed. I tried other LLMs too, but even the newer “reasoning” models that blurt out inner monologue before answering still have the same usability issues. Current LLM models just don’t speed up the writing process for me — all they do is force me to spend time doing what I hate instead of just putting time into what I enjoy. If you hate writing and never want to do it, ChatGPT can most certainly help you out. But if writing is a hobby for you or what you’ve chosen to do as a living, this thing will likely drive you crazy. In the end, I never published anything one could call “AI-generated.” Every time I tried to, as they say, “integrate it into my workflow,” I would end up bashing my head against the wall, wasting a lot of time, and then closing the thing down when I realized I had achieved nothing and my deadline was just around the corner. Editors’ Recommendations

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“Only atoms and the void are real,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus. “Well, actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Atoms can also be waves, the void is made up of fields and everyone is going to need to start using the word ‘quantum’ all the time.” OK, he said only the first bit. Democritus pioneered atomism – the idea that everything in the universe can be divided into atoms, which can then be divided no further. But as we mark 100 years since the development of quantum mechanics in 1925, I have been wondering whether, somewhere in a corner of the multiverse, he and other ancient philosophers could have come up with a version of the theory millennia earlier. If so, what would that world look like? This article is part of a special series celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of quantum theory. Read more here. “The story could have started 2400 years ago,” says Bob Coecke, chief scientist at quantum computing firm Quantinuum. For him, the point of divergence came when Parmenides, another ancient Greek philosopher, declared that the universe is singular and unchanging. He even believed that motion was impossible – something his contemporary Heraclitus reportedly attempted to disprove by waving his arm in front of his face. Parmenides was having none of it: just because the arm was in one place, then another, it doesn’t mean we can say it moved, he argued. Parmenides inspired Democritus, who – quite reasonably – rejected the wacky view that motion was impossible, but embraced the idea of an unchanging reality. His atomism squared these…

I successfully upgraded my Virgin Voyages room by bidding $80 on an upgrade I almost spent $1,100 for when I first booked my cruise. Nishaa Sharma 2025-04-20T13:38:01Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? I had an interior room on my Virgin Voyages cruise but got a sea-view room upgrade by bidding $80. Before trying Virgin's Level Upgrade program, I made sure my bid wasn't too close to the minimum. I found out I won the upgrade 24 hours before our ship's departure. Last year, I surprised my husband with a Virgin Voyages Caribbean cruise for his 30th birthday.It was difficult to keep the trip a secret from him at first, but saving up to foot the bill for this vacation solo might have been even tougher. To keep costs manageable, I booked us an interior room.Although I really wanted to get us a sea-view room, I couldn't justify spending an extra $1,100 for slightly bigger space with a window. However, months later, I got an email from Virgin's Level Upgrade program offering me a chance to bid on a sea-view room (and other higher-tier cabins) for far less.With a little bit of research and luck, I scored the room upgrade I originally wanted for just $80.I bid above the minimum — but not by too little or too much It's important to make a competitive bid. Virgin Voyages The window for bidding on upgrades varies from voyage to voyage, and closes as soon as any remaining cabin inventory fills up. In my case, the system opened two months in advance, and I placed my bids a few weeks later.I knew I didn't want to leave the minimum bids, since I imagine a lot of travelers do just that when the "Level Upgrade" email arrives just to see what happens. In those cases, you can beat out the competition by only bidding a few bucks. However, leaving too small of a margin can be risky .After reading about other bidders' experiences on various cruise forums, I also felt confident I wouldn't need to offer hundreds above the minimum bid threshold just to be successful.For our voyage, I successfully offered $80 on a sea-view cabin with a minimum bid of $45. I also placed an unsuccessful bid of $280 on a limited-view sea-terrace room, which had a minimum of $275.I was happy with sea-view room, which had a large porthole and the lowest minimum bid prices by over $200.Looking back, I had good odds of getting that room since we were in the lowest cabin tier and the majority of Virgin Voyages' rooms are sea terraces with balconies.This means most of my fellow travelers — bidders I was competing with — weren't even trying for a sea-view cabin. For them, it would've been a downgrade. Above all, I stayed patient and ready to enjoy our trip even without an upgrade From the start, I knew we'd have an amazing time on board no matter what cabin we ended up in. Nishaa Sharma Although there's a chance of hearing back earlier, we found out about our upgrade just a day before our voyage's departure.From the start, though, I knew we'd have an amazing time on board no matter what room we ended up in. After all, the bidding upgrade system is a gamble.Fortunately, one of the best things about a cruise, is that your trip is what you make of it — and you can spend as much (or as little) time in your accommodation as you'd like. Recommended video

Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of brazenly gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson turned celebrated vigilante, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Thursday.The federal charges include stalking, a firearms offense, and murder through use of a firearm, according to NPR. If convicted, the murder charge makes Mangione eligible for the death penalty. Mangione is also facing additional charges from state prosecutors in New York and in Pennsylvania, where he was arrested. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently directed prosecutors at the Department of Justice to seek the death penalty for Mangione. “If there was ever a death case, this is one,” Bondi told Fox News. “This guy is charged with hunting down a CEO, a father of two, a married man, hunting him down and executing him.” In the months since Thompson’s murder in December, Mangione has become a lightning rod of controversy. For many, he represents the resentment and disappointment many Americans harbor about the US health care system. Mangione’s online activity has also become the subject of intense scrutiny, from his banner photos on X to his more than 200 Goodreads reviews. His review of the so-called “Unabomber Manifesto” has attracted particular attention. “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless [to] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies,” he wrote. “But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”Sean Fleming, a research fellow at the University of Nottingham who studies ant-tech radicalism, has been trying to better understand that essay’s author, Ted Kaczynski, who he’s currently writing a book about. Although Fleming is cautious about saying Mangione was inspired by Kaczynksi, it’s hard not to notice a few parallels in their cases. “Assassinating corporate executives to create a media spectacle is straight out of the Unabomber’s playbook. The assassin of Brian Thompson also left some engravings on the shell casings, which reminds me of the engraving that Kaczynski left on the components of his bombs,” Fleming says. “And more generally, Kaczynski and Mangione are both disaffected overachievers with backgrounds in STEM fields.”Fleming shared some of his insights about the Unabomber with the host of Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Sean Rameswaram. Read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below. And listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.What stood out most to you when you first read the manifesto? What struck me is how unconspiratorial it was. Kaczynski doesn’t think there’s an evil cabal of technocrats plotting to oppress us all. His entire worldview is evolutionary. And so I thought: This is interesting as political theory. It’s extremely radical and there’s a lot I disagree with, but as a historian of political ideas, I thought it would make an interesting side project. And then it took on a life of its own. For those who don’t remember, who was he, what did he do, and how did people come to know him? Ted Kaczynski was born in Chicago in 1942, and he started out as a child prodigy in mathematics. He went to Harvard on a scholarship at the age of 16, and then he went on to do a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan. And he was then hired as an assistant professor in math at Berkeley, and at that time he was the youngest in the institution’s history.The reason we’re still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings.But after two years at Berkeley he abruptly resigned, and after a little while, he bought himself a piece of land outside Lincoln, Montana, where he built himself a one-room cabin that was 10 feet by 12 feet with no electricity or running water. And from there, he launched his one-man war against modern technology. He began sending bombs to corporate executives and scientists in 1978. And his bombs killed three people and injured 23 others by the time he was arrested in 1996. Why are we still talking about the Unabomber all these years later? The reason we’re still talking about Kaczynski is that he managed to blackmail the media into publishing his writings. In April 1995, he sent a letter to the New York Times promising that he would stop bombing if his 35,000-word essay titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” were published in the Times or some other major newspaper. The Manifesto was published in the Washington Post on September 19th, 1995. Which is, I think, hard to imagine today, but hundreds of thousands of people in this country were mailed this dude’s manifesto. Yes, that’s right. Without exaggeration, it might be one of the most read manifestos since The Communist Manifesto. Soon after that, it was published in paperback. It also was uploaded to Time Warner’s Pathfinder platform. It became what might be the first ever internet manifesto, and set the template for the manifestos that have become all too common in the aftermath of violent attacks. Not long ago, the Unabomber Manifesto was still a bestseller on Amazon. In the philosophy category, it was ahead of classics by Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine. Kaczynski writes that “There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is.” I think a lot of people could find some truth in that statement. What was he trying to get across with this manifesto?In the passage, you’ve just quoted, what he’s arguing is basically that human beings are biologically maladapted to the modern world. This is a big claim from evolutionary psychology. The argument is that, biologically speaking, we’re still Stone Age hunter-gatherers. We evolved hunting large animals on the savannah and in the span of just 10,000 years — the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms — we’ve constructed this world of concrete, steel, and screens. So Kaczynski argues that because of this, we suffer from depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, and so many other psychological pathologies that so-called primitive human beings do not. And what’s his solution? His solution is to destroy all modern technology and return ourselves to a more primitive condition, to crash out of the modern world. What he envisions is a group of anti-tech revolutionaries sabotaging the electric grid, blowing up the gas pipelines, and attacking the nervous system, so to speak, of modern society. He wanted to plunge us back into, if not the Stone Age, then something like small-scale agriculture and a shepherd society. How was this manifesto received in the ’90s when it was published by the Washington Post and delivered to front porches around the country? And how has his reputation changed over time? Well, there was a lot of debate about it. Many journalists treated Kaczynski as a serious intellectual, and many members of the public, in letters to the editor and on talk radio shows, hailed him as a folk hero. He was often described as a modern-day Thoreau. His warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people.Kaczynski fell out of fashion from the late ’90s until the early 2010s. But then he was rediscovered as concerns about climate change, artificial intelligence, and the consequences of digital immersion became so much more salient. And his warnings about the negative consequences of modern technology began to seem prophetic to many people. So there’s been a Unabomber revival. Who are the types of people who are glomming on to this manifesto? During the Unabomber mania of the mid-1990s, Kaczynski gained a following on the radical left, especially among green anarchists. But he’s returned to cultural prominence with the opposite political valence. Today he’s seen more as a figure of the right. As you may have noticed, he spends the first 3,000 words of his manifesto railing against leftism.And in the context of the culture war in the 2010s, conservatives rediscovered and rehabilitated him and co-opted him onto their side in the culture war. So Kaczynski has now been appropriated by neo-Nazis, eco-fascists, far-right accelerationists, a rag bag of people on the right who are drawn to his critique of leftism. Which is so interesting because Luigi Mangione has been hailed as something of a hero on the left, right? How is it that Kaczynski appeals to a figure like Mangione but also neo-Nazis? What makes Kaczynski appealing to so many different sorts of radicals is that he defies easy categorization. And this makes his ideology like an à la carte menu of ideas. For instance, green anarchists were enthralled with his critique of technology while neo-Nazis, generally speaking, ignore the critique of technology and focus solely on the critique of leftism. Does Kaczynski ever show any remorse for murder?No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t show any remorse for the people he killed and his bombings. He says they’re not innocent. At one point, he says the people who are responsible for the advancement of technology are worse than Stalin, worse than Hitler. What they’re doing to humanity is even more grotesque, he says. But he does acknowledge that his anti-tech revolution would kill millions if not billions of people. This is an extremely apocalyptic vision.Many people accept his argument up until the point where he suggests that we should blow up the electric grid and knock ourselves back to the Stone Age. In other words, many people accept parts of his diagnosis of the problems with the modern world. But they’re completely unwilling to take his prescription seriously.Do you think the ideas in Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto will stand the test of time?I think the points about evolutionary mismatch will stand the test of time and will become increasingly appealing to a new generation of radicals. The parts about intelligent machines look especially prophetic in our current moment. In the ’90s, he looked like a one-off. He could easily be dismissed as an isolated crank, with a sort of idiosyncratic ideology. But in the 2020s, it looks like the world’s caught up with him. As concerns about the negative consequences of modern technology become especially acute, I think it will become increasingly likely that others will follow in Kaczynski’s footsteps. See More:

Ayurella Horn-Muller, Grist Published April 20, 2025 | Comments (0) | Farmers plant rice crops in Yuexi county in central China's Anhui province © Feature China / Getty Images This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. Throughout the Yangtze River Delta, a region in southern China famed for its widespread rice production, farmers grow belts of slender green stalks. Before they reach several feet tall and turn golden brown, the grassy plants soak in muddy, waterlogged fields for months. Along the rows of submerged plants, levees store and distribute a steady supply of water that farmers source from nearby canals. This traditional practice of flooding paddies to raise the notoriously thirsty crop is almost as old as the ancient grain’s domestication. Thousands of years later, the agricultural method continues to predominate in rice cultivation practices from the low-lying fields of Arkansas to the sprawling terraces of Vietnam. As the planet heats up, this popular process of growing rice is becoming increasingly more dangerous for the millions of people worldwide that eat the grain regularly, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Planetary Health. After drinking water, the researchers say, rice is the world’s second largest dietary source of inorganic arsenic, and climate change appears to be increasing the amount of the highly toxic chemical that is in it. If nothing is done to transform how most of the world’s rice is produced, regulate how much of it people consume, or mitigate warming, the authors conclude that communities with rice-heavy diets could begin confronting increased risks of cancer and disease as soon as 2050. “Our results are very scary,” said Donming Wang, the ecological doctorate student at the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences who led the paper. “It’s a disaster … and a wake-up call.” Back in 2014, Wang and an international team of climate, plant, and public health scientists started working together on a research project that would end up taking them close to a decade to complete. Wading through rice paddies across the Yangtze Delta, they sought to find out just how projected temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 in 2050 would interact with the arsenic in the soil and the rice crops planted there. They knew, from past research, that the carcinogen was a problem in rice crops, but wanted to find out how much more of an issue it might be in a warming world. The team didn’t look at just any rice, but some of the grain varieties most produced and consumed worldwide. Although there are an estimated 40,000 types of rice on the planet, they tend to be grouped into three categories based on length of the grain. Short-grain rice, or the sticky kind often used in sushi; long-grain, which includes aromatic types like basmati and jasmine; and medium-grain, or rice that tends to be served as a main dish. Of these, the short-to-medium japonica and long-grain indica are the two major subspecies of cultivated rice eaten across Asia. Wang’s study modelled the growth of 28 varieties of japonica, indica, and hybrid rice strains central to cuisine for seven of the continent’s top rice consuming and producing countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Vietnam. India, Vietnam, and China are among the group of eight nations that lead the rest of the world in rice exports. After nearly a decade of observing and analyzing the growth of the plants, the researchers discovered that the combination of higher temperatures and CO2 encourages root growth, increasing the ability of rice plants to uptake arsenic from the soil. They believe this is because climate-related changes in soil chemistry that favor arsenic can be more easily absorbed into the grain. Carbon-dioxide enriched crops were found to capture more atmospheric carbon and pump some of that into the soil, stimulating microbes that are making arsenic. The more root growth, the more carbon in the soil, which can be a source of food for soil bacteria that multiply under warming temperatures. When soil in a rice paddy is waterlogged, oxygen gets depleted, causing the soil bacteria to rely further on arsenic to generate energy. The end result is more arsenic building up in the rice paddy, and more roots to take it up to the developing grain. These arsenic-accumulating effects linked to increased root growth and carbon capture is a paradoxical surprise to Corey Lesk, a Dartmouth College postdoctoral climate and crop researcher unaffiliated with the paper. The paradox, said Lesk, is that both of these outcomes have been talked about as potential benefits to rice yields under climate change. “More roots could make the rice more drought-resistant, and cheaper carbon can boost yields generally,” he said. “But the extra arsenic accumulation could make it hard to realize health benefits from that yield boost.” Read Next: Rice paddies, like cows, spew Arsenic comes in many different forms. Notoriously toxic, inorganic arsenic — compounds of the element that don’t contain carbon — is what the World Health Organization classifies as a “confirmed carcinogen” and “the most significant chemical contaminant in drinking water globally.” Such forms of arsenic are typically more toxic to humans because they are less stable than their organic counterparts and may allow arsenic to interact with molecules that ramp up exposure. Chronic exposure has been linked to lung, bladder, and skin cancers, as well as heart disease, diabetes, adverse pregnancy, neurodevelopmental issues, and weakened immune systems, among other health impacts. Scientists and public-health specialists have known for years that the presence of arsenic in food is a mounting threat, but dietary exposure has long been considered much less of a risk in comparison to contaminated groundwater. So policy measures to mitigate the risk have been slow going. The few existing standards that have been enacted by the European Union and China, for example, are considered inconsistent and largely unenforced. No country has formally established regulations for organic arsenic exposure in foods. (In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has established an action level of 100 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic in infant rice cereal, but that recommendation for manufacturers isn’t an enforceable regulation on arsenic in rice or any other food.) Wang hopes to see this change. The levels of inorganic arsenic commonly found in rice today fall within China’s recommended standards, for example, but her paper shows that lifetime bladder and lung cancer incidences are likely to increase “proportionally” to exposure by 2050. Under a “worst case” climate scenario, where global temperatures rise above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and are coupled with CO2 levels that increase another 200 parts per million, the levels of inorganic arsenic in the rice varieties studied are projected to surge by a whopping 44 percent. That means that more than half the rice samples would exceed China’s current proposed limit, which limits 200 parts per billion for inorganic arsenic in paddy rice, with an estimated 13.4 million cancers linked to rice-based arsenic exposure. Because these health risks are in part calculated based on body weight, infants and young children will face the biggest health burdens. Babies, in particular, may end up facing outsize risks through the consumption of rice cereals, according to the researchers. “You’re talking about a crop staple that feeds billions of people, and when you consider that more carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures can significantly influence the amount of arsenic in that staple, the amount of health consequences related to that are, for lack of a better word, enormous,” said study coauthor Lewis Ziska, a plant biologist researching climate change and public health at Columbia University. But everyone should not suddenly stop eating rice as a result, he added. Though the team found the amount of inorganic arsenic in rice is higher than a lot of other plants, it’s still quite low overall. The key variable is how much rice a person eats. If you are among the bulk of the world that consumes rice multiple times a week, this looming health burden could apply to you, but if you do so more sporadically, Ziska says, the inorganic arsenic you may end up exposed to won’t be “a big deal.” In that way, the study’s projections may also deepen existing global and social inequities, as a big reason rice has long reigned as one of the planet’s most devoured grains is because it’s also among the most affordable. Beyond mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions — what Ziska calls “waving my rainbows, unicorns, and sprinkles wand” — adaptation efforts to avoid a future with toxic rice include rice paddy farmers planting earlier in the season to avoid seeds developing under warmer temperatures, better soil management, and plant breeding to minimize rice’s propensity to accumulate so much arsenic. Water-saving irrigation techniques such as alternate wetting and drying, where paddy fields are first flooded and then allowed to dry in a cycle, could also be used to reduce these increasing health risks and the grain’s enormous methane footprint. On a global scale, rice production accounts for roughly 8 percent of all methane emissions from human activity — flooded paddy fields are ideal conditions for methane-emitting bacteria. “This is an area that I know is not sexy, that doesn’t have the same vibe as the end of the world, rising sea levels, category 10 storms,” said Ziska. “But I will tell you quite honestly that it will have the greatest effect in terms of humanity, because we all eat.” This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/the-king-of-poisons-arsenic-is-building-up-in-rice/. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org Daily Newsletter

Athletes' Village Paris 2024 Olympic Games / TRIPTYQUE + chaixetmorel.Save this picture!© Salem Mostefaoui Architects: TRIPTYQUE, chaixetmorel. Area Area of this architecture project Area:  22000 m² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2024 Photographs Photographs:Salem MostefaouiMore SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. Triptyque proudly presents its latest project in the Olympic and Paralympic Village in Saint-Denis, Paris. Designed to accommodate 450 athletes from the United States during the 2024 Summer Games, the Universeine building is a pioneering example of sustainable urban development and adaptable architecture. After the Games, the project will be transformed into social housing, part of a new and vibrant neighborhood in the rapidly evolving district around the Cité du Cinéma.Save this picture!Location and Context - Situated in the heart of the Universeine eco-district and the ZAC of the Olympic and Paralympic Village, the building is at the center of the transformation of northern Paris. Historically industrial and economically underdeveloped, this area is undergoing a renewal to become a model of sustainable and inclusive urban living. The main façade of the building, designed by Triptyque, forms a public square with the Cité du Cinéma, Olympic Athletes Village Paris 2024, creating a visually recognizable and engaging urban landmark.Save this picture!Save this picture!Architectural Concept: Reversibility and Mixed-Use Design - The architectural approach of the project addresses two crucial contemporary challenges: reversibility and mixed-use functionality. The residences are distributed across four pavilions, with layouts designed to optimize light and ventilation. The common areas face outward, while the bedrooms are positioned internally to ensure privacy and thermal comfort. The building’s exoskeleton provides each unit with a private balcony, ranging from 5 to 21.7 square meters, creating additional outdoor spaces for residents to connect with nature and their surroundings. "The idea was not to create an athletes' village, but a new neighborhood for the city, promoting change in less favored areas," said Guillaume Sibaud, co-founder of Triptyque. During the Games, the 300 rooms will be used as temporary housing for the United States delegation, each approximately 15 square meters. After September, these units will be converted into 125 apartments ranging from 30 to 105 square meters for long-term social housing.Save this picture!Sustainable Design Features - The Universeine project seeks E3C1 certification under France's E+C- (Energy + Carbon) label, recognizing buildings with positive energy and low carbon emissions. The building's low-carbon concrete core is wrapped in wooden panels for insulation and cladding. This layered structure reduces temperature fluctuations, minimizes the need for artificial cooling, and encourages cross-ventilation, further enhancing energy efficiency. Active and passive sustainability measures include:• An active green roof to promote biodiversity.• The use of water as a resource for urban cooling.• Solar panel installations for renewable energy generation.• Ample natural light and careful solar orientation to reduce energy consumption. Extensive bicycle storage capacity and charging stations for electric vehicles promote sustainable mobility.Save this picture!Community Integration and Social Ties - The design of the project promotes community interaction and social ties through shared green spaces and commercial areas on the ground floor. Shops and offices will create a dynamic mixed-use environment that will ensure the neighborhood's vitality beyond the Olympic Games. After the Games, the neighborhood will be home to approximately 6,000 residents and will create 6,000 jobs, supported by three hectares of parks and seven hectares of gardens. The modular and reversible design of the apartments will offer flexibility to adapt to the community's needs over time.Save this picture!Collaboration and Innovation - The Universeine project reflects the spirit of collaboration that defined the entire development of the Olympic Village. Triptyque worked closely with Solideo (the company responsible for constructing the village) and other international architecture firms to create a cohesive and forward-looking urban landscape. Each firm presented its building models and made adjustments based on group discussions, resulting in a more integrated and harmonious neighborhood.Save this picture!"The Olympic Village was a major project, a pioneering neighborhood in terms of its sustainability goals and material use," said Sibaud. "It is inspiring to know that the building for the United States delegation was designed by a Franco-Brazilian office and will serve as a model for future developments."Save this picture!A Legacy of Sustainable Urban Living - Beyond its role in the Olympic Games, the Universeine building exemplifies Triptyque's commitment to environmental responsibility and community-centered design. By combining cutting-edge sustainability practices with flexible, human-centered architecture, this project will leave a lasting impact on the metropolitan region of Paris for many years to come.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less Project locationAddress:Saint-Denis, FranceLocation to be used only as a reference. It could indicate city/country but not exact address.About this officechaixetmorel.Office••• Published on April 20, 2025Cite: "Athletes' Village Paris 2024 Olympic Games / TRIPTYQUE + chaixetmorel." [Vila Dos Atletas Jogos Olímpicos Paris 2024 / TRIPTYQUE + chaixetmorel.] 20 Apr 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1029234/athletes-village-paris-2024-olympic-games-triptyque-plus-chaixetmorel&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! 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  Image: Yana Iskayeva / Getty Images Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 If you wake up hungry and achy every morning, one man might have all the answers you need: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. At the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Kellogg, who is famous for creating Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, introduced the so-called Incandescent Electric-Light Bath. That innovation, which used electric bulbs as light therapy to apply heat to the body, laid the groundwork for the modern infrared sauna. The purported benefits of an infrared sauna offer plenty of promise—from limbering up our limbs to detoxifying our bodies—and the market is surging these days with expanding options inside wellness clinics and for the home. But can infrared saunas relax muscles, reduce stress, and detoxify? Results may vary, depending on what you’re using them for, said Dr. Vivek Babaria, a board-certified interventional spine and sports medicine physician at DISC Sports & Spine Center, who has seen interest in saunas—both traditional and infrared—rise post-COVID. What is an infrared sauna, and how should it be used?  Infrared light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum that can’t be seen by the human eye, but can be sensed as heat, as NASA explains. Like a traditional sauna, infrared saunas create heat, but there are some key differences. Infrared saunas don’t get as warm, usually reaching no more than 140 degrees Fahrenheit compared to a traditional sauna, which can reach as much as 212 degrees. [Related: The best infrared saunas] Unlike traditional saunas, infrared versions also don’t use a wood-burning stove or electric or gas heater to warm the air. Instead, they rely on lamps that emit specific infrared wavelengths of light to warm the body, with the potential to penetrate deep into the skin. “What science is trying to do is study how deep that wave actually goes,” Dr. Babaria said.  Based on the research that exists, such as this 2013 study, and his own opinion, Babaria suspects the answer is about one to two inches at most.   Do infrared saunas actually work?  But why do we need infrared wavelengths penetrating deep into our skin? In the field of regenerative medicine and biohacking, experts are exploring how energy, including infrared light, can stimulate mitochondrial activity, a process that could support the body’s ability to heal and regenerate, Babaria said. Mitochondria, often referred to as the powerhouses of the cell, play an important role in how our cells function and replicate.  The science is still in the early stages, but there is growing interest in how infrared light might activate these cell components, Babaria said. Some believe that if infrared energy can penetrate up to two inches deep into the body, it might stimulate mitochondria, enhance cellular activity and promote faster recovery for our aching muscles and joints.  “We can’t directly correlate infrared rays into stimulating mitochondrial activity because the science is limited in the research papers,” Babaria said. “In theory, it makes sense. If the cells are less than two inches deep and you stimulate them, potentially the mitochondria are more active.”  What benefits do infrared saunas provide?  What we do know, however, is that heat offers therapeutic benefits for our bodies. A 2021 meta-analysis found that heat therapy can reduce blood pressure and improve the ability of blood vessels to expand and contract properly. Small studies, published in 2022 and 2015, have found that heat from infrared saunas can help sore muscles post-workout. And a 2009 study found that infrared saunas can improve short-term pain and stiffness for those with rheumatoid arthritis. Time spent inside a sauna could also potentially make us more limber. A 2019 study of older adults practicing yoga inside a sauna found they enjoyed improved flexibility. “If you can do 15 to 20 minutes in a hot sauna, where you can move your legs and even do some stretching exercises, it might help improve your range of motion,” Babaria said.  As far as the sauna’s alleged detoxification benefits, however, Babaria is a bit more skeptical. The lymphatic system and the liver are the body’s primary organs that are responsible for detoxification, he said. While sweating through the skin in the sauna might help the appearance of pores, true detoxification happens inside our bodies—not through our skin. Should you use an infrared sauna?  Saunas—infrared or otherwise—aren’t for everyone. People who have difficulty sensing temperature changes or how hot something is due to thyroid or heart issues, autoimmune conditions, or peripheral diabetic neuropathy should avoid them altogether. And be careful not to get dehydrated. Babaria recommends no more than 15 to 20 minutes a day inside an infrared sauna and pairing it with water or electrolyte drinks. But whether it’s looser joints or better blood flow, there are plenty of reasons to sit inside an infrared sauna, Babaria said — even if it’s just to relax in a warm, cozy space and reset our mental health. “If it could just put you in the right mind frame,” he said, “the rest of the body will follow suit.”   This story is part of Popular Science’s Ask Us Anything series, where we answer your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the ordinary to the off-the-wall. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.

Nature, Published online: 16 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08722-8Data from the recently launched Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite reveal the characteristics of submesoscale eddies and waves and suggest that their potential impacts on overall ocean circulation is much larger than previously thought.