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On December 23, 1924, a group of international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would change the world for decades. Delegates from all major lightbulb manufacturers were present, including the Netherlands’ Philips and the United States’ General Electric. While revellers celebrated Christmas elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the global incandescent lightbulb market.

According to NPR, around the year 70,000 B.C., a volcano called Toba on Sumatra Island in Indonesia, erupted, blowing about a thousand kilometres of vaporized rock into the air. It is by far the largest volcanic eruption we know of.

According to Vox Media, the idea of a basic income was, for decades, something of a policy fantasy. However, the last few years have seen it become less fringe and more mainstream. In fact, we now have many limited basic income programs running around the world.

The general idea—that the government should give every citizen a regular infusion of money with no strings attached—has been around since the 16th century. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has given the idea fresh momentum, with the crisis generating significant financial loss and uncertainty.

According to PhysOrg, a scientific publication, scientific knowledge used in international studies is predominantly sourced from English-language documents, as it is assumed that all scientific knowledge is available in English. However, according to research scrutinizing over 400,000 peer-reviewed papers in 326 journals, published in 16 languages, scientific papers written in languages other than English may hold untapped information crucial to the conservation of global biodiversity.

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), many people with high-pressure jobs find themselves unhappy with their careers, despite working hard their whole lives to get to their current position. What happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself?

Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. You can become enmeshed with your career, too.

Toyota was the leader in eco-friendly hybrid vehicles for many years, according to ArsTechnica. The automotive company had a fuel-efficiency edge over its competition. However, it has recently struggled to compete with companies that sell electric vehicles such as Tesla, Nissan and Volkswagen.

Toyota has made two critical choices. First, it tethered itself to hybrids. Second, it bet its future on hydrogen. But now governments around the world are moving to ban fossil-fuel vehicles of any kind.

According to the National Geographic Society, Earth now has a new ocean: the Southern Ocean.

Geographers have debated whether the waters around Antarctica had enough unique characteristics to deserve their own name, or whether they were simply cold, southern extensions of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. 

In 2017, Shanna Swan and Hagai Levine, along with six other researchers, estimated the average sperm count for 43,000 men in 55 countries across the world. The data, from 185 previously published studies, suggest that sperm counts fell by about 25% between 1973 and 2011. They found that sperm counts had in fact fallen by about 50% in Western countries over the period. Although the data were less plentiful, similar trends were observed in developing countries, too.

Please have a look at the chart below and discuss what you see with your teacher.

National Public Radio (NPR), a publicly-funded American news organization, held an interview with the famous Japanese author Haruki Murakami about his new collection of stories, First Person Singular. In this collection, Murakami writes in the first-person singular “I” perspective.

According to The Economist, in April 2021, Apple, which supplies one-fifth of the world’s smartphones and around half of the United States', introduced a software update that will end targeted advertisement by companies. Its latest mobile operating system forces apps to ask users if they want to be tracked. Many are expected to decline. It is the latest privacy move forcing marketers to rethink how they target online ads.

According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), people often think they are better listeners than in actuality. They believe good listening means just a few things: not talking when others are speaking, letting others know you are listening through facial expressions and verbal sounds (e.g., Mm-hmm), and being able to repeat what others have said.

According to Shape of Life, an online resource on everything related to animals, the Anomalocaris (ah-NOM-ah-LAH-kariss), from the Greek meaning “unusual shrimp”, was a major predator of the ancient seas during the Cambrian Explosion 530 million years ago. 

According to the Harvard Business Review, the higher leaders rise in the ranks, the more they are at risk of getting an inflated ego. The bigger their ego grows, the more they are at risk of ending up in an insulated bubble, losing touch with their colleagues, the culture and ultimately their clients.

According to The Economist, languages face a trade-off between complexity and speed. Those packed with information are spoken more slowly, while simpler ones are spoken faster. As a result, most languages are equally efficient at conveying information.

For instance, a Japanese translation of this text would be longer and a Thai one would be shorter, but readers would finish reading it at about the same time.

Have a look at the graph below and discuss what you see with your teacher.

Albert Einstein spent nearly a decade developing his theory of general relativity, which he published in 1916. The theory asserts that gravity is matter warping space-time and so gravitational bends in space can alter the passage of time. While an appealing theory, it is yet unproven.

According to CNN, the first image of a black hole, captured in 2019, has revealed more support for Einstein's theory. The new finding has suggested his theory is now 500 times harder to disprove.

According to BigThink, a publication focused on education, what consciousness is and where it comes from has absorbed great minds for thousands of years. In today's world, it's a question posed by physicists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. There are a few prevailing theories.

The first is known as materialism. This is the idea that consciousness emanates from matter. In the case of people, by the firing of neurons inside the brain. If you take the brain out of the equation, then consciousness doesn't exist at all.

Global News, a Canadian news outlet, reported that astronomers detected an explosion over fifteen times the size of our galaxy. This makes it the biggest blast ever recorded.

According to National Geographic, the remains of two white giraffes were found in a nature conservancy in northeastern Kenya. The giraffes likely had a rare genetic condition called leucism, which inhibits skin cells from producing pigment. It is believed that they were killed by poachers.

The animals had been well-known since 2017, after rangers spotted them in the conservancy and posted a video to YouTube, which then went viral.

The cashless economy has become increasingly prevalent in developed countries such as the U.S. and Japan. Consumers are incentivized to use debit or credit cards through discounts and freebies, and banks and credit card companies collect information on people’s spending habits.

Over the past 20 years, American television entered a Golden Age. Before the turn of the millennium, most TV shows followed familiar patterns: crime shows and situational comedies—also known as sitcoms—consisted of self-contained episodes with little plot development through a season or the run of the show.