I recently asked LinkedIn followers two questions:

• "If someone has good news and bad news, do you want to hear the good news first, or the bad?"
• "If you have good news and bad news to share, do you tend to start with the good news, or the bad?"

Oddly enough, most people said they want to hear the bad news first -- even though most people say they tend to share the good news first.

Or maybe not so oddly. A 2013 study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that most people prefer to share the good news first, a news-order delivery approach the researchers call "priming emotion-protection." (Or in non researcher-speak, "This will probably go badly... so I better ease into it."

Innovation can be a buzzword associated with anything deemed “new,” yet in the world of travel, this can often apply to simple twists on existing features or slightly modified takes on a popular concept.

Then, there are changes that truly mark a brand-new approach. At this year’s TPG Awards, we took the opportunity to recognize several brands that have done just that over the last year.

Image: https://thepointsguy.com

Start-up businesses are at best the ultimate fertile ground for fearless blue-sky thinking, free from the shackles of heavy processes or calcified policies. But successful innovation also benefits from experience and requires investment that a young business may lack. Is this an impossible circle to square?

Image: Pexels/Pixabay

There’s a lot of weird and wonderful uses for AI applications. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen AI powering better marketing emails, more smartly understanding the context of video content, and getting the most from customer feedback. It shows no sign of slowing: OpenAI announced it is pouring $10 million into the ecosystem to accelerate things further. Now, Kirill Zubovsky is taking on the challenge of picking the perfect domain name, with a service he calls Smartynames.com.

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT, a free, open-source AI tool that allows you to use natural language chat with a friendly robot who will find information for you, write content and more. Some are calling it a Google killer; others say it could bring an end to the student essay.

But what can this tool do in the world of PR?

Writing an article

I asked the chat bot to perform two common tasks. First, I asked it to write an article on a common topic that comes up all the time here on PR Daily: how to pitch the media.

Spreadsheets are widely used by organizations of all sizes for all kinds of basic and complex tasks.

While simple calculations and graphs have long been part of the spreadsheet experience, machine learning (ML) has not. ML is often seen as being too complex to use, while spreadsheet usage is intended to be accessible to any type of user. Google is now trying to change that paradigm for its Google Sheets online spreadsheet program.

Image: Screenshot

Today, the U.S. economy is largely driven by intangible innovations. From content creators on TikTok to the metaverse and artificial intelligence, the value that is being generated by individuals and companies does not exist in a fixed form. Who will end up profiting from it? Those who develop a keen understanding of how to use intellectual property to establish and maintain ownership over what they invent and build have a distinct advantage.

Generative AI is among the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) trends in 2022, introducing users around the world to new capabilities such as automated text and image generation.

London-based startup Qatalog is taking a different approach to emerging technology. The company uses Generative AI to help build and enable business collaboration applications. Qatalog emerged from stealth in October 2020 with a goal of helping organizations unify enterprise tools and projects.

Image: https://venturebeat.com

"Failure, and How We Can Learn from It"

What prompted the idea for the course?

When I was a high school teacher, I found plenty of joy and fulfillment in my work. But I also felt the sting of failure: from a student who remained disengaged throughout the semester, or even just from a lesson that went off the rails. Now I prepare aspiring K-12 teachers to navigate that messy reality themselves, and I'm struck by how tough it can be for them to develop the resilience necessary to work so hard and yet inevitably fall short of their goals.

A protein that helps make neurons also works to reprogram scar tissue cells into heart muscle cells, especially in partnership with a second protein, according to a study led by Li Qian, PhD, at the UNC School of Medicine.

Image: Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine have made a significant advance in the promising field of cellular reprogramming and organ regeneration. (CREDIT: Creative Commons)

Marine sanctuaries are supposed to protect ocean life - but what can they do when this life moves away?

As climate change heats the planet’s seas, many marine species are permanently migrating in search of cooler habitats.

These migrants often stray beyond the fixed borders of protected areas, explains Dr Fanny Douvere, head of the UNESCO World Heritage Marine Programme.

With the help of simple tools available in many of the world’s medical centers, it is possible to predict the chances of patients with inflammatory muscle diseases developing heart failure – a disease that can endanger their lives – and even predict with high percentages which of them may die.

Residing within the human gut are trillions of bacteria and other microorganisms that can impact a variety of chronic human ailments, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, cancer, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and inflammatory bowel disease.

When plastic waste breaks down into the smallest fragments, less than 1 micrometer wide—or 1,000 times finer than human hair—it can’t be detected at wastewater treatment plants. But researchers have developed a new material that can capture and remove it before it washes into river or ocean waters and enters the food chain.

There's not enough lithium for the EV revolution, and hydrogen cars are tough to sell because you can't fill them up anywhere. But NamX has a neat solution, and it's had Pininfarina design a "Hydrogen Utility Vehicle" to get the idea rolling by 2026.

Image: Courtesy NamX

Solar and wind energy are critical to a clean, climate-friendly future. Many companies and homeowners in recent years have installed solar panels to trap the sun's energy, while wind farms have sprung up on land and sea to harvest powerful gusts. The French startup Unéole has created a unique wind turbine with solar panels to create a silent, innovative, and integrated clean energy system that offers 40% more energy than solar alone.

Image: Screenshot: YouTube

Scientists may never find the elixir of life, but they are finding new ways to extend our life spans. One day, protecting our cells from aging may be as easy as taking a pill. Mayo Clinic researchers say senolytic drugs can boost a key protein in the body that may protect older people against aspects of aging and a range of diseases. Their findings, which are published in eBioMedicine demonstrate this in mice and human studies.

For the first time, researchers at MIT, Caltech, Harvard University, and elsewhere sent quantum information across a quantum system in what could be understood as traversing a wormhole. Though this experiment didn’t create a disruption of physical space and time in the way we might understand the term “wormhole” from science fiction, calculations from the experiment showed that qubits traveled from one system of entangled particles to another in a model of gravity.

Image: A representation of a traversable wormhole with quantum information passing through. (CREDIT: A. Mueller/inqnet)

A few weeks ago, I interviewed the owner of a Chick-fil-A franchise who had decided to offer his employees a 3-day work week.

Verdict: They loved it, they were more productive and less likely to leave, and when word got out about the program, job applications went through the roof.

I'm glad it worked out for them, but squeezing a full week's worth of work into three days seems a bit extreme. And for that matter, what ever happened to the idea of a four day work week?

At the dawn of the Renaissance there was a strong sense of living in the end of days. Obscured by the shadow of the Middle Ages, the desire for a renewed identity, shaped by both humanitarian and scientific learning, was in its infancy. Artists and scientists began the work of dismantling of everything that for centuries had been taken for granted. The Italian Renaissance contributed significantly to breaking down the boundaries – those of ideas as well as those of geography or demarcated by political power. The new entrepreneurship coming into force in Medicis Florence, in Venice under the Dodges and in Milan dominated by Ludovico il Moro, taking place as a result of advances in the textile industry and in the wake of the Italian Renaissance, extended beyond the geographic and political borders and found profitable links with Flanders and, therefore, with the Renaissance in the Low Countries (corresponding roughly to the present-day Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg).