We asked four talented designers for their go-to rendering tips.

Have you ever wondered if the Earth has a heartbeat? Well, it turns out that our planet does pulsate every 26 seconds, and scientists have no idea why.

This mysterious phenomenon has been detected by seismometers across the world for more than half a century, but its origin and meaning remain unknown.

When the discovery of fossilized footprints made in what’s now New Mexico was made public in 2021, it was a bombshell moment for archaeology, seemingly rewriting a chapter of the human story. Now new research is offering further evidence of their significance.

While they look like they could have been made yesterday, the footprints were pressed into mud 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating of the seeds of an aquatic plant that were preserved above and below the fossils.

This date dramatically pushed back the timeline of humans’ history in the Americas, the last landmass to be settled by prehistoric people. The 61 dated prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin, near the edge of an ancient lake in White Sands National Park, were made at a time when many scientists think that massive ice sheets had sealed off human passage into North America, indicating that humans arrived in the region even earlier.

AI-powered parking platform Metropolis today announced that it raised $1.7 billion to acquire SP Plus, a provider of parking facility management services, in a combination of equity and debt.

Eldridge Capital and 3L Capital co-led the tranche with participation from BDT & MSD Partners’ affiliated credit funds, Vista Credit Partners, Temasek, Slow Ventures and Assembly Ventures. As a part of the financing, Metropolis will take on $650 million in loans and $1.05 billion in Series C preferred stock financing.

Metropolis will pay roughly $1.5 billion for SP Plus “while retaining significant capital on its balance sheet,” Metropolis co-founder and CEO Alex Israel said in a press release. Prior to the latest fundraise, Metropolis had raised $226 million in total.

The Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo was known for claiming that he deserved little credit for his beautiful works: they were already there inside the rock, he merely cut them out. ‘Every block of stone,’ he said, ‘has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’

The final product already existed within Michelangelo’s ideals. But it took years of trial and error, practice, and failure to reach the point of being able to give form to it. In a similar sense, Nietzsche would say the ‘you’ that you must become is already there. It’s already inscribed in your values. That which you admire – the preponderance of all your latent virtues – reflects who you are in the truest sense.

The act of becoming who you are is the act of carving your ideal self out of the hard stone of your psyche – of bringing greater and greater refinement to the crude shapes of character that exist in you now. Simultaneously an act of discovery and creation, to become who you are is to bring your virtues to life and synthesise them into a unified whole. Nietzsche proclaims: