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Wednesday, 12 October 2022

Top salaries and benefits for top execs at Neom + Man’s best friend understands our stress more than we thought

Saudi Arabia’s mega city Neom is luring in top management talent with USD 1.1 mn paychecks, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing an internal document. Riyadh is offering execs USD 1.1 mn annual incomes with zero taxes — and that’s without the added bonuses. The average annual income for c-suite executives is some USD 830k, according to data from MyLogIQ tracking around 3k major listed companies in the US, while top executives earn between USD 416-486k a year.

The generosity has some limits: Annual entry level incomes at Neom are around USD 54k, a little over half of the USD 100k annual income Wall Street and major consulting firms have been offering in recent years. People close to the recruitment process say Neom offers packages based on prospective employees’ salaries at their previous employer, meaning there could be major pay gaps depending on where employees are recruited from.


Your dog may be able to smell your sadness and anxiety: Their extraordinary sense of smell keeps us safe from dangerous situations in airports and can even identify life-threatening diseases, but a recent study by Queen’s University in Belfast has discovered that dogs are equally skilled at detecting human stress. Dogs are able to sniff changes in human breath and sweat, alerting them to chemical odors released when someone is stressed. Researchers collected sweat and breath samples from 36 human participants before and after they were given a difficult math problem to solve, using only samples from those with an elevated blood pressure and heart rate. In roughly 94% of the 720 trials, four different breeds of dogs correctly alerted the researchers to each person's stress sample. This proven ability for canines to perceive human stress adds value for training service and therapy dogs, according to researchers, proving that dogs have the ability to reduce anxiety and depression symptoms.

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