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Murtaza Hashwani: The human side of things keeps us going |Hashoo Group - wikipedia.org

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Murtaza Hashwani: The human side of things keeps us going |Hashoo Group - wikipedia.org

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Murtaza Hashwani, chairman of the award-winning Hashoo Foundation,  Deputy Chairman and CEO of the Hashoo Group.

Murtaza Hashwani still remembers a heart-warming moment he experienced when he visited Gilgit-Baltistan a few years ago. The chairman of Hashoo Foundation, Pakistan’s largest philanthropic organisation whose mission is to create an "ethical, equitable and inclusive society" across the Asian country, was on a tour of the area to see up close the work his foundation is doing to uplift and transform lives when he met an elderly woman and her granddaughter.

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi.

Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port. By the 1970s, it had become one of Pakistan's largest trading companies. However, in 1972, the Government of Pakistan nationalized cotton and rice exports leading the Hashoo Group to diversify into the hospitality sector. In 1978, the group established Holiday Inn Hotel in Karachi, and then another one in Islamabad in 1981. Both of the hotels were converted into Marriott brand in the 1990s. In 1985, the group made a successful bid for the majority shares of Pakistan Services Limited, which then owned four Inter-Continental Hotels across Pakistan, the hotels were re-branded into Pearl-Continental Hotels.

In 1995, Hashoo Group acquired the US-based corporation Occidental Petroleum's Pakistan operations (now known as Orient Petroleum Inc.). In 2001, it acquired the Destinations of the World franchise in Pakistan. In 2012, the group launched Hotel One, a mid-range hotel chain in Pakistan.

In October 2013, Tullow Pakistan exited the Pakistani market and sold its assets to Ocean Pakistan Limited, a subsidiary of the Hashoo Group.

In March 2016, BHP Billiton sold its Pakistani oil and gas operations to Hashoo Group.

Ocean Pakistan Limited.

Zaaver Petroleum Corporation Limited

OPI Gas (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Chemicals (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Mining Company Limited

Zaver Oils Limited

Pearl Ceramics (Previously known as Cera-e-Noor)

Hashoo International (Pvt) Limited

Hasan Ali & Company (Pvt) Limited

Genesis Trading (Pvt) Limited

Muzaffar and Companies

Hashoo Foundation - A nonprofit Organization managed by Murtaza Hashwani (chairman of Hashoo Foundation) Hashoo Foundation, that works extensively to address humanitarian and social concerns in communities across Pakistan

Umeed-e-Noor

Scholarship

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi. Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port.

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Rethinking the European Conquest of Native Americans

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Rethinking the European Conquest of Native Americans

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In a new book by Pekka Hämäläinen, a picture emerges of a four-century-long struggle for primacy among Native power centers in North America.

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In a new book by Pekka Hämäläinen, a picture emerges of a four-century-long struggle for primacy among Native power centers in North America.

When the term Indian appears in the Declaration of Independence, it is used to refer to "savage" outsiders employed by the British as a way of keeping the colonists down. Eleven years later, in the U.S. Constitution, the Indigenous peoples of North America are presented differently: as separate entities with which the federal government must negotiate. They also appear as insiders who are clearly within the borders of the new country yet not to be counted for purposes of representation. The same people are at once part of the oppression that justifies the need for independence, a rival for control of land, and a subjugated minority whose rights are ignored.

For the Finnish scholar Pekka Hämäläinen, this emphasis on what Native people meant to white Americans misses an important factor: Native power. The lore about Jamestown and Plymouth, Pocahontas and Squanto, leads many Americans to think in terms of tragedy and, eventually, disappearance. But actually, Indigenous people continued to control most of the interior continent long after they were outnumbered by the descendants of Europeans and Africans.

Much more accurate is the picture Hämäläinen paints in his new book, Indigenous Continent: a North American history that encompasses 400 years of wars that Natives often, even mostly, won-or did not lose decisively in the exceptional way that the Powhatans and Pequots had by the 1640s. Out of these centuries of broader conflict with newcomers and one another, Native peoples established decentralized hives of power, and even new empires.

In a previous book, , Hämäläinen wrote of what he controversially referred to as a "reversed colonialism," which regarded the aggressive, slaving equestrians of "greater Comanchería"-an area covering most of the Southwest-as imperialists in ways worth comparing to the French, English, Dutch, and Spanish in America. There was continued pushback from some scholars when Hämäläinen extended the argument northward in his 2019 study, Lakota America. (The impact of his work among historians may be measured by his appointment as the Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University.)

What was most distinctive about these two previous books was that Hämäläinen so convincingly explained the Indigenous strategies for survival and even conquest. Instead of focusing on the microbes that decimated Native populations, Hämäläinen showed how the Comanche developed what he termed a "politics of grass." A unique grasslands ecosystem in the plains allowed them to cultivate huge herds of horses and gave the Comanche access to bison, which they parlayed into market dominance over peoples who could supply other goods they wanted, such as guns, preserved foods, and slaves for both trade and service as herders.
Read: Return the national parks to the tribes
Hämäläinen treats Native civilizations as polities making war and alliances. In Indigenous Continent, there is less emphasis than in The Comanche Empire on specific ecosystems and how they informed Indigenous strategies. Instead, he describes so many Native nations and European settlements adapting to one another over such a wide and long time period that readers can appreciate anew how their fates were intertwined-shattering the simple binary of "Indians" and "settlers." Indigenous peoples adapted strenuously and seasonally to environments that remained under their control but had to contend at the same time with Europeans and other refugees encroaching on their vague borders. These newcomers could become allies, kin, rivals, or victims.

Hämäläinen sees a larger pattern of often-blundering Europeans becoming part of Indigenous systems of reciprocity or exploitation, followed by violent resets. When Dutch or French traders were "generous with their wares" and did not make too many political demands, Natives pulled them into their orbit. Spanish and, later, British colonists, by contrast, more often demanded obeisance and control over land, leading to major conflicts such as the ones that engulfed the continent in the 1670s-80s and during the Seven Years' War. These wars redirected European imperial projects, leading to the destruction of some nations, and the migration and recombination of others, such as the westward movement of the Lakota that led to their powerful position in the Missouri River Valley and, later, farther west. In this history, Indigenous "nomadic" mobility becomes grand strategy. North America is a continent of migrants battling for position long before the so-called nation of immigrants.

"Properly managed," settlers and their goods "could be useful," Hämäläinen writes. The five nations of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) confederacy established a pattern by turning tragic depopulation by epidemic into opportunities for what Hämäläinen calls "mourning wars" attacking weakened tribes and gaining captives. They formed new alliances and capitalized on their geographic centrality between fur-supplying nations to the west and north, and French and Dutch and, later, English tool and gun suppliers to the east and south. Hämäläinen insists that their warfare was "measured, tactical," that their use of torture was "political spectacle," that their captives were actually adoptees, that their switching of sides in wartime and the Iroquois' selling out of distant client tribes such as the Delaware was a "principled plasticity." This could almost be an expert on European history talking about the Plantagenets, the Hapsburgs, or Rome.

And there's the rub. Hämäläinen, a northern European, feels comfortable applying the ur-Western genre of the rise and fall of empires to Native America, but imperial history comes with more baggage. Hämäläinen seems certain that Comanche or other Indigenous imperial power was different in nature from the European varieties, but it often seems as if Indigenous peoples did many of the same things that European conquerors did. Whether the Iroquois had "imperial moments," actually were an empire, or only played one for diplomatic advantage is only part of the issue. Hämäläinen doesn't like the phrase settler colonialism. He worries that the current term of art for the particularly Anglo land-grabbing, eliminationist version of empire paints with too broad a brush. Perhaps it does. But so does his undefined concept of empire, which seems to play favorites at least as much as traditional European histories do.

If an empire is an expanding, at least somewhat centralized polity that exploits the resources of other entities, then the Iroquois, Comanche, Lakota, and others may well qualify. But what if emphasizing the prowess of warriors and chiefs, even if he refers to them as "soldiers" and "officials," paradoxically reinforces exoticizing stereotypes? Hämäläinen is so enthralled with the surprising power and adaptability of the tribes that he doesn't recognize the contradiction between his small-is-beautful praise of decentralized Indigenous cultures and his condescension toward Europeans huddling in their puny, river-hugging farms and towns.

Hämäläinen notes that small Native nations could be powerful too, and decisive in wars. His savvy Indigenous imperialists wisely prioritized their relationships, peaceful or not, with other Natives, using the British or French as suppliers of goods. Yet he praises them for the same resource exploitation and trade manipulation that appears capitalist and murderous when European imperialists do their version. In other words, he praises Natives when they win for winning. Who expanded over space, who won, is the story; epic battles are the chapters; territory is means and end.

And the wheel turns fast, followed by the rhetoric. When British people muscle out Natives or seek to intimidate them at treaty parleys, they are "haughty." At the same time, cannibalism and torture are ennobled as strategies-when they empower Natives. Native power as terror may help explain genocidal settler responses, but it makes natives who aren't just plain brave-including women, who had been producers of essential goods and makers of peace-fade away almost as quickly as they did in the old history. As readers, we gain a continental perspective, but strangely, we miss the forest for the battlefields.
Read: Rez life
It's already well known why natives lost their land and, by the 19th century, no longer had regional majorities: germs, technology, greed, genocidal racism, and legal chicanery, not always in that order. Settler-colonial theory zeroes in on the desire to replace the Native population, one way or another, for a reason: Elimination was intended even when it failed in North America for generations.

To Hämäläinen, Natives dominated so much space for hundreds of years because of their "resistance," which he makes literally the last word of his book. Are power and resistance the same thing? Many scholars associated with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association find it outrageous to associate any qualities of empire with colonialism's ultimate, and ongoing, victims. The academic and activist Nick Estes has accused Hämäläinen of "moral relativist" work that is "titillating white settler fantasies" and "winning awards" for doing so. Native American scholars, who labor as activists and community representatives as well as academics in white-dominated institutions, are especially skeptical when Indigenous people are seen as powerful enough to hurt anyone, even if the intent is to make stock figures more human. In America, tales of Native strength and opportunistic mobility contributed to the notion that all Natives were the same, and a threat to peace. The alternative categories of victim and rapacious settler help make better arguments for reparative justice.

In this light, the controversy over Native empires is reminiscent of what still happens when it's pointed out that Africans participated in the slave trade-an argument used by anti-abolitionists in the 19th century and ever since to evade blame for the new-world slaveries that had turned deadlier and ideologically racial. It isn't coincidental that Hämäläinen, as a fan of the most powerful Natives, renders slavery among Indigenous people as captivity and absorption, not as the commodified trade it became over time. Careful work by historians has made clear how enslavement of and by Natives became, repeatedly, a diplomatic tool and an economic engine that created precedents for the enslavement of Black Americans.

All genres of history have their limits, often shaped by politics. That should be very apparent in the age of the 1619 and 1776 projects. Like the Declaration and the Constitution, when it comes to Indigenous peoples, historians are still trying to have it both ways. Books like these are essential because American history needs to be seen from all perspectives, but there will be others that break more decisively with a story that's focused on the imperial winners.

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larger pattern of often-blundering europeans

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Rethinking the European Conquest of Native Americans

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In a new book by Pekka Hämäläinen, a picture emerges of a four-century-long struggle for primacy among Native power centers in North America. When the term Indian appears in the Declaration of Independence, it is used to refer to "savage" outsiders employed by the British as a way of keeping the colonists down.

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The world increasingly feels like it’s spiraling out of control, with a daily onslaught of grim news and economic anxiety. It’s no wonder that 31% of Americans are experiencing depression and anxiety — three times as many as before the pandemic — and nearly 50% of the workforce say they aren’t going to go above and beyond for their jobs.

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The world increasingly feels like it's spiraling out of control, with a daily onslaught of grim news and economic anxiety. It's no wonder that 31% of Americans are experiencing depression and anxiety - three times as many as before the pandemic - and nearly 50% of the workforce say they aren't going to go above and beyond for their jobs.

And while some say so-called "quiet quitting" is about drawing healthy boundaries between work and personal time, actions such as withdrawing from your team, limiting communication only to what's strictly required, and staying silent rather than contributing in meetings are " classic indicators of diminished motivation and low engagement."

While the term may be new, what's happening here really is just the latest expression of a fundamental aspect of human nature: In the face of persistent and inescapable stressors, people often respond by simply giving up. When nothing is in your control, why even try?

Scientists call this " learned helplessness." After you've endured an aversive situation in which nothing you do matters, you tend to remain passive and despondent - even in new situations in which you do have control.

One study shows how this bears out. Researchers gave students a sheet of paper with three anagrams to solve. Unbeknownst to the students, there were two different versions of the sheet. On one, the first two anagrams were easy; on the other, they were unsolvable. The third anagram on both sheets was the same easily solvable word.

Students who easily unscrambled the first two words on the first sheet also readily solved the third one. But students who encountered an unwinnable situation - staring at two anagrams with no possible solution - were stuck and frustrated, and they didn't even attempt the third one. As one student put it: "Nothing worked, so why try?"

What Drives Learned Helplessness?

Learned helplessness was originally identified in the 1960s in a famous psychological experiment that wouldn't be permitted in a modern lab. Martin Seligman - the psychologist whose later work launched the subfield known as positive psychology - restrained dogs on an electrified platform where they received electric shocks to their hind legs. Over time, learning they were powerless to free themselves, the dogs gave up trying.

When Seligman changed the conditions, moving the dogs onto an electrified metal plate they could easily have escaped, the dogs didn't even try to get away. Assuming they were still powerless, they curled up on the floor, whimpered, and passively accepted their fate. They never discovered that escape was within their grasp.

Seligman concluded that humans respond the same way dogs do. Assuming nothing we do matters, we stop trying to improve our circumstances.

More recent research, however, caused Seligman to do an about-face on his initial interpretation. Steven Maier, a researcher involved with Seligman's original experiment, later switched fields and became a neuroscientist. And his research suggests that helplessness isn't just a response to enduring misfortunes beyond our control. Rather, passivity is our default hardwired response to prolonged adversity. When subjected to sustained negative experiences, the brain assumes control isn't present - an innate response Maier and Seligman renamed "default passivity."

The implication is profound because it means that learned helplessness really isn't learned. Instead, shutting down and passively accepting the status quo is the normal human response to prolonged aversive events. Like a pandemic that never ends. Or a job you hate but are unable to leave.

Default passivity offers an explanation for the quiet quitting phenomenon. People have been stressed for years, but they don't have the freedom to just up and quit. Feeling powerless to escape a stressful situation, they respond in a way we now know is normal and predictable: by becoming passive. They don't contribute ideas in meetings. They don't take the initiative to switch teams or proactively seek out more meaningful work. They do only what they need to do to not get fired.

Combatting Default Passivity in the Workplace

Fortunately, passivity doesn't have to be a permanent condition. The original studies found that helplessness can be reversed. To test this, Seligman and his colleagues dragged the helpless dogs off the electrified platform and onto the other side where they were safe. After a few rounds of being moved to the other side, the dogs snapped out of their passivity and began responding entirely on their own. This intervention successfully reversed helplessness in 100% of dogs - and their recovery was "complete and lasting."

So how can organizations reverse passivity among employees to reduce quiet quitting? By giving employees a direct experience of autonomy - the feeling of having control over their life and choices. Managers can do this in two ways.

First, you can look for opportunities to give employees more autonomy. When possible, let them choose their own schedules and deadlines, and whether to work from home or the office. Let them make their own decisions about who to collaborate with, how to allocate their time, and how to approach getting their work done. Ask for their input on goals and strategies, and give them a voice in how decisions get made.

In addition to giving employees additional autonomy, encourage them to exercise the autonomy they already have by making their own decisions whenever possible to develop what psychologists call an " internal locus of control." The brain craves choices, and studies show that even just the expectation of getting to make a choice activates the ventral striatum, a brain region associated with anticipation and excitement. Encourage employees to switch things up, take on work that interests them, and focus on learning. Maybe that means choosing their own assignments or taking on more challenging work in order to learn new skills.

Whatever an employee's role, let them know you welcome their ideas on how they can make their work more meaningful in ways that still serve the needs of the team and the organization. That way, when things get stressful and employees feel bleak and hopeless, they'll take action to improve their situation instead of suffering in silence.

Remember that quiet quitting happens when employees feel trapped. The more freedom you can give them, the less they'll feel the need to respond in unproductive ways.

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While the term "quiet quitting" may be new, what's happening is just the latest expression of a fundamental aspect of human nature: In the face of persistent and inescapable stressors, people often respond by simply giving up. When nothing is in your control, why even try?

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Eight Self-Help Books That Actually Help

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Eight Self-Help Books That Actually Help

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These titles are challenging where others are pandering, and open-minded where others are prescriptive.

Any book can be a self-help book, depending on how it's read. Political pamphlets, epic poems, and contemporary novels can all offer insight into how to live-or how not to. But the self-help genre is thought to have had its true start in 1859, when Samuel Smiles, a second-rate Scottish journalist and doctor, published , With Illustrations of Character and Conduct. It became an international best seller, and the cult of personal improvement was born.

Today, self-help has mushroomed into something like a $10 billion industry: There's a book (or three) on every one of life's tribulations, alternately written by academics, charlatans, and others with advice to spare. Many texts still trade on a kind of Smiles-ish individualism; after all, readers are primarily seeking their own enlightenment. But the best kind of self-help book is like a trusted friend, a well-trained therapist, or an armchair philosopher-its words can connect a lone reader to the shared human experience. Whereas other texts can change our mind or even our heart, self-help provides a road map for better living.

As both an avid consumer and eager critic of this corner of the library, I take the task of selecting self-help books seriously-especially during a season whose unofficial slogan is "New year, new you." Diet guides and manuals for manifesting a better life via positive thinking are best left on the shelf; the following books are challenging where others are pandering, open-minded where others are prescriptive. Rather than giving us a paint-by-numbers for a new personality, these titles provide fresh perspectives on the obstacles we find in our way-and in ourselves.

When Grealy was 9, she was diagnosed with cancer in her jawbone. Surgeons removed much of her mandible, which resulted in the slow sinking of her face. Her memoir is a bildungsroman for the age of the image, as Grealy recalls an adolescent self-loathing that would seem universal were it not for the inescapable fact that her face, in some ways, was indeed " too ugly to go to school," as she puts it. The author renders nearly two decades' worth of her innermost thoughts with surgical precision. But the real beauty is in watching Grealy outgrow the convictions she holds about the world and her place in it-that her pain is meaningless compared with the suffering of others, that stoicism is the ultimate virtue-without ever claiming to cure her chronic self-reproach. In an era when everyone's face is a commodity, canvas, and passcode, Grealy's difficult development from a teen obsessed with her "unlovable" appearance to a young adult capable of loving others (and accepting love in return) has never felt more relevant.

Brown reigns over the self-help genre for a reason. Her Ph.D. in social work, original research on courage and compassion, and approachable Texas twang make her about the closest thing we have to an expert on the human spirit. She also seems to practice what she preaches: When the #MeToo founder Tarana Burke told Brown about the imperfect application of her insights to communities of color, Brown agreed, and the two began co-editing a new anthology on Black life and vulnerability, You Are Your Best Thing. For those new to Brown's "wholehearted" universe, Daring Greatly, the third of her many self-help books, remains the essential introduction to vulnerability-which she believes is the source of genuine connection with others. More than a decade since it was first released, this book is still helpful to those who want to cultivate openness not only in themselves, but also in their school, family, and workplace.
Read: ​​Robin DiAngelo and the problem with anti-racist self-help
This best seller has a deceptively simple thesis: You need to put your phone down. But Odell, a multidisciplinary artist whose interests have included the origin of items in the local landfill and the internet's promise of unfettered access to information, isn't offering just another screed about the attention economy. Instead, Odell takes readers on a meandering journey through the art classes she teaches to undergraduates; Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"; and the rose garden near her home, all in service of exposing the absurdity of current standards of productivity. Odell calls for readers to cultivate an ethic of care-one that turns away from our culture's insatiable desire for the new and toward the maintenance of what already exists. "Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves," she writes, "but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive."

Fans of The Four Agreements already know its titular precepts by heart: "Be impeccable with your word," "Don't take anything personally," "Don't make assumptions," and "Always do your best." This book, the first in Ruiz's Toltec Wisdom series, came out in 1997; a Mexican surgeon, Ruiz was drawn to spiritual healing after a near-death experience, and he's been studying wisdom traditions ever since. For all its unfashionable New Age elements, readers return time and again to this 160-page treatise. In addition to offering four rules to live by, Ruiz makes a compelling case against uncritically accepting the rules of society, many of which lead to more suffering. The hope is that these agreements (now five in number-"Be skeptical, but learn to listen" joined the list in 2009) will help us create a better "dream of the world."
Read: The limits of self-help productivity lit
In 2015, 37-year-old Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, died of lung cancer. His posthumous memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, documents the medical training that consumed his life, his vanishing future, and the process of dying. Like The Year of Magical Thinking and Tuesdays With Morrie, the book promises the clarity of vision that readers believe only confronting death can offer. But where it really excels is in the moments when Kalanithi (and Lucy, his wife-a fellow physician, the mother to their newborn, and the author of the book's lengthy postscript) acknowledges just how unrealistic this expectation of final clarity really is. Although readers might crave a tightly constructed proverb, it's Kalanithi's desperate struggle to give his life meaning that makes the book a must-read. To the end, he was strong and afraid, insightful and confused, continually changing-in other words, exactly as human as the rest of us.

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, by adrienne maree brown

For brown, activism is rooted in science fiction: Both are acts of world building. This boundless creativity is at the center of all of her work, which recontextualizes urgent social ills by asking, How can we move forward with feeling? At first blush, Pleasure Activism sounds like everything a political text is not: deeply personal, unabashedly sensual, emphatically erotic. But drawing on conversations with friends, Black feminist texts, and her own experiences, brown convinces readers that making space for rapture is a path toward liberation. By acknowledging our basic human needs, she writes, we "reclaim" ourselves from the "impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy." This work is neither individualistic nor hedonistic; although some delights can be felt only firsthand, brown's goal is to use them to transform readers, and through them, communities.
Read: 'The cure for burnout is not self-care'
This is not a diet book-or an anti-diet book. In Anxious Eaters, the nutritional anthropologist Janet Chrzan and the psychologist Kima Cargill investigate why fad diets remain so popular even though they almost always fail to produce sustained weight loss. In academic but accessible prose, they explain that although regimens such as clean eating and paleo ban certain foods and prioritize others, food itself is pretty insignificant to our culture's embrace of dieting. Instead, Chrzan and Cargill argue, fad diets are the logical consequence of our society psychology; each diet is a complex system of meaning intended to help us manage not our body, but our mind. Their book avoids easy action items, but that's the point: Rather than guiding readers to weight loss or body acceptance, Chrzan and Cargill hope to turn the popular notion of "good" and "bad" foods inside out.

The Artist's Way has been putting the work in workbook since 1992. This 12-week-long program developed by Cameron is intended to help artists reconnect with their innate creativity. There's one big rule: When you wake, before you do anything else, write three longhand pages. Cameron promises participants that these "morning pages" will clear their mind, clarify their goals, and perhaps even get them started on their next project. She would know; she's the author of dozens of books, poetry collections, and plays, and it's clear that she never lets her well run dry. But Cameron insists that every human being is an artist in one form or another, so anyone can benefit from sitting down with a pen and paper. "Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it," she writes, quoting Goethe. "Action has magic, grace and power in it."
​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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eager critic of this corner of the library

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Eight Self-Help Books That Actually Help

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These titles are challenging where others are pandering, and open-minded where others are prescriptive. Any book can be a self-help book, depending on how it's read. Political pamphlets, epic poems, and contemporary novels can all offer insight into how to live-or how not to.

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Unearthing the Original Mediterranean Diet

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Unearthing the Original Mediterranean Diet

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An archaeologist works to find out how much fish ancient Greeks ate

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This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

On the eastern end of the Greek island of Crete, archaeologist Dimitra Mylona steps out onto the dun-colored remains of the 3,500-year-old Minoan settlement of Palaikastro and considers the past. Not just the big- P past that is the fundament of her career but also the small- p past of her own route to truth through a discipline burdened by myth and speculation. For the past 30 years, Mylona has been testing and refining her methodology, sifting through sites to ever-finer degrees. And if there's anything the past few decades have taught her, it's that the closer you look at ancient Mediterranean civilizations, the more the fish rise to the surface.

Mylona is a zooarchaeologist-a specialist in the study of animal remains of ancient societies. Through the close observation of bones, shells, and other finds, zooarchaeologists try to re-create a picture of the way humans hunted, husbanded, ate, and more generally interacted with the animals around them. Traditionally, zooarchaeologists in the Mediterranean have focused on goat and sheep and other forms of terrestrial protein as the go-to meat sources for Greece and other Mediterranean countries. Back in 1991, as a new graduate student, Mylona thought no differently, imagining herself picking through the remains of livestock. But during one of her first digs, in the same Palaikastro she now surveys, the presence of an entirely different find captivated her-fish bones.

Working by the sea, Mylona and other students were excavating the dirt floors of Minoan houses more than 3,000 years old. To retrieve minuscule finds-carbonized seeds of plants, bits of wood charcoal, bones of birds, lizards, and fish-they sifted the soil by using water to float the smallest of objects to visibility. "One of the senior archaeologists called me over to look into the microscope," she says. "I imagine she was hoping to find someone that would take an interest in something others had ignored." In the scope was one of the many tiny fish bones that were found that day, probably belonging to a small comber or a wrasse. The senior archaeologist was right. Mylona gazed at the folds and crenulations of those fish vertebrae and mused: a story lurked. She learned during those early digs that archaeologists in Greece were just beginning to employ the much more fine-scale water flotation method to the soils of ancient sites, and as a result more and more fish remains were coming to light. The search for a fishier ancient world, Mylona thought, might be the way forward for her academic career.

Setting out to the University of Sheffield in England in the early 1990s for graduate work, Mylona immediately felt resistance to her newfound focus. Her graduate supervisor advised her against committing to a fish bone master's degree, instead urging her to specialize in the analysis of mammal bones. Fish bones were a dead end, he maintained. To prove his point, he gave her a book published in 1985 by the historian Thomas Gallant, A Fisherman's Tale: An Analysis of the Potential Productivity of Fishing in the Ancient World. The book claimed ancient Greek seas were too poor to support fisheries of significance. For decades, that perceived poorness became the accepted defining characteristic of the Mediterranean in academic circles. Because few rivers flow into the Mediterranean, the sea is considered nutrient-starved and described as containing little phytoplanktonic life- oligotrophic in scientific parlance. Without sufficient terrestrial nitrogen and phosphorous, phytoplankton-the very base of the marine food web-are sparse. Indeed, one of the reasons the Med, as researchers affectionately call the sea, shows its clear sapphire face to modern humanity is this paucity of plankton. This "containing little life" framework may be a case of what historical ecologists often refer to as presentism -the tendency to view the past through a present-day lens. Presentism or not, the acceptance of the narrative left Mylona perplexed: an entire theory was based on a narrow selection of evidence.

Back in the 1980s, Gallant and others were focused on ancient economies and building models to predict people's dietary behaviors in the past. To Gallant, for example, the evidence suggested that given the relatively high population of the Greek coastlines, there was not enough fish to go around. Goat and sheep obviously filled the caloric deficit. "So any calculation based on the few fish bones that were handpicked in Greek excavations at the time made [fish] a very insufficient source of nutrition," Mylona says.

Having come from a region in northern Greece where fish is an integral part of modern diets, Mylona felt something was askew with this methodology. Over the course of the next 10 years-while earning a master's and a PhD at the universities of Sheffield, York, and Southampton, and shuttling back to a growing family on Crete-Mylona started assembling the tools she would need to prove the hypothesis of a fishier Mediterranean.

While field excavation is often the most iconic part of archaeology, the real decoding of the evidence usually comes to light in laboratories and offices far away from the site. And so, after we look over Palaikastro, Mylona takes me up along winding roads into the hills of the Lasithi region and eventually brings us to the headquarters of the organization that has supported Mylona's fish investigations-the Institute for Aegean Prehistory. The institute's Study Center for East Crete (SCEC), funded by the American philanthropist and archaeologist Malcolm Wiener, is perched atop a site with a sweeping view of the Dikti Mountains and has an architecture designed to recall the airy halls of the Minoan palaces. Once inside, Mylona leads me first past archaeologists and conservators patiently piecing together vast jigsaw puzzles of pottery, then past an illustrator pen-and-inking renderings of sculpture, and finally to her office.

"In order to know what you are looking at, you need first to establish a reference collection," she says as she pulls out box after box of bones lining her office shelves. A reference collection is a kind of archive of skeletons that allows zooarchaeologists to compare excavated remains with the bones of present-day creatures. "In Greece in 1993, there was not a single reference collection for fish bones-none whatsoever," Mylona says. "Zooarchaeology is not taught in Greek universities, so there are no university collections of fish skeletons."

During what was the busiest decade of her life, she made regular trips to the central fish market in Crete's second-largest city, Chania on the northwest coast, and to moored fishing boats wherever she found them. She bought all the species of fish she could locate. Then she buried them around her home in the north-central Cretan coastal town of Rethymno. After digging them up months later once bugs and microorganisms had eaten away skin and flesh, Mylona scoured, cleaned, and filed away the fish bones like books in a library. When she deemed her collection big enough, she returned to the bones gathered during her first digs and got down to the serious business of seeing what was what.

Counting ancient fish to establish a baseline for classical fisheries may seem like a rather arcane, academic thing to do during a time of climate crisis and profound environmental disruption. But baselines are important. You cannot restore what you cannot remember. That said, the historical baseline that Mylona is heroically unearthing is elusive. Even gathering data on the modern baseline-what is in the sea today-is a neglected science. Ringed by 22 nations that have fished with ever-increasing relentlessness, the contemporary picture the scientific literature paints of the Med is grim indeed. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in 2019, only 36.7 percent of the assessed stocks in the Mediterranean and Black Seas were fished within biologically sustainable levels. After the Aswan High Dam near the mouth of the Nile in Egypt was completed in 1970, nutrient flow into the Mediterranean Sea from the Nile Delta has been curtailed, shifting the nature of plankton blooms and perhaps the entirety of the marine food web. Many other dams throughout the region have done similar damage.

Invasive species have further plundered the sea. Since the Mediterranean and the Red Seas were connected by the Suez Canal in 1869 to eliminate an expensive shipping detour around the Horn of Africa, hundreds of alien species have flooded the Med, and the sea is now considered the most invaded on the planet. On top of alien species eating their way through the Med's forage fish, some species, such as Lagocephalus sceleratus, are dangerously toxic, too.

All of these degradations to a once-productive marine food system are happening in part because, with the exception of small coastal communities, the rest of modern Europe no longer relies on the Med for its survival. If you were to believe the earlier work of other archaeologists, you could be persuaded that this was always the case. The sea may have birthed multiple civilizations, but that's not how early archaeologists and historians, like Gallant, imagined the past; imagined being the operative word.

As we continue on our odyssey of eastern Crete, Mylona and I eventually find our way down to Mochlos, a one-time fishing village now turned tourist resort an hour's drive west of Palaikastro-a place that inevitably leads one to compare past and present. We are looking down a steep escarpment out on the bluer-than-blue Aegean, an embayment of the Mediterranean running between Europe and Asia. Before us is a pair of massive stone fish tanks that have been lying at the seafront for more than 2,000 years. Romans created the pens during their occupation of Greece to support a fishing industry that brought in catches live and stored the most precious fish until they could be sold fresh to highly discerning, and rich, customers. Yet even with the investment in infrastructure made for the sake of seafood, Mylona told me, the fish were important to ancient societies even beyond their role on the plate.

"Fish are different," she says. "Cattle, sheep, goats-these were all animals used for sacrifice in religious rituals. There was a methodology in how you approached their slaughter and treatment. In classical Greece of the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and probably also earlier, they were ceremonially slaughtered and eaten. You find their remains on altars, on places of sacrifice, and everywhere within settlements." But fish, she says, occupied a place in society more closely linked to the day-to-day, something that is only realized when archaeological evidence is put in context of "softer" remains like ancient literature.

"Fish were more secular," Mylona explains. "Because fish participated in the vignettes of daily life, we find them a lot in the classical theatrical comedies. The fishmonger who is a cheater. Or the ignorant customer. Or the glutton who wants to buy all the fish in the market-a symbol of someone who is totally undemocratic. In comedy, fish are used to convey what is proper social behavior. Fish are the vehicle that transmits this idea." Yet, as much as fish were relegated to the comedies, Mylona and her reference collection show fish were a very serious part of society.

To prove her point, Mylona takes me back to her laboratory at SCEC to show me how something as simple as using water to wash and sift through archaeological deposits reveals a different world. Once the large pieces are extracted and cataloged in a first pass, the "fines" are put into the water flotation separator. A series of meshes allows researchers to extract the tiniest of bones from dirt and rock. Finally, Mylona lays out these bits of bones and tweezes them apart, comparing them flake by flake to the bones in her reference collection.

"The thing is that most fish bones are small, especially in this part of the world. Small fish predominate," she says. But even the larger fish, a grouper of seven kilograms, for instance, leave bones that may be no larger than two centimeters. "You can't easily see them in the course of an excavation. If you do it out in the open, if the light is not right, and if you are really hot and tired, you may not see it."

Despite the difficulty, Mylona has been persistent. And the result of all this tedious work was revelatory. At Palaikastro, where fish bones first entered her vision, the four large fish bones that were handpicked in one of SCEC's buildings were complemented by 4,000 more when water flotation took place. When Greek archaeologists applied the same methodology to coastal sites in the Aegean and even in many inland locations, fish bones were uncovered by the hundreds or thousands in nearly every location. Fish were clearly an important part of the ancient Greek diet: a vast underestimation of the importance of the sea as a source of food had taken place.

Does this persistent and pernicious misapprehension of the importance of fish in the Mediterranean's past have ramifications for the modern inheritors of the Mediterranean Sea thousands of years later? To probe this question, Mylona turns to her friend Manos Koutrakis who also went down a fishy career path. But where Mylona's fish are in the past, Koutrakis's are rooted in the present.

Koutrakis makes his home in Kavala, in northern Greece, near the villages where both he and Mylona grew up. Kavala sits on the Thracian Sea, a region nourished by three large rivers and the outflow of the Black Sea. All this makes it the most productive body of water in the eastern Mediterranean. Koutrakis is the child of a fisherman who worked those waters for 60 years. He feels the pulse of fishing he did as a child, though today Koutrakis does so as a researcher, collecting Kavala data with his team in the Fisheries Research Institute for all the fisheries of northern Greece. Koutrakis routinely interacts with commercial fishermen, parsing through fish auctions and diving the Med regularly in his quest to keep tabs on the national fishery.

Koutrakis is the first to acknowledge there has been a decline in fish populations in the past 50 years. Whereas pre-Second World War small-scale local fishermen, similar to their ancient counterparts, mainly worked the Mediterranean, the post-war era has seen a superstructure of much larger vessels on top of the preexisting locals. This pressure has squeezed the artisanal sector to an ever-greater degree. The problem is that scientists-much like archaeologists pre-Mylona-lack baseline data on modern fisheries in Greece.

"The Hellenic Statistical Authority was not considering the catches of vessels under 20 horsepower until 2015," Koutrakis says. "But most of the Greek artisanal vessels were probably exactly in this category." Yes, larger vessels have also impinged on the artisanal sector, but that sector is still there and in business. Furthermore, it was only in 2016 when Greece created an online database to collect data with self-reporting of landings from vessels more than 12 meters in length.

The discounting of data from small-scale fishers means that managers in charge of placing limits in areas and during specific seasons for the most sensitive stocks are in part blinded. In fact, this is all part of what is often called the Mediterranean Exception. Whereas fisheries around the world are increasingly moving toward quota management systems that try to allocate the exact tonnage each fisher may take, management in the Med still relies on much less precise methods. Seasonal openings and closures and mesh sizes of nets are the main tools that managers have to work with. Koutrakis needs the equivalent of Mylona's water flotation method for sifting the small bones of modern Greek fisheries, and he works toward that.

"The solution is to have good scientific data," Koutrakis concludes. And slowly that data is being amassed. "Since 2017, EU regulations require more effort on the quality of data collected. Scientific working groups are putting in more effort in assessing more stocks in order to know where the problem is," Koutrakis tells me. But is this enough? Will the gaps be filled too late? Will Mediterraneans lose what remains of their biological heritage before we have anything that resembles what they're now only starting to understand is the historical baseline?

Any talk of baselines in fisheries inevitably leads to the work of the fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. Pauly famously coined the term shifting baselines back in 1995. The essential premise of the shifting baselines hypothesis is that each successive generation has a diminished view of what constitutes abundance. The memories of the Greek fisherman who might have caught 100 sea bream in an hour are lost to his great-grandson who thinks a 10-fish day is a great success. To understand the actual condition of the sea with respect to the historical baseline, I contact Pauly.

"I don't accept this idea that the Mediterranean is a poor sea," Pauly tells me. "This is what people always say-few rivers going into the sea to deliver the nutrients. But we know from Roman records that there was probably a significant population of gray whales in the sea. That these whales brought in nutrients from the wider Atlantic, and through their feces fertilized the sea," Pauly says. What happened to these whales? "The Romans likely killed them all. Everywhere you look, we have evidence of a more abundant sea." Sharks are not abundant in the Med, but that's today. "We just did an analysis of film taken by the Austrian cinematographer Hans Hass in 1942. There are sharks everywhere."

And what will happen if we never refine our understanding of the historical baseline and use it to set recovery goals for fish abundance and diversity?

"The thing is, you don't need to have the fish to satisfy most people who visit the Mediterranean. You will have the clear, blue empty water. You will have the seaside developments, this ugly mess of concrete from which people will emerge to swim. You'll have postcards and souvenirs," Pauly says. "But you will have no fish. And no one will remember that they were ever there."

This is, of course, the last thing Mylona wants to see in her home waters. And so, she will keep on cataloging and counting, making a bone-by-bone argument for the legacy of a more abundant Mediterranean. "The interest coming from the European Union is more and more focused on environmental issues," she tells me. "This is our main problem and that's where our funding will go. More and more we have to ask questions that are relevant for today. The biggest challenge for archaeologists today is to build bridges with marine biology and conservation, to find ways to use the archaeological and historical fisheries data in meaningful and useful ways."

The hope and dream is a better memory of the past that will influence our behavior in the future-a baseline shifted back to something closer to the abundance we've lost.
This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.
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Unearthing the Original Mediterranean Diet

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This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. On the eastern end of the Greek island of Crete, archaeologist Dimitra Mylona steps out onto the dun-colored remains of the 3,500-year-old Minoan settlement of Palaikastro and considers the past.

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By

Peter Debruge, Owen Gleiberman, Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Tomris Laffly, Guy Lodge, Amy Nicholson

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The movies are now more than 100 years old. That still makes them a young medium, at least in art-form years (how old is the novel? the theater? the painting?). But they're just old enough to make compiling 's first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time a more daunting task than it once might have been. Think about it: You get an average of one film per year. A great deal of ardent discussion and debate went into the creation of this list. Our choices were winnowed from hundreds of titles submitted by more than 30 Variety critics, writers and editors. As we learned, coming up with which movies to include was the easy part. The hard part was deciding which movies to leave out.

Variety, which recently celebrated its 117th anniversary, is a publication as old as cinema. (We invented box office reporting, in addition to the words "showbiz" and "horse opera.") And in making this list, we wanted to reflect the beautiful, head-spinning variety of the moviegoing experience. We don't just mean different genres; we don't just mean highbrow and lowbrow (and everything in between). The very spirit of cinema is that it has long been a landscape of spine-tingling eclecticism, and we wanted our list to reflect that - to honor the movies we love most, whatever categories they happen to fall into.

Do we want you to argue with this list? Of course we do. That's the nature of the beast - the nature of the kind of protective passion that people feel about their favorite movies. We invited prominent filmmakers and actors to contribute essays about the movies that are significant to them, and that passion comes across in all that they wrote. No doubt you'll say: How could that movie have been left off the list? Or this one? Or that one? Trust us: We often asked that very same question ourselves. But our hope is that in looking at the films we did choose, you'll see a roster that reflects the impossibly wide-ranging, ever-shifting glory of what movies are.

We invite you to find out how many films from the list you've seen on this poll.

These film writers and critics contributed suggestions for movies: Manuel Betancourt, Clayton Davis, Peter Debruge, Matt Donnelly, William Earl, Patrick Frater, Steven Gaydos, Owen Gleiberman, Dennis Harvey, Courtney Howard, Angelique Jackson, Elsa Keslassy, Lisa Kennedy, Jessica Kiang, Richard Kuipers, Tomris Laffly, Brent Lang, Joe Leydon, Guy Lodge, Amy Nicholson, Michael Nordine, Naman Ramachandran, Manori Ravindran, Jenelle Riley, Pat Saperstein, Alissa Simon, Jazz Tangcay, Sylvia Tan, Zack Sharf, Adam B. Vary, Nick Vivarelli, Meredith Woerner.

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The movies are now more than 100 years old. That still makes them a young medium, at least in art-form years (how old is the novel? the theater? the painting?). But they're just old enough to make compiling 's first-ever list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time a more daunting task than it once might have been.

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Murtaza Hashwani  Deputy Chairman and CEO of the Hashoo Group. - Wikipedia

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Murtaza Hashwani  Deputy Chairman and CEO of the Hashoo Group. - Wikipedia

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Murtaza Hashwani, chairman of the award-winning Hashoo Foundation, Deputy Chairman and CEO of the Hashoo Group.

Read Here About Hashoo Group : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashoo_Group

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi.

Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port. By the 1970s, it had become one of Pakistan's largest trading companies. However, in 1972, the Government of Pakistan nationalized cotton and rice exports leading the Hashoo Group to diversify into the hospitality sector. In 1978, the group established Holiday Inn Hotel in Karachi, and then another one in Islamabad in 1981. Both of the hotels were converted into Marriott brand in the 1990s. In 1985, the group made a successful bid for the majority shares of Pakistan Services Limited, which then owned four Inter-Continental Hotels across Pakistan, the hotels were re-branded into Pearl-Continental Hotels.

In 1995, Hashoo Group acquired the US-based corporation Occidental Petroleum's Pakistan operations (now known as Orient Petroleum Inc.). In 2001, it acquired the Destinations of the World franchise in Pakistan. In 2012, the group launched Hotel One, a mid-range hotel chain in Pakistan.

In October 2013, Tullow Pakistan exited the Pakistani market and sold its assets to Ocean Pakistan Limited, a subsidiary of the Hashoo Group.

In March 2016, BHP Billiton sold its Pakistani oil and gas operations to Hashoo Group.

Ocean Pakistan Limited.

Zaaver Petroleum Corporation Limited

OPI Gas (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Chemicals (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Mining Company Limited

Zaver Oils Limited

Pearl Ceramics (Previously known as Cera-e-Noor)

Hashoo International (Pvt) Limited

Hasan Ali & Company (Pvt) Limited

Genesis Trading (Pvt) Limited

Muzaffar and Companies

Hashoo Foundation - A nonprofit Organization managed by Murtaza Hashwani (chairman of Hashoo Foundation) Hashoo Foundation, that works extensively to address humanitarian and social concerns in communities across Pakistan

Umeed-e-Noor

Scholarship

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi. Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port.

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Meal Kit Delivery Plans & Food Boxes | HelloFresh

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Meal Kit Delivery Plans & Food Boxes | HelloFresh

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Over 44 fresh recipes every week

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Meal Kit Delivery Plans & Food Boxes | HelloFresh

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Food is amazing, fresh and good quality. The biggest advantage for me is the fact that we don't waste anything now, at the end of the week I don't have to throw away anything Also, the choice of meals is bigger than anywhere else. Based on customer reviews on

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Passive-aggressive behavior isn’t always intentional. As a speech and communications expert, I’ve found that people who have these tendencies often just struggle with being honest about their emotions.

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Emotional resonance, not cold statistics, will bring home the scale of the climate crisis—and the need for action.

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Picture the world 4.4°C hotter than preindustrial levels by the end of this century. That was one of the IPCC's sixth assessment report predictions for scenarios with either unabated emissions rise or immediate climate action. But unless you've pored over climate models and understand the intricacy of tipping points to a tee, it's unlikely that you can visualize this outcome and truly imagine the severity of what's to come.

Now picture Timothy, who lives with his grandchildren in Walande Island, a small dot of land off the east coast of South Malaita Island, part of the Solomon Islands. Since 2002, the 1,200 inhabitants of Walande have abandoned their homes and moved away from the island. Only one house remains: Timothy's. When his former neighbors are asked about Timothy's motives they shrug indifferently. "He's stubborn," one says. "He won't listen to us," says another. Every morning his four young grandchildren take the canoe to the mainland, where they go to school, while Timothy spends the day adding rocks to the wall around his house, trying to hold off the water for a bit longer. "If I move to the mainland, I can't see anything through the trees. I won't even see the water. I want to have this spot where I can look around me. Because I'm part of this place," he says. His is a story that powerfully conveys the loneliness and loss that 1.1 degrees of anthropogenic warming is already causing.

The environmental crisis is one of overconsumption, carbon emissions, and corporate greed. But it's also a crisis of miscommunication. For too long, hard data buried environmentalists in an echo-chamber, but in 2023, storytelling will finally enable a united global response to the environmental crisis. As this crisis worsens, we will stop communicating the climate crisis with facts and stats-instead we will use stories like Timothy's.

Unlike numbers or facts, stories can trigger an emotional response, harnessing the power of motivation, imagination, and personal values, which drive the most powerful and permanent forms of social change. For instance, in 2019, we all saw the images of Notre Dame cathedral erupting in flames. Three minutes after the fire began, images of the incident were being broadcast globally, eliciting an immediate response from world leaders. That same year, the Amazon forest also burned, spewing smoke that spread over 2,000 miles and burning over one and a half football fields of rain forest every minute of every day-it took three weeks for the mainstream media to report that story. Why did the burning of Notre Dame warrant such rapid responses globally, when the Amazon fires did not? Although it is just a beautiful assortment of limestone, lead, and wood, we attach personal significance to Notre Dame, because it has a story we know and can relate to. That is what propelled people to react to it, while the fact that the Amazon was on fire elicited nothing.

Storytelling allows us to make sense of the world. Research from a multitude of fields suggests that story structures match human neural maps. What do a mother breastfeeding, a hug from a friend, and a story all have in common? They all release oxytocin, also known as the love drug. And it's powerful: In a study by neuroscientist Paul Zak, participants who were given synthetic oxytocin donated 57 percent more to charity than participants given a placebo. Similarly, hearing information in narrative form results in a higher likelihood of pro-social behavior.

The power of stories can be harnessed for good. For instance, in 2005, the International Rice Research Institute used a radio soap opera called Homeland Story to persuade millions of rice farmers in Vietnam to stop spraying their crops with harmful insecticides. Farmers who listened to the series were 31 percent less likely to spray their crops than those simply told not to.

In 2017 a viral and gruesome video detailing the story of a sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nose compelled the US city of Seattle, Washington, British prime minister Theresa May, and multiple airlines and global companies such as Starbucks to pledge to eliminate plastic straws.

That's why, in 2023, increased global connectivity will facilitate the spread of stories of people and animals on the frontier of the environmental crisis. Through various forms of art and media, it will be these stories that finally convince us that the climate emergency is not some intangible crisis affecting future generations, but a problem we must all, individually and collectively, act on now.

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Picture the world 4.4°C hotter than preindustrial levels by the end of this century. That was one of the IPCC's sixth assessment report predictions for scenarios with either unabated emissions rise or immediate climate action.

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The lost medieval sword fighting tricks no one can decode

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The lost medieval sword fighting tricks no one can decode

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No one knows how medieval knights really fought.

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One day, in the mid-12th Century, an unremarkable monk sat down in St Edmund's Abbey, Suffolk, and set pen to parchment. He was chronicling the scandalous life of a man he had met some years earlier - the story, he hoped, was not too improper.

The anonymous monk's interest had begun at another abbey, in Reading, where he had been visiting. Within the imposing building's rough flint walls, in the shadows of a virtually unlit room, he met the resident brothers. Among them was one who immediately stuck out as unusual - a monk who, though now dressed in the same hooded robes as the rest, had once led a very different life. In hushed tones, this man explained how he had become a monk by accident.

In 1157, Henry of Essex had been noble - by birth, rather than deed - wealthy, and powerful. He was a knight famous for his skill with a sword, and trusted by Henry II of England. He also wasn't very nice - he stole money, brought shame on women, and had an innocent man tortured.

Then a bizarre incident at a battle in Wales threatened everything. Essex mistakenly announced that the king was dead, almost causing the army to give up and flee. Six years later, in Reading, one of his own relatives publicly declared that this had been treason and challenged him to a duel. This would be a trial by combat.

With crowds watching from the muddy banks of the River Thames, the accusing relative - also a knight - attacked with "hard and frequent blows". At first, Essex defended himself with skill, but after a series of visions of those he had wronged, he was filled with shame and fear. He flew at his opponent blindly, abandoning everything he had ever learned. Amid much clattering of blades on armour, he fell.

The king ordered the local monks to carry Essex's body away and bury it. Miraculously, Essex survived, and lived the rest of his life in penitence among them - where many years later, he met the unremarkable chronicler. It was written as a moral tale, but there's another perspective: Essex had abandoned his sword-fighting knowledge, and lost everything.

Knights were the biggest celebrities of the medieval era. The best among them were rewarded for their skill with castles, lands, and courtly influence. They were widely celebrated as the romantic heroes of their age - livening up legends, poems and paintings with their clashing blades and chivalrous deeds.

Of course, becoming a knight required more than just shining armour and a noble steed - they needed technique. It was normal for ambitious warriors to train for up to a decade, often from childhood, practicing nimble footwork, how to deflect attacks, and various gruesome ways to kill opponents as quickly as possible.

Sword fighting was not a matter of random slashing or prodding - it was a sophisticated martial art to rival kung fu or sumo wrestling. But centuries later, crucial information needed to understand its secrets has been lost. Despite years of studying them, to this day the techniques involved remain mysterious.

In fact, the elaborate back-and-forth swordplay in every film, series, or play of the period has been largely made-up. "It does suck the enjoyment out of watching TV sometimes," says Jamie MacIver, a longsword instructor and the former chairman of the London Historical Fencing Club, "because you look at it and you think, 'Oh my God, wait, what are you doing?'."

How has this happened? And will we ever work out how it was really done?
Heroes and butchers
The ultimate experts in medieval sword fighting were the "fight masters" - elite athletes who trained their disciples in the subtle arts of close combat. The most highly renowned were almost as famous as the knights they trained, and many of the techniques they used were ancient, dating back hundreds of years in a continuous tradition.

Little is known about these rare talents, but the scraps of information that have survived are full of intrigue. Hans Talhoffer, a German fencing master with curly hair, impressive sideburns and a penchant for tight body suits, had a particularly chequered past. In 1434, he was accused of murdering a man and admitted abducting him in the Austrian city of Salzburg.

Fight masters worked with a grisly assortment of deadly weapons. The majority of training was dedicated to fencing with the longsword, or the sword and buckler (a style of combat involving holding a sword in one hand, and a small shield in the other). However, they also taught how to wield daggers, poleaxes, shields, and even how to fight with nothing at all, or just a bag of rocks (more on this later).

It's thought that some fight masters were organised into brotherhoods, such as the Fellowship of Liechtenauer - a society of around 18 men who trained under the shadowy grandmaster Johannes Lichtenauer in the 15th Century. Though details about the almost-legendary figure himself have remained elusive, it's thought he led an itinerant life, travelling across borders to train a handful of select proteges and learn new fencing secrets.

Other fight masters stayed closer to home - hired by dukes, archbishops and other assorted nobles to train themselves and their guards. A number even set up their own "fight schools", where they gathered less wealthy students for regular weekly sessions.

Neil Grant, a trustee of the Royal Armouries in the UK, explains that one such teacher set up a programme at the University of Bologna in northern Italy, where records show that attendance cost about the same as a modern gym membership. There he taught aspiring warriors, knights, and ordinary citizens - preparing them for war or mentoring them to survive judicial duels or tournaments.

It was no game. In the Middle Ages, apprentice fighters had the highly motivating prospect of not dying as a reward for their efforts, but there was also social honour to be gained - the very best fighters were able to transcend the hierarchies of the day, catapulting themselves into the ruling classes.

At the very least, sophisticated swordplay was essential so as not to waste money. "To make even a small sword would take an incredible amount of steel," says Richard Scott Nokes, an associate professor of medieval literature at Troy University in Alabama, US, who explains that it would also have taken hundreds of kilograms of charcoal to get it hot enough. "The sheer cost meant that you didn't just have a weapon and say, 'Well, I'll just go out there and stick them at the pointy end'," he says. "You didn't want to damage it."

Some fight masters regarded their techniques as top secret, though exactly how classified they actually were is up for debate. One particularly famous 14th Century Italian knight, Fiore de'I Liberi, vowed to keep his craft under wraps so that his students could have an advantage - otherwise anyone could have learned how to fight against them.

However, as Grant points out, this may have been more about marketing than integrity: "If you've got three fight masters and one of them is going 'I'll teach you the stuff everybody knows' and the others are going, 'No, I have mystic arts that no one else could possibly counter', which one are you going to go with?"

Fortunately, a number of knights had the opposite idea, writing their tricks up in "fight books". These ornately decorated manuscripts included descriptions of various techniques, often accompanied by illustrations - sometimes of real medieval people - demonstrating them in practice. The books would have been commissioned by the instructors' wealthiest employers and could take several authors working together years to complete.

For all their beauty, the hand-drawn works could also be decidedly bloodthirsty. In Talhoffer's 1467 manual, neat sequences of moves that look almost like dancing end abruptly with swords through eye-sockets, violent impalings, and casual instructions to beat the opponent to death. Some signature techniques even have names - chilling titles like the "wrath-hew", "crumpler", "twain hangings", "skuller" and "four openings".

Despite passing through countless generations of owners, and - in some cases - centuries of graffiti, burns, theft, and mysterious periods of vanishment from the historical record, a surprising number survive today. This includes at least 80 codexes from German-speaking regions alone.
Impossible moves and missing clues
But there's a problem. Many of the techniques in combat manuals, also known as "fechtbücher", are convoluted, vague, and cryptic. Despite the large corpus of remaining books, they often offer surprisingly little insight into what the fight master is trying to convey.

"It's famously difficult to take these static unmoving woodcut images, and determine the dynamic action of combat," says Scott Nokes, "This has been a topic of debate, research and experimentation for generations."

On some occasions these manuals seem to depict contortions of the body that are physically impossible, while those that attempt to convey moves in three dimensions sometimes give combatants extra arms and legs that were added in by accident. Others contain instructions that are frustratingly opaque - sometimes depicting actions that don't seem to work, or building upon enigmatic moves that have long-since been lost.

Oddly, the text is often written as poetry, rather than prose - and a few authors even made it hard to interpret their works on purpose.

Lichtenauer recorded his instructions in obscure verses which remain almost incomprehensible today - one expert has gone so far as to call them "gibberish". According to a contemporary fight master he trained, the grandmaster wrote in "secret words" to prevent them from being intelligible to anyone who didn't value his art highly enough.

Even when it is possible to decipher what a combat manual is describing or demonstrating , some experts suspect that crucial contextual information is always missing.

Take Philippo di Vadi, another Italian fencing master. He wrote his fight book in the 15th Century, and it's mostly text-based - again, written in poetry, some of which includes passages chosen purely because they rhyme. As one analysis points out, to get to any meaningful insights translators must wade through obscure metaphors that have long since vanished from common use, such as: "If you have salt on your brain [if you're gifted], You must consider here, The best way to climb these stairs [the best way to become successful]."

Even the parts that are genuinely instructive about a certain technique often lack critical details. "Most of the time it's not so much that you can't work out what's said, it's that there's four or five possibilities what it could be. And sometimes they don't make sense," says MacIver.

For MacIver, one of the hardest moves to grasp is di Vadi's footwork - where you step while "cutting", a kind of attack made with a chopping motion of the sword. "Throughout the text, he's like, 'Oh I've got new footwork, it's better than the ancestors' footwork'," says MacIver. "So he's really emphasising how important it is for him. And then he writes about it - and it's just incomprehensible."

Then there's the images. At the time, it wasn't yet common to draw or paint in three dimensions. So while this emerging fashion in art was being finessed, attempts to convey depth in pictures could often be confusing - and this includes those in fight books. "Sometimes you can't actually work out which of the two fencers involved is supposed to be winning," says MacIver. "There's one in particular... both fencers have a sword against their neck."

To get to the bottom of what knights were really doing, all this needs to be untangled. But even when it is, there are countless other unknowns, such as exactly how often the most peculiar techniques were actually used.

"Some [fight books] bring in stuff that's so weird you're going 'this cannot be used with any frequency'," says Grant. He gives the example of a sequence of fight books known as The Gladiatoria Series, which contains some eyebrow-raising tips. "One of the moves involves unscrewing the pommel of your sword [the circular fitting by the handle] and throwing it at somebody," he says.

Where they're only mentioned in one book, it's hard to tell whether such outlandish tricks really were in common use, just neglected by most authors, or so rare they almost never happened.
More monks ...and women
Tucked away in the back pages of Tahhoffer's book, past the endless images of medieval men disembowelling each other with swords, clubs, and poleaxes, is an arresting sight: a man stands waist-deep in a hole, looking rather anxious, while a woman in a loose-fitting bodysuit calmly swings a kind of improvised club through the air above him. In fact, she's wielding a 4 to 5lb (1.8-2.3kg) rock - roughly equivalent in weight to a standard modern brick - which has been wrapped in her veil. He is armed with a club of equivalent length.

The strange scene, which has baffled historians for decades, is thought to be a "judicial duel" - the same method used to try Henry of Essex for treason. In the medieval era, this was a perfectly legal way to settle disputes, and relied on the judgement of God. According to the logic of the age, there must be a guilty party - and naturally, the celestial power above would ensure that they lost.

It was normal to train for these fights exactly as you would for any other combat, and the images seem to be instructive. There are nine images in total, each depicting a different move. As usual, they're not particularly easy to follow, but in some, the man successfully kills the woman - in one particularly dramatic scenario, she's pulled into the hole head-first - while in others, she is the victor.

It's been widely speculated that this particular battle is an attempt to resolve a marital dispute, and possibly even " divorce by combat" - the unusual setup may have been contrived to remove some of the man's advantage. But as with many bizarre techniques in fight books, it's a total mystery.

"It's very, very odd - please do not ask me to explain it!" says Grant.

And this is not the only unexplained incidence of women in fight books. The oldest known European combat manual is a roughly 750-year-old book known as MS I.33 - the title page with its actual name and author is missing. This curious tome contains instructions for sequences with the sword and buckler, and involves a cast of characters that's still confounding historians today.

For a start, around half the scenes depict a priest - complete with the characteristic bald patch, or "tonsure" haircut, and robes - duelling with a scholar. This alone is highly unorthodox. Does this mean fencing was a common pastime at monasteries? Is it even possible that disgraced nobles like Essex may have continued honing their skills after enrolling as a monk? Or is the inclusion of the religious figures somehow symbolic? The book's earliest recorded home was, in fact, a monastery. But to this day, no one knows.

The rest of the images are just as odd - depicting a woman named Walpurga battling the priest. She wears her hair loose in waist-length braids, or dons the traditional headdress popular with women at the time.

It wouldn't be completely unprecedented for a woman to fight in the Middle Ages. In Europe, Joan of Arc, a peasant from northeast France, famously donned armour to participate in the Hundred Years' War, and Margaret of Anjou, an English queen in the 15th Century led her own army into battle. However, it's not thought that women were routinely allowed to fight, so the casual way Walpurgia is included is striking. "People have come up with all sorts of theories. but we just don't know," says Grant.
Padded jackets and blunted swords
Surprisingly, the people trying to figure this out are often not historians, but modern martial artists.

Over the last 20 years, interest in Historical European Martial Arts (Hema) has been steadily growing, and today there is a thriving community of amateur enthusiasts who spend much of their free time poring over fight books - often translating them from ancient European languages such as Middle High German themselves.

These raw conversions still need some interpreting, so to go any further the martial artists talk them through and come up with some possible moves that could fit them. And this is where it gets serious. "Really, the only way of getting to some kind of answer is to try them out with your friends," says MacIver.

The goals of modern enthusiasts and medieval fight masters are not well-aligned - the former strives to avoid injuries at all costs, while the latter wanted to teach how to murder an opponent as quickly as possible. So, nothing happens without comprehensive protective equipment - thick jackets with foam inserts around the vital organs, protective gloves and trousers, and a heavy-duty fencing mask.

Then the move is performed at a glacial speed, to work out the mechanics. Instead of real swords, they use blunted ones of a similar weight. "And they're more flexible. So if you thrust at a person it doesn't just push into them," says MacIver.

Eventually, after several attempts with different methods, the martial artists might settle on the one that most closely matches the images and captions. Finally, it's performed at a normal speed, usually as part of a sequence with other ancient techniques.

If they're successful, the reward is almost a form of time-travel - interacting with fight masters who died hundreds of years ago, and experiencing long-forgotten physical actions. Who knows, perhaps the same swish of a sword is what felled Henry of Essex?

"It is very satisfying, when you're finally in a [Hema] tournament, and you do something that you can trace back to a book that was written 500 years ago," says MacIver.

But the process can be extremely convoluted - often fraught with confusion and giant leaps of guesswork. "It's a lot of back and forth, you know, you go down blind alleys all the time," says MacIver, "So you'll think, 'okay, I think I've got it', and you try something and you're like, 'this doesn't work at all.'"

In the quest to solve di Vadi's famous fancy footwork, MacIver came up with four possible moves that broadly fit the ambiguous poetry laid down for his instruction. "And they all seem to work fine," says MacIver, "so it's almost impossible to work out which one he meant... I have a friend who speculated that maybe he meant all four, but I think that might be giving him too much credit."

In other cases, the clue they might be onto something is a sharp pain and a cry to stop. While attempting to simulate an arm-breaking move, MacIver and his friend discovered this was one to add to their blacklist. "We were trying all these different options - that doesn't seem right, or that doesn't do anything, that's no good...," he says. When they finally found a likely solution, there was a sudden yelp. "...after the barest pressure, he's like, 'No, no, no, stop, that's it.'"

Of course, it's not always so easy to tell if a technique has worked as intended, and martial artists are continually updating their interpretations as new evidence emerges. Take di Vadi's "guards" - defensive postures that you adopt before beginning a sequence of sword fighting actions. MacIver explains that getting these starting points right is essential, because everything that happens afterwards involves moving from one to another.

For about two years, he believed one was instructing him to hold his sword on the right side of his body - then one day, something clicked, and he realised it was the exact opposite. "It's very hard to tell from the image, because perspective isn't very good. It was kind of flat. And there are some kind of visual cues but they're not obvious like, how bent is the elbow, and a few other bits and pieces as well," says MacIver.

Even with the more obvious moves, some historians believe martial artists are attempting the impossible. In this view, attempting to recreate ancient fighting techniques is a bit like resurrecting long-lost music - both relied on intangible assumptions that were common knowledge at the time, but have long been forgotten.

As with medieval fighting, descriptions of the music at the time are frustratingly vague - long before it was expressed in notes, it was written up via "melodic outlines". Everything else you needed to interpret a particular song was stored in the musicians' brains, passed down faithfully through aural traditions. Once it had gone out of fashion, it stopped being transmitted - and as they died off, it vanished with them.

In fact, historians are increasingly recognising the importance of so-called "embodied knowledge" - where the body learns how to act through practise or observation - for understanding the past. This kind of sensory memory includes things like riding a bike, which can be described in words but not mastered without physically getting on a saddle.

Unfortunately, medieval sword fighting is riddled with opportunities to get these physical details wrong. There's the unknown strength with which blows were landed, the tempo different moves were performed at - including how long to linger in each position, which could have varied widely - the exact angles of the sword's blade as it slashed through the air. Like trying to teach someone how to become a professional ballerina while only communicating via email, what are the chances of performing all the moves correctly?

That's not to mention the drastic difference between how you would behave when in real mortal peril, versus during a highly choreographed session at an after-work hangout. MacIver points to a striking fact highlighted by de'l Liberi, who told his students "...for him that plays at sharp swords, on a single cover [attempt to block a strike] that fails, that blow gives him death.". Fighting without armour was so dangerous, the man himself only did it five times in his entire life - and never voluntarily.

In fact, many modern assumptions about how knights fought probably don't hold up. One is the elegance of sword fights, which were nothing like the depictions on television or even in medieval literature. In theory, knights were bound by the code of chivalry - a set of standards for how to behave fairly on the battlefield. And yet, according to Grant, these lofty ideals often weren't even honoured even in theory, let alone in practise.

"Certainly Fiore [de'l Liberi] knows what a fair fight looks like and he wants no part of it," says Grant. "The important thing is it's about making sure you're the one alive in the end. If that means pulling dirty tricks, 'Okay, great. Go for it.'"

In fact, there are hints that real-world combat would have been shockingly barbaric. Grant points to the insights provided by medieval skeletons, which show that fights rarely occurred on a blow-by-blow basis, at least in war - they were messy, rapid, and often involved several men attacking a single adversary simultaneously.

"What happens is you get a good strike into somebody's head and they go down under a flurry of blows," he says. "...very commonly what you'll see [on the skull] is they have six head wounds, of which two or three will probably be fatal. The second you're off balance, your opponent is going to follow up and they're going to be on top of you - they're going to keep hitting."

However, despite the large gaps between modern re-enactments and historical reality, MacIver is undeterred. He's optimistic that - irrespective of inevitable mistakes - the ancient fight masters would approve of what Hema enthusiasts are attempting. After all, some recorded their secrets exactly because they wanted to avoid them being lost.

As di Vadi explained 540 years ago, he wrote his own fight book so that the ancient techniques he learned "do not disappear through my negligence". Though it's very much a work in progress, you could say he's on track to achieving this goal.

* Zaria Gorvett is a senior journalist for BBC Future and tweets @ZariaGorvett

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The lost medieval sword fighting tricks no one can decode

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One day, in the mid-12th Century, an unremarkable monk sat down in St Edmund's Abbey, Suffolk, and set pen to parchment. He was chronicling the scandalous life of a man he had met some years earlier - the story, he hoped, was not too improper.

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This 5-Minute Total-Body Workout Feels So Good, You'll Want to Do It Every Day | Livestrong.com

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This 5-Minute Total-Body Workout Feels So Good, You'll Want to Do It Every Day | Livestrong.com

# data[].attributes.body
With high-intensity interval training (HIIT) being the hot trend, it's easy to see why many people might confuse the term "low-intensity" to mean ineffective. But that's a major misconception.

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With high-intensity interval training (HIIT) being the hot trend, it's easy to see why many people might confuse the term " low-intensity" to mean ineffective. But that's a major misconception.

While low-intensity workouts won't cause your heart rate to skyrocket like HIIT, they are efficient at burning calories and building lean muscle. Plus, they boast a big bonus for joint health.

Here's why: Low-intensity exercise allows you to work muscles and joints more consistently throughout their range of motion and properly load tendons, which also helps improve strength and stability in the joints, says Ben Lauder-Dykes, a certified kettlebell instructor and trainer for Fhitting Room.

But gentler on your joints doesn't equal easier. Low-intensity workouts - like this 5-minute full-body routine created by Lauder-Dykes - force you to focus on mastering proper form and using muscle work (not momentum).

This quick body-weight workout doesn't require equipment, just five minutes of your day. It's the perfect way to sneak in some movement during work hours and to combat the stiff muscles that come with sitting too much.

Try This 5-Minute Low-Intensity Total-Body Workout

Great for all fitness levels, including beginners and those with injuries, this routine takes you through four body-weight moves that work multiple muscle groups at once for an especially efficient total-body burn.

And because it doesn't put pressure (or pain) on the joints, you can do it every day whenever you have five free minutes in your schedule.

Do each exercise for the prescribed time, then repeat all the moves once more.

"This is a great movement for working the hamstrings and glutes through hip extension, which is especially important for those who sit for long periods," Lauder-Dykes says.

If you need a knee-friendly lunge variation, look no further than reverse lunges. They train the quads and glutes while helping to stabilize the knee joint and avoid knee pain, Lauder-Dykes says.

Push-ups provide a great bang for your exercise buck since they work multiple muscle groups at once, including your chest, shoulders, triceps and core, Lauder-Dykes says.

Too challenging? Modify the movement by dropping to your knees.

Side planks target your obliques, an important muscle group that helps stabilize the pelvis, Lauder-Dykes says. "Also, while many strength movements create compression front to back, side planks create compression from the side to help offset and reduce the risk of injury," he adds.

If side planks with straight legs are too intense, try performing the movement with bent knees, he sat. As you gradually build strength and stability, you can advance to the straight-legged side plank.

Bojana Galic

Jaime Osnato

Jaime Osnato

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This 5-Minute Total-Body Workout Feels So Good, You'll Want to Do It Every Day | Livestrong.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With high-intensity interval training (HIIT) being the hot trend, it's easy to see why many people might confuse the term " low-intensity" to mean ineffective. But that's a major misconception. While low-intensity workouts won't cause your heart rate to skyrocket like HIIT, they are efficient at burning calories and building lean muscle.

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Murtaza Hashwani, Chairman of Hashoo Foundation -  wikipedia.org

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Murtaza Hashwani, Chairman of Hashoo Foundation -  wikipedia.org

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Dubai-based Murtaza Hashwani, chairman of the award-winning Hashoo Foundation, a nonprofit that works extensively to address humanitarian and social concerns in communities across Pakistan, tells Anand Raj OK how his foundation’s initiatives are impacting less privileged people.

Murtaza Hashwani still remembers a heart-warming moment he experienced when he visited Gilgit-Baltistan a few years ago. The chairman of Hashoo Foundation, Pakistan’s largest philanthropic organisation whose mission is to create an "ethical, equitable and inclusive society" across the Asian country, was on a tour of the area to see up close the work his foundation is doing to uplift and transform lives when he met an elderly woman and her granddaughter.

Murtaza Hashwani, Chairman of Hashoo Foundation, and Deputy Chairman of Hashoo Group.

Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi.

Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port. By the 1970s, it had become one of Pakistan's largest trading companies. However, in 1972, the Government of Pakistan nationalized cotton and rice exports leading the Hashoo Group to diversify into the hospitality sector. In 1978, the group established Holiday Inn Hotel in Karachi, and then another one in Islamabad in 1981. Both of the hotels were converted into Marriott brand in the 1990s. In 1985, the group made a successful bid for the majority shares of Pakistan Services Limited, which then owned four Inter-Continental Hotels across Pakistan, the hotels were re-branded into Pearl-Continental Hotels.

In 1995, Hashoo Group acquired the US-based corporation Occidental Petroleum's Pakistan operations (now known as Orient Petroleum Inc.). In 2001, it acquired the Destinations of the World franchise in Pakistan. In 2012, the group launched Hotel One, a mid-range hotel chain in Pakistan.

In October 2013, Tullow Pakistan exited the Pakistani market and sold its assets to Ocean Pakistan Limited, a subsidiary of the Hashoo Group.

In March 2016, BHP Billiton sold its Pakistani oil and gas operations to Hashoo Group.

Ocean Pakistan Limited.

Zaaver Petroleum Corporation Limited

OPI Gas (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Chemicals (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Mining Company Limited

Zaver Oils Limited

Pearl Ceramics (Previously known as Cera-e-Noor)

Hashoo International (Pvt) Limited

Hasan Ali & Company (Pvt) Limited

Genesis Trading (Pvt) Limited

Muzaffar and Companies

Hashoo Foundation - A nonprofit Organization managed by Murtaza Hashwani (chairman of Hashoo Foundation) Hashoo Foundation, that works extensively to address humanitarian and social concerns in communities across Pakistan

Umeed-e-Noor

Scholarship

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi. Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port.

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Why scientists can’t give up the hunt for alien life

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Why scientists can’t give up the hunt for alien life

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Despite all we've learned about ourselves and the physical reality that we all inhabit, the giant question of whether we're alone in the Universe remains unanswered. We've explored the surfaces and atmospheres of many worlds in our own Solar System, but only Earth shows definitive signs of life: past or present. We've discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets over the past 30 years, identifying many Earth-sized, potentially inhabited worlds among them. Still, none of them have revealed themselves as actually inhabited, although the prospects for finding extraterrestrial life in the near future are tantalizing.

And finally, we've begun searching directly for any signals from space that might indicate the presence of an intelligent, technologically advanced civilization, through endeavors such as SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) and Breakthrough Listen. All of these searches have returned only null results so far, despite memorably loud claims to the contrary. However, the fact that we haven't met with success just yet should in no way discourage us from continuing to search for life on all three fronts, to the limits of our scientific capabilities. After all, when it comes to the biggest existential question of all, we have no right to expect that the lowest-hanging branches on the cosmic tree of life should bear fruit so easily.

Each of the three main ways we have of searching for life beyond the life that arose and continues to thrive on planet Earth has its own sets of advantages and disadvantages.

1. We can access the surfaces and atmospheres of other worlds in our Solar System, enabling us to look for even tiny, microscopic signs of biological activity, including imprints left by ancient, now-extinct forms of life. But we may have to dig through tens of kilometers of ice to find it, or recognize life forms wholly unrelated to life-as-we-know-it on Earth.

2. With thousands of exoplanets now known, the imminent technological advances that will enable transit spectroscopy and/or direct imaging of Earth-sized worlds could lead us to discover living planets with unmistakable biosignatures in their atmospheres. If life thriving on an Earth-sized world is common, positive detections are only a matter of time and resources.

3. And searches for extraterrestrial intelligence offer the most profound rewards: a chance to make contact with another, perhaps even a technologically superior, intelligent species. The odds are unknown, but the payoff could be unfathomable.

For these (and other) reasons, the only sensible strategy is to continue to pursue all three methods to the limits of our capabilities, as without superior information, we have no way of knowing what sorts of probabilities any of these methods will have of yielding our first positive detection. After all, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and that saying certainly applies to life in the Universe.

From a cosmic perspective, the laws that govern the Universe as well as the nature of the components that make it up indicate that the potential for life as a common occurrence might be absolutely inevitable. Initially, at the start of the hot Big Bang, our Universe was hot, dense, and filled with particles, antiparticles, and radiation moving at or indistinguishably close to the speed of light. In these beginning stages, neither the ingredients nor the conditions necessary for chemical-based life were in place; the Universe was born life-free. And yet, as time went on, the potential for biological activity would rise and rise.

As the Universe expanded and cooled, the following steps sequentially occurred:

the particles and antiparticles annihilated away, leaving a tiny excess of matter behind,

quarks and gluons formed bound states, giving rise to protons and neutrons,

fusion reactions occurred, creating the light elements,

atoms formed from these atomic nuclei and the surrounding bath of electrons,

gravitational contraction and collapse takes place, giving rise to stars,

star clusters and other clumps of matter attract, forming galaxies,

and within those galaxies, successive generations of stars are formed, creating heavy elements.

Once a galaxy becomes enriched enough with these heavy elements, the new generations of stars that follow can form with rocky worlds within those stellar systems, many of which will have the potential for life.

Within our observable Universe, since the dawn of the hot Big Bang, sextillions of stars have formed. Of those, the majority of them are found in large, massive, rich galaxies: galaxies comparable in size and mass to the Milky Way or greater. By the time billions of years have gone by, most of the new stars will have sufficiently large fractions of heavy elements to lead to the formation of rocky planets and molecules that are known as precursors to life. These precursor molecules have been found everywhere, from comets and asteroids to the interstellar medium to stellar outflows to planet-forming disks.

And, at this critical step, we find ourselves face-to-face with the end of our scientific certainty.

Where, and under what conditions, does life come into existence?

On those worlds where life arises, how frequently does it survive and thrive, persisting for billions of years?

How often does that life saturate its habitable regions, transforming and feeding back on its biosphere?

Where this occurs, how often does life diversify, becoming complex and differentiated?

And where that occurs, how frequently does life become intelligent enough to become technologically advanced, capable of communicating across or even traversing the vast interstellar distances?

These questions aren't merely there for us to philosophically ponder; they're there for us to gather information about, and eventually, to draw scientifically valid conclusions about such probabilities.

Of course, there are plenty of valid explanations for why we haven't succeeded in our searches for life just yet. The most sobering - and the most pessimistic - is that it's possible that one or more of the steps required to give rise to the type of life we'd be sensitive to are particularly difficult, and only rarely can the Universe achieve them. In other words, it's possible that any one of life, sustained life, complex and differentiated life, or intelligent and technologically advanced life are rare, and none of the worlds we've surveyed possess them. That's a possibility we have to keep in mind so long as we're committed to remaining intellectually honest.

But there's no reason, at least so far, to suspect that's the primary reason we haven't discovered life beyond Earth just yet. The old saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," applies wherever the odds of success are unknown, but we have every indication that success is possible under the right circumstances. Here on Earth, the evidence strongly indicates that our home planet is an example of such circumstances, and hence it's likely that there are places all throughout space and time where life sustains itself, evolves to become complex and differentiated, and achieves a level of technological advancement sufficient for interstellar communication.

The big unknowns are in the probabilities of the various types of alien life that are actually out there, not in the question of whether such achievements are possible within our Universe.

That doesn't mean that we should take seriously every claim that's been made - even by scientists - that alien life has been found. The "Wow!" signal, for example, was a high-powered radio signal received over the span of 72 seconds back in 1977; although its nature is unknown, it has never been replicated, either back at the original source or anywhere else. Without confirmation or repeatability, we can draw no affirmative, definitive conclusions.

Fast radio bursts, like many signatures observed astronomically, appear in many locations both in and out of our galaxy, but have no indication that they were intelligently created; they are likely simply a natural astronomical phenomena whose origins have yet to be determined.

NASA's Mars Viking lander conducted numerous tests for life on the Martian surface, with one experiment (the Labeled Release experiment) giving a positive signature. However, the possibility of contamination, the lack of reproducibility, and the lack of a verified follow-up experiment has cast tremendous doubt on the "biological positive" interpretation of the experiment.

And despite the possibility of encountering interstellar space probes, direct alien contact, or even the ubiquity of alien abduction stories, no robust verification of any of these claims has ever come forth. We have to keep our minds open while at the same time remaining skeptical of any grand claims. The conclusions we draw can only be as strong as the supporting evidence for them.

It's primarily for these reasons - we have every indication that the Universe has all the necessary ingredients for life, but no indication that we've found it just yet - that it's so vital to keep looking in a scientifically scrupulous way. When we do announce that we've found extraterrestrial life, we don't want it to be another instance of crying "wolf" with insufficient evidence that we've found a wolf; we want the claim to be supported by overwhelming, unassailable evidence.

1. That means building fleets of orbiters, landers, sample-return missions, and laboratory-equipped rovers to explore a wide variety of worlds in our Solar System: Venus's atmosphere, Mars's surface, Titan's lakes, and the oceans of Europa, Enceladus, Triton, and Pluto, among others.

2. That means building superior coronagraphs on world-class space-based and ground-based telescopes, considering the construction of a starshade, and investing in transit spectroscopy. By imaging the atmospheres and surfaces of exoplanets, including breaking down their molecular and atomic constituents and abundances over time, we should be able to identify any world with a life-saturated biosphere.

3. And that means continuing to search, with greater precisions and sensitivities across the electromagnetic spectrum, for any signals that might come from an intelligent species seeking to communicate or announce their presence.

If you don't find fruit on the lowest-hanging branches, that doesn't necessarily mean you give up on the tree; it means you find a way to climb higher, where the fruit may be present but out of your present reach.

This might also include expanding our searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. While most searches focus on far-reaching radio transmissions, it's possible that alien civilizations who seek to communicate across the stars and galaxies will rely on a different technology. Perhaps we should be monitoring the tails of water maser lines or the 21 cm spin-flip transition of hydrogen. Perhaps we should be looking for patterns in pulsar signals, including correlating signals between pulsars. Perhaps we should even be looking for extraterrestrial intelligences in gravitational wave signals that we have yet to discover. Wherever a signal can be encoded by a sufficiently advanced species, humanity should be looking and listening.

There are also avenues to explore that won't reveal alien life, but could help us understand how it arose and arises throughout the Universe. We can recreate the atmospheric conditions found on other worlds or even as they were on Earth long ago in the lab, with an eye toward recreating the origin of life-from-non-life. We can continue exploring the possibility of having nucleic acids (RNAs, DNAs, even PNAs: peptide-based nucleic acids) coevolve with peptides in an early prebiotic environment: perhaps the most compelling candidate for how life first arose on Earth.

The rewards of finding out that we're not alone in the Universe would be immeasurable. Perhaps we could learn how to survive the great environmental threats that face us: hazardous asteroids, a changing climate, or violent space weather events. Perhaps there are even more important lessons to be learned about how to overcome our own insufficiencies as human beings: the great challenge of moving beyond our primal nature. Perhaps other civilizations have success stories to offer us, recounting how, in the early days of their technological infancy, they overcame such issues as:

overconsumption, where they devoured their planet's resources beyond the point of sustainability,

short-term thinking, where they addressed the immediate, urgent problems at the expense of long-term ones that threatened their existence,

or the emergence of disease, famine, pestilence, and ecological collapse, resulting from the global changes wrought by a post-industrial society.

Our impulses toward greed, plunder, and self-gratification may not be unique, and there may be more experienced, wiser species out there that have figured out solutions that elude us today. Perhaps, if we're lucky, they may have lessons waiting-in-the-wings for us that could guide us toward a more successful future.

Many of us can imagine two different futures unfolding for the enterprise of human civilization. There's the one we should strive to avoid: where we resort to infighting, squabbling over the limited resources of our world, descending into ideologically-driven wars and ensuring our own eventual destruction. If we never find life beyond Earth - never find anyone else to communicate with, exchange information and culture with, and to give us hope that there's a future for humanity out there among the stars - perhaps extinction will indeed be our most likely outcome.

But there's another possible outcome for humanity: a future where we come together collectively to face the gargantuan challenges facing humans, the environment, planet Earth, and our long-term future. Perhaps the discovery of life beyond Earth - and potentially, of one or more intelligent, spacefaring, extraterrestrial civilizations - might give us not only the guidance and knowledge we need to survive our growing pains, but something far grander than any terrestrial achievements to hope for. Until that day arrives, we must make do with the knowledge that, at present, we have only one another to extend our kindnesses and compassion to.

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Why scientists can't give up the hunt for alien life

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Despite all we've learned about ourselves and the physical reality that we all inhabit, the giant question of whether we're alone in the Universe remains unanswered. We've explored the surfaces and atmospheres of many worlds in our own Solar System, but only Earth shows definitive signs of life: past or present.

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Tony Tetro's memoir starts with a bang - or, rather, a bust. On 18 April 1989, 25 policemen spilled into his condo in Claremont, California, confiscated the $8,000 he had just been paid in cash and proceeded to search the place, slicing through wallpaper, pulling up carpets and emptying drawers. The scene is pacy, thrilling, a bit silly. It reads like a Hollywood film script; which, if I'm being cynical, is probably the point. The pièce de résistance:

If you pressed #* on the cordless phone, a full-length mirror would pop open and reveal my secret stash of special papers, pigments, collector stamps, light tables, vintage typewriters, certificates of authenticity, notebooks with signatures - everything a professional art forger might need.

The first piece of art Tetro forged was itself intended to be a fake: a Chagall signed by Elmyr de Hory

You needn't have heard of Tetro to enjoy this book. Nor is any prior knowledge of the art world required. With all the cocaine and the fast cars, Con/Artist has more than a whiff of bad boy memoir about it, and the chapter titles ('The Last Laugh', 'The Wild West', 'Things Go Bad') read like the names of pop songs. But beneath the grit and the glamour is a fascinating tale of a diligent, self-taught artist with a good work ethic and a great natural talent. Co-authored with Giampiero Ambrosi, the investigative journalist involved in uncovering Tetro's connection to the Prince Charles art forgery scandal in 2019, this is the story of his life and art.

He was born Anthony Gene Tetro in 1950 in Fulton, New York, an all-American town not far from Lake Ontario, to Italian immigrant parents getting on with 'getting ahead'. Spending his time building and decorating sandcastles at Fair Haven Beach, and copying photos from books and magazines, he showed an interest in art from a young age. In high school a favourite teacher introduced him to the Old Masters, whose paintings he pored over in the library. He remembers reading that when Michelangelo heard others say that the Pietà had been made by one of his rivals, he snuck into the Vatican, outraged, and carved his name on it. 'I don't blame him,' writes Tetro. 'It's ironic considering what I do, but years later when I forged a piece that somebody else claimed, I think I understood what Michelangelo must have felt.'

After his girlfriend got pregnant, Tetro and his young family moved to California. He sold furniture six days a week and, for fun, stayed up at night painting meticulous copies of Rembrandt, Picasso and Renoir - 'letting my mind run with the flowing colours and brushstrokes'. The relationship didn't last, but Tetro's love of art did. It's evident in the description of his first trip to a museum - the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) - to see a Rembrandt: 'I remember an oval portrait of a man, and what struck me was that you could see he had a twinkle in his eye that looked so real and alive that he seemed to have a soul.'

After trying and failing to sell his work, Tetro stumbled on a copy of Clifford Irving's Fake! at the supermarket and was inspired by the story of the Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory. 'As I read, one idea became clearer and clearer: the only thing I could think was "I could do this."' He took it slowly, knowing that an oil painting by a big-name artist would draw attention, and that provenance could pose a problem. So the first piece of art that Tetro forged was itself intended to be a fake: a small self-portrait of Chagall signed by de Hory.

A magician never reveals his secrets, but Tetro is no magician. Readers hankering for the nitty gritty of how he made his fakes won't be disappointed. He recalls taking trips to Paris and Rome to pick up supplies: oils for Dalí, Chagall and Picasso; iron gall ink, a natural black that couldn't be dated; antique books with empty pages that could be used for drawings. In order to give 'just the lightest patina of age' to a Míro oil painting, he squashed the butts of Lucky Strike unfiltered cigarettes in a small glass of cold coffee, put the mixture through a strainer and then gently misted it onto the stretcher bars and the back of the canvas.

My favourite anecdote begins:

I knew a guy who had a restaurant. At night, when the restaurant was closed and everybody had gone home, he let me in and I stuck my painting, stretcher bars and all, into the wide-mouthed pizza oven, setting it at the lowest temperature, 140 degrees.

For a week Tetro baked this painting - his version of a Caravaggio - then he rolled it up and was pleased to see a spidery network of tiny white lines form across the surface. 'Now, with the paint cracked, I set about creating a past life for the Bacchus using layers of grime, soot and varnish to suggest a history of age and neglect.'

Because that's the thing, writes Tetro:

Ask 100 people what they think an art forger does and 99 will tell you they copy paintings. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth... To really make a forgery, you have to make something new that never existed and give it a reason for being born.

Back in the 1980s, art historians still had a lot to learn about the high priest of the Italian baroque. In Tetro's words, old books on Caravaggio were rare and facts were easily fudged. There was a chaotic period of Caravaggio's life in Malta, and talk of paintings being lost, looted and destroyed. 'In my mind, it all started to come together.'

I could have done without the passages on Tetro's love interests and the lacklustre later chapters when 'life didn't seem fun and vibrant anymore'. But from start to finish Tetro's passion for art and his knack for drama carry the reader through. As for what's real and what's fake, who knows? Tetro writes:

If you think about it, the key to being a great forger is not being a great painter but rather a convincing storyteller. Like the best con artists, you must create a context and a backstory that justify an otherwise unbelievable circumstance.

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Tony Tetro's memoir starts with a bang - or, rather, a bust. On 18 April 1989, 25 policemen spilled into his condo in Claremont, California, confiscated the $8,000 he had just been paid in cash and proceeded to search the place, slicing through wallpaper, pulling up carpets and emptying drawers.

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The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer

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The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer

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The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer

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Such a device could help address climate change and food scarcity, or break the Internet. Will the U.S. or China get there first?

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Lessons learned after living in an off-grid rental

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Spending a week off the grid is good training for an energy crisis.

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The beautiful destinations that pay people to live there, from rural Portugal to Alaska

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The beautiful destinations that pay people to live there, from rural Portugal to Alaska

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The Capela dos Ossos (Chapel of Bones) in Évora, Portugal, which has been among the rural locations to which workers have moved for financial rewards (Photo: Getty)

The winter chill has arrived. Coupled with the rising cost of living, bitter morning commutes may encourage Britons to consider a fresh start outside the UK. Long-stay holiday packages, "workations" and digital nomad visas are among the routes by which travellers are seeking an escape.

However, for break with a little more permanence, one of Europe' s faded villages or towns could offer an alternative - albeit with a heavy chunk of admin for non-EU citizens - or perhaps somewhere further afield, say Vermont or Chile.

Schemes that offer a financial reward to new residents are certainly attention-pulling. The "shrinking villages" of Spain, the abandoned housing of rural Italy and the rural remote working schemes in Portugal 's countryside have attracted domestic and international applicants. Headline grabbing offers may come with a catch or, in some cases, already have expired. That said, there are still offers to unearth.

How about New England? Vermont offers incentives to workers who move to the US state (Photo: Getty)

Visas, tax implications and healthcare are all part of the small print that British passport holders would need to consider to move to the locations below. Yet the prospect of being awarded tens of thousands of Euros to create a new life in a peaceful hilltop village may, to some, be worth the hassle. Elsewhere, cities, states and countries are luring long-term residents with money for those that stay or courting entrepreneurs with tax-free grants.

Here are five places that offer cash incentives to relocate.

Presicce-Acquarica, Puglia, Italy

Italy has offered up an abundance of €1 home schemes in underpopulated towns and villages. Each initiative has come with the caveat of investing far more than a single euro in the renovation of an abandoned dwelling. The latest spot seeking to lure new residents is Presicce-Acquarica in the far south, which has been selected as part of a network of beautiful villages by the association I Borghi più belli d'Italia.

Presicce-Acquarica has around 10,000 residents and an old town that includes The Ducal Palace of Presicce, which was built in the 16 th century and has rooftop gardens with views across the town. A quirk of Presicce-Acquarica is its underground mills for olive oil production.

Those qualifying for the scheme could be awarded up to €30,000 (£25,900) in exchange for buying a house in the town, registering that house as an official address and using the grant towards buying or renovating the building. As such, candidates will need to put at least €30,000 of their own money towards the project.

Rural Portugal

Seek out rooftop views in Evora (Photo: Getty)

Since 2020, Portugal has provided grants of up to €4,827 to workers who move to rural areas under a scheme called Emprego Interior Mais (Inland Employment Plus). To qualify, applicants must stay in their new home for at least a year.

The offer has been extended to EU workers and those holding a valid work visa. It has proved popular with younger candidates; 52 per cent of applications are from people under 34.

Popular places to move have included Monsanto (a mid-sized city with a cathedral and castle), Evora (the capital of the Alentejo region), Bragança (with a medieval citadel and a centre for contemporary art) and Portalegre in the São Mamede Hills, close to the border with Spain.

Vermont, USA

You can move to any part of the American east coast state under Vermont's Worker Relocation Incentive Programme, which comes with reimbursement grants of up to $7,500 (£6,240). This payment is limited to one person per household. There are two options to qualify: taking a job with an employer in the state or bringing a remote job with you. Foreigners can apply for the initiative, although they will first need to secure a relevant visa for living in the US.

Among the stipulations under the remote working option are: relocating to the state and becoming a full-time resident; full-time employment with an out-of-state employer; working remotely from a home office or co-working space in the state and a wage that is equal to or more than Vermont's livable wage rate ($13.39 per hour; due to be updated in 2023). Successful applicants will be subject to Vermont income tax.

Mountains (220, in fact), forest and a thriving food and drink scene are among Vermont's charms. Westminster, Vermont's oldest town with a population of less than 4,000, is among the many English namesakes to which Britons might move. Hiking trails, craft beers and farm-to-fork dining are also on the menu.

Alaska, USA

Alaska's landscape may entice nature lovers (Photo: Getty)

United States-based schemes will tend to come with the barrier of securing permanent residence in the US. The Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) is paid to the state's residents annually. The funds come from Alaska's oil wealth: since the 1980s, the state has paid dividends to the people living there from money made when state-owned land was auctioned off to an oil company in 1969.

To receive this annual stipend, citizens from elsewhere must have been "lawfully admitted for permanent residence", be legally present in Alaska and able to form the intent of remaining in the state indefinitely. There is further small print to receive the PFD. Yet, over the course of a few years, moving to the state could earn a resident tens of thousands of dollars. In 2021, eligible residents received $1,114 (£913, using today's exchange rate). Meanwhile, in September, Alaska Governor, Mike Dunleavy, confirmed that the 2022 figure would be $3,284. The dividends were paid out from September and in October.

Hardy Britons who enjoy time in nature would be best-suited to a state in which winter temperatures can drop below -40 ° C and where the landscape includes fjords, icebergs, volcanoes and vast national parks. Wildlife to spot around the nothern-most US state includes bears, wolves, Arctic foxes, caribou and humpback, orca and grey whales.

Santiago, Chile

Stretching 2,700 miles along the west coast of South America, Chile offers desert, coast and ice. Its capital city, Santiago, founded in the 1500s and from which there are views of the Andean peaks, would make an appealing base for startup founders.

Entrepreneurs could apply for a stint in Santiago (Photo: Getty)

Those who move to the country through its initiative, Start-Up Chile, could spend downtime by one of its many beaches. Its seaside highlights range from Caribbean-like idylls (the resort of Bahía Inglesa) to rugged spots that require a little extra work to reach (Playa Cole Cole, which, to visit, you must embark on a rainforest hike).

To live in Chile via this scheme, a government-funded accelerator, you will need to work on your business. The programme launched in 2010 and aims to attract entrepreneurs to the country with mentorship, a network of founders and an equity-free grant of up to tens of thousands of dollars - as well as a one-year work visa.

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Five beautiful destinations that pay people to live there

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The winter chill has arrived. Coupled with the rising cost of living, bitter morning commutes may encourage Britons to consider a fresh start outside the UK. Long-stay holiday packages, "workations" and digital nomad visas are among the routes by which travellers are seeking an escape.

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How science changes the way we think, according to 10 leading scientists

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How science changes the way we think, according to 10 leading scientists

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Science speaks truth. But it is not a truth that is always easy to see. We live our lives, oblivious to the inner world of bacteria within us. Subatomic particles move in ways that seem magical and counterintuitive. The Universe goes on and on, stretching farther than our minds can comprehend. Somehow, the language of math ties everything together, bringing beauty and symmetry to the spiral of the galaxy and the unfolding of a fern leaf.

This is science to me. It is beautiful, yet it constantly reminds me that while we are part of this world and this Universe, we are observers that are far from all-knowing. There is so much we are learning, but even more that we do not know how to look for - truths hidden from our eyes and our ears, far beyond our experience yet every bit as real as the world we perceive.

Science has transformed how I see the world, and I wanted to know how it has done so for others. So I took the opportunity to speak to prominent scientists and thinkers in a range of fields to ask them one simple question: How has science changed how you think about the world? This is what they had to say.

Always new questions
Dr. Carlo Rovelli, Physicist
Professor of Physics at the Centre de Physique Theorique de Luminy, Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute
"I am not two separate persons - one a scientist and the other a normal human creature. I am just a single one, and my worldview changes continuously, like for all of us, including because of what I do in my science. Since my adolescence I have posed to myself questions about reality, about myself, about the nature of thinking, about life and death, the nature of knowledge, the nature of time and space, history, and politics. In the course of my scientific life, these questions have guided my quest, and my work in various areas of quantum gravity, general relativity and the history and philosophy of science has continuously altered my views about all these matters. I have discarded naive ideas, got clarity about something and have been puzzled by new questions."
Science needs art
Dr. Lekelia Jenkins, Marine sustainability scientist and science dance choreographer
Associate Professor, School of the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University
"Great science or innovative leaps are creative processes, so engaging in art feeds our creativity and helps find connections and solutions that the scientific process alone might not have led us to. I think that science art speaks to people at an emotional level that impacts how our minds and the biochemistry of our bodies work. We can harness science art to build empathy with environments and species in need of protection. We can also use science art to uplift people in the midst of dealing with overwhelming issues like climate change. I believe delivering a message about climate or the environment through art allows people to sit with these difficult issues longer, and the longer people can sit with and process a problem, we are more likely to find and agree on solutions."
The brain and the mind
Dr. Jorge Morales, Psychologist
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Philosophy and Director of the Subjectivity Lab, Northeastern University
"Becoming a scientist completely changed my understanding of uncertainty. What we understand about the human mind and brain, and what we don't, is much more nuanced and interesting than I used to think. Certain things that used to seem obvious to me about the human mind now completely baffle me. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, I constantly find myself impressed by how much we do know and how well we understand many aspects of how the human mind and brain work."
Science and equality
Rev. Gregory Simpson, Ph.D., Chemist
Pastor, Nauraushaun Presbyterian Church and Co-Founder & Chair of the Board, Green Community Consulting, Inc.
"First, as a natural-product chemist, I saw the critical role that natural remedies (teas, tinctures, etc.) played in ethnic identity, health, and well-being in rural life. Second, related to my research on environmental contaminants in communities of color, in both the Caribbean and upstate New York, where those most affected were least able to advocate for themselves for several reasons, including a more nuanced understanding of the medical threats faced. Both explorations pointed to the challenge of helping communities use scientific approaches when front-line communities are unaccustomed to such practices daily. For me, the lack of access to appropriate scientific knowledge is the greatest injustice in a heavily scientific and technological world. Not only does it disenfranchise communities in terms of economic, physical, and psychological wholeness, but it also generally reinforces a state of distrust in the sciences. The result has been my advocacy, and a more profound commitment to science education reforms that transform rather than stifle society in a global sense."
Boundaries are dissolved
Dr. Eiichiro Komatsu, Astrophysicist
Director of the Department of Physical Cosmology, Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik
"There were many occasions in which I felt that my view of the world had been changed by science education. Probably the greatest impact was the realization that the same physical laws operate on Earth and in the whole Universe. I felt, suddenly, that borders and boundaries became meaningless to me. I still understand the importance of respecting cultural differences between regions on Earth (or in the Universe), but in the end, the idea that all obey the same physical laws has somehow enabled me to see much further, in space and time, than those without a scientific background."
What it means to be human
Dr. Maya Ackerman, AI researcher and opera singer
CEO & Co-Founder of WaveAI
"Research substantially impacts my worldview. Paradoxically, it brings both more rigor and more wonder and creativity into my understanding of the universe. You can tell you are approaching the truth when order and beauty emerge. More specifically, doing research in generative AI has been a wonderful journey. Generative AI enables an aggregation of human creativity, elevating that creativity to previously unimaginable heights. My research and industry work in generative AI has foundationally transformed my worldview, allowing me to experience firsthand the critical role that researchers have in creating our societies, as well as the need to focus on socially responsible and ethical developments for powerful innovations. In a very real way, science creates science fiction. Combining scientific rigor with great imagination has led to the greatest transformations in humanity, and we are only just beginning."
It's all one big piece
Br. Guy Consolmagno, Ph.D., Astronomer of the Pope
Director of the Vatican Observatory, President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation
"I've been a scientist all my adult life, for fifty years now, and a Catholic for even longer. Of course my worldview has changed over the years. How much of that had to do with science? That's impossible to say since I see everything, including my religion and my hobbies, in the light of being a scientist, just as I understand what it means to be a scientist in light of my religious faith."
What is the Universe up to?
Dr. Brian Green, Ethicist
Director of Technology Ethics, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University

"First, biochemistry and genetics led me to marvel at the deep complexity of life and of any Universe that could create such life. Second, science lays out a causal trail to the origin of the Universe and then stops at a question mark - a place it can no longer investigate. And yet we know that this non-investigable place must have an ability to cause effects, otherwise our Universe could not exist. Together, both are profoundly suspicious. The Universe came into existence from a cause outside itself and it seems to be doing something, developing from simplicity towards complexity. This was enough to tell me that what we can see through science is only the tip of the iceberg. The Universe is doing something and, as parts of the Universe, we each have a place in that activity. The next step is to consider what the Universe is doing and what our part might be, and that - our own better and worse behavior when confronted by this realization - is the question of ethics. This is why I changed my career to what I do now."

On being an explorer
Dr. Seth Shostak, Astronomer
Senior Astronomer and Institute Fellow at the SETI Institute
"I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to investigate a truly profound question: Is Homo sapiens the only intelligent species in the universe? This is very unlike the usual research program that tries to refine an experimental result of physics, biology, or some other discipline. In fact, SETI is more exploration than traditional science research. If we were to find evidence of others out there, that would be a result that humanity would forever know and celebrate. It's truly a 'big picture' question that we're trying to answer, and it's a privilege to be part of that effort."
Look for the evidence
Dr. Briana Pobiner, Paleoanthropologist
Research Scientist at the Smithsonian Institution
"The other day, my brother - who is not a scientist - sent me a message with a link to a story about eggs evolving before chickens. In our exchange, he said 'You always taught me to do my research; don't take someone's word, find out the facts and if it's backed up by real research. I'll always remember that.' Without me even realizing it initially, my exploration of science has changed my worldview in that it has led me not only to 'think like a scientist' - to look for reliable evidence when I have a question about the natural world, and to figure out how to frame questions to be answerable with this kind of evidence - but to also encourage others around me to do the same."

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How science changes the way we think, according to 10 leading scientists

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Science speaks truth. But it is not a truth that is always easy to see. We live our lives, oblivious to the inner world of bacteria within us. Subatomic particles move in ways that seem magical and counterintuitive. The Universe goes on and on, stretching farther than our minds can comprehend.

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Murtaza Hashwani, chairman of the award-winning Hashoo Foundation | Hashoo Group - Wikipedia

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Murtaza Hashwani, chairman of the award-winning Hashoo Foundation | Hashoo Group - Wikipedia

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Murtaza Hashwani still remembers a heart-warming moment he experienced when he visited Gilgit-Baltistan a few years ago. The chairman of Hashoo Foundation, Pakistan’s largest philanthropic organisation whose mission is to create an "ethical, equitable and inclusive society" across the Asian country, was on a tour of the area to see up close the work his foundation is doing to uplift and transform lives when he met an elderly woman and her granddaughter.

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi.

Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port. By the 1970s, it had become one of Pakistan's largest trading companies. However, in 1972, the Government of Pakistan nationalized cotton and rice exports leading the Hashoo Group to diversify into the hospitality sector. In 1978, the group established Holiday Inn Hotel in Karachi, and then another one in Islamabad in 1981. Both of the hotels were converted into Marriott brand in the 1990s. In 1985, the group made a successful bid for the majority shares of Pakistan Services Limited, which then owned four Inter-Continental Hotels across Pakistan, the hotels were re-branded into Pearl-Continental Hotels.

In 1995, Hashoo Group acquired the US-based corporation Occidental Petroleum's Pakistan operations (now known as Orient Petroleum Inc.). In 2001, it acquired the Destinations of the World franchise in Pakistan. In 2012, the group launched Hotel One, a mid-range hotel chain in Pakistan.

In October 2013, Tullow Pakistan exited the Pakistani market and sold its assets to Ocean Pakistan Limited, a subsidiary of the Hashoo Group.

In March 2016, BHP Billiton sold its Pakistani oil and gas operations to Hashoo Group.

Ocean Pakistan Limited.

Zaaver Petroleum Corporation Limited

OPI Gas (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Chemicals (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Mining Company Limited

Zaver Oils Limited

Pearl Ceramics (Previously known as Cera-e-Noor)

Hashoo International (Pvt) Limited

Hasan Ali & Company (Pvt) Limited

Genesis Trading (Pvt) Limited

Muzaffar and Companies

Hashoo Foundation - A nonprofit Organization managed by Murtaza Hashwani (chairman of Hashoo Foundation) Hashoo Foundation, that works extensively to address humanitarian and social concerns in communities across Pakistan

Umeed-e-Noor

Scholarship

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi. Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port.

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Murtaza Hashwani: The human side of things keeps us going - wikipedia.org

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Murtaza Hashwani: The human side of things keeps us going - wikipedia.org

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Dubai-based Murtaza Hashwani, chairman of the award-winning Hashoo Foundation, a nonprofit that works extensively to address humanitarian and social concerns in communities across Pakistan, tells Anand Raj OK how his foundation’s initiatives are impacting less privileged people

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi.

Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port. By the 1970s, it had become one of Pakistan's largest trading companies. However, in 1972, the Government of Pakistan nationalized cotton and rice exports leading the Hashoo Group to diversify into the hospitality sector. In 1978, the group established Holiday Inn Hotel in Karachi, and then another one in Islamabad in 1981. Both of the hotels were converted into Marriott brand in the 1990s. In 1985, the group made a successful bid for the majority shares of Pakistan Services Limited, which then owned four Inter-Continental Hotels across Pakistan, the hotels were re-branded into Pearl-Continental Hotels.

In 1995, Hashoo Group acquired the US-based corporation Occidental Petroleum's Pakistan operations (now known as Orient Petroleum Inc.). In 2001, it acquired the Destinations of the World franchise in Pakistan. In 2012, the group launched Hotel One, a mid-range hotel chain in Pakistan.

In October 2013, Tullow Pakistan exited the Pakistani market and sold its assets to Ocean Pakistan Limited, a subsidiary of the Hashoo Group.

In March 2016, BHP Billiton sold its Pakistani oil and gas operations to Hashoo Group.

Ocean Pakistan Limited.

Zaaver Petroleum Corporation Limited

OPI Gas (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Chemicals (Pvt) Limited

Zaver Mining Company Limited

Zaver Oils Limited

Pearl Ceramics (Previously known as Cera-e-Noor)

Hashoo International (Pvt) Limited

Hasan Ali & Company (Pvt) Limited

Genesis Trading (Pvt) Limited

Muzaffar and Companies

Hashoo Foundation - A nonprofit Organization managed by Murtaza Hashwani (chairman of Hashoo Foundation) Hashoo Foundation, that works extensively to address humanitarian and social concerns in communities across Pakistan

Umeed-e-Noor

Scholarship

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Hashoo Group is a Pakistani conglomerate company which is active in hospitality, oil and gas sectors. It was founded in 1960 by Saddaruddin Hashwani in Karachi. Hashoo Group was established in 1960 as Hassan Ali & Company, a commodities trading company based in Karachi Port.