The Coming Financial Time Bomb

A brave YouTuber has managed to defeat a fake Nintendo lawyer improperly targeting his channel with copyright takedowns that could have seen his entire channel removed if YouTube issued one more strike. Sharing his story with The Verge, Dominik "Domtendo" Neumayer—a German YouTuber who has broadcasted play-throughs of popular games for 17 years—said that it all started when YouTube removed some videos from his channel that were centered on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

'Tis the season for many holiday traditions, including the Ugly Christmas Sweater—you know, those 1950s-style heavy knits featuring some kind of cartoonish seasonal decoration, like snowflakes, Santa Claus, or—in the case of Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones' Diary (2001)—Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. "It’s obnoxious and tacky, but also fuzzy and kind of wholesome—the fashion equivalent of a Hallmark Christmas movie (with a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek)," as CNN's Marianna Cerini recently observed. Fashion (or lack thereof) aside, sweaters and other knitted fabric are also fascinating to physicists and mathematicians.

OpenAI has finally shared details about its plans to shake up its core business by shifting to a for-profit corporate structure. On Thursday, OpenAI posted on its blog, confirming that in 2025, the existing for-profit arm will be transformed into a Delaware-based public benefit corporation (PBC). As a PBC, OpenAI would be required to balance its shareholders' and stakeholders' interests with the public benefit.

Apparently Hertz's purging of electric vehicles from its fleet isn't going fast enough for the car rental giant. A Reddit user posted an offer they received from Hertz to buy the 2023 Tesla Model 3 they had been renting for $17,913. Hertz originally went strong into EVs, announcing a plan to buy 100,000 Model 3s for its fleet by the end of 2021, but 16 months later had acquired only half that amount.

The price of the Microsoft 365 service is going up in some parts of the world due to the inclusion of the Copilot AI assistant.

There are thousands of YouTube videos in which DIY science enthusiasts cut grapes in half—leaving just a thin bit of skin connecting them—and put the grapes in the microwave, just to marvel at the sparks and plume of ionized gas (plasma) that the grapes produce. This quirky property of grapes might help make more efficient quantum sensors, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Applied. The plasma-inducing grape effect was first observed in 1994, per the authors.