Author: Elon Mark

After the men who will select the next pope were locked inside the Sistine Chapel without cellphones on Wednesday, the only thing left to do was wait for them to send a signal to the outside world. By smoke.The highly secret voting began inside what is possibly one of the world’s most secure vaults in the early evening, with the 133 cardinals tasked with deciding who will succeed Pope Francis writing candidates’ names on voting cards by hand, trying to disguise their handwriting.Outside in St. Peter’s Square, thousands of the faithful, the curious and the vacationing gathered to await the…

From citizens of ancient civilizations rubbing clay powder into their hair to the first commercially available dry shampoo hitting the market in the 1940s, people have spent their entire lives trying to bridge the gap between dirty hair and busy lifestyles. I remember vividly my mom using baby powder in the 1980s, as well as my first purchase of drugstore dry shampoo in the early 2000s. It went on like spray paint and probably contained enough chemicals to poison a small animal, but it did the job of letting me skip a couple days of my arduous wash, dry, and…

Friedrich Merz’s party won Germany’s national election in late February. After weeks of coalition negotiations, Mr. Merz finally made it to the chancellor’s office late Tuesday afternoon, one failed parliamentary vote and several hours behind schedule.In the interim, nearly all of Mr. Merz’s problems got worse.Forecasts for the stalled German economy, which Mr. Merz has promised to jump-start, have sagged under the weight of President Trump’s tariffs and trade war. Relations with Mr. Trump’s administration continue to fray.The far-right political party that many of Mr. Trump’s team seem to favor, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has pulled even with…

Data analysis is a cornerstone of effective business leadership. But it’s also a process prone to missteps. In the rush to make decisions, leaders may jump to conclusions before fully understanding what the data says. “Our brains are programmed to take shortcuts to accelerate decision-making,” says Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson, faculty chair of the Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program, who teaches the online course Dynamic Teaming. “While we might be aware that jumping to conclusions is not the best way to make a decision, telling people not to do so is unhelpful. Jumping…

The communication app TeleMessage Signal, used by at least one top Trump administration official to archive messages, has already reportedly suffered breaches that illustrate concerning security flaws and resulted in its parent company imposing a service pause this week pending investigation. Now, according to detailed new findings from the journalist and security researcher Micah Lee, TM Signal’s archiving feature appears to fundamentally undermine Signal’s flagship security guarantees, sending messages between the app and a user’s message archive without end-to-end encryption, thus making users’ communications accessible to TeleMessage.Lee conducted a detailed analysis of TM Signal’s Android source code to assess the…

In recent years, an office within the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem had a direct line of communication with Washington. That was meant to signal that the United States saw Palestinian issues as important, and considered the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip to be separate from Israel.Now, the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has decided to shut down this direct channel, according to U.S. officials who spoke condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The decision will effectively end the special status of the Office of Palestinian Affairs at the embassy, which had been sending cables to…

Jessica Frick wants to build furnaces in space. Her company, California-based Astral Materials, is designing machines that can grow valuable materials in orbit that could be used in medicine, semiconductors, and more. Or, as she puts it, “We’re building a box that makes money in space.”Scientists have long suggested that the microgravity environment of Earth’s orbit could enable the production of higher-quality products than it is possible to make on Earth. Astronauts experimented with crystals—a crucial component of electronic circuitry—as early as 1973, on NASA’s Skylab space station. But progress was slow. For decades, in-space manufacturing has been experimental rather…

Follow live updates on Merz’s bid to become Germany’s next leader.Exactly six months after Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition imploded, Friedrich Merz, a conservative Christian Democrat, was expected to become Germany’s next chancellor. He had been expected to be sworn in on Tuesday, but in a sign of the challenges he faces, Mr. Merz fell six votes short in the lower house of parliament. He now faces a second round of voting and is expected to eventually prevail.Mr. Merz was set to be named as chancellor after less than two months of negotiation between his Christian Democratic Union, which came in…

The newly proposed structure keeps the nonprofit in control, though Monday’s blog post didn’t go into detail about what exactly that will look like. The company specified that its current for-profit subsidiary will become a public benefit corporation (PBC), which is how its competitors Anthropic and xAI are set up. PBCs are legally allowed to prioritize both shareholder and societal interests.“The nonprofit will control and also be a large shareholder of the PBC, giving the nonprofit better resources to support many benefits,” OpenAI’s blog post said. “Our mission remains the same, and the PBC will have the same mission.”Delaware attorney…

Eighteen states sued the Trump administration Monday over its halting of permits for wind-energy projects, arguing that its actions posed an existential threat to the burgeoning industry.“This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” said Attorney General Letitia James of New York, which is one of the plaintiffs. She said the halt threatened “the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and billions in investments” and was “delaying our transition away from the fossil fuels that harm our health and our planet.”The halt on federal permits for wind energy was first laid out…