Thousands of Swedes are choosing to have microchips inserted into their bodies. Here’s why

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Thousands of people in Sweden have inserted microchips, which can function as contactless credit cards, key cards and even rail cards, into their bodies.

Once the chip is underneath your skin, there is no longer any need to worry about misplacing a card or carrying a heavy wallet. But for many people, the idea of carrying a microchip in their body feels more dystopian than practical.

Some have suggested that Sweden’s strong welfare state may be the cause of this recent trend. But actually, the factors behind why roughly 3,500 Swedes have had microchips implanted in them are more complex than you might expect.

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WHO classifies ‘gaming disorder’ as mental health condition

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(CNN) — Watching as a video game ensnares their child, many a parent has grumbled about “digital heroin,” likening the flashing images to one of the world’s most addictive substances.

Now, they may have backup: The World Health Organization announced “gaming disorder” as a new mental health condition included in the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases, released Monday.

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How people fake their own death — and why

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The Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko who faked his own death isn’t alone.

Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko was recently found lying face down on the floor of his apartment in Kiev, Ukraine, blood seeping through his T-shirt. He was quickly driven away by an ambulance, pronounced dead, and delivered to a morgue.

But the three bullet holes were fake, and the blood came from a pig — Babchenko was alive.

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How data scientists are using AI for suicide prevention

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The Crisis Text Line uses machine learning to figure out who’s at risk and when to intervene.

When horrible news — like the deaths by suicide of chef, author, and TV star Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade, or the 2015 Paris attacks — breaks, crisis counseling services often get deluged with calls from people in despair. Deciding whom to help first can be a life-or-death decision.

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This one shocking factor can make you 4600 percent more likely to become an addict

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It was discovered quite by accident – in part of a study of a totally different subject.

One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. As I got older, I understood why. We had addiction in my family. And as I watched some of my other close relatives become addicts, I asked myself several questions, but one in particular seemed haunting and insistent: why does addiction so often run in families? Why does it seem to pass from mother to daughter, from father to son, as though it were some dark genetic twist?

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Study: Gen Z craves ‘novelty’ and experience

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Generation Z shoppers share a love of real-world retail experiences, as long as they are augmented by technology.

Gen Z, also called the Instagram generation, lives by visuals and expects retailers to make experiences cool and aesthetic, show how products are used, and feature them in their best light. This requires their favorite brands to empower the use of mobile, the Web, and apps, according to “Gen Z Report,” from Criteo.

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Millennials aren’t going out to drink and date, study says – but why?

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Are apps to blame, or are millennials just lazy and poor?

As a “younger millennial,” I will admit that any negative news about the millennial generation gets my defensive hackles up. But a new study about millennials and our socializing habits doesn’t seem totally off-base to me. Apparently, younger millennials aren’t going out to drink and date, and there are a lot of pretty good reasons why.

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The world is running out of Japanese people

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Japan is shrinking. Fast.

The health ministry recently announced that only 946,060 babies were born in Japan in 2017, the fewest births since official statistics began in 1899. At the same time, 1,340,433 Japanese people died last year. This means that the non-immigrant population declined by nearly 400,000 people.

It’s an astonishing shift. The Japanese population grew steadily throughout the 20th century, from around 44 million in 1900 to 128 million in 2000. The gains were primarily due to increased life expectancy, but also buoyed by families that typically had at least two children. But beginning in the late 1970s, birth rates crashed. While the average Japanese woman had 2.1 kids in the 1970s, today, they only have about 1.4—far lower than in comparably wealthy countries like the US and Sweden.

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Employee burnout is a huge problem in the tech industry. This survey shows which companies have it the worst

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Employee burnout and stress is a big problem in the average American workplace, but it’s especially true among some of the country’s biggest tech companies, many of which have famously rigorous workplace cultures that often encourage long hours, favor young people, and sometimes require unreasonably high levels of productivity.

Blind, a message board app created for employees to talk about work anonymously, surveyed more than 11,000 employees at 30 of the biggest tech companies to find out just how many of them feel burnt out by their work.

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Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018

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YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular online platforms among teens. Fully 95% of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say they are online ‘almost constantly’

Until recently, Facebook had dominated the social media landscape among America’s youth – but it is no longer the most popular online platform among teens, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Today, roughly half (51%) of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 say they use Facebook, notably lower than the shares who use YouTube, Instagram or Snapchat.

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People are so obsessed with trading cryptocurrencies that a hospital just launched a program to treat addictive behavior

Scottish addiction treatment center Castle Craig Hospital has launched a program geared to help people who are addicted to buying and selling cryptocurrencies online.

In its online guide, the hospital describes the addictive behavior as similar to that of other online addictions, and offers practical advice as well as longterm therapeutic treatments.

Since bitcoin first appeared nearly a decade ago, cryptocurrencies have transformed internet culture. Online, crypto traders and blockchain enthusiasts eagerly swap anecdotes regarding market speculation and upcoming token offerings, and the crypto culture has spilled out into the world at large as well, inspiring thousands of summits, meet-up groups, and conferences worldwide.

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The historically low birthrate, explained in 3 charts

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US women are having fewer and fewer babies. In some ways, it’s a sign of progress.

The number of births in the US dropped by 2 percent between 2016 and 2017, to 60.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, continuing a general downturn that started with the great recession of 2008. Getty Images/Ikon Images

American women are having so few babies these days that the fertility rate has hit a historic low, according to stunning provisional data just published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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