LifeMost dogs aren't bred to feel at ease in our homes, but scientists studying puppy cognition have found ways you can help yours adapt 25 November 2024 Sophie GamandOreo was my best friend growing up, says Brian Hare. If Hare wanted to hone his baseball pitching skills, his Labrador enthusiastically took on fielding duties. If he decided to explore the nearby woods, Oreo was an ever-willing companion. But there was one place where boy and dog always parted company. Oreo never set foot in our house. Not one time, says Hare.Today, the front door is no longer closed to most dogs in higher-income countries and many spend their days relaxing on sofas and watching TV. You would think they would be in doggy heaven. But Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, thinks the development has left them in the doghouse. For millennia, he says, we expected dogs to guard our property and protect our family at nighttime. Now, we have a different set of expectations. Not only do we want our indoor dogs to be friendly around strangers and rest quietly through the night, they should also respond to potty training, refrain from chasing other animals and keep their dirty feet off the upholstery. Its an evolutionary mismatch, says Hare.The good news is that this problem is solvable. A glut of recent studies indicate that selective breeding and careful training can help dogs adapt to indoor life. Meanwhile, Hare and his team have set up a puppy kindergarten in their lab to drill down into the behaviours required and shed new light on dogs cognitive developmental milestones. Better yet, the researchers have devised techniques

EnvironmentProjects to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by making the oceans less acidic are popping up all over the world New Scientist visited one in New York Citys East river 25 November 2024 New York Citys East river is polluted and contains higher than average levels of carbon dioxideEd Rooney/AlamyOn 14 November, I toured a shipping container bristling with tubes and wires, perched beside New York Citys East river. It is the test site of a start-up called Vycarb, which recently began adding crushed rocks and other chemicals to the water to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.On one side of the container, an hourglass-like device mixed a fine stream of calcium carbonate mineral powder with water pumped from below. This alkaline, grey-green slurry was then released into an

Nature, Published online: 25 November 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-03830-3Methods for exploring the geography of molecular-scale processes within tissue samples are transforming cancer research, but the toolbox can be daunting.

Nature, Published online: 25 November 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-03432-zAnti-Russian sentiment and government sanctions have left many Russian scientists struggling to develop their careers abroad.

Apartment prices didn't move much in November, but they may slide in early 2025.Landlords tend to cut prices during the winter, and some are even giving unusual perks.Here are 12 cities where rent is affordable and on the decline.Fewer people are moving during a seasonally slow stretch in the rental market, but those who are looking for a new apartment soon may be in luck.Rent was flat or down across the US in November, a recent report from real-estate site Zumper found. The cost of one-bedroom apartments was little changed for a fourth straight month at $1,534, while two-bedroom setups were modestly cheaper, down 0.4% from October at $1,902.These findings suggest that the long-standing stalemate on price between landlords and tenants is dragging on, though the path of least resistance may be lower later in the coming months."Most renters who were planning to move this year have already done so, and property owners tend to price down units to fill vacancies before the holidays," Zumper's team wrote in the report.So, while softer demand and limited apartment supply have offset each other, property managers hoping to be fully booked may have to cut prices or get creative with concessions. One such perk unusual as it may sound is free groceries for a year, Zumper researchers noted."We anticipate that national rents will continue to see modest declines through the rest of this year and likely into the beginning of next year as well," Zumper CEO Anthemos Georgiades said in a statement for the report.Even if renters score savings this winter, apartment prices remain 2.3% to 2.5% higher than they were a year ago, according to Zumper. However, that's still below the official inflation rate of 2.6% and well under the 4.9% jump in the shelter price index. Zumper If price growth continues to fade next year, interest rates should tick down, and mortgage rates would follow suit. That would be a boon for homebuyers, though renters could also benefit since more people buying houses would likely mean less intense competition for apartments."Easing inflationary pressures could drive further declines to national rent prices and pave the way for additional interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve," Zumper researchers wrote.12 cities with attractively priced apartmentsAlthough the national rate for one-bedroom rent didn't budge this month, there are a dozen midsize or large US cities where apartments are reasonably priced and heading down.Below are the 12 cities where rent was at least $250 cheaper than the national median price of $1,534 in November and less expensive than 12 months ago. Along with each market are its year-over-year and month-over-month rent changes and its median rent, the savings compared to the national median, and its rank among the 100 top US real-estate markets.

I've been fighting with my health insurance company a lot lately. The mundane billing disputes are exactly the type of situation that, theoretically, AI should make easier. That, however, is not what's going on. The first point of contact is the AI-powered online virtual assistant, which asks what it can help me with but has, thus far, never been able to actually help. After some back and forth, it directs me to an allegedly real person who's supposed to be better equipped to handle the matter. A lot of the time, I get referred to a phone number to call instead. Once I call that number, I'm presented with a new robot this time, one that talks. It's not any better at understanding my problem than the typing robot, but it's also not so sure I'm ready to get to an agent just yet. Yes, it understands I'd like to speak with a representative, but why don't I explain what about first? As my frustration grows, I can hear my voice rise to a Karen-level pitch I swore I'd never use.By corporate America's (sometimes dubious) telling, AI is basically the answer to everything, including customer service. Businesses say it's the way to unlock efficiencies and improve customer "journeys" so people can solve their problems and get what they need on their own, and fast. The bigger, though less advertised, focus is how AI can save companies money and cut costs, whether by helping human assistants or, in likelier scenarios, reducing the need for human assistants at all. Corporations have long seen contact centers as cost centers, and ones they're constantly looking for ways to reduce."It's a lot of work, and it's expensive to think about customer experience and design your AI in a way that's going to be an enjoyable experience," said Michelle Schroeder, the senior vice president of marketing at PolyAI, which creates AI-based voice assistants. "And most companies that are thinking about cost cutting and the AI revolution are not really thinking about the customer."Simply put, the AI still doesn't work that well. Many of these chatbots and virtual support agents are not ready for prime time. People don't want to use them, but they have to anyway."Companies are operating in the dark, in some sense. They have this idea that this technology is going to provide them with cost savings," said Michelle Kinch, an assistant professor of business administration at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "They don't exactly know how to deploy it."At the moment, customers are the guinea pigs in companies' experimentation with AI. We're the ones navigating the mishaps, overcoming the hurdles, and serving as case studies for what works and what doesn't. The hope is that all this testing will pan out, and the AI will get better as time goes on. But that's not the only outcome possible. We may just be consumers, standing in front of a chatbot, begging to talk to a real person forever.Consumers are already suspicious of the whole chatbot thing. A recent Gartner survey found that nearly two-thirds of customers prefer that companies don't use AI for customer service. The main reason for their concern was that it would make it harder for them to reach a person. They also worried it would take jobs and give the wrong answers. A J.D. Power survey found bank customers aren't sold on AI. Some academic research indicates that when consumers hear "AI," it lowers emotional trust, and that consumers evaluate service as worse when it's provided by a bot versus a human, even when the service is identical. People think automation is meant to benefit the company as in, save money and not them.When we do have that acute need to talk to a person, the chatbot becomes a hurdle.Many of them use AI in their daily lives, to some extent, like using ChatGPT to research a product or ask a question about a warranty, said Keith McIntosh, a researcher at Gartner. They're just wary in a customer-service setting that it won't do the trick. "They know the tools can work, but they're just worried that service organizations will use it to just block access to a person and probably do not trust yet that the technology will actually give them a solution," he said.Companies need to reassure customers that they're actually using AI to deliver a solution they can use in a self-service way and offer a clear path to an agent when necessary, he said. That sounds nice, but that's often not the reality. It's tough, if not impossible, to get a real person on the phone in a way that can be deeply frustrating and anxiety-inducing."When we do have that acute need to talk to a person, the chatbot becomes a hurdle," Kinch said.Even setting aside the cost savings for companies, there are clear reasons that AI should be a good fit for customer service. When people reach out to a company, it's often with the same basic questions when is my package arriving, where are my tickets, what is the balance on my checking account? Generative AI chatbots are good at distilling this sort of simple information and packaging it in an easy-to-read, conversational way assuming they're not making stuff up."Most companies have tiered operations where they have tier-one, tier-two, tier-three support in increasing complexity, and that tier-one support is typically the sort of high-volume, low-complexity type questions," said Jason Maynard, the chief technology officer of North America and Asia Pacific Zendesk, a customer-service platform. "We're already seeing some customers that are really successful at automating a lot of what has been typically like their tier-one operations."He pointed to DraftKings, which has millions of players, many of whom have basic questions about where to find their bonuses or how to work a promotion that would be expensive and inefficient for a human to answer on a case-by-case basis. It would be an "untenable cost" for the size of their brand, he said.What gets more complicated is when people get up the ladder into tier-two and tier-three issues. When "Where is my package?" becomes, "You say my package is here and keep sending me a picture the FedEx guy snapped of the delivery, which shows of my package is clearly missing," the robot's in a pickle. (A former coworker is in such a situation now.)"Customer experience is so much more complicated than people realize," said Chris Filly, who heads marketing at Callvu, a customer-experience company. "The customer-service team has to deal with an infinite number of potential issues that come up across all these different touchpoints, all these different customer types. It's very, very complicated to make sure that every node in that network has perfect information from everything else."No system, AI-driven or otherwise, is going to be perfect. But weighing on the corporate decision of what counts as "good enough" is money. Maynard, from Zendesk, spends a lot of time with chief operating officers and chief customer officers in his position, and they're under pressure to cut costs. They "know they're under the microscope," he said some CFO reads a story about how a company cut 700 jobs using AI support agents, and they shoot over an email asking, "Why aren't we doing that?""We're in a macroeconomic environment where there's just much more scrutiny on costs these days for any organization," Maynard said, adding that thanks to increases in interest rates, there's a "real focus on profitability, and that puts pressure on margins."This creates some misaligned incentives. Companies are inclined to implement AI broadly even if it's not appropriate and will make their customers miserable. They may see the immediate dollar signs they save by moving to an automated system but they don't see the consumer on the line shouting at the AI agent and pleading to talk to a human."They tend to view contact centers as a cost center, not as a profit center, and the only thing you want to do in a cost center is reduce cost," said Jeff Gallino, the CEO of CallMiner, a software company that focuses on conversation intelligence and customer experience. "They're not looking for transformative, they're looking for incremental."I recently found myself watching a panel at a conference hosted by Fortune magazine that was focused on unlocking the economic potential of AI, featuring executives at companies such as Santander and Siemens. The consensus was that AI was inevitable bank tellers are out, robots are in, and everyone is just going to have to get used to it, including begrudging consumers who are often on the unfortunate end of it. Rodney Zemmel, a senior partner at McKinsey, said consumer acceptance is coming. "It's amazing how many people in the US were dead against any form of facial recognition until it saves them two minutes in the Delta security line in the airport," he said, or were "massive privacy advocates and for a free pizza online will give away all their personal information." As long as the benefits are there, people will come around to it.That sounds lovely, except for a lot of consumers, the benefits aren't that evident yet, or at least not enough to outweigh the drawbacks. AI looks like just another measure companies put in place to boost their bottom lines. The bull case is that the AI gets better over time, that five years from now, the virtual agents will be lifelike enough that nobody can tell the difference, and we'll just be chatting away with robots all day to solve our problems. At the moment, companies are building the AI-enabled plane, in a sense, while flying it. Eventually, the plane will be built: The models will be trained, they'll have the right data, and there will be best practices in place for deployment.People are not enjoying that experience right now.Maynard compared the current moment to building a website in 1999 everyone's guessing at what this is supposed to look like, but eventually, they'll figure it out. "That transition, we're just very, very early in it, and like all technology changes, it's sort of like things that you think are going to happen really fast tend just to proliferate out into the broader economy and have people adopt them and all these things, it just takes longer than anyone expects," he said."People are not enjoying that experience right now," Gallino said. "I very strongly believe that they will enjoy the experience probably soon."Filly, from Callvu, said that a survey his company conducted on attitudes toward AI in customer-service settings shows consumers are coming around on it and are more willing to give it a chance. Still, they prefer to deal with a live agent in most situations."The honest truth is that the data is getting better, that there is hope that this will all resolve itself," he said. "We know that there are certain aspects of customer service that AI is doing well. Now, how long before the state-of-the-art AI makes it into that chatbot that's annoying the heck out of you? It might not be there yet."The bear case is that significantly better doesn't come. There are no guarantees that this will all just work itself out. The conventional wisdom in business is that if customers have a bad experience, they'll vote with their pocketbooks and go elsewhere. But many industries are uncompetitive, and you can't easily pick up and walk away from your health insurer or your cable company. What's more, if every company has a mediocre AI experience, the bar might just be lowered across the board.Many companies don't prioritize customer service and contact centers. They're a necessity, but the goal is to make them as cheap as possible."Everybody says, 'Oh, this is just going to get better naturally, and then thus conversational AI will get better naturally.' There's two huge flaws with that," Schroeder, from PolyAI, said. For one thing, Google Home and Alexa have been around for years, and they're not wizards. "Even that is, still years later, not getting the difference between 15 and 50," she said. That's a "dealbreaker" for a good conversation. "The second thing is that most of these companies are thinking about conversational AI purely as an efficiency play and as a cost savings and human replacement," she said. If the point of the AI isn't to do a good job, then why would it?Companies' new favorite way to make or, rather, save money, is making consumers slightly more miserable. Hopefully, that will change, eventually. We've just got to wait and see.Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Latest Nintendo Switch 2 rumours discuss announcement date and release monthGameCentralPublished November 25, 2024 11:56amUpdated November 25, 2024 3:41pm The rumourmill has reset (Nintendo)A new round of Nintendo Switch 2 rumours has begun but theres still a sliver of hope the new console could be announced this year.As you may have noticed, the rumours about the Switch 2 being announced in October and November did not prove correct. Whether that means all the many different sources were wrong or Nintendo changed their plans is not clear, but the fact remains they promised to unveil their new console before April next year.They never said anything about when Nintendo would release it but the assumption has always been either late spring/early summer or autumn 2025. Although the latter risks happening at the same time as GTA 6, which even though its not related will split mainstream attention in a way Nintendo probably doesnt want.That means a reveal in January or February is now the most logical assumption, with a release sometime between March and May. That also means anyone can say exactly that and pretend they have an inside source telling them as much, which is what seems to be happening on social media at the moment.A particularly bizarre post on the Famiboards forum is written in code and is primarily concerned with rumours that remakes of Pokmon Black and White (the second generation to be released on the DS) will be an early priority on the Switch 2, which isnt much of a stretch.Technically, neither is the other supposed revelation, which states that, Ounce will announce in January 2025, and release in March. Ounce being the supposed codename for the new console.Theres no reason to think the person behind this information isnt just making it all up but their suggestion is one of the most likely outcomes and seems to be supported by another rumour from over the weekend. Does this mean March is now the most likely release date? (X)Streamer Stephen Georg claims that he received a business email about an unnamed new game that included the following text: rolling out Q1 2025 on PC (Steam), Xbox One & Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch(es)!The implication is that whatever the game is will be released on the Switch successor and that it will be out by at least March.Its actually common for third party publishers to tease a new console before its officially announced, as happened with Ubisofts Watch Dogs and its subsequent release on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U.More TrendingIn fact, another publisher has already hinted at a release on the Switch 2, with a trailer for Playtonics Yooka-Replaylee making it plain that they intend to support the new format.Does that mean that they, or anyone else, knows exactly when itll be released, or announced? At this point major publishers almost certainly do, so the question is how far down does that knowledge go?While January is a good guess for when the unveil might happen theres still a very small chance that Nintendo could announce the Switch 2 this year, although if they did it would likely only be a tease.Theres some speculation that could happen at The Game Awards on December 13, but while Nintendo has occasionally used the event to showcase their games theyve never made an announcement that important before. Maybe theres a chance of a tease next month? (The Game Awards)Emailgamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below,follow us on Twitter, andsign-up to our newsletter.To submit Inbox letters and Readers Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use ourSubmit Stuff page here.For more stories like this,check our Gaming page.GameCentralExclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content.This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy

But scientists are racing to find out

Those Wicked cameos surprised fans of the original Broadway musical with a show-stopping moment that was more than blink and youll miss it. If like us, youre OG cast die-hards, it was more like a blink away all the tears experience if you happened to catch the film over its opening weekend. Wicked director Jon M. Chu revealed how he was able to produce a magic trick like no other: sneak in original Broadway Elphaba Idina Menzel (Frozen) and Galinda Kristin Chenoweth (Descendants) to feature in an extended and updated version of One Short Day, the song in which the witch besties (played in the movie by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, respectively) arrive in the Emerald City.The question for us was, how, and how much are they willing to do in it, and how much can the story itself handle it? Because theyre such iconic people and especially to these roles, Chu told the Hollywood Reporter.In his movie, Menzel and Chenoweth appear as troupe actresses portraying the wise ones of Oz who musically perform the history of the Grimmerie book of magic and how the Wizard came into the possession of such a powerful artifact. It was like a mania. [We said], Lets make them the biggest stars of Oz. Lets make them this iconic legends of Oz on the stage show, and let them present the history of Oz. They would be the wise women of Oz. It just seemed to make sense. And [composer] Steven Schwartzit might have actually come from him from my memorysaid, I know exactly how to do it because we needed some information about the story of the history of Oz, plus it would be them, so it would be more meaningful.Image: Wicked The Musical YouTube Chu recounted how they shot under the cover of a rainy night in London, the moment they sang the songs and got their iconic moments in that, it was beautiful. And what was cool about the day was, I think it was really healing for everybody. I said, This is in honor of you. This whole us making this movie is an honor of you because we want you to experience what we got to experience when we first saw it, when I went to the theater before it went into Broadway, what it felt like to watch Elphaba and Glinda steal our hearts, you have never got to experience that. And now we get to do that for you. It was moving for Wickeds new stars to witness. Ari is crying the whole time. Cynthia was crying the whole time. There was a lot of love on that set that day. And so Im so grateful for them to come out there. I was not involved with the deal-making. I have no idea what it took to get them there. All I knew is they were down and willing. We just had one day to do it. And it was worth the massively kept secret, I openly wept at their appearance and cheered when Menzel did her signature Defying Gravity belt and Chenoweth her Glinda high notes.Winnie Holzman, the musicals book writer, also appears in the scene as an Emerald City Ozian residentand Stephen Schwartz plays the announcer guard who tells Glinda and Elphie, The Wizard will see you now! Wicked Part One is now playing in theaters. Part Two arrives November 21, 2025. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

This Christmas, all the cool kids are going to suck. Suck blood, that is, when they go to see easily the darkest wide release this holiday season, Robert Eggers Nosferatu. It stars Bill Skarsgrd as the evil Count Orlok, an immortal vampire whose control over a young couple (Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp) throws a whole town into chaos. Local theaters might be chaos too thanks to a promotional tie-in to the film. Focus Features has revealed its teaming with select theaters (its unclear which, specifically, so check your local one) to release a special popcorn bucket for the film. Its of Count Orloks coffin. You see a glimpse above, see a little video here, and heres a better image. The Nosferatu popcorn bucket Focus Though themed popcorn bucks have long been a thing, the trend saw a huge surge in 2024 with the release of the sexually charged bucket for Dune: Part Two. That shined a new spotlight on subsequent buckets from films such as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and gave Marvel an excuse to make its own sexually suggestive bucket for Deadpool and Wolverine. The buckets have continued since, most recently with one for Gladiator II that uses augmented reality.This Nosferatu bucket is where its at though. A prop from the movie, translated to a popcorn receptacle with a shape that can actually hold popcorn. Were all about it. Plus, with tickets now on sale for the holiday thriller, Focus is having some extra fun too. For example, sold-out seats on Fandango show up as coffins for the film. How macabre is that? Well have more from Nosferatu in the coming weeks. For now, where does this rank among 2024 popcorn buckets for you? Let us know below. Co-starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, and Willem Dafoe, Nosferatu opens on Christmas Day. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.