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The Olympics came to a rapturous conclusion this weekend when the US men's ice hockey team won the gold medal for the first time since the “Miracle on Ice” in 1980.

As the Pentagon was pressing Anthropic PBC to drop the guardrails on its powerful artificial intelligence tools, a senior US defense official posed a hypothetical scenario to the company's safety-conscious chief executive officer, Dario Amodei.

The increasingly ugly feud between the Pentagon and artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic is shining a harsh spotlight on the ethics behind how the U.S. military uses AI.

Instead of relishing their role in the U.S. military's unequivocally successful capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, the executives at Anthropic are openly questioning the ethics of using emerging technology to conduct military missions.

The final medal count for the 2026 Olympic Winter Games is in, and there’s a clear winner. Of the 29 countries to win at least one medal, Norway took home the most hardware overall with 41 medals. This included 18 gold medals, the most of any country. It’s a resounding victory over the United States, which came in second place with 33 medals. High-performing Olympic nations are often famous (or infamous) for their aggressive training tactics. China, for example, has been said to “ruthlessly select and train competitors from an early age—with children as young as four being enlisted to train for the team.” Nearly everyone hoping for Olympic greatness has to start training at a young age. Norway, however, takes a different approach with its youth sports culture. Instead of winning, it’s all about fun. The country does a few things differently that are counterintuitive to a hyper-competitive, gold-at-any-cost mindset. A skier is seen mid-air. Photo credit: Canva No keeping score Per CNN, “Until the age of 12 in Norway, nobody in youth sports is allowed to keep score, and there are no league standings either.” Compare that to many American youth sports leagues, which generally begin keeping score around the age of seven. Keeping score in kids’ leagues is often a source of great controversy. Proponents argue that it teaches children sportsmanship, how to lose with grace, and how to cope with disappointment. However, critics say the emphasis on winning sucks the fun out of the sport and prematurely ratchets up pressure many kids just aren’t ready for. No early specialization You’d think the best path to becoming a great alpine skier would be to focus rigorously on the sport as early as possible. Coaches in Norway disagree. Instead, they believe true talent is revealed not in early childhood but in the teen years. Kids growing up in Norway try many different sports before deciding which one they’re best suited to focus on. Participation trophies for all Yes, the dreaded participation trophy was once decried as the thing that made Millennials soft. But it seems to be working out OK for the Norwegians. If one kid gets a trophy in Norway, everyone gets one. And the guidelines don’t end there. Norway isn’t big on travel leagues, preferring to keep kids in local leagues as long as possible, and it caps the cost of youth sports instead of letting them balloon out of control. The entire youth sports ecosystem is run by the government and not-for-profit organizations. Leagues also mandate equal playing time for kids at younger ages to ensure everyone has fun and gets an opportunity. It’s all summed up beautifully by the slogan, “Joy of Sport for All.” It sounds counterintuitive, but it works for them. And 2026 was no outlier. The Norwegians often excel in the Winter Olympics and have won four straight games. They’re not too shabby in the Summer Games, either. Though the country is naturally better suited to snow sports like skiing, Norway regularly nabs top results in summer sports like weightlifting, beach volleyball, and track and field. Per capita, its performance in the Summer Games is especially impressive. Norway’s model is not perfectly replicable in every country. The U.S., for example, features decentralized and privately run sports leagues. It would be nearly impossible to get them all to operate in the same way and discard decades of success. It’s also debatable whether we would even want to, because the U.S., it turns out, is also quite good at sports. View this post on Instagram But it’s fascinating to watch a country operate in ways that seem almost completely antithetical to high-level competition and still achieve elite results. Not only does Norway bring home Olympic medals, but its kids also have some of the highest sports participation rates in the world. They’re also generally fit, healthy, and extremely happy. It’s no wonder the country is considered one of the best places in the world to raise kids. The post Youth sports in Norway shun competition for fun. And they just won the Olympics. appeared first on Upworthy.

Humans have devised many ways of measuring things in an attempt to learn more about our world, including numerical systems that help get us all on the same page. But we haven’t always agreed. The ongoing battle between the imperial and metric systems demonstrates the challenge of standardizing measurement. As most of the world uses the base-10 metric system, the United States remains the primary imperial holdout. But one thing we agree on is how we measure time, or at least how we measure hours and seconds. And oddly enough, it’s not using the metric system. Why is that? How did we decide to split days into 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes instead of splitting them into, say, hundredths? Why 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes? Photo credit: Canva Why there are 24 hours in a day Let’s start with how we got the 24-hour day. We measure time, in general, by years using the Earth’s full orbit of the sun. But we could really split that year up any way we choose. The rising and setting of the sun gives us a framework for days, so that’s a helpful divisor. However, daylight length varies greatly from place to place and from season to season. So how did we land on 24 hours in a day? We have the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks—and their affinity for duodecimals (counting by 12)—to thank for that. They each had a way of breaking light and dark hours into 12 parts each, giving us a 24-part day. However, those 12 parts were not measured equally. The way we organise time is strange.365 days in a year, 12 months (of 31, 30, 28, or sometimes 29 days), 52 weeks, 7 days in a week, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute.How did this happen?! The story begins with an Ancient Egyptian sundial… pic.twitter.com/o3OUsbu7FT— The Cultural Tutor (@culturaltutor) July 5, 2024 According to Scientific American: “The concept of fixed-length hours, however, did not originate until the Hellenistic period, when Greek astronomers began using such a system for their theoretical calculations. Hipparchus, whose work primarily took place between 147 and 127 B.C., proposed dividing the day into 24 equinoctial hours, based on the 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness observed on equinox days. Despite this suggestion, laypeople continued to use seasonally varying hours for many centuries. (Hours of fixed length became commonplace only after mechanical clocks first appeared in Europe during the 14th century.)” Why there are 60 minutes in an hour Oddly enough, the need for a standard way to divide 12-hour days and nights into smaller parts led us back to ancient times once again. The Babylonians used a sexagesimal (base-60) system to make astronomical calculations, which they had inherited from the Sumerians, who used it around 2000 B.C. What makes 60 special? With 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60), it can be evenly divided in more ways than any other number up to and including 100, which has only nine divisors. Fun fact: every time you look at a clock, you are using a 4,000 year old idea. The reason we have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour comes from ancient Babylonian mathematics, not modern science.The Babylonians chose 60 because it is incredibly practical. Sixty… https://t.co/b44Qa2Mkvp— Avelino Guido (@AvelinoGuido28) January 22, 2026 Using that system, Greek astronomer Eratosthenes (276 to 194 B.C.) divided a circle into 60 parts to measure latitude. Hippocrates honed this sexagesimal (base-60) system by adding in longitude a century later. Ptolemy later improved those measurements, subdividing the 360 degrees of latitude and longitude into smaller parts. The first 60 parts became known as partes minutae primae, or “minutes.” The second division of 60 became partes minutae secundae, or “second minute” (what we now call seconds). Minutes and seconds were first used in geography, not time measurement. Photo credit: Canva Those minutes and seconds were used for measuring latitude and longitude, not time, but a circle is a circle. The very first round clock displays divided hours into halves, thirds, quarters, and even twelfths, but not sixtieths. The 60-minute hour didn’t become popularized until minutes were put on mechanical clocks at the end of the 16th century. The spread of the Gregorian calendar around that time also helped universalize how humans measured time, but countless questions remained about the precision of timekeeping. Exactly how long is a second? After all, how long is a second exactly? We can measure it as a division of larger units of time, but on its own, how do we determine a standard for it? Precision and standardization in timekeeping became more and more important as things like train travel, where people had to know what time a train would arrive or depart, became more common. That happened in 1967, when researchers gathered at the 13th General Conference of the International Committee for Weights and Measures. Among other things, they debated which element to use as the standard for atomic clocks. Ultimately, they landed on Cesium-133, which had been used in atomic clock research since the 1950s. The video above explains exactly how and why scientists chose that element and made the calculation, but the result was that a second became formally defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 ticks of a Cesium-133 atom. That may be far more than you ever wanted to know about time measurement. But isn’t it fascinating how a combination of ancient wisdom and modern technology gave us 60-minute hours and clocks that can tell us, down to the second, what time it is anywhere in the world? Aren’t humans amazing? The post The ancient, brilliant reason we divide days into 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes appeared first on Upworthy.