A majority of Britons may now consider themselves neurodivergent, with conditions such as autism, dyslexia or ADHD, according to a leading psychologist from King’s College London. Professor Francesca Happe, an expert in cognitive neuroscience, said reduced stigma around these conditions has prompted more people to seek medical diagnoses or self-diagnose.

“Once you take autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and all the other ways that you can developmentally be different from the typical, you actually don’t get many typical people left,” Happe told BBC Radio 4.

Autism diagnoses increased 787% between 1998 and 2018 in the UK, with estimated prevalence rising from one in 2,500 children 80 years ago to one in 36 today. Happe, who was appointed CBE in 2021 for her autism research, warned that behaviors previously considered “a bit of eccentricity” are now being labeled with medical terms.

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The National Hurricane Center’s forecasts in 2024 were its most accurate on record, from its one-day forecasts, as tropical cyclones neared the coast, to its forecasts five days into the future, when storms were only beginning to come together.

Thanks to federally funded research, forecasts of tropical cyclone tracks today are up to 75 percent more accurate than they were in 1990. A National Hurricane Center forecast three days out today is about as accurate as a one-day forecast in 2002, giving people in the storm’s path more time to prepare and reducing the size of evacuations.

Accuracy will be crucial again in 2025, as meteorologists predict another active Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30.

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The old turn-it-off-and-on-again adage has helped successfully troubleshoot computers for years, but there’s more than one way to restart your hardware and software—including a lesser known option on Windows that may well be new to you.

Having spent many years writing about tech, it isn’t often that I come across something I didn’t already know about. So when I stumbled across this old BetaNews article about an emergency restart feature in Windows, I was taken aback.

It showed a screen and a keystroke combination I had genuinely never heard of before. A bit more digging revealed that this has been in Windows for decades, making it even stranger that I’d never come across it.

Official information on this emergency restart in Windows seems to be thin on the ground, or has perhaps been lost to time. Essentially though, it seems to replicate what a long press on your PC’s power button would do: A quick, no-questions-asked reboot of your computer, with the minimum of fuss.

The Windows enthusiasts over on Reddit have spotted this feature before, and there appear to be plenty of people on the boards who hadn’t come across it until their attention was drawn towards it. If you dig into those threads you’ll find some technical information on what exactly is going on behind the scenes, and the different calls that the feature might be making.

It’s worth emphasizing that this is very much a last resort option, as indeed the feature itself will tell you. You’re not going to get a chance to save anything you’re working on, as is the case if you force a reboot by pressing and holding the power button.

How to access the emergency restart option

Use at your own risk.
Credit: World of OSes

If all is well with your Windows computer, you can of course click the Start menu button on the taskbar, then the power button on the right, and then Restart. But what if your computer has crashed and left you hanging, so you can’t click anything? What if the situation is so bad that the Start menu has mysteriously disappeared?

To get to the emergency restart option, you need to press the familiar Ctrl+Alt+Del keyboard shortcut, known by pretty much everyone who’s ever had to fix a Windows PC at some point. This shortcut is designed to work even if your computer is otherwise unresponsive, and gives you access to options for locking your PC, signing out of your account, and bringing up the Task Manager.

Down in the lower right corner, there’s also a power button: Click this and you get the standard Sleep, Shut down, and Restart options. However, if you hold down Ctrl and then click the power button, that takes you to the emergency restart page, together with the warning about losing any unsaved data. Click OK, and your computer will reboot itself almost instantly.

If you can get to the screen after Ctrl+Alt+Del, then you’ll want to try the normal restart option first—you’ll only need to go down the holding Ctrl route if that doesn’t work. Presumably, that will be because there’s a program or a part of the Windows code that isn’t shutting down properly to clear the way for a restart.

Should you need yet another way of restarting your computer without using the Start menu, you can do it from the command prompt or PowerShell utility, too: Just type “shutdown /r” and hit Enter. There are a host of extra flags you can add to that command if needed, including setting a timer for the restart and forcing applications to close: You can read full instructions here.

Having now familiarized myself with the emergency restart option in Windows, I’m off to find more features that I haven’t come across—even though they’ve been around for years. Any suggestions are most welcome.

This is a compilation of Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes performing her so-bad-it’s-good dance (aka the trippy hitchhiker) in a variety of other shows and movies. The clips were edited by the Bell Brothers, who previously added Home Alone’s Kevin McAllister to other Christmas movies. That dance… I forgot how good it was. I’m going to perform it at my wedding. Well not MY wedding, a friend’s wedding everyone will refer to as mine afterwards because I stole the show at the reception. People probably won’t even be able to remember what color the bride was wearing.

Original clip included after for reference.

Everyone works with text while on their Macs, and PopClip is a simple and effective way to speed up all your text workflows. On the surface, it’s really simple. The app, also available on mobile, simply adds a small popover menu to your screen every time you select text on your Mac. By default, it gives you access to four commonly used actions: search, cut, copy, and paste. This alone is good enough for most people, but the app can do a lot more.

Mobile is a bit more limited, but on Mac, you can customize the popover menu by adding or removing features, and there’s a big extension directory to make this even better. With some tweaking, you can use it for relatively basic operations such as text transformations, or more advanced ones such as sending text to the translation service of your choice. PopClip’s free trial lets you use text actions 250 times, and once you’ve exhausted those, you can buy the app for $12 or $25. The lower price guarantees two years of updates, after which you can continue using it without new features, but if you pay more, you get access to app updates for as long as PopClip is in active development.

Customizing PopClip

Credit: Pranay Parab

Customizing PopClip is a bit annoying, because the app’s window is quite small and uses tiny font sizes. Click its menu bar icon to get started. The good news is that you won’t have to use the menu bar window much, so I can look past its tiny size and barebones UI. In the app’s window, begin by clicking the home icon, which will allow the app to launch at login. This way, you won’t have to keep activating PopClip every time you restart your Mac.

Next, go to the gear icon tab and change the size and position (above or below the selected text) of the popover menu to suit your needs. A larger size is more intrusive, but it makes it easier to click the buttons in the menu. On the same page, you can record a keyboard shortcut to access PopClip without using the mouse, too. The next tab has a puzzle piece icon, and it lets you configure your actions or add additional actions not included in the default set, like translation or dictionary tools. Uncheck the options you don’t use, and drag the four dots next to each action upwards or downwards to reorder them.

Finally, go to the next tab to customize a list of excluded apps. PopClip’s menus won’t appear when you select text in those apps.

Adding extensions to supercharge the app

Credit: Pranay Parab

PopClip’s real magic comes from its extension support. Just go to the extensions directory page, select any extensions you like, download them, and open the downloaded files. This automatically adds those extensions to PopClip. Simply go to back to the puzzle piece icon in the settings to see your new additions. There are plenty of extensions on this page, and it can be hard to stop adding them to the app, because most of them are quite useful. The extensions page even has an RSS feed, and you can add it to the RSS reader of your choice to get informed whenever a new tool shows up. 

It’s hard to make a definitive list of the best PopClip extensions, since that depends on what you want to do with the app. Personally, I like to select text and send it into third-party apps (to quickly create to-dos or calendar entries, translate text, etc.), and there are plenty of great actions for that. I’m also a big fan of the Append to Clipboard action, which lets me copy multiple bits of text and adds it all to the clipboard. This way, I can quickly copy an excerpt and add the article’s URL to the clipboard, then paste them both to a social media post in one go. Without PopClip, that would require pasting twice, plus switching between tabs.

Yahoo Finance reports that Mark Zuckerberg made bold predictions for investors on Meta’s earnings call this week — about advertisers. “AI has already made us better at targeting and finding the audiences that will be interested in their products than many businesses are themselves,” Zuck said, “and that keeps improving…”

“If we deliver on this vision, then over the coming years, I think that the increased productivity from AI will make advertising a meaningfully larger share of global GDP than it is today…”

If investors are still searching for answers to nagging questions about how massive AI investments will pay off, Zuckerberg provided the clearest reply yet: It will strengthen our core business. In fact, it is our business… On what many believe to be the cusp of an economic downturn, Meta isn’t pitching its AI developments as an add-on to its operations, but as something central to its core proposition of targeted advertising…

“While Meta’s investments in GenAI have spooked certain investors who continue to question the return on these investments, we saw further signs of GenAI monetization in the firm’s ad business,” wrote Morningstar equity analyst Malik Ahmed Khan in a note on Thursday. In a powerful showing, coming after Alphabet’s own impressive results, Meta noted that a new ads recommendation model it’s testing for Reels has already boosted conversion rates by 5%. And nearly one-third of advertisers were using AI creative tools in the past quarter. For Zuckerberg, the enhancements AI offers to finding the right consumers and providing measurable results strengthen the case for boosting capacity and for a revamped model of advertising’s scope.

And with the company set to invest upwards of $70 billion toward its AI opportunity this year, the bet is not all about ads, of course. Zuckerberg outlined four other areas of focus for its AI efforts: business messaging, Meta AI, AI devices, and more engaging experiences. Meta’s efforts can also be viewed as an ambitious play to take on its rivals across tech’s legacy and emerging platforms. As John Blackledge, senior analyst at TD Cowen, said in a note on Thursday, the AI opportunities Zuckerberg outlined are about “ultimately taking on Google search, iPhone and ChatGPT all at once.”
In the pre-AI world, “Businesses used to have to generate their own ad creative and define what audiences they wanted to reach,” Zuckerberg told Meta’s investors this week.
And by Friday’s closing, Meta’s stock had jumped 12.6% over its value Wednesday morning, leading Yahoo Finance to conclude that Wall Street “appears to be buying into” Zuckerberg’s vision.

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The rocket was there. And then it decidedly was not.

Shortly after sunrise on a late summer morning nearly nine years ago at SpaceX’s sole operational launch pad, engineers neared the end of a static fire test. These were still early days for their operation of a Falcon 9 rocket that used super-chilled liquid propellants, and engineers pressed to see how quickly they could complete fueling. This was because the liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel warmed quickly in Florida’s sultry air, and cold propellants were essential to maximizing the rocket’s performance.

On this morning, September 1, 2016, everything proceeded more or less nominally up until eight minutes before the ignition of the rocket’s nine Merlin engines. It was a stable point in the countdown, so no one expected what happened next.

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