Futures Lab Update #156: Customizable Databases With Airtable

More than 80 researchers from a dozen-plus institutions recently worked together to study an ‘artificial meteor’ as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Earth is constantly bombarded by fragments of rock and ice, also known as meteoroids, from outer space. Most of the meteoroids are as tiny as grains of sand and small pebbles, and they completely burn up high in the atmosphere.

We need to know if ocean-based technologies to reduce carbon dioxide and climate risk are viable, safe, and scalable. Deep below the ocean surface, the light fades into a twilight zone where whales and fish migrate and dead algae and zooplankton rain down from above. This is the heart of the ocean’s carbon pump, part of the natural ocean processes that capture about a third of all human-produced carbon dioxide and sink it into the deep sea, where it remains for hundreds of years.

As temperatures increase, workers who spend time in hot environments—like restaurant kitchens—are demanding new protections to help keep cool. This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Extremes in confidence and caution can affect decision-making, team performance, and overall leadership effectiveness, this executive coach says. Leadership requires a delicate balance between confidence and caution. Both are needed, and leaders must be able to move between them. Yet there are leaders whose default is the extremes. Some leaders always want to be right and on the other side of the spectrum; others are always trying to avoid being wrong at all costs.

With sex robots being coded with AI-response technology, and virtual reality allowing users to see their AI companions up close and personal, we’re inching closer to Stepford territory.  When OpenAI launched the voice assistant ChatGPT-4o in May, users quickly noticed some eerie similarities to the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her. Scarlett Johansson, who voiced the film’s AI assistant, Samantha, even called out the company for producing a voice so indistinguishable from her own.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Singapore Airlines said Tuesday it has offered compensation to passengers of a flight that hit extreme turbulence last month, in a rare case that killed one passenger and injured dozens. The Being 777 jet, carrying 211 passengers and 18 crew from London to Singapore, ran into sudden turbulence over the Irrawaddy basin on May 20, hurling people and items around the cabin.