Tag: Time

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With the Clock Running Out, Humans Need to Rethink Time Itself

Another day, another deadline: To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, greenhouse gas emissions must peak “at the latest before 2025,” according to the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. This is how we live now—not in the Biblical end times, but in a permanent “time of the end,” in the words of 20th-century German Jewish philosopher Günther Anders. Between the possibility of nuclear war and the forward march of climate change, for at least 70 years a distinctly secular apocalypse has always seemed just around the corner. Time itself is one of the victims.

Just take a look around: The mega-droughts, wildfires, and category-busting hurricanes we see today are the result of emissions past—a hauntological  [...]  read more

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A New Tool for Finding Dark Matter Digs Up Nothing

Even the strongest gravitational waves that pass through the planet, created by the distant collisions of black holes, only stretch and compress each mile of Earth’s surface by one-thousandth the diameter of an atom. It’s hard to conceive of how small these ripples in the fabric of spacetime are, let alone detect them. But in 2016, after physicists spent decades building and fine-tuning an instrument called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), they got one.

With nearly 100 gravitational waves now recorded, the landscape of invisible black holes is unfurling. But that’s only part of the story.

Gravitational wave detectors are picking up some side gigs.

“People have started to ask: ‘Maybe there’s more to what we get out of these machines than just gravitational waves?’” said Rana Adhikari, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology.

Inspired by the extreme sensitivity of these detectors, researchers are devising ways to [...]  read more

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New top story from Time: South Carolina Senate Challenger Jamie Harrison Breaks Fundraising Record With $57 Million Haul

COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison has shattered congressional fundraising records, bringing in $57 million in the final quarter for his U.S. Senate campaign against Republican incumbent Lindsey Graham as the GOP tries to retain control of the chamber in the Nov. 3 election.

Harrison’s campaign said Sunday that the total was the largest-ever during a single three-month period by any Senate candidate. That tops the $38 million raised by Democrat Beto O’Rourke in 2018 in the final fundraising period of his challenge to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who won the race.

 [...]  read more

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New top story from Time: Roger Ferguson, CEO of TIAA, on Why You Shouldn’t Watch the Wild Stock Market All Day

(Miss this week’s The Leadership Brief? This interview below was delivered to the inbox of Leadership Brief subscribers on Sunday morning, Oct. 11; to receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.)

Roger Ferguson’s Wall Street career has been marked by a series of crises. Ferguson is the president and CEO of TIAA, the Fortune 100 financial giant that is a major provider of retirement services for teachers and employees at more than 15,000 nonprofits and other institutions. He is currently working with his team to ensure that the COVID-19 economic downturn doesn’t jeopardize TIAA’s $1.1 trillion in assets under management. The company is the No. 1 manager of farmland investments worldwide and one of the largest commercial real estate investors globally. Ferguson, 69, came to TIAA as CEO in 2008, amid another financial crisis; previously, he was the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve on 9/11, personally leading the central bank’s nimble response to that catastrophe.

Ferguson, who has bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard—plus an economics Ph.D. from the school— is one of only four Black CEOs running a  [...]  read more

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New top story from Time: President Trump Makes First Public Appearance Since His Hospitalization for COVID-19

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Saturday made his first public appearance since returning to the White House after being treated for the coronavirus. The White House has refused to declare that he is no longer contagious, and the gathering of hundreds of people on the South Lawn went ahead despite the guidance of public health officials.

Trump delivered an address on his support for law enforcement from the Blue Room balcony to a friendly crowd. The president wore a mask as he walked out for the speech but took it off to make his remarks. He received an enthusiastic response from his supporters.

“I’m feeling great,” said Trump, who said he was thankful for their good wishes and prayers as he recovered.

Trump is also priming for a Florida rally on Monday and campaign events in Iowa and Pennsylvania later in the week.

The president addressed the large crowd even as the White House refuses to declare that he is no longer contagious and against the guidance of [...]  read more

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New top story from Time: Nursing Home Residents Struggle to Vote Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

Ivan Lakos was born in Hungary and came to the United States in 1951 as a displaced person after World War II. He became a citizen after about five years and has voted consistently ever since. But this year, with COVID-19 cases again on the rise in the U.S., the 96-year-old worried whether he’d be able to continue that tradition.

Lakos lives in a skilled nursing home at the Carol Woods Retirement Community in North Carolina, which is home to roughly 500 residents and usually hosts its own polling place with volunteers on hand to help residents fill out ballots and navigate voting machines. But this year, that isn’t an option for him. To protect against COVID-19, the facility has restricted its activities and is currently banning visitors inside the buildings. For Lakos—and roughly 2.2 million other people like him who live in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities across the country—that presents a significant barrier to enfranchisement.

 [...]  read more

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New top story from Time: Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie Says He’s Out of the Hospital After Treatment for COVID-19

TRENTON, N.J. — Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Saturday he has been discharged from a New Jersey hospital where he spent a week, following his announcement that he had contracted the coronavirus.

“I am happy to let you know that this morning I was released from Morristown Medical Center,” Christie said in a Saturday morning post on Twitter. “I want to thank the extraordinary doctors & nurses who cared for me for the last week. Thanks to my family & friends for their prayers. I will have more to say about all of this next week.”

Christie announced Oct. 3 that he had tested positive and said hours later that he had checked himself into the hospital after deciding with his doctors that doing so would be “an important precautionary measure,” given his history of asthma.

Christie was part of a string of virus cases connected to President Donald Trump’s inner circle. In addition to Trump and first lady Melania Trump, multiple [...]  read more

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New top story from Time: What Happens Next in Ethiopia’s Political Turmoil

This week Ethiopia’s government entered the controversial sixth year of its five-year mandate. But the administration of Abiy Ahmed isn’t going anywhere… not even after a particularly violent summer. Covid-19 has produced plenty of political drama these last few months, but Ethiopia has experienced more than most—here’s why.

Why It Matters:

Ethiopian politics operates in a system of “ethnic federalism”—while there is a central government to this federation, its constituent parts are carved out along ethnic lines and jockeyed over by parties promising the best deal for the ethnicities within them (of which there are dozens throughout a country of 112 million). Yet for all its diversity, political power in Ethiopia has long been concentrated in the hands of the few—first a string of emperors and eventually a Marxist military junta that attempted to centralize power and homogenize the country. When the junta was overthrown in the early [...]  read more

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New top story from Time: U.S. States Are Rolling Out COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps. Months of Evidence From Europe Shows They’re No Silver Bullet

On Oct. 1, New York state released an app that can notify you if you’ve come into contact with a person who has tested positive for COVID-19.

Called “COVID Alert NY,” the app is one of 10 currently active in states around the U.S. that are based on Google and Apple’s decentralized contact tracing system, which was developed to maintain privacy while also giving health authorities a potentially powerful new tool to clamp down on outbreaks of the virus.

“Everybody’s wondering, ‘I was next to this person, I was next to that person,’ but this can actually give you some data,” said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, announcing the app’s release. “I think it’s going to not only bring contact tracing to a new level, but it’s going to give people comfort.”

Contact tracing—either via an app or the old-fashioned method of interviewing people—is crucial to notify people who [...]  read more