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What a difference a year makes.

Last October, luxury retailer Neiman Marcus unveiled its 2019 Christmas Book, a curated selection of almost 800 holiday gifts. Among these were its legendary Fantasy Gifts, a franchise whose 60th anniversary was celebrated at an event at the retailer’s then-new store at New York City’s Hudson Yards, with presents such as a 007 Aston Martin designed by Daniel Craig on display.

Fast forward to today: The U.S. economy has been crippled by the Covid-19 pandemic, its society riven by political and social strife, and Neiman Marcus has filed for Chapter 11, reorganized and emerged from bankruptcy. The process included closing its Hudson Yards store, among others, as well as 17 of its 22 Last Call stores; its two Bergdorf Goodman stores remain open.

It is against this backdrop—and daunting challenges facing all brick-and-mortar retailers across the country—that Neiman Marcus is unveiling its 2020 holiday campaign.

Not surprisingly, it is a continuation of its digital transformation strategy, underway before the pandemic. Featuring the theme “Make It Magic,” the campaign, which launches today, will be promoted on the retailer’s website, Hulu (a new partner) and YouTube, as well as social media and email.

A new spot, created in-house in 30- and 60-second versions, features five adults, a young girl and a dog cavorting in a contemporary home decorated with a large white Christmas tree and lights. They pass among themselves a small, rectangular white box, tied with a red ribbon, illuminated from within and trailing a stream of small, sparkling, white CGI stars. At the end of the spot, one of the men gives the box to one of the women; she appears overjoyed when she opens it and the two kiss.

“Neiman Marcus: Make it magic,” the ad says. “There’s magic in coming home, where memories (and mischief) are made. There’s magic in being together. There’s magic in giving … delighting everyone on your list. There’s magic in you.”

Darren “Daz” McColl, who was named Neiman Marcus’ interim chief marketing officer in January and was given the post permanently last week, said the campaign is “about intimacy, connection with family, bringing back traditions, bringing the magic to Christmas.” He said the retailer hopes to inspire people and enable them to “connect with the thoughtfulness of giving, the joy of spreading joy. These are moments we believe are really important.”

The retailer is also creating 10 different virtual holiday stories—the first being the spot launching today—which will be released through the end of 2020. It also will create some 55 additional pieces of content, such as editorial and gift advisor emails, to illustrate each story.

In addition to the digital campaign, each Neiman Marcus store will have a gift lounge where sales associates will show customers a curated selection of merchandise. The stores’ window displays also will illustrate the “Make It Magic” theme.

The retailer said it would offer some 3,000 holiday gifts. McColl said the gifts are “based on customer needs today, which have changed in the last 12 months.” Because of the pandemic, he said there is greater demand for leisurewear, shoes and handbags, and more shopping by men.

“Trends are not as predictable by season; they are way more fluid,” he added.

The campaign, McColl said, “is built around our customer, and recognizes a desire to come together this year, in whatever form it takes to connect, to enjoy traditions new and old in a magical way. The stories we tell throughout the season were developed to inspire, celebrate and bring the magic of Neiman Marcus to our customers, however they shop with us this season.”

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One theory is that water hitched a ride to the moon as protons in the solar wind. When these protons interacted with the oxygen-rich lunar regolith, they formed hydroxyl, which is just water that’s missing one of its hydrogen atoms. Data from several spacecraft have shown that hydroxyl is all over the lunar surface, but they weren’t equipped with the types of instruments that are needed to tell the difference between hydroxyl and water. “We didn’t plan to look for it, so there wasn’t wasn’t really an instrument designed to look for bound water on the moon,” says Matt Siegler, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute, who wasn’t involved with the research. “It’s one thing to see hydroxyl, but actual water molecules is another thing altogether.”

But where there’s a lot of hydrogen and oxygen, there’s a good chance that there might be water, too. All that’s needed to turn it into water is energy. When a meteorite strikes the moon, the intense heat causes hydroxyl molecules to combine into water. It also melts the regolith, turning it into glass that traps the water molecules. Or, another theory suggests that the water may already be present on the meteorite and get trapped in the newly-formed glass during the impact.

No lunar orbiters have had the equipment needed to tell the difference between hydroxyl and water, but NASA’s Sofia observatory has instruments that were able to observe in just the right part of the electromagnetic spectrum to detect traces of water. “Earth’s atmosphere has a lot of water vapor, so we needed to get above as much of the atmosphere as we possibly could to gather some signal,” said Honniball. “It turned out that the only instrument currently operating that can make this sort of measurement was the Sofia airplane.”

Honniball’s discovery is good news for NASA, which wants to harvest the constituent elements of water—oxygen and hydrogen—for useful things on the moon like breathable air or rocket fuel. While this could also be accomplished with hydroxyl, it’s harder to extract it from lunar regolith because of its tight bond with the grains. And even though the water is there, it’s unclear if there’s enough of it to be useful. “When we look at the amount of water, it’s kind of low,” Honniball said. Her data shows it to be present at 100 to 400 parts per million in the regolith. “We would want more to use it for a mission,” she said. “So what we really want to know is: Are there locations that have more water?”

But even if there’s not enough molecular water on the surface to be useful to future astronauts, a second paper published today suggests that there may be far more water ice locked up in shadowy pockets on the lunar surface than previously thought. In 2018, data from India’s Chandrayaan lunar orbiter confirmed the existence of water ice in large shadow-covered craters at the moon’s south pole. Now, a team of researchers led by Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, has found that there are likely a lot of smaller cold traps all over the surface that would be much easier for robots and crew to access than the cratered regions at the pole.

Using a computer model built from data supplied by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the team discovered that there are probably tens of billions of “micro cold traps” on the moon. These are permanent shadows created by tiny craters and surface variations that might only be a few centimeters across, but nevertheless keep the temperatures low enough to capture ice. Their models suggest that they would approximately double the total area where frozen water could exist on the moon. “We found that the number of cold traps at the scales we can’t see actually dominate on the moon by a lot,” says Hayne. “They are so abundant that if you were just standing on the surface looking down you would see hundreds of these quarter-sized cold traps just in the few meters around you.”

If you ever want to remove the demographic information you’ve shared with LinkedIn, our guide will show you how this is done.

Note: These screenshots were captured in the LinkedIn application on iOS.

Step 1: Tap your profile picture in the top-left corner of the screen.

Step 2: Tap “Settings.”

Step 3: Tap “Data privacy.”

Step 4: Tap “Personal demographic information.”

Step 5: Tap “remove” near the top of the screen.

Step 6: Tap “Remove” on the confirmation window that appears.

Midway through his 30s, Tom Ainsworth realized he was going to die. Of course, he always knew. Death comes for all of us—those are the rules. But when his own father passed away, in 2011, and then his best friend a few years later, it suddenly hit him over the head like a cartoon anvil. One day he, too, would leave everything he loved behind. Not right away. Or, maybe right away. Who could know? He had to start preparing.

In 2014, Ainsworth created a memorial page for his dad on Skymorials, a sort of digital cemetery. “I was one of the first users ever,” Ainsworth says. Now, he’s the CEO. The company, based in Melbourne, has since rebranded as Memories; its users come there to mourn loved ones on digital memorial pages and offer condolences with things like virtual flowers. (Ainsworth wasn’t sure people would pay money for that, until he saw his kids spending egregiously on new Fortnite skins.) Memories also hosts digital “vaults” for living people to store things like precious photos, videos, and life stories, which can be shared after their passing. Kind of like Dropbox, but for the dead.

Ainsworth loves his job. Death, it seems, gives him life. He spends a lot of time thinking about how to help people grieve, and about his own legacy—he journals religiously, so he can pass down his life story to his kids when he’s gone. That got him thinking. Maybe there was a way for Memories to preserve peoples’ legacies more dimensionally. It could let people speak to their descendants directly, for years to come, maybe even generations into the future. The concept became Future Messages, Memories’ latest feature. It lets people record video messages, while they are alive, to be dispatched to loved ones after their death. Since developing Future Messages, Ainsworth regularly sends little recordings to his wife—mostly to test that the feature works, but also, you never know.

Grief is intractable, and egged on by wishful thinking. If only Dad could be here to walk me down the aisle. I wish our last conversation hadn’t been so dull. What I wouldn’t give to hear “I love you” one more time. Future Memories aims to quell some of that, by encouraging the living to imagine how they will be grieved, and then inviting them to show up after they’re dead. In a commercial for Future Messages, a boy mourns his grandpa, occasionally sending him updates on his life in a one-way text thread. Then one day, years later, Grandpa messages back. “If you’re watching this, Maxie, it’s your 18th birthday,” Grandpa says in a video recording. “I’m really proud of the fine young man you’re becoming. I’ll always be with you, mate.” The effect is heart-wrenching.

Though death is hard to control, people like Ainsworth are determined to create a future where you at least have some say in what comes next. In that vision, he is not alone. Scads of startups have emerged to sell better death preparation, to people who are still alive. Some are as simple as modernizing the process of drafting a will (like Willing—TurboTax for estate planning). Others aim to give people more control over their end-of-life wishes (like Cake, where people can document requests for viking funerals, or preemptively draft their final tweets). The classic burial options have been upgraded by startups like Bio Urn (turn your ashes into a tree), Eternal Reefs (lay to rest on the ocean floor), Algordanza (from corpse to wearable diamonds), and Recompose (human composting).

Katz joins us this week to talk about how election coverage will look different this year, and why we might very well be looking at extended coverage well after Election Day.

You can listen and subscribe to Yeah, That’s Probably an Ad on Apple Podcasts, check it out on Spotify or stream the full episode below.

It’s impossible to talk about Boston Dynamics robots without acknowledging two things: They’re a marvel of modern engineering, and their agility can be incredibly unnerving. A 46-second video of Spot the robot “dog” opening a door has more than 56 million views on YouTube. Atlas, the company’s headless humanoid robot, can go for a jog or do parkour. And just last week, the company released new footage of Spot the robot recharging on its own. (If it sounds like a Black Mirror episode, well, that’s because it sort of is.)

But even as many observers joke about a robot apocalypse—or the perhaps more realistic possibility that robots will simply take humans’ jobs—Boston Dynamics insists these machines still have a long way to go. That’s one of the things Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics, focused on in his conversation with WIRED’s Matt Simon on this week’s Get WIRED podcast.

“There’s a lot of mobility, dexterity, real-time perception of the world around us. [The robots] are good. They’re getting better all the time. But there’s a lot more we need to do,” Raibert says. That includes redesigning the environments around the robots, like warehouses, to create different lanes for humans and robots so they can work together; as he puts it, “to make the robot do all the things that are in a problem, but also adjust the problem to make it more doable.” Boston Dynamics has also been designing different attachments for its robots, like the new manipulator arm it’s now selling for Spot the robot. “Having manipulators that have a mobile base like Spot under it is really a game changer,” Raibert says.

And when it comes to robots taking our jobs, Boston Dynamics tends to position these machines as a form of augmentation to human labor, capable of helping us out with tasks that may be too dangerous for humans alone to attempt. It’s a rosy view of the human-robot relationship, but there are at least a few proofs of concept for it already: Raibert reveals in the podcast that Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been using Spot robots in the leadup to rocket launches. “The cool thing, of course, about robots, is they can do this in places where people can’t go.”

The network invited some 500 fans, influencers, celebrities and press to view the episode, titled Full Circle, at the Lovecraft Country Drive-In, held Oct. 15 at the Paramount Drive-In Theatres in Los Angeles. The experience followed smaller viewing events for Episodes 1, 6 and 8 at drive-in theaters in Washington, D.C., Chicago and Newark, New Jersey.

HBO tapped one of its go-to experiential partners, Giant Spoon—the agency responsible for elaborate activations for Game of Thrones and Westworld—to create an experience designed to immerse guests in Lovecraft Country’s eerie, mysterious 1950s setting. But there was one obvious caveat: Due to the pandemic, the teams had to determine how to best build a world that guests could only experience from the safety of their vehicles, and seamlessly fit design elements into a contactless environment.

Giant Spoon co-founder Trevor Guthrie said the agency actually pitched the spooky drive-in concept in 2019 because it aligned with the series’ 1950s road trip story. This meant the design and live entertainment elements didn’t require a major pivot, but the challenge was figuring out how to deliver the experience with restrictions to attendees in a way that was still entertaining and interactive.

“The original idea for the drive-in was going to be built around the question: Will you be able to drive out of it? It made sense for the show and we thought it would be the right vessel to transport audiences to Lovecraft Country,” Guthrie said. “Because of Covid-19, we had to think through other ways to continue building on the original concept, but bring more of the world into people’s cars so they could actually experience it.”

To do this, Giant Spoon ensured the journey for fans began outside of the venue. The agency erected 1950s-style faux billboards promoting fake businesses such as Folk soda and the Lovecraft Tourism Bureau. The teams also created a fictional Lovecraft Country Safety Commission OOH campaign, which informed guests to remain in their vehicles and wear their masks.

Audio had a major role in immersing guests into the show’s narrative. Guthrie said the agency created more than 160 hours of faux radio programming for the Lovecraft Country FM frequency, a real radio station that guests could access in their cars. The station broadcast fake ads inspired by the 1950s, songs from the decade and a live set by DJ Moonlight.

Guthrie said the radio station was designed to “set the scene of the world we created.”

After checking into the venue, staff directed guests to stop at an “abandoned” concession kiosk where they could grab bottles of Folk (which was actually black cherry soda) and lunch boxes filled with treats and show-themed swag.

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This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The calm waters of Gippsland Lakes near Melbourne, Australia, are broken by a fin, then the quiet afternoon is pierced by a high-pitched whistle. A Burrunan dolphin has breached the surface before diving down and emitting the sound, which, ordinarily, would be received only by other aquatic animals. This time, however, the dolphin’s signal is picked up by a team of scientists, for whom the coronavirus pandemic has had a silver-dorsal lining.

In the past, their recordings of dolphin communication have been occluded by the whirs, clunks, and splashes from boat traffic in this lake system, which is just a few hours by car from a city of five million people. But lately, both above and beneath the water, there has been uncommon silence.

With Melbourne still working its way out of a long, strict lockdown, human activity has plummeted in this cluster of pristine lakes, lagoons, and estuaries, which stretches along the Victorian coast for more than 40 miles, partially separated from the Tasman Sea by sand dunes.

The reduction in noise has gifted Marine Mammal Foundation (MMF) scientists rare underwater quiet, and an unusual opportunity to effectively record and interpret the language of endangered Burrunan dolphins for the first time. The founding director of this Australian nonprofit, Kate Robb, was responsible for the classification of the Burrunan as a unique species of bottlenose in 2011. (A recent paper has disputed that the Burrunan is a distinct species, though Robb says it is “very widely accepted” as its own species among her peers.)

Before then, there were only two known species of bottlenose in the world—the common bottlenose and the smaller, lighter-colored Indo-Pacific bottlenose. Robb analyzed genetic samples of some of the 185 Burrunan dolphins in Gippsland Lakes and Port Phillip Bay, which flanks Melbourne, and found they match neither of those two identified species.

MMF scientists have studying the Burrunans for more than a decade, but the pandemic quiet has only just made it possible, via 3,000 hours of clear recordings of the animal’s noises, to begin to understand what the aquatic mammals have been saying. Robb says the recordings reveal each Burrunan has a “signature whistle”—a unique greeting to other dolphins, akin to them saying their own names. The recordings are also starting to uncover complex relationships between members of the pod, some of whom had been close friends for up to 14 years.

Decoding animal communication has long fascinated humans and dolphins, as one of the world’s most intelligent creatures, have been the focus of many such studies. A central goal of this work has long been to finally identify the outlines and complexity of dolphin communication—and determine whether it is a language humans can understand.

Communication and language are, of course, two very different things. The former broadly refers to the transmission of information, which can be as simple as an animal baring its teeth to convey aggression. Language, by comparison, is communication using complex systems of symbols, words, or other signals.

For decades, scientists have known dolphins emit sounds in sophisticated patterns. They release high-pitched whistles to message other dolphins, make burst-pulse signals when socializing, and release clicking noises for echolocation.

According to Laela Sayigh, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who is not involved in the Burrunan research, identifying which dolphin in a pod is vocalizing at a particular time is key to deciphering their communication systems. “Without knowing who is the sender or intended receiver, it is very difficult to interpret their communication signals at a fine-grained level,” she says. “There are also challenges in classification of their sound types, as there is no system shared by all researchers. We know a lot about individually specific signature whistles of dolphins, thanks to a long-term research program in Sarasota, Florida. But we know very little about most of their other signals.”

Augustine points out—and this seems especially relevant to your dilemma—that the most insidious temptations are those that we cannot completely banish from our lives. We need food, of course, for our health and survival. But there is a fine line between nourishment and gluttony, and our weaker nature can exploit this ambiguity. In the face of these uncertain cases, “the wretched soul cheers up and marshals excuses in its own defense,” he writes. The internet is yet another gray zone where virtue bleeds seamlessly into vice. We need it to do our work, perform our duties, and stay informed, and it is all too easy to rationalize our addictive impulses with these more noble motivations.

But to return to the main question: What, ultimately, is the point of such struggles? For Augustine and Paul, temptation belonged to the moral drama of the Christian life; their trials were opportunities to grow closer to God and reap rewards in the afterlife. For those of us, on the other hand, who are simply trying to do our jobs and get through the day, self-opposition seems entirely worthless. It’s even hard to understand, from our modern point of view, what it means to have conflicting desires.For those of us who are strict materialists, it makes little sense to speak in dualistic terms—and yet, in daily life, it often feels as though the body escapes the control of the mind, that the flesh is at war with the spirit.

Contemporary philosophers tend to account for warring impulses in terms of first- and second-order desires. First-order desires are motivated by impulse, appetite, and instinct, whereas second-order desires involve something quite different: the desire to want to desire something different, or to be rid of a given desire. As the philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues, second-order desires are a uniquely human phenomenon. Other animals are moved by instinct and impulse, but they do not reflect on their desires or wish they could change them. (Nor, I might add, do machines. The app that is designed to stop you from accessing Twitter might be said to have certain “goals” or “objectives,” but it does not trouble itself with whether these are worthwhile. It does what it’s programmed to do.)

One might conclude, with this in mind, that we are at our most human when we struggle against ourselves. Perhaps battles of the will do have intrinsic value, in that they are the fullest expression of our essential nature. They belong to a distinctly human song, echoing down through the ages, a chorus that includes Paul and Augustine and all the other divided souls who have lamented their self-alienation. One might further conclude that our very capacity to form higher-order desires means we have the ability to control our destiny, that we can perfect ourselves through discipline. But I would actually caution against this second conclusion.

Much of Augustine’s writing was intended to dramatize the futility of perfecting the will. He was writing during a time when Christianity was divided over what is now called the “Pelagian controversy,” named after a sect who believed in the unqualified power of the will and taught that it was possible to live a morally blameless life. According to the Pelagians, if you found yourself struggling with temptation, you needed to toughen up, draw on your inner resources, and try harder. It is a recognizable impulse, and indeed, many Pelagian-like doctrines still abound today—in corporate self-help books that warn against “limiting beliefs,” for example, or the resurgent Stoicism that has driven Silicon Valley CEOs to submit themselves to ice baths, silent retreats, and weeklong fasts to prove their inner fortitude.

Augustine did not believe such perfection was within humanity’s power. He is, after all, the theologian who solidified the doctrine of Original Sin, the notion that humans cannot, despite their best efforts, attain the self-mastery they desire. Contra the Pelagians, he insisted that humans were completely dependent upon God to remove the feeling of temptation. It was only through the free gift of divine grace that we could obtain the strength to overcome such vices, which required not the exercise of the will, but the willingness to surrender it.

Black people in the US suffer more from chronic diseases and receive inferior health care relative to white people. Racially skewed math can make the problem worse.

Doctors often make life-changing decisions about patient care based on algorithms that interpret test results or weight risks, like whether to perform a particular procedure. Some of those formulas factor in a person’s race, meaning patients’ skin color can affect access to care.

A new study of patients in the Boston area is one of the first to document the harm that can cause. It examined the effect on care of a widely used but controversial formula for estimating kidney function that by design assigns Black people healthier scores.

The study analyzed health records for 57,000 people with chronic kidney disease from the Mass General Brigham health system that includes Harvard teaching hospitals Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s. One third of Black patients, more than 700 people, would have been placed into a more severe category of kidney disease if their kidney function had been estimated using the same formula as for white patients.

That could have affected decisions such as when to refer someone to a kidney specialist, or refer them for a kidney transplant. In 64 cases, patients’ recalculated scores would have qualified them for a kidney transplant wait list. None had been referred or evaluated for transplant, suggesting doctors did not question the race-based recommendations.

“That was really staggering,” says Mallika Mendu, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and kidney specialist at Brigham and Women’s whose work on the study convinced her to stop using the race-based calculation with her own patients. “We know there are already other disparities in access to care and management of the condition. This is not helping.”

The study is the most recent of several signs that math tools exacerbate health inequalities. Last year, software used by many health systems to prioritize access to special care for chronic conditions was found to systematically privilege white patients over Black patients. It didn’t explicitly take account of race, but replicated patterns in access to health care caused by factors like poverty.

The kidney algorithm, by contrast, is one of many clinical decision algorithms that explicitly take account of race. A recent review listed more than a dozen such tools, in areas including cancer and lung care. In August, a group of Black retired NFL players sued the league, claiming it used an algorithm that assumes white people have higher cognitive function to decide compensation for brain injuries.

The issue is winning more attention, including from federal lawmakers. Representative Richard Neal (D-Massachusetts), chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, says the kidney study underlines the need to reconsider use of race in all medical algorithms. “Many clinical algorithms can result in delayed or inaccurate diagnoses for Black and Latinx patients, leading to lower quality care and worse health outcomes,” he says.

Neal has asked medical societies and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to investigate the impact on patients of clinical algorithms that use race. Last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and others asked the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate race-based medical algorithms.

The new study examined a standard calculation called CKD-EPI used to convert a blood test for a person’s level of the waste product creatinine into a measure of kidney function called estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR. Lower scores indicate worse kidney function; the score are used to categorize the severity of a person’s disease and guide what care they receive. The equation factors in a person’s age and sex. Black patients get their score boosted by an additional 15.9 percent.

That design is coming under fire from academics and medical residents who fear it bakes discrimination into kidney care. Researchers who created the formula in 2009 added the “race correction” to smooth out statistical differences between the small number of Black patients and others in their data. But that project and subsequent studies have not explained why the correlation between creatinine and kidney function looked different in Black patients, or the role of factors proven to affect creatinine levels such as diet, says Nwamaka Eneanya, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who also worked on the new Boston study. A person’s race is a social category, not a physiological one, she says, and it doesn’t make sense to use it to interpret blood tests.