These shoes were called “crakows” or “poulaines” (a term also used to refer to the tips alone), and the court of King Edward IV eventually found them offensive enough to pass a sumptuary law prohibiting shoe tips that extended over two inches beyond the toe. Shawcross also serves as the shoe resources officer at Northampton Museum and Art Gallery in England, which claims to have the world’s largest collection of shoes (at 12,000 pairs, but alas, just one intact pair of poulaines). Though far less extreme than the most dramatic poulaines, winklepicker wearers also stuffed the toes of their shoes with cotton or tissue paper to keep their tips aloft—like medieval lords.

Marc Bekoff, a researcher at the University of Colorado and a lifelong student of animal behavior, argues that play broadens an animal’s behavioral repertoire, giving them the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. In other words, animal play creates diverse behaviors, regardless of whether that diversity is immediately useful. One hallmark of play is that it suspends judgment so that we are no longer focused on selecting good ideas and discarding bad ones.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and deployment of Zanzibar, a global system for storing and evaluating access control lists. Its authorization decisions respect causal ordering of user actions and thus provide external consistency amid changes to access control lists and object contents. Zanzibar scales to trillions of access control lists and millions of authorization requests per second to support services used by billions of people.

Marc Bekoff, a researcher at the University of Colorado and a lifelong student of animal behavior, argues that play broadens an animal’s behavioral repertoire, giving them the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. In other words, animal play creates diverse behaviors, regardless of whether that diversity is immediately useful. One hallmark of play is that it suspends judgment so that we are no longer focused on selecting good ideas and discarding bad ones.

From here, in a feat of electrical wiring, several radio stations (four of which are run by Lucke) are connected to the 5,000-volt radio tower behind the dungeon, and pushed out into the sky. As advertisers flock to larger stations, small independent radio operators like KHIL end up with fewer listeners, fewer sponsors, and far less revenue to get by. When Lucke began working at the station in 2003, KHIL and its sister station KWCX (then the only FM station in Willcox) were owned by Lakeshore Media, a national conglomerate.

To get this far, Wojcicki weathered an annus horribilis that threatened to end it all—her separation from Brin in 2013 came at the same time the Food Drug Administration forced 23andMe to immediately cease health-test sales—and has faced skeptics who viewed her company as little more than a parlor trick. Wojcicki wants to leverage the exponentially plunging costs of genetic sequencing (down 99% in a decade) and 23andMe’s massive DNA library (the world’s largest genetic research database) to fuel a “biotech machine” that will not just indicate genetic predispositions to certain diseases but also help create the drugs that will treat those diseases. So, in July of last year, Wojcicki inked a deal with U.K.-based giant GSK (formerly called GlaxoSmithKline; 2018 sales: $31 billion), which invested $300 million in 23andMe and signed a four-year exclusive partnership to identify new drug targets.

The human body is a complex mosaic made up of clusters of cells with different genomes — and many of these clusters bear mutations that could contribute to cancer, according to a sweeping survey of 29 different types of tissue. Tissue mosaics arise as cells accumulate mutations — from DNA errors that creep in during cell division, or because of exposure to environmental factors such as ultraviolet light or cigarette smoke. But he says that his team was initially surprised to find that some of the mutations in their results — which are associated with cancer, and so could have indicated the presence of a tumour — were from a group of normal blood cells.

China’s WeChat is a site for social interaction, a form of currency, a dating app, a tool for sporting teams and deliverer of news: Twitter, Facebook, Googlemaps, Tinder and Apple Pay all rolled into one. This moment in history has been all but erased from public discourse on mainland China but in Hong Kong, with its special status in the Chinese-speaking world, people turn out every year to remember the bloody crackdown. Then, when I tried to log back in, a new message appeared: “This WeChat account has been suspected of spreading malicious rumours and has been temporarily blocked…”
It seems posting photos of an actual event taking place, without commentary, amounts to “spreading malicious rumours” in China.

Now, a sweeping survey of these interactions suggests that gut bacteria can modify many drugs and that the genetic makeup of a patient’s microbiota may predict that person’s response to medications, researchers report online June 3 in Nature. Researchers tested the ability of 76 types of bacteria — selected to represent the microbial diversity of the human gut — to alter the molecular structure of 271 oral drugs, from hormones to antiviral medications. Such insight may help clinicians choose medications, or decide whether to prescribe a treatment to make a person’s gut bacteria more amenable to a certain drug.

That same month, the California State Assembly passed a less comprehensive bill that would simply ban law enforcement use of realtime body camera facial recognition technology. Here are the bill’s chief justifications for the ban:
The use of facial recognition and other biometric surveillance is the functional equivalent of requiring every person to show a personal photo identification card at all times in violation of recognized constitutional rights. Facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technology has been repeatedly demonstrated to misidentify women, young people, and people of color and to create an elevated risk of harmful “false positive” identifications.