For the first ten months of 2023, the market rally was largely concentrated in seven tech stocks, led by Nvclassia, a maker of the computer chips that are used to process artificial-intelligence (AI) algorithms. Since then, however, it broadened and gained pace. Firms that mirror the wclasser economy, such as retailers and banks, soared—JPMorgan Chase is up by a quarter since late October. The S&P 500 rose by 14% in the final two months of 2023, and towers 31% above its most recent trough, well above the 20% that is often used to define a bull market.

The explanation for the run was a happy mix of strong economic growth, an orderly reduction of inflation and, crucially, an enormous shift in interest-rate expectations over the past two months. America’s economy expanded at an impressive annualised pace of 4.9% in the third quarter; real-time estimates suggest it grew at a still-robust 2.5% in the last three months of the year. In the past three months “core” consumer prices have risen at an average annualised pace of just 2.2%, only a smclassgen above the Federal Reserve’s inflation target.

That led to a big shift in investors’ expectations for interest rates. In October they thought one-year rates in a year’s time would be close to 5%. Thanks to lower inflation data and a doveish set of forecasts from the Fed, that has fallen to 3.5%. Bond investors see the central bank cutting rates as soon as March—and continuing in almost every meeting in 2024. This tantalising prospect of immaculate disinflation, robust growth and the promise of easier monetary policy has underpinned the rally.

Can the bull market be sustained? Asset prices still have room to rise. Although markets are close to the heights they reached after the protracted mania of 2021, that does not mean that things are as excessive now as they were then. In real terms, stock prices remain lower; valuations are therefore not quite as elevated. Participation by retail investors, which reached a gclassdy peak of 24% of daily trading volumes in early 2021, was steady at around 18% in 2023.

Yet everything hangs on whether investors’ classeal economic scenario comes to pass. The expectation that it will helped lift stocks close to a record high last year. But risks to the outlook abound, and may have given investors pause in the cold light of January. Inflation in America may not be fully vanquished, not least with the economy still in rude health and the fiscal deficit unusually wclasse. Strife in the Mclassdle East could cause another commodity-price shock; the one-time easing of the supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic may be keeping inflation low only temporarily.

Waking up at the crack of dawn and going for a run might feel intimclassating when you start trying to make it a habit. Weaving a significant new activity such as this into your regular routine obviously takes determination and time—but how much time is really needed to make that habit stick?

One popular classea suggests that it takes 21 days to solclassify a habit. A three-week time frame might sound easily reachable to someone making a resolution on New Year's Day, when people tend to feel extra motivated to start a new habit or kick an old one, says Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology who has conducted research on habit formation. Yet every January 21 very few people can boast that they have kept their resolutions. One survey showed that only 9 percent of people actually stuck to their goals in 2023.

Everyone has a unique habit-building timeline—and no matter how long it is for any indivclassual, repetition is the key to making it work, explains Phillippa Lally, a senior lecturer in psychology and the co-director of the Habit Application and Theory group at the University of Surrey in England. Both Lally and Camerer suggest various indivclassualized ways to reinforce healthy behaviors and to eventually turn a wholesome task into an unconscious habit.

The type of activity is also a factor. Teaching yourself a completely new skill or process obviously takes longer than remembering to drink more water in the morning, Lally notes. A 2015 study found that new gym-goers had to exercise at least four times a week for six weeks in order to develop an exercise habit. And last year Camerer and his colleagues conducted a study that used machine learning to determine the time needed for habit-building. In it, machine-learning models analyzed vast amounts of data on repeated observations of a behavior and factored in different variables that may influence a person’s decision to continue the behavior.

The results showed that creating a handwashing habit took a few weeks, compared with the half year it took for people to develop an exercise habit. Handwashing, the study noted, is less complex than exercising and offers more opportunities to practice. The researchers also suggested that habit formation depends on the effort that a person puts into practicing an activity and on the presence of environmental cues that would remind them to carry out the behavior.

Neither “Oppenheimer” nor “Barbie,” two of Hollywood’s biggest hits last year, cracked the top 30 in China at the box office, according to Maoyan, a Chinese entertainment data provclasser that has tracked ticket sales since 2011. The only other recent year when Hollywood was shut out of China’s top 10 was 2020, during the pandemic.

Chinese moviegoers who once flocked to Hollywood films have been steadily disappearing. China is, by far, the biggest movie market outsclasse the United States, and a place that American studios rely on for growth and profitability as the film industry struggles.

China’s film industry is producing more high-quality movies that resonate with domestic audiences. The country’s top two films last year highlight the diversity of offerings: “Full River Red,” a dialogue-rich suspense thriller, and “The Wandering Earth II,” a science-fiction blockbuster heavy with special effects.

Over the last year, studio executives have decclassed that the demand for American films in China, at least for now, has changed so drastically that movie budgets must be recalibrated. Franchise sequels must be made for less money because China can no longer be counted on for the same level of revenue, even though the number of movie theater screens has quadrupled over the last decade.

Hannah Li, 27, works at a technology company in Beijing. She used to watch only foreign films, she saclass, but that has changed recently. She saclass her favorite film last year was “The Wandering Earth II,” a story about how the world came together to save Earth from being engulfed by the sun. The film’s message, Ms. Li saclass, promotes a type of collectivism that she rarely sees in Hollywood movies — and should send a signal to American producers. “If you don’t want to get off your high horse to see what we like, then it’s natural that you will be washed-out,” Ms. Li saclass. “Hollywood movies can no longer bring novelty to Chinese audiences.”

When we walk and use a phone at the same time, Dr. Giang saclass, we reflexively adjust how we move. Vclasseo footage of pedestrians has shown that people on phones walk about 10 percent slower than their undistracted counterparts. “You see a number of gait changes that reflect slowing down,” saclass Patrick Crowley, a project manager at the Technical University of Denmark who has studied the biomechanics of walking while using a phone. “People take shorter steps and spend longer time with both feet on the ground.”

Looking down at a smartphone while walking — as opposed to standing up straight — can also increase the amount of load, or force, placed on the neck and upper back muscles, which can contribute to symptoms of “text neck.” And research in the journal Gait & Posture suggests all this could reduce balance and increase the risk of stumbles or falls.

When scientists want to study stress, they often ask people to perform several tasks at once. That’s because multitasking is a reliable way to stress people out. There’s evclassence that walking while using a phone functions this way too, even if we’re not aware of it in the moment. One experiment found that the more people used a phone while walking on a treadmill, the more their levels of cortisol, the so-called stress hormone, tended to rise.

Dr. Giang’s work has looked at the connection between “phone-related distracted walking” and emergency department visits. Using government data spanning the years 2011 to 2019, he and his colleagues turned up nearly 30,000 walking injuries occasioned by phones. While many of those accclassents occurred on streets and sclassewalks, almost a quarter happened at home. Tripping over something or falling down the stairs is a real risk, Dr. Giang saclass.

Age was one of the major risk factors for phone-related walking injuries, his study found. Young people from the ages of 11 to 20 had the highest proportion of injuries, followed by adults in their 20s, 30s and 40s — perhaps because younger people use their phones more than older people do, he saclass.

Gummy supplements are a relatively new phenomenon, but gummy candies are not. Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s, though, dclass the supplement industry begin experimenting with gummies. The driving principle was not a new one: As Mary Poppins put it, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” Flintstones multivitamins have been around in their hard, chewable form since 1968; even if superior to pills, they basically taste like sweet, vaguely chemical chalk.

Now gummy supplements are everywhere. They’re a rapclassly expanding $7 billion–plus industry, and by 2027 that figure is projected to double. But what makes gummy supplements appealing also makes them concerning. The reason they taste as good as candy, it turns out, is because on average, they can contain just as much sugar as candy does. The earliest gummy supplements, Cooperman told me, were basically just candy with vitamins sprayed on.

They’ve come a long way since then: The active ingredients are now carefully integrated into the gummy itself by scientists such as Puch, and done so in a way that preserves as much of the gummy’s flavor and consistency as possible. But the nutritional essentials haven’t changed much—the average gummy vitamin contains about the same amount of sugar in a serving as one Sour Patch Kclass does.

Annual calls to Poison Control for pediatric melatonin overdoses have risen 530 percent over the past decade, in part, experts suggested to me last year, because of the hormone’s increased availability in gummy form. The overdose numbers are also up for multivitamins.

The risk of overdose can be greatly mitigated by simply taking care to store gummies where kclasss can’t get them. The more significant problem, Cooperman told me, is that gummies are simply a less reliable delivery mechanism than the alternatives. Vitamins and many other compounds degrade far faster in gummies’ half-liquclass, half-solclass state than in traditional pill or capsule form, he saclass, because gummies offer less protection from heat, light, moisture, and other contaminants.

Chayka is a staff writer at the New Yorker and he is concerned about the effect of the Filterworld, his word for the 'network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed'.

He is referring to the songs Spotify cues up, the films Netflix suggests, the stories Facebook feeds its users, the broken flush of TikTok videos. They all use algorithms which calculate what grabs our attention and give us more of it, neglecting the ‘veggies’ of more nourishing content. We are Homer Simpson in hell, hooked up to the endless doughnuts machine – and, like Homer, we lap it up.

From an audience perspective, the fear is that we will end up in a place of shallow, short-term satisfaction, culturally fulfilled. Chayka also worries about the impact on creators, who might be encouraged to converge on what pleases the algorithms. The combined result, he says, is the ‘pervasive flattening’ of culture: ‘By flatness I mean homogenisation, but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most.’

He uses 'the generic coffee shop' as an example, describing his visits to Kyoto, Berlin, Beijing and Reykjavík, where his phone directed him to independent coffee shops that were all the same, despite no head office controlling them: white tiles, industrial -looking furniture, 'hanging pendant lamps fitted with Edison bulbs'. He says the ‘strict sameness surpassed the usual indicators of globalisation’, blaming the algorithms for harmonising people’s tastes.

That might be true: Chayka is the expert. But to a non-American it seems to be exactly globalisation, specifically Americanisation, an acceleration of the cultural hegemony many of us were used to long before Filterworld’s algorithms. Global platforms have enabled American culture to spread more quickly, New York’s trends followed minute to minute by people in Sheffield or Tokyo or Reykjavik, but those trends spread before the internet. The algorithms might be a better mallet, but it is still America flattening global culture.

Low fertility has become a national emergency in South Korea, where experts say that if the decline continues, the nation’s population could shrink by two-thirds by the end of the century. Korean newspapers are filled with stories about closing nursery schools, expanded baby bonuses and whether it will become necessary to conscript women into the armed forces to meet quotas. If fertility in South Korea can fall so far, it’s “plausible,” Pomeroy said, to think that it might happen in other countries, including the United States, where the total fertility rate is still a bit above 1.6. The U.S. population is still growing slowly, mainly because of immigration.

What makes a baby bust so hard to fight is that its effects compound over the generations. Fewer births in one generation lead to fewer women in the next generation to give birth. A smaller population may put less stress on the environment, but an upside-down population pyramid leaves too few working young people to support the retired elderly.

The politically preferred solution to a low birthrate is simply to raise the rate. But pronatalist policies such as bonuses for having babies, free child care and so on haven’t met expectations where they’ve been tried. If policymakers can’t get birthrates up, they will be left with an unappetizing set of choices: raise taxes, raise the retirement age, cut retirement and health care benefits for older adults or increase immigration.

That last option, increasing immigration, has a lot going for it. It can benefit both the receiving nation and the sending nation. People who go abroad to work send remittances home. They may also bring back ideas for new businesses. The Philippines has a small but growing start-up culture that seems to have been energized by Filipinos who worked abroad, Pomeroy said.

The challenge for rich nations with low birthrates is to integrate new arrivals both economically and socially. That requires the public’s support for investment in housing, education and other things immigrants need. In the United States, a nation of immigrants, support for immigration remains fairly strong despite the chaos on the southern border.

At last year’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presented a stark warning. The world remains on track for at least three degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century and, with it, the threat of massive social and political upheaval. To avert this looming catastrophe, countries must accelerate the transition to net-zero carbon energy and the decarbonization of their economies.

Such a transition is within reach in engineering terms, but it remains politically and economically difficult. Some observers insist that it will only come with stiff costs. During last fall's strike in the United States by the United Autoworkers' Union (UAW)—when employees at the “big three” car makers forced management to cave to most of their demands—many analysts framed the dispute as one that in effect pitted the green economy against workers.

U.S. auto companies had created a production system for electric vehicles built around low-wage, nonunion jobs; in the process, they set up a seemingly existential choice between decarbonization on the one hand and good jobs for manufacturing workers on the other. The union, many observers insisted, was not keeping up with the times; its imperatives were at odds with the realities of the transition to clean energy.

But that frame profoundly misunderstood both the strike and the challenge of tackling climate change. The resolution of the UAW strike shows why a successful clean energy transition must be a just one that strengthens the rights of workers and gives the needs of all the stakeholders in the economy their due. The strike cut through the false binary presented by its critics. The union forced the inclusion of the production of electric vehicles and their batteries in the new, improved autoworker contracts—showing that the decarbonization of the auto industry can still create good jobs.

The workers' demand to be fully included in the green transition in the auto industry is a call for a revival of the system that prevailed in World War II, when government investment was effectively combined with private initiatives, strong labor standards, and direct union involvement. Indeed, it was the UAW under its first president, Walter Reuther, that pioneered this strategy in the days after Pearl Harbor, forcing a much more rapid conversion to war production than the auto companies had said was possible. It is this speed and scale—driven by a new kind of relationship between firms, workers, and the state—that will be needed if the planet is to avoid ruin.

The UAW strike challenged the model of financialized shareholder capitalism that holds sway today. That prevailing economic system has failed to respond effectively either to the threat of climate change or to the needs of workers. Since the 1970s, the global economy has been dominated by a form of capitalism in which power within firms is overwhelmingly held by shareholders, the management of firms responds to shareholder-oriented financial metrics, and the allocation of capital is the province of largely unregulated financial markets dominated by short-term investors.

This kind of capitalism emerged in the 1980s, championed by leaders such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S President Ronald Reagan, and became mainstreamed in business schools and idolized by politicians, academics, and business leaders in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It encourages stock buybacks and treats workers as a cost rather than an asset: businesses focus on quarterly returns and reward their shareholders but not the workers, who are central to creating value.

The reality is that this shareholder capitalism—which has resulted in $6.3 trillion in share buybacks over the last decade that aim to boost stock prices, stock options, and executive pay—will not be able to steer the investment needed to fight against climate change. Instead, countries must build structures of cooperation and mutual benefit between firms, workers, and government. Stakeholder capitalism, in contrast with shareholder capitalism, requires that public support for private firms have strong conditionality: clear goals to which businesses are held accountable; high labor, social, and environmental standards; and profit sharing with the public.

Stakeholder capitalism is defined by a balance of power among an economy’s stakeholders: notably its firms, workers, and government. The institutional mechanisms that order these relationships have varied and will continue to vary across different countries with different histories. And the ways states shape markets and interact with firms vary even more widely. But what characterizes this alternative to financialized shareholder capitalism is the insistence that workers be included in the governance of the firm and that any benefits to companies are conditional on them making investments that are good for people and the planet.

Stakeholder capitalism does not mean the end of private ownership of firms, nor does it abandon the idea of the firm as a profit-making entity. Instead, it seeks to shape how corporations are governed, what their incentives and constraints are, and how they fit into the wider picture of societal governance as they pursue their mission of long-term profit generation. It does mean that shareholders—who retain in all the world’s significant economies a disproportionate role in the governance of private firms—have to act as stewards for the firm in the context of markets actively shaped by states in the service of the common good.

The numbers say it all: cities are hugely important to the world’s future but face big challenges. More than half of the world’s nearly eight billion people live in a city. Of those, 2.8 billion — the combined population of China and India — lack proper housing. For more than one billion individuals, home is in an informal settlement, and that number is rising. Some 90% live in Africa or Asia, according to 2020 data.

What's more, few, if any, of the targets of the 11th United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 11) to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” are even within shouting distance of being achieved by the 2030 deadline . Some progress has been made in expanding access to public transport (currently available to around half of the world’s urban dwellers). However, “vast gaps” remain when it comes to achieving universal access to affordable homes, improving living conditions and reducing the environmental impact of cities, says the urban-development agency UN-Habitat.

There are gaps, too, when it comes to cities and science. Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) need the kind of knowledge-based decision-making that is routine in high-income countries. And yet most research expertise is concentrated in rich nations, notes Eduardo Cesar Leão Marques, a political scientist at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, in a review article in the inaugural edition of Nature Cities.

This, in turn, makes it harder for researchers in LMICs to publish their research on regions such as Latin America in journals based in the United States, says María José Álvarez-Rivadulla, a sociologist at the University of the Andes in Bogotá who has worked on cities in both areas. This is at least in part because reviewers don’t see such articles as relevant to readers who are based mainly in high-income countries. “You have to keep justifying why you study the cities that you study, because they are not in the global north and your research isn’t based in a rich university in a rich country,” she says.

A second, related, problem is that most existing research in, on or about cities falls in disciplines that don’t focus exclusively on urban environments. Studies on governance, climate and sustainability, public health, transport and other topics relevant to cities can be found in publications, including the Nature Portfolio journals, that serve their respective communities. But there are few journals that speak to all those working in the urban space and consider urban challenges across social divides.

Dragons are a big deal in Chinese culture. Whereas in the West dragons are often depicted as winged, fire-breathing monsters, the Chinese dragon, or the loong, is a symbol of strength and magnanimity. The mythical being is so revered that it snagged a spot as the only fictional creature in the Chinese Zodiac’s divine roster. And the imagery pervades society today—whether in boats, dances, or the stars.

Where the Chinese dragon first came from is still debated by historians and archaeologists. But one of the most ancient images of the loong was unearthed in a tomb in 1987 in Puyang, Henan: a two-meter-long statue dating back to the Neolithic civilization of Yangshao Culture some 5,000–7,500 years ago. Meanwhile, Hongshan Culture’s Jade Dragon—a C-shaped carving with a snout, mane, and thin eyes—could be traced back to Inner Mongolia five millennia back.

Nothing cemented the Chinese dragon’s might better than when it became a symbol of the empire. The mythical Yellow Emperor, a legendary sovereign, is said to have been fetched by a Chinese dragon to head to the afterlife. The loong are also said to have literally fathered emperors, or at least that’s what Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han dynasty (202-195 B.C.), made his subjects believe: that he was born after his mother consorted with a Chinese dragon.

From then on, the loong was a recurrent theme across dynasties. The seat of the emperor was called the Dragon Throne, and every emperor was called “the true Dragon as the Son of Heaven.” D. C. Zhang, a researcher in the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, tells TIME that later dynasties even prohibited commoners from using any Chinese dragon motif on their clothes if they weren’t part of the imperial family.

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) created the first iteration of a Chinese national flag featuring a dragon with a red pearl, which was to be hung on Navy ships. But as the Qing Dynasty weakened after several notable military losses, including the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) and Boxer Rebellion of 1900, caricatures of the dragon began to be used as a form to protest against the government for its weakness, says Zhang.

Modern research confirms that personality is malleable. Across the population, personality changes in a healthier direction over time. In other words, as people age, they tend to experience fewer negative emotions and more positive ones, are more conscientious, place greater emphasis on positive relationships, and are less judgmental of others. Importantly, there is a lot of variability here—some people change a great deal and others remain relatively stable.

Is it possible to speed up these gradually unfolding positive changes? In my research conducting clinical trials to test the effect of cognitive behavioral therapy on personality traits, we find that meaningful, lasting change can occur over the course of just 12 weeks. Moreover, in a large meta-analysis(basically, a summary of all the studies done in this area) of clinical trials that included an assessment of personality, the Big Five traits changed significantly, with the greatest improvement occurring early in treatment(within eight weeks) and in response to cognitive behavioral therapy.

The good news is that cognitive-behavioral techniques are relatively simple, and they don’t necessarily require the help of a therapist. The first component involves changing your thinking patterns (this is the “cognitive” piece). You have to become aware of your thoughts to determine whether they’re keeping you stuck acting in line with a particular trait. For example, if you find yourself thinking that “people are only looking out for themselves,” you are likely to behave defensively around others.

The behavioral component involves becoming aware of your current action tendencies and testing out new responses. If you are defensive around other people, they will probably respond negatively to you (e.g., withdrawing, snapping at you), confirming your belief that you can’t trust others. By contrast, if you try behaving more openly (perhaps sharing that you’re struggling with a task with a co-worker), you have the opportunity to see if that changes the way others act toward you. By taking small, manageable steps (i.e., changing your behavior) and shifting how you think about yourself (i.e., changing your thoughts), you can start an upward trajectory that ends in lasting personality change.

The first step is to identify a meaningful relationship, career, or personal life goal. For example, I hope to someday be in a leadership role at my university. Then, think about the traits or characteristics that make success more likely in this area. University leaders are often diplomatic and measured, where as I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve and have a hard time keeping my opinions to myself in meetings.

What is a small behavioral change you could make that would be more in line with the desired trait—something that would take you out of your comfort zone a little bit, but still feels manageable? For my goal, I might try holding my tongue during faculty meetings until at least three people have expressed their opinions. I might learn from that experience that other people may have the same concerns and I don't always have to be the one to go out on a limb. This is an example of small changes to my behavior and thoughts that, if maintained over time, can be the first step on the journey of personality change.

High-temperature superconductivity is one of the holy grails of physics. It also seems to attract a steady stream of controversy, with a recent string of retracted papers and provocative claims that haven’t held up to scrutiny.

Superconductivity is the name physicists give to an unusual phenomenon in which a material is able to conduct electricity with no resistance. While the effect has been known for more than a century, so far superconductivity has only been found to occur at incredibly low temperatures. And in the few cases where it’s been achieved at anything approaching the balminess of a winter’s day in Antarctica, it’s required mind-bogglingly high pressure comparable to the pressure deep in the Earth’s core.

The stakes are enormous: If superconductors worked at anything close to room temperature, it could lead to everything from levitating trains and improved MRI scanners to better energy storage devices and more efficient electronics in general. Perhaps because of that potential, the field has spawned a great deal of hype, often accompanied by disappointment.

Could some of the controversy be avoided if scientists were more open in terms of making their methods and data available for scrutiny? I think there are a few reasons why there is controversy. First of all, making sure that you are reporting something that is a superconductor and not just a metal with strange properties, can in some cases be very difficult. So in the case of the hydrides, for example, it was really hard to show that they do indeed expel a magnetic field — that they exhibit what is known as the Meissner Effect—just because of the way that the experiments are performed in diamond anvil cells that have a lot of magnetic material. So it’s just experimentally difficult, in that case, to actually 100 percent prove that what you have is a superconductor.

Of course, there are other issues about reporting all data and making sure that researchers have access to it. But, there are issues about fraud, and then there are issues about not being able to prove something 100 percent correctly at that given time because of experimental limitations, which are two separate issues.

An Instagram-worthy ombré bubble tea may not seem like the most British of beverages, compared to a cup of Earl Grey during elevenses. Yet Taiwan region's boba tea, known for its chewy tapioca pearls and endless customisation options, has become increasingly ubiquitous in the UK. The country is certainly not the first to cash in on this market, but it's found an even bigger opportunity amid a shifting demographic and changing consumer base.

Served hot or cold, bubble tea is typically a sweetened fruity or milky tea – always shaken, never stirred – with starchy tapioca balls slurped through a jumbo straw. Originating in Taiwan region in the 1980s, bubble tea started spreading as stalls blossomed across Hong Kong, China’s mainland and the US, gaining popularity among Taiwan residents communities in California in the 90s.

In the UK, boba shops seem to be sprouting up overnight around busy tube stations, trendy high streets and at university cafés. Franchises including Gong cha, Bubbleology, Mooboo and T4 are rapidly multiplying. Long lines of enthusiastic customers attest to the popularity of the drink, with people posting on social media about enjoying #BobaTime – on TikTok, #BubbleTea tops 8.3 billion views.

Justin Goes, development director for UK and Ireland at the tea franchise Gong cha, which is planning to open 500 new stores in Britain, believes "bubble tea is one of the most exciting segments of the UK’s F and B [food and beverage] industry", especially as the demand for "east-to-west food and beverage spikes in the UK". The beverage addresses what Goes calls an "explosion" in broad consumer demand, but its appeal and growth is specifically bolstered by young consumers with new purchasing power – and specific preferences.

That bubble tea lends itself so well to the endless customisation and bold flavours Gen Z prefers is part of the reason it's so popular, explains McCoy-Ward, known on social media platforms as Bubble Tea Kristin. The beverage feeds into frenzied FOMO and the desire to get in on the biggest, quirkiest and prettiest new trend. Muslim customers, says McCoy-Ward, have also taken up bubble tea as a treat of choice, as it's "perfect for people who can't drink alcohol and don't want coffee". In England and Wales, Muslims make up 6.5% of the population, and are also one of the youngest groups.

Appeals to common sense are a staple of politics, especially when an insurgent wishes to distinguish himself from a supposedly aloof and out-of-touch elite. But in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mark Whiting and Duncan Watts, a pair of computational social scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, note that the idea has seldom been rigorously studied. The two researchers set out to fix that. They started by noting that the standard concept of common sense has a somewhat circular definition: common sense is a set of claims that sensible people agree with, and sensible people are those who possess common sense.

To get around such philosophical tangles, the researchers turned to Mechanical Turk, a website run by Amazon, a big tech firm, that allows people to post odd jobs. They recruited 2,046 human participants and asked them to rate 50 statements from a corpus of 4,407 claims that might plausibly be seen as commonsensical.

As common sense might have predicted, the researchers found that plainly worded claims concerning facts about the real world were the most likely to be rated as demonstrating common sense (“triangles have three sides”, for example, which is true by definition, or “avoid close contact with people who are ill”). The more abstract the claims, the less likely participants were to agree that they were common sense (“all human beings are created equal”; “perception is the only source of knowledge”).

When they split the claims by subject, the researchers found that those concerning technology and science were the most likely to be rated as commonsensical, while matters of history and philosophy were the least likely. A respondent’s age, sex, income and personal politics had little effect on what they thought counted as common sense, although psychological measures of social perceptiveness and the ability to reflect on one’s opinions did.

Having investigated individual opinions, the researchers looked at how common sense works across big groups. Here, they found much less agreement than might have been expected. Only around 44% of claims in the corpus were rated as commonsensical by at least 75% of respondents. A stricter definition of common sense, in which everyone has to agree with a claim for it to count, cut that number to just 6.6%. Where exactly a sensible cut-off lies is a matter for debate. But truly “common” sense, it seems, is an elusive thing.

Move along, not much to see here. That seemed to be the message from OpenAI last week, about an experiment to see whether its advanced AI chatbot GPT-4 could help science-savvy individuals make and release a biological weapon.

The chatbot “provided at most a mild uplift” to those efforts, OpenAI announced, though it added that more work on the subject was urgently needed. Headlines reprised the comforting conclusion that the large language model was not a terrorist’s cookbook.

Dig deeper into the research, however, and things look a little less reassuring. At almost every stage of the imagined process, from sourcing a biological agent to scaling it up and releasing it, participants armed with GPT-4 were able to inch closer to their villainous goal than rivals using the internet alone.

The chief takeaway from the exercise should not be a sense of relief. “[Open AI] ought to be pretty worried by these results,” wrote Gary Marcus, a commentator who has testified on AI oversight before a US Senate committee, last week in his widely read newsletter.

So should we. We need better independent mechanisms for realistically assessing and curbing such threats. Just as we do not permit drug companies to rule on the safety of medicines, AI risk evaluation cannot be left to the industry alone.

Ten times a second an object shaped like a thick pizza box and holding a silicon wafertakes off three times faster than a manned rocket. For a few milliseconds it moves at a constant speed before being halted abruptly with astonishing precision—within a single atom of its target. This is not a high-energy physics experiment. It is the latest lithography machine dreamed up by ASML, a manufacturer of chipmaking tools, to project nanoscopic chip patterns onto silicon wafers. On January 5th Intel, an American semiconductor giant, became the first proud owner of this technical marvel’s initial components for assembly at its factory in Oregon.

Like the outwardly unassuming machine, its Dutch maker is full of surprises. The company’s market value has quadrupled in the past five years, to €260bn ($285bn), making it Europe’s most valuable technology firm. Between 2012 and 2022 its sales and net profit both rose roughly four-fold, to €21bn and €6bn, respectively. In late 2023 ASML’s operating margin exceeded 34%, staggering for a hardware business and more than that of Apple, the world’s biggest maker of consumer electronics.

Such stellar performance, which is set to shine brightly again when ASML reports quarterly results on January 24th, is now routine. The firm holds a monopoly on a key link in the world’s most critical supply chain: without its kit it is next to impossible to make cutting-edge chips that go into smartphones and data centres where artificial intelligence (AI) is trained. With global semiconductor sales forecast to double to $1.3trn by 2032, every big country and every big chipmaker wants ASML’s gear. The company has become so important in the Sino-American techno-tussle that, as it recently emerged, America’s government pressed ASML to cancel planned deliveries of even its older machines to China.

Yet ASML’s spectacular success is also underpinned by two other, less obvious factors. The company has created a network of suppliers and technology partners that may be the closest thing Europe has to Silicon Valley. And its business model ingeniously combines hardware with software and data. These unsung elements of ASML’s success challenge the notion that the old continent is incapable of developing a successful digital platform.

ASML’s complex machines perform a simple task. They project chip blueprints onto photosensitive silicon wafers. In 1986, when its first model was delivered, individual transistors measured micrometres and its kit was almost like a glorified photocopier, explains Marc Hijink, a Dutch journalist and author of “Focus—How ASML Conquered the Chip World”, a new book. Today, with transistors shrunk by a factor of a thousand, ASML lithography gear is possibly the most sophisticated equipment ever sold commercially.

More than half of British girls do not feel confident learning maths while two-fifths feel insecure about science, according to a report which highlights an “alarming” gender confidence gap in schools. Research by the education charity Teach First found that 54% of girls lacked confidence in maths, compared with 41% of boys, but the gap was even wider in science, where 43% of girls lacked confidence compared with 26% of boys.

Despite feeling less confident, girls often outperform boys in Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects at GCSE, with a higher percentage achieving top grades – though fewer girls then take these subjects at A-level and go on into Stem careers. The results have prompted warnings that poor gender diversity will exacerbate the skills shortage currently facing the Stem sector, and Teach First is calling for more high-quality, specialist teachers to help inspire the next generation into these fields.

In 2020, women made up less than 30% of the UK Stem workforce, while the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has warned of a shortfall of more than 173,000 workers – the equivalent of 10 unfilled roles per business,on average.

Teach First, which trains high-quality graduates to teach in schools in challenging areas, is calling for an increase in pay for trainee teachers to incentivise Stem professionals into teaching in order to alleviate some of the shortages. Many schools are struggling to recruit teachers, particularly for maths, computing and physics.

Teach First’s chief impact officer, Amy Mitchell, said: “It’s deeply troubling that too few children feel confident studying science and maths, with too many girls in particular left behind. “Girls are just as capable as boys when it comes to maths and science, but this confidence gap poses a huge threat to the UK’s future, with Stem skills desperately needed to boost economic growth and to help tackle the major problems we face such as climate change.”

Think: Lifetime movie cut up into TikTok videos. Think: soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age. The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and is hoping to bring a successful formula established abroad to the United States by hooking millions of people on its short-form content.

ReelShort’s titles include “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband,” “I Got Married Without You” and “Bound by Vendetta: Sleeping With the Enemy.” The shows are formulaic: The plotlines include romance and revenge, the characters are archetypical and the dialogues are simple. ReelShort aims to get people hooked as quickly as possible, with much of the action happening in the first few super short episodes. “This is a pay-as-you-go model,” Mr. Jia said. “If people are confused by the story, they leave.”

The cost of making these features is relatively low, $300,000 or less, according to Crazy Maple Studios. The crews are small and partly made up of recent film graduates in Los Angeles, according to actors who worked on the productions.

Viewers can watch dozens of minute-long episodes on ReelShort for free via multiple platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. But at some point, they must either pay or watch ads to unlock subsequent episodes. Sometimes people pay as much as $10 or $20 to keep watching, Ms. Zhang, the producer, said. “Isn’t that a crazy business?”

Last month, ReelShort was downloaded one million times and earned $5 million in revenue in Apple’s app store, according to the data firm Sensor Tower, and it was downloaded three million times in the Google Play Store, earning $3 million in revenue there. Since November, ReelShort has ranked somewhere in the top 15 of most popular entertainment apps in both app stores on most days. (For a few days in November, ReelShort even surpassed TikTok as the most popular entertainment app in Apple’s app store.)

In late summer, Death Valley National Park earns its name. The heat in this region of California and Nevada is relentless. Record temperatures are set, and the air is often bone dry. Despite the heat and aridity, there was a slow but steady drip of water into the collection vial of Omar Yaghi’s device, an assembly of components loosely resembling a telescope. By the end of the day, this system had collected only a few millilitres of water — barely enough for a refreshing sip. But these results, published in July, nevertheless represent a landmark in the field of atmospheric water harvesting (AWH).

Given the extremity of the testing conditions, the results suggest that the key ingredient in this device — a water-absorbing compound called MOF-303 — has the potential to deliver life-sustaining volumes of clean water to regions that currently struggle to access it. “The vision there is to have something like a village-scale device,” says Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you’ve got a tonne of MOF-303, you could deliver about 500 litres of water a day, every day for five to six years.”

By current estimates, roughly two billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Desalinated seawater can meet some of this need, but the technology required remains costly and is limited to communities with coastal access. This explains the growing enthusiasm for alternative solutions that extract clean water from the air. The US Geological Survey estimates that Earth’s atmosphere contains nearly 13,000 cubic kilometres of water — more than six times the volume of the world’s rivers.

“You cannot deplete it — it’s always replenished by natural evaporation from a larger water body,” says Tian Li, a materials scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. And although many of the most promising AWH technologies are still at the stage of lab demonstrations or proof-of-concept devices, the field is quickly building momentum towards real-world systems that produce plentiful amounts of water at low cost.

Systems that condense water from ambient air offer a more generally useful solution. Several companies have already developed electrically powered ‘active’ AWH machines for this purpose. In most cases, these use fans to draw warm, moisture-bearing air into an apparatus that directly cools the air and collects the resulting water condensate; in some cases, this water is also subject to filtration and additional treatment. These systems can produce considerable volumes.

Women are up to four times more likely than men to be affected by autoimmune disease, conditions in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's own cells. Now, scientists think they know why: Women's outsized risk may be tied to how the body controls its X chromosomes.

Humans have two types of sex chromosomes: X and Y. Most females carry two X chromosomes in each cell, while most males have an X and a Y. The X chromosome is larger than the Y and contains far more genes that code for proteins. But in people with two X chromosomes, only one needs to participate in protein production — otherwise, cells could soon be overwhelmed with too many proteins. To prevent this, one X chromosome in each cell is "silenced" in females during embryonic development.

A long molecule of RNA — the genetic cousin of DNA — called Xist executes this silencing by latching onto one X chromosome. It turns out, however, that many proteins are prone to sticking to Xist, and these big complexes of RNA and proteins may predispose females to autoimmune disease.

That's because the complexes can set off an immune reaction in which the body makes antibodies against them proteins within it, according to a new study in mice and humans published Thursday (Feb. 1) in the journal Cell.

"So besides it's [Xist] job in controlling gene activity, there's really a major immunological imprint that maybe hadn't previously been recognized," Dr. Howard Chang, co-senior study author and a professor of cancer research and genetics at Stanford University , told Live Science. These findings could therefore open up new avenues for research into treatments for autoimmune diseases, he said.

A bus with passengers crosses London Bridge during the morning rush hour, March 10, 2023. A group of academics and transport officials chose 150 London buses and placed stickers on the windows prompting passengers to say “hi” and “thank you.”

A group of transport officials and academics wanted to see what would happen on city buses across London if it put up signs encouraging riders to say “hi” and “thank you” to their drivers. The simple experiment bore fruit, bumping positive interactions with drivers by 30% on buses where signs were posted. Researchers say these methods could be deployed elsewhere to promote stronger social connection.

“Small interactions matter, and they are a bedrock on which you can build,” says Grainne O’Dwyer, senior program manager of Neighbourly Lab, a research nonprofit that partnered on the study. “Communities can support themselves if they’re more resilient and work together, and feel they have someone to rely on. ... There’s lots of value in social connection.”

Essential workers from shopkeepers to street sweepers to grocery baggers come across hundreds of people on a day-to-day basis. They present huge, untapped potential for connection, says Ms. O’Dwyer. “There’s growing evidence that social connection has value,” says Ms. O’Dwyer. “It’s also just a very basic human need to say, ‘I feel respected. I feel seen.’ And very simple nudges that you can put in context that can have a big, big impact.

What’s next for behavioral scientists is to figure out what makes such interactions so rare. The “reward circuitry” of the brain encourages connection, says Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist and psychologist at the University of Chicago. “If you feel better saying hi to your bus driver, why don’t people do it more?” asks Dr. Epley. Society shapes how one is expected to interact in public. But there’s also the fear of the unknown, says Dr.Epley. “Reaching out – it’s a little like going into the ocean when there could be sharks. Our brains aren’t very good at handling uncertainty. Even a small dose of it can cause us to be reluctant to do things,” he says.

People with blue eyes can read better in darker conditions than those with brown eyes, a small study has found. This suggests having blue eyes is an advantage in low-light conditions, and might help explain why the trait evolved in northern Europe. But the finding needs to be confirmed in a larger study.

Yamaguchi says when she moved to Europe from Japan, she was struck by how much dimmer the lighting was in buildings, often finding it too dark to read by. This made her wonder whether there was a biological basis for this weaker lighting, rather than just a cultural one. To learn more, she and her student Faith Erin Cain tested the vision of 40 people of European descent who had either blue or brown eyes.

After the volunteers sat in darkness for 30 seconds, the researchers gradually increased the brightness of the lighting until the participants were able to read a sequence of letters on a wall 3 metres away. Those with blue eyes needed a light level of 0.7 lux on average, compared with 0.82 lux for those with brown eyes.

Other experts say the idea that having blue eyes helps in dim conditions makes sense, but the number of volunteers in this study was too small to draw firm conclusions. Pirro Hysi at King’s College London says: “This is possible, [but] not proven because the analyses were based on a small sample.” If the finding is confirmed, it might help explain why blue eyes evolved in some populations in northern Europe, says Yamaguchi.

The current thinking is blue eyes were a side effect of selection for lighter skin and blonde hair, and the driving force behind this was a need to get sufficient vitamin D. Our bodies use ultraviolet rays to make vitamin D in the skin, so darker skin can result in vitamin D deficiency in regions with little sunlight. Another idea is that blue-eyed people had more children because the trait was seen as attractive, says David Mackey at the Lions Eye Institute in Australia. “Or it may have a specific biological advantage, which is what this research is looking at,” he says. “Seeing better at night in the northern winter would have some advantages.”

There has long been a cultural taboo around layoffs in Silicon Valley, where employers went to great pains to woo and pamper talent. Along with stock options, cruise ship-worthy buffets, free shuttle buses and on-site dry cleaning, job security was one of the most powerful attractions to tech companies racing to hire skilled software engineers.

That taboo has now been broken. “The shine of tech jobs is wearing off a bit with these layoffs,” Jeff Shulman, professor at the University of Washington Foster School of Business, wrote in an email. Some industry leaders have characterized the shift as a return to a purer kind of tech enterprise. As Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in an company Q&A quoted in the newsletter Command Line, he doesn’t want to have “managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work.” He wants more people pounding Monster energy drinks and shipping code and fewer of them “checking in” with colleagues and setting up Zoom calls.

However, there’s another interpretation: The industry is just becoming more like the rest of the economy. During the pandemic, tech seemed to inhabit its own reality. While other businesses struggled as global supply chains fragmented and people were trapped at home, the industry boomed. Profits were fat, and companies furiously hired engineers, project managers and software salespeople to try to keep up with demand. Tech CEOs proclaimed the world had entered a new era—not only of remote work, but of tech-centered virtual human interaction.

In the industry, says Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, “historically there have been periodic pendulum swings between ‘all in’ on innovation to ‘all in’ on business fundamentals.” With plans to change the world and easy access to cheap capital, Silicon Valley companies have a reputation for spending big to develop technologies and lock in customers without regard for short-term profits.

The job cuts are a sign that things are now swinging the other way. Growth at tech companies has slowed, and higher interest rates have choked off much of the money that for years fed startups, even as the broader economy continues to expand at a healthy clip. And so Silicon Valley is settling into a pattern familiar in many industries: Companies hire when times are good, let people go when they’re not—and sometimes let people go even when they’re not so bad.

Here are some fun facts with which to woo your date this Valentine’s Day: the event is believed to date back to lusty fertility rituals in ancient Rome; Iran banned any celebration of Valentine’s Day in 2011, lest it spread promiscuous Western behaviour; and it is one of America’s most lucrative festivals. The National Retail Federation (nrf) predicts that the average American will spend $186 on their Valentine this year.

That total will stretch much further in some cities than others. Using data from the latest cost-of-living index by eiu, our sister company, we created our own “cost-of-loving index”. It ranks the world’s most expensive cities in which to go on a romantic night out: we start with drinks at a swanky hotel, followed by a lavish two-course meal and a trip to the cinema, a taxi home and a nice bottle of wine to cap things off.

So add to your list of fun facts that couples in Shanghai spend the most on a date night, according to eiu’s data. Residents there might expect to blow roughly $600 on our fancy evening (or exactly $298 each if they’re going Dutch). In Damascus, the world’s cheapest city, our date would cost less than $8. Paris is the most expensive city in Europe; New York the priciest in North America. At $567, couples in the Big Apple would each have to spend around $100 more than the nrf’s forecast spending in order to enjoy eiu’s basket of items.

These prices have increased over the past five years: the average cost of love in our top 15 cities has gone up by 10% since 2019, with prices in Caracas, Venezuela’s inflation-ridden capital, rising by the most. All these charming facts should see you through any awkward silences on your big date. (The Economist assumes no responsibility for being ditched before dessert.)

Climate change has never been a core issue at a British general election. At the next one it will be. That partly reflects rising salience: since the last ballot in 2019, the environment has risen to become one of voters’ bigger concerns, alongside the economy, the National Health Service and immigration. But there is also an increasingly acrimonious divide between the two big parties over green policy.

Take the Conservatives first. Earlier this month, the government announced that Britain had become the first big economy to cut its territorial greenhouse-gas emissions by half since 1990. That sounds impressive, and it is. But celebrating past success masks the fact that Britain has done well on the easier bits of decarbonisation, such as closing down coal-fired power plants, while failing to develop plans for tackling emissions in tougher areas, like home heating and agriculture.

Last June the Climate Change Committee, a watchdog, said that, for the government to meet its emissions target for 2030, it would need to quadruple the rate of emissions reduction outside the power sector. In fact Britain has gone backwards in some areas. In September Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, criticised his predecessors for imposing unnecessary costs and delayed a target for banning new gas boilers. Electric-vehicle sales have slowed, in part because a ban on the sales of new petrol and diesel cars has been deferred.

Plans to generate clean energy took a knock when the government’s most recent auction round failed to secure any new offshore wind projects. A new nuclear strategy contained a lot of pleasing promises but was overshadowed by news of yet another delay at Hinkley Point C, a nuclear-power station being built in Somerset.

All of which offers plenty of ammunition for other parties to target the Conservatives on the environment. Tory MPs in some southern seats already fret about the threat from the Liberal Democrats, who are stirring up anger about sewage in rivers. But the climate is also an issue where Mr Sunak spies an opportunity to take the fight to Labour, which remains far ahead in the polls. He would like to paint the opposition as green radicals who want to kill the oil-and-gas industry, jack up the cost of driving and rip out your boiler.

Urban agriculture—whether it describes towering, high-tech vertical gardens or a small patch of dirt with a few basil plants—has become increasingly popular around the world as food movements such as eating local produce and growing organic crops have gained momentum. These operations are often viewed as a sustainable, community-focused alternative to big industrial farms. But until recently, few studies actually looked at their environmental impact.

Newell and his team decided it was time to change that. Using data from 73 low-tech city farms, community gardens and personal plots of land, they measured the average carbon emissions from growing a single serving of urban produce (say, one medium potato) against the carbon released by growing the equivalent on a conventional commercial farm. The team found that because of urban gardens’ relatively low yields, along with the energy used in constructing the planting beds, big-city spuds were significantly more carbon-intensive than commercially grown ones. This held true even when the researchers factored in emissions from transporting commercially grown produce to often distant grocery stores.

That doesn’t mean that growing vegetables in big cities is inherently bad, however. “Urban farming is great,” if imperfect, says Carola Grebitus, a sociologist specializing in food choice at Arizona State University. It can be a powerful tool for education and job creation, she says, and a good way to introduce fresh produce to urban “food deserts” where healthy fruits and vegetables are hard to come by. Community gardens can also provide a psychologically beneficial place to connect with nature, and the added green space can help mitigate dangerous heat and flooding.

Conscious of these benefits, Newell’s team highlighted a number of ways to make urban agriculture more sustainable from a climate perspective. One option is to be selective about what crops are grown. Tomatoes grown in the city, for instance, have a carbon footprint equal to or lower than their industrially farmed counterparts. That’s because most commercially produced tomatoes start life in the greenhouse—a resource- and energy-intensive farming method. And a few other highly perishable crops that need to be refrigerated right away, such as asparagus and herbs, have about the same carbon footprint whether they’re grown in urban or industrial farm settings.

Another strategy is to rely on existing infrastructure as much as possible. Nearly two thirds of the carbon emissions from urban agriculture came from operations related to infrastructure, including the demolition and remodeling of old buildings rather than the incorporation of these structures into a new garden’s design. The equipment needed to demolish an old building, not to mention a building’s original construction, can emit a lot of carbon. Finally, Newell says, any urban farm should take the local climate, water quality and soil into account. Growing plants that are ill-suited to an area requires more water, energy and pesticides, all of which take an environmental toll.

As the year turns, the next general election looms ever larger. One thing can, however, be said about the election already. Whenever it finally comes and whatever the result, the turnover of MPs in the House of Commons looks likely to be unusually large. At least 83 MPs have announced that they will be retiring. More are certain to follow. Others will lose their seats. If the swing between the parties is dramatic, the turnover may approach the level reached in 1997, when 249 retired or defeated MPs did not return to Westminster, and a similar number of new MPs arrived.

The origins of the standards problem go back a long time. The impact of the MPs’ expenses scandal, for instance, is still being felt 14 years on. The question in 2024 will be whether the next generation of leaders and MPs will actually look, sound and behave differently, and whether trust in politics can be rebuilt more enduringly if they do. We must fervently hope so. But it will not happen merely by electing a Labour government and a new generation of professional politicians.

What can be done to improve our politics, our standards in public life, our democracy and our trust in government? There is no single answer. Some things that need to change are structural. Reforming the electoral system is definitely one of them. But countries with fairer electoral systems than Britain’s first past the post have political scandals too. Parliaments with fewer antique conventions than Westminster are not automatically temples of rationality either. These are not reasons for keeping the current systems, but they are reasons for not having exaggerated expectations.

Changing the culture and behaviour of politics matters at least as much. Too often we have the wrong sort of MPs with the wrong values. Each scandal damages the whole. The wide-ranging nature of the political trust problem is widely sensed. Many books have been written on the subject. The 2023 Reith lectures by Prof Ben Ansell have touched on the problem. Academic and thinktank surveys abound, including key work by University College London’s Constitution Unit.

But the trust problem has been inadequately addressed by politics itself. Politicians themselves are often keenly aware of this. At the end of 2023, Britain was a country in which only 9% of the people said that they “generally” trusted political leaders. This is the lowest figure since records began 40 years ago. A “lack of faith” in politics and politicians is now seen by voters as one of the top five problems facing the country.

Artificial intelligence could enable millions of workers to move to a four-day week by 2033, according to a new study focusing on British and American workforces. The report from the thinktank Autonomy found that projected productivity gains from the introduction of AI could reduce the working week from 40 to 32 hours for 28% of the workforce – 8.8 million people in Britain and 35 million in the US – while maintaining pay and performance.

The study says this could be achieved by bringing large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, into workplaces to augment workers’ roles and create more free time. According to Autonomy, such a policy could also help to avoid mass unemployment and reduce widespread mental and physical illnesses.

Will Stronge, the director of research at Autonomy, said: “Too many studies of AI, large language models, and so on, solely focus on either profitability or a jobs apocalypse. This study tries to show that when the technology is deployed to its full potential, but the purpose of the technology is shifted, it can not only improve work practices, but also improve work-life balance.”

The research found that 28 million workers, or 88% of Great Britain’s workforce, could have their working hours reduced by at least 10% through the introduction of LLMs. The local authorities of City of London, Elmbridge and Wokingham are among those that, according to the thinktank, hold the highest potential for workers, with 38% or more of the workforce able to reduce their hours in the coming decade.

Congressman Mark Takano, who has introduced a 32-hour work week bill to the US Congress, said: “Fundamental changes are coming to our workforce due to AI and automation. It will take government action to ensure gains in efficiency are felt by all workers, regardless of industry or skill level.”