Thursday 25th April 2024

Welcome to the TikTok Meltdown

So: You’ve decided to force a multibillion-dollar technology company with ties to China to divest from its powerful social-video app. Congratulations! Here’s what’s next: *awful gurgling noises*

Yesterday evening, the Senate passed a bill—appended to a $95 billion foreign-aid package—that would compel ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app within about nine months or face a ban in the United States. President Joe Biden signed the bill this morning, initiating what is likely to be a rushed, chaotic, technologically and logistically complex legal process that is likely to please almost no one.


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How Bird Flu Is Shaping People’s Lives

A conversation with Katherine J. Wu about the disease sweeping through animals and raising food-safety questions

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.


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What to do when racing thoughts keep you up at night | Psyche Ideas

is a commissioning editor at Psyche. He was previously a senior editor at Psychology Today.

It’s time for bed. You lay down, pull up the cover, close your eyes, and then… the thoughts come rushing in. Maybe you’re replaying a conversation from earlier in the day, chewing on a piece of unhappy news, or thinking ahead to tomorrow’s to-do list. Perhaps you start worrying about sleep itself and whether you’ll get enough of it. With the lights out and nothing else to do, it suddenly seems impossible not to focus on these thoughts. So you lie there and wait anxiously for sleep to come.

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Bottles of 250-Year-Old Cherries Discovered Beneath George Washington's Home

Researchers at Mount Vernon say that the stash still “bore the characteristic scent of cherry blossoms”

George Washington’s legacy is famously colored by myths: He never did wear wooden dentures, for instance, and he didn’t skip a silver dollar across the Potomac River.

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Paleontologists Unravel Secrets of 'Enigmatic' 33-Foot Prehistoric Shark After Fossil Discovery

Scientists didn’t know much about Ptychodus, an ancient shark genus, because its remains were usually just fragments. Now, complete fossils reveal its body shape and hunting habits

After years of uncertainty, a prehistoric shark mystery has at last been solved—thanks to the recent discovery of remarkably complete fossil skeletons in northeastern Mexico.

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The 'World's Largest Wildlife Crossing' Will Help Animals Walk Safely Over Eight Lanes of California Traffic

The 210-foot-long bridge across a busy freeway in Los Angeles County is expected to be finished in 2025

When freeways are built through their natural habitats, animals often end up suffering—and so do humans on the road. Every year, more than one million wildlife-vehicle collisions occur across America, resulting in 200 deaths and 26,000 injuries to drivers and passengers.

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This Rare Condition Makes Some People Get Drunk, Even When They Haven't Touched a Drop of Alcohol

A man in Belgium was acquitted of drunk driving charges this week, after doctors showed he has auto-brewery syndrome, which makes his body produce alcohol

In April 2022, police pulled over a brewery worker in Belgium and found that his blood alcohol level was more than four times the legal limit. He was pulled over again about a month later, with a blood alcohol level more than three times the legal limit.

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Archaeologists May Have Found the Villa Where the Roman Emperor Augustus Died

After decades of excavations in Italy, archaeologists have discovered a villa that could have belonged to Augustus, the first emperor of Rome.

Since 2002, researchers from the University of Tokyo have been exploring Somma Vesuviana, an archaeological site north of Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that extinguished the ancient city of Pompeii in 79 C.E. Recently, these excavations revealed a structure destroyed by the same eruption.

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Bird Flu Virus Detected in Pasteurized Milk, as U.S. Moves to Test More Dairy Cows

The FDA maintains that the commercial milk supply is safe, and it plans to report results of further tests in the coming days and weeks

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has found evidence of bird flu virus in pasteurized milk, but it says the milk supply is still safe to drink, according to a statement from the agency on Tuesday.

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Ecologists Struggle to Get a Grip on 'Keystone Species' | Quanta Magazine

In the late 1960s, Bob Paine described the Pisaster sea star as a "keystone species" in Pacific Northwest tide pools. The concept has since taken on a life of its own.

Anne Salomon's first week as a graduate student in 2001 was not what she had anticipated. While other new students headed to introductory lectures, Salomon was whisked away by van and then motorboat to Tatoosh Island, which sits just offshore of the northwestern tip of Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Among the tide pools of this isolated island, Salomon peered at the web of life on the rocks: ochre sea stars, barnacles, mussels, snails and assorted algae that took forms reminiscent of lettuce, moss and bubble wrap.

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