How summer 2021 has changed our understanding of

extreme weather
theconversation.com/how-summer-2021-has-changed-our-understanding-of-extreme-weather-165268

Christopher J White

A succession of record-breaking natural disasters have swept the globe in recent weeks.
There have been serious floods in China and western Europe, heatwaves and drought in
North America and wildfires in the sub-Arctic.

An annual report on the UK’s weather indicates extreme events are becoming
commonplace in the country’s once mild climate. August 2020 saw temperatures hit 34°C
on six consecutive days across southern England, including five sticky nights where the
mercury stayed above 20°C. In the future, British summers are likely to see temperatures
greater than 40°C regularly, even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C.

The Canadian national temperature record was shattered in June 2021 meanwhile, with
49.6°C recorded in Lytton, British Columbia – a town that was all but destroyed by
wildfires a few days later.

Many of these events have shocked climate scientists. The Lytton temperature record, for
example, was head-and-shoulders above those set during previous heatwaves in the
region. Some scientists are beginning to worry they might have underestimated how
quickly the climate will change. Or have we just misunderstood extreme weather events
and how our warming climate will influence them?

Everything is connected
Floods and wildfires are not discrete events: they are the result of numerous
interconnections and feedback loops in the climate system. Take the mid-July flash floods
in London. These were caused by summer rainstorms, which were in turn driven by warm
air rising from the Earth’s surface that built up during the preceding heatwave, stacking
the deck for the downpours that were to follow. The wildfires raging in the western US,
meanwhile, are a catastrophe whose stage was set by long-term drought.

The Earth’s climate is complex, dynamic and chaotic, involving interactions and energy
fluxes between the land, ocean and atmosphere. The idea that scientists can study one
part of this system in relative isolation is flawed. But it was not always possible to model
or understand all of these complexities, so scientists had to break them into manageable
pieces in order to fit them into linear systems and models. These were often split across
the scientific disciplines that most of us are still somewhat confined to today, such as
atmospheric sciences, hydrology, Earth systems sciences, or engineering.

As a result, we are used to treating each natural hazard independently from another. But
it takes more than rain to create a flood, and more than a spark to start a wildfire. All of
the elements of our climate system – and the hazards it produces – are connected in one

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way or another.

It’s not that these interactions and combinations are new, it’s just that we haven’t always
thought about them in such a joined-up way. It may seem shocking when disaster follows
disaster, seemingly in increasingly quick succession. This is because we are trained to
think about weather hazards singularly, focused on one type – a drought or flood, for
example – at a time. Just about all risk assessments underestimate the risks associated
with interconnected events.

But as our climate continues to warm, its baseline is shifting. How these hazards and their
causes interact is therefore also changing fast, challenging the very definition of extreme
weather events.

The interconnections between extreme weather events have, until recently, been largely
overlooked by the science community. But there is now growing international research
tasked with mapping these complex relationships.

Compound events – a term only adopted by the IPCC in 2012 – describe the outcomes of
a combination of causes that ultimately surpass the capacity of an underlying system to
cope. These include events where a hazard like a wildfire was made worse by something
which had preconditioned the environment, like drought.

Wariness of these compound events should influence the way we live our lives in a
warmer world. More research across disciplines is needed, as well as new approaches to
disaster risk assessment and climate change adaptation that look across all weather-
driven hazards and their complex and changing interactions. Improvements in climate
modelling mean we can do more of this type of science – the climate crisis dictates that we
must.

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How the climate crisis is transforming the meaning of
‘sustainability’ in business
theconversation.com/how-the-climate-crisis-is-transforming-the-meaning-of-sustainability-in-business-166539

Raz Godelnik

In his 2021 letter to CEOs, Larry Fink, the CEO and chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest
investment manager, wrote: “No issue ranks higher than climate change on our clients’ lists of
priorities.”

His comment reflected a growing unease with how the climate crisis is already disrupting
businesses.

Companies’ concerns about climate change have typically been focused on their operational,
financial and reputational risks, the latter associated with the growing importance of the issue
among young people. Now, climate change is calling into question the traditional paradigm of
corporate sustainability and how companies address their impacts on society and the planet overall.

As a professor working in strategic design, innovation, business models and sustainability, I’ve been
tracking how climate change is transforming the meaning of “sustainability” in business, and I’m
starting to see early signs of change.

The sustainability gap

Over the past few decades, many companies came to embrace sustainability. It became the
corporate norm to seek ways to reduce a company’s negative impacts on society and the planet and
operate more responsibly.

Sustainability reporting is probably the clearest evidence of this trend. In 2020, 96% of the world’s
largest companies by revenue, known as the G250, released details about their sustainability efforts.
But that rise in sustainability reporting was not accompanied by actual improvement in key
environmental and social issues. Global greenhouse gas emissions continued to grow, as did the pay
gap between CEOs and employees, for example.

As I suggest in my new book, “Rethinking Corporate Sustainability in the Era of Climate Crisis – A
Strategic Design Approach,” this gap between companies’ growing attention to sustainability and
the minimal change produced is driven by their approach, which I call “sustainability-as-usual.”

Sustainability-as-usual is the slow and voluntary adoption of sustainability in business, where

companies commit to changes they feel comfortable making. It’s not necessarily the same as what
science shows is needed to slow climate change, or what the United Nations recommends for an
equitable society. Businesses’ response to both will be drawing global attention in November when
world leaders gather for the annual U.N. climate conference.

The problem with sustainability-as-usual

Companies have taken this incremental approach because while they have paid more attention to
social and environmental issues, their first priority has remained maximizing profit for their
shareholders.

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Take, for example, companies’ focus on improving the recyclability of single-use products instead of
considering new business models that could have greater positive impact, such as shifting to
reusable packaging or eliminating it altogether.

One notable example is Heinz. The ketchup maker announced a cap for its ketchup bottle that is
100% recyclable. It was the outcome of $1.2 million invested and 185,000 hours of work over eight
years, according to the company.

Climate change requires a new approach

While companies appear to grasp the magnitude of the climate crisis, they have been trying to
address it mainly in a sustainability-as-usual fashion – one ketchup bottle cap at a time.

Consider emissions reductions. Companies have been slow to commit to reducing their emissions to
zero no later than mid-century, a target that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
considers necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – roughly 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit
– and avoid the worst effects of climate change. Only about one-fifth of the major companies have
2030 goals that are in line with reaching net-zero goals by 2050 at the latest.

The companies that do set net-zero targets often do so in ways that lack the necessary robustness
and allow them to continue emitting greenhouse gases, as recent reports point out. One concern, for
example, is their dependence on carbon offsets, which allow them to pay for potential carbon
reductions elsewhere without making any real changes in their own value chain.

How to transform business sustainability

Companies have tried to rebrand their efforts in ways that sound more sophisticated, moving from
terms like “corporate social responsibility (CSR)” to “environmental, social and governance (ESG),”
“purposeful companies” and “carbon-neutral products.”

But when companies don’t put actions with their words, they increasingly meet resistance from
activists, investors and governmental and regulatory bodies. One example is the growing scrutiny of
companies that promote themselves as climate leaders but at the same time donate money to
politicians opposing climate policies. Public relations and advertising employees called out their
own industry in a report exposing 90 agencies working with fossil fuel companies.

Business is at a strategic inflection point, which Andy Grove, the former CEO of computer chip-
maker Intel, described as “a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to
change.”

This transformation could evolve in different ways, but as I suggest in my book, fighting climate
change effectively requires a new mindset that shifts the relationships between profit maximization
and sustainability to prioritize sustainability over profit.

Early signs of evolution

There are early signs of evolution, both within companies and from the forces that shape the
environment in which companies operate.

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One example is how other industries are reassessing their relationship with fossil fuel companies.
Some newspapers, including The Guardian, have banned advertising from fossil fuel companies. A
growing number of insurance companies and banks have stopped financing coal projects. The
French bank Crédit Mutuel said it saw the impact of climate change on its customers and was
willing to lose money “in the short term” to respond to the risk.

Another example is changes in companies’ relationships with suppliers – for example, the business
software company Salesforce added a sustainability clause to its contracts requiring suppliers to set
carbon reduction goals.

And investors are moving for the first time from just urging companies to take bolder action on
climate change to using sticks. Fidelity announced that it would vote against corporate directors
whose companies don’t disclose their emissions or have a policy on climate change.

Add to these bright spots changes in regulation and policy worldwide that aim to put in place key
sustainability principles and push to cut emissions at a faster pace, plus the changing expectations
of young job seekers when it comes to environmental and social issues, such as inclusion and
diversity, and you can start to see how the end of sustainability-as-usual may be closer than many
people think. Due to climate change, the question is more “when” than “if” it will happen.

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How to know if a country is serious about net zero:
look at its plans for extracting fossil fuels
theconversation.com/how-to-know-if-a-country-is-serious-about-net-zero-look-at-its-plans-for-extracting-fossil-
fuels-170508

Fergus Green

Fresh emissions targets from Saudi Arabia and Australia – two of the world’s largest
fossil-fuel producers – are due to arrive just in time for global climate talks in Glasgow.
These would commit the two countries to reducing domestic emissions to net zero by
around mid-century – though both are expected to continue exporting fossil fuels for
decades to come.

For the leaders of countries and governments that produce fossil fuels, UN climate
summits are a public relations boon. They get to talk up their commitments to a green and
clean future without being held to account for their disproportionate role in fuelling the
problem. It’s hard for experts, let alone the average citizen, to tell fact from fiction.

Because it’s only domestic greenhouse gas emissions that are counted for the purpose of
the UN climate negotiations, burning exported fossil fuels counts towards the emissions
of the importing country. Accordingly, the role that major fossil fuel exporters like Saudi
Arabia (oil and natural gas) and Australia (coal and natural gas) play in stoking global
heating is not accurately reflected in the talks.

Unlike some areas of international cooperation, like limiting the spread of nuclear
weapons, climate-change summits aim to control something which evades easy
calculation. Nuclear weapons and their production facilities are tangible, chunky and
relatively few in number. Greenhouse gases are everywhere, invisible and caused by lots
of different processes – from cow digestion to steel production.

These gases are also in constant flux. Emissions are produced from ubiquitous sources,
but there are also natural systems – especially forests and soil – that suck carbon dioxide
(CO₂) from the atmosphere. These natural removals of carbon are known as sinks. That is
why scientists and governments speak of net greenhouse gas emissions: emissions minus
removals.

It’s relatively easy to monitor aggregate levels of CO₂ in the global atmosphere. This is
why scientists have a clear picture of how badly off-track the world is with tackling the
climate crisis. But all this complexity concerning sources and sinks makes it easy for
governments and corporations to obfuscate their real contribution to climate change.

For example, countries with lots of uninhabited land, like Australia, have become
especially adept at gaming the systems of accounting for net emissions of CO₂. Australia
effectively gets credited for large amounts of carbon stored in forests, which make it look
like overall emissions have been falling, even though emissions from burning fossil fuels
have been growing for decades.

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One sure-fire way of telling whether a government official is hoodwinking you when
lauding their government’s climate credentials is to look upstream and see whether
they’re producing the coal, oil or gas that ultimately causes about three-quarters of global
emissions, and if so, what they’re doing about it.

Extracted fossil fuels are much easier to monitor and verify than greenhouse gas
emissions. They come from a relatively small number of sources and are already
measured by multiple parties for a range of purposes. Customers need proof that the
shipments they receive reflect their contracts with suppliers. Governments collect
production information to assess a company’s compliance with licensing requirements,
tax liabilities and customs obligations.

Fossil-fuel infrastructure and projects are even easier to monitor. Oil rigs, gas pipelines
and coal mines are large, making them easy to see both on the ground and via satellite.
These features make it simpler to hold fossil fuel-producing countries to account for their
contribution to global heating, compared with the more slippery measure of net
emissions.

The fossil fuel production gap

In a new report, the UN Environment Programme and other research institutions found
that governments plan to produce more than twice the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than
would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels – the goal
of the Paris Agreement. Countries’ fossil-fuel production plans and projections in
aggregate even exceed, by close to 10%, the levels of global fossil-fuel production implied
by their own climate pledges.

Shockingly, governments are pouring fuel on the fire. G20 countries have directed more
than US$300 billion (£218 billion) in new funds towards supporting fossil-fuel
production, such as subsidies and tax breaks, since the beginning of the pandemic – about
10% more than they have invested in clean energy.

The report echoes recent calls for greater transparency around fossil-fuel production and
the support – financial and otherwise – governments provide at home and abroad.
Research by various organisations has provided a better understanding of this, but the
information is incomplete, inconsistent and scattered.

Governments could help by disclosing plans, funding and projections for fossil-fuel
production, and how they intend to manage a just transition away from coal, oil and gas.
Fossil-fuel companies should disclose their spending and infrastructure plans, as well as
all the greenhouse gas emissions their product is responsible for, and financial risks to
their business from climate change.

Numerous environmental organisations are working to build a global picture of the

sources and flows of fossil fuels. So even if governments fail to illuminate the activities of
fossil-fuel companies and their role in it, they can still be named and shamed.

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Talking only about a country’s net greenhouse gas emissions gives fossil fuel-producing
companies and governments a free pass to bullshit their way through the climate
negotiations. If we want to force the PR managers to really earn their money, we should
turn the conversation to fossil-fuel production.

This story is part of The Conversation’s coverage on COP26, the Glasgow

climate conference, by experts from around the world.
Amid a rising tide of climate news and stories, The Conversation is here to clear the air
and make sure you get information you can trust. More.

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Will we ever know the real death toll of the pandemic?
nationalgeographic.com/science/article/will-we-ever-know-the-real-death-toll-of-the-pandemic

ByAmruta ByatnalPublished June 11, 2021• 11 min read

The past year has been a stark reminder of global inequalities—including the resources
needed to collect timely and accurate data on deaths. These innovators aim to fix that.

On a sweltering April night in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the Indian state of Gujarat,
Shayar Rawal rode his motorbike to a COVID-designated government hospital at 11:55
p.m. Over the next 24 hours, he had just one task: to count the number of dead bodies
being brought to the mortuary.

Rawal—a reporter at the Gujarati daily newspaper Divya Bhaskar—counted four deaths
in the first hour. Grieving relatives collected five more dead bodies in the next hour. When
the number reached 100, he says, reality sunk in.

“I knew the government was hiding numbers, but this was way more than what I had
expected,” Rawal says.

Officially, the city recorded just 15 COVID-19 deaths that day. But by the end of his vigil,
Rawal had counted 112 bodies—and that was just the dead from one city hospital. Over
the next few weeks, his colleagues also counted bodies at crematoria and burial grounds
and accessed death certificates from districts across the state. Their final analysis revealed
that the death toll over nine weeks in the state of Gujarat was 10 times higher than the
official figure. In response to the Divya Bhaskar report, the state government gave
multiple reasons for the discrepancy, from saying deaths with co-morbidities cannot be
counted as COVID-19 deaths to claiming that duplicates of death certificates had been
issued. National Geographic’s questions to the state government went unanswered.

“There are fundamental, inherent challenges,” says Samira Asma, assistant director
general for data, analytics, and delivery for impact at the World Health Organization.
Even in wealthy nations, officials are grappling with incorrect diagnoses, irregularities in
the data tracking, and other factors that can obscure the virus’s true impact. “So because
of this, we don't have a complete understanding of the entire scope of the pandemic.”

But the past year has also been a stark reminder of inequalities throughout the world—
including the resources needed to collect timely and accurate data on deaths. In an
assessment conducted in 2019, the WHO found that about two-thirds of the countries in
the world lack strong civil registration and vital statistics systems that keep a count of
births and deaths.

This disparity is having dangerous consequences with COVID-19. The World Health
Statistics Report released last month stated that there were 3 million deaths directly and
indirectly attributed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus—that’s 1.2 million higher than the official
figures reported by countries and then tallied by the WHO.

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The lack of robust data in low- and middle-income countries such as India means
grassroots efforts such as Rawal’s are crucial in determining the true death toll, which in
turn affects our understanding of the pandemic’s global trajectory.

“To have an accurate understanding of historic mortality is key in knowing how effective
different interventions have been, but also in helping us to more accurately forecast what
may happen in the future of the pandemic,” says Oliver Watson, a postdoctoral researcher
in infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London.

Deaths due to COVID-19

At the beginning of the pandemic, a lack of standardized methods to designate COVID-19
deaths across countries led to underreporting. In a bid to understand the true toll better,
demographers, reporters, and economists developed alternate tracking methods, and each
approached the problem from different angles.

For Ariel Karlinsky it started with a meme.

Karlinsky is a graduate student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and an economist at

Kohelet Policy Forum, a think tank. When Israel locked down in March 2020, a popular
meme doing the rounds was that COVID-19 was claiming as many lives as the flu had in
previous years. Curious to find out if that was true, Karlisnky started digging for data, but
he didn’t find any. So he started collecting data on his own from individual countries—he
emailed national and regional statistics offices, as well as researchers who were working
on the issue in various countries.

In January 2021 he started collaborating with Dmitry Kobak, a research scientist at

Tübingen University. Their effort has led to the creation of the World Mortality Dataset,
which includes information from 95 countries and territories. The Economist has since
used the World Mortality Dataset to make its own projections on global deaths due to
COVID-19. Recognizing Karlinsky's work, the WHO invited him to be part of a technical
advisory group that aims to map the death toll of the pandemic across the world.

Karlinsky is surprised. “Usually there are organizations like the World Bank and the
OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] that essentially do
what I did. They take data from each individual country and they harmonize it. For some
reason, they hadn’t done it, and they still haven’t done it,” he says, speaking over Zoom on
a recent Sunday afternoon. “Although they are now taking my data, which is sort of
strange because they are official organizations with a much higher budget than me and
my laptop.”

Karlinsky is now also working on local mortality figures based on data for smaller regions,
such as cities or states across the world. By collecting and standardizing this data in one
place, more people can use the information to make informed decisions about their local
pandemic response.

“A lot of data exists, but that data is not being used, the data is not being shared—it's the
same as the data not existing at all, right?” he says.

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New sources, old problems
One source that made its way into the World Mortality Dataset comes from Indian data
journalist Rukmini S, who like Karlinsky believes that the data exists in India’s civil
registration system, which records births and deaths across the country. Knowing this,
Rukmini scraped together mortality data for all causes in the city of Chennai, in South
India.

One way to get a handle on COVID-19 deaths when specific causes are not available is to
look at what are known as excess deaths. This figure represents the gap between the
number of deaths in an average year, after adjusting for population growth, and that in a
year with an extenuating circumstance, like a pandemic.

Excess deaths could be COVID-19 deaths that went unreported, but they might also be
due to indirect causes, such as an inability to access healthcare during lockdown, or due to
unrelated diseases. While more analysis and data will be needed to link the past year’s
excess deaths to COVID-19, researchers are increasingly relying on excess mortality
figures to understand the direct and indirect consequences of the virus.

In Chennai, the data show more than 74,000 deaths in 2020, which is 12,000 more than
the average of the five preceding years. That’s a 20 percent increase, despite the fact the
city’s official number of reported COVID-19 deaths for that time period was just 4,000.

In other places, public health experts have found even more novel data sources. In
Damascus, Syria, public pressure led to the mortuary office releasing data on deaths due
to all causes for a limited period of eight days between July 25 and August 1, 2020.
Watson, of Imperial College London, matched this information with data from a Facebook
group that uploads obituaries.

Using these data points, Watson and his colleagues calculated estimates for the entire
duration of the pandemic, from February up until September 2020, to arrive at a
staggering figure: Their model shows that only 1.25 percent of COVID-19 deaths in
Damascus had been reported as of September 2, 2020, and over 4,380 deaths might have
been missed through the official reporting system.

For Watson, the analysis was an eye-opener. “It completely changed how we understood
the scale of the pandemic,” he said. ”It was just shocking that you could have that amount
of death happen, that level of health system collapse, and how it didn’t get much media
attention.”

At first, he says, it was just hard to convince people that the officially reported death toll
was inaccurate. But he notes that he has found a sense of community in other researchers
who are also willing to question the official data and try various methods to arrive at
better estimates.

“Coming across other individuals who are coming at it with an understanding of actually
no, we all are missing a lot of what’s actually happened and we need to be doing much
better—actually going out there and finding that data—it’s definitely quite a bonding

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experience,” Watson says.

Government transparency
While acknowledging the benefits of these kinds of creative methods, Rukmini, the data
journalist from Chennai, emphasizes that the most accurate data need to be made public
by governments.

“While I am all for novel sources, and everyone working on this is doing it out of the spirit
of scientific inquiry and obviously working very hard for it, I am a bit concerned that
enough democratic pressure is not building for official statistics to be released,” she says.

Chinmay Tumbe, an economist who has studied past pandemics, thinks that relying on
government figures would mean that the actual toll would only be revealed in a few years,
when census data comes in. But that would be too late for governments, businesses, and
other policy-makers to use the data to influence the course of the pandemic.

Getting to the true death toll will eventually help in figuring out the true infection fatality
rate, the proportion of all infected people who died because of COVID-19. This value was
crucial in the early stage of the pandemic to understand how serious the implications
might be if the public health restrictions were not put in place and the virus was allowed
to spread freely in populations.

“However, it is very difficult to estimate correctly if we don't know the true number of
people who have died,” Watson says.

He explained that the infection fatality rate for COVID-19 has been a topic of debate.
Some people argue that it has been inflated, and they have used that position to
discourage lockdowns and other interventions. They also point to lower reported
mortality in lower-income settings as evidence that the pandemic is not as deadly as
initially thought. “Those arguments are blatantly incorrect, given the scale of
underreporting that has been observed,” he says.

That is why researchers need to continue to put pressure on governments to prioritize

accurate and timely data collection, Tumbe says. “I think it can easily become a poll issue.
And it might even become a manifesto issue—saying that, well, if you elect us, we will
form a committee with which we will count the deaths.”

Need for accountability

In some countries, the pressure on the government has worked. Recently, Peru revised its
official death count, which now stands at 185,380—almost three times the original figure
of 69,342. At 5,551 deaths per million people, Peru has the worst official death toll in the
world.

Convincing countries to accept a higher death count than what was officially reported is
not going to be an easy task. With the help of the advisory task force, the WHO has a plan,
says Asma. By November 2021, the WHO aims to standardize methodology for counting

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excess deaths, decide what parameters should be used, and have revised estimates for all
countries, which will be followed by consultations with representatives of governments.

“We are going to do it in a transparent way, so that is going to be very critical,” she says.
That way countries can work with the WHO to flag inconsistencies and land on the most
accurate estimates. She believes a dialogue will encourage countries to come to a
consensus on the true impact of the pandemic and acknowledge and release better data.

“If data is a public good, it should be open,” she says. “And that is the only way to hold
each other accountable.”

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How the water and sewage under your feet could end
up flooding your home (and what to do about it)
theconversation.com/how-the-water-and-sewage-under-your-feet-could-end-up-flooding-your-home-and-what-to-
do-about-it-158527

Ana Manero, Anneliese Sytsma, Margaret Shanafield, Sally Thompson

Recent flooding in the Sydney Basin pushed thousands from their homes and left others
facing enormous insurance costs.

These events show how traumatic and costly it can be to live in areas vulnerable to
disaster. Too often, socio-economically disadvantaged populations are disproportionately
affected.

Some flood dangers, however, can be far less visible – to planners, developers and home-
buyers. Sometimes, the danger comes from groundwater beneath the surface.

Earlier this year, for example, residents of the New South Wales town of Stuarts Point
were evacuated and decontaminated after sewage spilled into their streets, as septic tanks
filled with shallow groundwater.

And across Perth’s Swan Coastal Plain, groundwater damage to buildings, parks, roads
and piping has cost local residents millions of dollars in remedial works.

These problems are not inevitable. Our recent report shows how changes to urban
planning, building design and construction practices could reduce groundwater risks.
That means better outcomes for residents, developers, governments and the environment.

Urbanisation can cause the water table to rise

In many cities around the world, the water table is only a few metres or less below the
ground. Groundwater levels tend to naturally rise and fall with winter rains and summer
drying, as this UK video demonstrates:

However, urbanisation can cause the water table to rise above its “natural” level.

When we clear bush or farmland for housing, we reduce opportunities for plants to
intercept and soak up rainwater. More rain then infiltrates through the soil and causes
aquifers to fill up more quickly.

Balancing the short and long-term costs

The urban suburbs most affected by high groundwater are typically newer and cheaper.
To attract buyers, developers must keep prices low, but mitigating the risk of groundwater
flooding is expensive.

Developers sometimes import and install sand as “construction fill” to elevate the ground
level. They may also install drainage to control groundwater levels. These sorts of

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 The streaks of iron staining on the pavement in this Perth suburb show groundwater continues to
seep above ground level, even after remediation works. Authors' own image

measures can represent one-third of the price of developing a housing lot.

Such measures on their own, however, don’t solve the problem.

Our recent report for the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities
suggested ways to improve groundwater management on Perth’s Swan Coastal Plain.
These findings may help people in other areas dealing with similar problems.

Obstacles and opportunities for change

First, we identified three key obstacles:

the data needed to predict how groundwater will respond to new developments is
not always available

local authorities may struggle to find the human and technical resources to fully
assess proposals for managing groundwater

business-as-usual designs for new developments are not usually resilient enough to
cope when water tables rise.

Deeper problems are generated by the planning process. In Western Australia, high
groundwater and waterlogging does not preclude land from being zoned for urban
development.

Developers are also not required to address water management in detail until later stages
of planning, by which time they may have already made substantial investments. This
creates its own risks.

Water management plans at the subdivision level are addressed on a case-by-case basis by
local authorities. That makes it difficult to determine and reduce cumulative impacts on
flood risk at regional scales.

We also identified ways to improve housing development in high groundwater areas. For
example, groundwater could be drained, diverted and used for direct irrigation in the
drier months.

“Lightweight” or “highset” homes and floodable public open spaces could also help reduce
groundwater risks. Incentivising such improvements would benefit the public and the
environment.

Policy change is needed — and, in some places, already underway

There’s also an urgent need to update planning policies to consider groundwater flood
risk and how the cumulative impacts of development affect that risk. Fortunately, change
is already underway in many places.

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Such policies are being proposed in Sydney (via updates to a NSW government planning
document called the Flood Prone Land Package).

In Britain, the UK Environment Agency requires mapping of groundwater-flooding

regions, and discourages development in these areas.

In the United States, cities in the San Francisco Bay area are developing metrics to assess
vulnerability to groundwater flooding as sea levels rise. Pierce County in Washington state
is updating its flood management plan to address persistent groundwater flooding.

A legacy of liveable, resilient and equitable cities

Expanding our cities into environmentally vulnerable areas will only aggravate
environmental injustice, as disadvantaged populations are forced to pay the price of poor
planning policies.

Preventing such structural injustice requires planners be aware of all forms of

environmental risk, including from groundwater.

We must address flooding risks early in the development process, and apply best practices
from design to construction when high groundwater land is being developed.

This will require boldness from governments, consultancies, developers and financiers.
The payoff will be a legacy of liveable, resilient and equitable cities.

Greg Claydon, a member of the Board of Directors at CRC for Water Sensitive Cities,
contributed to this article. This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on
the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the
stories here.

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There aren’t enough trees in the world to offset
society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be
theconversation.com/there-arent-enough-trees-in-the-world-to-offset-societys-carbon-emissions-and-there-never-
will-be-158181

Bonnie Waring

One morning in 2009, I sat on a creaky bus winding its way up a mountainside in central Costa Rica, light-headed from diesel
fumes as I clutched my many suitcases. They contained thousands of test tubes and sample vials, a toothbrush, a waterproof
notebook and two changes of clothes.

I was on my way to La Selva Biological Station, where I was to spend several months studying the wet, lowland rainforest’s
response to increasingly common droughts. On either side of the narrow highway, trees bled into the mist like watercolours into
paper, giving the impression of an infinite primeval forest bathed in clouds.

As I gazed out of the window at the imposing scenery, I wondered how I could ever hope to understand a landscape so complex. I
knew that thousands of researchers across the world were grappling with the same questions, trying to understand the fate of
tropical forests in a rapidly changing world.

Our society asks so much of these fragile ecosystems, which control freshwater availability for millions of people and are home to
two thirds of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity. And increasingly, we have placed a new demand on these forests – to save us
from human-caused climate change.

Plants absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, transforming it into leaves, wood and roots. This everyday miracle has spurred hopes
that plants – particularly fast growing tropical trees – can act as a natural brake on climate change, capturing much of the CO₂
emitted by fossil fuel burning. Across the world, governments, companies and conservation charities have pledged to conserve or
plant massive numbers of trees.

This story is a collaboration between Conversation Insights and Apple News editors
The Insights team generates long-form journalism and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been
engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges.

But the fact is that there aren’t enough trees to offset society’s carbon emissions – and there never will be. I recently conducted a
review of the available scientific literature to assess how much carbon forests could feasibly absorb. If we absolutely maximised
the amount of vegetation all land on Earth could hold, we’d sequester enough carbon to offset about ten years of greenhouse gas
emissions at current rates. After that, there could be no further increase in carbon capture.

Yet the fate of our species is inextricably linked to the survival of forests and the biodiversity they contain. By rushing to plant
millions of trees for carbon capture, could we be inadvertently damaging the very forest properties that make them so vital to our
wellbeing? To answer this question, we need to consider not only how plants absorb CO₂, but also how they provide the sturdy
green foundations for ecosystems on land.

How plants fight climate change

Plants convert CO₂ gas into simple sugars in a process known as photosynthesis. These sugars are then used to build the plants’
living bodies. If the captured carbon ends up in wood, it can be locked away from the atmosphere for many decades. As plants
die, their tissues undergo decay and are incorporated into the soil.

While this process naturally releases CO₂ through the respiration (or breathing) of microbes that break down dead organisms,
some fraction of plant carbon can remain underground for decades or even centuries. Together, land plants and soils hold about
2,500 gigatonnes of carbon – about three times more than is held in the atmosphere.

Because plants (especially trees) are such excellent natural storehouses for carbon, it makes sense that increasing the abundance
of plants across the world could draw down atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.

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Plants need four basic ingredients to grow: light, CO₂, water and nutrients (like nitrogen and phosphorus, the same elements
present in plant fertiliser). Thousands of scientists across the world study how plant growth varies in relation to these four
ingredients, in order to predict how vegetation will respond to climate change.

This is a surprisingly challenging task, given that humans are simultaneously modifying so many aspects of the natural
environment by heating the globe, altering rainfall patterns, chopping large tracts of forest into tiny fragments and introducing
alien species where they don’t belong. There are also over 350,000 species of flowering plants on land and each one responds to
environmental challenges in unique ways.

Due to the complicated ways in which humans are altering the planet, there is a lot of scientific debate about the precise quantity
of carbon that plants can absorb from the atmosphere. But researchers are in unanimous agreement that land ecosystems have a
finite capacity to take up carbon.

If we ensure trees have enough water to drink, forests will grow tall and lush, creating shady canopies that starve smaller trees of
light. If we increase the concentration of CO₂ in the air, plants will eagerly absorb it – until they can no longer extract enough
fertiliser from the soil to meet their needs. Just like a baker making a cake, plants require CO₂, nitrogen and phosphorus in
particular ratios, following a specific recipe for life.

In recognition of these fundamental constraints, scientists estimate that the earth’s land ecosystems can hold enough additional
vegetation to absorb between 40 and 100 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. Once this additional growth is achieved (a
process which will take a number of decades), there is no capacity for additional carbon storage on land.

But our society is currently pouring CO₂ into the atmosphere at a rate of ten gigatonnes of carbon a year. Natural processes will
struggle to keep pace with the deluge of greenhouse gases generated by the global economy. For example, I calculated that a
single passenger on a round trip flight from Melbourne to New York City will emit roughly twice as much carbon (1600 kg C) as
is contained in an oak tree half a meter in diameter (750 kg C).

Peril and promise

Despite all these well recognised physical constraints on plant growth, there is a proliferating number of large scale efforts to
increase vegetation cover to mitigate the climate emergency – a so called “nature-based” climate solution. The vast majority of
these efforts focus on protecting or expanding forests, as trees contain many times more biomass than shrubs or grasses and
therefore represent greater carbon capture potential.

Yet fundamental misunderstandings about carbon capture by land ecosystems can have devastating consequences, resulting in
losses of biodiversity and an increase in CO₂ concentrations. This seems like a paradox – how can planting trees negatively
impact the environment?

The answer lies in the subtle complexities of carbon capture in natural ecosystems. To avoid environmental damage, we must
refrain from establishing forests where they naturally don’t belong, avoid “perverse incentives” to cut down existing forest in
order to plant new trees, and consider how seedlings planted today might fare over the next several decades.

Before undertaking any expansion of forest habitat, we must ensure that trees are planted in the right place because not all
ecosystems on land can or should support trees. Planting trees in ecosystems that are normally dominated by other types of
vegetation often fails to result in long term carbon sequestration.

One particularly illustrative example comes from Scottish peatlands – vast swathes of land where the low-lying vegetation
(mostly mosses and grasses) grows in constantly soggy, moist ground. Because decomposition is very slow in the acidic and
waterlogged soils, dead plants accumulate over very long periods of time, creating peat. It’s not just the vegetation that is
preserved: peat bogs also mummify so-called “bog bodies” – the nearly intact remains of men and women who died millennia
ago. In fact, UK peatlands contain 20 times more carbon than found in the nation’s forests.

But in the late 20th century, some Scottish bogs were drained for tree planting. Drying the soils allowed tree seedlings to
establish, but also caused the decay of the peat to speed up. Ecologist Nina Friggens and her colleagues at the University of
Exeter estimated that the decomposition of drying peat released more carbon than the growing trees could absorb. Clearly,
peatlands can best safeguard the climate when they are left to their own devices.

The same is true of grasslands and savannahs, where fires are a natural part of the landscape and often burn trees that are
planted where they don’t belong. This principle also applies to Arctic tundras, where the native vegetation is covered by snow
throughout the winter, reflecting light and heat back to space. Planting tall, dark-leaved trees in these areas can increase
absorption of heat energy, and lead to local warming.

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But even planting trees in forest habitats can lead to negative environmental outcomes. From the perspective of both carbon
sequestration and biodiversity, all forests are not equal – naturally established forests contain more species of plants and
animals than plantation forests. They often hold more carbon, too. But policies aimed at promoting tree planting can
unintentionally incentivise deforestation of well established natural habitats.

A recent high-profile example concerns the Mexican government’s Sembrando Vida programme, which provides direct payments
to landowners for planting trees. The problem? Many rural landowners cut down well established older forest to plant seedlings.
This decision, while quite sensible from an economic point of view, has resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of hectares of
mature forest.

This example demonstrates the risks of a narrow focus on trees as carbon absorption machines. Many well meaning
organisations seek to plant the trees which grow the fastest, as this theoretically means a higher rate of CO₂ “drawdown” from
the atmosphere.

Yet from a climate perspective, what matters is not how quickly a tree can grow, but how much carbon it contains at maturity,
and how long that carbon resides in the ecosystem. As a forest ages, it reaches what ecologists call a “steady state” – this is when
the amount of carbon absorbed by the trees each year is perfectly balanced by the CO₂ released through the breathing of the
plants themselves and the trillions of decomposer microbes underground.

This phenomenon has led to an erroneous perception that old forests are not useful for climate mitigation because they are no
longer growing rapidly and sequestering additional CO₂. The misguided “solution” to the issue is to prioritise tree planting ahead
of the conservation of already established forests. This is analogous to draining a bathtub so that the tap can be turned on full
blast: the flow of water from the tap is greater than it was before – but the total capacity of the bath hasn’t changed. Mature
forests are like bathtubs full of carbon. They are making an important contribution to the large, but finite, quantity of carbon
that can be locked away on land, and there is little to be gained by disturbing them.

What about situations where fast growing forests are cut down every few decades and replanted, with the extracted wood used
for other climate-fighting purposes? While harvested wood can be a very good carbon store if it ends up in long lived products
(like houses or other buildings), surprisingly little timber is used in this way.

Similarly, burning wood as a source of biofuel may have a positive climate impact if this reduces total consumption of fossil fuels.
But forests managed as biofuel plantations provide little in the way of protection for biodiversity and some research questions
the benefits of biofuels for the climate in the first place.

Fertilise a whole forest

Scientific estimates of carbon capture in land ecosystems depend on how those systems respond to the mounting challenges they
will face in the coming decades. All forests on Earth – even the most pristine – are vulnerable to warming, changes in rainfall,
increasingly severe wildfires and pollutants that drift through the Earth’s atmospheric currents.

Some of these pollutants, however, contain lots of nitrogen (plant fertiliser) which could potentially give the global forest a
growth boost. By producing massive quantities of agricultural chemicals and burning fossil fuels, humans have massively
increased the amount of “reactive” nitrogen available for plant use. Some of this nitrogen is dissolved in rainwater and reaches
the forest floor, where it can stimulate tree growth in some areas.

As a young researcher fresh out of graduate school, I wondered whether a type of under-studied ecosystem, known as seasonally
dry tropical forest, might be particularly responsive to this effect. There was only one way to find out: I would need to fertilise a
whole forest.

Working with my postdoctoral adviser, the ecologist Jennifer Powers, and expert botanist Daniel Pérez Avilez, I outlined an area
of the forest about as big as two football fields and divided it into 16 plots, which were randomly assigned to different fertiliser
treatments. For the next three years (2015-2017) the plots became among the most intensively studied forest fragments on
Earth. We measured the growth of each individual tree trunk with specialised, hand-built instruments called dendrometers.

We used baskets to catch the dead leaves that fell from the trees and installed mesh bags in the ground to track the growth of
roots, which were painstakingly washed free of soil and weighed. The most challenging aspect of the experiment was the
application of the fertilisers themselves, which took place three times a year. Wearing raincoats and goggles to protect our skin
against the caustic chemicals, we hauled back-mounted sprayers into the dense forest, ensuring the chemicals were evenly
applied to the forest floor while we sweated under our rubber coats.

Unfortunately, our gear didn’t provide any protection against angry wasps, whose nests were often concealed in overhanging
branches. But, our efforts were worth it. After three years, we could calculate all the leaves, wood and roots produced in each plot
and assess carbon captured over the study period. We found that most trees in the forest didn’t benefit from the fertilisers –
instead, growth was strongly tied to the amount of rainfall in a given year.

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This suggests that nitrogen pollution won’t boost tree growth in these forests as long as droughts continue to intensify. To make
the same prediction for other forest types (wetter or drier, younger or older, warmer or cooler) such studies will need to be
repeated, adding to the library of knowledge developed through similar experiments over the decades. Yet researchers are in a
race against time. Experiments like this are slow, painstaking, sometimes backbreaking work and humans are changing the face
of the planet faster than the scientific community can respond.

Humans need healthy forests

Supporting natural ecosystems is an important tool in the arsenal of strategies we will need to combat climate change. But land
ecosystems will never be able to absorb the quantity of carbon released by fossil fuel burning. Rather than be lulled into false
complacency by tree planting schemes, we need to cut off emissions at their source and search for additional strategies to remove
the carbon that has already accumulated in the atmosphere.

Does this mean that current campaigns to protect and expand forest are a poor idea? Emphatically not. The protection and
expansion of natural habitat, particularly forests, is absolutely vital to ensure the health of our planet. Forests in temperate and
tropical zones contain eight out of every ten species on land, yet they are under increasing threat. Nearly half of our planet’s
habitable land is devoted to agriculture, and forest clearing for cropland or pasture is continuing apace.

Meanwhile, the atmospheric mayhem caused by climate change is intensifying wildfires, worsening droughts and systematically
heating the planet, posing an escalating threat to forests and the wildlife they support. What does that mean for our species?
Again and again, researchers have demonstrated strong links between biodiversity and so-called “ecosystem services” – the
multitude of benefits the natural world provides to humanity.

Carbon capture is just one ecosystem service in an incalculably long list. Biodiverse ecosystems provide a dizzying array of
pharmaceutically active compounds that inspire the creation of new drugs. They provide food security in ways both direct (think
of the millions of people whose main source of protein is wild fish) and indirect (for example, a large fraction of crops are
pollinated by wild animals).

Natural ecosystems and the millions of species that inhabit them still inspire technological developments that revolutionise
human society. For example, take the polymerase chain reaction (“PCR”) that allows crime labs to catch criminals and your local
pharmacy to provide a COVID test. PCR is only possible because of a special protein synthesised by a humble bacteria that lives
in hot springs.

As an ecologist, I worry that a simplistic perspective on the role of forests in climate mitigation will inadvertently lead to their
decline. Many tree planting efforts focus on the number of saplings planted or their initial rate of growth – both of which are
poor indicators of the forest’s ultimate carbon storage capacity and even poorer metric of biodiversity. More importantly,
viewing natural ecosystems as “climate solutions” gives the misleading impression that forests can function like an infinitely
absorbent mop to clean up the ever increasing flood of human caused CO₂ emissions.

Luckily, many big organisations dedicated to forest expansion are incorporating ecosystem health and biodiversity into their
metrics of success. A little over a year ago, I visited an enormous reforestation experiment on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico,
operated by Plant-for-the-Planet – one of the world’s largest tree planting organisations. After realising the challenges inherent
in large scale ecosystem restoration, Plant-for-the-Planet has initiated a series of experiments to understand how different
interventions early in a forest’s development might improve tree survival.

But that is not all. Led by Director of Science Leland Werden, researchers at the site will study how these same practices can
jump-start the recovery of native biodiversity by providing the ideal environment for seeds to germinate and grow as the forest
develops. These experiments will also help land managers decide when and where planting trees benefits the ecosystem and
where forest regeneration can occur naturally.

Viewing forests as reservoirs for biodiversity, rather than simply storehouses of carbon, complicates decision making and may
require shifts in policy. I am all too aware of these challenges. I have spent my entire adult life studying and thinking about the
carbon cycle and I too sometimes can’t see the forest for the trees. One morning several years ago, I was sitting on the rainforest
floor in Costa Rica measuring CO₂ emissions from the soil – a relatively time intensive and solitary process.

As I waited for the measurement to finish, I spotted a strawberry poison dart frog – a tiny, jewel-bright animal the size of my
thumb – hopping up the trunk of a nearby tree. Intrigued, I watched her progress towards a small pool of water held in the
leaves of a spiky plant, in which a few tadpoles idly swam. Once the frog reached this miniature aquarium, the tiny tadpoles (her
children, as it turned out) vibrated excitedly, while their mother deposited unfertilised eggs for them to eat. As I later learned,
frogs of this species (Oophaga pumilio) take very diligent care of their offspring and the mother’s long journey would be repeated
every day until the tadpoles developed into frogs.

It occurred to me, as I packed up my equipment to return to the lab, that thousands of such small dramas were playing out
around me in parallel. Forests are so much more than just carbon stores. They are the unknowably complex green webs that bind
together the fates of millions of known species, with millions more still waiting to be discovered. To survive and thrive in a future

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of dramatic global change, we will have to respect that tangled web and our place in it.

For you: more from our Insights series:

Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap

How we discovered a hidden world of fungi inside the world’s biggest seed bank

Rewilding: rare birds return when livestock grazing has stopped

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based
news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

5/5
Biden vows to slash US emissions by half to meet
‘existential crisis of our time’
theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/22/us-emissions-climate-crisis-2030-biden

Oliver Milman April 22, 2021

Joe Biden has called upon the world to confront the climate crisis and “overcome the
existential crisis of our time”, as he unveiled an ambitious new pledge to slash US planet-
heating emissions in half by the end of the decade.

Addressing a virtual gathering of more than 40 world leaders in an Earth Day climate
summit on Thursday, Biden warned that “time is short” to address dangerous global
heating and urged other countries to do more.

Shortly before the start of the summit, the White House said the US will aim to reduce its
greenhouse gas emissions by between 50% and 52% by 2030, based on 2005 levels. Biden
said the new US goal will set it on the path to net zero emissions by 2050 and that other
countries now needed to also raise their ambition.

Greta Thunberg urges House panel to ‘listen to and act on the science’ at US climate
hearing – live

“Particularly those of us that represent the world’s largest economies, we have to step up,”
the US president said in a speech opening the gathering.

“Let’s run that race, win a more sustainable future than we have now, overcome the
existential crisis of our time.”

Biden said a shift to clean energy will create “millions of good paying union jobs” and that
countries that act on the climate crisis will “reap the economic benefits of the clean energy
boom that’s coming”.

He said: “This is a moral imperative, an economic imperative, a moment of peril, but also
a moment of extraordinary possibilities. Time is short but I believe we can do this and I
believe we will do this.”

The Biden administration has also outlined a new plan to double the amount of funding
the US gives to developing countries struggling to adapt to the ravages of drought,
flooding and other climate impacts.

Other wealthy countries and the private sector should shift financing away from fossil
fuels towards clean energy, Biden said. “This moment demands urgency – good ideas and
good intentions aren’t good enough,” the president said. “We need to ensure the financing
is there, public and private, to meet the moment on climate change and help us seize the
opportunity for good jobs, strong economies and a more secure world.”

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A procession of world leaders then followed Biden, with Xi Jinping, president of China,
urging countries to be “committed to harmony between man and nature” and stating that
China will peak its emissions more quickly than other major economies. Boris Johnson,
the British prime minister, stressed the importance of financial aid for countries most
vulnerable to the climate crisis and said that cutting emissions wasn’t just an “expensive
politically correct green act of bunny hugging”.

Substantive new announcements came from Japan, with the prime minister, Yoshihide
Suga, revealing it will slash emissions 46% by 2030, based on 2013 levels, an increase on
its previous commitment. South Korea, meanwhile, committed to not financing any more
overseas coal projects.

Canada also upped its goal, to a 40% to 45% reduction in emissions by 2030, based on
2005 levels.

The new US target, to be formally submitted to the UN, represents a stark break from the
climate denialist presidency of Donald Trump and will “unmistakably communicate that
the United States is back”, according to a White House official who was briefed on the
emissions goal. “The US isn’t going to wait. The costs of delay are too great and our nation
is resolved to act right now,” the administration official added.

The US is scrambling to regain international credibility after Trump pulled the country
out of the Paris climate agreement. But the Biden administration said it has already
helped secure improved emissions reductions from Canada, Argentina and Japan,
meaning that, along with new pledges by countries such as the UK, governments that
oversee half of the global economy have targets consistent with stopping the planet’s
average temperature from rising above 1.5C, a key Paris goal to avoid disastrous climate
impacts.

China, the world’s largest carbon polluter, has expressed some skepticism over the US’
return to the climate fold, but the White House is confident America retains its clout.
“This new target gives us significant leverage to push for climate action abroad,” said the
White House official. “Every ton of reductions achieved in the United States has
multiplier effect in inspiring climate action overseas.”

Faced with the task of coming up with an ambitious but feasible goal, the new US target
does not match that of the UK and the EU but is still among the strongest pledges to date.
António Guterres, the secretary general of the UN, said that a 50% reduction by the US
was needed to help stop the planet slipping into a climate “abyss”, with scientists warning
the world must slash emissions in half by 2030 if it is to curb calamitous heatwaves,
wildfires, floods and societal unrest.

“This is a groundbreaking step for our country,” said Al Gore, the former US vice-
president.

The Biden administration has reiterated it wants the US electricity grid to run 100% on
clean sources such as solar and wind by 2035 in order to meet its goals and has framed an
explosion in renewable energy and electric car production as a boon to American jobs. It

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has shied away, however, from mandating all vehicles sold by 2035 be zero emission
models, despite a letter from the governors of a dozen states, including California and
New York, urging the US president to do so.

“It is very ambitious, even if one considers that US greenhouse gas emissions have
actually been declining already since 2007,” said Flavio Lehner, a climate scientist at
Cornell University, of the new US target. “Is this new pledge enough? Probably not, but
this also depends on what other major emitters will do this decade.”

The summit will feature a parade of leaders including the German chancellor, Angela
Merkel, , Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of
India, and Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia.

The gathering will be focused on themes such as clean energy innovation and the
importance of oceans and forests, with speakers including Pope Francis and Bill Gates,
the Microsoft co-founder. A constellation of other names surround the event, with Greta
Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, telling a US congressional committee that
ongoing subsidies for fossil fuels are a “disgrace” while the Dalai Lama, along with 100
other Nobel prize winners, is calling for a phase out of fossil fuels.

The summit will be just the first in a series of gatherings, including the G7 and G20, that
will take place ahead of crucial UN climate talks in Scotland later this year. John Kerry,
Biden’s climate envoy, said he hoped 2021 will see countries embrace a shift to clean
energy in a transformation that rivals the space age or Industrial Revolution. “This is the
greatest moment of transformation of our economy in our lifetime,” Kerry told the
Washington Post. “We need to seize it.”

Some climate activists have said Biden needs to do even more, however.

“While many will applaud the president’s commitment to cut US emissions by at least half
by 2030, we have a responsibility to tell the truth – it is nowhere near enough,” said Evan
Weber, the political director and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement climate group.

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If it’s safe, dump it in Tokyo. We in the Pacific don’t
want Japan’s nuclear wastewater
theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/26/if-its-safe-dump-it-in-tokyo-we-in-the-pacific-dont-want-japans-nuclear-
wastewater

April 26, 2021

Earlier this month, the Japanese government announced plans to discharge 1m tonnes of radioactive wastewater
accruing since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 into the Pacific Ocean.

To Pacific peoples, who have carried the disproportionate human cost of nuclearism in our region, this is yet
another act of catastrophic and irreversible trans-boundary harm that our region has not consented to.

While Japan’s plan is for the water to be diluted first and discharged over the course of about 30 years, and the
Japanese government has tried its hardest to convince the wider public of the treated water’s safety through the
use of green mascots and backing from American scientists, Pacific peoples are once again calling it for what it
is: an unjust act.

Fukushima: Japan announces it will dump contaminated water into sea

Read more

“We need to remind Japan and other nuclear states of our Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement
slogan: if it is safe, dump it in Tokyo, test it in Paris, and store it in Washington, but keep our Pacific nuclear-
free,” said Motarilavoa Hilda Lini, Vanuatu stateswoman and veteran activist of the Nuclear Free and
Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement, after Japan’s announcement. “We are people of the ocean, we must
stand up and protect it.”

Many in the Pacific have lived experience of nuclear harm with the continuing irradiation of our environments,
while survivors and their descendants continue to experience harrowing maladies such as lymphatic cancers,
thyroid and reproductive health issues.

Since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations in 1945, 315 nuclear tests have been undertaken across the
Marshall Islands, Australia, Kiribati and Maohi Nui (French Polynesia). All of which were, at the time, described
by nuclear nations to be scientifically sound and safe.

Indeed, both Japan and Pacific states share the trauma of nuclear testing. However, the Japanese government
has since enthusiastically embraced the nuclear power industry.

One would think that Japan’s proposal to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is something novel but
there is a history of precedent. The shady practice was virtually a global norm in the past for the likes of nuclear
nations like Japan, America and Europe. Things came to a head in 1979, when Japan’s clandestine proposal to
dump nuclear waste in neighbouring Northern Marianas was exposed. Japan severely underestimated a united
furore from political leaders, non-governmental groups and grassroots activists from the Northern Marianas,
Micronesia and the Pacific.

On Hiroshima Day in Japan 1980 before the World Conference Against the Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, an
activist from the northern Pacific country of Palau memorably asked the Japanese audience: “Are the Japanese
going to change from nuclear victims to nuclear assailants?”; “Are you going to dump your own garbage in other
people’s back yards?”; “Are you really going to throw dangerous nuclear wastes in the Pacific which will harm
not only us but our children and the following generations?”. These questions rocked the conscience of those
from Japanese civil society and soon bonds of solidarity were formed.

But these questions are still relevant today, as Japan prepares once again to dump nuclear waste material into
the Pacific Ocean.

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Pacific peoples at all levels are protesting the move. Dame Meg Taylor made a statement on behalf of the Pacific
Islands Forum, the key regional body, calling for Japan to hold off discharging the water until consultations and
an independent review took place.

And we, as youth activists from the region, are concerned about the potential harm this will have on the health of
our ocean, which is the economic, spiritual and cultural heart of Pacific countries.

The Japanese government intends to starting dump the nuclear wastewater in two years from now. We ask them
to reflect on our joint nuclear legacy and listen to their Pacific neighbours. We are saying loudly and clearly: our
ocean is not your dumping ground.

Joey Tau is a campaigner with the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG). He is a Pacific media and
communications specialist.

Talei Luscia Mangioni is a Youngsolwara activist and a PhD candidate at the Australian National University.

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Hedgehog
animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/hedgehog

CLASS: Mammalia (Mammals)

ORDER: Erinaceomorpha
FAMILY: Erinaceidae
GENUS: 5
SPECIES: 16

ABOUT

A pincushion with legs: The hedgehog is a short and stout little mammal that is
sometimes called a pincushion with legs! Most mammals have fur or hair that is
somewhat flexible and soft. But the hair on the back of a hedgehog is a thick layer of
spikes (or modified hairs) known as quills. These quills are made of keratin, the same
stuff our hair and fingernails are made of.

Hedgehogs can be white or light brown to black, with several shades found in bands along
their quills. Their belly, face, and neck are covered in coarse hair. Some hedgehogs have a
dark brown or black mask across their eyes. These interesting critters have small but
powerful legs and big feet with five toes each. The exception is the four-toed hedgehog
that has—you guessed it!—four toes. Curved claws make hedgehogs amazing diggers. A
long snout with a wet nose gives them an excellent sense of smell. Their ears are large
compared to body size, giving the spiky little creatures a good sense of hearing.

Is that a porcupine? No! The hedgehog's closest relatives are moonrats, shrews, and
moles. People often confuse porcupines and hedgehogs because the two share a common
characteristic: quills!

The hedgehog’s best defense against predators is its spiky outer armor. With about 3,000
to 5,000 quills covering its back, the hedgehog can protect itself from predators that think
it would make a tasty snack. When threatened, the hedgehog raises its quills upright in a
crisscross pattern, making its body pointy and sharp. It uses its belly muscles, back
muscles, and extra skin to tuck in its head, legs, and tail to curl into a complete ball,
protecting its soft belly. The solid ball of spikes is hard for predators to open.

Ancient Roman and Chinese folklore tell tales of hedgehogs carrying fruit on their quills.
Although fruit, leaves, and twigs may get stuck on one of these “pincushions,” hedgehogs
do not use their quills to carry food. And unlike the hedgehogs from the book Alice in
Wonderland or the popular video game “Sonic the Hedgehog,” they cannot roll along
when curled into a ball.

Perhaps the biggest myth of all is that a hedgehog can shoot its quills! Can you shoot the
hair out of your head? Just like your hair, a hedgehog’s quills can fall out or break off, but
the hedgehog cannot shoot its quills to defend itself.

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In Europe, people consider hedgehogs to be friends of backyards and gardens. These
hedgehogs are often found in flower beds, vegetable gardens, and compost heaps. Some
gardeners make nests of straw, hay, or boxes to attract hedgehogs. In turn, the hedgehogs
eat snails, slugs, and other garden pests.

HABITAT AND DIET

The hedgehog can live in many different habitats, from desert to forest and beyond! The
desert-dwelling types live in areas that receive little rainfall. Others live throughout Asia.
European hedgehogs are widespread in Europe, from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia.
In Africa, hedgehogs live in savannas, forests, and even city streets, where they waddle
along, foraging for insects.

Hedgehogs live on the ground, never in trees. They like to live alone and may be
territorial. Some hedgehogs dig burrows in the soil up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) deep.
Others prefer to make nests with dead leaves, grasses, and branches. Desert hedgehogs
hide between boulders or burrow into the sand to escape the desert heat. In Asia, long-
eared hedgehogs often move into burrows left by turtles, foxes, gerbils, and otters.

Hedgehogs are insectivores. But they can also eat other ground-dwelling creatures such as
slugs and snails. The European hedgehog dines on earthworms, beetles, millipedes,
caterpillars, slugs, snails, earwigs, and birds’ eggs and chicks. Some hedgies, like those in
Africa's deserts, even eat dead wildlife, small rodents and snakes, and scorpions. The
menu of a South African hedgehog includes all the above as well as fungi, frogs, lizards,
termites, grasshoppers, and moths.

Don’t forget the veggies! Some hedgies include fruit, roots, grass, leaves, and seeds along
with their creepy-crawly main course.

Hedgehogs at the San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Park eat a well-balanced diet of
vegetables, cat kibble, pellets made for insectivores, crickets, and mealworms.

Hedgehogs are active at night. They dig, chew, and forage through the darkest hours.
Although they make amazing animal ambassadors for the San Diego Zoo, hedgehogs don’t
make good pets. In fact, it is illegal to have a hedgehog as a pet in many places.
Hedgehogs have teeth—up to 44 of them, and, like any wildlife with teeth, they can bite!
They can also carry parasites on their quills. Hedgehogs are wondrous creatures, but
remember that they just aren’t as cuddly as a dog or a cat.

FAMILY LIFE

Hooray for hoglets! Baby hedgehogs are called hoglets or piglets. An adult female usually
gives birth to four to seven young once or twice a year. Newborns look like chubby white
caterpillars. They do have quills at birth, but these are soft and flexible. During birth, the
quills are covered by puffy, fluid-filled skin to avoid hurting the mother. Within a day, the
hoglet’s skin shrinks, and about 150 white quills appear.

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At a week old, hoglets may push each other over the milk supply. By the time they are a
month old, they have opened their eyes, and their back has dense, dark quills. The mother
takes her hoglets on foraging trips, showing them how to find food.

If a young hedgehog is separated from its mother, it may make a twittering or a whistle
sound to let Mom know where to find it. Adult hedgies squeal and grunt when they are
excited or afraid. They also grunt while foraging.

Depending on the species, it takes 6 to 13 weeks for the hoglets to be weaned. When they
are ready, they leave their mother to begin a new life as a solo hedgie.

CONSERVATION

Although not currently listed as Threatened or Endangered, many hedgehogs face

challenges. Hugh’s hedgehog Mesechinus hughi (also known as the Shaanxi hedgehog) is
a native of China. It is on the decline as some people use them for food and medicine. The
Daurian hedgehog Mesechinus dauuricus has lost habitat in much of China, Mongolia,
and Russia as people increase mining activities, graze livestock, and set out poison to kill
local rodents. The Indian hedgehog Paraechinus micropus, found in India and Pakistan,
is losing some of its range as farms expand into its desert habitat. The Madras
hedgehog Paraechinus nudiventris of southern India suffers habitat loss due to the
collection of wood for fuel, farmland increases, and the quick growth of cities.

Still, the good news is that most hedgehogs have stable populations and are not at great
risk. Yet hedgehogs will need our help someday. More research should be done on these
amazing little mammals. The more we know about them, the better we can protect them.

By supporting San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, you are our ally in saving and protecting
wildlife worldwide.

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Why some bike shares work and others don't
bbc.com/future/article/20210112-the-vast-bicycle-graveyards-of-china

By Hope Ngo13th January 2021

Bicycle share schemes have had huge success in some cities and flopped spectacularly in
others – what is it that makes or breaks a bike share?

A set of iconic photos from 2017 show brightly coloured fields which, at first glance, look
like meadows filled with flowers in full bloom. It takes a while to register that the images
aren't of verdant fields, but ones filled with bicycles: hundreds and thousands of two-
wheelers, stacked end-to-end in what came to be called China's bicycle graveyards.

The fields were the remains of a countrywide boom-to-bust bike share scheme. The
scheme had captured the world's imagination for its innovative use of technology
involving a smart digital lock and GPS. The digital lock innovation was a game changer for
China, which was once known as the "kingdom of bicycles", before the rapid growth of its
automobile industry.

The bike share schemes presented a cost-effective alternative solution to traveling in cars,
easing traffic congestion in the process. Ofo, one of the country's most well-known bike
share companies, had wanted to present a technology-driven transport solution that could
serve the needs of people who wanted to travel short distances. They had aimed to match
up the existing number of bikes in service with the number of people who needed them.
The scheme was a hit with investors seeking green transport solutions for China. Ofo was
not the only one to gain interest – its competitors such as Mobike and Bluegogo also
garnered substantial interest from venture capitalists and investors.

But while these firms started off with healthy balance sheets, there was no regulatory
framework under which these bikes might be gradually introduced and integrated into
China's existing public transport system. A sudden influx of what amounted to millions of
bikes inundated China's urban centres. The lack of regulation also allowed copycat bike
share companies to spring up unchecked, so that at one point, there were more than 40
dockless bike share companies operating around the country, leading to an oversupply of
shared bicycles.

The sudden growth of the industry meant that China's biggest cities including Shanghai
and Hangzhou had to create their own guidelines which were meant to ring fence its
players, because by this point, bikeshare bikes were being vandalised, stolen or simply
ditched. At one point, more than 3,000 of these two-wheelers were reportedly found in
rivers in southern China after a clean-up operation. Bikes are still being uncovered in
rivers and vegetation to this day.

The graveyards where excess bicycles and those causing a nuisance were dumped became
a massive recycling problem. The digital locks were complex to recycle, with some of the
bikes even came with their own micro-sized solar panels, which would charge the bike's

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batteries when the two-wheelers were not being used, says Kurt Kamminer, a US-based
collector of shared bikes. There were other challenges for recycling too, including the
durable solid tyres that were hard to separate from the frames.

A multitude of choice of bike shares in large Chinese cities led to a surplus of bikes, many
of which ended up abandoned, vandalised or confiscated (Credit: Getty Images)

Some of the unlocked bikes have since been donated to areas hit by natural disasters
outside of China, Kamminer notes. Though whether the vast majority were used enough
to offset their carbon footprint is unknown. One group of Chinese researchers estimated
the carbon footprint of a shared bike at 34.56kg of CO2 over its lifetime, meaning a bike
would have to be used for nearly two years before it led to net carbon savings.

"The first wave of dockless systems were completely privatised and unregulated, and most
governments agree [at] this point that this was a mistake," Jemilah Magnusson, global
communications director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy,
headquartered in the US. "It was never a system at all, but a competition between private
companies who were trying to dominate the market."

Magnusson notes that despite the "cautionary tale" of the early forays into dockless
schemes, many bike share schemes are effective and sustainable. Some of the more
established bike share systems that have been around for much longer prove it works.
With these bikes in use for longer, they have a greater chance to save emissions.

One of the more successful is New York's Citi Bike, which launched in 2013. By 2015,
bikers had taken more than 10 million rides – the highest annual rate for any bike share
programme. Another example of a successful bike share system can be found in Taiwan,
where a number of cities have partnered with the world's biggest bike manufacturer
Giant, to run YouBike, and which is now available in several cities across the island.

Many former share bikes ended up as urban waste in cities around the world (Credit:
Getty Images)

So what is it that makes one bike share scheme work, and another fail? And how can the
pitfalls of bicycle mass graveyards be avoided in other urban areas?

Several factors have a big influence on success or failure of a bike share scheme, write
Derlie Mateo-Babiano, senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Melbourne,
and her colleagues at the universities of Queensland and Melbourne.

The first is the physical geography of the city in question. The first is obvious to anyone
who has cycled: hills. Hills aren't conducive to broad uptake of cycling schemes and can
cause returned bikes to bunch in low-lying areas. Using e-bikes are one solution to this,
the researchers note, or paying people extra to return a bike at the top of a hill. In a 2016
study, Mateo-Babiano and colleagues found that accounting for such factors – along with
a city's typical temperature and weather – can help choosing the right sites for bicycle
distribution, and hence the uptake and success of the scheme.

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Another big determinant of a share scheme's success is how well it integrates with existing
transport – something that was lacking in the first large initiatives. Mateo-Babiano found
that the length of off-road cycle lane leading away from a cycle station strongly affected
the usage of bikes – in other words, the better the infrastructure for cyclists, the more use
the bikes would get. Getting such infrastructure right has been the key to making cycling
in general "irresistible" in countries such as the Netherlands and Germany.

Close cooperation between operators and regulators also helps, particularly in a market
like China – where more mature, stable bike sharing companies have already made an
industry comeback. These new, regulated companies are already reaping the renewed
interest in cycling due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has made people averse to
buses, trains and other forms of mass transit where social distancing can be challenging.
The early difficulties for China's first large bike share schemes weren't that there was no
need for such a system, but with flaws in the early business models, Winston Ma Wenyan,
former managing director of China's sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment
Corporation, writes in an article for the World Economic Forum.

There are several factors that make a bike share more likely to be successful – including
the availability of cycle lanes near bicycle stations (Credit: Getty Images)

Magnusson is optimistic about the future of bikes and bike sharing. "All regions would
benefit from increased cycling, especially if it means fewer car trips." The region with the
greatest potential for such schemes is Africa, she says. One of the continent's early bike
share schemes came in 2016, when Medina Bike launched in Morocco, with more bike
share firms popping up in South Africa and Rwanda, among others.

"African cities are among the most rapidly growing in the world, they have high density,
low car ownership, and a huge need," says Magnusson. "If these cities were to design for
cyclists, with safe routes for cycling everywhere, and a bike share system to increase
cycling access, they could avoid the damage that a major increase in cars brings, as well as
improving access and quality of life for everyone."

But, she notes, what is important is that cities "create a quality system of bikes and bike
infrastructure that provides a real alternative to other, more carbon-intensive modes.
Because, if the fields of defunct bicycles of 2017 have taught us anything, it's that no bike
share scheme can work in a city that isn't prepared for it.

Mexico has more species of oak tree than any other country. In recent years, the saplings
of one of its most vulnerable and well-loved oak species have disappeared.

By the banks of a seasonal riverbed in north-western Mexico, a collection of towering,

gnarled oak trees stand guard. These trees descend from ancestors that lived more than
50 million years ago and their species has faced, and survived, any number of challenges.

Today fewer than 5,000 of them are still standing, and they are found only in the Sierra
La Laguna mountains, in the state of Baja California Sur. These trees, at the tip of the Baja
California peninsula, are the last living populations of Quercus brandegeei, a species of

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oak known locally as "encino arroyero" (stream oak) due to its restricted habitat along the
banks of streams.

"They are survivors, those trees are heroes," says Silvia Álvarez Clare, a Costa Rican
ecologist who is the director of the Global Tree Program of the Morton Arboretum, a
botanical garden and conservation center in Illinois.

Mexico is home to more species of oak than any country in the world, though many of
them are threatened. In the case of the arroyo oak, as it is known, the species now faces a
particularly troubling problem. Though plenty of trees aged more than 100 years can be
found, locals noticed that in recent years there had been no seedlings that have sprouted
from their acorns in sight. For some reason, the trees had simply stopped reproducing.

The arroyo oak likely had a much wider range in the past, but is now restricted to a small
pocket of Mexico (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

Álvarez Clare describes the trees as "a community of arroyo oak pensioners, because we
haven't been able to find juveniles. And in a healthy population of trees there are a lot of
young individuals".

Mexican and US scientists, alongside local communities, are now seeking not only to solve
this mystery of the missing stream oak saplings, but to save this iconic species from
extinction.

Global but vulnerable

"It is estimated that there are between 400 and 600 species of oaks in the world," explains
Maricela Rodríguez, a Mexican botanist specialising in oaks and the coordinator for
Mexico and Central America of the Global Consortium for the Conservation of Oaks
(GCCO).

Some scientists conservatively estimate there to be "a figure of 435 species, of which 168
are found in Mexico", says Rodríguez. "In other words, 38% of the total are found in this
part of the world. Other regions with high oak species richness are South East Asia, which
is home to 140 species, and the United States with 91 species."

The Red List of Oaks 2020, a study published by the Morton Arboretum and the Botanic
Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), indicates that at least one third of oak
species are endangered. And for about another 105 species, there is not enough
information to tell how the population is doing.

Arroyo oaks provide rare shade in hot weather, but this can lead to its own problems for
the trees' acorns (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

"I find it incredible. They are such rare, new [to science] or unknown species that we don't
even know if they are threatened or not," says Álvarez Clare.

In the case of Mexico, the Red List estimates that 32 of the country's oak species are in
danger of extinction. And among the most threatened is the arroyo oak.

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A haven in Mexico

Part of the puzzle lies in the species' limited range, far from its evolutionary relatives. The
most closely related species to the stream oak is Quercus fusiformis, which is found in
Texas, Oklahoma and north-east Mexico, says botanist Allen Coombes, who curates
scientific collections at the Botanic Garden of the University of Puebla in Mexico.

So how did the stream oak come to survive only at the tip of the Baja California
peninsula?

"Since its appearance about 55 million years ago, in the late Paleocene, the genus Quercus
has survived many biological and physical changes," says Rodríguez. "Since then, climatic
changes have caused population movements, expansions and decreases in their
distribution, both latitudinally and altitudinally."

The arroyo oak probably had a wider distribution in the past, and found a haven in the
Sierra La Laguna, says Mexican ecologist Aurora Breceda from the Centre for Biological
Research of the Northwest (Cibnor). "Everything indicates that it is a relict species,” she
says, referring to species that survive only in small populations, serving as remnants of
the past.

"There is only that relic of the historical distribution of the arroyo oak that we calculate
must have a total of less than 5,000 individuals, very restricted to only the banks of the
streams," says Álvarez Clare.

Local people have helped revive the arroyo by planting, caring for and "adopting"
seedlings (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

Scientists believe that the species failed to adapt to changes that, over millions of years,
created a near-desert climate in this region. Today, the habitat is so dry that many
streams are only filled with water by winter rains or hurricanes that create powerful but
ephemeral currents.

It is only in the humidity of sandy soil on the banks of the streams of the Sierra La
Laguna, that the arroyo oak found its refuge.

An oasis and a resource

Quercus brandegeei is considered a key species for the ecosystem and is highly valued by
the local population.

The arroyo oaks "are beautiful", says Breceda. "Here in Baja California Sur, an area with
scarce vegetation cover, you have these huge trees.

"An arroyo oak can measure 20m [66ft] in height and have crowns of 30sq m [320sq ft].
They are like a peaceful oasis."

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Most of these scattered oak populations are found within a range of 3,000sq km (1,200sq
miles), most inside the perimeter of the Sierra La Laguna Biosphere Reserve. Biosphere
reserves are natural spaces identified by Unesco – the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization – where biological conservation coexists with the
cultural and economic development of local people. The arroyo oak survives here
alongside humans and their cattle, which are allowed to roam the area freely.

Many locals report having lived with this species for generations. "I remember my
grandmother who used the acorns to make oil, tortillas," says Rogelio Rosas López, owner
of a local tour agency, Rancho Ecológico El Refugio. His grandmother, he recalls, also
cooked with the seeds "atole", a typical Mexican pudding. "And she used to take us and
pinch us because we had to gather sacks of acorns to give to the pigs."

Livestock such as pigs have shared the landscape with the arroyo oak for generations
(Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

The acorns of the stream oak are food for pigs and goats, as well as wild animals.
Occasionally, if there is a fallen tree, the wood is used.

"A lot would be lost for the ecosystem if the oaks weren't there, mainly the shade. We
wouldn't enjoy such a beautiful landscape," says Juan Refugio Manríquez Rosas, another
member of the community. "People would lose the best acorns, and everything from birds
to raccoons and squirrels would be affected." The honey from this oak, too, is highly
valued and has become a source of local income, he adds.

The missing saplings

No one knows exactly how old the arroyo oaks of the Sierra La Laguna are. "It really is a
great mystery. We think they are definitely over a hundred years old. But it could be that
they are hundreds of years old," said Álvarez Clare. In 2022, a team of experts in
dendrochronology, the science of dating trees, is expected to find a conclusive answer to
the question.

But the biggest puzzle is the absence of juveniles, something that has long drawn the
attention of local inhabitants.

"My grandfather used to say that there were many more trees," said José Abelino Cota,
owner of a plot of land in the Sierra La Laguna. "It is very rare to see a new tree. I don't
know what is the reason for it."

Explaining this lack of regeneration is vital. Although oaks can sometimes reproduce
asexually, producing underground stems with shoots that give rise to new individuals, this
form of reproduction does not protect the future of the species. It only creates clones of
the same tree, without the genetic variability necessary to respond to drastic
environmental changes or new diseases.

Only sexual reproduction, with small trees born from acorns, is likely to maintain the
arroyo oak in the long run.

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Looking for answers

Scientists explored various hypotheses to explain the lack of regeneration. The first was
the impact of climate change, which, according to Álvarez Clare, has caused "the dry
season to be drier and hotter, and the rains to be more unpredictable in this area of Baja
California Sur".

The second hypothesis was the lack of viability of the acorns – but a study at Cibnor
showed the opposite. "We collected seeds from several locations. At Cibnor we measured
them, did a morphological study and put them to germinate. And they have a very high
germination rate – more than 90% germinate," says Breceda.

The acorns of the arroyo oak had no trouble in germinating, researchers found – the
limitations to the oak's regeneration must lie elsewhere (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

The third hypothesis, according to the Morton Arboretum's Álvarez Clare, was the conflict
with the ranchers' cattle. "We think the cows are definitely a problem for the oak because
they love to be in the shade and they crush the seedlings," she says. "And besides, the pigs
eat the acorns."

For Álvarez Clare, the mystery of the stream oak's lack of regeneration continues and "has
only been partially solved". Scientists agree on the impact of livestock crushing and eating
acorns, but the consequences of climate change raise further questions. "Climate change
is indeed a problem, but how much and to what magnitude is something we are still not
sure about," she says.

For Breceda, the big problem could be the changes in the temporary patterns of both
rainfall and temperatures. "We really don't know if the effects of climate change could be
causing variations in these seasonal patterns, which could be affecting the species. We
don't know, a separate study is required."

'Let's Save the Arroyo Oak'

Although the precise impact of climate change on the germination of acorns is unknown,
there is one thing that the project's experts are certain about: the way to save these oaks
lies in the hands of the community members themselves.

"The ranchers have a double function: they are part of the problem, but they are our only
solution if we want to save the arroyo oak," says Álvarez Clare.

The scientists' response has been to establish a tree care and adoption program with
ranchers and other residents called Salvemos al Encino Arroyero, or "Let's save the
Arroyo Oak". The project is part of the Global Trees Campaign, an initiative to save the
world's threatened trees coordinated by the BGCI.

The idea is that local people plant, care for and "adopt" seedlings, becoming guardians of
the species, says Mexican biologist and researcher Daniel Wblesther Pérez Morales, who
leads the work with the communities, explains. The residents will in turn benefit from the

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acorns and the many other services that these trees provide.

"We established a community nursery and propagated seedlings to plant new arroyo oak
trees in the region," says Pérez Morales. It's important that collected acorns are planted,
as the seeds of the stream oak do not tolerate being dehydrated. So far, close to 500 new
trees have been planted with the help of the inhabitants of the communities.

Researchers like Silvia Alvarez Clare have worked to collect arroyo acorns, before they are
devoured by pigs (Credit: The Morton Arboretum)

"We plan to plant about 1,200 new oaks in the region. We will plant within the fences of
the ranches to ensure that each oak is growing protected and well cared for," says Pérez
Morales.

"We will also plant outside the ranches in areas where there is less pressure from
predators. And with the help of the municipal authorities, we will plant in public spaces,
where each planted tree has protection, care and its growth can be monitored."

The Morton Arboretum and the GCCO are also working with botanic gardens in Mexico to
establish the oak elsewhere beyond its current range, to improve the chances for
conservation of the species. Currently 15 trees are growing in the botanic garden of the
University of Puebla in central Mexico.

An exchange of knowledge

Scientists, local authorities, ranchers and other members of the community in the town of
San Dionisio in Baja California Sur came together to discuss the oak's future at a
workshop on the initiative in late 2021. "It was a workshop where we co-constructed
knowledge," says Breceda. "Because it's not like 'wise' scientists are going to tell local
people what to do with something that has been theirs for hundreds of years. They grew
up with these trees."

Local people know better than anyone the best places to plant, says Pérez Morales. And
they know that without their help, in an increasingly dry and unpredictable climate, it will
be very difficult for the oak to survive.

"It is important that we ranchers give ourselves the task of taking care of these spaces, of
watering the trees until they are at least two years old," says Rogelio Rosas López.

More workshops are planned in 2022, as well as the first "Festival of the Arroyo Oak" in
San Dionisio. The idea is also to promote other activities that are a source of income,
including ecotourism and artisan products such as mango jelly or a drink from damiana, a
local plant.

Clinging to life

The stream oak project shows how complex, and case-by-case, the task of saving
endangered species is.

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"The work has not been easy since the results of these efforts are not immediate and it
must be understood that they will be seen over longer periods. However, we are on the
right track," says Pérez Morales.

Noelia Álvarez de Román, director of conservation for Latin America and the Caribbean of
the BGCI, has praised the outcomes so far. "The Quercus brandegeei conservation project
has resulted in important advances in knowledge of the species and its threats, in the
dissemination of the importance of its conservation and in the increase of capacities of
local collaborators," she says.

"If this species disappears, it disappears from the face of the known universe," says
Cibnor's Aurora Breceda. "And on the other hand we lose the possibility of sustainable
resources for the rural populations of Baja California Sur, for which I have enormous
respect and admiration."

The Morton Arboretum's Álvarez Clare never ceases to be amazed that "currents, storms,
hurricanes, droughts happen to these oaks and they are still clinging there, producing
their acorns, providing shade, cleaning the air, giving life".

"Actually, when I'm next to one of those trees, I just touch the trunk and say, 'thank you!'.

"The arroyo oaks have been there much longer than we have," says Álvarez Clare. "And we
want to ensure that they are there for our children and our grandchildren, that they can
have the shade of that wonderful tree that our grandparents had."

--

Alejandra Martins is a broadcast journalist at BBC Mundo. This article was originally
published in Spanish on BBC Mundo – you can read it here. This is also why this story
does not have an estimate for its carbon emissions, as Future Planet stories usually do.

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What is evolution?
biologos.org/common-questions/what-is-evolution

Introduction
Providing a definition of “evolution” is tricky because the word is used in different ways.
First we need to distinguish between the broader worldview some associate with
evolution and the scientific theory of evolution.

Evolution as worldview
Some people consider evolution to be equivalent to atheism, thinking it replaces God or
otherwise rules out God’s involvement in the development of life. But that is a
philosophical or worldview position (sometimes called “evolutionism” or simply
“naturalism”), not a strictly scientific position.

At BioLogos, we are against evolutionism and instead hold to the worldview of Christian
theism. We call our position on origins “Evolutionary Creation.” That is to say, we
believe God is the Creator and also accept that evolution is the best scientific description
for how life has developed. This is similar to saying we believe God provides for the
growth and development of plants while we also accept that the theory of photosynthesis
is the best scientific explanation for that process.

Evolution as a scientific theory

In non-scientific contexts, “theory” usually means something like a guess (e.g., I have a
theory about…). But in its scientific sense, a theory is a tested and well-confirmed
explanation for a set of observations. The observations explained by the theory of
evolution come primarily from the fossil record, comparative morphology, biogeography,
and now most importantly, genetics. Evolution does not attempt to give a scientific
explanation for the origin of life, but only for the development and diversification of
lifeforms after the first life began.

The theory of evolution states that all the lifeforms on earth share a common ancestor as a
result of variation and selection over a very long time (currently thought to be around 4
billion years). Variation means that offspring are not exact replicas of their parents, and
selection occurs when only some of those offspring go on to produce more of their own
offspring. Common ancestry does not mean the species we find today have evolved from
each other—dogs did not evolve from cats, and humans did not evolve from chimpanzees.
Instead, if you go back far enough in the ancestral tree of any two organisms, common
ancestry predicts that you’ll come to a “grandparent” of which both current organisms are

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descendants. For humans and our closest relatives the chimpanzees, you have to go back
around 300,000 generations to find that common ancestor (that would be your
299,998th-great grandparent!). What did that process look like?

That ancient population (which was neither human nor chimpanzee) split into two
groups, and these groups were reproductively isolated—that is, the members of each
group only mated with other members of the their own group. Then over the many
generations of offspring, different variations were preserved in each group. Eventually
the characteristics of each group were different enough for scientists to recognize them
as different species. The theory of evolution claims that a similar story could be told for
the ancestral lineage of any two species that have ever lived.

Debates about evolution

There is very little debate in the scientific community about this broad characterization
of evolution (anyone who claims otherwise is either uninformed or deliberately trying to
mislead). The observational evidence explained by common ancestry is overwhelming.
Of course new data causes scientists to adjust some of the specifics (like how long ago
species diverged, or which species are most closely related), but this core view is
overwhelmingly supported and agreed upon by the vast majority of scientists in the field.

But that is not to say there are no debates and controversies about evolution among
those who accept this core view of the theory. Evolutionary scientists debate the extent to
which the variation element is explained by random genetic mutations, and how
important other selection mechanisms are beyond reproductive fitness. Scientists have
different views on topics like how gradual evolutionary change is and on the details of
how natural selection works. And as we’ve already seen, there are significant differences
of opinion about how to interpret various aspects of evolution with respect to
worldviews, such as whether there is overall direction to evolution, and what the
significance of evolution is for theology.

At BioLogos we believe the best contemporary science is consistent with Christian

theology. Find more information on evolution and the BioLogos perspective on origins in
the other resources on this page or by searching on particular terms in our search box.

Dear BioLogos reader ...

In the escalating vitriol in our culture, “science” and “faith” have found each other on
opposite sides of a polarized divide. Truth and community are under attack.

If there is one thing the pandemic has shown us, it is what science can and cannot do.
Scientists and doctors have done amazing things during the pandemic—identified the
virus, treated the disease, and developed safe vaccines that work.

But in these polarized times, science can’t reduce anger, forgive sins, build
mutual respect, or fill us with compassion for others.

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Science alone can’t give us hope. Faith can. Join BioLogos today in reaching a world
desperate for hope.

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Why care about the Polar Bear?
bluesci.co.uk/posts/why-care-about-the-polar-bear

Rachael Beasley reveals how there is more to polar bears than meets the eye

SUNDAY, 11 FEBRUARY 2018

Climate change. Already in your mind are images of traffic jams hazy with pollution, melting
icecaps, and most likely the polar bear. This year marked the fifth lowest Arctic sea ice extent since
records began. The low amount of ice has a severe impact on the bears – in fact, they are
increasingly becoming known as the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of climate change. But let’s imagine a
world without global warming; would you still care if these animals vanished from the cold, desolate
Arctic? Admittedly, they aren’t as cute as pandas; you won’t see them falling off tables and being
dragged out of leaf barrels. If anything, news headlines of bears mauling students and besieging
meteorologists may do little to inspire caring for this ambling nomad. Yet, perhaps, a brief look into
their physiology and behaviour may convince you otherwise: with the polar bear comes a genome
that could revolutionise treatment of human conditions like cardiovascular disease and
osteoporosis.

In the Arctic, the polar bear’s home, temperatures can reach an eyeball-freezing −40°C. Yet the
bears are more at risk of overheating than freezing to death. This is because healthy polar bears
have up to 11 cm of fat underneath their skin. In fact, this can result in half of their weight being fat.
In comparison, humans with this amount of adipose tissue would be considered obese and suffer
from atherosclerosis, diabetes and heart disease. Yet the polar bear deals with no such
consequences. A 2014 study by Liu and colleagues sheds light on this mystery. They compared the
coding regions of genes from polar bears with the ones from their closest relatives from a warmer
climate, the brown bears. This allowed them to determine the genes that have allowed polar bears to
survive in one of the toughest environments on earth.

Liu and colleagues found sixteen genes that had been strongly positively selected in polar bears;
nine of them were involved in cardiovascular function, including one known as APoB. This gene
codes for an apolipoprotein that binds low-density lipoproteins (LDL), a form of cholesterol
associated with increased risk of heart disease in humans. Once bound, this protein increases LDLs
transportation out of the blood and into somatic cells. There is therefore no build-up of LDL in the
blood, which is thought to prevent heart disease and atherosclerosis. Interestingly, humans also
possess many of the sequences highlighted in the study. Deleterious mutations in these genes,
including APoB, are being associated with atherosclerosis and heart disease. Polar bears may
therefore be an important study model to understand vascular diseases in humans.

The genome of the polar bear may also provide the solution for another condition, one that
particularly plagues our older generation: osteoporosis. This is a disease where bones show reduced
density, usually caused by rare exercise, reduced calcium intake, and food starvation. Bone tissue is
dynamic and is constantly being remodelled, meaning that bone is added or removed depending on
nutrient availability and the stress that the bone is under. Female polar bears, however, undergo
extreme conditions during every pregnancy. Once autumn comes around these females will dig
maternity dens and remain in them until spring to birth their cubs. This results in around six
months of fasting where the new mothers have to keep themselves and their newly born cubs alive,
depleting their own calcium and calorie reserves. Despite all this, their bones remain strong and
dense.

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Physiologists Lennox and Goodship found an explanation for this paradox in 2008 by comparing
biochemical markers in the blood of wild female polar bears before and after denning. After denning
markers associated with bone removal were not significantly increased. Prior to denning, markers
associated with bone formation, for example osteocalcium, were double that of bears which were
not pregnant. Thus, the scientists showed that female bears are able to increase the density of their
bones prior to denning, and reduce bone removal during denning to retain a strong skeleton
throughout. Hibernating brown bears do not have this capacity and must therefore resort to major
bone reformation in the following spring. If the mechanism of bone remodelling in polar bears can
be understood, many bedridden humans, and even astronauts, could potentially benefit.

The medical benefits of the polar bear for humanity certainly have their importance in our
conservation efforts, but these should not be the only ones in the balance. We tend to want to
protect animals we think are intelligent and possess emotions, such as elephants and primates.
Bears on the other hand seem to be perceived as stupid and thoughtlessly violent. And yet,
anecdotal evidence from the field challenges these assumptions, suggesting for example that polar
bears have good problem solving abilities. A male bear called GoGo in Tennoji Zoo, Osaka, has even
been observed manipulating his environment through tools. The bear used a tree branch on
multiple occasions to knock off a piece of meat hung out of his reach. Problem-solving ability has
also been witnessed in wild polar bears (though not as obviously as GoGo); a calculated move by a
male bear involved running and jumping onto barrels to brush the leg of a photographer on a
platform four metres high. Normally, even male bears at three metres tall would not be able to reach
that height.

In other studies, such as one by Alison Ames in 2008, polar bears showed deliberate and focused
object manipulation, like stacking objects and knocking them over as part of game-playing.
Although these more complex behaviours were only being exhibited 10.7% of the time by female
bears, the study still demonstrates that bears are capable of agile and thought-out behaviours. These
examples suggest bears have greater creativity and problem solving abilities than previously
thought.

As for emotions, while the evidence is once again anecdotal, many bears have been seen to swat ice
and snow - seemingly out of frustration - when they have just missed out on a kill. Moreover, polar
bears can form unusual relationships with other species, including playing with sled dogs.
Remarkably, one hand-raised polar bear called Agee has formed a close relationship with her owner
Mark Dumas to the point where they even swim together. This is seen as even more astonishing
when it is known that polar bears do actively hunt humans in the wild. Thus, polar bears are not
necessarily aggressive all the time, and may form strong attachments to other individuals.

So, climate change or not, perhaps spare a few more thoughts for the polar bear. Their extinction
will mean the loss of not only potential breakthroughs in human medicine, but more importantly
the disappearance of an intelligent, majestic animal.

Rachael Beasley is a 2nd year undergraduate studying Natural Science at Homerton College

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Interesting Things Men Often Lie About
bustle.com/p/7-interesting-things-men-often-lie-about-to-women-according-to-couples-counselors-26473

By Raven Ishak
Feb. 22, 2017

Like most women in a LTR, I can usually tell when my boyfriend lies. His nostrils will
nervously dance, his pupils will enlarge, and — key giveaway — he'll laugh out loud. At
this point, my boyfriend, like most men, believes he's gotten away with it. But while he
may think that I had no idea that he'd cleverly hid a whole box of chocolate-covered
doughnuts underneath his side of the bed (true story), little did he know, I was already
closing the case.

Redefine your day with the Bustle newsletter.

While this specific incident may not happen in every relationships, it would be an
#alternativefact to say that men don't lie to their significant others for some of the strange
reasons. So why exactly do men to choose to lie about such interesting things?

To help answer this mystifying question, I connected with licensed professional counselor
Jeremy McAllister over email to see what his thoughts were on this matter.

"Lying happens for a whole variety of reasons. We lie to protect ourselves, to protect
others, to avoid punishment, to preserve a relationship, to trigger separation or elicit
attention, to get someone back, to make them understand how it feels, or just out of
boredom or forgetfulness. As it is more likely, in this culture, for men to land on the
avoidant side (back to this theme of attachment for both articles), avoidant strategies tend
to amplify work stress or time constraints as a way to justify their need for space and
alone time (a genuine, legitimate need that is often not respected by someone on the
anxious end of attachment)," McAllister says.

In any case, finding out that someone lied to you simply sucks. But instead of getting into
a screaming match, it's helpful to find out why they did it in the first place. Here are seven
interesting things men often lie about to women.

How Many Partners They've Had

Let's be real: for most of us, intimacy can be a sensitive topic. While women may feel
pressured to feel sexy, men often correlate their manhood by how well they think they
please their partners. So, in return, men might feel the need to fluff their experience by
lying about how many partners they've had. "They want to be seen as an experienced
lover," says couples consultant and coach Lesli Doares in an interview with Bustle over
email about interesting things men most often lie about to women.

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2

Where They Were

Some people might freak out over the word "monogamous." They don't want to feel
trapped, and definitely don't want to have to answer to anyone. And while some guys may
lie about where they've been because of romantic reasons (i.e. they're planning something
sweet), other people might lie because they're afraid to fully commit to a relationship.
"They don’t want to feel controlled or give up certain things for your relationship," says
Doares about things she often hears men lying about to women in relationships.

Finding Other People Attractive

Whether you're in a LTR or not, you're most likely going to continue to find other people
attractive. It's biology. But just because everyone knows this doesn't mean your partner
will be OK with it when they hear it from you. "Through experience [men] have learned
that [finding other people attractive] isn’t received well [with their partners]," says
Doares.

Being Scared

Men are often pressured by societal standards to be emotionally strong when they were
young. "Don't cry" and "be a man" were probably just a couple of things they were told
during their life. So when the emotion of fear arises, they may choose to withhold that
feeling because they don't want their partner to think less of them. "[Men] are scared (of
moving forward with the relationship, of losing their job, being sick, etc.) — they want to
be seen as strong and invincible in your eyes," says Doares.

Being Afraid Their SO Is Going To Leave Them

Some men have abandonment issues and they rather refrain from telling the truth to take
control of a situation, then communicate about their emotions. "There's a story behind the
lies. Lies come from fear — fear of hurting or being hurt. Maybe our current partner is
totally trustworthy and understanding. Maybe they would be just fine knowing we watch
porn. But we don't know that. We know previous partners have left for this, so what gets
triggered is this fear of abandonment. It may go back to old partners or even back to
childhood," says McAllister about interesting things men often lie about to women.

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6

Not Wanting To Deal With A Situation

It's no surprise that women and men sometimes think differently. And when it comes to a
particular issue, they might not see eye to eye. So rather than going through the stress of
communicating about it with their partner, some men might withhold the information
and choose to talk about it at a later time when they're ready to do so. "More often than
not, [men] lie not because [they] think something is bad, but because [they] expect [their]
partners will be hurt or get angry or increase demands on time and ask [them] to justify
something that [they] do not believe is innately wrong," says McAllister.

Showing Their True Selves

Most women and men want a partner who is honest and vulnerable. They want to share
experiences with them rather than go through life pretending everything is A-OK. In
today's society, men might be afraid to be honest with their partners about their emotions
because they don't want to feel judged for not being "strong enough" or "too clingy." In
reality, most men want to find a true connection with a partner and sometimes, that
requires both members to be vulnerable. "Underneath your lying partner is a human
carrying beliefs based on their own past experience — beliefs that determine whether or
not it is okay to be their full real self in the presence of another person. 'If I am really me,
my partner will... leave me, attack me, judge me, pity me, consume me, manipulate me,
imprison me, love me, accept me, etc.,' If we can change these attachment-level beliefs,
the entire relationship changes," says McAllister.

Even though some men might lie for different reasons other than women do doesn't mean
women wouldn't lie about those situations either. However, try to view the world with a
open mind and communicate with your partner about your concerns if you feel like
they're not being honest. This can save a potential relationship or friendship.

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Science inspired the world wide web. Two decades on,
the web has repaid the compliment by changing
science
economist.com/node/13277389/print

Rex FeaturesA proud father

“INFORMATION Management: A Proposal”. That was the bland title of a document
written in March 1989 by a then little-known computer scientist called Tim Berners-Lee
who was working at CERN, Europe's particle physics laboratory, near Geneva. Mr
Berners-Lee (pictured) is now, of course, Sir Timothy, and his proposal, modestly dubbed
the world wide web, has fulfilled the implications of its name beyond the wildest dreams
of anyone involved at the time.

In fact, the web was invented to deal with a specific problem. In the late 1980s, CERN was
planning one of the most ambitious scientific projects ever, the Large Hadron Collider, or
LHC. (This opened, and then shut down again because of a leak in its cooling system, in
September last year.) As the first few lines of the original proposal put it, “Many of the
discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question—‘Yes, but how
will we ever keep track of such a large project?' This proposal provides an answer to such
questions.”

Sir Timothy is now based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he runs the
World Wide Web Consortium, which sets standards for web technology. But on March
13th, he will, if all has gone well, have joined his old colleagues at CERN to celebrate the
web's 20th birthday.

The web of life

The web, as everyone now knows, has found uses far beyond the original one of linking
electronic documents about particle physics in laboratories around the world. But amid
all the transformations it has wrought, from personal social networks to political
campaigning to pornography, it has also transformed, as its inventor hoped it would, the
business of doing science itself.

As well as bringing the predictable benefits of allowing journals to be published online

and links to be made from one paper to another, it has also, for example, permitted
professional scientists to recruit thousands of amateurs to give them a hand. One such
project, called GalaxyZoo, used this unpaid labour to classify 1m images of galaxies into
various types (spiral, elliptical and irregular). This enterprise, intended to help
astronomers understand how galaxies evolve, was so successful that a successor has now
been launched, to classify the brightest quarter of a million of them in finer detail. More
modestly, those involved in Herbaria@home scrutinise and decipher scanned images of
handwritten notes about old plant cuttings stored in British museums. This will allow the
tracking of changes in the distribution of species in response to, for instance, climate
change.

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Another novel scientific application of the web is as an experimental laboratory in its own
right. It is allowing social scientists, in particular, to do things that would previously have
been impossible.

We recently reported two such projects. One used a peer-to-peer moneylending site to
show that a person's physiognomy is a reliable predictor of his creditworthiness (see
article). The other, carried out at the behest of The Economist, confirmed anthropologists'
observations about the sizes of human social networks using data from Facebook (see
article). A second investigation of the nature of such networks, which came to similar
conclusions, has been produced by Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard's
research arm in Palo Alto, California. He and his colleagues looked at Twitter, a social
networking website that allows people to post short messages to long lists of friends.

At first glance, the networks seemed enormous—the 300,000 Twitterers sampled had 80
friends each, on average (those on Facebook had 120), but some listed up to 1,000. Closer
statistical inspection, however, revealed that many of the messages were directed at a few
specific friends, revealing—as with Facebook—that an individual's active social network is
far smaller than his “clan”.

Dr Huberman has also helped uncover several laws of web surfing, including the number
of times an average person will go from web page to web page on a given site before giving
up, and the details of the “winner-takes-all” phenomenon whereby a few sites on a given
subject grab most of the attention, and the rest get hardly any.

Scientists have therefore proved resourceful in using the web to further their research.
They have, however, tended to lag when it comes to employing the latest web-based
social-networking tools to open up scientific discourse and encourage more effective
collaboration.

Journalists are now used to having their every article commented on by dozens of readers.
Indeed, many bloggers develop and refine their essays on the basis of such input. Yet
despite several attempts to encourage a similarly open system of peer review of scientific
research published on the web, most researchers still limit such reviews to a few
anonymous experts. When Nature, one of the world's most respected scientific journals,
experimented with open peer review in 2006, the results were disappointing. Only 5% of
the authors it spoke to agreed to have their article posted for review on the web—and their
instinct turned out to be right, as almost half of the papers that were then posted attracted
no comments.

Michael Nielsen, an expert on quantum computers who belongs to a new wave of scientist
bloggers who want to change this, thinks the reason for this reticence is neither shyness or
fear of reprisal, but rather a fundamental lack of incentive.

The unsocial scientist

Scientists publish, in part, because their careers depend on it. They keenly keep track of
how many papers they have had accepted, the reputations of the journals they appear in
and how many times each article is cited by their peers, as measures of the impact of their

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research. These numbers can readily be put in a curriculum vitae to impress others.

By contrast, no one yet knows how to measure the impact of a blog post or the sharing of a
good idea with another researcher in some collaborative web-based workspace. Dr
Nielsen reckons that if similar measurements could be established for the impact of open
commentary and open collaboration on the web, such commentary and collaboration
would flourish, and science as a whole would benefit. Essentially, this would involve
establishing a market for great ideas, just as a site such as eBay does for coveted objects.

How to do that is, at the moment, mysterious. Intellectual credit obeys different rules
from the financial sort. But if some keen researcher out there has an idea about how to do
it, “Information Management: A Proposal” might be an equally apposite title for his first
draft. Who knows, there may even be a knighthood in it.

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READ: Introduction to Globalization
khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-7-the-great-convergence-and-divergence-1880-ce-to-the-future/75-
global-interactions-betaa/a/read-global-interactions-and-institutions-beta

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:

1. What does globalization look like from your perspective? How does it affect your
family and community? Do you think it has been a good thing for you? Why or why
not?

2. Globalization looks very differently studied through each of the three course frames.
Pick one of the three course frames and describe the effects of globalization on your
home town or neighborhood using only that frame narrative. How would your
results have been different if you had chosen a different frame?

Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to
these questions once you’ve finished reading.

Introduction to Globalization

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor

Globalization is now a buzzword in twenty-first-century politics. This interconnection

and interdependency has equally long lists of pros and cons. What does globalization
mean and when did it begin?

What is globalization?

In the later decades of the twentieth century, people found they needed a term to describe
the dizzying amount of changes going on around them. The businesses that people
worked for were buying and selling more goods in distant places. International
organizations were increasingly bringing together representatives from many different
communities. People were exchanging ideas rapidly as technology made travel and
communications easier. These networks were not only getting bigger and covering more
ground, but also their activity had become more intense. It was now possible to send and
receive information or visit other places much more rapidly than ever before. Some
observers even noted that people could have closer relationships with others living

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thousands of miles away, than with their own neighbors. How could all of these changes
be described? If you guessed "a hot mess," you're close enough, but scholars and
journalists eventually settled on globalization.

A general term, globalization refers to how the world has become more connected
economically, politically, socially, and culturally over time. In this general sense, its roots
go back to the era of agrarian societies as empires expanded and trade networks grew.
These connections really accelerated and encompassed the whole world after the
Columbian Exchange. When people, plants, goods, diseases, and ideas were shared across
all world zones, the lives of humans everywhere changed. In some regions this was mainly
positive. For example, the introduction of more caloric food increased life expectancy.
However, in other regions, the effects were more negative, such as slavery and
exploitation of the land and resources for profit elsewhere—known as the dependency
cycle.

After the Industrial Revolution, the world became even more interconnected, and some
scholars say that globalization really began in this period. In this sense, globalization is
about people around the world becoming so connected that local life is shaped by what is
happening in other parts of the world. This challenges our definition of community in
some ways. Through the Industrial Revolution, local-global connections like this began to
be established. Transportation and communication advancements led to an increase in
travel and the sharing of ideas (collective learning). Imperialist nations exerted control
over other areas of the world. The legacy of this colonization was, of course, negative in
many ways when you consider slavery, destruction of traditional cultures, and the
depletion of resources. But there were some effects most think of as positive, including the
new technologies like railways and telegraph lines that connected more people and ideas
around the world.

The world wars globalized us even more. In fact, these major conflicts proved to the world
that working together across global networks could be good and bad. There was global
disaster with World War I, the even deadlier sequel, and the Great Depression. But we
also saw global cooperation for good—like ending the Nazi regime. After World War II,
many global organizations were formed to help to bring peace, stability, and economic
prosperity to the world. The United Nations, NATO, the World Bank, and the
International Monetary Fund are all global organizations you'll learn about later in this
unit.

Globalization’s effect on communities and economies

Globalization has touched all aspects of human existence. In the modern era, voluntary
migration as well as forced migration have resulted in a diverse human population in
many parts of the world. America, which is often called a "melting pot", is a prime
example of how the mass movement of people has shaped the modern world. Today's
Americans come from all corners of the globe. But equally diverse populations can be

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found in parts of Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, and many other places. And as people
move, they bring with them their language, culture, food, and customs. These become
interwoven within an existing society and create diversity, which should be celebrated.

Similarly, the world economy today is so intertwined that if one nation struggles
financially, the effects are felt in global markets. The 2008 global recession, for example,
caused several banking crises in Europe and Asia, but really began with a "bubble" of bad
loans in the United States. On an everyday basis, globalization is represented by
multinational corporations that employ people around the world. These companies often
make a single product from resources and labor in many different countries.

The pros and cons of globalization

This kind of intense globalization brings together people from around the world. But—and
there are some buts—what are the side-effects? Technological innovations now let people
around the world communicate and share ideas in real time, when messages sent across
continents used to take months. But not everybody has the same access to computing or
the Internet. Governments can work together to trade and solve problems. But that means
some people are affected by laws or policies made in other countries. Beliefs are shared,
which results in millions of people practicing the same faith in various parts of the world.
But these shared beliefs also increase tensions with disagreements between people of
different faiths, and even within faiths. Economies have become intertwined through
international trade and aid. But, globalization has also led to an increase in inequality. In
some nations the wealthy have become far richer while the poor have stayed stagnant
economically. Some areas of the world have become extremely powerful and wealthy
while others are still trying to overcome the negative effects of colonialism. In perhaps the
biggest but of them all, the use of fossil fuels in industrialized nations has led to pollution
that spreads around the world. As a result, one nation's pollution becomes the problem of
other nations, as wind and water currents carry these toxic fumes and chemicals. Wealthy
nations have also exported their waste to poorer nations including toxic waste and
garbage from landfills.

Interconnection and interdependency, therefore, can be a double-edged sword, as you will

learn in this unit's lessons. However, with all of the twenty-first century's technology,
medical innovations, and multinational corporations, it's impossible to think that we can
ever retreat from the modern world to focus only on ourselves. As humans, we have the
ability and consciousness to improve not only our own lives but also the lives of all
humans as well as other species by working together. Globalization isn't reversible, so how
can we eliminate some of the negatives as we move forward and continue to reap the
rewards of working together and exchanging ideas?

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Kids whose grandparents are overweight are almost
twice as likely to struggle with obesity
theconversation.com/kids-whose-grandparents-are-overweight-are-almost-twice-as-likely-to-struggle-with-obesity-
173739

Edmund Wedam Kanmiki, Abdullah Mamun, Yaqoot Fatima

School holidays can be a special time for extended families to gather. Children may see
their grandparents at seasonal gatherings or as part of childcare arrangements to help
working parents. New research suggests the biology, environment and the food they share
contributes to children’s future health.

According to the World Health Organization, 39 million children under five years are
overweight. Some 25% of Australian children and adolescents are overweight or obese.

How parents contribute to their offspring’s obesity risk is well established but the link
between grandparents and grandchildren has been less clear. Our systematic review of
studies involving more than 200,000 people around the world confirms obesity is
transmitted across multiple generations of families. We still need to figure out why and
how to break this cycle.

Setting up for a lifetime of health issues

Obesity among children and adolescents is associated with developing health problems.
These include high blood pressure, cholesterol imbalance, insulin resistance, diabetes
mellitus, accelerated growth and maturity, orthopaedic difficulties, psychosocial
problems, increased risk of heart disease and premature mortality.

We examined the current global evidence on the association between grandparents who
are overweight or obese and the healthy weight status of their grandchildren. We looked
at 25 studies that involved 238,771 people from 17 countries. The combined data confirms
obesity is transmitted multigenerationally – not just from parent to child but also from
grandparent to grandchild.

We found children whose grandparents are obese or overweight are almost twice as likely
to be obese or overweight compared to those whose grandparents are “normal” weight.

Nature and nurture?

Further research is needed into how children’s obesity status is influenced by their
grandparents but there are likely two pathways at work. The influence could be indirect
via parents’ genes or occur directly through the roles played by grandparents in children’s
upbringing.

Let’s start with biological factors. Both egg and sperm cells contain molecules that
respond to the nutritional intake of parents. This means traits that are susceptible to high
weight gain can be passed on from grandparents to parents and then to their

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grandchildren. And evidence shows genetics, environmental factors, lifestyle and eating
habits all play key roles in predisposing individuals to obesity.

What we eat and feed our family members can lead to the expression of certain genetic
traits (a term referred to as epigenetics) which can then be transferred to successive
generations. Due to shared familial, genetic, and environmental factors, obesity tends to
aggregate within immediate families and studies have consistently reported an
intergenerational transmission of obesity from parents to children.

Food intake can also influence health and biology across multiple generations. In Sweden,
a study reported adequate food for paternal grandparents at ten years of age reduced
heart disease and diabetes and increased longevity among their grandchildren.

Food and family

So, grandparents’ weight status and choices about what and how much is eaten in their
home could influence their grandchildren’s weight directly or via the children’s parents.
These influences may be greater or less significant depending on the role grandparents
play as primary care givers or in shared living arrangements. According to the recent
Australia’s Seniors’ survey, one in every four Australian grandparents provides primary
care to their grandchildren.

Grandparents’ role as caregivers significantly affects children’s healthy eating knowledge,

attitude, and behaviours. This might be seen in the meals shared, recipes passed down or
special treats for loved ones. Such habits can add to childhood obesity risks, above and
beyond genetic factors.

Working on prevention
Our research shows the importance of including grandparents in obesity prevention
strategies. In addition to parents, grandparents could be oriented to provide guidance on
responsible feeding, recognising hunger and fullness, setting limits, offering healthy foods
and using repeated exposure to promote acceptance. They can help encourage regular
exercise and discourage coercive feeding practices on their grandchildren.

While our study shows a multigenerational link in the transmission of obesity, most of the
available evidence comes from high-income countries – predominantly America and
European countries. More studies, especially from low-income countries, would be
helpful.

Further investigation into the effect of grandparents on grandchildren’s obesity across

different races and ethnicities is also needed. Grandparents have varied social and
cultural roles in the upbringing of their grandchildren around the world. More data could
help design effective obesity prevention programs that recognise the vital importance of
grandparents.

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3/3
How Globalization Works: Pros and Cons of
Globalization
masterclass.com/articles/how-globalization-works-pros-and-cons-of-globalization

Business
Written by the MasterClass staff

From ancient silk roads to modern-day trade agreements like NAFTA, different parts of
the world have been engaging in trade across national borders for centuries in a practice
called “globalization.”

What Is Globalization?
In international economics, globalization is the web of relationships between economies
worldwide by way of international trade and investments. While the history of
globalization dates back to ancient times, the modern era of globalization began in
earnest in the early nineteenth century. Starting with the Industrial Revolution,
advancements in transportation (like railroads and steamships) and communication
(like the telegraph) allowed increased economic interaction and cooperation across
country borders.

The opposite of economic globalization—or free-market trade across borders—is

protectionism, an economic policy that attempts to protect domestic businesses from
foreign competition and labor markets, usually by imposing trade barriers like tariffs.

3 Examples of Globalization
Examples of globalization include:

1. Intergovernmental organizations. Globalization has made it possible for

international organizations to be created through treaties between many different
countries. Examples include the European Union, the United Nations, the World
Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF).
2. Intergovernmental treaties. Many governments across the world have engaged
in treaties or trade policies to make it easier for international investment and trade.
These treaties, called free-trade agreements, include the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade
Agreement (CETA).

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 3. Multinational corporations. A multinational corporation is an organization
that does business in many different countries. Globalization is the reason that
multinational businesses exist. For example, globalization allows major US
corporations to sell their products to Mexico, Europe, and China.

What Are the Benefits of Globalization?

Globalization can benefit a country’s economy in many ways:

Increases economic growth. By increasing the international exchange of

goods, technological advances, and information, globalization increases economic
development for any country participating in the global economy. An increase in
economic growth means better living standards, higher incomes, more wealth in a
country, and, often, less poverty—in short, the overall well-being of a country.
Makes production more affordable. A global market allows businesses wider
access to production opportunities and consumers, meaning that there are more
goods available at a wider range of price points.
Promotes working together. When different countries come together to engage
in trade and investments in a global financial market, they become interdependent
and often come to rely on one another for certain goods and services.
Brings opportunities to poorer countries. Globalization allows companies to
move their production from high-cost locations to lower-cost locations abroad—
this means bringing jobs, information technology, and other economic
opportunities to countries with fewer resources.

What Are the Disadvantages of Globalization?

While it can benefit nations, there are also several negative effects of globalization. Cons
of globalization include:

Unequal economic growth. While globalization tends to increase economic

growth for many countries, the growth isn’t equal—richer countries often benefit
more than developing countries.
Lack of local businesses. The policies permitting globalization tend to
advantage companies that have the resources and infrastructure to operate their
supply chains or distribution in many different countries, which can hedge out
small local businesses—for instance, a local New York hamburger joint may
struggle to compete with the prices of a multinational burger-making corporation.
Increases potential global recessions. When many nations’ economic
systems become interdependent, the likelihood of a global recession increases
dramatically—because if one country’s economy starts to struggle, this can set off a
chain reaction that can affect many other countries simultaneously, causing a
worldwide financial crisis.

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Exploits cheaper labor markets. Globalization allows businesses to increase
jobs and economic opportunities in developing countries, where the cost of labor is
often cheaper. However, overall economic growth in these countries may be slow or
stagnant.
Causes job displacement. Globalization doesn’t result in an increased number
of jobs; rather, it redistributes jobs by moving production from high-cost countries
to lower-cost ones. This means that high-cost countries often lose jobs due to
globalization, as production goes overseas.

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Indigenous conservation could mean richer wildlife
tourism in Canada
nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/indigenous-conservation-could-mean-richer-wildlife-tourism-in-canada

ByChloe BergePhotographs ByJesaja ClassPublished March 16, 2022• 11 min read

Our raft bobs down the Atnarko River in British Columbia’s lush Great Bear Rainforest,
one of Earth’s largest remaining temperate rainforests. As we round a rocky strand of
riverbank, a young grizzly bear and her two cubs emerge from the canary grass. They
march single file alongside us—a little too close for comfort.

Years of backcountry hiking—and established safety protocols for avoiding grizzlies—tell

me to put more space between us. But a recent Canadian study, developed in
collaboration with First Nations groups, suggests that humans may have once shared a
closer relationship with bears, one based on resource reciprocity rather than fear.

In an ecosystem experiencing habitat loss through logging and a province with a history of
grizzly bear trophy hunting, the study’s findings could have wide implications for
Indigenous-led conservation and wildlife tourism in British Columbia. The report
supports the conventional wisdom that Indigenous traditions are effective conservation
practices.

A ‘kincentric’ view
In 2021, researchers from five coastal First Nations and scientists at the University of
Victoria studied grizzly genetic groups on the central coast of the Great Bear Rainforest.
Using DNA samples from hair snags, they made a stunning observation. Three distinct
genetic groups of bears lived in areas that geographically aligned with the traditional
territories of three Indigenous language groups: Tsimshian, Northern Wakashan, and
Salishan Nuxalk.

The researchers concluded that these bear territories may have formed from shared
resources with humans rather than “resistance factors,” or physical barriers such as a
mountain range. In other words, the bears chose to stay in areas with plenty of food,
water, and shelter, just like these Indigenous groups did. “The landscape is shaping bears
and people in some similar ways,” says Lauren Henson, a biologist at the University of
Victoria’s Raincoast Applied Conservation Science Lab and a study coauthor.

That conclusion seems to echo the “kincentric” view that some coastal First Nations have
lived by for centuries—that all natural elements of an ecosystem are closely related. “Our
elders said that bears taught us a lot about how to live here—what we could eat, where we
could stay. We just have a lot of the same needs,” says Jennifer Walkus, a Wuikinuxv
Nation elected council member and a study coauthor.

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The findings challenge the efficacy of current government grizzly bear management
practices, which don’t take genetic data into account. That’s an important distinction
because monitoring for genetic differences can help improve the health of a population by
alerting managers to high levels of inbreeding. It can also help grizzlies better adapt to
threats and a changing ecosystem.

Equally important, the study makes a compelling case for integrating Indigenous
ecological knowledge into conservation efforts, a recommendation now supported by a
government mandate in Canada.

Science-backed Indigenous conservation practices

Not only does Indigenous knowledge contribute to more nuanced research, a 2021 study
showed that it can lead to more successful conservation. Similar findings have been made
around the world from Australia to Brazil. In British Columbia, Indigenous-led or
sponsored research has been used to impact bear conservation policy, from ending trophy
hunting in 2017 to protecting habitat on B.C.’s islands.

“Researchers are usually only there for a short period of time, whereas if you’re working
with local nations who work within a territory, they get to see what happens with these
animals over the full span of the year,” explains Walkus.

The understanding that First Nations societies have gained over centuries of living along
British Columbia’s central coast allows for a holistic approach to ecosystem management.
“The government tends to look at all species from a very high level and manages them on
a regional scale, whereas our people manage resources on the watershed scale,” says
William Housty, conservation manager for the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management
Department and coauthor of the language group study. “When we start to look at the
health of all these different resources in one system, we can really paint a picture of how
interconnected everything is and manage individual species accordingly.”

That philosophy is being applied to B.C.’s salmon population, a main food source for
grizzlies that’s been decimated by overfishing and climate change. To restore a healthy
population in their territory, the Wuikinuxv Nation is working with Fisheries and Oceans
Canada (DFO) to determine carrying capacity and harvest limits that consider bears, fish,
and people equally.

This effort comes on the heels of multiple studies by the Wuikinuxv and the Raincoast
Conservation Foundation, one of which found that people and bears can share salmon
equitably in a way that benefits both. “Finding ways to manage not just for people but for
all of the species on our land is critical,” says Walkus.

What does this mean for travelers?

The 2021 genetic grizzly study isn’t just filling in important context for conservation, it
could lead to a richer wildlife watching experience for travelers at places such as
Indigenous-owned Knight Inlet Lodge on Vancouver Island, in the Great Bear Rainforest,

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which helped establish the Commercial Bear Viewing Association of British Columbia
(CBVA). The association also led the effort to end trophy hunting in British Columbia and
now sets the standard for responsible bear viewing in the area.

“The experience of viewing a grizzly bear coupled with conservation messages in a

tourism setting has potential to influence human attitudes and perceptions,” says Kate
Field, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria, who is collaborating with
Indigenous researchers to study the effects of human presence on bear behavior.

“The study may help people understand how intricate and important the relationship is
between people and bears and give people the opportunity to see that on the ground,”
adds Housty. “The more people know and understand that, the better we can manage our
relationship with bears and conserve their habitat.”

By learning this history, as well as the cultural significance of grizzlies to coastal First
Nations, travelers may come away with a changed perspective on their own relationship
with grizzly bears and the land. That’s important to Ellie Lamb, a bear guide at CBVA
partner Tweedsmuir Park Lodge, who has spent years improving her knowledge about the
keystone species from bear behavior experts and the Nuxalk people.

“First Nations know how to get along with bears; it’s been passed on from generation to
generation,” she says. “They’ve witnessed, and I think as guides, we can learn from them.”

Back in the Great Bear Rainforest, Lamb leads me on a hike through Kettle Pond in
Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. We stop before a sasquatch-sized print in the velvety moss
beneath our feet. “It’s a stomp trail,” she explains, made by bears as they “stomp-walk”
through the forest, leaving their scent and hair by scratching their backs on tree trunks.

“This was left recently,” she says, as she plucks bear hair from one of the trees. That
familiar rush of adrenaline I felt while rafting returns, but quickly dissipates. As we follow
the bear paw prints, just like First Nations people have been doing for centuries, their
proximity elicits a feeling closer to kinship than fear. I see their traces in this ancient
forest as a reminder of the connection coastal Indigenous peoples have with grizzlies.

Who better to lead the future of grizzly ecotourism than the people who have lived
alongside these animals for millennia? “When we think about managing bears, it’s like
managing ourselves.” says Walkus. “We were so closely bound together.”

How to visit

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Killing cockroaches with pesticides is only making the
species stronger
nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/pesticides-are-making-german-cockroaches-stronger

ByTroy FarahPublished March 16, 2022• 9 min read

Americans need a less toxic approach to managing the most common cockroaches, which
are evolving resistance to store-bought insecticides.

At around age 10, I spotted a cockroach on the kitchen counter and grabbed the closest
thing near me: a coffee pot, which I brought down on the head of the bug and then found
myself standing there, holding nothing but the glass handle. “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said
about the broken flask. “But at least I got the roach.”

German cockroaches were a regular, omnipresent part of growing up in a trailer park in

Phoenix, Arizona. Nothing seemed to deter them: no amount of poisons, electric zappers,
or bug bombs. It wasn’t until we moved to a house that my family finally rid ourselves of
our six-legged plague.

Tens of thousands of people in the U.S. understand the frustration of bad roach
infestations. And there may be a good reason why these bugs can be so hard to control. A
burgeoning body of data suggests some German roach populations in the country have
evolved resistance to pesticides, essentially rendering the chemicals useless.

A recent study in the Journal of Economic Entomology, for instance, shows that German
cockroaches in some southern California residential units can survive exposure to five
types of commonly used pesticides.

That’s a concern, because serious roach infestations can cause health issues, such as
asthma or allergies, says study leader Chow-Yang Lee, an urban entomology professor at
the University of California, Riverside. At least 11 different allergens are associated with
Blattella germanica, which can also spread bacteria such as Salmonella. The stress of a
cockroach infestation can take a toll on a person’s mental health.

While other types of roaches can infest human dwellings, invasive German roaches are by
far the most problematic, Lee says. There’s some debate as to whether the bugs originated
in Africa or Southeast Asia, but nonetheless, the hardy species has spread worldwide
through international shipping, and is now the most common cockroach on Earth. (Carl
Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist, coined the name Blattella germanica because he was
sent samples of the insects in the mail from Germany in the 1770s.)

True to its scrappy reputation, of the more than 4,500 known cockroaches, “only German
cockroaches are known to be capable of developing resistance to insecticide,” Lee says—an
example of how humans are driving the evolution of the pests around us.

But we may not need to keep pushing roaches to evolve defenses to our pest controls.

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Scientists are also studying more effective approaches to controlling cockroaches in
human areas, such as a multi-system approach that includes using essential oils such as
limonene, a citrus component whose strong smell deters roaches.

A never-ending story of resistance

Lee and his colleagues focused on how German roaches in four cities in southern
California respond to gel bait insecticides, some of the most used consumer products to
control the insects in the U.S.

Using vacuum cleaners and traps, they collected hundreds of roaches—mostly using
vacuum cleaners—from public housing residences around Los Angeles, San Diego, Vista,
and San Jose. Lee says that because people in these areas often cannot afford professional
extermination services, they tend to apply more and more store-bought pesticides.

This creates a feedback loop. Greater exposure creates more opportunities for
cockroaches that can survive the pesticide’s effects to survive and then breed, leading to a
new, tougher generation of pesticide-resistant roaches. (Read more about how cockroach
genes help them thrive.)

Lee calls it “a never-ending story [of] insecticide resistance.”

The research team next brought the roaches back into their California lab, then, in
separate trials, exposed the animals to six common, over-the-counter pesticides. They
repeated the same experiment with dozens of lab-reared German roaches that had never
been exposed to bug-killing chemicals.

The control roaches quickly died. But in five of the six trials, the pesticides failed to kill
the captured roaches, with most surviving after two weeks. Only one pesticide—abamectin
—effectively killed the captured roaches. However, research in 2019 showed that roaches
can develop higher resistance to abamectin in just two generations, or about a year.

To escape the "zombifying" sting of emerald jewel wasps, cockroaches deliver swift kicks
aimed at the wasp's head.

Most insecticides target a specific part of the bug’s body, such as its nervous system, says
study co-author Shao-Hung Dennis Lee, a Ph.D. student in Lee’s lab. “So a lot of resistant
cockroaches will have a [genetic] mutation in this area that is attacked, making it less
sensitive to the insecticide.”

Humans can also suffer from indoor pesticide use. Pesticide residues, which are
“widespread” in American homes, can cause headaches, dizziness, and nausea, as well as
increase the risk of cancer, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Evolution in action

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Overall, the research shows that trying to combat German cockroaches with pesticides is
not only failing, but also creating even stronger animals, Shao-Hung Dennis Lee says. “If
we weren't applying insecticides, none of these things would be occurring. So it’s all a
human-caused selection process.”

Our shaping of cockroach evolution reaches back centuries. When the species first arrived
in Europe, many died in the harsh winters. “But some survived because they basically
survived indoors,” Chow-Yang Lee says.“Probably also during this period they lost their
ability to fly.”

Another factor that drove their success was that the insects evolved the ability to eat
pretty much anything.

German cockroaches’ digestive systems have “a gigantic array of enzymes that help them
to metabolize everything,” says Seun Oladipupo, an entomologist and Ph.D. student at
Auburn University in Alabama, who studies sustainable pest-management strategies.
“They’re able to naturally detoxify all the things we throw at them.”

Oladipupo is investigating ways to control German roaches using concentrated plant

extracts called essential oils. In a 2020 experiment, Oladipupo combined different
essential oils with hydrogel baits and found that they reduced the ability of German
cockroaches to breed and shortened their life spans, even at sublethal doses. One essential
oil, called carvacrol, reduced the longevity of male roaches by at least 34 percent.

Essential oils are still technically pesticides, but they’re less toxic to bugs and humans,
and it’s also less likely that roaches will develop resistance to them. That’s because these
chemicals act on multiple sites in a roach’s body, compared with many pesticides, which
have specific targets, Oladipupo says.

Other products also hold promise for less-toxic pest control, such as diatomaceous earth,
a powder of naturally occurring sedimentary rock that can dehydrate insects such as
cockroaches, leading to their deaths.

Integrated approach
But Oladipupo cautions interventions suchh as essential oils are not “a standalone option.
The answer is not chemical, it's a multi-system approach to managing insect pests.”

This is known as integrated pest management, which combines different strategies such
as rotating, reducing, or eliminating pesticide use. But it can include practical advice, too.
For instance, Oladipupo recommends keeping the places roaches tend to seek out—
mainly kitchens and bathrooms—clean and dry.

Because roaches are especially attracted to pet food, it’s also important to store pet food in
an air-tight container when it’s not being used. When it’s mealtime, experts advise
keeping pet food bowls raised off the ground or buying a bug-deterring bowl with a moat
of water around the food, which prevents the insects from accessing it.

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Chow-Yang Lee also suggests learning more about wild roaches, many of which play
beneficial roles in the environment. They can act as decomposers, breaking down leaves
on the rainforest floor. Some even pollinate flowers. Others are stellar parents.

Next, both Oladipupo and Shao-Hung Lee plan to study the biological mechanisms of
resistance in roaches, such as studying their microbiome. (Read how bugs and spiders
keep New York City clean by eating trash.)

What’s more, some cockroaches could actually help humans: Because they live in such
dirty places, cockroach bodies contain molecules that can kill even the toughest bacteria.
Studying how this process works could inform scientists how to combat antibiotic
resistance in humans, a major scourge.

And with 17 million people dying each year due to bacterial infections, a cockroach could
someday even save your life.

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First pig-to-human heart transplant: what can scientists
learn?
nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00111-9

NEWS
14 January 2022

Researchers hope that a person who has so far lived for a week with a genetically modified
pig heart will provide a trove of data on the possibilities of xenotransplantation.
Sara Reardon

Surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center transplanted a genetically altered

pig heart into David Bennett.Credit: University of Maryland School of Medicine

The first person to receive a transplanted heart from a genetically modified pig is doing
well after the procedure last week in Baltimore, Maryland. Transplant surgeons hope the
advance will enable them to give more people animal organs, but many ethical and
technical hurdles remain.

“It’s been a long road to get to this point, and it’s very exciting we are at a point where a
group was ready to try this,” says Megan Sykes, a surgeon and immunologist at Columbia
University in New York City. “I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting things to be
learned.”

Physicians and scientists worldwide have for decades been pursuing the goal of
transplanting animal organs into people, known as xenotransplantation.

Unusual opportunity
Last week’s procedure marks the first time that a pig organ has been transplanted into a
human who has a chance to survive and recover. In 2021, surgeons at New York
University Langone Health transplanted kidneys from the same line of genetically
modified pigs into two legally dead people with no discernible brain function. The organs
were not rejected, and functioned normally while the deceased recipients were sustained
on ventilators.

Aside from that, most research has so far taken place in non-human primates. But
researchers hope that the 7 January operation will further kick-start clinical
xenotransplantation and help to push it through myriad ethical and regulatory issues.

Success for pig-to-baboon heart transplants

“From 4 patients, we’d learn a lot that we wouldn’t learn from 40 monkeys,” says David
Cooper, a transplant surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “It’s time we
move into the clinic and see how these hearts and kidneys do in patients.”

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Xenotransplantation has seen significant advances in recent years with the advent of
CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing, which made it easier to create pig organs that are less
likely to be attacked by human immune systems. The latest transplant, performed at the
University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), used organs from pigs with ten genetic
modifications.

The researchers had applied to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to do a
clinical trial of the pig hearts in people, but were turned down. According to Muhammad
Mohiuddin, the University of Maryland surgeon who leads the research team behind the
transplant, the agency was concerned about ensuring that the pigs came from a medical-
grade facility and wanted the researchers to transplant the hearts into ten baboons before
moving on to people.

But 57-year-old David Bennett gave Mohiuddin’s team a chance to jump straight to a
human transplant. Bennett had been on cardiac support for almost two months and
couldn’t receive a mechanical heart pump because of an irregular heart beat. Neither
could he receive a human transplant, because he had a history of not complying with
doctors’ treatment instructions. Given that he otherwise faced certain death, the
researchers got permission from the FDA to give Bennett a pig heart.

The heart used in the transplant came from a pig with several genetic modifications,
including some to knock out genes that trigger the human immune system.Credit:
University of Maryland School of Medicine

The surgery went well and “the heart function looks great”, Mohiuddin says. He and his
team will monitor Bennett’s immune responses and the performance of his heart. They
will continue working towards controlled clinical trials, but Mohiuddin says they might
apply to conduct more emergency procedures if the right patients come along.

If Bennett’s procedure proves successful and more teams try similar surgery, regulators
and ethicists will need to define what makes a person eligible for a pig organ, says Jeremy
Chapman, a retired transplant surgeon at the University of Sydney in Australia. Waiting a
long time for an organ isn’t enough to justify the highly experimental and possibly risky
procedure, he says. That’s especially true with other organs, such as kidneys; most people
waiting for kidney transplants can be put on dialysis.

Chapman likens the process to the use of experimental cancer drugs that are too
dangerous to test in people with other options. Regulators and ethicists will need to
decide what chance of success outweighs the risk of making a person wait for a human
organ, he says.

‘Crazy, exciting week’

For now, transplantation is limited by the supply of pigs as well as regulatory hurdles.
There is currently just one company — Revivicor in Blacksburg, Virginia, owned by United
Therapeutics — that has suitable facilities and clinical-grade pigs.

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“This has been a crazy, exciting week,” says Revivicor chief executive David Ayares. The
company’s pigs are being raised at a facility near Birmingham, Alabama, but Revivicor is
building a larger facility in Virginia that it hopes will eventually supply hundreds of
organs per year.

Ayares has been engineering pigs for two decades, testing how various genetic
modifications limit rejection in humans and other primates. To make the pig heart used in
the transplant, the company knocked out three pig genes that trigger attacks from the
human immune system, and added six human genes that help the body to accept the
organ. A final modification aims to prevent the heart from responding to growth
hormones, ensuring that organs from the 400-kilogram animals remain human-sized.

‘Organs-on-chips’ go mainstream

Although the combination seems to have worked, it’s unclear how many of the
modifications are necessary. “There’s a lot more science needed in assessing each genetic
modification,” says Sykes, who adds that “we need that information” because the
modifications also have the potential to be harmful in people.

Mohiuddin says that because each transplant into a baboon costs approximately
US$500,000, testing multiple combinations would be prohibitively expensive. Cooper
and others say that the future of xenotransplantation probably includes tailoring the
modifications to suit particular organs and recipients. Cooper’s own research, for
example, has found that in baboons that receive pig kidneys, the growth-hormone
modification causes problems with urine transport. But he says that his team hopes to
perform a kidney transplant into a person soon, if it can get a pig with the proper genetic
modifications.

Whatever happens, it might be some time before other organs are ready for clinical use.
Waiting lists are shorter for liver transplants, making it harder to justify people receiving
a pig organ. And although people who require lung transplants often die on the waiting
list, Sykes says that fragile pig lungs have proved tricky to transplant into primates and
are often rejected.

Limits of animal models

Cooper, Chapman and others say that it is important to study the transplants in humans
rather than baboons. The differences between species “preclude us moving further with
that model to predict the clinical outcome”, Chapman says.

Non-human primates tend to have antibodies that humans don’t, which attack proteins
on pig organs, so a lot of work has gone into making the organs suitable for baboons, not
people.

New life for pig-to-human transplants

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Furthermore, researchers need to be able to study the pig heart’s physiology — whether it
will beat at the same rate as a human heart, for instance — and whether ill people will
react to the transplant in the same way as healthy baboons.

Several other companies are engineering pigs for solid organ transplants with different
genetic modifications, although none yet has medical-grade facilities, as United
Therapeutics does. eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is making pigs that cannot
pass on retroviruses that are present in all pig genomes. And NZeno in Auckland, New
Zealand, is breeding miniature pigs whose kidneys remain human-sized without growth-
hormone modifications. Chapman suspects that many more organizations are genetically
modifying pigs for transplant but have yet to disclose commercially sensitive information.

Ayares and United Therapeutics declined to say how much each pig costs to produce,
although they acknowledge that the animals are expensive. But as more companies get
into the game, Cooper expects that the cost will drop and the FDA and other regulators
will loosen some of their requirements for clean facilities. Infection with pathogens from
pig organs doesn’t yet seem to be a problem, although Bennett and any future recipients
will need to be monitored.

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How your looks betray your personality
newscientist.com/article/mg20126957-300-how-your-looks-betray-your-personality

By Richard Wiseman , Roger Highfield and Rob Jenkins

Find out how our experiment worked, and see the results

THE history of science could have been so different. When Charles Darwin applied to be the
“energetic young man” that Robert Fitzroy, the Beagle’s captain, sought as his gentleman
companion, he was almost let down by a woeful shortcoming that was as plain as the nose on his
face. Fitzroy believed in physiognomy – the idea that you can tell a person’s character from their
appearance. As Darwin’s daughter Henrietta later recalled, Fitzroy had “made up his mind that no
man with such a nose could have energy”. Fortunately, the rest of Darwin’s visage compensated for
his sluggardly proboscis: “His brow saved him.”

The idea that a person’s character can be glimpsed in their face dates back to the ancient Greeks. It
was most famously popularised in the late 18th century by the Swiss poet Johann Lavater, whose
ideas became a talking point in intellectual circles. In Darwin’s day, they were more or less taken as
given. It was only after the subject became associated with phrenology, which fell into disrepute in
the late 19th century, that physiognomy was written off as pseudoscience.

Now the field is undergoing something of a revival. Researchers around the world are re-evaluating
what we see in a face, investigating whether it can give us a glimpse of someone’s personality or
even help to shape their destiny. What is emerging is a “new physiognomy” which is more subtle but
no less fascinating than its old incarnation.

First impressions are highly influential, despite the well-worn admonition not to judge a book by its
cover. Within a tenth of a second of seeing an unfamiliar face we have already made a judgement
about its owner’s character – caring, trustworthy, aggressive, extrovert, competent and so on
(Psychological Science, vol 17, p 592). Once that snap judgement has formed, it is surprisingly hard
to budge. What’s more, different people come to strikingly similar conclusions about a particular
face – as shown in our own experiment (see “The New Scientist face experiment”).

People also act on these snap judgements. Politicians with competent-looking faces have a greater
chance of being elected, and CEOs who look dominant are more likely to run a profitable company.
Baby-faced men and those with compassionate-looking faces tend to be over-represented in the
caring professions. Soldiers deemed to look dominant tend to rise faster through the ranks, while
their baby-faced comrades tend to be weeded out early. When baby-faced men appear in court they
are more likely than their mature-faced peers to be exonerated from a crime. However, they are also
more likely to be found guilty of negligence.

There is also a well-established “attractiveness halo”. People seen as good-looking not only get the
most valentines but are also judged to be more outgoing, socially competent, powerful, sexually
responsive, intelligent and healthy. They do better in all manner of ways, from how they are greeted
by other people to how they are treated by the criminal justice system.

Is there any substance to such snap judgements? Are dominant-looking people really more
dominant? Are baby-faced people naive? Are we electing the most competent leaders, or simply
people who look the part? As psychologist Alexander Todorov of Princeton University points out,

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the fact that different people come to remarkably similar conclusions about a particular face is very
different from saying there is a correspondence between a face and something real in an individual’s
personality.

There is, however, some tantalising evidence that our faces can betray something about our
character. In 1966, psychologists at the University of Michigan asked 84 undergraduates who had
never met before to rate each other on five personality traits, based entirely on appearance, as they
sat for 15 minutes in silence (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 4, p 44). For three
traits – extroversion, conscientiousness and openness – the observers’ rapid judgements matched
real personality scores significantly more often than chance.

More recently, researchers have re-examined the link between appearance and personality, notably
Anthony Little of the University of Stirling and David Perrett of the University of St Andrews, both
in the UK. They pointed out that the Michigan studies were not tightly controlled for confounding
factors: the participants could have been swayed by posture, movement, clothing and so on. But
when Little and Perrett re-ran the experiment using mugshots rather than live subjects, they also
found a link between facial appearance and personality – though only for extroversion and
conscientiousness (British Journal of Psychology, vol 98, p 111).

While these experiments suggest that our snap judgements of faces really do contain a kernel of
truth about the personality of their owner, Little stresses that the link is far from clear-cut. He and
Perrett only found a correlation at the extremes of personality, and other studies looking for links
with different aspects of personality have failed to find any association at all. The owner of an
“honest” face, for example, is no more likely to be trustworthy than anyone else.

What is also not fully understood is why we make facial judgements so readily. Is there an
evolutionary advantage to judging books by their covers? Little suggests that because these
judgements are so rapid and consistent – and because they can indeed reveal aspects of personality
– it is likely that evolution has honed us to pick up on the signals.

Support for this, and the kernel of truth idea, has come from a study of 90 ice-hockey players
published late last year by Justin Carré and Cheryl McCormick of Brock University in Ontario,
Canada. They found that a wider face in which the cheekbone-to-cheekbone distance was unusually
large relative to the distance between brow and upper lip was linked in a statistically significant way
with the number of penalty minutes a player was given for violent acts including slashing, elbowing,
checking from behind and fighting (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol 275, p 2651).

Testosterone-fuelled
They also found a link between the facial width-to-height ratio and the male sex hormone
testosterone. According to the results of a recent pilot study by Carré, men with wider faces have
higher testosterone concentrations in their saliva.

The critical – and as yet unanswered – question is whether people judge men with wider faces as
more aggressive. McCormick and Carré are studying this, and though the results are not all in,
McCormick says a preliminary analysis suggests that they do.

If this pans out, it would mean that men with high testosterone levels, who are known to be bigger,
stronger and more dominant, are more likely to have rounder faces – and that we evolved to judge
such faces as aggressive because their owners are more likely to attack us. Carré stresses, however,

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that the face is only one of many cues that we use to read the intentions of others. “It is not the be all
and end all of assessing people.”

The kernel of truth idea isn’t the only explanation on offer for our readiness to make facial
judgements. Leslie Zebrowitz, a psychologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts,
says that in many cases snap judgements are not accurate. Our readiness to judge books by their
covers, she says, is often an “overgeneralisation” of a more fundamental response (Social and
Personality Psychology Compass, vol 2, p 1497).

A classic example of overgeneralisation can be seen in predators’ response to eye spots, the
conspicuous circular markings seen on some moths, butterflies and fish. These act as a deterrent to
predators because they mimic the eyes of other creatures that the potential predators might see as a
threat, or are simply conspicuous in their own right.

Zebrowitz says the same thing may be true of our reaction to baby-faced men, who on first
impression are generally judged to be submissive and naive. Just as an eyespot is not an eye, so a
person with a baby face may not be babyish, but an observer is likely to respond as if they are, she
says. It is a similar story with our reaction to unattractive faces, which she says is an
overgeneralisation of an evolved aversion to people who are diseased or suffer from some genetic
anomaly. There is also “familiar face overgeneralisation”, whereby people are judged to have the
traits of others who they resemble.

Another researcher who leans towards overgeneralisation is Todorov. With Princeton colleague
Nikolaas Oosterhof, he recently put forward a theory which he says explains our snap judgements of
faces in terms of how threatening they appear. Todorov and Oosterhof asked people for their gut
reactions to pictures of emotionally neutral faces, sifted through all the responses, and boiled them
down to two underlying factors: how trustworthy the face looks, and how dominant. They then
worked out exactly which aspects of facial appearance were associated with looking trustworthy,
untrustworthy, dominant or submissive.

Next they generated random faces on a commercial program called FaceGen and morphed them
into exaggerated caricatures of trustworthy, untrustworthy, dominant or submissive faces. An
extremely trustworthy face, for example, has a U-shaped mouth, and eyes that form an almost
surprised look. An untrustworthy face has the corners of the mouth curled down and eyebrows
pointing to form a V (see diagram).

Finally, they showed these faces to people and asked them a different question: what emotions did
they appear to be expressing? People consistently reported that trustworthy faces looked happy and
untrustworthy ones angry, while dominant faces were deemed masculine and submissive ones
feminine.

Todorov and Oosterhof conclude that personality judgements based on people’s faces are an
overgeneralisation of our evolved ability to infer emotions from facial expressions, and hence a
person’s intention to cause us harm and their ability to carry it out (Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p11087).

Todorov, however, stresses that overgeneralisation does not rule out the idea that there is
sometimes a kernel of truth in these assessments of personality. “I would not say there is no
accuracy at all in these judgements, particularly in the case of dominance,” he says. “It is not the
case that overgeneralisation and kernel of truth ideas are mutually exclusive.”

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So if there is a kernel of truth, where does it come from? How exactly do some personality traits
come to be written all over our faces? In the case of the ice-hockey players there are links between
facial appearance, testosterone levels and personality. But there are other possibilities.

Perrett has a hunch that the link arises when our prejudices about faces turn into self-fulfilling
prophecies – an idea that was investigated by other researchers back in 1977 (Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, vol 35, p 656). Our expectations can lead us to influence people
to behave in ways that confirm those expectations: consistently treat someone as untrustworthy and
they end up behaving that way.

“Infants with masculine faces grow up to be children and adults with masculine faces,” Perrett says.
“Parental and societal reactions to these cues may help shape behaviour and personality. In essence,
people would be growing into the character expected of their physiognomy.”

This effect sometimes works the other way round, however, especially for those who look cute. The
Nobel prize-winning ethologist Konrad Lorenz once suggested that baby-faced features evoke a
nurturing response. Support for this has come from work by Zebrowitz, who has found that baby-
faced boys and men stimulate an emotional centre of the brain, the amygdala, in a similar way.

But there’s a twist. Baby-faced men are, on average, better educated, more assertive and apt to win
more military medals than their mature-looking counterparts. They are also more likely to be
criminals; think Al Capone. Similarly, Zebrowitz found baby-faced boys to be quarrelsome and
hostile, and more likely to be academic high-fliers. She calls this the “self-defeating prophecy
effect”: a man with a baby face strives to confound expectations and ends up overcompensating.

“Baby-faced men are better educated, more assertive and more apt to win military medals”

There is another theory that recalls the old parental warning not to pull faces, because they might
freeze that way. According to this theory, our personality moulds the way our faces look. It is
supported by a study two decades ago which found that angry old people tend to look cross even
when asked to strike a neutral expression. A lifetime of scowling, grumpiness and grimaces seemed
to have left its mark.

This takes us back to Darwin himself. He referred to how “different persons bringing into frequent
use different facial muscles, according to their dispositions; the development of these muscles being
perhaps thus increased, and the lines or furrows on the face, due to their habitual contraction, being
thus rendered more conspicuous.” Once again, Darwin was ahead of his time: in an intriguing way,
we get the face we deserve.

The New Scientist face experiment

Our experiment examined whether some subtle aspects of our psychological make-up might be
related to facial appearance, while offering readers the chance to appear on the cover of this issue in
a composite image.

We asked readers to submit a photograph of themselves looking directly at the camera, and to
complete a simple online personality questionnaire. In this they rated how lucky, humorous,
religious and trustworthy they considered themselves to be. More than 1000 people were kind
enough to submit their photographs and ratings.

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From these personality self-assessments we identified groups of men and women scoring at the
extremes of each of the four dimensions. We then took these people’s photographs and blended
them electronically to make several composite images.

The face-blending technique we used was pioneered more than a century ago by the Victorian
polymath Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin. The principle behind it is simple. Imagine having
photographs of two people who look very different. To create a composite we manipulate digitised
versions of the images to align key facial landmarks such as the corners of the mouth and eyes. This
allows us to calculate an average of the two faces. For example, if both faces have bushy eyebrows
and deep-set eyes, the resulting composite would also have these features. If one face has a small
nose and the other has a large nose, the final image would have a medium-sized nose.

The composites all looked very different from one another, but would people be able to identify the
personalities of the people behind the images? To find out, we paired up composites from the
extreme ends of each dimension and posted them online at www.facesexperiment.co.uk. So, for
example, the composite face from the women who had rated themselves as extremely lucky was
paired with the composite from those who had rated themselves as very unlucky. More than 6500
visitors to the site attempted to identify the lucky, humorous, religious and trustworthy faces.

From this it seems that women’s faces give away far more than men. An impressive 70 per cent of
people were able to correctly identify the lucky face, and 73 per cent correctly identified the religious
one. In line with past research, the female composite associated with trustworthiness was also
accurately identified, with a statistically significant 54 per cent success rate. Only one of the female
composites was not correctly identified – the one from the women who assessed themselves as
humorous.

The results for the male composites were very different. Here, our respondents failed to identify any
of the composites correctly. The images identified with being humorous, trustworthy and religious
all came in around chance, whilst the lucky composite was only correctly identified 22 per cent of
the time. This suggests that our perception of lucky-looking male faces is at odds with reality.

Why should these big sex differences have emerged? Perhaps female faces are simply more
informative than male ones. It could also be that the men who sent us their portraits were less
insightful when rating their personalities or less honest. Or perhaps the women were more
thoughtful when selecting the photographs they submitted.

The results of our pilot study were fascinating and should hopefully pave the way for additional
work. They show that people readily associate facial appearance with certain personality traits, and
suggest that there may be a kernel of truth in their judgements.

Our findings explored some dimensions not usually examined in this kind of research, and raise the
intriguing possibility that, among women at least, subtle aspects of an individual’s personality may
indeed be written all over her face.

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Advantages and disadvantages of family businesses
nibusinessinfo.co.uk/content/advantages-and-disadvantages-family-businesses

If you start or join a family business, as a family member you're likely to benefit from a
range of advantages which you often don't find in other enterprises. On the other hand,
you may also face some difficulties that specifically relate to family businesses.

Advantages of family businesses

1. Common values - you and your family are likely to share the same ethos and beliefs
on how things should be done. This will give you an extra sense of purpose and pride
- and a competitive edge for your business.
2. Strong commitment - building a lasting family enterprise means you're more likely
to put in the extra hours and effort needed to make it a success. Your family is more
likely to understand that you need to take a more flexible approach to your working
hours.
3. Loyalty - strong personal bonds mean you and family members are likely to stick
together in hard times and show the determination needed for business success.
4. Stability - knowing you're building for future generations encourages the long-term
thinking needed for growth and success - though it can also produce a potentially
damaging inability to react to change.
5. Decreased costs - family members may be more willing to make financial sacrifices
for the sake of the business. For example, accepting lower pay than they would get
elsewhere to help the business in the longer term, or deferring wages during a
cashflow crisis. You may also find you don't need employers' liability insurance if
you only employ close family members.

Disadvantages of family businesses

1. Lack of skills or experience - some family businesses will appoint family members
into roles that they do not have the skills or training for. This can have a negative
effect on the success of the business and lead to a stressful working environment.
2. Family conflict - conflict can arise in any business, but it's important to consider
that disputes within a family business can become personal as the staff are working
with the people closest to them. Bad feelings and resentment could destabilise the
business' operations and put your family relations at risk.
3. Favouritism - can you be objective when promoting staff and only promote the best
person for the job whether they are a relative or not? It is important to make
business decisions for business reasons, rather than personal ones. This can
sometimes be difficult if family members are involved.

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4. Succession planning - many family business owners may find it difficult to decide
who will be in charge of the business if they were to step down. The leader must
determine objectively who can best take the business forward and aim to reduce the
potential for future conflict - this can be a daunting decision.

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Why Play Is Important
psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beastly-behavior/201705/why-play-is-important

From an evolutionary biology point of view, it's not immediately obvious why humans
spend so much time on recreation and play. In humans, as well as other animals, time
spent playing is time not spent looking for food. Play could be a distraction from looking
out for predators. Play could cause needless injuries—even traumatic death. Viewed from
the lens of species survival, the drive to play seems like it would be a huge disadvantage.
But yet, all humans in all cultures like to play.

Source: Steve Hillebrand , U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

The universality of play argues that it is an innate feature passed down from our
ancestors. Furthermore, playing is not exactly a minor part of our lives. It is a big and
important part of who we are. This behavior cannot simply be an evolutionary side effect
or a genetic accident. We’re not talking about a tiny appendix in our abdomen. Play is a
huge part of the human experience, especially among the young, and thus there must be
value in it.

Just like organs or tissues, behaviors will be carefully honed over time by natural
selection. Behaviors that enhance survival and/or reproduction of individuals will develop
through the generations and become part of the innate “nature” of the species. Such as the
suckling of all infant mammals, many of our behavioral urges are driven purely by
instinct.

So what is the purpose or benefit of play? To understand our behaviors, it is often helpful
to examining correlates in other animals. (That's the whole thrust of my book!) But do
animals even engage in play?

Let's start with dogs. Undoubtedly, dogs are naturally given to wrestling with and chasing
each other. However, rather than purely for fun, these behaviors could be attempts to
establish dominance within a social context and a means to establish trust and familiarity.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that these behaviors aren’t also fun for the dogs, but it does
mean that we can’t claim that they are, per se, evidence that animals play just for the fun
of it, like humans do. That’s the kind of play that we are talking about—just plain old
having fun. That’s what we humans do. We just have fun. For humans, play is for play’s
sake.

Or is it? Maybe our definition of play is the problem. If we think of play as doing
something enjoyable that has no other purpose, then of course we won’t find another
purpose—we’ve made not having a purpose part of the definition. Instead, we need to
keep an open mind about hidden purposes of play. We play because it is fun, but it may
also be serving other purposes—that’s what we’re looking for.

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After all, if we discover biological benefits to playing, then it really isn’t “just for the fun of
it.” It only seems that way. Perhaps the example of dogs playing together really is a clue to
the function of play for other species, including us. Perhaps the secret to understanding
the function of play is the realization that playful acts can be fun and serve some other
purpose for the species.

Defining Play

Defining play is a complicated business, but I find Gordon Burghardt's painstaking

work to be the authority on the subject. He has convincingly established a five-point
standard that well captures the essence of playful behavior. (He focuses on non-human
animals but it holds for us as well.) For the purpose of this discussion, we can use the
simple, though unscientific shorthand, "That which is fun/enjoyable but not other things
like sex, eating, hunting, etc." When it comes to play and fun - we know it when we see it.

It's also important to remember that the "enjoyment" of fun is mostly secondary to its
purpose. Pleasure is a neurological phenomenon that drives us to seek certain experiences
that are good for our evolutionary future. Pleasure drives us to eat, have sex, wield power,
and, of course, to play. Pleasure drives individual to do things, but that's just a trick.
The goals of each of those things are wildly different. So the question is - why has
evolution programmed us to enjoy seemingly pointless activities like playing baseball,
doing puzzles, and engaging in make-believe?

The many benefits of different kinds of play

I spend most of the first chapter of my book summarizing many studies on the benefits
of play for humans and other animals. I then analyze each of these "modalities" of play
against the backdrop of our evolutionary history. Here are the highlights:

1.) Play for establishing social rank. Although the image of animals fighting each other for
dominance is common, all-out fights-to-death are rare in most species. Instead, wrestling
and other feats of physical strength are used to establish the dominance hierarchy. It is
safer to the individuals and better for group cohesion (in social-cooperative species).

2.) Play for learning social rules. Many animals learn social etiquette and other important
behaviors through playing. This involves correction, coercion, and reconciliation, but the
benefit is social cohesion, orderly hierarchy, and cooperation for mutual aid. Animal
behaviorist Marc Bekoff, a leading expert on animal play, has extensively studied its
important role in the social fabric of wolves.

3.) Play as practice. This idea is that some forms of play serve as a warm-up for doing the
real thing as adults. Cats play-hunt inanimate objects and some monkeys engage in play-
mothering as juveniles. The jury is out whether play-practice actually helps or is merely
an outlet for the instincts that will take shape as the animals (including humans) mature.

4.) Play to establish motor coordination. Fine control of muscle movements requires a lot
of practice and feedback training. The fun of play drives animals to stay active and to
especially practice certain kinds of movement that helps them develop their motor skills.

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5.) Play as social bonding. In social animals, play helps to promote bonding among group
members, relieve in-group tension, and establish trust. The group that plays together
stays together.

6.) Play for managing stress. Humans aren't the only animals that get stressed out.
Certain forms of play serve to lower stress hormones and, in so doing, promote mental
and physical health.

7.) Play for developing certain cognitive and creative skills. Separate from fine-motor
control and the practicing of certain tasks or skills, playing can help in the general
development of our brains and minds. It can encourage creativity, planning, problem
solving, and a whole bunch of task-specific skills like spatial reasoning and logic. For both
humans and animals, play is a low-risk way to develop our cognitive abilities.

There are certainly more, but I discuss these benefits of play because they have solid
research studies with both humans and animals that explore the mechanisms and
benefits. Humans are a playful species, as are all animals.

One of the most important features of play is that it is only engaged when an animal is in a
"relaxed field," meaning they are adequately fed, healthy, and not under imminent
predator threat. This is why we see animals playing in captivity more than we do in the
wild, since they are relatively protected and their temporal needs are met. When animals
in captivity are NOT playful, we know that they are stressed and the stress may come from
the captivity itself.

Make sure you make some time to play today!

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Why Men May Struggle to Communicate Their Feelings
psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-intersection-mental-health-relationships-and-sexuality-in-the-modern-
world/202112/why-men

Key points
The demands of rigid masculinity make it difficult for many men to fully express
their needs in relationships.
Alexithymia presents a hosts of challenges in relationships, for both partners.
Men deserve to be seen, and their emotions validated, without their masculinity
being called into question.

In adult romantic relationships, it is all too common to find two people whose ways of
managing emotions differ wildly. People who emote outwardly and people who retreat
inward with their emotions can find themselves struggling to connect or to maintain
effective communication with each other.

Competing needs and differing emotional regulation strategies can leave partners
misinterpreting psychological survival skills as personal attacks or abandonments. This
chasm in communication is often amplified if one or both partners suffer from
alexithymia.

Understanding Alexithymia
Translated, the word “alexithymia” means “without words for emotions” (Soni et al.,
2018). What this means, essentially, is that the individual with it struggles to understand,
process, or describe their emotions (Panahi et al., 2018).

Alexithymia serves as a temporary, albeit meticulous, defense against emotional pain

whereby a person suppresses or represses the conscious experience of the distress. Typical
emotional functioning resumes when the stressor or threat subsides, or as the person
develops more sophisticated coping skills (Soni et al., 2018).

Alexithymia can lead to insecure attachment styles in adult romantic relationships, as

children who develop alexithymia may have had parents who were ambivalent, rejecting,
or emotionally unavailable (Scigala et al., 2021).

Alexithymia may present in different people with a varied constellation of symptoms.

According to Panahi et al. (2018) and Scigala et al. (2021), some of the most common
indicators of alexithymia include:

Difficulty regulating emotions in general

Increased difficulty with arousal and emotional regulation in intimate relationships
Utilizing distancing or cutoff strategies
Difficulty staying aligned with their own values and convictions
An amplified preference for autonomy
Fear of emotional intimacy

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 Difficulty articulating their feelings to themselves or other people
Inhibited emotional expression
A lack of internal imagination
Distress in social settings
Chronic negative mood
A limited capacity for empathy

Normative Male Alexithymia

Research indicates that alexithymia occurs more frequently in men than women
(Leonard, 2019). For cisgender men, the performative nature of masculinity can be
exhausting. While sex is noted at birth, gender is a socialized construct. Many men learn
the rules of toxic masculinity—dominance, competition, aggression, and stoicism (Murti,
2020) early in life.

DeAngelis (2001) noted that by age two, boys are typically less verbally expressive
compared to girls. Perhaps due to socialization, boys are less facially expressive by the age
of four, compared with same-aged girls. Peers and other men in school, family, and friend
groups may reinforce the rules of masculinity, and bully boys who don’t comply. For fear
of being found not masculine enough, an exaggerated sense of emotional repression is
required, so as not to risk being excluded from the club of men (Reeser & Gottzén, 2018).

Families that maintain more traditional or rigid gender role expectations tend to
discourage sons from expressing vulnerable emotions while simultaneously encouraging
expression for their daughters. Though not rooted in direct relational trauma, male
gender role socialization teaches boys to suppress emotions and deny feelings they have of
vulnerability, passivity, or tenderness (DeAngelis, 2001). One could posit that doing so
could engender significant emotional distress, while concurrently stripping boys of the
ability to recognize, label, and express their emotions in a constructive way.

Subclinical levels of alexithymia were found to be more prevalent in men. While not
“normal,” the trait has become “normalized” due to the reinforcing nature of performative
masculinity that demands stoicism. These suppressed feelings may then be acted out
through the guise of anger, given that aggression is a sanctioned expression of emotions
within the framework of traditional masculinity.

Due to reinforcing narratives of stoicism and individualism, it is no surprise that men

tend to employ a cut-off strategy to manage their emotions. In terms of attachment, men
are reported to have a higher prevalence of avoidant attachment than women, as they
learn to minimize their attachment needs to avoid being seen as weak or unmasculine.

Impact on A Coupleship
In a romantic relationship, alexithymia presents a host of challenges, which are only
heightened when placed in tandem with rigid gender role expectations, should they exist
in the relationship. One partner’s desire to co-regulate big feelings with their partner may
feel overwhelming or threatening to the partner with alexithymia. Not only does the

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partner with alexithymia struggle to identify, express, or discern their emotions, but they
are often so overwhelmed by the task of thinking about their feelings that it evokes an
emotional and relational cutoff.

A partner with alexithymia is most inclined toward autoregulation, the tendency to

regulate emotions without involving others. They may also struggle to be empathetic with
a partner who may be far more emotionally expressive, and in need of co-regulation for
comfort. A partner of someone with alexithymia may feel abandoned in plain sight, as it
often evokes anxiety, and fears of rejection or abandonment (Scigala et al., 2021).

Alexithymia has been shown to have a negative correlation with physical affection, as well
as the quality and satisfaction felt within a relationship (Panahi et al., 2018). When one or
both partners has unaddressed alexithymia, couples may struggle to feel safe, validated,
heard, or seen, and can have a difficult time establishing a sense of purpose, protection,
and connection. Deficits in emotional expression, communication, connection, and
regulation pose a direct threat to the secure functioning of the couple.

Emotions are a biological imperative, necessary for survival. Emotional awareness and
intelligence are evolutionary strategies that can be learned, even later in life. Working to
deconstruct the limiting self-expression that rigid masculinity demands empowers men to
experience a full range of their own emotions. Men deserve to be seen, and their emotions
validated, without their masculinity being called into question.

Individual therapy can help in this quest, teaching men the emotional regulation skills
that help them become stronger communicators. Couples therapy can help bring partners
closer together, and back in alignment with their shared relational goals. Developing a
mutual understanding and the skills to effectively meet each other’s needs, are the
liberation partners need to break free of patterns of self-protection that silo partners,
instead of connecting them.

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Why Do People Think Art is Boring?
pyaarnation.com/art-design/why-do-people-think-art-is-boring

August 26, 2021

The phrase “art is boring” might offend art lovers! Whether you like it or not, art is
constantly changing the world. It is an integral part of the collective human conscience. It
works to affect social change when activists show images of children suffering, from
poverty or oppression, in their campaigns.

When photographers publish photos of war-torn areas, it catches the attention of the
masses whose hearts reach out for those in need of an escape.

Art can also serve as a respite from the humdrum of our normal day-to-day routines and
can serve as a form of entertainment.

Why is it then, that some people find art to be boring?

Is it because they are not exposed to the unbound nature of different art forms.

Or is it because human emotions are so subjective that what fascinates the creator may
not invoke the same emotions in the audience?

Does art have to be ‘good’ to be considered not boring, or does it have to be provocative or
shocking to induce reactions?

Let’s look into some of the common narratives around – why art is boring?

Art is boring because I don’t understand it

Very few people are born with an innate sense of understanding all the existing art forms.

Expecting to understand art instinctively is akin to thinking that one might understand
the views of another individual without talking to them.

Much like the skill of holding a conversation, appreciating art is something that is
cultivated over time. If we are exposed to better ‘conversations’ with art as children or
young adults, it becomes much easier to understand.

Also, it helps to derive value from various forms such as modern art, contemporary
movement arts, etc. However, no one is too old to engage with art.

Art is boring because I can’t relate to it

When you know why a work of art was created or research the story behind its inspiration,
you make it easier for your mind to understand. Only then does art cease to be boring.

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So, the next time you see a piece of art that seems to catch your interest but you’re not
sure why to ask yourself how this work of art came to be.

Who was the artist and what could their inspiration have been? How did these works
impact other people who saw this before me?

Do I feel the same way when I see it or does it hold a different meaning to me?

Let see if you still art is boring or not.

Once you know the answers to these questions, you’ll find that the piece of art is no longer
as boring as you thought it was.

It is deeply personal and subject to the interpretation of the viewer.

Art is irrelevant in modern times

The famous theater director Anne Bogart, in her essay titled How to Embody Time, wrote
that she experienced time in two different ways- horizontal and vertical.

Time flows horizontally when one is moving hurriedly from one task to another in their
day.

However, there are moments of pause where there doesn’t seem to exist either a past or a
future. These breaks can be from something as simple as meditation, or something as
sensorial as art.

What she means is that art can become the very means of experiencing time. She says:

“Art creates the experience of vertical time for the perceiver by plunging a stake or
dropping an anchor into the endless flow of time, thereby creating a sense of eternity in the
human body.”

When we talk about art, we often forget that most, if not all works of art are bound by a
fourth dimension- time.

Art is usually a reaction to the current trends and ethos of society. Artists can only react to
things in their past or present.

Hence, when we look at realistic paintings from centuries bygone, we must remember that
these were produced before the advent of the camera.

With the advent of industrialization and mass production in the 20th century, new
technology made the emergence of new mediums much easier. Art moved away from
being a realistic (or ‘boring’) representation of our world.

Artists went from using pastels and paints, into digital and 3D media, using imaging
software and innovative materials to create works of art.

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Contemporary artists are using insects, dirt, and even. It can’t be denied- art is a sign of
the times.

Maybe art does not impact me directly

Online, almost all kinds of subjects are depicted in art, be it in the form of entertaining
cartoons or culturally significant music and movies.

What’s more interesting, is that technology has democratized art that would otherwise be
subject to the whims of a museum curator.

Most kinds of visual arts – from films and photographs to paintings (and even memes!) –
are now being presented and circulated online.

While classic galleries still exist in most cities, most artists find that it’s much easier for
new creations to gain attention through the internet.

In the recent past, works of art- either temporal or permanent- posted on social media
apps have become instrumental in leading social movements and protests.

The art world is no longer steeped in economic and racial discrimination but has become
a level playing field.

This has led to a diverse range of voices from all over the globe; anyone can now create
and find an audience that relates to their lived experiences.

Too much money for something ‘My Two-Year-Old Could Have

Made’
As you read this, art continues to find ways to change and enhance the human experience.

And yes, it can enhance your life as well.

Art is not just confined to white gallery walls or stuffy classical music and serious plays.

Therefore, we don’t just showcase inspiration, we make it accessible.

We envision a world that is full of artists and patrons from all walks of life, who can
understand and purchase art that moves them, even if it is not something that is very
expensive.

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The Surprising Benefits of Sarcasm
scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprising-benefits-of-sarcasm

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence,” wrote that
connoisseur of wit, Oscar Wilde. Whether sarcasm is a sign of intelligence or not,
communication experts and marriage counselors alike typically advise us to stay away
from this particular form of expression. The reason is simple: sarcasm expresses the
poisonous sting of contempt, hurting others and harming relationships. As a form of
communication, sarcasm takes on the debt of conflict.

And yet, our research suggests, there may also be some unexpected benefits from
sarcasm: greater creativity. The use of sarcasm, in fact, promotes creativity for those on
both the giving and receiving end of sarcastic exchanges. Instead of avoiding sarcasm
completely in the office, the research suggests sarcasm, used with care and in moderation,
can be effectively used and trigger some creative sparks.

Sarcasm involves constructing or exposing contradictions between intended meanings.

The most common form of verbal irony, sarcasm is often used to humorously convey
thinly veiled disapproval or scorn. “Pat, don’t work so hard!”, a boss might say upon
catching his assistant surfing the Internet. Early research on sarcasm explored how
people interpret statements and found that, as expected, sarcasm makes a statement
sound more critical. In one laboratory study, participants read scenarios in which, for
instance, (1) one person did something that could be viewed negatively, such as smoking,
and (2) a second person commented on the behavior to the first person, either literally (“I
see you don’t have a healthy concern for your lungs”) or sarcastically (“I see you have a
healthy concern for your lungs”). Participants rated sarcasm to be more condemning than
literal statements. In a similar study, participants were encouraged to empathize either
with a person behaving in a way that could be construed as negative or with a second
person commenting on the first person’s behavior. Both perspectives prompted
participants to rate sarcastic comments by the second person as more impolite relative to
literal comments.

Other research has show that sarcasm can be easily misinterpreted, particularly when
communicated electronically. In one study, 30 pairs of university students were given a
list of statements to communicate, half of which were sarcastic and half of which were
serious. Some students communicated their messages via e-mail and others via voice
recordings. Participants who received the voice messages accurately gleaned the sarcasm
(or lack thereof) 73 percent of the time, but those who received the statements via e-mail
did so only 56 percent of the time, hardly better than chance. By comparison, the e-
mailers had anticipated that 78 percent of participants would pick up on the sarcasm
inherent in their sarcastic statements. That is, they badly overestimated their ability to
communicate the tenor of their sarcastic statements via e-mail. What’s more, the
recipients of the sarcastic e-mails were also decidedly overconfident. They guessed they

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would correctly interpret the tone of the e-mails they received about 90 percent of the
time. They were considerably less overconfident about their ability to interpret voice
messages.

In recent research, my colleagues and I discovered an upside to this otherwise gloomy

picture of sarcasm. In one study, we assigned some participants to engage in either
simulated sarcastic, sincere, or neutral dialogues by choosing from pre-written responses
on a sheet of paper. Others were recipients of these different types of messages from
others. Immediately after participants engaged in these “conversations,” we presented
them with tasks testing their creativity. Not surprisingly, the participants exposed to
sarcasm reported more interpersonal conflict than those in other groups. More
interestingly, those who engaged in a sarcastic conversation fared better on creativity
tasks. The processes involved in initiating and delivering a sarcastic comment improved
the creativity and cognitive functioning of both the commenter and the recipient. This
creativity effect only emerged when recipients picked up on the sarcasm behind the
expresser’s message rather than taking mean comments at face value.

Why might sarcasm enhance creativity? Because the brain must think creatively to
understand or convey a sarcastic comment, sarcasm may lead to clearer and more creative
thinking. To either create or understand sarcasm, tone must overcome the contradiction
between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that
activates, and is facilitated by, abstraction, which in turn promotes creative
thinking.Consider the following example, which comes from a conversation one of my co-
authors on the research (Adam Galinsky, of Columbia) had a few weeks before getting
married. His fiancée woke him up as he was soundly asleep at night to tell him about
some new ideas she has for their upcoming wedding next month –many of which were
quite expensive. Adam responded with some ideas of his own: “Why don’t we get Paul
McCartney to sing, Barack Obama to give a benediction and Amy Schumer to entertain
people.” His comment required his fiancée to recognize that there is a distinction between
the surface level meaning of the sentence (actually signing up these people to perform)
and the meaning that was intended.

This is not the first set of studies showing that creativity can be boosted by things that
would commonly be considered creativity killers. In one series of studies, for example,
researchers found that moderate noise can be an untapped source of creativity, providing
a welcome distraction that helps the brain make disparate associations. In addition,
alcohol is believed to aid creativity, up to a point, by reducing focus and relaxing the
mind.

Sarcasm can be interpreted negatively, and thus cause relationship costs. So, how do we
harness its creative benefits without creating the type of conflict that can damage a
relationship? It comes down to trust. Our studies show that, given the same content and
tone, sarcasm expressed toward or received from someone we trust is less conflict
provoking than sarcasm expressed toward or received from someone we distrust. Of
course, if we were to vary the tone and content, it would make a difference too – given an
extremely harsh tone and critical content, even trust might not be enough.

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Given the risks and benefits of sarcasm, your best bet is to keep salty remarks limited to
conversations with those you know well, lest you offend others—even as you potentially
help them think more creatively.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Francesca Gino is a behavioral scientist and professor at Harvard Business School. She is
the author of Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to
the Plan (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Twitter: @francescagino

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Act on Climate Emergency Now to Prevent Millions of
Deaths, Study Shows
scientificamerican.com/article/act-on-climate-emergency-now-to-prevent-millions-of-deaths-study-shows

Andrea Thompson

Every metric ton of carbon dioxide humans emit comes at a cost—not only in terms of the financial toll of the
damage wrought by floods, heat waves and droughts but also the price in human lives. Substantially curtailing
emissions today could prevent tens of millions of premature deaths over the course of the 21st century,
according to a new study that calculated this “mortality cost of carbon.”

The research, published on Thursday in Nature Communications, breaks out one piece of the social cost of
carbon (SCC), a metric that calculates the future damages from carbon emitted today to put a price on those
emissions. The SCC helps governments weigh the costs and benefits of climate regulations, mitigation projects
and fossil fuel infrastructure. The Biden administration is currently in the midst of revamping the U.S. federal
government’s estimate of this metric to include the most recent science on climate impacts, as recommended by
a 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report. Those impacts include expected
premature deaths. The Biden administration has temporarily put its SCC estimate at about $51 per metric ton,
close to where it was in the Obama years—before the Trump administration slashed it to as little as $1 per ton.

R. Daniel Bressler, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and author of the new study, was interested in
looking at how SCC estimates would change if researchers included the most recent science on temperature-
related deaths tied to climate change. He also broke out that component separately so that the human toll would
be clearer. To do so, Bressler updated a model created by economist William Nordhaus (who won a Nobel prize
in economics for that model in 2018). It effectively links various climate scenarios to their economic impacts to
calculate the social cost of carbon and determine the optimal plan for reducing emissions. Bressler wanted to
tweak the model to make climate-related mortality a bigger contributor to the overall cost of climate change and
to incorporate extensive recent research on the matter. “There’s really been an explosion of literature [on the
topic] over the last decade or so,” he says.

When Bressler incorporated that newer research, he calculated that—under a scenario in which emissions
continue to grow—every 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere in 2020 would result in
one excess death globally by 2100. (For comparison, 3.5 Americans emit that much in their lifetime.) Looking
more broadly, one million metric tons of CO2 emitted in 2020—or what 35 commercial planes, 216,000 cars or
115,000 American homes release in a year—would cause 226 premature deaths by the end of the century.

Factoring in those deaths increased the social cost of carbon from $37 to $258 per metric ton, effectively making
it much more economically advantageous to reduce emissions now. It also makes rapidly reducing emissions
and fully decarbonizing by 2050 more cost-effective, in comparison with the more tapered approach that
Nordhaus’s model originally recommended. The result is “quite a big difference in terms of what the suggested
climate policy is,” Bressler says. Following a faster emissions reduction path instead of letting emissions
continue to grow unabated would reduce premature deaths from about 83 million to nine million by 2100.

Bressler notes that his study has a wide uncertainty range and that the mortality figures only include deaths
related to temperature. Ideally, disease transmission, floods and other climate-related impacts should also be
factored in, but these elements have less research to draw on. Bressler’s work is similar to what other scientists,
including those at the Climate Impact Lab collaboration, are doing to revise the social cost of carbon, says
Maureen Cropper, a University of Maryland economist and co-chair of the group that wrote the 2017 National
Academies report. Bressler’s estimate of the SCC is much higher than the Climate Impact Lab’s because of
various economic assumptions he made, but translating this aspect of the social cost of carbon from more
abstract dollar figures is valuable, Cropper adds. “When you put things in terms of people,” she says, “I think it
does resonate.”

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Future Space Travel Might Require Mushrooms
scientificamerican.com/article/space-travels-most-surprising-future-ingredient-mushrooms

Nick Hilden

The list of mycologists whose names are known beyond their fungal field is short, and at its apex is
Paul Stamets. Educated in, and a longtime resident of, the mossy, moldy, mushy Pacific Northwest
region, Stamets has made numerous contributions over the past several decades— perhaps the best
summation of which can be found in his 2005 book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can
Help Save the World. But now he is looking beyond Earth to discover new ways that mushrooms
can help with the exploration of space.

In a new “astromycological” venture launched in conjunction with NASA, Stamets and various
research teams are studying how fungi can be leveraged to build extraterrestrial habitats and
perhaps someday even terraform planets. This is not the first time Stamets’s career has intersected
with speculative space science. He also recently received an honor that many researchers would
consider only slightly less hallowed than a Nobel Prize: the distinction of having a Star Trek
character named after him.

Scientific American spoke with Stamets about the out-of-this-world implications for the emerging
field of astromycology.

Advertisement

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

First, a chicken-or-egg question: Did Star Trek: Discovery name a character after you
because you had started exploring astromycology, or was the idea for astromycology
inspired by Star Trek?

CBS got ahold of me and said the writers of Star Trek wanted to talk to me: “We’re in the dungeon,
there’s about a dozen of us, we’ve been tasked with Star Trek: Discovery, we’re hitting a brick wall,
and we saw your TED Talk.” I had mentioned terraforming other planets with fungi.

What separates Star Trek from other science fiction, you know, is it really pioneered the importance
of inclusivity, recognizing that the diversity of the members of our society gives us strength. And,
indeed, that’s what I’ve learned as a mycologist: the biodiversity of our ecosystem gives our
ecosystem resilience. Ultimately, diversity wins.

So I told them terraforming with fungi on other planets is very plausible. Fungi were the first
organisms that came to land, munching rocks, and fungi gave birth to animals about 650 million
years ago. We’re descendants of the descendants of these fungal networks.

I said, “You can have all these concepts for free. I’m a Star Trek fan; I don't want anything for this.”
I said, “But, you know, I always wanted to be the first astromycologist.” And at the very end, they go,
“Astromycologist, we love that! What a great phrase; we can use that.”

How do you define the term astromycology here in our nonfictional universe?

Astromycology is obviously a subset of astrobiology, so astrobiology would be the study of biological

organisms extraterrestrially.

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Really, you’re talking about the biology of the universe—and within the biology of the universe is our
fungi. So astromycology would be the study of fungal biology throughout the universe. And I think
it’s inevitable we’re going to someday find fungi on other planets.

How can Earth’s fungi help with the development of human habitats or even entire
ecosystems on other planets?

[Plants that support terraforming] need minerals, and pairing fungi up with the plants and debris
from humans [causes them to] decompose into a form that then creates rich soils that could help
generate the foods that astronauts need. It’s much easier to take one seed and grow your food than it
is to take a ton of food to space, right? Nature is incredibly efficient in terms of a payload. It’s much
better for nature to generate a payload of food than for your rocket to carry a payload of food.

Your current research proposal with NASA has two stages. The first involves
identifying the best fungal species for breaking down asteroid regolith. Do you
currently have any possible candidates?

Basically, regolith is asteroid dust. [Research teams] have constructed [synthetic] regolith that is
supposed to mimic the components that are found on the surface of asteroids and also on Mars. So
we’re working with them now. I have a suite of about 700 strains of fungi in my cultural library. I
made some recommendations, and I’m happy to say oyster mushrooms are one of the best ones that
we’ve experimented with on the regolith so far.

And just recently we have found something synergistically that was unexpected when we took one
species, gave it a nutritional source, and we wanted to know how far it would grow into the regolith
[with its mycelial roots]. When we took one species of fungi, and we looked at the reach that it had
in the regolith, then we combined it with other species of fungi—each of which did not have that
great of a reach. When we had a plurality of fungal species together, the outreach was far greater
than anticipated. In some ways, it just proves this whole concept about biodiversity.

The second stage of your proposal involves determining the most effective way to use
a fungus once the best type is selected. What might that look like?

The universe is rich with hydrocarbons. What oyster mushrooms do really well is break down
hydrocarbons and dismantle them and restructure them into fungal carbohydrates, into sugars.
Sugars are an absolutely essential nutrient, of course, for practically all life forms that I know of on
this planet. So the idea of using hydrocarbons as a feedstock for oyster mushrooms makes a lot of
sense.

Now, you have these kind of start/stops. You can only go so far without other inputs of essential
nutrients. So it’s not like the fungi could just use hydrocarbons alone—they need a boost. That’s
where we have to supplement them. But once you begin to create this reaction, it becomes catalytic
—that is, self-sustaining. The more you feed this catalytic reaction, the more biodiversity you have.
Again, you are having other organisms grow and die. They become a resource that provides
vitamins, other minerals, perhaps other decomposable organic compounds such as cellulose or
lignin, which can fuel these fungi to grow even larger and then support more plants that create more
cellulose. And then they die, and they decompose, and these lenses of mycelium—shallow, usually
circular colonies of mycelium—then begin to grow out more and more. So you’re creating a micro-
oasis environment that may just be a speck. And then these things begin to elaborate. And as their
communities become more diverse and complex, these lenses of life then begin to become larger
oases. And when the oasis environment is large enough, then it can sustain humans.

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In addition to generating healthy soil, there are teams investigating how fungi might
be used to grow structures on other worlds. Could you tell me more about how this
sort of so-called mycotecture might work?

We grow lots of reishi mycelium, for instance. We grow reishi blocks. We wanted to crush these
blocks in order to turn them into soil or get other value-added products. So we dried out these reishi
blocks and we tried to crush them. But we couldn’t crush them. You could saw them with a saw
blade, but if you tried to hit them with a hammer or something, they just wouldn’t break. So this
great engineer built us a hydraulic stainless steel press, and I had like 2,000 psi [pounds per square
inch] in this press, and we gave it my reishi blocks, and it bent the stainless steel. Trying to
compress it, it actually broke the machine. This thing will crush rocks all day long and could not
crush mycelium.

They’re so structurally strong. They’re also good at retaining heat, so their insulation properties are
phenomenal. Moreover, these could become batteries. You can have solar panels on a structure on
Mars made of mycelium. (The entire mycelium is about 85 percent carbon, and studies have shown
that porous carbon can be an excellent capacitor.) You could then pregrow these and arrange them
on a form such that they become nanobatteries. And they could then not only insulate you from the
cold on the Martian or asteroid surface, but the house itself becomes a giant battery for power
because they’re so rich in carbon fibers. So that, to me, is really cool.

What kind of timelines do you have in mind for all of this? Is this the sort of thing we
might see applied a decade from now or in a century?

Tomorrow. It’s happening now. I’m guessing it will be implemented in space within 10 to 20 years.

Before we wrap up, let’s get a little more speculative. What are some of the more
fantastic ways mushrooms might be applied in space?

Well, what I can tell you? I’m sure some of your editors may go, “No way, we’re not going to publish
this.” But I think using psilocybin mushrooms in spaceflight makes a lot of sense. There are more
than 65 articles right now ... at ClinicalTrials.gov that say psilocybin mushrooms help people
overcome [post-traumatic stress disorder], loneliness and depression. Do you think the astronauts
are going to have loneliness and depression and PTSD? I think yes. How are you going to help
them?

Under carefully controlled conditions, our astronauts [being] able to take psilocybin in space and
look at the universe and not feel distant and alone but feel like they’re part of this giant
consciousness will give them a better frame of mind—psychologically, emotionally—to work with
other astronauts and stay on mission. I feel that isolation, loneliness and depression are going to be
major issues that astronauts face.

So I say this with great sincerity: NASA and anyone else working and looking at the settlement of
space, you should consider that psilocybin mushrooms should be an essential part of your
psychological tool kit for astronauts to be able to endure the solitude and the challenges of space
and isolation.

Psilocybin mushrooms build creativity; people who are more creative come up with more solutions.
I think that, in a sense, is a fertile ecosystem that can lead to the sustainability of humans in space.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Nick Hilden is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Daily Beast, Men's Health,
Thrillist, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, and more. He's usually exploring some exciting corner of the
world, and you can follow his writing and travels on Instagram @nick.hilden or Twitter
@nickhilden.

Follow Nick Hilden on Twitter

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Let’s Start Naming Climate-Related Disasters for
Polluters and Their Enablers
scientificamerican.com/article/lets-start-naming-climate-related-disasters-for-polluters-and-their-enablers

Drew Shindell

The first taste I had of the power of naming bad things came when in college I mentioned how I’d had German
measles when I was young. Bristling, a student from Bremen said “What is this German measles? There is
nothing German about it!” “Um, I dunno—that’s just what it was called when I was a kid,” I stammered.

In fact, the illness (now known as rubella) was so called because a German scientist named Friedrich Hoffmann
was the first to identify it as a distinct disease, in the 1700s. But it’s not surprising that my classmate was
distressed; such reactions are now well-known. To prevent inadvertent defamation, the World Health
Organization now leaves place names out of diseases and uses Greek letters for new COVID variants. So rather
than the “India variant,” we now worry about the less inflammatory sounding “Delta variant.” Defamation isn’t
always inadvertent, either; Donald Trump frequently called COVID the “China virus” in a deliberate attempt to
blame the Chinese for the pandemic. Either way, it’s clear that naming can be tantamount to shaming.

But that might not always be a bad thing. Germans weren’t responsible for rubella, but some destructive forces
are in fact unleashed by bad actors. Climate disasters are a good example—so I propose that we name climate-
related extreme events such as the floods that have devastated Germany and drought and wildfires tormenting
the American West after the polluters whose behavior has, despite repeated warnings from scientists, continued
to warm the planet.

Here’s an example. The National Weather Service labels tropical storms according to a list of proper names. The
weather authorities have turned to Greek letters in years (such as 2020) when those names ran out, though that
practice was recently retired by the World Meteorological Organization in favor of a longer list of proper names.
But what if they drew instead on a list of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters? Imagine the connections people
would make—correctly—if it was Hurricane ConocoPhillips that flooded Houston in 2017 instead of Hurricane
Harvey. Or if we’d been hit by Exxon this year instead of Elsa?

And there’s no reason to stop at tropical storms. There are now human fingerprints on many climate-related
extreme events, including hurricanes, wildfires, heat waves and floods. What impression would people get if the
West were currently suffering under the Marathon Oil Megadrought on top of which the Peabody Energy Heat
Dome shattered temperature records? The right one. Companies might even be motivated to clean up their act,
with Royal Dutch Shell, for example, perhaps getting itself off the list of shame if it follows recent court orders to
dramatically reduce its carbon footprint.

And let’s not forget the largest emitters of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas. Maybe if the
Hilcorp Energy Fire were burning through New Mexico, its citizens wouldn’t be so happy to have the company’s
refinery operations there emitting far more methane per unit of oil or gas produced than other companies.

In my state of North Carolina, imagine if a Duke Energy Heat Wave was making summer even hotter than usual.
Maybe then the farmers trying to keep their crops from dying would think twice about voting for General
Assembly members who enable Duke to be among the least ambitious adopters of renewables of any major
power company. Similarly, singling out another laggard with the Florida Power and Light Hurricane might help
persuade Florida voters that the Sunshine State should actually use all that potential solar power (which you’d
think would be a no-brainer).

Would the government go for such an idea? Probably not, since the National Weather Service has resisted calls
to give names of any kind to extremes such as heat waves. It also doesn’t formally recognize the names given to
non-Hurricanes by the Weather Channel. But there’s a silver lining to that, as without government involvement
we’d be free to get personal and include the enablers too. I can picture the news feed already: “Damage from the
Charles Koch Floods along the Missouri River are being compounded by heavy rains from Hurricane Inhofe.” Or
“Texas facing blackouts and Florida oranges shriveling as Abbott and DeSantis Heat Waves bake the South.
Perhaps even “Scores feared dead as U.S. Chamber of Commerce Fires burn across four states.”

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You might argue, of course, that we’d be in danger of running out of names. But you’d be wrong, as a look at the
records of dozens of companies, CEOs and many hundreds of legislators at the state and federal levels makes
sadly but abundantly clear.

This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those
of Scientific American.

Rights & Permissions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Drew Shindell is Nicholas Professor of Earth Science at Duke University and special advisor for methane
action for the Climate and Clean Air Coalition.

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The Boomers Ruined Everything
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/boomers-are-blame-aging-america/592336

June 24, 2019

The mistakes of the past are fast creating a crisis for younger Americans.

By Lyman Stone

June 24, 2019

About the author: Lyman Stone is a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.

The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way
to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a
strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem
frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in
the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The
longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?

One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old
in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates
are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different
interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term
problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more
easily ignored.

But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created,
advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent
report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work
rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent
pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and
stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely
hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger
Americans.

Zoning codes in America have their roots in the early 1900s. Some land-use rules arose
out of efforts to manage growing density in cities due to industrialization and new
construction technologies that allowed taller buildings. But most zoning was intended to
protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial groups. For many
decades, though, zoning codes were relatively limited in scope.

Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as
suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s. This shift is
reflected in the increasing frequency with which various land-use associated words were

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used in Google’s database of American English-language publications. These decades,
when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp
escalation in land-use rules.

There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may
have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others
suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused
homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.

Today, strict land-use rules—whether framed as rules about parking, green space, height
limits, neighborhood aesthetics, or historic preservation—make new construction
difficult. Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more
and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are
locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to
rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events
marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.

But, of course, Boomers didn’t only make rules that nudge young people out of
homeownership. They also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws
and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have
proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers
were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.

Just as tight land-use rules make existing homeowners richer by reducing how many new
houses are listed on the market, strict licensing rules make existing workers richer by
reducing competition in their fields. And while some industries clearly need licensing
rules for health and safety reasons, most of the growth in licensure has been in fields
where health and safety justifications are less salient: Do you really need hours of course
work and special exams to be a florist, an interior designer, or an auctioneer?

Recommended Reading
By privileging existing workers, licensure rules increase income inequality, and they do so
specifically by shifting income toward older workers. When licensure standards exclude
felons, they also disproportionately affect minorities. Young people, and especially
minorities, are increasingly being legally prohibited from work.

Again, scholars differ on explanations for why licensure has proliferated. It could be that
work has simply gotten more complex. Or it could be that the decline of unions led to a
search for new ways to maintain occupational closure. Increased gender and racial
integration in workplaces may also have led to a search for new forms of hierarchy.

But even for workers who don’t need a formal license, barriers to work have grown over
time. Jobs that once required a high-school degree now require a college degree. This
escalation of credential requirements has created a kind of educational arms race. The
rise in collegiate attainment, again, did not begin with Boomers. Rather, the GI Bill, and

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the explosion in new university chartering that it underwrote, created a new norm of
college education for many jobs. With the rising availability of higher education,
employers, who tend to be older than their employees, often demand degrees as licenses.

Meanwhile, even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to
a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than
people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water.
The social norm requiring degrees for virtually any middle-class job is one largely
invented by Boomers and their parents, and enforced by those generations.

As with formal licensing and land-use rules, there are explanations for the rise of degree
requirements: greater public support for education, a complex economy, growing demand
for knowledge-workers. All probably have some validity. But the actual enforcement
mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for
younger job applicants.

And whatever specific factors contributed to the rise of licensure, land-use rules, and
demands for more degrees, these developments are part of a wider social trend toward
increasing control and regulation across all walks of life. Regardless of changes in formal
segregation, unionization, demand for knowledge workers, returns to various asset
classes, or other explanations for the rise of work and housing regulation, what is striking
is that these trends occurred simultaneously. A graph tracking the rise in paperwork
needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the
federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would
show the same basic trend. Sector-specific explanations seem a bit suspect when the trend
itself is so general.

The most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one
to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates. Even though murder
rates are today at the same levels they were in the 1950s, the imprisoned share of the
population is higher in America than in any country other than North Korea. We imprison
a larger share of the population than authoritarian countries such as Turkmenistan and
China.

That huge spike has a very clear origin in the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s.
Academic research has shown that incarcerating more criminals does reduce crime
somewhat, so, as with all the other examples I’ve given, this response was understandable.

But many countries experienced a similar crime wave. Most of them experienced similar
crime declines in the 1990s, even without so much imprisonment. Furthermore, research
has also shown that imprisonment patterns in America were heavily biased by race, with
incarceration rates not always reflecting actual rates of criminality.

Today, while incarceration rates are edging lower, they remain astonishingly high. Even
as younger Americans are locked out of jobs and housing by strict rules set by previous
generations, a startlingly large share of them, especially in minority communities, are

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literally behind bars. Those who remain free are nonetheless bereft of family, friends, and
potential co-workers—and whole communities are, as a matter of law, stripped of
potential workers.

It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to
respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was
disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and
procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy
making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s. And whatever specific
arguments may have justified a command-and-control response to crime, this kind of
response reared its head for every major political problem encountered by Baby Boomers:
housing, jobs, education, crime, and, of course, debt.

Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt
—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and
credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social
Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the
time. Already, in places such as Detroit, Illinois, and Puerto Rico, where political rules
make flexible solutions hard and the population is aging very quickly, massive debt
restructurings loom large. But around the country, the pressures of long-term obligations
will grow.

Below, I show a reasonable projection of the share of national income that will have to be
spent paying for these obligations in the future if there is no substantial restructuring of
liabilities. It’s based on consensus forecasts from groups such as the Congressional
Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget for economic growth and for
programs such as Social Security and Medicare where such forecasts are available—but in
some cases, such as state debts and pensions, no such forecast was available, and so I
developed a simple one.

Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower
alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer
generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.

Furthermore, the basic demographic balance sheet is getting worse all the time,
increasing the relative burden on young people. Working-age Americans are dying off in
alarming numbers.

The odds of a 32-year-old dying have risen by 24 percent in the past five years, even as
death rates among older Americans are about stable. Baby Boomers are living longer even
as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose,
suicide, car accidents, and violence. But, of course, while this sudden increase in working-
age death rates is a new concern, the long-run fiscal crunch has been obvious for decades.
For virtually the entire period of Boomer political dominance, it has been obvious that
long-term obligations needed to be fixed. And yet, the problem has not been fixed.
Younger Americans will suffer the consequences.

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As dire as this all sounds, there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless
rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum
lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can
have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities
can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending, while solutions for
government debt and obligations are widely known, even if they are politically
unpalatable.

Not all of these problems were first caused by the Boomers, but they each worsened on
their watch. If leaders in business, education, and politics want to solve these problems,
they can. Whether the gerontocracy in charge today wants solutions may be another
question altogether.

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100 years ago, this man discovered an exquisite parrot
thought to be extinct. What came next is a tragedy we
must not repeat
theconversation.com/100-years-ago-this-man-discovered-an-exquisite-parrot-thought-to-be-extinct-what-came-
next-is-a-tragedy-we-must-not-repeat-171939

Russell McGregor

Exactly 100 years ago tomorrow, a bird that had been relegated to extinction made a
comeback. The exquisitely beautiful paradise parrot was rediscovered by Cyril Jerrard, a
grazier from Gayndah in Queensland’s Burnett district, on December 11 1921.

But its return was fleeting. Scattered pairs were seen around Gayndah until 1929. Some
were seen around nearby Gin Gin in the 1930s. After that came only rumour and hope.

Today, the paradise parrot has the tragic status of extinct. It’s the only mainland
Australian bird species known to have suffered that fate since colonisation.

On the 100th anniversary of the parrot’s rediscovery, we might revisit the event and
consider why the bird’s resurrection was so brief. From that, we may gain insights into
how to help the many species threatened with extinction today.

Our ‘avarice and thoughtlessness’

In 1924, a few years after rediscovering the paradise parrot, Jerrard identified the reasons
for its decline. “Directly by our avarice and thoughtlessness,” he wrote, “and indirectly by
our disturbance of the balance so nicely preserved by nature, we are undoubtedly
accountable for the tragedy of this bird.”

Although a grazier, he acknowledged “the most fatal change of all” was wrought by the
pastoral industry.

Jerrard’s collaborator in trying to save the bird, the journalist and birder Alec Chisholm,
also nominated pastoralism – especially the burning of grasslands – as a main factor in
the decline, along with trapping for the aviary trade and feral cats.

But while Jerrard and Chisholm could point out why the paradise parrot was sliding
towards extinction, they were unable to do much about it. In books, newspapers and
magazines, Chisholm publicised the parrot’s plight and pleaded for its preservation. His
pleas didn’t exactly fall on deaf ears, but they were inadequate to counter a social ethos
that privileged economic gain over avian loss.

Besides, ornithologists in the 1920s and 1930s had a lamentably limited repertoire of
strategies to save endangered species.

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On the latter issue, things have changed dramatically. We now have comprehensive
scientific studies of the risks facing endangered species, and a vast array of remedial
measures.

There are gaps in the science and imperfections in the conservation strategies, but there is
a potential to rescue endangered species today that was lacking when the paradise parrot
was rediscovered.

Lessons for the golden-shouldered parrot

Take, for example, the paradise parrot’s close relative, the golden-shouldered parrot of
Cape York Peninsula. Currently listed by the International Union for the Conservation of
Nature as endangered, it faces threats similar to those that annihilated its southern cousin
last century.

In the heartland of golden-shouldered parrot territory, pastoralists Sue and Tom

Shephard are devoted to preserving the parrots on their station, as was Jerrard 100 years
ago. But unlike the Gayndah grazier, the Shephards have scientific backup.

From the pioneering studies of environmental scientists in the 1990s to more recent
investigations, scientists working on Cape York Peninsula have scrutinised the species’
needs and advised on how to safeguard them. They place particular stress on fire
management.

The birds eat seeds from several preferred grasses, which require specific fire regimes to
thrive. The availability of seed affects the parrot’s breeding success. Fire also helps
maintain the birds’ grassy woodland habitat and leaves fewer places for predators to hide.

But since European colonisation, fire regimes in Australia have changed dramatically
across northern Australia. It has meant the golden-shouldered parrot has less food and is
more vulnerable to predators.

Chisholm in the 1920s knew fire had something to do with the paradise parrot’s demise,
but his writings on the topic were sketchy and vague. There was then no clear
understanding of the fire ecology of this land, still less of the role of Indigenous fire
regimes or willingness to learn from them.

Now, we have detailed calibrations of the type and intensity of fires needed to ensure
breeding success for the golden-shouldered parrot and to minimise its loss to predators.
Traditional owners of its territory, the Thaypan and Olkola peoples, collaborate with
pastoralists and ecologists, linking traditional knowledge with Western science to
reestablish fire regimes beneficial to the parrot.

While we’re better equipped today to rescue endangered species than was the case for the
paradise parrot last century, that’s no cause for complacency.

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Despite the superior conservation strategies and technologies now available, the drivers of
extinction identified by Cyril Jerrard in the 1920s – our “avarice and thoughtlessness” –
remain stubbornly persistent.

Prioritising bird welfare

If we’re to ensure the golden-shouldered parrot and other endangered species do not go
the way of the paradise parrot, we need scientific strategies and technologies.

But we need more than those. Sometimes, at least, we need to subordinate avarice to
avian welfare.

For that, we need to connect, emotionally and ethically, with the birds around us. Birds
must matter to us – not merely in an abstract or objectified fashion but as beings of
intrinsic worth.

That’s what Chisholm was getting at in his 1922 book, Mateship with Birds, the
concluding chapter of which was titled “The Paradise Parrot Tragedy”. In the lavish
language then fashionable among nature writers, he urged readers to:

“dispute the dangerous idea that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever in a cage or cabinet; and
disdain, too, the lopsided belief that the moving finger of Civilisation must move on over
the bodies of ‘the loveliest and the best’ of Nature’s children”.

He and Jerrard lacked the tools and technologies to avert the paradise parrot’s tragedy,
but not an appreciation of our moral responsibility to try to do so. We now have the tools
and technologies, but our moral compass seems as fickle as ever.

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A brief history of African nations at the Olympic
Winter Games
theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-african-nations-at-the-olympic-winter-games-176619

Cobus Rademeyer

A record number of eight African countries competed at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games
in PyeongChang, South Korea. At the 2022 Beijing winter games, currently underway,
Africa is represented by six athletes from five countries: Eritrea, Ghana, Madagascar,
Morocco and Nigeria. Five are competing in Alpine (downhill) skiing and one in cross
country skiing.

These athletes are not touted to win medals in 2022. But, in general, the overarching
theme with African participation in the winter Olympics is in taking part and not winning,
as my study of the continent’s history at the winter games shows.

In contrast, African countries have done relatively well at the summer Olympic Games,
particularly in the middle and long distance running events. Since 1908, they have won
over 400 medals at the summer Olympics. Athletes representing African countries have
not had any medal success at the Olympic Winter Games so far.

Given the continent’s geography, this is not surprising. The average annual temperature
in Africa is 25.7 degrees Celsius. The difference between the average warmest and coldest
month in Africa is a mere 1.9 degrees Celsius and snow is a rarity. The continent therefore
lacks the climate for all winter sports contested outside on snow or ice. Despite this,
athletes representing African countries have contributed to the Olympic movement’s goals
of universality and inclusion.

The majority of these Olympians had strong ties with snowbound countries in the
northern hemisphere. Many were born to parents with respective European and African
heritages and left Africa at a young age to live in the northern hemisphere. Or they left the
continent to pursue education and training in regions of the world known for snowy
winters. In many instances they returned to Africa to represent their respective countries
at the games.

A total of 15 African countries have participated at the winter Olympics in 58 years, from
1960 to 2022. Despite not winning medals, individual athletes have found success and
acted as trailblazers in other ways.

Most competitive countries

Of the 15 countries to represent Africa, only seven have participated in more than one
winter Olympics. South Africa was the first African country to participate. Given the
political boycotts against apartheid in South Africa, the country’s first appearance at the

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1960 games in Squaw Valley in the US was also their last until democracy. South Africa
was barred from the 1964 games and suspended from the Olympic Movement in 1970.
The country’s return to the winter Olympics was in Lillehammer, Norway in 1994.

Morocco became the second African country to compete at the winter Olympics when a
team of five Alpine skiers represented the country at the 1968 games in Grenoble, France.
It was just over a decade prior, in 1956, that the country gained its independence from
French colonial rule. The Western Sahara conflict contributed to Morocco not competing
at the winter Olympics for the next 16 years. On the country’s return at the Sarajevo
games in Yugoslavia in 1984, a four-man team represented Morocco, once again in Alpine
skiing.

Senegal made its first of five appearances at the winter Olympics in 1984 in Sarajevo.
Three athletes make up the sum total of Senegal’s participation at five different Olympic
Winter Games that span a period of 26 years. Two of the three Senegalese athletes had
strong links with countries in the northern hemisphere, both growing up in the Alps. This
opportunity enhanced their ability to train and prepare for the games.

While Algeria has not accomplished any significant results at the winter games in 1992,
2006 and 2010, the country has at least moved past the ‘once-off’ appearance scenario, a
feat many other African countries have not yet achieved.

Individual feats
A characteristic of many African countries’ participation is that their teams consisted of
only one athlete. Kenya was represented by a sole representative at all four of the winter
games the country competed in between 1998 and 2018. Cross-country skier Philip Boit
represented Kenya in 1998, 2002 and 2006, while Alpine skier Sabrina Simader was the
sole Kenyan representative at the 2018 Games in South Korea.

Madagascar has competed in three winter games, in 2006, 2018 and 2022. Alpine skier
Mialitiana Clerc, their sole representative, will be the only African woman competing in
2022.

In both the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, as well as in PyeongChang in

2018, Ghana was represented by a single athlete. In 2010 it was Alpine skier Kwame
Nkrumah-Acheampong, who was born in Scotland to exiled Ghanaian parents. It marked
the first time African competitors were measured against other athletes from Africa –
creating a race within a race. In 2018 Akwasi Frimpong became the second Ghanaian to
compete at the winter Olympics in skeleton sledding. Frimpong was born and raised in
Ghana but moved to the Netherlands at a young age.

Togo’s maiden participation came at the 2014 winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, when the
country was represented by two female athletes – cross country skier Mathilde-Amivi
Petitjean and Alpine skier Alessia Afi Dipol. Only one athlete ever represented Ethiopia at
either games in which the country participated to date. Robel Teklemariam competed at
both the 2006 Turin games and the 2010 Vancouver games in cross country skiing.

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Based on geographical, political, social and economic factors, Egypt, Swaziland,
Cameroon and Zimbabwe have all been one-time participants at the winter Olympics.
These countries helped contribute to constant African representation at the winter games.

A constant presence
A Olympic Winter Games highlight for Africa came in 2018 when a record number of
eight countries lined up for the opening ceremony in South Korea. Athletes from Nigeria,
Eritrea, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, South Africa, Morocco and Togo represented the
continent. After the hype of what many people considered as the most “African Winter
Olympics” ever in South Korea in 2018, only five African countries will be present at the
Winter Games in Beijing in 2022.

But since 1984, at least one African nation has competed at each subsequent winter
Olympics.

The lack of climate for winter sports such as bobsleigh, skiing and snowboarding limits
the level of participation in winter sports. However, globalisation and the relatively
limited access to tertiary institutions in Africa have brought young African athletes in
contact with many forms of winter sport while studying or working abroad,
predominantly in the northern hemisphere.

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A lunar return, a Jupiter moon, the most powerful
rocket ever built and the James Webb Space Telescope
– space missions to watch in the coming months
theconversation.com/a-lunar-return-a-jupiter-moon-the-most-powerful-rocket-ever-built-and-the-james-webb-
space-telescope-space-missions-to-watch-in-the-coming-months-175490

Chris Impey

Space travel is all about momentum.

Rockets turn their fuel into momentum that carries people, satellites and science itself
forward into space. 2021 was a year full of records for space programs around the world,
and that momentum is carrying forward into 2022.

Last year, the commercial space race truly took off. Richard Branson and Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos both rode on suborbital launches – and brought friends, including actor
William Shatner. SpaceX sent eight astronauts and 1 ton of supplies to the International
Space Station for NASA. The six tourist spaceflights in 2021 were a record. There were
also a record 19 people weightless in space for a short time in December, eight of them
private citizens. Finally, Mars was also busier than ever thanks to missions from the U.S.,
China and United Arab Emirates sending rovers, probes or orbiters to the red planet.

In total, in 2021 there were 134 launches that put humans or satellites into orbit – the
highest number in the entire history of spaceflight. Nearly 200 orbital launches are
scheduled for 2022. If things go well, this will smash last year’s record.

Read news coverage based on evidence, not tweets

I’m an astronomer who studies supermassive black holes and distant galaxies. I have also
written a book about humanity’s future in space. There’s a lot to look forward to in 2022.
The Moon will get more attention than it has had in decades, as will Jupiter. The largest
rocket ever built will make its first flight. And of course, the James Webb Space Telescope
will start sending back its first images.

I, for one, can’t wait.

Everyone’s going to the Moon

Getting a rocket into orbit around Earth is a technical achievement, but it’s only
equivalent to a half a day’s drive straight up. Fifty years after the last person stood on
Earth’s closest neighbor, 2022 will see a crowded slate of lunar missions.

NASA will finally debut its much delayed Space Launch System. This rocket is taller than
the Statue of Liberty and produces more thrust than the mighty Saturn V. The Artemis I
mission will head off this spring for a flyby of the Moon. It’s a proof of concept for a rocket
system that will one day let people live and work off Earth. The immediate goal is to put
astronauts back on the Moon by 2025.

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NASA is also working to develop the infrastructure for a lunar base, and it’s partnering
with private companies on science missions to the Moon. A company called Astrobotic
will carry 11 payloads to a large crater on the near side of the Moon, including two mini-
rovers and a package of personal mementos gathered from the general public by a
company based in Germany. The Astrobotic lander will also be carrying the cremated
remains of science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke – as with Shatner’s flight into space, it’s
an example of science fiction turned into fact. Another company, Intuitive Machines,
plans two trips to the Moon in 2022, carrying 10 payloads that include a lunar hopper and
an ice mining experiment.

Russia is getting in on the lunar act, too. The Soviet Union accomplished many lunar firsts
– first spacecraft to hit the surface in 1959, first spacecraft to soft-land in 1966 and the
first lunar rover in 1970 – but Russia hasn’t been back for over 45 years. In 2022, it plans
to send the Luna 25 lander to the Moon’s south pole to drill for ice. Frozen water is an
essential requirement for any Moon base.

All aboard the Starship

While NASA’s Space Launch System will be a big step up for the agency, Elon Musk’s new
rocket promises to be the king of the skies in 2022.

The SpaceX Starship – the most powerful rocket ever launched – will get its first orbital
launch in 2022. It’s fully reusable, has more than twice the thrust of the Saturn V rocket
and can carry 100 tons into orbit. The massive rocket is central to Musk’s aspirations to
create a self-sustaining base on the Moon and, eventually, a city on Mars.

Part of what makes Starship so important is how cheap it will make bringing things into
space. If successful, the price of each flight will be US$2 million. By contrast, the price for
NASA to launch the Space Launch System is likely to be over $2 billion. The reduction in
costs by a factor of a thousand will be a game-changer for the economics of space travel.

Jupiter beckons
The Moon and Mars aren’t the only celestial bodies getting attention next year. After
decades of neglect, Jupiter will finally get some love, too.

The European Space Agency’s Icy Moons Explorer is scheduled to head off to the gas giant
midyear. Once there, it will spend three years studying three of Jupiter’s moons –
Ganymede, Europa and Callisto. These moons are all thought to have subsurface liquid
water, making them potentially habitable environments.

Additionally, in September 2022, NASA’s Juno spacecraft – which has been orbiting
Jupiter since 2016 – is going to swoop within 220 miles of Europa, the closest-ever look at
this fascinating moon. Its instruments will measure the thickness of the ice shell, which
covers an ocean of liquid water.

Seeing first light

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All this action in the Solar System is exciting, but 2022 will also see new information from
the edge of space and the dawn of time.

After successfully reaching its final destination, unfurling its solar panels and unfolding
its mirrors in January, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will undergo exhaustive
testing and return its first data sometime midyear. The 21-foot (6.5-meter) telescope has
seven times the collecting area of the Hubble Space Telescope. It also operates at longer
wavelengths of light than Hubble, so it can see distant galaxies whose light has been
redshifted – stretched to longer wavelengths – by the expansion of the universe.

By the end of the year, scientists should be getting results from a project aiming to map
the earliest structures in the universe and see the dawn of galaxy formation. The light
these structures gave off was some of the very first light in history and was emitted when
the universe was only 5% of its current age.

When astronomers look out in space they look back in time. First light marks the limit of
what humanity can see of the universe. Prepare to be a time traveler in 2022.

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A new treatment helped frogs regenerate their
amputated legs – taking science one step closer to
helping people regrow their body parts, too
theconversation.com/a-new-treatment-helped-frogs-regenerate-their-amputated-legs-taking-science-one-step-
closer-to-helping-people-regrow-their-body-parts-too-175646

Michael Levin, David Kaplan, Nirosha Murugan

Our bodies connect us to the world. When people lose parts of their bodies to disease or
traumatic injury, they often feel that they’ve lost a part of who they are, even experiencing
a grief akin to losing a loved one. Their sense of personal loss is justified because unlike
salamanders or snarky comic book characters like Deadpool, adult human tissues
generally do not regenerate – limb loss is permanent and irreversible.

Or is it?

While there have been significant advances in prosthetic and bionic technologies to
replace lost limbs, they cannot yet restore a sense of touch, minimize the sensation of
phantom pains or match the capabilities of natural limbs. Without reconstructing the
limb itself, a person won’t be able to feel the touch of a loved one or the warmth of the
sun.

We are researchers in regenerative and developmental biology and biomedical

engineering. Our recent study in the journal Science Advances showed that just 24 hours
of a treatment we designed is enough to regenerate fully functional and touch-sensitive
limbs in frogs.

Kickstarting regeneration
During very early development, cells that will eventually become limbs and organs
arrange themselves into precise anatomical structures using a set of chemical,
biomechanical and electrical signals. In considering ways to regenerate limbs, we
reasoned that it would be much easier to ask cells to repeat what they already did during
early development. So we looked for ways to trigger the “build whatever normally was
here” signal for cells at the site of a wound.

One of the major challenges in doing this, however, is figuring out how to create an
environment that encourages the body to regenerate instead of forming scars. While scars
help protect injured tissue from further damage, they also change the cellular
environment in ways that prevent regeneration.

Some aquatic animals such as the axolotl have mastered regeneration without scar
formation. And even in early human development, the amniotic sac provides an
environment that can facilitate regenerative mechanisms. We hypothesized that
developing a similar environment could override scar formation at the time of injury and
allow the body to reactivate dormant regenerative signals.

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To implement this idea, we developed a wearable device made of a silk hydrogel as a way
to create an isolated chamber for regeneration by blocking other signals that would direct
the body to develop scars or undergo other processes. We then loaded the device with a
cocktail of five drugs involved in normal animal development and tissue growth.

We chose to test the device using African clawed frogs, a species commonly used in
animal research which, like humans, does not regenerate limbs in adulthood. We attached
the device onto one leg stump for 24 hours. We then removed the device and observed
how the site of the lost limb changed over time. Over the course of 18 months, we were
amazed to find that the frogs were able to regenerate their legs, including fingerlike
projections with significant nerve, bone and blood vessel regrowth. The limbs also
responded to light pressure, meaning that they had a restored sense of touch, and allowed
the frog to return to normal swimming behavior.

Frogs that were given the device but without the drug cocktail had limited limb regrowth
without much functional restoration. And frogs that weren’t treated with the device or the
drug cocktail did not regrow their limbs, leaving stumps that were insensitive to touch
and functionally impaired.

Interestingly, the limbs of the frogs treated with the device and the drug cocktail weren’t
perfectly reconstructed. For example, bones were sometimes fragmented. However, the
incompleteness of the new limb tells us that other key molecular signals may be missing,
and many aspects of the treatment can still be optimized. Once we identify these signals,
adding them to the drug treatment could potentially fully reverse limb loss in the future.

The future of regenerative medicine

Traumatic injury is one of the leading causes of death and disability in Americans. And
limb loss from severe injury is the most frequent source of lifelong disability. These
traumatic injuries are often caused by automobile accidents, athletic injury, side effects of
metabolic diseases such as diabetes and even battlefield injuries.

The possibility of decoding and awakening dormant signals that enable the body to
regenerate parts of itself is a transformative frontier in medical science. Beyond regrowing
lost limbs, regenerating heart tissue after a heart attack or brain tissue after a stroke could
extend life and dramatically increase its quality. Our treatment is far from being ready to
use in humans, and we only know that it works when applied immediately after injury.
But uncovering and understanding the signals that allow cells to regenerate means that
patients may not have to wait for scientists to really understand all the intricacies of how
complex organs are constructed before they can get treated.

Making a person whole again means more than just replacing their limb. It also means
restoring their sense of touch and ability to function. New approaches in regenerative
medicine are now beginning to identify how that may be possible.

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A quick guide to climate change jargon – what experts
mean by mitigation, carbon neutral and 6 other
key terms
theconversation.com/a-quick-guide-to-climate-change-jargon-what-experts-mean-by-mitigation-carbon-neutral-
and-6-other-key-terms-167172

Wändi Bruine de Bruin

As a major U.N. climate conference gets underway on Oct. 31, 2021, you’ll be hearing a lot
of technical terms tossed around: mitigation, carbon neutral, sustainable development.
The language can feel overwhelming.

“It sounds like you’re talking over people,” one person said of the terminology during a
recent study colleagues and I conducted through the USC Dornsife Public Exchange.

Climate reports are often written at a scientific level. So we thought it would be helpful to
clarify some of the most common terms.

To do that, we interviewed 20 people about common terms used by climate scientists and
climate journalists. We then used their feedback to explain those terms in everyday
language. With the help of the United Nations Foundation, we chose eight terms from
reports written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Here’s a guide that may help you to follow the news about climate change. The
explanation of each term starts with the technical definition from the IPCC. The text that
follows puts it into plain language.

1. Mitigation
IPCC definition: Mitigation (of climate change): a human intervention to reduce
emissions or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.

Translation: Stopping climate change from getting worse.

When people talk about “mitigation” they often focus on fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural
gas – used to make electricity and run cars, buses and planes. Fossil fuels produce
greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide. When these gases are released, they linger in
the atmosphere. They then trap heat and warm the planet.

Some ways to mitigate climate change include using solar and wind power instead of coal-
fired power plants; making buildings, appliances and vehicles more energy efficient so
they use less electricity and fuel; and designing cities so people have to drive less.
Protecting forests and planting trees also help because trees absorb greenhouse gases
from the atmosphere and lock them away.

2. Adaptation

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IPCC definition: In human systems, the process of adjustment to actual or expected
climate and its effects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. In
natural systems, the process of adjustment to actual climate and its effects; human
intervention may facilitate adjustment to expected climate and its effects.

Translation: Making changes to live with the impacts of climate change.

Climate change is already happening. Heat waves, wildfires and floods are getting worse.
People will have to find ways to live with these threats. Los Angeles, for example, is
planting trees to help people stay cooler. Coastal cities like Miami may need sea walls to
protect against floods. More “adaptation” actions will be needed as climate change gets
worse.

3. Carbon dioxide removal

IPCC definition: Carbon dioxide removal methods refer to processes that remove CO2
from the atmosphere by either increasing biological sinks of CO2 or using chemical
processes to directly bind CO2. CDR is classified as a special type of mitigation.

Translation: Taking carbon dioxide out of the air.

The amount of carbon dioxide in the air has been increasing for many years. In 2019,
there was 1.5 times more of it than in the late 1700s. Planting trees and restoring
grasslands can remove carbon dioxide from the air. There are also carbon dioxide removal
technologies that store it underground or in concrete, but these are new and not widely
used.

4. Carbon neutral
IPCC definition: Carbon neutrality is achieved when anthropogenic CO2 emissions are
balanced globally by anthropogenic carbon dioxide removals over a specified period.
Carbon neutrality is also referred to as net-zero carbon dioxide emission.

Translation: Adding no net carbon dioxide into the air. This does not have to mean that
you can’t add any carbon dioxide. It means that if you do add carbon dioxide into the air
you take out the same amount.

The IPCC warns that the world needs to be carbon neutral by 2050 to avoid a serious
climate crisis. This means using both “mitigation” to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide
added to the air and “carbon dioxide removal” to take carbon dioxide out of the air.

5. Tipping point
IPCC definition: A level of change in system properties beyond which a system
reorganizes, often abruptly, and does not return to the initial state even if the drivers of
the change are abated. For the climate system, it refers to a critical threshold when global
or regional climate changes from one stable state to another stable state.

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Translation: When it is too late to stop effects of climate change.

One of the most talked-about tipping points involves the collapse of the West Antarctic ice
sheet. Some research suggests it may have already started happening. West Antarctica
alone holds enough ice to raise sea levels worldwide by about 11 feet (3.3 meters). If all
glaciers and ice caps melt, sea levels will end up rising about 230 feet (70 meters).

Why the West Antarctic ice sheet may have passed a tipping point.

6. Unprecedented transition
IPCC definition for “transition”: The process of changing from one state or condition to
another in a given period of time. Transition can be in individuals, firms, cities, regions
and nations and can be based on incremental or transformative change.

Translation: Making big changes together to stop climate change – in a way that has not
been seen before.

In 2015, countries around the world agreed to try to keep the planet from warming more
than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F). Among the biggest sources of global warming are coal-
fired power plants. Quickly shifting the world to renewable energy, such as wind and solar
power, would be an unprecedented transition. Without big changes, climate change could
make the world unlivable.

7. Sustainable development
IPCC definition: Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and balances social, economic
and environmental concerns.

Translation: Living in a way that is good for people alive today and for people in the
future.

The United Nations has shared “sustainable development goals.” These goals aim to help
countries grow in ways that are healthy for both people and the environment. Producing
more carbon dioxide than the planet can manage is an example of unsustainable
development that’s causing climate change.

8. Abrupt change
IPCC definition: Abrupt climate change refers to a large-scale change in the climate
system that takes place over a few decades or less, persists (or is anticipated to persist) for
at least a few decades and causes substantial disruptions in human and natural systems.

Translation: A change in climate that happens much faster than it normally would.

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Our world is changing quickly as a result of climate change. Wildfires are raging in parts
of the Western U.S. that were once too wet to burn. Coral reefs are dying as the ocean is
getting warmer. These changes would not have happened so quickly – or at all – were it
not for climate change.

Lance Ignon, a former communications adviser for the IPCC and now senior associate
dean for strategic initiatives and communication at USC Dornsife and a co-author of the
paper with Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Lila Rabinovich, Kate Weber Marianna Babboni
and Monica Dean, contributed to this article.

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A study of entrepreneurs explains why we sometimes
give without receiving
theconversation.com/a-study-of-entrepreneurs-explains-why-we-sometimes-give-without-receiving-166646

Rekha Krishnan, Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode

From someone dropping off dinner at the doorstep of a neighbour with COVID-19 to an
octogenarian in India giving up his oxygen bed for a middle-aged patient, instances of people giving
to those in need without expectations has made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

People are often in direct competition for shared resources, so biologically, it would make sense that
there would be an expectation that giving must be reciprocal. Yet even in situations characterized by
intense competition, giving and sharing can take precedence over winning, whether it’s Olympians
giving up their medal positions to help peers in need or small businesses banding together to help
fellow entrepreneurs hit by the pandemic.

Why do people give without expecting anything in return? This question continues to baffle
sociologists because, theoretically, unilateral giving and receiving within a community cannot be
sustained as the desire to receive without any obligation to give back can give rise to more takers
than givers.

As organizational theorists, we were interested in the dynamics surrounding unilateral giving when
the combined motives of co-operation and competition co-exist. Our research team published our
findings in the Administrative Science Quarterly. We examined how acts of giving emerge and are
sustained in a Silicon Valley business accelerator.

Early stage entrepreneurs increasingly gravitate towards start-up accelerators, which provide them
access to investors, clients and the experiences of fellow entrepreneurs.

A typical accelerator brings together entrepreneurs who are unlikely to have known each other prior
to entering the program. Besides providing participating entrepreneurs access to potential investors
and clients, a key goal of accelerators is to create a supportive community of entrepreneurs.

In a typical start-up accelerator, entrepreneurs are expected to give to their fellow entrepreneurs
without expectations, but those seeking help can find themselves competing for resources, including
mentorship and funding.

Creates a cycle of giving

In our eight-month study of an accelerator in Silicon Valley, we followed three start-up camps. In
the beginning, entrepreneurs across all camps actively sought help from fellow entrepreneurs. But
the responses to these early requests differed across camps, setting in motion positive or negative
dynamics.

We discovered that a single act of giving to a fellow entrepreneur in need spurs a cycle of gratitude
and giving in the network. On the other hand, a single act of refusal to help triggers a cycle of
shaming and avoidance. But what motivates these early acts of giving?

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At the heart of these dynamics are social interactions at events like formal onboarding events,
weekly progress meetings, informal dinners, parties or outdoor activities. The accelerator program
was structured so that one of the camps regularly engaged in weekly progress meetings, while others
did not.

The accelerator’s weekly progress meetings, which we label “tournament rituals,” focused on
entrepreneurs’ shows of strength as they discussed progress made on their products or services. In
other camps, informal weekend get-togethers, which we label “bonding rituals,” organically
emerged thanks to formal onboarding events that focused on building familiarity among
entrepreneurs.

In these bonding rituals, entrepreneurs let their guards down and opened up about challenges they
faced as entrepreneurs. This helped participants realize their common experiences as entrepreneurs
and the need to help their peers.

Those who participated in these bonding rituals were not only comfortable asking other
entrepreneurs for help, but also received help from their peers who gave without expecting anything
in return. These early acts of giving generated a sense of gratitude among receivers who willingly
paid it forward. This giving-gratitude cycle eventually resulted in a thriving community of giving
and a dense network populated by positive relationships.

Shows of strength don’t lead to giving

On the other hand, those show-of-strength or tournament rituals generated an expectation among
entrepreneurs to be strategic in exchanging resources with others in the accelerator program.
Accordingly, when participants strategically approached knowledgeable entrepreneurs in their
camp for help, they were rebuffed because their peers saw no value in lending a helping hand.

These early failed exchanges became shaming rituals — for example, entrepreneurs who felt
undervalued and rejected by fellow entrepreneurs in their camp avoided interacting with them to
steer clear of further negative experiences. This shaming-avoidance cycle resulted in a rapid
dissolution of ties and what remained, in the end, was a sparsely connected network.

In short, organic bonding rituals helped competitors identify with each other, triggering and
sustaining early acts of giving. But tournament rituals only encouraged entrepreneurs to further
their own interests, which eventually gave rise to more takers than givers.

We believe our research offers valuable insights into human interactions. Beyond start-up
accelerators, our research applies to other organizational contexts where both competitive and co-
operative motives exist. For instance, our research offers critical lessons for organizations looking to
build a more collaborative culture.

Although employees are expected to co-operate, they also compete with each other for promotions.
Formal meetings are a regular feature in organizations, but they can foster collaboration by
ensuring they focus on the camaraderie among members rather than celebrating their individual
wins.

Avoiding shows of strength in formal meetings can also encourage employees to engage in bonding
rituals outside the organization, which our study shows are essential for building bonds within the
group.

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Amid the pandemic era, which has left more people feeling lonely and distanced from their
community — not willingly but reluctantly — our research underscores the importance of bonding
rituals for building healthy communities of giving.

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After the FDA issued warnings about antidepressants,
youth suicides rose and mental health care dropped
theconversation.com/after-the-fda-issued-warnings-about-antidepressants-youth-suicides-rose-and-mental-health-
care-dropped-171008

Stephen Soumerai, Ross Koppel

Depression in young people is vastly undertreated. About two-thirds of depressed youth

don’t receive any mental health care at all. Of those who do, a significant proportion rely
on antidepressant medications.

Since 2003, however, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned that young
people might experience suicidal thinking and behavior during the first months of
treatment with antidepressants.

The FDA issued this warning to urge clinicians to monitor suicidal thoughts at the start of
treatment. These warnings appear everywhere: on TV and the internet, in print ads and
news stories. The most strongly worded warnings appear in black boxes on medication
containers themselves.

We are professors and researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of

Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and University at Buffalo. For over 30 years,
we have been studying the intended and unintended effects of health policies on patient
safety.

We have found that FDA drug warnings can sometimes prevent life-threatening adverse
effects, but that unintended consequences of these warnings are also common. In 2013,
working for the FDA itself, we published a systematic review of the effects of previous
FDA warnings on a variety of medications. We found that about a third backfired,
resulting in underuse of needed care and other adverse effects.

In our more recent study from 2020, we found that the FDA antidepressant warnings
have led to reduced mental health care and increased suicides among youth – even
though researchers have yet to find a clear link between antidepressants and increased
suicidality in young people.

Further, despite the warnings, monitoring by clinicians of suicidal thoughts at the start of
treatment has not increased from its tiny rate of less than 5%.

Youth suicides rose following FDA warnings

For our 2020 study, we obtained 28 years of data, between 1990 and 2017, on actual
suicide deaths in the U.S. among adolescents and young adults. We used data from the
WONDER Database, maintained by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
which contains mortality counts based on death certificates for U.S. residents and
population counts for all U.S. counties.

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We found that during the pre-warning period, there was a 13-year stable downward trend
in youth suicides, following availability of new and safer antidepressants.

That trend reversed, we found, soon after the FDA began antidepressant warnings in late
2003. Youth suicide deaths increased significantly.

Then we applied our findings to the whole U.S. population of adolescents and young
adults. The results of that analysis suggest that there were almost 6,000 additional suicide
deaths in just the first six years after the FDA issued the boxed warnings, from 2005
through 2010. The rates also continued to rise thereafter.

Over this same time period, older adults – whose depression is not targeted by the
warnings – experienced much lower increases in suicide.

Fewer depressed youths got treatment

Our findings align with a growing body of research that confirms these warnings have had
serious unintended effects: scaring many patients, as well as their parents and doctors,
away from both antidepressant medications and psychotherapy that can reduce major
symptoms of depression.

These studies include a rigorous 2017 study that analyzed mental health care trends
among 11 million youths who rely on Medicaid for insurance coverage. This research
documented that immediately after the FDA warnings began in 2003, there was a sudden
and sustained 30%-40% drop in youth visits to doctors for all depression care, including
antidepressant prescriptions.

Seven years after the first FDA warning, doctor visits for depression by young people had
dropped by around 50%, compared with the pre-warning trend, thus severely reducing
treatment and suicide prevention.

That trend included Black and Latino youths, who have already long suffered from
undertreatment.

Almost simultaneously, youth poisonings via prescription drugs, such as sleeping pills,
went up. Research has shown that prescribed medications are a widespread method by
which young people attempt suicide. This finding adds to the evidence that the
antidepressant warnings increased suicidal behavior.

In 2018, researchers reported on two patients in their 20s whose experiences illustrate
the potential real-life impacts of the black-box warnings. Both young adults had been
prescribed antidepressants for major depression and severe panic attacks, but they
refused to take them because of the FDA’s message.

Their conditions worsened, and eventually both attempted suicide. Fortunately, family
members were able to intervene in time, and each young adult was then hospitalized.

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After they accepted the reassurances of hospital psychiatrists that the benefits of the
medications would likely exceed any risks, both patients began to take their prescribed
antidepressants. These medications, combined with talk therapy, alleviated their
symptoms without intensifying suicidal thoughts.

Reevaluating the warnings

As scientists, we are trained to always seek potential alternative explanations – some
additional factor not included in the research – that could explain the reduction in care or
increase in suicides that we and others have recorded in our studies.

However, the sudden, simultaneous and large effects – all of which directly reduced
treatment and increased suicidal behavior – strongly suggest this is not a coincidence. It
is unlikely that any outside factor can account for the multiple parallel effects on
depression care, suicidal behavior and suicide deaths.

A large and growing body of evidence shows that the FDA’s black-box warnings on
antidepressants need to be reevaluated.

More generally, there’s a need for independent researchers to monitor the effects of FDA
warnings on public health – both intended and unintended.

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An unemployment rate below 4% is possible. But for
how long?
theconversation.com/an-unemployment-rate-below-4-is-possible-but-for-how-long-175618

Jeff Borland

It would be nice to think Australia’s low unemployment rate – now 4.2%, the lowest since
August 2008 – is here to stay.

We’ve been waiting a long time to see this. In the decade before the onset of COVID-19 the
jobless rate hardly moved. In March 2010 it was 5.4%. Ten years later, in March 2020, it
was 5.3%. In between the lowest the rate was to 4.9% - and then just for two months.

In 2021 the unemployment rate was under 5% in six out of 12 months.

A lower rate of unemployment makes us all better off. It means more of the nation’s
productive resources are being put to work, and higher living standards for those extra
people employed and their families.

Even with the effects of Omicron, there are good reasons to think the rate will fall further
in 2022.

The bigger question is whether whatever lower rate we achieve can be sustained once all
the effects of the pandemic are behind us. This will depend largely on how
macroeconomic policy makers handle the transition.

High job vacancies

One reason to expect the rate to go lower in 2022 is recent employment growth – 365,000
in November, and 65,000 in December. With that pace of growth it’s likely there’s more to
come, especially given the high level of job vacancies.

Had the vacancy rate at the end of 2021 been the same as before COVID-19, an extra
158,000 jobs would have been filled. Just half of those jobs going to the unemployed
would have seen the December unemployment rate drop to 3.6%.

Uncertainties make it difficult to predict exactly how much lower the jobless rate could go,
or for how long. That will depend on macroeconomic policy – the reason the
unemployment rate is where it is now.

Government action has been crucial

The big reason the unemployment rate has fallen is due to growth in the proportion of the
population who are employed accelerating since mid-2021.

When you think about what changed in 2021 to make this happen, government policy has
to be the main explanation.

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Government spending on COVID-related programs has added considerably to gross
domestic product, increasing employment.

Closed borders may also have added to GDP – by as much as 1.25% per annum, according
to economist Saul Eslake – due to Australians redirecting spending from international
travel to domestic consumption.

What follows is that a low rate of unemployment will depend on the policy makers being
willing to continue to provide stimulus to economic activity.

An opposing force
One headwind blowing the unemployment rate higher may be faster growth in the labour-
force participation rate, which measures the proportion of the population who want to
work.

Before COVID-19 the participation rate had been increasing rapidly. With COVID-19 it
slowed, due to reasons such as parents having to withdraw from the labour force to care
for children.

Should growth in the labour-force participation rate return to its previous pace once the
impact of COVID-19 recedes, the rate of unemployment will be pushed back up.

Statistics for young workers

Issues to do with measurement may also be temporarily making the rate of
unemployment artificially low.

The strongest employment growth from March 2020 to December 2021 was for those
aged 15 to 24 years.

Younger workers were hardest hit during the 2020 downturns associated with COVID-19.
But by December 2021 the proportion of young people employed was 3.5 percentage
points higher than in March 2020. This compares with the employment rate being 1.2
percentage points higher than before the pandemic for those aged 25-64 years, and 0.9
percentage points higher for those 65 years and older.

The strength of employment growth for the young – given all we know about the
increasing difficulties they faced in the labour market in the 2010s – is surprising.

My guess is it may in part be due to young Australian permanent residents taking over
jobs previously held by international students and working holiday makers, and being
more likely to be captured in official surveys.

In that case,total employment of the young may not actually have changed by much, but
the statistics show it increasing because of who is doing the work.

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Before COVID-19 we could reasonably have expected the rate of unemployment today to
be 5%. Instead, we’re at 4.2% and looking ahead in 2022 to further falls in
unemployment. What lies beyond that is less certain.

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Anti-Asian violence spiked in the US during the
pandemic, especially in blue-state cities
theconversation.com/anti-asian-violence-spiked-in-the-us-during-the-pandemic-especially-in-blue-state-cities-
176501

Arie Perliger

It’s widely known that Asian Americans felt – and were – persecuted during the
pandemic. But the extent of this violence, and its uneven geographic distribution across
the U.S., is now much clearer, thanks to research I conducted with collaborators at the
University of Massachusetts Lowell and the independent research firm Development
Services Group.

The Asian American-Pacific Islander Equity Alliance, a nonprofit based in California, has
collected reports of 10,370 “hate incidents” from March 2020 through September 2021.
The categories of those incidents include verbal harassment, refusal of service at a
business and online abuse, as well as assaults and property damage.

My collaborators and I looked more specifically at violent attacks against Asian Americans
or their property from 1990 to 2021. In the 30 years before the pandemic, we identified
public reports of 210 anti-Asian violent attacks in total, an average of 8.1 per year. But
during 2020 and 2021, there were 163 attacks, averaging out to 81.5 a year – or more than
11 times the previous average.

Pandemic sparks violence

Minorities and other vulnerable groups have been targeted for persecution during public
health crises throughout history. In 14th-century Europe, Jews were blamed for the
bubonic plague. In 1900, Chinese people were unfairly blamed for a plague outbreak in
San Francisco’s Chinatown. And in the 1980s, Haitians were wrongly blamed for bringing
HIV/AIDS to the U.S.

Our data found that before 2020, the average number of Asian Americans killed or
injured in anti-Asian attacks was just over eight per year. In 2020 and 2021, however, 49
were physically harmed, an average of almost 25 per year.

We found that almost half of the anti-Asian attacks in 2020 and 2021 were motivated, at
least partially, by anger and animosity associated with COVID-19, a disease first identified
in Asia. For instance, in June 2020, an Asian restaurant in New Jersey was vandalized
with graffiti reading “coronavirus” and “COVID-19.” And in February 2021, Denny Kim, a
27-year-old Korean American veteran of the U.S. Air Force, was beaten by two men who
shouted anti-Asian slurs at him and called him “Chinese virus.”

Continuing previous trends of violence

The additional anti-Asian attacks in 2020 and 2021 tended to be in the same places that
had seen high levels of anti-Asian violence before the pandemic.

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Before 2020, about half of these attacks happened in the New York City metropolitan area
and in urban centers in California. During the pandemic, almost 60% of the attacks
happened in those same regions. With higher numbers of Asian American residents, those
might seem more likely places for anti-Asian violence to happen, but they aren’t home to
60% of Americans of Asian descent, so the level of anti-Asian violence is still
disproportionately high.

Most anti-Asian violence, both before and during the pandemic, happened in urban and
suburban areas in typically progressive states.

Regardless of when they happened, the attacks were of similar types as well. Before the
pandemic, more than 70% of anti-Asian hate crimes targeted people of Asian descent
personally, such as a 2016 attack on a Chinese exchange student by an alleged white
supremacist.

About 20% of attacks were aimed against property owned or regularly used by Asian
Americans, such as in 2008 when someone painted racist graffiti on a trash can behind an
Asian market in St. Paul, Minnesota, and in a nearby park.

During the pandemic, the proportions were similar: About 60% of anti-Asian attacks were
against people, and about one-third were against their property.

Some changes in trends, too

During the pandemic, more of the violence was spontaneous, rather than preplanned,
than it had been before 2020, according to our analysis. Most other hate crimes are
unplanned.

We also found that a higher proportion of attacks were carried out by a single person than
had been normal before the pandemic.

Overall, our findings support and confirm the experiences of Asian Americans who
reported being targeted by violence more often during the pandemic.

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Are you binge-watching too much? How to know if
your TV habits are a problem – and what to do about it
theconversation.com/are-you-binge-watching-too-much-how-to-know-if-your-tv-habits-are-a-problem-and-what-to-
do-about-it-172817

Mark Griffiths

The term “binge-watch” was a contender for the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2013 word of
the year. Although it didn’t win (“selfie” ultimately took the crown), this pointed to the
rise of what was becoming a popular activity of watching multiple episodes of a TV show
in a single sitting.

Today, millions of us – including me – regularly consume our favourite series in this way.
The proliferation of streaming services over recent years has made it very easy to do.
Unsurprisingly, during COVID lockdowns, research shows many of us spent more time
binge-watching than usual.

But can binge-watching become problematic or addictive? And if you can’t tear yourself
away, what can you do?

Problematic binge-watching isn’t defined by the number of episodes watched (although

most researchers agree it’s at least two in a row), or a specific number of hours spent in
front of the TV or computer screen. As with other addictive behaviours, more important is
whether binge-watching is having a negative impact on other aspects of the person’s life.

Over many years studying addiction, I’ve argued that all addictive behaviours comprise
six core components. In relation to binge-watching, this would mean:

1. Binge-watching is the most important thing in the person’s life (salience)

2. The person engages in binge-watching as a way of reliably changing their mood: to

feel better in the short-term or to temporarily escape from something negative in
their life (mood modification)

3. Binge-watching compromises key aspects of the person’s life like relationships and
education or work (conflict)

4. The number of hours the person spends binge-watching each day has increased
significantly over time (tolerance)

5. The person experiences psychological and/or physiological withdrawal symptoms if

they’re unable to binge-watch (withdrawal)

6. If the person manages to temporarily stop binge-watching, when they engage in the
activity again, they go straight back into the cycle they were in previously (relapse).

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In my view, any person who fulfils these six components would be genuinely addicted to
binge-watching. A person who only fulfils some of these may be exhibiting problematic
binge-watching, but wouldn’t be classed as addicted by my criteria.

Like many other behavioural addictions, such as sex addiction, work addiction and
exercise addiction, binge-watching addiction is not officially recognised in any psychiatric
manuals. We also don’t have accurate estimates of the prevalence of problematic binge-
watching. But research into this phenomenon is growing.

A look at the evidence

In the latest study on this topic, a research team in Poland surveyed 645 young adults, all
of whom reported that they had watched at least two episodes of one show in a single
sitting. The researchers wanted to understand some of the factors underlying problematic
binge-watching.

The authors (who based their definition of problematic binge-watching partly on my

components model of addiction) used a questionnaire they developed in an earlier study
to assess problematic binge-watching among participants. Questions included: “How
often do you neglect your duties in favour of watching series?” “How often do you feel sad
or irritated when you can’t watch the TV series?” and “How often do you neglect your
sleep to binge-watch series?”

Participants had to give answers on a six-point scale from one (never) to six (always). A
score above a certain threshold was deemed indicative of problematic binge-watching.

Using a range of other scales, the researchers found that impulse control difficulties, lack
of premeditation (difficulties in planning and evaluating the consequences of a given
behaviour), watching to escape and forget about problems, and watching to avoid feeling
lonely were among the most significant predictors of problematic binge-watching.

Using the same data, the researchers reported in an earlier study that problematic binge-
watching had a significant association with anxiety-depressive syndrome. The greater the
symptoms of anxiety and depression, the more problematic a person’s binge-watching
was.

Other studies have reported similar findings. A study of Taiwanese adults, for example,
found problematic binge-watching was associated with depression, anxiety around social
interaction and loneliness.

An American study found the behaviour was associated with depression and attachment
anxiety. Most related studies – like this one from Portugal – have also shown escapism to
be a key motivation of problematic binge-watching.

In terms of personality traits, research has shown that problematic binge-watching

appears to be associated with low conscientiousness (characterised by being impulsive,
careless and disorganised) and high neuroticism (characterised by being anxious and

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prone to negative emotions). We see these types of associations in addictive behaviours
more generally.

Breaking the habit

If you want to cut down on the number of episodes you watch in one sitting, my golden
rule is to stop watching mid-way through an episode. It’s really hard to stop watching at
the end of an episode as so often the show ends with a cliff-hanger.

I also suggest setting realistic daily limits. For me, it’s 2.5 hours if I have work the next
day, or up to five hours if I don’t. And only start watching as a reward to yourself after
you’ve done everything you need to in terms of work and social obligations.

Remember, the difference between a healthy enthusiasm and an addiction is that the
former adds to your life, whereas the latter detracts from it. If you feel binge-watching is
taking over your life, you should seek a referral from your GP to see a clinical
psychologist. Most addictions are symptomatic of other underlying problems.

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Art, drama and music lower stress. Here’s what you
need to know if you’re thinking of taking arts in years
11 and 12
theconversation.com/art-drama-and-music-lower-stress-heres-what-you-need-to-know-if-youre-thinking-of-taking-
arts-in-years-11-and-12-164713

Shelley Hannigan

This article is part of a series providing school students with evidence-based advice for choosing subjects in
their senior years.

If you’re thinking of taking a performing or visual arts subject in years 11 and 12, you are probably weighing up a
few considerations. These may include your passion and interest in the subject, how doing one or two arts
subjects might affect your entry into university and what you could do with the skills you learn.

Nearly 30% of all year 12 students across Australia (53,311 year 12 students in total) chose to study visual or
performing arts in year 12 in 2019. But twice as many girls took an arts subject (40%) as boys (18%).

The arts subject selection you have will depend on what state you live in. But these are the types of subjects you
can broadly choose from in visual and performing arts.

Visual arts
Visual arts is a theory-based subject. You will learn about different artworks and the role of artists in society. You
will engage in discussions and writing tasks about what artworks mean. This includes ideas from historical and
contemporary arts and culture.

In studio arts, you will learn about artists’ practices and the art industry while also developing your own art.

You will experiment with techniques and art processes in the mediums of your choice. These include
photography, painting, drawing, printmaking, film, digital arts, ceramics or textiles. You will develop your own
artworks, document this process and exhibit your work.

Media arts involves researching and learning about narrative across different media forms. You will demonstrate
your understanding of production processes by designing a media product (such as a film or photographic
exhibition) and presenting it.

Product design and technology involves learning about, and experimenting with, materials and processes. The
materials will vary from school to school, but you may be able to choose from wood or timber, metal, fabrics,
polymers, glass or ceramics. You will learn how to design and put these designs into production.

Performing arts
Dance will teach you about dance traditions, styles and works from different cultures. You will learn about music
theatre, the work of tap or jazz or street performers, ballet and modern dance, and choreography. As you learn
this content through theory and practice, you will engage in analysis of dance that will help you develop your
own choreographed performance with others.

Drama involves studying practice and theory to understand the ways theatre and performance can communicate
stories and ideas. You will explore different traditions of drama including costume, set design and lighting,
make-up, masks, props and puppetry and sound design. You will ultimately create, develop and present a solo
performance.

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Music has different pathways depending on what state you live in. In the Victorian curriculum, there are three
pathways culminating in units 3 and 4 of music investigation and music performance. These pathways require at
least four years’ experience in learning an instrument. Another pathway, VET music industry, focuses on
performing in public.

While each pathway and qualification is different, you will learn through listening, performing and composing.
You will apply creative thinking skills to analyse and critique contemporary and historical music and musicians.

What benefits will I get through studying arts?

From my research and practice as an artist and university educator of 15 years, I know any of the year 11 and 12
art subjects will enable you to learn from extensive creative processes. Developing a set of paintings will require
experimenting with techniques, learning from other artists, developing a theme or message to convey, and
ensuring the subject matter in your paintings is suitable for conveying the message and appropriate for the style
you are working in.

Your technique must be proficient to achieve good marks. You also need to document the development of your
research and ideas with visual images you created and written statements in journals. This is somewhat risky as
you are putting yourself out there. It must also come together in a certain time frame, which can be challenging
and stressful.

But it will pay off as research shows arts education has many benefits.

Beyond technical knowledge and skills, benefits include actual enjoyment and stress relief. The senior years can
be stressful years, so adding an arts subject to the mix can actually be a way to take care of yourself. It is well
documented the arts offer mental health benefits as the focus on creating art is a form of mindfulness.

Creating art is a process of focusing on bringing together subject matter, technique and creative experience to
communicate a story or an idea. The ability to express your feelings through the arts is a form of release. And
reflecting on its meaning can provide insights into your self, which is therapeutic.

In addition, you will develop a range of skills that will help you in any area of life. Beyond creativity and thinking
skills, research shows arts education will help you enhance your communication and expressive skills, as well as
boosting your confidence and self-esteem. Teamwork, too, is a big part of the arts, and learning this skill will be
helpful at university and in your future employment.

The presentation, communication and performance skills you learn are adaptable for public speaking,
community and public art careers, as well as teaching.

Will doing the arts bring down my ATAR?

The ATAR is a university-based system that determines how many students will get into particular courses. Like
a queue, it ranks you against everyone in the year 12 age group.

But university entry, particularly when it comes to the arts, doesn’t rely on ATAR. It often requires an interview
process with presentation of a portfolio.

If you’re not looking to do arts at university, it’s still important to choose senior subjects you are interested in
and good at. Plus, skills you learn in the arts can enhance your entry prospects. For instance, entry into a
medical degree requires a high ATAR. But most universities also conduct an interview to test your empathy,
collaboration and ethical reasoning skills – all of which are enhanced by the arts.

What will I do with these skills after school?

Many students who study senior art go on to study the visual and/or performing arts at university. Some become
self-employed artists. Others practise art on the side and that helps them maintain a good balance in life.

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One ex-student, now in her late 20s, studied visual art and music in school but is now a psychiatric nurse who is
also in a band. She said being a musician helps her cope with the stresses of her job.

Another ex-student, a 20-year-old male, studied the VCE VET in music industry as well as media arts, studio
arts, visual arts, psychology and literature. He is a full-time intern in a technology company. He said the
networking he does now is very close to what he had to do for the documentary he made in media arts. He also
said his creative skills were helpful in the marketing material he designs.

You have to be a creative strategist to get people to give you time of day in sales and
marketing.

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As heat waves intensify, tens of thousands of US
classrooms will be too hot for students to learn in
theconversation.com/as-heat-waves-intensify-tens-of-thousands-of-us-classrooms-will-be-too-hot-for-students-to-
learn-in-164761

Paul Chinowsky

Rising temperatures due to climate change are causing more than just uncomfortably hot days
across the United States. These high temperatures are placing serious stress on critical
infrastructure such as water supplies, airports, roads and bridges.

One category of critical infrastructure being severely affected is the nation’s K-12 schools.

Ideally, the nation’s more than 90,000 public K-12 schools, which serve over 50 million students,
should protect children from the sometimes dangerous elements of the outdoors such as severe
storms or extreme temperatures.

But since so many of America’s schools are old and dilapidated, it’s the school buildings themselves
that need protection – or at least to be updated for the 21st century.

Twenty-eight percent of the nation’s public schools were built from 1950 through 1969, federal data
shows, while just 10% were built in 1985 or later.

As a researcher who studies the impact of climate change, I have measured its effects on
infrastructure and health for over a decade. During that time, I’ve seen little attention focused on
the effects of climate change on public schools.

Since 2019, climate scientist Sverre LeRoy, at the Center for Climate Integrity, and I have worked to
determine if the nation’s schools are prepared for the heat waves on the approaching horizon.

Comparing the climate conditions under which U.S. schools were built with the projected conditions
over the next two decades, we looked at the vulnerability of all K-12 schools to increasing
temperatures. We determined whether current schools have air conditioning or not and whether
they would be required to add air conditioning in the future.

The results of our study, “Hotter Days, Higher Costs: The Cooling Crisis in America’s Classrooms,”
show that by 2025, more than 13,700 schools will need to install air conditioning, and another
13,500 will need to upgrade their existing systems.

Hot classrooms
Research has shown that high classroom temperatures can make it harder to learn. Hot school days
cause difficulty in concentrating, sleepiness, a decrease in energy and even reduced memory
capacity.

Local school districts have policies for extreme heat events. However, rising temperatures mean
these guidelines are no longer limited to rare occurrences.

Over the past several years, schools across the U.S. are increasingly forced to take “heat days,”
cutting school days short because of classrooms that are too hot for students to effectively learn.

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This is happening in places that range from Denver to Baltimore and Cleveland.

Compounding the increase in temperatures is the national trend that seasonal temperatures are
rising in both the spring and the fall. For example, both Rhode Island and New Jersey have seen
average spring and fall temperatures rise over 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 Celsius). Rather than high
temperatures only occurring when students are on summer break, these heat events now occur
regularly during the school year too. Students today in a greater number of cities are beginning and
ending the school year in classrooms that often exceed 80 F (27 C).

Expensive upgrades
The problem of more hot days is due to average temperatures increasing over the past 40 years. The
number of days with high temperatures has risen across the country, with notable increases in large
northern cities. For example, Chicago has seen the number of days over 80 degrees during the
school year increase from 27 in 1970 to 32 in 2020 and a projected 38 by 2025. These increases
affect schools in two distinct ways.

Schools in the traditionally cooler north – especially older schools – will need to be retrofitted with
new air conditioning systems at an accumulated cost of US$40 billion by 2025. For schools in the
traditionally warmer South and West, many existing systems will need to be upgraded at a projected
cost exceeding $400 million.

Temperature increases are especially costly in large cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and Los
Angeles, where existing efforts and continued needs will result in outlays exceeding $500 million,
$1.5 billion and $600 million, respectively. These large districts have a greater number of older
buildings that require upgrades in electrical and structural systems to support new air conditioning
systems.

For all schools – even ones that don’t require system upgrades – the additional costs of operating
air conditioning systems to meet the new demands will exceed $1.4 billion per year.

An equity issue
Since school districts are dependent on local taxes or bond measures to finance the school system,
districts in affluent areas have a greater opportunity to obtain funds through tax increases or voter-
approved bond measures.

In contrast, districts located in less affluent counties – including Bell County, Kentucky; Scott
County, Tennessee; and DeKalb County, Alabama – face the challenge of creating safe learning
environments without a financial safety net. With household incomes for the entire district in the
bottom 20% of national averages, or less than $43,000 per year, these districts are unable to absorb
significant tax increases.

In this regard, classroom environments become an equity issue. While the increase in temperature
may affect all children, the relative impact of the increase and the ability to adapt is not equal.

Unsustainable solutions
Increasingly, school districts are turning to individual window units to address classroom
overheating. However, window units do not cool interior offices, cannot circulate and exchange air
within the classrooms, and will not meet expected lifespans due to extensive use. Furthermore, they

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create uneven cooling patterns and classroom disturbance due to noise. While these solutions are
popular from an initial budget perspective, they ultimately fail to solve the hot classroom crisis.

Where mechanical systems are not an option due to budgetary constraints, school districts are
looking at altering the school year to start later or end earlier. However, there are limits to this
approach because there are minimum requirements for the number of days that are in the school
year. Some schools are even experimenting with remote learning as a response when extreme
temperatures are an issue.

The bottom line for schools and their surrounding communities is that rising temperatures from
climate change are a growing threat to school infrastructure. Schools will need additional funding to
install or upgrade air conditioning systems, pay for increased energy usage or redesign school
buildings to enhance natural cooling. Various cities and states argue that fossil fuel companies have
a duty to pay these infrastructure costs associated with climate change.

The only other choice is for America’s students to continue to endure classrooms where it’s simply
too hot to learn.

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Being chased, losing your teeth or falling down? What
science says about recurring dreams
theconversation.com/being-chased-losing-your-teeth-or-falling-down-what-science-says-about-recurring-dreams-
166006

Claudia Picard-Deland, Tore Nielsen

Having the same dream again and again is a well-known phenomenon — nearly two-
thirds of the population report having recurring dreams. Being chased, finding yourself
naked in a public place or in the middle of a natural disaster, losing your teeth or
forgetting to go to class for an entire semester are typical recurring scenarios in these
dreams.

But where does the phenomenon come from? The science of dreams shows that recurring
dreams may reflect unresolved conflicts in the dreamer’s life.

Recurring dreams often occur during times of stress, or over long periods of time,
sometimes several years or even a lifetime. Not only do these dreams have the same
themes, they can also repeat the same narrative night after night.

Although the exact content of recurring dreams is unique to every individual, there are
common themes among individuals and even among cultures and in different periods.
For example, being chased, falling, being unprepared for an exam, arriving late or trying
to do something repeatedly are among the most prevalent scenarios.

The majority of recurring dreams have negative content involving emotions such as fear,
sadness, anger and guilt. More than half of recurring dreams involve a situation where the
dreamer is in danger. But some recurring themes can also be positive, even euphoric, such
as dreams where we discover new rooms in our house, erotic dreams or where we fly.

In some cases, recurring dreams that begin in childhood can persist into adulthood. These
dreams may disappear for a few years, reappear in the presence of a new source of stress
and then disappear again when the situation is over.

Unresolved conflicts
Why does our brain play the same dreams over and over again? Studies suggest that
dreams, in general, help us regulate our emotions and adapt to stressful events.
Incorporating emotional material into dreams may allow the dreamer to process a painful
or difficult event.

In the case of recurrent dreams, repetitive content could represent an unsuccessful

attempt to integrate these difficult experiences. Many theories agree that recurring
dreams are related to unresolved difficulties or conflicts in the dreamer’s life.

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The presence of recurrent dreams has also been associated with lower levels of
psychological well-being and the presence of symptoms of anxiety and depression. These
dreams tend to recur during stressful situations and cease when the person has resolved
their personal conflict, which indicates improved well-being.

Recurrent dreams often metaphorically reflect the emotional concerns of the dreamers.
For example, dreaming about a tsunami is common following trauma or abuse. This is a
typical example of a metaphor that can represent emotions of helplessness, panic or fear
experienced in waking life.

Similarly, being inappropriately dressed in one’s dream, being naked or not being able to
find a toilet can all represent scenarios of embarrassment or modesty.

These themes can be thought of as scripts or ready-to-dream scenarios that provide us

with a space where we can digest our conflicting emotions. The same script can be reused
in different situations where we experience similar emotions. This is why some people,
when faced with a stressful situation or a new challenge, may dream they’re showing up
unprepared for a math exam, even years after they have set foot in a school. Although the
circumstances are different, a similar feeling of stress or desire to excel can trigger the
same dream scenario again.

A continuum of repetition
William Domhoff, an American researcher and psychologist, proposes the concept of a
continuum of repetition in dreams. At the extreme end, traumatic nightmares directly
reproduce a lived trauma — one of the main symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Then there are recurring dreams where the same dream content is replayed in part or in
its entirety. Unlike traumatic dreams, recurring dreams rarely replay an event or conflict
directly but reflect it metaphorically through a central emotion.

Further along the continuum are the recurring themes in dreams. These dreams tend to
replay a similar situation, such as being late, being chased or being lost, but the exact
content of the dream differs from one time to the next, such as being late for a train rather
than for an exam.

Finally, at the other end of the continuum, we find certain dream elements recurring in
the dreams of one individual, such as characters, actions or objects. All these dreams
would reflect, at different levels, an attempt to resolve certain emotional concerns.

Moving from an intense level to a lower level on the continuum of repetition is often a
sign that a person’s psychological state is improving. For example, in the content of
traumatic nightmares progressive and positive changes are often observed in people who
have experienced trauma as they gradually overcome their difficulties.

Physiological phenomena

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Why do the themes tend to be the same from person to person? One possible explanation
is that some of these scripts have been preserved in humans due to the evolutionary
advantage they bring. By simulating a threatening situation, the dream of being chased,
for example, provides a space for a person to practise perceiving and escaping predators
in their sleep.

Some common themes may also be explained, in part, by physiological phenomena that
take place during sleep. A 2018 study by a research team in Israel found that dreaming of
losing one’s teeth was not particularly linked to symptoms of anxiety but rather associated
to teeth clenching during sleep or dental discomfort upon waking.

When we sleep, our brain is not completely cut off from the outside world. It continues to
perceive external stimuli, such as sounds or smells, or internal body sensations. That
means that other themes, such as not being able to find a toilet or being naked in a public
space, could actually be spurred by the need to urinate during the night or by wearing
loose pyjamas in bed.

Some physical phenomena specific to REM sleep, the stage of sleep when we dream the
most, could also be at play. In REM sleep, our muscles are paralyzed, which could
provoke dreams of having heavy legs or being paralyzed in bed.

Similarly, some authors have proposed that dreams of falling or flying are caused by our
vestibular system, which contributes to balance and can reactivate spontaneously during
REM sleep. Of course, these sensations are not sufficient to explain the recurrence of
these dreams in some people and their sudden occurrence in times of stress, but they
probably play a significant role in the construction of our most typical dreams.

Breaking the cycle

People who experience a recurring nightmare have in some ways become stuck in a
particular way of responding to the dream scenario and anticipating it. Therapies have
been developed to try to resolve this recurrence and break the vicious cycle of nightmares.

One technique is to visualize the nightmare while awake and then rewrite it, that is, to
modify the narrative by changing one aspect, for example, the end of the dream to
something more positive. Lucid dreaming may also be a solution.

In lucid dreams we become aware that we are dreaming and can sometimes influence the
content of the dream. Becoming lucid in a recurring dream might allow us to think or
react differently to the dream and thereby alter the repetitive nature of it.

However, not all recurring dreams are bad in themselves. They can even be helpful insofar
as they are informing us about our personal conflicts. Paying attention to the repetitive
elements of dreams could be a way to better understand and resolve our greatest desires
and torments.

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Bones and teeth help reveal whether teenagers have
always been a source of worry for their parents
theconversation.com/bones-and-teeth-help-reveal-whether-teenagers-have-always-been-a-source-of-worry-for-
their-parents-174376

Creighton Avery

They were promiscuous, rarely home and thought they knew everything. They were teenagers from centuries
ago, and by studying their bones and teeth, bioarcheologists can confirm that teens have always been a source of
worry for their parents.

Today, adolescence is a tumultuous period of change and distress, with clinical research suggesting it is a key
phase of development, responsible for long-term mental and physical well-being.

Yet even as we worry about teenagers’ well-being, the question remains: What does “normal” adolescence look
like? Or what makes a “good” adolescence?

Bioarcheologists — people who study human remains from archeological sites — are trying to answer those
questions. As a bioarcheologist, I examine bones and teeth to better understand when kids started to look like
and act like adults in the Roman Empire (first to fifth centuries CE).

By examining bones and teeth, and incorporating archeological data, burial patterns, written sources and other
lines of evidence, bioarcheologists are finding that teens today have a lot in common with teens of the past, but
there’s one key difference.

Teenagers were innovative

In the Upper Paleolithic (50,000 to 12,000 years ago) and Neolithic (around 12,000 to 6,500 years ago),
teenagers were innovative and played an important role in the origin and spread of new ideas. They were highly
mobile, creative and felt driven to meet and interact with new groups.

Similarly, teens today are creating more words, TikTok dances and social trends than any other age group.
They’re also developing new ways to detect cancers and assess wounds, demonstrating that age is not a
requirement for innovation.

Being “wired for innovation” may be due to the unique plasticity of the adolescent brain, which makes teens
more open to learning new skills and taking on new opportunities.

So, rather than belittling adolescents for moving too fast or talking differently, we may need to put their
innovative thinking to good use. That, and continue to have comedian Seth Meyers explain teen slang.

Teenagers tried on adult roles

For teens today, having a part-time job has short- and long-term benefits, including higher incomes and better
networking skills later in life. However, there are some risks, particularly for those who work too much. Studying
teens of the past shows us that this is not new.

Thousands of years ago, in the Neolithic, teens were practising to be adults, learning how to throw spears and
hunt big game, joining adults in providing for their communities.

Similarly, in the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, bioarcheological and ancient literary sources indicate young
men began apprenticeships or joined the military under semi-protected status as teens, although this didn’t
happen overnight and was a gradual process.

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When these changes happened quickly, like in 18th-century Canada, teens faced poor health and well-being,
mirroring patterns we see today. Those who take on full adult roles too quickly can face consequences, but a
gradual transition has benefits.

Teenagers didn’t have an identity crisis

Today, teens are often seen as troublesome and difficult. Ancient Roman writers, too, described adolescence as a
period of “hooliganism and debauchery,” when young men were encouraged to drink heavily and visit brothels
(although recent bioarcheological research may suggest this is only true of wealthy families).

In the Upper Paleolithic, there was no “teenage rebellion,” likely because Paleolithic teens had a strong sense of
self and belonging, as well as a sense of individual autonomy.

When moving from small, open-air communities to large, fortified communities in 13th-century Arizona, older
children and teens found many of the activities that had helped create a sense of autonomy were gone. They no
longer fetched water or worked with clay, making them less capable as farmers, hunters and foragers as they
became adults.

And we may be seeing similar patterns today — teens are losing their autonomy by not having the opportunity to
participate in adult roles. However, not all changes in 13th-century Arizona were negative. The move to larger
communities also meant that these teens had greater opportunities to meet people, leading to new social skills
and opportunities.

So because teens today aren’t given the same opportunities to participate in adult roles, they may be rebelling in
an attempt to exert some form of autonomy and control over their lives.

Evolutionary basis for behaviour?

As bioarcheologists continue to explore adolescence, and what it was like to be a teen in the past, studies are
showing that many of the behaviours we see today are not new.

Teens across millennia have yearned to explore, try new things and participate in risky behaviours. The key
difference, however, seems to be the experience of a rebellion or restlessness, which does not appear to be a part
of adolescence in the past: teens weren’t always wild.

Which raises the question — does a rebellious phase have to be part of adolescence today?

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Book review: how Africa was central to the making of
the modern world
theconversation.com/book-review-how-africa-was-central-to-the-making-of-the-modern-world-175656

Lauren van der Rede

Journalist, photographer, author and professor Howard W. French’s Born in Blackness:

Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, is
the most recent in a long career of thoughtful and significant literary and journalistic
interventions. It demands an account of modernity that reckons with Africa as central to
the making of the modern world.

The book’s main aim, French explains early on, is to restore those key chapters which
articulate Africa’s significance to our common narrative of modernity to their proper place
of prominence.

French intricately traces, from the early 15th century through the Second World War, the
encounters between African and European civilisations. These, he argues, were motivated
by Europe’s desire to trade with West Africa’s rich, Black civilisations. These included the
Ghanaian and Malian empires. The ancient West African region was perceived as an
abundant source of both gold and slaves. French argues that it is the “intertwined
background of gold and slavery” which would eventually birth the transatlantic slave trade
of the early 16th century.

A 600 year journey

Born in Blackness sprawls approximately 600 years. It traverses geographies from the
edge of Europe, across Africa and the Americas. It follows the long history of the age of
European “discovery” beginning with Portugal’s early ventures into Africa and Asia in the
late 1400s and early 1500s, through the Atlantic slave trade’s “modest” start in Barbados
in the 1630s to the Haitian Revolution.

Then it moves to London’s abolishment of the transatlantic trafficking of humans in 1807

and the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker. This invention “could do the work
of fifty sharecropping Blacks, a fact not lost on the white planters of the (Mississippi
Delta)”. French’s historical tracing of the crafting of the modern world through the
oppression and subjugation of Black persons continues on through the Second World War
and beyond.

Citing Simeon Booker, a noteworthy African-American journalist whose work concerned

the American civil rights movement and the murder of Emmett Till, an African-American
teenager accused of offending a white woman, French notes that in the early 1960s,
“Mississipi could easily rank with South Africa, Angola or Nazi Germany for brutality and
hatred”.

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His careful weaving together of how gold and slavery became intertwined over centuries
and continents makes one thing abundantly clear. Without the trade of persons belonging
to African civilisations across the globe, but particularly the Atlantic, the modern world
would not have been made.

A reckoning with slavery

As the author explains, the boom of the cotton, sugar and tobacco industries of the
colonial US simply would not have happened without the trade of slaves from Africa.
Without this “capitalist jolt” as French puts it, what we know now as the United States of
America would have remained relatively obscure. It would not likely have become the
superpower state it is today.

In this way Born in Blackness challenges emphatically the deliberate forgetting of

European contests over control of African resources. This process of erasure, French
explains, began with Europe’s “Age of Discovery” (1400s-1600s). The improperly
explained rationale for this era was that European civilisations wanted to form trading
ties with Asia. To do so, they reached across continents, including Africa, for territory –
and, later, subjects.

But French insists that the real rationale was Europe’s earnest desire to establish
economic ties with Africa, and in particular West Africa with its resource-rich civilisations
and resource-based economies.

The intervention of Born in Blackness, then, is to insist on reckoning with the role played
by the brutal bond between Europe and Africa. This was forged through slavery. It is what
drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy; it hastened the processes of
industrialisation and revolutionised the world’s diets by facilitating the globalisation of
the consumption of sugar.

It is also important to mark, as French does, that the centrality of enslaved Africans’
labour extends beyond the mining of plantation crops to the very creation of the
plantations themselves. It was the slaves who prepared the land for planting: they
removed plants and rocks, but most importantly displaced indigenous peoples from their
territories.

A world born in Blackness

In marking this, Born in Blackness demonstrates how the displacement to which African
persons taken as slaves is mirrored in the making of modern-day America and echoed in
the displacement of first nations or indigenous Americans.

What is at stake in the intervention of the book is precisely what is gestured toward by its
title: that modernity and the modern world was indeed born in Blackness. The
civilisational transformations the author traces – economic, spatial and most importantly
cultural in their texture – are a product of Blackness.

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3/3
Break up songs owe a lot to the love lorn lyrics of
the Romantics
theconversation.com/break-up-songs-owe-a-lot-to-the-love-lorn-lyrics-of-the-romantics-173287

Anthony Howe

Taylor Swift’s recently re-recorded and released 2012 album Red is a discombobulating
affair for those interested in the singer’s relationship status. Treacherous and I Knew You
Were Trouble build into the earworm magnum opus We are Never Ever Getting Back
Together. But this is pop, not tragedy, and Swift’s “never ever” starts to take on a “never-
say-never” tinge. The Last Chance Saloon has revolving doors and the next track is Stay,
Stay, Stay.

Also no stranger to breakup songs, Adele’s latest album, 30, takes relationship
disintegration to the next level. Like Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 Rumours, this is a full breakup
album, charting the singer’s lockdown divorce, her guilt at the effect of this on her son,
and the prospect of picking up the wine-stained pieces. It is raw, straight-through-your-
bullet-proof-vest stuff. Songs like To Be Loved make you feel every hangover, every ugly
cry, every vocal cord nodule to come. It’s the breakup song to break your speakers.

Breakup songs express big, universal feelings. 1. Please don’t go 2. You’ve gone and the
world is broken 3. You’ve gone, thank God, and we are never ever ever…

We can all get on board, which is why there are so many successful breakup songs with
equally or more successful cover versions. Sinead O’Connor, with unscripted tears rolling
down her cheeks, turned a song from a Prince side project (Prince and the Revolutions)
Nothing Compares 2 U into a breakup classic. Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t
Leave Me) has been reworked by, among many others, Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey, Sting
and Barbra Streisand.

Brel is a modern representative of the French chanson tradition, a poetic style of

songwriting that can trace its origins back to the medieval period. He bridged the gap,
along with artists such as George Brassens and Léo Ferré, between popular music and
serious literature. They were latter-day Romantics, growing up on the writers Lamartine,
Vigny and Victor Hugo.

Mourning the loss of childish innocence

The Romantic poets defined, in many ways, the cultural concerns of the 19th century, and
remain vitally influential to this day. They were preoccupied by lost states of innocence
and the darkness we risk in trying to recover paradise. Breakup pop, whether it knows it
or not, is marked by this Romantic inheritance. The serial breaker-upper is an idealist,
forever searching for a heaven on Earth that is either lost or withheld.

In I Drink Wine, Adele recalls that:

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 When I was a child, every single thing could blow my mind
Soaking it all up for fun, but now I only soak up wine

Being a grownup is a permanent state of mourning for the enchanted consciousness of

childhood. Repetition of the experience wears away what William Wordsworth, in his
Immortality Ode, calls the “visionary gleam”. As a child, his world had been “apparelled in
celestial light”, but no longer.

Wordsworth sought to compensate for the lost “gleam” through his lifelong enthusiasm
for the natural world. Nature can still save us, if we accept the shadows that build with
age: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep
for tears”. But not everyone is in a position to make such sensible commitments. The
serial monogamist seeks a lost paradise pathologically, in a series of echoes, in
diminishing returns. Other Romantics took the path of chemical obliteration – Coleridge’s
opium, Adele’s cases of rosé.

Byron the breakup artist

The titan of Romantic disappointment (and wine abuse) was Lord Byron, another great
breakup artist.

When Byron departed England for the final time in 1816, he left behind a disastrous
marriage (that lasted about as long as Adele’s), a young daughter he would never see
again, and his half-sister Augusta, with whom he had an intense, and probably incestuous,
relationship. His always-fragile emotional world was shattered, and he wrote about his
feelings in some of the most powerful, but also complex, breakup lyrics in the English
language.

Love may sink by slow decay,

But by sudden wrench, believe not,
Hearts can thus be torn away

Every “We will never ever..” has a “Stay, Stay, Stay” B-side because the wrench is never
clean when sudden.

Byron’s breakup lyrics are not always what they seem. His poems to Lady Byron are canny
public relations exercises with a nasty side.

Like Taylor Swift and Adele he was a major celebrity who knew the world was fascinated
by his personal life. By taking control of the narrative in the public sphere, he could limit
the damage to his reputation and deflect from his undoubted culpability in the affair. In
the end, he realised that acceptance was the best policy. Heaven is for the young and
should not bear repetition:

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 Could I remount the river of my years
To the first fountain of our smiles and tears
I would not trace again its stream of hours
Between its outworn banks of withered flowers.
But bid it flow as now – until it glides
Into the number of the nameless tides.

Even if he could go back to the start he wouldn’t. The flowers only bloom once, so attend
to the part of the journey you still have left. If Adele ever does 35, perhaps it will be a
more Zen affair.

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Can animals sense when an earthquake is about
to happen?
theconversation.com/can-animals-sense-when-an-earthquake-is-about-to-happen-168483

Anne Quain

Within minutes of Melbourne being rattled by yesterday’s earthquake, my Victorian

friends reported changes in the behaviour of their animals.

One friend wrote on social media that her dog Harvey stood in the hallway howling for
five full minutes before the earth moved. A colleague reported his television reception
went fuzzy, but when he walked outside to check the aerial, he noted an “unusual and
striking absence of birdsong” before he felt the quake.

My friend’s cat Henry inexplicably disappeared before the quake, but returned home safe
after a few hours. Conversely, her rough collie Angie — who is terrified of storms — was
reportedly “totally chilled” before, during and after the seismic event.

Earthquakes are unsettling, terrifying and potentially fatal. The 1989 Newcastle
earthquake killed 13 people and injured 160. If our animal companions can give us a
heads-up when an event like this is about to happen, it could be truly lifesaving. But can
they really? Let’s have a look at the evidence.

The scholarly literature provides dozens of anecdotal reports of companion animals,

livestock, wildlife and even insects behaving strangely before earthquakes.

But a review of 180 publications reporting 700 records of abnormal or unusual animal
behaviours prior to 160 earthquakes found the evidence correlating these behaviours with
subsequent earthquakes was weak.

The majority of reports were anecdotal, and were made after the earthquake, making
them vulnerable to “recall bias”. Put simply, people may be more likely to interpret their
animal’s behaviour as strange in the light of a particularly memorable or traumatic event.

To establish that unusual animal behaviours can predict earthquakes, scientists would
need to observe animals under controlled environmental conditions for extended periods
of time — long enough to be able to observe their behaviour before, during and after
earthquakes. To be confident animals do indeed behave strangely before an earthquake,
we would need to also see them not behaving strangely when there isn’t an impending
quake.

Sadly, the evidence doesn’t come close to satisfying this. But the authors of the review did
find the supposed “predictive” behaviour in animals occurred around the same time as
“foreshocks” — smaller earthquakes that precede the main seismic event.

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If this is the case, then what people interpret as animals’ ability to “predict” earthquakes
may in fact be reactions to the vibrations or sounds from earthquakes that are too faint for
us humans to detect.

This wouldn’t be surprising, given that animals often outperform us when it comes to
sensory perception, such as smell. And it makes sense, given almost 60% of unusual
animal behaviours associated with earthquakes occurred in the five minutes preceding the
quake.

Fright and flight

Fear, anxiety or distress triggered by foreshocks might explain why animals display
behaviours such as vocalising (like Harvey the howling dog) or fleeing to somewhere they
feel safer (like Henry the disappearing cat).

But of course it’s possible Harvey and Henry behaved like this for purely non-earthquake-
related reasons and the timing was sheer coincidence. There are many reasons a dog may
howl (a courier opens the front gate) or a cat may go missing (your cat may hear a loud
noise and hide under the bed), but we tend to make the connection only when we’re aware
of the same stimuli.

What we do know is that animals can be seriously affected by earthquakes, whether

through injury, displacement or compromised access to food and water. Thousands of
animals, along with 185 people, died in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and many
more animals were left homeless by property damage.

Yesterday’s quake is also an important reminder for people with companion animals to
include them in emergency planning. Dogs and cats should be identified with a collar and
be tagged and microchipped. And don’t forget to update the contact details if you move
house or change your phone number — that way you’ll more easily be reunited.

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Caring or killing: harmful gender stereotypes kick in
early — and may be keeping girls away from STEM
theconversation.com/caring-or-killing-harmful-gender-stereotypes-kick-in-early-and-may-be-keeping-girls-away-
from-stem-169742

Laura Scholes, Sarah McDonald

Gender stereotypes begin in early childhood. Bright pink “toys for girls” and blue “toys for
boys” are sold on store shelves around the world.

In the boys’ section you’ll find science, construction and warfare toys — perhaps a
motorised robot, or a telescope. In the girls’ lane you’ll get toys related to cleaning, prams,
dolls, kitchens, makeup, jewellery and crafts.

Our research, published this week, shows by the early years of primary school, gender
stereotypes from a variety of sources have already influenced children — leading them to
aspire to “traditional” male and female vocations.

This flows into lower numbers of girls taking STEM (science, technology, engineering and
mathematics) subjects at school. In turn, this means fewer women are going on to work in
the sciences. Women make up only 28% of the STEM workforce.

The gender gap is particularly high in the fastest-growing and highest-paid jobs of the
future, such as computer science and engineering.

Gender-related aspirations are concerning

We spoke with 332 students (176 girls and 156 boys) from 14 schools and found 7- and 8-
year-old children have already made up their minds about what jobs they want in the
future. Girls overwhelmingly aspire to traditionally “feminine” jobs, while boys are
attracted to “masculine” pursuits.

For example, the top three choices for boys include careers in professional sports, STEM-
related jobs, and policing or defence. Meanwhile, girls either want to be teachers, work
with animals, or pursue a career in the arts.

There are obvious patterns in girls’ and boys’ career choices which can be linked to gender
stereotypes. Many girls talked about “feminine” ideas such as caring or helping others.
They told us:

I want to work in a zoo because I want to take care of the animals — Sophie

I want to be a nurse because I want to help people if they are hurt and take care of my Dad,
and other people — Kate

They also talked about love, another traditionally “feminine” ideal.

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 I want to be a mother because I love babies — Maddi

I want to be a teacher because I love little kids — Sara

On the other hand, the boys’ reasoning for their career choices heavily featured
“masculine” themes, such as making money and having power over others. For instance,
they wanted to work in the police force because:

I get to arrest people — Dan

I want to shoot guns — Harry

I can put people under arrest — Josh

Or they wanted jobs that highlighted traditionally masculine attributes such as strength,
dominance and physicality.

I want to be an assassin so I can kill people — Matt

I want to be an army commando because you can shoot tanks — Ben

Clearly, boys’ and girls’ career aspirations are very different, even at this young age. And
young people’s career aspirations are a good indication of job trajectories as they
transition to adulthood.

But it’s not just about gender

We also found differences in opinion that seemed to correlate with social class. Boys from
affluent school communities (30%) aspired to STEM careers more than boys from
disadvantaged school communities (8%), while girls from disadvantaged school
communities had a greater desire to “help” and “care”.

These values can be more important for female students whose families have more
traditional work- and family-related gender beliefs. If these girls go into STEM, they may
go into the medical and life sciences, rather than fields such as physics or engineering,
which are viewed by society as masculine.

Our findings help explain how gender-related trends continue to be visible in workplaces
and industries, and why men from more socioeconomically advantaged communities are
more likely to become employed in STEM jobs.

Challenging old and outdated ideas

We have to challenge problematic beliefs about the roles of men and women in society.
And we have to challenge them early. One way to do this is to end the sale of gendered and
stereotypical toys, which research has shown can give young children the wrong ideas
about gender roles.

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Some stores and toy companies are finally under pressure to make this change. Due to a
law passed last month, department stores in California are now required to display
childrens’ products in a designated gender-neutral section.

Although the law stopped short of entirely outlawing separate sections for “boys” and
“girls”, it makes California the first US state to work against reinforcing harmful gender
stereotypes.

If you’re thinking there are plenty of gender-neutral toys available already — hello,
LEGO? — think again. One study found 76% of parents said they would encourage their
son to play with LEGO, but only 24% would recommend it to a daughter.

LEGO, the world’s largest toy-maker, this week announced its future products and
marketing will be free of gender bias and harmful stereotypes.

The company’s recently launched Ready for Girls campaign will celebrate girls who
rebuild the world through creative problem-solving. This is a start. Hopefully more
companies will follow suit.

We should stop telling children that what constitutes acceptable play depends on their
gender. Let’s let girls be scientist and boys be carers, if that’s what they want.

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Cities worldwide aren’t adapting to climate change
quickly enough
theconversation.com/cities-worldwide-arent-adapting-to-climate-change-quickly-enough-169984

John Rennie Short

Climate change is magnifying threats such as flooding, wildfires, tropical storms and
drought. In 2020 the U.S. experienced a record-breaking 22 weather and climate
disasters that each caused at least US$1 billion in damage. So far in 2021, the count
stands at 18.

I study urban issues and have analyzed cities’ relationship with nature for many years. As
I see it, cities are quickly becoming more vulnerable to extreme weather events and
permanent shifts in their climate zones.

I am concerned that the pace of climate change is accelerating much more rapidly than
urban areas are taking steps to adapt to it. In 1950, only 30% of the world’s population
lived in urban areas; today that figure is 56%, and it is projected to rise to 68% by 2050.
Failure to adapt urban areas to climate change will put millions of people at risk.

Extreme weather and long-term climate zone shifts

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows in its latest report, released in
August 2021, global climate change is widespread, rapid and accelerating. For cities in
temperate latitudes, this means more heat waves and shorter cold seasons. In subtropical
and tropical latitudes, it means wetter rainy seasons and hotter dry seasons. Most coastal
cities will be threatened by sea level rise.

Around the globe, cities will face a much higher probability of extreme weather events.
Depending on their locations, these will include heavier snowfalls, more severe drought,
water shortages, punishing heat waves, greater flooding, more wildfires, bigger storms
and longer storm seasons. The heaviest costs will be borne by their most vulnerable
residents: the old, the poor and others who lack wealth and political connections to
protect themselves.

Extreme weather isn’t the only concern. A 2019 study of 520 cities around the world
projected that even if nations limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit) above preindustrial conditions, climate zones will shift hundreds of miles
northward by 2050 worldwide. This would cause 77% of the cities in the study to
experience a major change in their year-round climate regimes.

For example, the study authors predicted that by midcentury, London’s climate will
resemble that of modern-day Barcelona, and Seattle’s will be like current conditions in
San Francisco. In short, in less than 30 years, three out of every four major cities in the
world will have a completely different climate from the one for which its urban form and
infrastructure were designed.

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A similar study of climate change impacts on more than 570 European cities predicted
that they will face an entirely new climate regime within 30 years – one characterized by
more heat waves and droughts, and increased risk of flooding.

Mitigating climate change

Cities’ responses to climate change fall into two broad categories: mitigating (reducing)
emissions that drive climate change, and adapting to effects that can’t be averted.

Cities produce more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from heating
and cooling buildings and powering cars, trucks and other vehicles. Urbanization also
makes people more vulnerable to climate change impacts.

For example, as cities expand, people clear vegetation, which can increase the risk of
flooding and sea level rise. They also create impermeable surfaces that don’t absorb water,
such as roads and buildings.

This contributes to flooding risks and produces urban heat islands – zones where
temperatures are hotter than in outlying areas. A recent study found that the urban heat
island in Jakarta, Indonesia, expanded in recent years as more land was developed for
housing, businesses, industry and warehouses.

But cities are also important sources of innovation. For example, the inaugural
Oberlander Prize for landscape architecture was awarded on Oct. 14, 2021, to U.S.
landscape architect Julie Bargemen for re-imagining polluted and neglected urban sites.
And the prestigious Pritzker Architectural Prize went this year to French architects Anne
Lacaton and Jean-Phillipe Vassal for creating resilient buildings by transforming existing
structures instead of demolishing them to make room for new construction.

Just 25 of the world’s cities account for 52% of total urban greenhouse gas emissions. This
means that focusing on these cities can make a huge difference to the arc of long-term
warming.

Cities worldwide are pursuing a rich variety of mitigation measures, such as electrifying
mass transit, cooling with green buildings and introducing low-carbon building codes. I
see these steps as a source of hope in the medium to long term.

Adaptating too slowly

In contrast, adaptation in the shorter term is moving much more sluggishly. This isn’t to
say that nothing is happening. For example, Chicago is developing policies that anticipate
a hotter and wetter climate. They include repaving streets with permeable materials that
allow water to filter through to the underlying soil, planting trees to absorb air pollutants
and stormwater runoff, and providing tax incentives to install green roofs as cooling
features on office buildings. Similar plans are moving forward in cities around the world.

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But reshaping cities in a timely manner can be extremely expensive. In response to levee
failures that inundated New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the U.S.
government spent more than $14 billion to build an improved flood control system for the
city, which was completed in 2018. But many other cities around the world face similar
threats, and few of them – especially in developing countries – can afford such an
ambitious program.

Time is also a critical resource as the pace of climate change accelerates. In the European
Union, about 75% of buildings are not energy efficient. A 2020 report from the European
Commission predicted that it would take 50 years to make those buildings more
sustainable and resilient to shifting climate conditions.

At best, urban infrastructures that were built for previous climate regimes and less
extreme weather events can only be changed at a rate of about 3% per year. At that rate,
which would be difficult even for the wealthiest cities in the world to maintain, it will take
decades to make cities more sustainable and resilient. And the most vulnerable city
dwellers live in fast-growing cities in the developing world, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh,
Lagos, Nigeria, and Manila, Philipines, where local governments rarely have enough
resources to make the expensive changes that are needed.

Remaking cities worldwide quickly enough to deal with more extreme weather events and
new climate regimes requires massive investments in new ideas, practices and skills. I see
this challenge as an ecological crisis, but also as an economic opportunity – and a chance
to make cities more equitable for the 21st century and beyond.

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Climate repair: three things we must do now to
stabilise the planet
theconversation.com/climate-repair-three-things-we-must-do-now-to-stabilise-the-planet-163990

David King, Jane Lichtenstein

“Nowhere is safe.” As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a recent
report that climate change and its consequences are here to stay, is there still an opportunity to
mitigate some of the dangers and to get back to a place of relative safety for humanity?

The challenge of surviving the next 50 years is now seen as a planet-wide existential crisis; we need
to work together urgently, just to secure a short-term future for human civilisation. Global weather
patterns are violently disrupted: Greece burns; the south of England floods; Texas has had its
coldest weather ever, while California and Australia suffer apocalyptic wild fires. All of these violent,
record-breaking events are a direct result of rapid heating in the Arctic - occurring faster than in the
rest of the world. A warm Arctic triggers new ocean and air currents that change the weather for
everyone.

The only way to reverse some of these catastrophic patterns, and to regain a kind of stability in
climate and weather systems, is “climate repair” – a strategy we call “reduce, remove, repair” –
which demands that we make very rapid progress to net zero global emissions; that there is massive,
active removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere; and, in the first instance, that we refreeze
the Earth’s poles and glaciers to correct the wild weather patterns, slow down ice-melt, stabilise sea
level, and break the feedback loops that relentlessly accelerate global warming. There are no
either/or options.

Reducing emissions
About 70% of world economies have net zero emissions commitments over varying timescales, but
this has come too late to restore climate stability.

The IPCC has asked for accelerated progress on this trajectory, but whatever happens, current
emission rates of atmospheric greenhouse gases imply global warming of 1.5℃ by 2030 and well
over 2℃ above pre-industrial level by the end of the century – a devastating outcome. In particular,
melting ice and thawing permafrost are considered inevitable even if rapid and deep CO₂ emissions
reductions are achieved, with sea-level rise to continue for centuries as a result. In every area of the
world, climate events will become more severe and more frequent, whether flooding, heating,
coastal erosion or fires.

There are definitely important steps that can still reduce the scale of this devastation, including
faster and deeper emissions reductions. However, this is not enough on its own to avert the worst.
Together there is real evidence that the massive removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere
and solutions such as repairing the Earth’s poles and glaciers could help humanity find a survivable
way out of this crisis.

Removing greenhouse gases

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Taking CO₂ and equivalent greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, with the aim of getting back to
350ppm (parts per million) by 2100, involves creating new CO₂ “sinks” – long-term stores from
which CO₂ cannot escape. Sinks operate at many scales, with forest planting, mangrove restoration,
wetland and peat preservation all crucially important.

Very large projects, such as the restoration of the Loess Plateau in China demonstrate scalable CO₂
removal, with multiple add-on benefits of food production, bio-diversity enhancement and weather
stabilisation.

Habitat restoration can also make economic sense. In the Philippines, mangrove is the focus of a
cost-benefit analysis. Mangrove captures four times more carbon than the same area of rainforest,
provides numerous ecosystem services and protects against flooding, conferring socio-economic
benefits and significantly reducing the cost of dealing with extreme weather events.

Big new carbon sinks must be created wherever safely possible, including in the oceans.
Interventions that mimic natural processes, known to operate safely “in the wild”, are a workable
starting point. Promotion of ocean pastures to restore ocean diversity and fish and whale stocks to
the levels last seen 300 years ago is one such possibility – offering new sustainable food sources for
humans, as well as contributing to climate ecosystem services and carbon sinks.

In nature, sprinklings of iron-rich dust blow from deserts or volcanic eruptions, onto the surface of
deep oceans, generating – in a matter of months – rich ocean pastures, teeming fish stocks and an
array of marine wildlife. Studies of ocean kelp regeneration show the full range of real-life impacts,
from increased protein sources for human consumption, to restoration of pre-industrial levels of
ocean biodiversity and productivity, and extensive carbon sequestration.

Extending the scale and number of ocean pastures could be achieved by systematically scattering
iron-rich dust onto target areas in oceans around the world. The approach is intuitively scalable,
and could sequester perhaps 30 billion tons per year of CO₂ if 3% or so of the world’s deep oceans
were to be treated annually.

Largescale carbon-sink creation of this kind is pivotal if the atmosphere is to return to pre-industrial
CO₂ levels. A billion tons per year of sequestration is the minimum threshold coordinated by the
Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge given the intensity of the climate crisis. While the scale of
intervention is sometimes called “geoengineering”, the approach is closer to forest planting or
mangrove restoration. The aim is to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere using natural means, to
return us to pre-industrial levels within a single generation.

Repairing the planet

The immediate challenge is to stabilise the planet, achieving a manageable equilibrium that gives a
last chance to shift to renewable energy and towards a circular global economy, with new norms in
urban, rural and ocean management. “Repairing” systematically seeks to draw the Earth back from
climate tipping points (which, by definition, cannot happen without direct effort), providing a
supporting framework in which “reduce” and “restore” can happen. Political and societal will is
needed.

The most urgent effort is to refreeze the Arctic, interrupting a bleak spiral of accelerating ice loss,
sea-level rise - and the acceleration of climate change and violent global weather changes that they
cause. Arctic temperatures have risen much faster (and increasingly so) than global average

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temperatures, when compared with pre-industrial levels. Figure 1 shows this clearly from 1850 to
the present day.

Melting Arctic ice embodies a powerful feedback force in climate change. White ice reflects the Sun’s
energy away from the Earth before it can heat the surface. This is known as the albedo effect. As ice
melts, dark-blue seawater absorbs increasing amounts of the Sun’s energy, warming increases, and
ever-larger areas of ice disappear each summer, expanding the acceleration. Arctic temperatures
govern winds, ocean currents and weather systems across the globe.

A tipping point is passing: sea-ice loss is becoming permanent and accelerating; Greenland ice will
follow and will eventually raise global sea-levels by over seven metres. Total loss may take centuries
but, decade by decade, there will be relentless incremental impacts. By mid-century the melting will
be irreversible, and sea-level rise alone will leave low-lying countries like Vietnam in desperate
circumstances, with reductions to global rice production a certainty, many millions of climate
refugees and no obvious pathway forward for such nations.

The rapid Arctic temperature increase is matched by the rapid and accelerating loss in minimum
(summer) sea-ice volume (Figure 2), which further accelerates the temperature rise in a spiral of
reinforcing feedback loops.

It is vital to pivot the world back from this ice-melt tipping point, and to repair the Arctic as rapidly
as possible. Marine cloud brightening in which floating solar-powered pumps spray salt upwards to
brighten clouds and create a reflective barrier between the Sun and the ocean, is known to cool
ocean surfaces and is a promising way to promote Arctic summer cooling. It mimics nature, and can
be scaled up or down in a flexible way. Studies of marine cloud brightening, its climate impacts and
interactions with human systems, are underway.

As with promotion of ocean pastures, such solutions must be critically analysed, but there is no
longer any doubt of their crucial importance.

What we do in the next five years determines the viability of humanity’s future. Even if we narrow
our aspirations to “survival”, fixing on a timescale of 50 years or so, the challenges are daunting.
Humanity deserves better. We know what to do to be able to imagine thousands of years of human
civilisation ahead, as well as behind us.

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Conversations about consent need to start early, and
parents need to get comfortable with it
theconversation.com/conversations-about-consent-need-to-start-early-and-parents-need-to-get-comfortable-with-
it-174524

Joanna Cheek

Psychiatrist Dr. Gaiathry Jeyarajan envisions a future where parents are comfortable
having conversations with their kids early on about consent and boundaries. Avoiding
these discussions only perpetuates the culture of silence that allows interpersonal trauma
to thrive, says Jeyarajan.

“I want to remind parents, if it’s this hard for you to talk about, can you imagine how hard
it is for your child?”

Jeyarajan is the author of a self-published book Ella’s Choice, which teaches children
about consent and healthy boundaries in hopes of modelling a strong awareness of their
own and other’s bodies and boundaries, normalizing these discussions in daily life.

Interpersonal trauma, such as abuse and sexual assault, are intensely private crimes but
pervasively common, constituting a public health crisis that affects both children and
adults.

Read news coverage based on evidence, not alarm.

The recent #MeToo movement, explosion of research and advocacy around “adverse
childhood experiences” and awareness of escalating intimate partner violence during the
pandemic are helping make it known that interpersonal trauma is widely experienced.

All too common

Half to two-thirds of people have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience
(such as abuse or exposure the domestic violence).

Over four in 10 women and one-third of men report some form of intimate partner
violence. More than one-third of men and women (and even higher rates for transgender
Canadians) have experienced at least one physical or sexual assault since the age of 15
outside of their intimate partnership.

As a psychiatrist who specializes in treating adult survivors of interpersonal trauma, I

regularly see how these health effects last a lifetime and expand beyond post-traumatic
stress disorder. Many studies show what I see every day in my clinic: Interpersonal
trauma is pervasive, enduring and at times, deadly.

Beyond PTSD

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Interpersonal trauma can lead to depression, anxiety, problems regulating emotions,
substance use disorders, eating disorders, problems with attention, relationships,
sexuality, violence in intimate relationships, suicidality and many stress-mediated
physical illnesses.

People who suffered high levels of adverse childhood experiences, such as abuse or
exposure to domestic violence die nearly 20 years prematurely. These adverse childhood
experiences are linked to a long list of illnesses including cancer, heart disease, stroke,
asthma, chronic inflammatory lung disease, diabetes, chronic pain, mental health
problems and substance use disorders. They are also associated with job instability, social
problems, learning disabilities and violence.

While our knowledge of interpersonal trauma has grown, our parenting strategies to
recognize and help prevent it may not have kept up, says Jeyarajan. “We learn how to set
and respect boundaries at home,” she says.

Many of us adopt parenting styles passed down from previous generations without being
mindful of repeating unhealthy patterns that ignore concepts of consent and boundaries,
such as forcing food intake or hugs and kisses with others, Jeyarajan says.

As Jeyarajan writes in Ella’s Choice:

But if Ella doesn’t want to give a hug,

She will say “NO” without a shrug.

Mom says, “That’s totally fine,

Because it’s your body, not mine!”

“Knowing your limits is part of growing,”

Applauds Daddy.

Proud Ella is glowing.

“Trauma often relates to boundary violations,” Jeyarajan says. “If you know that this is my
body and this is what makes me uncomfortable, then you can come tell your parents and
say, ‘Listen, I feel this person is making me uncomfortable.’ How are you going to respect
boundaries if you don’t even know they exist?”

Jeyarajan hopes to model for children that consent can be withdrawn at any time. “Maybe
their friend wanted to play fight and now they don’t want to play fight anymore: They can
change their mind.”

She wonders whether as a society, we can teach children to listen to their body’s limits
and cues rather than rigidly following through at any cost. By starting these conversations
early, we can change our culture from one of silence around boundary crossings and
violations to explicit consent and empowerment.

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So, when Ella meets a fluffy bright-eyed cat, Jeyarajan writes:

She seeks Lexi’s permission before reaching for a pat.

Ellie’s respect for the boundaries for the kitten

Leaves everyone around her smitten.

Witty Ella wants everyone to know

That touch without an approval is a “no-go.”

“It’s never too early to starting teaching children about boundaries if we want to raise a
new generation of empowered youth,” Jeyarajan says. “If that’s the kind of humans we’re
raising — that are aware of their own and others’ bodies and needs and have empathy
from a really young age — then I think we’re heading in the right direction with regards to
changing rape [and abuse] culture.”

We can’t separate our personal health from that of the environment we inhabit. To protect
our children, we must shift our collective culture away from a silent complacency around
interpersonal trauma and towards intentionally working to prevent it.

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Could knowing how much your coworker earns help
close the gender pay gap?
theconversation.com/could-knowing-how-much-your-coworker-earns-help-close-the-gender-pay-gap-58570

Nancy Modesitt

Editor’s note: This article is part of our collaboration with Point Taken, a new program from
WGBH that will next air on Tuesday, May 3 on PBS and online at pbs.org. The show features fact-
based debate on major issues of the day, without the shouting.

Pay transparency is all the rage these days.

President Obama has taken action to increase pay transparency among federal contractors. The
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces laws prohibiting employment
discrimination, recently issued a regulation requiring large companies to disclose aggregate salary
information in their annual informational filing. And states have been taking action as well, with
California and New York enacting legislation to support pay transparency efforts.

Their primary goal is to eliminate the gender wage gap. Currently, in the United States, women earn
approximately 21 percent less than men. The gap between men’s and women’s wages remains even
when taking into account factors such as career choice (e.g., college-educated women become
teachers more often than men do, and teachers are paid less than many other jobs requiring a
degree), experience and education. One study found that 10 years after graduation, women earned
12 percent less than men after accounting for all other factors that could affect pay.

Pay transparency laws represent the latest effort to close the gap, which has remained stubbornly in
place for decades. But will they be effective?

The answer depends in part on whether employees are willing to disclose their salaries and how
employers address the concerns that are likely to arise when a salary gap is revealed.

No salary disclosure required

Part of the problem is that with one exception – government employees – the laws currently in
place to promote pay transparency do not actually require disclosure of individual salary
information.

For example, the federal regulation that has been touted as a pay transparency law only prohibits
employers from retaliating against employees who disclose their own salary. California’s and New
York’s laws are essentially the same. The idea behind these anti-retaliation laws is to allow
employees to disclose their pay without repercussion, eliminating pay secrecy policies and customs.

For these laws to create actual pay transparency, however, employees must be willing to share salary
information. And while there appears to be a trend toward employee willingness to do so, it is at
odds with the longstanding social norm against discussing pay.

Finding a link to pay equity

In the absence of a legal requirement to disclose wages, an increasing number of companies are
making salary information transparent on their own.

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Different companies have taken varying approaches to this. For example, Whole Foods allows
workers to check their colleagues’ salaries, while social media scheduler Buffer publicly discloses the
formula it uses to determine employees’ salaries. At the extreme end of transparency, many
governmental employees’ salaries are publicly available, depending on the state.

One could argue, and many do, that increased pay transparency decreases the gender pay gap.

The argument has logic: if employers disclose salaries, they will also be disclosing any gender pay
gap that exists, and this will lead to efforts to eliminate it. This is precisely what happened at Buffer,
which, after disclosing employee salaries, found a wage gap and changed its compensation system
and hiring priorities to eliminate it.

Pay transparency in the federal workforce can also be seen as support for the argument that pay
transparency helps eliminate the gender wage gap. It is significantly lower in the federal workforce
– in which salaries are publicly available online – than in the private sector.

Assessing pay transparency’s impact

Despite this anecdotal evidence of the effect of pay transparency, a note of caution is warranted.

First, there appears to be no empirical study of the effect of pay transparency on the gender wage
gap. Specifically, there is no systematic research of what happens to the gap when companies shift
from withholding to disclosing employee pay. Nor is there research comparing the gender wage gap
in companies that keep salaries secret with companies that disclose employee pay.

While there is research comparing the federal workforce’s gender wage gap with that in the private
sector, it does not show whether pay transparency is a factor. And, in fact, it is quite probable that
the most important factor explaining the smaller federal wage gap is the government’s highly
structured pay and promotion system.

Second, when one looks closer at the anecdotal evidence, what it suggests is that pay transparency is
only one piece at play. Comparing the experiences of Buffer, the example that appears to be most
popular in the press, with Salesforce illustrates this.

At Buffer, the company disclosed salaries then took concrete steps to eliminate the gender wage gap
that was revealed. In contrast, Salesforce conducted an internal review but did not disclose salaries.
On the basis of the review, the company adjusted the pay of six percent of its employees to eliminate
the gender wage gap.

The common link in these approaches is not pay transparency but recognition of a gap between
men’s and women’s pay and a commitment to close it. Thus, pay transparency can assist in pushing
companies toward recognition of a problem, but it isn’t an essential component to eliminating it.

Corporate attitude
Indeed, a company’s attitude toward the wage gap and its causes may be more significant in
eliminating it than putting in place a transparent pay policy.

Consider the fact that differences in an employee’s initial salary contributes to the gender wage gap.
Is this caused by differences in previous salary? Or that men are usually rewarded for negotiating a
better salary – while women are penalized for doing the same?

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Pay transparency would reveal a gap in starting salary, but the company could decide that it is not
due to gender but “market forces” – e.g., the man had to be paid more to take the job in order to
avoid a wage cut – or because of his negotiating ability. That would make it less likely that the
company would take action.

To take another example, women take off more time than men do after the birth of a child. A
“gender neutral” policy of basing raises on seniority will result in women having lower salaries over
time than men do. Pay transparency will reveal this difference.

Yet seniority is generally considered a neutral, nongendered reason for a wage gap, and a company
can explain away any differences based on this, claiming that it has nothing to do with sex. But isn’t
a pay gap based on gender if it is caused by the fact that women have babies or that they stay home
with sick children more often than men?

Companies have to be willing to reconsider many such components of compensation to eliminate

gender disparities in pay.

Negative consequences
Taking a step back and accepting that pay transparency would at least allow differences to be
revealed, which could lead to a decrease in the gender pay gap, one must also consider the negative
repercussions.

One downside to pay transparency is the effect on employee morale. A fascinating study on the
effect of revealing salaries of University of California employees showed that employees below the
median salary for their position had decreased job satisfaction and an increase in desire to change
jobs.

This was not offset by improvements in employee morale among those who were paid higher than
the median salary. Thus, there was a net overall decrease in employee morale.

On the other hand, a recent PayScale survey suggests that transparency has the opposite effect,
encouraging retention, because employees tend to think they’re more underpaid than they actually
are.

To avoid negative consequences, the Society for Human Resource Management recommends that
employers be prepared to explain any reasons for pay disparities that are revealed. This also
suggests that how an employer handles a pay gap matters more than the disclosure of it.

Putting this all together, pay transparency in and of itself doesn’t necessarily help close the gender
pay gap. It creates opportunities for employers to reconsider their current compensation systems
but doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily do anything about it.

So while pay transparency is a good idea, on its own it probably won’t be able to eliminate the
persistent pay disparities between men and women.

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Does my child have separation anxiety? How parents
can help with children’s back-to-school fears
theconversation.com/does-my-child-have-separation-anxiety-how-parents-can-help-with-childrens-back-to-school-
fears-166619

Audrey-Ann Deneault, Sheri Madigan

Going back-to-school is an exciting time for many children. But for some it also stirs up
stress and anxiety. Are they going to like their new teacher? Are they going to enjoy their
new school? Are their friends going to be in their class?

It is normal for young children to experience anxiety when separating from parents or
caregivers. When you layer a pandemic on top of ordinary back-to-school stress, many
children will be struggling more than usual.

In everyday language, it’s common for people to talk about children (or even pets)
experiencing separation anxiety.

When children experience more intense fears and anxieties that interfere with going to
school over a prolonged period of time, or that interfere with how they function at school
and/or how they interact with others, this is what psychologists call separation anxiety
disorder. Separation anxiety disorder is the most common anxiety disorder in children
under 12 years of age.

Even when children are experiencing typical levels of anxiety — whether they are starting
kindergarten, transitioning to a new school — or returning to more familiar surroundings,
how parents respond is important.

Anxiety and the pandemic

After long periods of social isolation with family members, it may be hard for some
children — and parents — to be separated from them once the school bell rings.
Particularly after our pandemic year, some children and parents may still feel some
anxiety about going into unfamiliar places. They may also have concerns about pandemic
safety that makes going back to school stressful.

In a normal year, approximately one in 10 children experience elevated anxiety levels.

However, research shows that anxiety levels in children have doubled during the
pandemic, with one in five experiencing significant anxiety.

In the past year and a half, most children spent more time at home than usual, notably
when schools were closed. Even when children were allowed to spend time with friends,
there were often restrictions in place, such as being outdoors or keeping a mask on, and
staying socially distant.

For some children, these restrictions can increase stress associated with interactions
outside of their family.

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What separation anxiety can look like
Separation anxiety can unfold in different ways. Children may refuse to go to school or
participate in new activities in the absence of their parent. They may also refuse to go to
bed without their parent or sleep away from home.

Some children experiencing separation anxiety have physical symptoms such as stomach
aches and nightmares, while others may experience headaches or a racing heartbeat.
Others may have persistent thoughts that something bad is going to happen to themselves
or to their parents.

Some children may also be anxious when it comes to the pandemic specifically. Going
back to school can entail some risks for unvaccinated children, and some may fear
contracting COVID-19 or transmitting it to their friends and family. Also, children, much
like adults, may feel a little “rusty” when it comes to interacting with people outside the
family, particularly with strangers like a new teacher.

Strategies to support your child

Whether you know your child has struggled significantly with anxiety before, or they seem
worried or anxious about going back to school, we offer several strategies below to help
you navigate these feelings with them.

1. Validate your child’s fears and anxieties. Feeling anxious about separating
from the comfort of caregivers is a normal response to stressful events. When
children express anxiety, let them know you hear them and understand. You can
validate and normalize their feelings by saying: “I get that you feel worried. I bet
many other kids are feeling that way too.”

2. Encourage positive self-talk. Help children develop a growth mindset that

includes positive and productive statements such as: “I am brave, I can do this.”
Positive self-talk has been linked to increased self-esteem in kids. Try practising this
at home in the lead up to school, so it’s familiar and easy for kids to use these
statements when they are separated from you or get anxious at school.

3. Plan to take small steps through the fall. It is a lot to ask children to go from
limited social interactions during the pandemic to extended social interactions in a
small space at school. During the first few weeks of school, try to resist the
temptation to fill the evening weekends with outings and events. Consider doing
home-based activities that children are familiar with to help provide some
consistency in their environment. As your children get more comfortable with social
interactions, start progressively adding more activities to their calendar as pandemic
restrictions permit.

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 4. Stick to routines. The transition to a new school climate may feel unpredictable to
children. This can result in increased anxiety. One way to reduce such anxiety is by
having consistent routines at home. For example, stick to a consistent schedule
when it comes to eating, bath time, screen time and bedtime. Research has found
this has helped children experience more well-being during the pandemic.

5. Talk about the positive aspects of going to school and venturing out in
new ways. Children (and adults!) can have a hard time seeing the positive aspects
of anxiety-inducing situations. Parents can help children see the positive side of the
back-to-school, including learning new things, time with friends or participating in
extracurricular activities.

6. Model positive behaviours. Children are not the only ones that have seen an
increase in their anxiety this past year. There have also been rises in parental
anxiety. Even with respect to school, many parents may also be anxious about being
separated from their child. When parents discuss their anxiety and stressors,
children may internalize these worries. Try to avoid discussing your life stressors in
front of your child, and also avoid exposure to alarming media, which has been
shown to increase children’s anxiety.

It is understandable that children may struggle with separating from their loved ones as
they experience another unconventional back-to-school. Nonetheless, these strategies can
help parents play an important role in easing their children’s anxiety and making the
back-to-school more enjoyable for them.

If you have questions about whether your child could benefit from additional support, you
can consider reaching out for professional help, including talking to your family
physician. Anxiety Canada provides a directory of professional services available across
Canada.

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Ethiopian Airlines is flying 737 Max again: here are the
lessons learnt
theconversation.com/ethiopian-airlines-is-flying-737-max-again-here-are-the-lessons-learnt-177000

Chrystal Zhang

Ethiopian Airlines has announced that it plans to put its Boeing’s 737 Max back to
service for the first time since the aircraft model was involved in a crash that claimed
157 lives three years ago. Chrystal Zhang has studied the business models of airlines. We
asked her to make sense of the source of Ethiopian Airlines’ confidence.

When, and why was Boeing’s 737 Max grounded?

By 12 March 2019, two days after Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed, civil aviation
authorities in China, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Malaysia, Mongolia,
Oman and Singapore had already grounded the 737 Max.

This was in addition to airlines in Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Norway, India,
Turkey and other countries. On March 13, 2019, the US Federal Aviation Administration
grounded the entire 737 Max fleet.

The decision was made following the fatal crash of Ethiopian Airlines’ 302 flight enroute
from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. The accident killed all 157 passengers and crew members on
board.

This wasn’t the Boeing 737 Max aircraft’s first incident.

On 29 October 2018 there was a fatal crash of a flight operated by Lion Air, an Indonesian
low-cost carrier. The airline was enroute from Jarkata to Pangka Pinang and the crash
resulted in 189 casualties.

Two years earlier, in March 2017, the US Federal Aviation Administration had granted an
amended-type certificate to Boeing for the 737-8 aircraft, the first of the 737 Max family.
An amended type certificate approves modification, and how such modification affects the
original design. The Max is the fourth generation of the 737 model airplane, and is the
successor to the company’s 737 Next Generation family of aircraft.

The 737 Max was the 12th derivative model of the 737 aircraft, which was first certified
half a century earlier in 1967. Two months after the US Federal Aviation certification, the
first 737 Max entered revenue passenger service with Malindo Air, a Malaysian air carrier.
Seventeen months later the 737 Max suffered its first fatal crash.

Is there a consensus on the cause of the accidents?

A study has analysed the cause of the 737 Max crashes. The model had a new feature in its
flight control computer – the manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system – that
has become the centre of scrutiny for Max crashes.

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The new system had an ability to trigger flight control movements that challenged the
pilots’ command of the aircraft. In addition, the software operated on input from one of
the two sensors externally mounted on either side of the aircraft’s fuselage (main body).

For Ethiopian flight, the system triggered four times as a result of false sensor readings,
forcing the airplane into a nose down from which the pilots were unable to recover. Faulty
sensor data that erroneously triggered the system to repeatedly activate landing played
critical roles in the Max crashes.

Given significant advances in aviation safety over the last two decades it was
extraordinary for two new airplanes, of a new derivative model, to crash within five
months of each other.

While certain facts and circumstances surrounding the accidents differed, a common
component in both was the new flight control feature.

Boeing developed the system to address stability issues in certain flight conditions
induced by the plane’s new larger engines and their relative placement on the 737 Max
aircraft compared to the engines’ placement on the 737 NG.

Is Ethiopian Airlines jumping the gun?

So far, 13 airlines have resumed flying Boeing’s 737 Max. These include The Ryanair
Group of Ireland, Air Canada, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines and India-based
SpiceJet.

In the case of Ethiopian airlines, the reasons for resuming its flights include:

The action taken by both Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Administration in
terms of product redesign, pilot training requirements, commitment to corporate
culture change and certification. These seek to ensure that the aircraft model
satisfies all regulatory requirements.

Boeing’s 737 Max has its unique market positioning to serve the short-medium haul
market

The aircraft is more economically viable for airlines to use to serve their target
market

The airline had made financial commitment to aircraft procurement

Have the crashes been fully analysed and resolved?

The US House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure conducted an 18-month
investigation into design, development, and certification of the 737 Max aircraft, and
related matters.

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The Committee’s investigation has revealed multiple missed opportunities that could have
turned the trajectory of the Max’s design and development toward a safer course. The
model resulted from flawed technical design criteria, faulty assumptions about pilot
response times, and production pressures.

Boeing failed in its design and development of the Max. The US Federal Aviation
Administration, on the other hand overlooked its aviation safety mission. It failed in its
oversight of Boeing and its certification of the aircraft.

At the direction of Committee Chair Peter DeFazio and Subcommittee on Aviation Chair
Rick Larsen, the 245-page report is being released to help inform the public’s
understanding of what went so horrifically wrong and why.

What are the lessons learnt?

Never be complacent: Boeing is renowned for its disruptive innovation and novel
products. It has served the global aerospace and aviation markets throughout its one-
century history. But the company has become more of a financially successful business
than a great engineering firm. It was the intent of Harry Stonecipher, its President and
Chief Operation Officer in 2004, who championed the corporate culture change. But past
glory does not warrant future success. Staying competitive in the market requires
innovation, but more importantly, respect and protection of customers and stakeholders.

Do things right, and do the right things: These are the fundamental ethical values that a
good engineer upholds to be accountable for the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
Driven by the desire to outpace its rivals - in the course of designing, developing and
introducing B737 Max to the market - Boeing failed to meet both criteria. Boeing, and any
other business, need to adhere to these fundamental values and be accountable for its
conduct.

Improve safety cultures: There is an ongoing debate that upholding highest safety
standards and nurturing safety culture jeopardises a business’s financial success and
operational efficiency. However, safety is the foundation of aerospace and aviation
business. A safety culture ensures trust, accountability and responsibility. It eventually
leads to a firm’s sustainability.

Face the truth and act honestly, and with integrity: When in a crisis, the most effective
way to win trust from the public and society is to face the truth and act honestly and with
integrity. Any attempts to cover up the truth or mislead the public are doomed to fail.

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Facebook has known for a year and a half that
Instagram is bad for teens despite claiming otherwise –
here are the harms researchers have been
documenting for years
theconversation.com/facebook-has-known-for-a-year-and-a-half-that-instagram-is-bad-for-teens-despite-claiming-
otherwise-here-are-the-harms-researchers-have-been-documenting-for-years-168043

Christia Spears Brown

Facebook officials had internal research in March 2020 showing that Instagram – the
social media platform most used by adolescents – is harmful to teen girls’ body image and
well-being but swept those findings under the rug to continue conducting business as
usual, according to a Sept. 14, 2021, Wall Street Journal report.

Facebook’s policy of pursuing profits regardless of documented harm has sparked

comparisons to Big Tobacco, which knew in the 1950s that its products were carcinogenic
but publicly denied it into the 21st century. Those of us who study social media use in
teens didn’t need a suppressed internal research study to know that Instagram can harm
teens. Plenty of peer-reviewed research papers show the same thing.

Understanding the impact of social media on teens is important because almost all teens
go online daily. A Pew Research Center poll shows that 89% of teens report they are
online “almost constantly” or “several times a day.”

Teens are more likely to log on to Instagram than any other social media site. It is a
ubiquitous part of adolescent life. Yet studies consistently show that the more often teens
use Instagram, the worse their overall well-being, self-esteem, life satisfaction, mood and
body image. One study found that the more college students used Instagram on any given
day, the worse their mood and life satisfaction was that day.

Unhealthy comparisons
But Instagram isn’t problematic simply because it is popular. There are two key features
of Instagram that seem to make it particularly risky. First, it allows users to follow both
celebrities and peers, both of whom can present a manipulated, filtered picture of an
unrealistic body along with a highly curated impression of a perfect life.

While all social media allows users to be selective in what they show the world, Instagram
is notorious for its photo editing and filtering capabilities. Plus, that is the platform
popular among celebrities, models and influencers. Facebook has been relegated to the
uncool soccer moms and grandparents. For teens, this seamless integration of celebrities
and retouched versions of real-life peers presents a ripe environment for upward social
comparison, or comparing yourself to someone who is “better” in some respect.

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Humans, as a general rule, look to others to know how to fit in and judge their own lives.
Teens are especially vulnerable to these social comparisons. Just about everyone can
remember worrying about fitting in in high school. Instagram exacerbates that worry. It is
hard enough to compare yourself to a supermodel who looks fantastic (albeit filtered); it
can be even worse when the filtered comparison is Natalie down the hall.

Negatively comparing themselves to others leads people to feel envious of others’

seemingly better lives and bodies. Recently, researchers even tried to combat this effect by
reminding Instagram users that the posts were unrealistic.

It didn’t work. Negative comparisons, which were nearly impossible to stop, still led to
envy and lowered self-esteem. Even in studies in which participants knew the photos they
were shown on Instagram were retouched and reshaped, adolescent girls still felt worse
about their bodies after viewing them. For girls who tend to make a lot of social
comparisons, these effects are even worse.

Objectification and body image

Instagram is also risky for teens because its emphasis on pictures of the body leads users
to focus on how their bodies look to others. Our research shows that for teen girls – and
increasingly teen boys – thinking about their own bodies as the object of a photo increases
worrying thoughts about how they look to others, and that leads to feeling shame about
their bodies. Just taking a selfie to be posted later makes them feel worse about how they
look to others.

Being an object for others to view doesn’t help the “selfie generation” feel empowered and
sure of themselves – it can do exactly the opposite. These are not insignificant health
concerns, because body dissatisfaction during the teen years is a powerful and consistent
predictor of later eating disorder symptoms.

Facebook has acknowledged internally what researchers have been documenting for
years: Instagram can be harmful to teens. Parents can help by repeatedly talking to their
teens about the difference between appearance and reality, by encouraging their teens to
interact with peers face-to-face, and to use their bodies in active ways instead of focusing
on the selfie.

The big question will be how Facebook handles these damaging results. History and the
courts have been less than forgiving of the head-in-the-sand approach of Big Tobacco.

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Five things people get wrong about standard English
theconversation.com/five-things-people-get-wrong-about-standard-english-168969

Willem Hollmann

When I recently explained why teaching grammar in primary school still matters, Radio 4’s Today
programme invited me to debate the importance of standard English. My opponent was Nevile
Gwynne, a British private tutor, author and, as presenter Nick Robinson put it, a “stickler for the
right sort of grammar”.

Robinson asked that I explain my position, which is as follows: standard English should not be
presented in the national curriculum as the only correct form, but as what it is, which is the socially
most prestigious form. Saying it is the only correct way to speak puts those children who don’t speak
that way from birth at a disadvantage.

How so? Well, if your teacher tells you that “I was going to the shops” is the only correct way to say
it, and if that’s how you’ve always said it, you’re going to have an easier time than another child who,
at home, has always said, “I were going to the shops”, and has to change the way they speak when
they get to school.

“Does it really matter,” Robinson asked Gwynne, “if I say, ‘I were going to the shops’?”

It absolutely does, came Gwynne’s reply. “If you say, ‘I were’, you’re just not thinking straight”.

This position is as absurd as it is misguided. It implies that the 85% to 88% of the UK population
that speak non-standard forms of English, not to mention the many millions of people elsewhere in
the world who speak non-standard varieties of English, cannot think clearly.

And that’s before you dig into the history of the language. Is that really a claim anyone wants to level
against, well, every English speaker before 1400, which is when what we now think of as standard
English in Britain first emerged?

The op-eds that have since followed go further in demonstrating the widespread misunderstandings
of what standard English is. Here then, a debunking of the five major myths.

1. Grammar and standard English grammar are the same thing

Despite what some would argue, it is not contradictory to advocate for grammar to be taught and for
standard English to be presented simply as one variety.

It is just as valid to tell a child that “were” in the non-standard clause “I were” is a verb, as it is to
point to “was” in the standard clause “I was”. Both observations will help the child learn what a verb
is, as opposed to a noun.

Discussing non-standard forms non-judgmentally may also help many children and parents feel less
intimidated in and around school. Teachers might explore instances of non-standard conjugation.
They might explain, for example, that some speakers in Lancashire use “were” instead of “was”,
while others actually say “was” instead of “were”. The key here is for the teacher not to label
Lancashire (or any other variety) as wrong but simply as a different dialect.

2. There is only one standard English

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English is a global language. And precisely because of this worldwide spread, there are several,
different standard forms, including standard Scottish, Australian and American English.

A New Yorker, for example, who moves to London may well say “gotten” instead of the English
Standard English “got”. The notion that there is a single, monolithic standard English – be that
across the world, in the UK or in England – is a fiction.

Standard English is best characterised as the most prestigious dialect in those countries where it is
spoken as a first language. It is highly codified in grammar books and dictionaries and used
especially in formal writing.

Unlike regional dialects, it is not tied to a particular part of the country but rather to a segment –
the upper segment – of the social scale. Much like other dialects, though, it continues to change.

3. Standard English and Received Pronunciation are the same

thing
Standard English is not about speaking in a posh accent. Linguists concur that anyone who speaks
in the accent known as received pronunciation (RP) will also use the words and grammar that make
up standard English. However, not all speakers of standard English have the same accent.

Of the UK population, only 3% speak in RP, whereas standard English is the home dialect of 12 to
15%. The expressions “I was” and “I were” do not represent variation in terms of accent but between
standard and non-standard English.

4. Standard English is the only variety with clear rules

Some critics defend standard English by stating, essentially, that its rules are crucial for people to
understand each other. However, non-standard varieties of the English language also have
grammatical rules.

I have written about Lancashire speakers who say “I gave it him” rather than “I gave him it” or “I
gave it to him”. For them, that’s a rule. Following it does not lead to a lack of clarity.

In fact, non-standard varieties can provide greater clarity. Take the word “you”. English used to
differentiate between “thou”, to address one person, and “you”, for talking to two or more. Modern
versions of numerous other languages, including French, Polish and Punjabi, still make this
distinction. Standard English, by contrast, only has “you”, which is ambiguous. Many non-standard
varieties are clearer: they have plural forms such as “yous”, “y’all” or “yins”.

5. You need Standard English in order to think straight

Elitist and classist, this fifth myth around standard English perfectly encapsulates why treating all
dialects non-judgmentally is vital. It is important that it be taught as part of the national
curriculum, particularly for use in formal writing. But many educational linguists agree that
presenting it as the only correct way – and by extension, telling a child they speak in an incorrect or
wrong way – is humiliating. It can discourage them from engaging fully in education. And that can
only ever harm both the individuals concerned and society at large.

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3/3
Food production generates more than a third of
manmade greenhouse gas emissions – a new
framework tells us how much comes from crops,
countries and regions
theconversation.com/food-production-generates-more-than-a-third-of-manmade-greenhouse-gas-emissions-a-
new-framework-tells-us-how-much-comes-from-crops-countries-and-regions-167623

Xiaoming Xu, Atul Jain

Producing enough food for a growing world population is an urgent global challenge. And
it’s complicated by the fact that climate change is warming the Earth and making farming
harder in many places.

Food production is a big contributor to climate change, so it’s critically important to be

able to measure greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector accurately. In a new
study, we show that the food system generates about 35% of total global man-made
greenhouse gas emissions.

Breaking down this share, production of animal-based foods – meat, poultry and dairy
products, including growing crops to feed livestock and pastures for grazing – contributes
57% of emissions linked to the food system. Raising plant-based foods for human
consumption contributes 29%. The other 14% of agricultural emissions come from
products not used as food or feed, such as cotton and rubber.

We are atmospheric scientists who study the effects of agriculture and other human
activities on Earth’s climate. It’s well known that producing animal-based foods generates
more greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based foods, which is why shifting toward a
more plant-based diet is recognized as an option for curbing greenhouse gas emissions
and climate change.

But to quantify the potential impact of such a shift, we saw a need for better tools to
estimate emissions from individual plant- and animal-based food items, with more details
about how emissions are calculated and covering all food-related sub-sectors, such as land
use change and actions beyond the farm gate.

Current methods rely on sparse data and simplified representations of many key factors,
such as emissions from farmland management. They don’t treat different sub-sectors
consistently or calculate emissions for producing many specific commodities.

To fill those gaps, we have developed a comprehensive framework that combines

modeling and various databases. It enables us to estimate average yearly global emissions
of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide from the production
and consumption of plant- and animal-based human food. Currently, our study covers the
years 2007-2013. Here are some of the insights it offers, using data that represents an
average of those years.

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Greenhouse gases from food production
We considered four major sub-sectors of emissions from plant- and animal-based food
production. Overall, we calculated that the food system produces emissions that are
equivalent to approximately 17.3 billion metric tons (17.318 teragrams) of carbon dioxide
yearly.

Land use change – clearing forests for farms and ranches, which reduces carbon storage
in trees and soils – accounts for 29% of total food production greenhouse gas emissions.
Another 38% comes from farmland management activities, such as plowing fields, which
reduces soil carbon storage, and treating crops with nitrogen fertilizer. Farmers also burn
a lot of fossil fuel to run their tractors and harvesters.

Raising livestock generates 21% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production. It
includes methane belched by grazing animals, as well as methane and nitrous oxide
released from livestock manure. The remaining 11% comes from activities that occur
beyond farm gates, such as mining, manufacturing and transporting fertilizers and
pesticides, as well as energy use in food processing.

Which foods generate the most greenhouse gas emissions?

Our framework makes it possible to compare how different food products and food-
producing regions affect Earth’s climate.

Among animal-based foods, beef is the largest contributor to climate change. It generates
25% of total food emissions, followed by cow milk (8%) and pork (7%).

Rice is the largest contributor among plant-based foods, producing 12% of the total
greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector, followed by wheat (5%) and sugarcane
(2%). Rice stands out because it can grow in water, so many farmers flood their fields to
kill weeds, creating ideal conditions for certain bacteria that emit methane.

This helps to explain why South and Southeast Asia have the greatest food-production-
related emissions by region, producing 23% of the global total. This region is the only
place where plant-based emissions are larger than animal-based emissions. South
America is the second-largest emitter at 20%, and has the largest emissions from animal-
based food, reflecting the dominance of ranching there.

Among individual countries, China, India and Indonesia have the highest emissions from
plant-based food production, contributing 7%, 4%, and 2% respectively of global food-
related greenhouse gas emissions. The countries with leading emissions from the
production of animal-based foods are China (8%), Brazil (6%), the U.S. (5%) and India
(4%).

How food production affects land use

Our framework also shows that raising animal-based foods consumes six times as much
land as producing plant-based foods.

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Worldwide, we estimate that humans are using 18 million square miles (4.6 billion
hectares) of land to produce food – about 31% of Earth’s total land area, excluding areas
covered by snow and ice. Of this, 30% is cropland and 70% is various types of grazing
land.

Looking at how these areas are managed, we estimate that 13% of total agricultural land is
being used to produce plant-based foods. The other 77% is being used to produce animal-
based foods, including croplands that are growing animal feed and grazing lands. The
remaining 10% is being used to raise other products, such as cotton, rubber and tobacco.

Our study uses a consistent framework to provide a complete estimation of greenhouse

gas emissions from food production and consumption, covering all food-related sub-
sectors, at local, country, regional and global scales. It can help policymakers identify the
plant- and animal-based food commodities that contribute the largest shares to climate
change, and the higest-emitting sub-sectors at different locations.

Based on these results, governments, researchers and individuals can take actions to
reduce emissions from high-emitting food commodities in different places. As U.N.
leaders have stated, making food production more climate-friendly is essential to reduce
hunger in a warming world.

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Football: English fans want an independent regulator –
here’s how it could help save clubs from ruin
theconversation.com/football-english-fans-want-an-independent-regulator-heres-how-it-could-help-save-clubs-
from-ruin-172720

Mark Middling

Football clubs are not like other businesses. Their primary aim is not to make a profit, but
to win matches.

Research shows this creates a conflict between sporting goals on the one hand, and the
logic of business on the other. This in turn can result in what one study refers to as a
“gambling culture” in which “clubs overspend on playing talent in the hope of achieving
sporting success”.

The financial impact can be catastrophic for clubs and fans. For while the English Premier
League (EPL) is the highest earning football league in the world, with a domestic TV
rights deal worth over £1.5 billion a year, life in the leagues below sees a stark reduction in
revenues – and intense competition for promotion.

To address this, a fan-led review into the the game has listed no fewer than 47
recommendations aimed at protecting English football.

Among the ideas presented are the creation of a new regulator to oversee financial
governance, fairer financial distribution, and more power given to fans. The fundamental
issue addressed by the review, which was published at the end of November 2021, is
financial mismanagement.

Led by MP, football coach and Spurs fan Tracey Crouch, with the help of ex-England
manager Roy Hodgson, the review states that the long-term financial stability of clubs as
“the single most important factor” facing English football.

It suggests that a new regulator oversee clubs’ financial management by introducing

business plans, monitoring costs, and having the power to demand improvements in club
finances. This would take financial governance away from leagues and clubs and allow a
regulator to intervene before issues become severe.

These suggestions have not been universally well received, with the owner of Leeds FC,
comparing them to the Maoist regime in China. But the argument in favour of better
regulation can be illustrated by the fortunes of two English clubs: Derby County and Bury
FC.

Own goals
In September, Derby went into administration after years of overspending and failure to
achieve promotion to the Premier League. This prompted an automatic points deduction
which left Derby bottom of the Championship (the second tier of English football).

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Bury, meanwhile, overspent on players, which led to promotion to League One, but also
serious financial problems and eventually expulsion from the English Football League.

It is likely that the measures recommended in the recent review may have prevented both
of these situations. The clubs may not have been allowed to spend so much on wages, and
the regulator would have stepped in to bring their finances under control before
administration or expulsion occurred. The review’s recommendation of greater
involvement by fans into the how their clubs are run could have also highlighted issues
sooner.

More generally, if the recommendations are taken up, there could be an end to clubs’
institutionalised overspending. This is most evident in the Championship, where
spending on wages can count for as much as £2 for every £1 of income.

But there are also two significant areas where the review could go further.

First, although the review suggests a transfer levy of 10% on Premier League transfer fees
to be distributed to lower league clubs, it leaves the distribution of funds to the existing
authorities – the Premier League and the English Football League. Some have argued that
this is not a solution to the poorer clubs’ difficulties, partly because the current system of
distribution sees a stark reduction in distribution for every lower tier.

For example, Championship clubs receive around £4.5 million each per season (excluding
parachute payments for relegated teams), whereas League Two clubs get approximately
£450,000. There is nothing to suggest this will change.

Second is a lack of focus on transparency. The review recommends that clubs “publish
high quality easy to understand financial information” and highlights Plymouth Argyle as
good practice. However, my own work with fans of lower-level clubs demonstrates a
significant gap between what happens now and what would actually make clubs
accountable.

Current reporting is not fit for purpose as it is designed for shareholders, not fans.
Specific, fan-focused reporting should be developed.

Overall though, the review goes a long way toward protecting the people that matter most
– the fans. If implemented properly, independent regulation could save the teams that
supporters hold dear. It could prevent the heartache that closing down clubs can bring to
communities, and help them to concentrate on the tricky business of playing football.

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For bullied teens, online school offered a safe haven
theconversation.com/for-bullied-teens-online-school-offered-a-safe-haven-177126

Hannah L. Schacter

Online school during the COVID-19 pandemic was hard on many teens, but new research
I co-authored has found a potential silver lining: Students were bullied less during remote
instruction than while attending classes in person.

We learned this by surveying 388 ninth graders at U.S. high schools. We asked them to
answer questions three times over the 2020-2021 school year, at about three-month
intervals: in November 2020 and February and May 2021.

During that period, many students switched between online-only, in-person-only and
hybrid schooling, as the severity of the pandemic shifted and state and local guidelines
adjusted. We asked the students to tell us which of those environments they were learning
in, how frequently they were the target of bullying, and whether they were feeling
depressed or anxious, or having physical symptoms of stress, like headaches and nausea.

What we found was that bullied teens reported heightened anxiety when they were
attending in-person school, but not when they were attending online school. And the
higher proportion of the year a teen spent in online school, the less likely they were to
report being bullied.

Switching school formats

Most of the teens in our study – 86% – began the 2020-2021 school year online. But most
of them switched formats – usually from online to hybrid or in-person, or from hybrid to
fully in-person – at some point during the year. By the school year’s end in May 2021, less
than half the students were in online-only school.

We found that during periods when the students reported being bullied, they tended to
feel more depressed and report more stress-related physical symptoms, like stomachaches
and headaches, than when they were not being bullied. This connection was strong
regardless of whether the student was in online, in-person or hybrid school.

Less bullying
We adjusted our results statistically to account for other factors that might relate to teen
bullying and mental health – given that some students are more likely to be bullied based
on their gender and sexual identity, or that students in places with high levels of COVID-
19 might be more anxious, regardless of bullying.

Our findings stood up: Bullying was less common in online high school and more
common at traditional, in-person high school. Compared to students who spent the whole
year in in-person school, those who spent the whole year in online school reported being

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bullied less frequently. Although the difference was quite small, bullying is hard to reduce,
so even small changes can be meaningful.

Families and education professionals alike are looking to the important social, emotional
and academic benefits that in-person school provides. But our research serves as a
reminder that for some students, leaving virtual school means a return to bullying and
anxiety that were not missed during pandemic shutdowns.

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For engineers, asking for help at work is influenced
by gender
theconversation.com/for-engineers-asking-for-help-at-work-is-influenced-by-gender-165151

Cristina Poleacovschi, Amy N. Javernick-Will, Sheng Wang, Tony W. Tong

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea

In a study published in the Journal of Management in Engineering, we analyzed whether
knowledge accessibility – defined as the time and effort that individuals spend seeking
knowledge from their colleagues – is influenced by gender.

Whether solving a technical problem or seeking career advice, employees benefit from
knowing who can answer their questions. However, employees may find it difficult to ask
certain colleagues for help and may avoid approaching them. In the male-dominated
engineering industry, where women represent only about 11% of the workforce, gender
influences whom individuals turn to for answers to their questions.

Based on data from 530 interactions in which employees sought knowledge from their
peers in a large U.S.-based engineering company, female engineers were likelier than men
to feel that knowledge was easy to access. Women were also more likely to ask questions
of other female colleagues than of male colleagues. When male engineers did seek
knowledge from colleagues, they were more likely to request help from other men.

In our study, knowledge accessibility was measured by social effort, or comfort

approaching the other person, and cognitive effort, or how easy the information was to
understand. We also measured physical effort – how much time it took to access the new
information. Gender still had an effect on employees’ perceptions of how easy it was to
acquire knowledge from colleagues, even when considering age, race, expertise, seniority
and how often the colleagues spoke to each other.

Why it matters
These findings have important implications. For example, they suggest men are less likely
to reach out to others for knowledge or expertise. This serves as a disadvantage to men, as
they will potentially make less informed or less knowledgeable decisions.

Further, women’s knowledge and skills may be sought less by men. This would make
women’s knowledge less known and shared across a company, which may disadvantage
female engineers’ career progression in an industry where many leaders are men.

When employees in an organization are more willing and able to share their knowledge,
whether it is technical expertise or problem-solving skills, everyone is better off.
Knowledge sharing, which can be boosted by a collaborative organizational culture, has
been shown to improve the productivity of employees.

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Promoting the knowledge and skills of women in engineering can help increase the
visibility of those employees while amplifying their knowledge throughout the
organization. For instance, rather than implementing a traditional mentorship program,
in which the mentor provides advice to a mentee, a mentor can provide introductions to
those in powerful positions to ensure the mentee’s expertise is shared more widely with
others. This could help make the mentee’s knowledge and skills more sought after.

What still isn’t known

Future research may examine the specific reasons that female engineers tend to reach out
to their female colleagues while male engineers are less likely to seek out knowledge from
their female co-workers. It could also be helpful to investigate the specific ways
organizations promote knowledge sharing across genders.

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From walking to cycling, how we get around a city is a
gender equality issue – new research
theconversation.com/from-walking-to-cycling-how-we-get-around-a-city-is-a-gender-equality-issue-new-research-
175014

Oyinlola Oyebode, Rahul Goel

In urban societies around the world, there are gendered differences in how people get to
where they need to go. From the number of journeys taken and the distances travelled, to
the purpose for travelling in the first place, women’s experiences of journeying through
the city differ significantly from those of men.

In many cities men tend to have greater access to private cars than women. They also
commute further in the city.

By contrast, constraints such as childcare and household tasks, fall disproportionately on

women. In some cities this means they are confined at home. In others, and despite
perceptions of relative vulnerability and safety, women tend to rely on public transport
more than men.

These gendered differences further extend to what transport experts and epidemiologists
term active travel: walking and cycling. This has consequences for everyone. Active travel,
after all, has been shown to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, while
improving population health.

For a recent study, we examined the extent to which men and women’s access to active
travel varies across 19 cities from 13 different countries on five different continents. We
found that women in most of our cities achieve as much active travel time as men.
However, by being more likely to walk and less likely to cycle, women’s access to the city is
significantly limited.

Transport variations
Active travel can involve walking and cycling for your entire journey or the incidental
walking and cycling you might do on the way to accessing public transport.

We analysed secondary data from population-representative travel surveys, which has

asked respondents to report their travel activities for a day or two. The cities these surveys
covered were Accra, Kisumu, Cape Town, Delhi, Melbourne, London, Berlin, Cologne,
Hamburg, Munich, Zurich, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Santiago, Bogota, Mexico City,
Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City.

Of the three modes of transport we examined – walking, public transport and cycling –
cycling showed the greatest variation between the cities.

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We found that women are half as likely as men to cycle overall. The lowest levels of cycling
were in Accra and Cape Town, with almost no cycling among women and less than 1%
among men. The highest levels were in the four German cities we looked at, with an
average of 14–15% for the two gender groups: women in three of those cities were more
likely to cycle than men.

Research has shown that there are vast discrepancies in how vulnerable women, as
opposed to men, are – or feel – while walking, or on public transport. This vulnerability is
particularly pronounced when it comes to cycling.

A lack of safe infrastructure – from off-road paths or protected bike lanes – goes some
way to explaining why women are less likely to use a bike. Research suggests that they
may be generally more risk averse than men. The German cities in our study demonstrate
that this can be changed given their higher rates of overall cycling and little gender
inequality.

However, research also highlights social and cultural norms around the world that
discourage women from cycling. Cycling is sometimes perceived as a masculine domain,
especially in those cities that lack safe infrastructure and where cycling levels are low.
This is made worse in settings where women are socially restricted from travelling alone,
such as in Karachi, Pakistan.

Access to the city

In most cities, women were more likely than men to report that they had not travelled
outside of their home at all on the day of the travel survey – a four percentage point
difference overall. Only two of the 19 cities had equal levels of immobility: Kisumu in
Kenya and Los Angeles in the US.

The cities with the most drastic gender gaps were Delhi (with a 26 percentage point gap),
Accra (12 percentage point gap) and Sao Paulo (9 percentage point gap). In Delhi, nearly
60% of women reported no trips outside their home on the day of the survey. This rate of
women being confined to their homes is far higher than the average across all the cities,
where 26% of women and 22% of men reported no trips.

What is surprising is that despite women being less likely to have travelled at all, they
nonetheless achieved 5% more physical activity through active travel than men across our
cities on average. We found that women were more likely to walk, and to walk all the way
to where they’re going.

On average our female respondents achieved 62% of their active travel time in trips where
they only walked. In comparison this share is 54% among men. In addition, in all cities
but Delhi and Mexico City, women were more likely to use public transport than men.

Women’s greater dependence on walking and public transport results from two major
factors. First, due to gender inequality – both within households and at the societal level –
women have lower access to private cars. This inequality is likely worse in countries with
low levels of vehicle ownership. Second, beyond the social norms and lack of

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infrastructure mentioned above, there are other constraints such as a need to transport
groceries, for example, or to ferry children around, that make cycling less convenient for
women.

Taken together this data suggests that women are achieving as much active travel time as
men, but by virtue of their being more likely to walk and less likely to cycle, they have
comparatively less access to the city. This can result in their options for jobs, education
and health facilities and social networks being restricted.

Making streets safer for both walking and cycling is crucial to public health, as is making
public transport more accessible and more affordable. Some laudable steps are being
taken to do this in England.

It is well established that those who regularly walk and cycle accrue many health benefits.
But public transport users do too. After all, many of those who use buses and trains
actually achieve their 30 minutes of daily physical activity or their 10,000 steps per day
just by getting to the station or bus stop and back.

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Gut microbes help hibernating ground squirrels
emerge strong and healthy in spring
theconversation.com/gut-microbes-help-hibernating-ground-squirrels-emerge-strong-and-healthy-in-spring-
175610

Hannah V. Carey, Matthew Regan

Ground squirrels spend the end of summer gorging on food, preparing for hibernation.
They need to store a lot of energy as fat, which becomes their primary fuel source
underground in their hibernation burrows all winter long.

While hibernating, ground squirrels enter a state called torpor. Their metabolism drops to
as low as just 1% of summer levels and their body temperature can plummet to close to
freezing. Torpor greatly reduces how much energy the animal needs to stay alive until
springtime.

That long fast comes with a downside: no new input of protein, which is crucial to
maintain the body’s tissues and organs. This is a particular problem for muscles. In
people, long periods of inactivity, like prolonged bed rest, lead to muscle wasting. But
muscle wasting is minimal in hibernating animals. Despite as much as six to nine months
of inactivity and no protein intake, they preserve muscle mass and performance
remarkably well – a very handy adaptation that helps ensure a successful breeding season
come spring.

How do hibernators pull this off? It’s been a real head-scratcher for hibernation biologists
for decades. Our research team tackled this question by investigating how hibernating
animals might be getting a major assist from the microbes that live in their guts.

A nitrogen-recycling system
We knew from previous research that a hibernator’s gastrointestinal system undergoes
dramatic changes in its structure and function from summer feeding to winter fasting.
And it’s not only the animals who are fasting all winter long – their gut microbes are, too.
Along with our microbiology collaborators, we figured out that winter fasting changes the
gut microbiome quite a bit.

And then we wondered … could gut microbes play a functional role in the process of
hibernation itself? Could certain bacteria help keep muscle and other tissues working
when the mostly immobile animals aren’t eating?

Biologists had previously identified a clever trick in ruminant animals, such as cattle, that
helps them survive times when protein intake in the diet is low or protein needs are
especially high, such as during pregnancy. A process called urea nitrogen salvage allows
the animal to recoup nitrogen – a critical ingredient for building protein – that would
otherwise be excreted in urine as the waste product urea. Instead, the urea’s nitrogen is
retained in the body and used to make amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

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This salvage operation depends on the chemical breakdown of urea molecules to release
their nitrogen. But here’s the kicker: Chemical breakdown of urea requires urease, an
enzyme that animals do not produce. So how does a cow, for instance, get that nitrogen
out of urea?

It turns out certain microbes that are normal residents of animals’ guts can do just that.
They make the urease enzyme and use it to chemically split urea molecules, freeing up the
nitrogen, which becomes part of ammonia molecules. Microbes then absorb ammonia and
use it to make new protein for themselves.

Peculiarities of the ruminant digestive system allow those animals to benefit greatly from
this process. But for other animals – like hibernators and us – it was less clear whether
and how the urea nitrogen could make its way into the animals’ bodies to support protein
synthesis.

This was our challenge as scientists: Could we demonstrate urea nitrogen recycling in
hibernators and show that it is particularly helpful to them the longer they fast?

Our experimental game plan

Using the 13-lined ground squirrel, we designed experiments to investigate key steps in
urea nitrogen salvage.

First, we injected into the squirrel’s bloodstream urea molecules in which the two
nitrogen atoms were replaced by a heavier form of nitrogen that naturally occurs only in
tiny amounts in the body.

We were able to follow these heavier nitrogen atoms as the injected urea moved from the
blood into the gut, then as microbial urease broke down the urea into its component
parts, and finally into the squirrels’ tissue metabolites and proteins. Wherever we saw
higher levels of the heavier form of nitrogen, we knew that urea was the source of the
nitrogen, and therefore gut microbes had to be responsible for getting the urea nitrogen
back into the animals’ bodies.

To confirm that the microbes were doing the nitrogen recycling, we compared squirrels
that had normal gut microbiomes to squirrels that didn’t. We treated some animals with
antibiotics to reduce gut microbes at three times of the year: summer; early winter, when
they were one month into fasting and hibernation; and late winter, whwithen they were
four months into fasting and hibernation.

In squirrels with normal microbiomes, we saw evidence of urea nitrogen salvage at each
step of the process that we tested. But squirrels with depleted microbiomes displayed
minimal urea nitrogen salvage. Our observations confirmed that this process was indeed
dependent on the gut microbes’ ability to break down urea and liberate its nitrogen in the
hibernators’ guts. Hibernators’ liver and muscle tissue incorporated the most urea
nitrogen during late winter – that is, the longer they’d been hibernating and without food.

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We also found that the ground squirrels contribute to this remarkable symbiosis. During
hibernation, their gut cells increase production of proteins called urea transporters. These
molecules are lodged in intestinal cell membranes and shepherd urea from the blood into
the gut where the microbes that contain urease are found. This assist means that what
little urea the animal makes during hibernation has an easier route to the gut.

Finally, we found that it wasn’t just squirrels who benefited from this process. The
microbes too were using the urea nitrogen to build their own proteins, showing that urea
nitrogen salvage provides both parties with this important molecular building block
during the long winter fast.

Every few weeks, hibernating squirrels arouse temporarily, as seen in this time-lapse video. They
don’t eat or drink or leave the burrow, but the short increase in body temperature lets enzymes
like urease do their jobs.

Could this kind of symbiosis help humans?

This example of hibernator-microbe symbiosis has potential clinical applications. For
example, undernourishment, which affects millions of people globally, leads to a
progressive decline in muscle mass and compromises health. Sarcopenia, which is muscle
wasting that is a natural part of aging, impairs mobility and makes people more
susceptible to injury. A detailed understanding of how the hibernator nitrogen salvage
system is most effective when the risk of tissue loss and muscle wasting is greatest could
lead to new therapeutics to help people in similar situations.

Another potential application is in human spaceflight, during which crew members

experience high rates of muscle atrophy because of a microgravity-induced suppression of
muscle protein synthesis. Even the extensive exercise regime that astronauts undertake to
offset this is insufficient. A microbiome-based countermeasure that facilitates muscle
protein synthesis similar to the process we have observed in hibernators may be worth
investigating.

These applications, though theoretically possible, are a long way from delivery. But
studies in the 1990s demonstrated that humans are capable of recycling small amounts of
urea nitrogen with the help of their gut microbes. So the necessary machinery is in place –
it just needs to be optimized.

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‘Hangxiety’: why some people experience anxiety
during a hangover
theconversation.com/hangxiety-why-some-people-experience-anxiety-during-a-hangover-176285

Craig Gunn

The morning after a night of drinking is never fun if you’ve got a hangover. For most
people, hangovers involve a headache, fatigue, thirst or nausea. But some people also
report experiencing what many have dubbed “hangxiety” – feelings of anxiety during a
hangover. By some estimates, anxiety during a hangover affects around 12% of people,
and can vary in severity depending on the person.

As the body recovers from a night of drinking, a hangover creates a state of physiological
stress. Generally speaking, physiological stress happens when the body is under pressure
– such as from an illness or injury. A hangover kind of works the same way. Not only does
it cause changes to our immune system, it also increases cortisol levels (often called the
“stress hormone”), blood pressure and heart rate – changes which also happen with
anxiety.

The brain also experiences changes. Research shows that brain activity involving
dopamine (a type of neurotransmitter) is lower during a hangover. This is important, as
dopamine plays an important role in regulating anxiety. The heightened stress during a
hangover can also make it difficult for someone to cope with any additional stress that
may happen throughout the period.

Interestingly, stress and sleep deprivation in combination (reflecting aspects of a

hangover), can lead to declines in both mood and cognitive function (including attention
and memory). Fatigue, stress and dealing with other unpleasant hangover symptoms can
also make it difficult to manage daily tasks. For example, someone with a hangover may
be too preoccupied with nursing their feelings of nausea, headache or fatigue to be able to
effectively deal with anxious thoughts.

Our own research has shown that people experience a negative shift in their emotions
during a hangover. Many also reported feeling like they had more trouble regulating their
emotions compared to when they aren’t hungover. In other words, people feel bad during
a hangover and find it difficult to pick themselves back up.

But when we asked participants to actually regulate their emotions in a computer task,
they were able to regulate them to the same extent as they could when they aren’t
hungover – but with increased effort. We did this by showing participants pictures that
evoked various emotions (including positive or negative emotions) but asked them to
experience their emotions without expressing them outwardly. Having greater difficulty
regulating emotions during a hangover might also explain why some people experience
anxiety.

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In another study, our team looked at how hangovers influence executive functions
(mental skills which are important for many aspects of our daily life, including working
memory, flexible thinking and self control). Participants were given a series of tasks that
tested these mental skills, such as remembering a series of letter and recalling it when
prompted.

We found that people who were hungover had worse performance in key aspects of
executive functions. Executive functions help people cope with anxiety and inhibit
anxious thoughts. If these mental skills are poorer during a hangover, it may help explain
why some people struggle with anxiety.

Feeling anxious?
But why do some people experience hangxiety, while others don’t?

Pain is part of almost every hangover – whether its a headache or muscle aches. But
research shows that people who “catastrophise” pain (a tendency to exaggerate pain or
expect the worst) are more likely to experience anxiety. Research also shows that this
group are more likely to experience severe hangovers. This might explain why some
people experience anxiety, while others don’t.

People who are likely to experience anxiety in general may also be particularly susceptible
to hangxiety. Negative life events, depression or anger while drinking, guilt from drinking
and even certain personality traits (such as neuroticism) are all also linked to mood
changes during a hangover. Hangxiety has even been reported to be higher in people who
say they’re very shy and may be linked to symptoms of alcohol use disorder.

Combined, these factors highlight why hangxiety can affect people differently, and why
it’s a part of hangovers worth taking seriously. Mood changes during a hangover are not
just unpleasant, but may even be linked to problematic drinking, increased conflict with
others and reduced productivity at work.

If you’re someone who experiences hangxiety, the same techniques that help with anxiety
will also be useful. This might include meditation, practising mindfulness and general self
care. Planning ahead of your night out to make sure you have the following day free to
recover and avoid other stressors (such as work or family problems) may also help deal
with the additional psychological stress. For some, a hangover can even be used as a
bonding exercise where people can discuss their previous night of drinking with friends
and even cope with feelings of anxiety together.

Of course, the best way to avoid experiencing hangxiety is to avoid drinking altogether –
or at least drink in moderation.

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Have you stopped wearing reusable fabric masks?
Here’s how to cut down waste without compromising
your health
theconversation.com/have-you-stopped-wearing-reusable-fabric-masks-heres-how-to-cut-down-waste-without-
compromising-your-health-175243

Aleasha McCallion, Forbes McGain, Kim Borg

At the beginning of the pandemic, many of us opted to buy reusable fabric masks to help
fight the spread of COVID – they’re better for the environment than disposables, can be
locally made, and come in a range of creative designs.

But since the highly infectious Omicron variant emerged, we’ve been urged to wear well-
fitted respirator mask as a first choice (N95, KN95, or P mask). These, however, have a
short shelf-life, and it may be jarring to switch back to a more wasteful product for many
environmentally-minded Aussies.

While it’s too soon to say exactly how many disposable masks go to landfill in Australia,
we do know textile waste is already a massive issue. Every year, each Australian throws
away around 23 kilograms of clothes on average, with more than 780,000 tonnes of
leather, rubber and other textile waste generated Australia-wide.

As waste generation is likely to increase as we protect ourselves against Omicron, are

there ways we can minimise our waste without compromising our health?

Making the most out of masks

Australians have been advised since mid-2020 that N95 masks offer the best protection
against coronavirus. They typically offer a tighter fit to the face and a higher level of
filtration than fabric masks, protecting the wearer from aerosols and droplets.

But supply chain issues, concerns of shortages, and lower transmission rates of earlier
variants meant the comparatively less effective fabric and surgical masks were fit-for-
purpose in lower-risk settings. This is no longer the case under the Omicron variant.

An easy way to minimise waste if you own N95 masks is to safely extend their life. In
hospital settings, it’s advised to avoid use beyond one day and to dispose if they become
soiled or moist.

This, however, is not realistic for the general public, such as when supply is low. There are
a range of methods to reuse N95 masks safely, which are supported by the mask’s
inventor. There are also re-usable options such as elastometric respirators.

For disposable respirators, the most straightforward reuse method in non-medical

settings is to rotate your mask every three or four days, storing it in a clean paper bag
when not in use. Wash your hands thoroughly before and after you touch your mask, and

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keep your mask dry – if your mask gets wet, stop using it. Consider numbering your
masks so you don’t mix them up.

The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends using N95s up to
five times before throwing it away (if they’ve been kept clean and aren’t damaged). But it’s
important to note the long-term effects of cleaning and reuse are still unknown.

There’s no need to throw away fabric masks. Having your favourite fabric masks on hand
as backup in your car, bag or pockets is important because any mask is better than no
mask in low-risk and fleeting contact settings, such as outside.

Double masking – placing your fabric mask over a disposable surgical mask – offers
increased protection compared to a single fabric or surgical mask. And fabric masks will
also offer protection against other droplet-based diseases, like the flu.

Sustainability in healthcare
The surge in disposable mask waste points to a broader issue that’s getting increasingly
recognised: hospital waste.

Take single use plastic hospital gowns, for example. An estimated 1 million gowns have
been used each year of the pandemic at just one (of six) acute public hospitals in Victoria,
according to an ongoing investigation undertaken by co-author Forbes McGain.

This number is a conservative estimate, and only captures public hospitals when we know
disposal gowns are used in many other settings. This includes in private hospitals, aged
care, residential and home care, allied health services and testing and vaccination centres.

Environmentally sustainable healthcare is an emerging field aimed at finding alternative

solutions to the waste generated in healthcare, its impacts on the environment, and how
we educate health professionals on sustainable practices.

For example, research shows there’s potential to expand the “tiered approach”, which
offers further choice of protection depending on low or high risk settings. For example,
integrating reusable gowns when appropriate could help keep people safe, put less strain
on supply systems, and help reduce waste.

Spearheading this effort is textile scientist Meriel Chamberlin, who is collaborating with
clinicians to develop compliant, safe and reusable textile gowns that offer protection and
comfort with a lower environmental impact than disposables.

When it comes to masks, more sustainable options are also being developed. This
includes masks and filters made from biodegradable agricultural crop waste.

Research is also underway to identify processes for re-purposing discarded single-use face
masks into road pavements materials.

Six ways to offset our daily waste

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Even during a pandemic, people don’t want to be wasteful. Tellingly, “Plastic Free July”
saw a huge global increase in participation from 250 million participants in 2019, to 326
million in 2020.

There are many ways to reduce waste without compromising your health. The key is to
focus on behaviours within your control, such as minimising single-use plastics. To help
offset your daily waste from disposable masks, consider:

1. making the switch to refillable cleaning products to cut down on single-use

packaging (there are even delivery options)

2. if you’ve shifted to online grocery delivery, choose paper over plastic bags and either
reuse them at home or compost them after use

3. when dining at home, repurpose your leftovers, prioritise older food, and avoid
over-buying to cut down on food waste

4. if you’re shopping online more, find second-hand retailers and peer-to-peer

platforms to give pre-loved items a new life (there are delivery options for this too)

5. before throwing away household items (clothing, furniture), try selling or giving
them away online - you’d be surprised what other people find useful

6. if your household items are damaged, get them repaired, or use them for a different
purpose, such as using well-worn clothes as cleaning rags.

Just because we’re in a period of significant social change, doesn’t mean we have to lose
momentum on sustainability.

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How climate change threatens the Winter Olympics’
future – even snowmaking has limits for saving it
theconversation.com/how-climate-change-threatens-the-winter-olympics-future-even-snowmaking-has-limits-for-
saving-it-177040

Steven R. Fassnacht, Sunshine Swetnam

The Winter Olympics is an adrenaline rush as athletes fly down snow-covered ski slopes,
luge tracks and over the ice at breakneck speeds and with grace.

When the first Olympic Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France, in 1924, all 16
events took place outdoors. The athletes relied on natural snow for ski runs and freezing
temperatures for ice rinks.

Nearly a century later, in 2022, the world watched skiers race down runs of 100% human-
made snow near Beijing. Luge tracks and ski jumps have their own refrigeration, and four
of the original events are now held indoors: Figure skaters, speed skaters, curlers and
hockey teams all compete in climate-controlled buildings.

Innovation made the 2022 Winter Games possible in Beijing, but snowmaking can go
only so far in a warming climate.

As global temperatures rise, what will the Winter Games look like in another century?
Will they even be possible?

Former host cities that would be too warm

The average daytime temperature of Winter Games host cities in February has increased
steadily since those first events in Chamonix, rising from 33 degrees Fahrenheit (0.4 C) in
the 1920s-1950s to 46 F (7.8 C) in the early 21st century.

In a recent study, scientists looked at the venues of 19 past Winter Olympics to see how
each might hold up under future climate change.

They found that by midcentury, four former host cities – Chamonix; Sochi, Russia;
Grenoble, France; and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany – would no longer have a
reliable climate for hosting the Games, even under the United Nations’ best-case scenario
for climate change, which assumes the world quickly cuts its greenhouse gas emissions. If
the world continues burning fossil fuels at high rates, Squaw Valley, California, and
Vancouver, British Columbia, would join that list.

By the 2080s, the scientists found, the climates in 11 of 21 former venues would be too
unreliable to host the Winter Olympics’ outdoor events; among them were Turin, Italy;
Nagano, Japan; and Innsbruck, Austria.

These venues would all be susceptible to problems associated with snowmaking.

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Ideal snowmaking conditions today require a dewpoint temperature – the combination of
coldness and humidity – of around 28 F (-2 C) or less. More moisture in the air melts
snow and ice at colder temperatures, which affects snow on ski slopes and ice on bobsled,
skeleton and luge tracks.

As Colorado snow and sustainability scientists and avid skiers, we’ve been watching the
developments and studying the climate impact on the mountains and winter sports we
love.

Conditions vary by location and year to year

The Earth’s climate will be warmer overall in the coming decades. Warmer air can mean
more precipitation in some areas. It can also mean more winter rain, particularly at lower
elevations. Over the globe, snow has been covering less area.

However, local changes vary. For example, in northern Colorado, the amount of snow has
decreased since the 1970s, but the decline has mostly been at higher elevations.

A future climate may also be more humid, which affects snowmaking and could affect
bobsled, luge and skeleton tracks.

Of the 15 Winter Games sports today, seven are affected by temperature and snow: alpine
skiing, biathlon, cross-country skiing, freestyle skiing, Nordic combined, ski jumping and
snowboarding. And three are affected by temperature and humidity: bobsled, luge and
skeleton.

Technology also changes

Developments in technology have helped the Winter Games adapt to some changes over
the past century.

Hockey moved indoors, followed by skating. Luge and bobsled tracks were refrigerated in
the 1960s. The Lake Placid Winter Games in 1980 used snowmaking to augment natural
snow on the ski slopes.

Today, initiatives are exploring ways to make skiing possible year-round with indoor
skiing facilities. Ski Dubai, open since 2005, has five ski runs on a hill the height of a 25-
story building inside a resort attached to a shopping mall.

But making snow and keeping it cold requires energy and water – and both become issues
in a warming world. Water becomes more scarce in many areas. And energy, if it means
more fossil fuel use, further contributes to climate change.

The International Olympic Committee recognizes that the future climate will have a big
impact on the Olympics, both winter and summer. It also recognizes the importance of
ensuring the adaptations are sustainable.

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The Winter Olympics could become limited to more northerly locations, like Calgary,
Alberta, or be pushed to higher elevations.

Summer Games are feeling climate pressure, too

The Summer Games also face challenges. Hot temperatures and high humidity can make
competing in the summer difficult, but these sports have more flexibility than winter
sports.

For example, changing the timing of typical summer events to another season can help
alleviate excessive temperatures. The 2022 World Cup, normally a summer event, is
scheduled for November so Qatar can host it.

What makes adaptation more difficult for the Winter Games is the necessity of snow or ice
for all of the events.

Future depends on responses to climate change

In uncertain times, the Olympics offer a way for the world to come together.

People are thrilled by the athletic feats, like Jean-Claude Killy winning all three Alpine
skiing events in 1968, and stories of perseverance, like the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team
competing beyond all expectation.

The Winter Games’ outdoor sports may look very different in the future. How different
will depend heavily on how countries respond to climate change.

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How ‘deliberate listening’ builds bonds between
managers and workers
theconversation.com/how-deliberate-listening-builds-bonds-between-managers-and-workers-167255

Felicity Fu, Jeffrey Yip

The digital transformation of the workplace has created greater opportunities for new
forms of work arrangements — remote, hybrid, distributed and flexible work.

While in-person meetings create opportunities for conversation, employees in online

meetings tend to drop off immediately at the end of the meeting and return to their work
in a split-second.

Physically, we may no longer work in the same office, have hallway conversations or grab
a quick lunch or coffee together. The spontaneous conversations that occur in a shared
physical environment requires deliberate attention with remote work.

Even before the pandemic, research has shown that remote workers feel left out and are
less engaged with their work.

They worry that colleagues talk behind their backs, or that their work is considered a
lower priority in the eyes of their supervisors. It’s more difficult to interpret body gestures
and facial expressions through a computer screen; the lack of informal yet physical nods
of approval in the traditional setting can also let our negativity take over and paranoia
hinder productivity.

These experiences have an impact on employees’ sense of a shared reality — the perceived
commonalities with other people when it comes to feelings, beliefs and concerns about the
world. As researchers on listening, we provide some perspectives for managers to build
this shared reality through what we call deliberate listening.

Here are three practices to deliberate listening:

Listen to bridge boundaries

The idea of shared reality arises from our fundamental need to bond with other people
and to understand the world around us. We communicate in order to share our realities,
which also form the basis of our thoughts.

Listening builds bridges between different experiences and perspectives. Co-workers and
employees may hesitate to share their struggles at home or their conflict with colleagues if
not asked. They often only talk about these experiences via deliberate listening.

Managers can engage in deliberate listening to acknowledge differences, reduce

defensiveness and to bridge the gaps between “us and them.” Employees can express
themselves more fully, expand their thinking and correct faulty generalizations.

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Questions aimed at listening — such as a simple as “How are things at home?” or “What’s
on your mind?” — can bridge these gaps and the invisible barriers created by distance.

Listen to affirm
Sharing our inner thoughts strengthens our social connections. People tend to feel more
connected if they have the same interpretation of events. American psychologist and
researcher E. Tory Higgins introduced the idea that “sharing is believing” — people not
only tweak what they say to fit with their communication partner’s attitude, they also
subsequently remember the observations they share.

In order to listen well, managers can use external tools, like taking notes, to help them.
Larry Bossidy, the former CEO of Honeywell, used the technique of dividing a sheet of
paper and scribbling notes of what he heard on one side and his thoughts about the
matter on the other.

Listeners can also intentionally adjust tones and descriptions to align with the attitude of
their conversation partner. Sentences like “I feel the same way” and gestures such as nods
build a two-way communication relationship in which interaction partners build on
common beliefs and feel closer to each other.

Successful listening results in people feeling they clicked and fuels a desire to maintain
this close relationship. That feeling can extend to other colleagues and thereby create a
sense of cohesion at work.

Listen to challenge
When others disclose negative emotions, mere listening as support offers minimal help,
and can actually perpetuate the frustrating situation.

If the listener validates the negativity, the speaker can brood by immersing in the
negativity and replaying the adverse reaction. The magic recipe for constructive listening
is attentiveness plus some enlightenment.

Responses that gently challenge the validity of the aggrieved person’s feelings or their
appraisal of a perceived problem are most effective for mitigating negativity. Such an
approach can motivate people to re-evaluate their initial reaction to the problem and
reposition themselves, cognitively and emotionally.

Listening builds shared reality

Listening to others is often undervalued as only passive acceptance. But effective listening
as people disclose details of both their professional and personal lives, including
hardships and emotions that affect the workplace, takes dedication and skills.

Listening is not passive. It creates a shared reality — one that is crucial for understanding,
collaboration and action.

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By bridging, affirming and challenging, listeners can build a shared sense of belonging
and understanding that shape the realities of our work and world around us. That’s
regardless of whether we work in a physical office or online.

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How scammers like Anna Delvey and the Tinder
Swindler exploit a core feature of human nature
theconversation.com/how-scammers-like-anna-delvey-and-the-tinder-swindler-exploit-a-core-feature-of-human-
nature-177289

Vanessa Bohns

Maybe she had so much money she just lost track of it. Maybe it was all a
misunderstanding.

That’s how Anna Sorokin’s marks explained away the supposed German heiress’s strange
requests to sleep on their couch for the night, or to put plane tickets on their credit cards,
which she would then forget to pay back.

The subject of a new Netflix series, “Inventing Anna,” Sorokin, who told people her name
was Anna Delvey, conned over $250,000 out of wealthy acquaintances and high-end
Manhattan businesses between 2013 and 2017. It turns out her lineage was a mirage.
Instead, she was an intern at a fashion magazine who came from a working-class family of
Russian immigrants.

Yet the people around her were quick to accept her odd explanations, even creating
excuses for her that strained credulity. The details of the Sorokin case mirror those from
another recent Netflix production, “The Tinder Swindler,” which tells the story of an
Israeli conman named Simon Leviev. Leviev persuaded women he met on the dating app
to lend him large sums of money with similarly unbelievable claims: He was a billionaire
whose enemies were trying to track him down and, for security reasons, couldn’t use his
own credit cards.

How is it that so many people could have been gullible enough to buy the fantastical
stories spun by Sorokin and Leviev? And why, even when “[t]he red flags were
everywhere” – as one of Sorokin’s marks put it – did people continue to believe these
grifters, spend their time with them and agree to lend them money?

As a social psychologist who has written a book about our surprising power of persuasion,
I don’t see this as an unusual glitch of human nature. Rather, I view the stories about
Sorokin and Leviev as examples of bad actors exploiting the social processes people rely
on every day for efficient and effective human communication and cooperation.

To trust is to be human
Despite the belief that people are skeptics by nature, primed to shout “gotcha!” at any
mistake or faux pas, this simply isn’t the case. Research shows that people tend to default
to trusting others over distrusting them, believing them over doubting them and going
along with someone’s self-presentation rather than embarrassing them by calling them
out.

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Elle Dee, a DJ whom Delvey once asked to pick up a 35,000-euro bar tab, described the
ease with which people went along with Delvey’s claims: “I don’t think she even had to try
that hard. Despite her utterly unsound story, people were all-too-eager to buy it.”

It still might be hard to believe that people in Sorokin’s circle would willingly hand over
their money to someone they hardly knew.

Yet psychologists have watched participants hand over their money to complete strangers
for many years across hundreds of experiments. In these studies, participants are told
they are taking part in various types of “investment games” in which they are given the
opportunity to hand over their money to another participant in the hopes of receiving a
return on their investment.

What’s fascinating about these studies is that most participants are cynical about ever
seeing their money again – let alone any returns on their investment – and yet they still
hand it over. In other words, despite deep reservations, they still choose to trust a
complete stranger.

There’s something deeply human about this impulse. Humans are social creatures, and
trusting one another is baked into our DNA. As psychologist David Dunning and his
colleagues have pointed out, without trust it is hard to imagine endeavors like Airbnb, car
shares or a working democracy having any success.

Lies are the exception, not the norm

Of course, Sorokin’s requests were often accompanied by elaborate explanations and
justifications, and you might wonder why so few people seemed to doubt the veracity of
her claims. Yet just as trust is a default of human interaction, a presumption of sincerity is
a default expectation of basic communication.

This maxim of communication was first proposed by Paul Grice, an influential

philosopher of language. Grice argued that communication is a cooperative endeavor.
Understanding one another requires working together. And to do that, there must be
some ground rules, one of which is that both parties are telling the truth.

In an era of “truthiness” and “fake news,” such a premise may seem absurd and naϊve. But
people lie far less than you might think; in fact, if the default assumption were that the
person you were talking to was lying, communication would be nearly impossible. If I
challenged you on whether you read every book you claimed to have read, or whether the
steak you had last night was really overcooked, we’d never get anywhere.

Researchers have found experimental evidence for what is sometimes called the “truth
default.” In one series of studies, researchers asked participants to evaluate whether
statements were true or false. Sometimes the participants were interrupted so they
couldn’t fully process the statements. This allowed the researchers to get at people’s
default assumption: When in doubt, would they default to belief or disbelief?

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It turns out that when participants weren’t able to fully process statements, they tended to
simply assume they were true.

A reluctance to accuse
Even if Sorokin’s marks were to doubt her story, it’s unlikely that they would have called
her out on it.

The sociologist Erving Goffman’s classic theory of “facework” argues that it is as

uncomfortable for us to call someone else out – to suggest they aren’t who they are
presenting themselves to be – as it is to be the person called out. Even when people see
someone doing something they disagree with, they’re loath to say anything.

Other studies have explored this phenomenon. One found that people hesitate to call
others out for using racist language they disagree with or for sexual harassment.

As much as you’d like to believe that if you were in the shoes of Sorokin’s and Leviev’s
targets you would have been emboldened to blow the lid off the whole charade, chances
are that rather than make things uncomfortable for everyone, you’d simply go along with
it.

The tendency to trust, believe and go along with other people’s explanations of events may
seem disadvantageous. And it’s true, these inclinations can expose people. But without
trust, there is no cooperation; without assuming others are telling the truth, there is no
communication; and without accepting people for what they present to the world, there is
no foundation on which to build a relationship.

In other words, the very features that look like glitches when exploited are in fact the very
essence of what it means to be human.

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How social media can crush your self-esteem
theconversation.com/how-social-media-can-crush-your-self-esteem-174009

Sabrina Laplante

We all have a natural tendency to compare ourselves to others, whether intentionally or not, online
or offline. Such comparisons help us evaluate our own achievements, skills, personality and our
emotions. This, in turn, influences how we see ourselves.

But what impact do these comparisons have on our well-being? It depends on how much comparing
we do.

Comparing ourselves on social media to people who are worse off than we are makes us feel better.
Comparing ourselves to people who are doing better than us, however, makes us feel inferior or
inadequate instead. The social media platform we choose also affects our morale, as do crisis
situations like the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a PhD student in psychology, I am studying incels — men who perceive the rejection of women as
the cause of their involuntary celibacy. I believe that social comparison, which plays as much a role
in these marginal groups as it does in the general population, affects our general well-being in the
age of social media.

An optimal level of comparison

The degree of social comparison that individuals carry out is thought to affect the degree of
motivation they have. According to a study by researchers at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany,
there is an optimal level of perceived difference between the self and others that maximizes the
effects of social comparison.

Specifically, if we see ourselves as vastly superior to others, we will not be motivated to improve
because we already feel that we are in a good position. Yet, if we perceive ourselves as very inferior,
we will not be motivated to improve since the goal seems too difficult to achieve.

In other words, the researchers note, beyond or below the optimal level of perceived difference
between oneself and another, a person no longer makes any effort. By perceiving oneself as inferior,
the individual will experience negative emotions, guilt and lowered pride and self-esteem.

Unrealistic comparisons on social media

Social comparisons therefore have consequences both for our behaviour and for our psychological
well-being. However, comparing yourself to others at a restaurant dinner does not necessarily have
the same effect as comparing yourself to others on Facebook. It is easier to invent an exciting
existence or embellish certain aspects of things on a social media platform than it is in real life.

The advent of social media, which allows us to share content where we always appear in our best
light, has led many researchers to consider the possibility that this amplifies unrealistic
comparisons.

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Research shows that the more time people spend on Facebook and Instagram, the more they
compare themselves socially. This social comparison is linked, among other things, to lower self-
esteem and higher social anxiety.

A study conducted by researchers at the National University of Singapore explains these results by
the fact that people generally present positive information about themselves on social media. They
can also enhance their appearance by using filters, which create the impression that there is a big
difference between themselves and others.

In turn, researchers working at Facebook observed that the more people looked at content where
people were sharing positive aspects of their lives on the platform, the more likely they were to
compare themselves to others.

COVID-19: Less negative social comparison

However, could the effect of this comparison in a particularly stressful context like the COVID-19
pandemic be different?

A study from researchers at Kore University in Enna, Italy, showed that before lockdowns, high
levels of online social comparison were associated with greater distress, loneliness and a less
satisfying life. But this was no longer the case during lockdowns.

One reason for this would be that by comparing themselves to others during the lockdown, people
felt they were sharing the same difficult experience. That reduced the negative impact of social
comparisons. So, comparing oneself to others online during difficult times can be a positive force for
improving relationships and sharing feelings of fear and uncertainty.

A different effect depending on the social media

There are distinctions to be made depending on which social media platform a person is using.
Researchers at the University of Lorraine, France, consider that social media platforms should not
be all lumped together.

For example, the use of Facebook and Instagram is associated with lower well-being, while Twitter
is associated with more positive emotions and higher life satisfaction. One possible explanation:
Facebook and Instagram are known to be places for positive self-presentation, unlike Twitter, where
it is more appropriate to share one’s real opinions and emotions.

Trying to get social support on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic may reactivate negative
emotions instead of releasing them, depending on which social media platform a person is using.

Many things motivate us to compare ourselves socially. Whether we like it or not, social media
exposes us to more of those motivations. Depending on the type of content that is being shared,
whether it is positive or negative, we tend to refer to it when we are self-evaluating. Sharing content
that makes us feel good about ourselves and garners praise from others is nice, but you have to
consider the effect of these posts on others.

Yet overall, I believe that sharing your difficulties in words, pictures or videos can still have positive
effects and bring psychological benefits.

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