Late last week, a team of about 50 scientists, drillers, and support staff successfully punched through nearly 4,000 feet of ice to access an Antarctic subglacial lake for just the second time in human history. From a report: On Friday, the Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA) team announced they'd reached Lake Mercer after melting their way through an enormous frozen river with a high-pressure, hot-water drill. The multi-year effort to tap into the subglacial lake -- one of approximately 400 scientists have detected across Antarctica -- offers a rare opportunity to study the biology and chemistry of the most isolated ecosystems on Earth. The only other subglacial lake humans have drilled into -- nearby Lake Whillans, sampled in 2013 -- demonstrated that these extreme environments can play host to diverse microbial life. Naturally, scientists are stoked to see what they'll find lurking in Lake Mercer's icy waters. "We don't know what we'll find," John Priscu, a biogeochemist at Montana State University and chief scientist for SALSA, told Earther via satellite phone from the SALSA drill camp on the Whillans Ice Plain. "We're just learning, it's only the second time that this has been done."

Russell Lewis, writing for NPR: When Nancy Grace Roman was a child, her favorite object to draw was the moon. Her mother used to take her on walks under the nighttime sky and show her constellations, or point out the colorful swirls of the aurora. Roman loved to look up at the stars and imagine. Eventually, her passion for stargazing blossomed into a career as a renowned astronomer. Roman was one of the first female executives at NASA, where she served as the agency's first chief of astronomy. Known as the "Mother of Hubble," for her role in making the Hubble Space Telescope a reality, Roman worked at NASA for nearly two decades. She died on Dec. 25 at the age of 93. Roman fought to earn her place in a field dominated by men, paving the path for future female scientists. She was born in Nashville, Tenn. in 1925 and organized an astronomy club in fifth grade. She attended high school in Baltimore, where she requested to take a second year of algebra instead of a fifth year of Latin. When she made the appeal, she recounted in a 2017 interview with NPR that the guidance counselor wasn't supportive of her dream to become a scientist. Her efforts helped lead to the creation of the Hubble Space Telescope. In her role at NASA, Roman developed and planned the Hubble Space Telescope, which is famous for its stunning images of space. Because of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have been able to collect data and gain insight into even the most remote galaxies of the universe. The success of the project led to future space telescopes. Roman's work, however, reached far beyond just the Hubble Space Telescope. In an interview with NASA, Roman once stated that one of the highlights of her career was when she discovered the first indication that common stars were not all the same age.

Apple has for years been a premium brand that rarely, if ever discounted products. Every year, the company could raise prices on products, and consumers would not only happily pay, but stand in long lines for the privilege of doing so. From a report: So when Apple started putting misleading, but seemingly consumer-friendly posters in front of Apple Stores at the end of 2018 offering a new iPhone model for $300 off (with trade-in of your current phone), you know something different happened for the company this year. Consumers fought back. Many analysts have reported that in the wake of poorer-than-expected sales for this year's crop of iPhones, Apple cut back on production, including on the $1,100 iPhone XS Max, the $999 iPhone XS and the XR, the "budget" model that replaced the previous entry-level new phone, the $349 SE. The price for the XR (the one Apple is hawking discounts for): $749. "This should be a wakeup call for Apple," says Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. "They swung, and they really missed." The prices on the new phones are "far too high," says Terry Walton, a tourist from Auckland, New Zealand. He has an iPhone 7 and didn't even consider any of the X-series iPhones because it still works just fine. Upgrading "didn't enter my mind at all," he says. It wasn't just iPhones that got price hikes. Apple also upped the cost of the top-of-the-line iPad to $1,000 as well (or over $2,800 for a loaded model) and added $300 to the cost of the Mac Mini and new MacBook Air computers.

Perhaps the most insightful piece that sums up why the U.S. and its allies are apprehensive of using Huawei's products. Six reasons, we are just highlighting the pointers, click on the source story to read the description: 1. There could be "kill switches" in Huawei equipment. 2. ... That even close inspections miss. 3. Back doors could be used for data snooping. 4. The rollout of 5G wireless networks will make everything worse. 5. Chinese firms will ship tech to countries in defiance of a US trade embargo. 6. Huawei isn't as immune to Chinese government influence as it claims to be.

schwit1 shares a report: Another year, another reason to take the promises of residential home batteries with a grain of salt. This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions -- assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs. Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly. "There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.

The reputation of the meat industry will sink to that of big tobacco unless it removes cancer-causing chemicals from processed products such as bacon and ham, a coalition of experts and politicians in UK warn this week. From a report: Led by Professor Chris Elliott, the food scientist who ran the UK government's investigation into the horse-meat scandal, and Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist, the coalition claims there is a "consensus of scientific opinion" that the nitrites used to cure meats produce carcinogens called nitrosamines when ingested. It says there is evidence that consumption of processed meats containing these chemicals results in 6,600 bowel cancer cases every year in the UK -- four times the fatalities on British roads -- and is campaigning for the issue to be taken as seriously as sugar levels in food. "Government action to remove nitrites from processed meats should not be far away," Malhotra said. "Nor can a day of reckoning for those who dispute the incontrovertible facts. The meat industry must act fast, act now -- or be condemned to a similar reputational blow to that dealt to tobacco." [...] In a statement issued today, the coalition warns "that not enough is being done to raise awareness of nitrites in our processed meat and their health risks, in stark contrast to warnings regularly issued regarding sugar and fattening foods."

In late 1966, a 29-year-old computer scientist drew a series of abstract figures on tracing paper and a quadrille pad. Some resembled a game of cat's cradle; others looked like heavenly constellations; still others like dress patterns. Those curious drawings were the earliest topological maps of what we now know as the internet. The doodler, Lawrence G. Roberts, died on Dec. 26 at his home in Redwood City, Calif. He was 81. The New York Times: The cause was a heart attack, said his son Pasha. As a manager at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, Dr. Roberts designed much of the Arpanet -- the internet's precursor -- and oversaw its implementation in 1969. Dr. Roberts called upon a circle of colleagues who shared his interest in computer networking for help in creating the technical underpinnings of the Arpanet, integrating and refining many ideas for how data should flow. Dr. Roberts was considered the decisive force behind packet switching, the technology that breaks data into discrete bundles that are then sent along various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. He decided to use packet switching as the underlying technology of the Arpanet; it remains central to the function of the internet. And it was Dr. Roberts's decision to build a network that distributed control of the network across multiple computers. Distributed networking remains another foundation of today's internet. Dr. Roberts's interest in computer networking began when he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. He paid close attention to the work of his longtime colleague, Leonard Kleinrock, who had done research on theoretical aspects of computer networks, analyzing the problem of data flow. Dr. Roberts also followed the ideas of J.C.R. Licklider, a prominent psychologist and predecessor of Dr. Roberts's at ARPA, who envisioned what he called an "intergalactic computer network."

Some of the most popular apps for Android smartphones, including Skyscanner, TripAdvisor and MyFitnessPal, are transmitting data to Facebook without the consent of users in a potential breach of EU regulations. From a report: In a study of 34 popular Android apps, the campaign group Privacy International found that at least 20 of them send certain data to Facebook the second that they are opened on a phone, before users can be asked for permission. Information sent instantly included the app's name, the user's unique ID with Google, and the number of times the app was opened and closed since being downloaded. Some, such as travel site Kayak, later sent detailed information about people's flight searches to Facebook, including travel dates, whether the user had children and which flights and destinations they had searched for. European law on data-sharing changed in May with the introduction of General Data Protection Regulation and mobile apps are required to have the explicit consent of users before collecting their personal information.

Corn and soybean crops have been good to farmers in the American Midwest and Plains. But these staple crops have taken a toll on the very earth they draw nourishment from. Now, a new generation of farmers is looking underground to try to replenish their soils in a way that both restores nutrients and reduces chemical runoff into the environment. From a report: "Mainstream agriculture, they just don't get it," says North Dakota farmer Jerry Doan. "You have got to feed the biology of the soil." Some farmers are experimenting with growing cover crops on their fields. Devoting valuable land to new crops can be risky for producers, whose thin margins make them reluctant to make big changes if their yields are going to fall, even temporarily. But in some communities, such as Washington County, Iowa, farmers are taking the leap together.

New York City police will deploy a camera-equipped drone above Times Square, along with new "counter-drone technology" blocking other devices from the area, where they expect as many as 2 million New Year's Eve revelers. From a report: The drone technology is the newest innovation developed by the largest U.S. police department as it prepares for an annual event that already features a broad array of anti-terrorism tactics. They will be used along with police airplanes and helicopters as surveillance tools, said Police Commissioner James O'Neill. Police and federal agents have worked with hotel staffs throughout the area in an effort to prevent an incident similar to the sniper who shot to death 59 outdoor concert-goers from a hotel room high above the Las Vegas strip on Oct. 1, 2017. O'Neill said authorities have no evidence of any credible threat of terrorism for New Year's Eve.

An anonymous reader shared a report: Sam Schreiber was mid-shampoo at a Drybar blow-dry salon in Los Angeles when someone from the front desk approached her stylist with an emergency: a woman was trying to pay for her blow-out with cash. "There was this beat of silence," says Ms. Schreiber, 33 years old. "She literally brought $40." More and more businesses like Drybar don't want your money -- the paper kind at least. It's making things awkward for those who come ill prepared. After all, you can't give back a hairdo, an already dressed salad or the two beers you already drank. The salad chain Sweetgreen has stopped accepting cash in nearly all its locations. Most Dig Inns -- which serve locally sourced, healthy fast food -- won't take your bills either. Starbucks went cashless at a Seattle location in January, and at some pubs in the U.K., you can no longer get a pint with pound notes. The practice of not accepting cash has become popular enough to catch the attention of American lawmakers. [...] Despite the popularity of debit- and credit-card transactions, plenty of people do still pay for things with actual money. Cash represented 30% of all transactions and 55% of those under $10, according to a Federal Reserve survey of 2,800 people conducted in October 2017.

Here's an analysis by OverOps on how shared accountability affects the delivery of reliable software in a DevOps environment, and what are some of the top challenges teams face when it comes to building and maintaining quality applications. Conclusion from the report [PDF], which relies on a survey of over 2,000 IT professionals around the globe : At the center of this DevOps adoption chaos is the evolving relationship between development and operations. Many organizations are already taking a shared approach to accountability for application health, however they still lack the tools and application visibility needed to know who is ultimately responsible for addressing and fixing each issue. As the lines between these two teams continue to blur, organizations will need to focus on adopting tools that deepen visibility into their applications. Clarifying ownership of applications and services, and avoiding the "multiple owners = no owner" syndrome is a crucial for even the most bleeding edge organizations. The "Dev vs. Ops: State of Accountability" survey revealed that as more organizations begin the transition to DevOps workflows, defining roles and processes becomes more difficult and more important. Furthermore, businesses of all sizes are building and releasing new code and application features faster than ever before, which adds additional pressure across the entire software delivery supply chain. Organizations going through the DevOps transformation are more likely to face visibility challenges that make it difficult to maintain or improve application quality and reliability.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will visit a tiny and mysterious object in the Kuiper belt on Tuesday, seeking clues to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood. From a report: In June 1983, newspaper headlines declared that NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft had left the solar system, crossing beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was the common view of the time: All of the solar system's big, interesting things -- the sun and the nine planets -- were behind Pioneer 10. Thirty-five years later, the Kuiper belt -- the region Pioneer 10 was just entering -- and the spaces beyond are perhaps the most fascinating parts of the solar system. In their vast, icy reaches are clues about how the sun and planets, including ours, coalesced out of gas and dust 4.5 billion years ago. Even farther out might be bodies the size of Mars or Earth, or even a larger one some astronomers call Planet Nine, and technological advances could usher in a new age of planetary discovery. On Tuesday, New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft that snapped spectacular photographs of Pluto in 2015, will provide humanity with a close-up of one of these mysterious, distant and tiny icy worlds. Its target of exploration is believed to be just 12 to 22 miles wide, known as 2014 MU69 -- its designation in the International Astronomical Union's catalog of worlds -- or Ultima Thule, the nickname bestowed upon it by the New Horizons team. This will be the farthest object ever visited by a spacecraft. New Horizons will speed past Ultima Thule at 31,500 miles per hour and pass within 2,200 miles of the surface. What the probe finds could reveal much about the earliest days of the solar system and what else lies in the Kuiper belt.

In his year-end letter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says his to-do list for 2019 includes persuading U.S. leaders to regain America's leading role in nuclear energy research and embrace advanced nuclear technologies such as the concept being advanced by his own TerraPower venture. From a report: "The world needs to be working on lots of solutions to stop climate change," Gates wrote in the wide-ranging letter, released Saturday night. "Advanced nuclear is one, and I hope to persuade U.S. leaders to get into the game." Gates acknowledged that tighter U.S. export restrictions, put in place by the Trump administration, have virtually ruled out TerraPower's grand plan to test its traveling-wave nuclear technology in China. "We had hoped to build a pilot project in China, but recent policy changes here in the U.S. have made that unlikely," Gates wrote. He said "we may be able to build it in the United States" if regulations are updated and the investment climate for nuclear power improves.

A computer virus hit newspaper printing plants in Los Angeles and at Tribune Publishing newspapers across the country. From a report: Tribune Publishing said Saturday night that malware affected its ability to print newspapers across its chain of outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, the Baltimore Sun and the Orlando Sentinel. Many subscribers to the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune, which were previously owned by Tribune Publishing and still share some production technology with the company, stepped into a chilly sunny morning Saturday only to find empty doorsteps. The computer malware was detected Friday and "impacted some back-office systems which are primarily used to publish and produce newspapers across our properties," said Marisa Kollias, Tribune communications vice president, in a statement.

Long-time Slashdot reader reporter shared this article from NPR: The former chairman and two vice presidents of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. should spend five years in prison over the 2011 flooding and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japanese prosecutors say, accusing the executives of failing to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe. Prosecutors say the TEPCO executives didn't do enough to protect the nuclear plant, despite being told in 2002 that the Fukushima facility was vulnerable to a tsunami.... "It was easy to safeguard the plant against tsunami, but they kept operating the plant heedlessly," prosecutors said on Wednesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. "That led to the deaths of many people." Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78; former Vice President Ichiro Takekuro, 72; and former Vice President Sakae Muto, 68, face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury.... All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.

One of the great triumphs of the human spirit is our unwavering determination to solve impossible problems. Take, for example, our quest to find a hangover cure: Ever since the invention of alcohol around 7,000 BC, scientists and physicians have tried—and failed—to find something to effectively alleviate the sometimes catastrophic effects of a night of over-indulgence, to no avail. That has yet to deter our efforts. Like most ancient medicine, the first hangover cures were rooted in more lore than actual science. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal points out, some of the earliest attempts to get rid of a hangover were actually external, like cabbage leaves bound to the head in ancient Greece, and necklaces of laurel leaves in ancient Egypt. Eventually, physicians realized that the best way to cure an internal affliction was to ingest something else. The ancient Greeks were also the first to come up with the notion of “the hair of the dog,” according to Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, author of Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure. Around 400 BC, the Greek playwright Antiphanes wrote (or at least the equivalent words in ancient Greek, Bishop-Stall notes): Take the hair, it is well written, Of the dog by which you’re bitten, Work off one wine by his brother, One labor with another. Antiphanes may have been referencing some Egyptian mythology in which a god drank too much and was revived by a literal hair of a dog with a little plant matter and oil placed on his forehead, per the Wall Street Journal. And as Bishop-Stall writes, Antiphanes’s words reflected a common belief in medicine at the time: Like cures like. If you were suffering from a hangover from alcohol, more alcohol would make you feel better. Surprisingly, there may be some truth to this idea. Because hangovers are a mild form of alcohol withdrawal, having another drink could make you feel better—although doctors advise against this, because it merely prolongs the inevitable. Ancient doctors, though, were satisfied enough with this short-term fix, and therefore prescribed all sorts of booze-laden remedies for hangovers. Hippocrates—he of the physician’s oath to do no harm—prescribed “wine therapy” for hangovers and all sorts of ailments, Bishop-Stall writes. In the first century AD, Pliny the Elder, a physician and author of the first encyclopedia, suggested that “eggs of a night-owl in wine,” “a mullet killed in red wine,” and “two eels, suffocated in wine” would all do the trick after a night out. He also used wine to treat gladiator wounds (again, not totally misguided—alcohol in some forms can be an antiseptic). Alcohol continued to be a popular hangover cure through the 16th century. By the Middle Ages, hangover remedy ingredients also started including “ashes of scorpions, dog excrement, and wolf’s liver.” Dried human skulls also made appearances: Sometimes, they were mixed into piping hot elixirs, but if you were feeling guilty with your hangover—we’d call it “hangxiety” today—you could grow moss in the skull, crush it up, and snort it. Eventually, in the 1600s a version of this bizarre skull remedy became one of the world’s first expensive medical scams, the Wall Street Journal reports. Jonathan Goddard, a physician close to Oliver Cromwell, created lozenges with crushed skulls in them, which he sold to King Charles II of England for thousands of pounds. (These lozenges weren’t just hangover cures, though: They were marketed as cures for just about anything, although they probably cured nothing.) For a brief period in the 19th century, physicians used opium to cure hangovers. Doctors eventually moved on to what we know today: There are no real hangover cures, besides time. In fact, the reason so many of these bizarre cures “worked” for centuries is because people eventually felt better—not because of their ingredients. However, as Quartz has reported before, there are some ways to make hangovers more bearable. Essentially, you need to replenish your body with all the water, electrolytes, and sleep it lost as a result of drinking. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and caffeine (or a nap) can calm a headache, and drinks with sugars and electrolytes—think sports drinks, or now the adult Sparkling Rush Pedialyte—can restore your body’s natural balance. And of course, you could always just drink less.

Many US investors would rather forget 2018. Especially General Electric stockholders. Markets have been dragged down by the US-China trade war, as well as concern that the Federal Reserve is taking the punch bowl away from the stock market’s party. Even so, GE’s plunge stood out: It was among the worst-performing equities in the S&P 500 index of US stocks, falling to levels last seen in 2009 amid the Great Recession. GE was founded at the end of the 19th century and was still one of the most valuable companies in the world at the turn of the most recent one, with businesses that ranged from jet engines to media. Since then its market value has slipped from around $600 billion in 2000 to around $65 billion. The conglomerate, which had come to rely on its GE Capital unit for much of its profit, nearly collapsed during the financial crisis and was rescued by the Fed. While its stock showed signs of recovering in the years after the panic, those gains evaporated and turnaround plans from two CEOs—Jeffrey Immelt and then John Flannery—including a focus on core businesses, failed to reassure investors. GE’s new exec, Larry Culp, is trying to restore profits after the company lost more than $20 billion in the third quarter, a loss driven by its faltering power unit. To preserve cash, GE slashed its once-generous stock dividend. In the meantime, the company founded by Thomas Edison also had its credit-rating cut and lost its spot in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Bad news, from write-downs to regulatory scrutiny over its accounting practices, has piled up. GE’s decline from industry titan to crumbling turnaround project was chronicled (paywall) in a Wall Street Journal article this month. It described an industrial company that used profits from its GE Capital unit to paper over weaknesses in other parts of its sprawling businesses. Could 2019 be a better year for GE? Some analysts appear cautiously more optimistic. The company may sell its healthcare business in an IPO and reorganize its software business, according to a CNBC report. As “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer said, “an epic eulogy” in the Wall Street Journal sometimes marks the bottom for a stock. Even so, the CNBC anchor and former hedge-fund manager admitted he wasn’t ready to bet on GE just yet.

Bed bugs are a home dweller’s worst nightmare. The Cimex lectularius species is nocturnal, can hide in nooks and crannies for weeks at a time, and swells to twice its normal size after feeding… on human blood. Finding one is enough to make some residents trash their furniture, or even move. A new app called Bed Bug Field Guide, created by Ohio State University entomology professor Susan Jones with a grant from the US Environmental Protection Agency, is hoping to at least walk people through the experience. It’s meant to be a sort of Homeowners’ Guide to the Galaxy of Bed Bugs. “If you don’t know anything about an organism, then you are sort of at the mercy of that creature,” Jones told the AP. She has been researching bed bugs for nearly a decade, and says that despite all the anxiety and attention surrounding bed bugs, there remains a lack of awareness about how to deal with them. Bed Bug Field Guide is more of a detailed booklet than a savvy mobile app. It features 15 chapters, including one on preventing bed bugs, another on identifying them, and another on choosing a pest control service. The app also includes tips on how to avoid picking up bed bugs while traveling. It also comes at a good time. While the bed-bug population in most rich countries was nearly stamped out by DEET in the 20th century, the adaptive critters have come back in force. They now have 15% thicker skin than a few decades ago, according to Business Insider, as well as enzymes that break down harmful insecticides. The Bed Bug Field Guide could help combat any future infestations, but it’s not for the squeamish. Be prepared to come across photos of bed bugs, their bite marks, and their feces. Sign up for the Quartz Obsession email Enter your email Sign me up Stay updated about Quartz products and events.

Late December is a time for New Year’s resolutions, and Whole Foods Market has a big one: Be nicer to workers. Whole Foods co-founder and CEO John Mackey said in a video to employees last month that he would work to address employee concerns, improve communication, and strengthen career-development opportunities in 2019, as the grocery chain enters its second year under Amazon ownership, the Wall Street Journal reported (paywall). “At the beginning of the second year of this merger, we are going to pivot back to team member growth and happiness,” Mackey said, according to the Journal. Whole Foods is key to Amazon’s transition from a giant of online sales to a company that dominates both online and offline shopping. Amazon bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in July 2017, gaining a bougie grocery brand and a chain of more than 400 physical stores. In October 2017, Amazon chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky identified “a lot of opportunity” for Amazon to work with Whole Foods. Since then, many of the plans—for instance, adding Amazon lockers for customers to receive and return online orders, and building out Amazon’s on-demand Prime Now service—have come to fruition. But the transition hasn’t always gone smoothly for workers at Whole Foods. In early 2018, Business Insider reported that Whole Foods employees were being graded with new scorecards and on-the-spot quizzes that had many terrified of losing their jobs. Supermarket News reported that a new system for managing grocery inventory was leading to empty shelves in stores. Disillusioned by Amazon’s leadership, Whole Foods employees moved to unionize earlier this year. Organizers called for a $15 minimum wage and better health care, and expressed concern about future layoffs as Amazon automated grocery stores. Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all US employees in October, but that didn’t reassure workers at Whole Foods, whose employer spent 20 years on Fortune’s list of best places to work until it was purchased by Amazon. Maybe in 2019 Mackey will turn it all around.

Have you heard about how good tea is? If you are a human being, your answer is probably yes. People in cultures around the world have been well-attuned to the joys of a hot cuppa for millennia. They have also heard of how nice it is to “sleep” and “breathe” and “eat food.” But there are still those who eschew tea in favor of coffee, wine, soda, or boring old water. Until this year, I was one of those people. And I was missing out. The idea that something might be missing from my life first struck me while reading Conversations with Friends, by the Irish writer Sally Rooney. In Rooney’s novels, people prepare tea when they are sick, when they are nervous, and when they are bored. They brew pots before watching Netflix, in the midst of writing flirtatious emails, and while pondering illicit affairs. Eventually the reader must conclude in the Rooney universe, all characters are in the midst of either making or drinking tea at all times, unless otherwise specified. I brought this observation up with a British friend who also likes Rooney’s books, thinking I’d identified an interesting quirk. “I think that’s just reality,” she said. In Ireland, as well as in much of the UK, she noted, people simply make tea whenever there’s a lull. Indeed, when work brought me to London for a few months this fall, the thing I was most struck by was the kindness of the tea-making act. In the office, whenever anyone was getting up to make themselves tea, they would ask the people sitting nearby if they wanted a cup, too. A few minutes later, they’d return, bearing a little clattering bouquet of ceramic mugs with milk and sugar, adjusted to your liking. Everyone did this; everyone took turns. It was just a small thing. But it helped brighten up your day. If you’d been staring at a computer screen for hours trying to work out a particular problem and you were frustrated and a bit fried, to have someone ask if you would like some tea was a little reminder that you weren’t alone. Research suggests that there are real social benefits to offering one another hot beverages. A 2008 study by Yale psychologists, published in the journal Science, found that participants who had recently held a cup of hot coffee were more likely to think of others as generous and caring, compared to participants who had held a cup of iced coffee. The researchers suggest that our association between physical and emotional warmth may go back to early childhood: Staying close to caregivers is essential to a young child’s comfort and safety, and so we grow up to associate the warmth of body heat with warm feelings toward others. That’s not to mention the psychological comfort we derive from rituals of any kind, tea-making included. As behavioral scientists Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton explain in Scientific American, rituals make us feel more calm in the face of uncertainty. In addition, they write, their own research suggests that ”engaging in rituals mitigates grief caused by both life-changing losses (such as the death of a loved one) and more mundane ones.” Speaking personally, I can see how the simple tradition of making tea for oneself and others could be enough to keep entire civilizations going for centuries. It’s hard to stay mad at your friends and neighbors if they’re serving you afternoon tea; it’s easier to get over minor quibbles with your colleagues if they’re also the people who are offering you a beverage five minutes later. Kristen Surak, a professor of Japanese politics and author of Making Tea, Making Japan, tells NPR’s Layla Eplett that at the heart of the Japanese tea ceremony is the idea that “if everybody sat around and had a bowl of tea, we could create world peace.” It doesn’t always work that way in practice, of course. As Surak explains, politics and power cravings are not easy to overcome, whether among 15th-century Japanese aristocrats or in the 17th-century court of Queen Catherine of Braganza. And not only has a passion for tea “started wars and ruined lives,” as Nina Caplan writes for New Statesman, a 2014 report (pdf) from the Ethical Consumer Research Association highlights the fact that tea farmers and workers are notoriously vulnerable to labor abuse. And so making tea is not necessarily a pure pastime. When ethically sourced, however, it’s hard to imagine a better drinkable companion. Social worker Melody Wilding has written that whenever we’re feeling overwhelmed or frustrated, we should always stop to ask ourselves if we’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. Any of those feelings are likely to fuel poor judgment, which means that it’s time to stop what we’re doing, take a break, and either eat a sandwich or do some journaling or call a friend or take a nap. These are all excellent ideas. Based on my experience in England, I would add that whenever we’re feeling anything at all, we should probably make some tea and offer it to whoever is in the vicinity. A good cup, as George Orwell suggests, can make you feel wiser, braver, and more optimistic. And at the very least, if making tea is your default thing, then whatever is happening, no matter how scary, you will always, like the characters in Rooney’s novels, have something to do.

American chickpea farmers had a great year in the field, planting some 330,000 acres of the legume, up from 250,000 in 2017, and enjoying ample rainfall that led to high yields. Except now most of those plump garbanzos are sitting in storage, waiting for buyers. Traditionally, India has been the primary endpoint for American chickpeas; the country is the largest consumer of chickpeas and lentils in the world, and typically imports about half the US crop. But Indian chickpea farmers have had two excellent years in a row, lowering demand. To protect its farmers, India also levied 50% tariffs on imported lentils and 66% on imported chickpeas. “India has taken this step against all suppliers, really to protect its own domestic market,” Pete Klaiber, vice president of marketing for the USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council, told The Spokesman-Review. While India has long employed tariffs to help its farmers, a trade dispute with the US over Indian steel, as well as increasingly thorny trade battles around the world, are compounding the issue for American chickpea farmers. “The U.S. pulse industry will continue to suffer low prices until the trade disputes are resolved around the world,” Tim McGreevy, CEO of the U.S. Dry Pea and Lentil Council, told the Independent Record in Montana, a major grower of chickpeas. (Chickpeas and lentils are both pulses, a subcategory of the legume family.) Spain, China, Mexico, Columbia, Peru, and Pakistan are also major importers of American chickpeas; exports to China and the European Union have fallen drastically because of tariffs, while other countries are waiting out the resulting price fluctuations to place orders. “It was a bit of a rollercoaster,” Allen Druffle, a chickpea farmer in Washington State told NPR. “It was one of the best crops we’ve ever harvested. And then to see the pricing take a 40 to 60% fall is really unfortunate. If you’re talking real numbers, in February of 2018 I sold chickpeas for 50 cents a pound—and today they’re trading at 18 cents a pound.” One reason US farmers are planting more acres of chickpeas is an increase in domestic demand, as American diners awake to the pulse’s delicious possibilities. The American appetite for hummus has grown exponentially in recent years, and vegetable-loving, Mediterranean-centric chefs like Yotam Ottolenghi have made them a new household staple in the US and EU. Alison Roman, author of Dining In, recently published a chickpea and coconut stew in The New York Times that quickly went viral. But chickpeas are not the only staple crop sitting in silos as a result of US president Donald Trump’s trade conflicts. American soybean farmers are also hanging on to their crop and waiting for better prices, as Chinese imports of soy have dropped 90% since 2017.

Many people spend New Year’s Eve surrounded by lots of people, drinking and cheering and anxiously anticipating the stroke of midnight. That’s alright, but it’s not the only way to spend this night, which feels meaningful because it promises a fresh start yet often ends up leaving us drained, with an incurable hangover—and barely able to muster the resolve to make it to brunch, let alone ready to implement ambitious resolutions. Another option is to do it your way, making this a night of preparation and contemplation. While it may not seem glamorous to pass your evening on chores while friends are popping bubbly and doing shots, chances are good that you’ll feel fantastic afterward, refreshed and ready for the year ahead. The revelers will already be nursing new regrets. Perform these rites to start the year right: Make space Lighten your material load to create space for the great new things the new year will bring you. The more you love stuff, the more likely it is you’ve got too much. Take it from Marie Kondo, a woman with a mania for organization who sold the world on the life-changing magic of tidying up, clearing up space makes for a home that “sparks joy.” By decluttering, you’ll feel less burdened by your goods, and can do some good. Get rid of the books you have read, the clothes you no longer wear, the gadgets and tchotchkes you don’t use and figure out where to donate them. Books can go to a local little free library, clothes and home items to a Goodwill drop-off or thrift shop. Junk can just be trashed. Clean house Pour some wine if you like, play music, and start scrubbing—tackle the pile of junk on your desk, wash the dishes, sweep the floor, take out the garbage, bleach, polish, do the laundry, and change your sheets. Cleaning your house for the new year is a perfect way to start 2019. It’s both a practical and contemplative practice. In the words of the Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Shoukei Matsumoto, “We sweep dust to remove our worldly desires. We scrub dirt to free ourselves of attachments.” If you’re feeling particularly ambitious and witchy, consider moving some of your furniture around and burning sage, an ancient spiritual ritual and medicinal practice that dates back to ancient Egypt for cleansing a space. This way, your place will look, smell, and feel healthy and fresh. Water rites Now it’s time to relax. Take a home vacation that doubles as a meditation. Draw a bath or get in the shower, delighting in your sparkly clean space, the clean clothes that await you, and the sensation of being in the water. “The shower is a proxy for the…ocean,” according to marine biologist and author of the 2014 book Blue Mind, Wallace Nichols. “You step in the shower, and you remove a lot of the visual stimulation of your day…it’s a steady stream of ‘blue noise.’ You’re not hearing voices or processing ideas. You step into the shower and it’s like a mini-vacation.” Therapy session Grab a pen and paper and start scribbling. Think about the year that has just passed, the highs and lows, the surprises, what you didn’t know or couldn’t have anticipated, and what you wish you’d done differently. This isn’t a work of literature. It’s a stream of consciousness so don’t worry about formulating great sentences or sticking to a chronology. Just let your thoughts flow freely for about 30 minutes as a kind of meditation. Write about what you’d like to improve in the next year, what you fear and loathe, where you want to go and hope will happen, who you’d like to be, what you want to see, how you’d like to treat other people and yourself. The act of writing, particularly by hand, frees up your mind, helps you process emotions, and turns abstract thoughts into concrete words. It’s therapeutic. Letting it go You and your space are totally clean, you’ve scribbled your thoughts and are ready to release them. Now, you can step out for New Year’s Eve and perform the final rite while getting some gentle exercise. Before you go, grab some matches or a lighter and the pages you wrote. Whatever the weather, go for a contemplative stroll. Gaze at the stars, talk to the moon, wonder about what the year ahead will bring, formulate your resolutions or a life thesis, or empty your mind altogether. The physical activity will lift your mood and start your year off on the right foot, literally. When you get to a safe and quiet space, set your cone of pages aflame. Watch as the words turn to ash and make sure to stamp out any burning embers (starting the year with an arson charge would suck). Breathe deep, look up at the sky, and feel free. Burning the pages liberates your thoughts, releases your hopes, dreams, and regrets, and is a potent symbol of detachment. It’s a reminder that everything is fleeting and that next year will disappear just like this last one. So it’s worth making the most of these moments.

Last winter, as bitcoin zoomed to $10,000, Mike Novogratz, a hedge-fund-manager-turned-crypto-investor, proclaimed that it could “easily” reach $40,000. Then, when bitcoin broke $11,000, antivirus software pioneer John McAfee boldly predicted $1 million bitcoin by 2020. For one astonishing moment, when bitcoin exceeded $20,000 per coin in mid-December 2017, Novogratz and McAfee seemed prophetic. But while $1 million bitcoin by 2020 is still theoretically possible, the last year has cast serious doubts on their prognostication abilities. Bitcoin’s price has been in steady decline since May and the cryptocurrency is now floundering below $4,000, an 80% fall from its peak. Its market cap has sunk from $327 billion to $66 billion over the last 12 months. Roughly speaking, it’s gone from the size of Exxon Mobil to about the size of FedEx. If 2018 was the year bitcoin was supposed to make inroads toward widespread adoption, the falling price is just one signal the mainstreaming of bitcoin hasn’t happened. Beyond bitcoin, it’s been a painful year for the crypto faithful. Since Jan. 1, the collective market cap for all cryptocurrencies fell from $822 billion to $130 billion. That includes alternative cryptocurrencies and scam projects, as well as bitcoin offshoots, so it might not be the best representation of the bitcoin ecosystem. Bitcoin’s network fundamentals also illustrate the 2018 decline. According to BitInfoCharts, the number of bitcoin wallet addresses active daily has declined from 1.1 million in December 2017 to 450K. And the network lost about 1,500 nodes—the computers that connect to the bitcoin network—a 12% decline over the last year, according to Bitnodes. Mining revenue, the money generated through compensation for securing the network, and the number of transactions confirmed per day have also fallen, suggesting that fewer people used bitcoin this year than last year. And per Google Trends, during 2018, bitcoin’s worldwide popularity score dropped from 100 to 18—another indication of its crushing descent. Also in 2018, the US Securities and Exchange Commission did not approve a bitcoin exchange-traded fund. The long-awaited financial product would allow investors to own bitcoin without having to buy it themselves. An ETF might have brought a fresh wave of speculators and provided tacit endorsement of cryptocurrency as an asset class, but the SEC passed due to ongoing concerns about manipulation in the bitcoin spot market. Meanwhile, existing financial products, like bitcoin futures, haven’t garnered much interest. “Institutional players have stayed on the bitcoin sidelines, and as long as they are, the futures contracts are likely not to generate substantial amounts of volume,” Craig Pirrong, a finance professor at the University of Houston, told Bloomberg in October. In 2018, corporate acceptance of bitcoin was also a mixed bag. Microsoft resumed its bitcoin payment option in January, and Dish Network even added bitcoin cash—an offshoot of bitcoin—as a payment choice for its subscription television service. But this year, Expedia and Reddit also dropped support for bitcoin payments, and broader adoption by Starbucks turned out to be caffeinated hype. Finally, as crypto-focused companies, like ConsenSys and Bitmain, lay off employees, it’s one more reminder that bitcoin’s price last year may have been just a blip on the radar. The year 2018 was supposed to be bitcoin’s victory lap. Instead, it’s looked more like a goodbye tour.

At least one person is winning big off the video-game phenomenon that is Fortnite: Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Fortnite developer Epic Games. Fortnite reportedly generates $2.5 million a day in revenue, which helped Epic Games rake in $3 billion in profits in 2018. According to Bloomberg, Fortnite’s success also propelled Sweeney into the Bloomberg Billionaires Index after he amassed a $7.2 billion fortune this year. The index tracks the world’s 500 richest people, and Sweeney now ranks 194th. Business Insider notes that this valuation is based on the presumed sale of Epic Games stock during a venture fundraising round announced in October. While this is Sweeney’s first appearance on the Bloomberg list, he is in the midst of a long and successful career in gaming. Sweeney founded Epic Games from his parents’ basement in 1991. He later launched Unreal Engine, a set of software tools for developers that also generates royalties for Epic Games. Unreal is responsible for many popular titles, such as Gears of War, Bioshock, and of course Fortnite. While Fortnite is free to play, Epic earns revenue when players make in-game purchases that don’t actually affect performance, such as seasonal costumes or famous dance moves. In addition to being highly profitable, the game has become a global and cultural phenomenon, and has boosted the esports industry as a whole. Sweeney was far from the biggest winner on Bloomberg’s list. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and the richest man in the world, topped the index for the second year in a row after growing his net worth to $123 billion in 2018, up $24 billion from last year. Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune suffered the most, dropping by almost $20 billion this year. Other individuals that added significantly to their net worth include Lei Jun, founder of Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi, and Colin Huang, founder of e-commerce company Pinduoduo. Georg Schaeffler, who owns one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world, and Amancio Ortega, founder of the Inditex fashion group that owns Zara, saw their fortunes decline. You can view the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in its entirety here.