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Do what you're meant to do because there are people in the world who need it and are waiting for it. The sooner you act, the sooner you'll bring what they need into their lives.

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Do what you're meant to do because there are people in the world who need it and are waiting for it. The sooner you act, the sooner you'll bring what they need into their lives.

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‎Good Life Project: James Victore | How to Have a Point of View [BEST OF] on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show Good Life Project, Ep James Victore | How to Have a Point of View [BEST OF] - Aug 15, 2021

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‎Design Matters with Debbie Millman: James Victore on Apple Podcasts

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On this episode of Design Matters with Debbie Millman designer James Victore talks about leading a creative life.

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‎Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Tatiana Schlossberg on Apple Podcasts

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On this episode, Debbie talks to journalist Tatiana Schlossberg about what we can do, as individuals, about climate change.

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Chicago is set to launch a big guaranteed income pilot

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Mayor Lori Lightfoot explains why her new cash assistance program will be a critical part of the city's broader anti-poverty agenda.

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Surprising Lessons From 100 Days of Rejection: Jia Jiang at TEDxAustin

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Goodbye for now, sweet home Chicago. Tokyo, here we come. So excited.

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Goodbye for now, sweet home Chicago. Tokyo, here we come. So excited. https://t.co/laM8lCHSkm

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Goodbye for now, sweet home Chicago. Tokyo, here we come. So excited. pic.twitter.com/laM8lCHSkm
— Rahm Emanuel (@RahmEmanuel) January 22, 2022

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Goodbye for now, sweet home Chicago. Tokyo, here we come. So excited. https://t.co/laM8lCHSkm

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Goodbye for now, sweet home Chicago. Tokyo, here we come. So excited. https://t.co/laM8lCHSkm

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Goodbye for now, sweet home Chicago. Tokyo, here we come. So excited.

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SpaceX's Starship carrying out test flight maneuvers.

Elon Musk recently provided the first big update on SpaceX's Mars-bound rocket, Starship, and its competitors are watching on with "a mix of awe and horror", according to a report from Politico.

At his latest Starship presentation, SpaceX CEO Musk highlighted the fact that Starship will be reusable over and over again at a fraction of the cost of previous rockets. It's a development that threatens to leave NASA and other competitors in its wake as it launches to the proverbial stratosphere.

Starship will likely launch at a fraction of the cost of NASA's rockets

While it has long been known that Starship would be reusable, the advanced capabilities reportedly have other space organizations, including NASA, worried that their own in-development rocket projects will be rendered obsolete.

"They are shitting the bed," one top Washington space lobbyist told Politico under conditions of anonymity.

Starship is designed to be the first reusable spacecraft that will be able to take crew and cargo to the Moon and Mars before returning to Earth. By contrast, NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) for its Artemis Moon landing missions has gone billions of dollars over original budget estimations and is years behind schedule. What's more, NASA estimates that an SLS mission will cost approximately $2 billion per launch, while Musk announced in his latest presentation that a Starship mission could cost a comparatively low $1 million.

Starship could render other rocket programs obsolete

That disparity between the capabilities of SpaceX's machine and the historic space innovator, NASA, could have wide-ranging implications for the space industry as a whole. It's a development that has gradually played out in recent years with SpaceX bringing crewed spaceflight back to the U.S. in 2020. Now, Starship could take things to a whole new level.

"Once [Starship's] reliability is demonstrated with a large number of flights, which could happen in a matter of months, it will obsolesce all existing launch systems," aerospace engineer and consultant Rand Simberg told Politico. "If SLS is not going to fly more than once every couple of years, it's just not going to be a significant player in the future in space, particularly when Starship is flown."

Of course, Musk has been known to make grand statements that haven't come true, and the production of his other firm Tesla's Cybertruck has faced long delays since it was first unveiled in 2019. Still, given the capabilities Starship has already shown off in test flights, and the recent promises made by Elon Musk and SpaceX, NASA and private contractors - including Northrup Grumman and Boeing - may find the status quo altered to the point they have to go back to the drawing board.

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Starship's advanced design is said to have NASA officials "sh**ting the bed"

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SpaceX's Starship carrying out test flight maneuvers. Elon Musk recently provided the first big update on SpaceX's Mars-bound rocket, Starship, and its competitors are watching on with "a mix of awe and horror", according to a report from Politico .

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Kevin Kelly, the founder of WIRED, has recently updated his list of " unsolicited pieces of advice." They are excellent. One that struck a chord with me was, " A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea."

This is an oft referenced, but seldom practiced, truth. It resonates with Isaac Asimov's observation that, "For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display."

I've written about this before, both about how to deal with the embarrassment inherent in the creative process, and also about the mindset required to endure the risk of a bad idea. Yet even for myself, it's hard to remember - and I vowed to " join the quantity group" for New Year's! ** Show me a person who comes up with a volume of possible answers instead of the answer - or better yet, a number of possible questions, rather than the question - and I'll show you a wildly creative individual.

One technique we've been advocating in our classes at Stanford is a "Daily Idea Quota," a regular practice of deliberately flipping your mindset to a quantity orientation - as opposed to a quality orientation - on one problem per day.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.

**As an aside, down a dark corner of the internet, I found this fantastic piece of investigative journalism (by James Clear, via Austin Kleon) to get to the source of the parable that advocates for the quality group.

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Drive Quality By Quantity - Jeremy Utley

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Kevin Kelly, the founder of WIRED, says, "A multitude of bad ideas is necessary for one good idea." This is an oft referenced, but seldom practiced, truth.

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Have you noticed how hard it's become to focus these days, to know what really matters, get out of the stuck zone, start to build momentum and actually finish the stuff that truly is important to you? It was already hard in Before Times, and now, we might as well go ahead and 10X the challenge. If you're feeling this, you're not alone. The struggle is real. But, what if there was a way to quickly figure out what matters most, focus on that, dislodge the wheel-spinning inertia, get unstuck, and go from idea to done? To become a productivity Jedi. That is what we're talking about in today's powerful Best Of conversation with one of my closest advisors, regular collaborator, multi-award-winning author of the book, Start Finishing , and founder of Productive Flourishing Charlie Gilkey.

We dive into Charlie's specific ideas around why so much of our effort to be productive fails, and how to rewire our brains and schedules and actions to more easily see beyond distraction, identify what really matters, choose what's worth finishing, then take immediate action to make it happen. Along the way, we also explore how Charlie's highly-unique background as a philosopher, military officer, productivity strategist and consultant to creative professionals, founders and fast-growth entrepreneurial teams has shaped his powerful lens of going from idea to done.

You can find Charlie at: Website | Instagram
If you LOVED this episode:

You'll also love the conversations we had with Brad Feld about focusing in what really matters in life or what he calls picking your 2% and putting everything up against it.
My new book is available! Check out our offerings & partners:

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How to Get Unstuck & Finish What Matters | Charlie Gilkey [Best Of]

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Have you noticed how hard it's become to focus these days, to know what really matters, get out of the stuck zone, start to build momentum and actually finish the stuff that truly is important to you? It was already hard in Before Times, and now, we might as well go ahead and 10X the challenge.

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Highway expansions tend to bring more greenhouse gas emissions. A few states are trying to change that dynamic, but it won't be easy.

Evening rush hour traffic in Denver. The Colorado governor, Jared Polis, has promised to cut transportation emissions by 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Credit... David Zalubowski/Associated Press

The highways in Colorado, one of the nation's fastest-growing states, are frequently clogged with suburban workers driving into Denver, skiers heading high into the Rocky Mountains and trucks rumbling across the Interstates.

A Western frontier state with an affinity for the open road and Subaru Outbacks, Colorado's traditional answer to traffic congestion could be summed up in two words: more asphalt.

But widening highways and paving new roads often just spurs people to drive more, research shows. And as concerns grow about how tailpipe emissions are heating the planet, Colorado is among a handful of car-dominated states that are rethinking road building.

In December, Colorado adopted a first-of-its-kind climate change regulation that will push transportation planners to redirect funding away from highway expansions and toward projects that cut vehicle pollution, such as buses and bike lanes.

It's a big change for Colorado, which is reeling from devastating wildfires and droughts fueled by global warming and where Denver and the Front Range often exceed federal ozone pollution standards, partly from vehicle exhaust. Under Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, the state aims to cut transportation emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

The rule marks a new front in the battle against climate change. Increasingly, experts warn that if states want to slash planet-warming emissions from cars and trucks, it won't be enough to sell more electric vehicles. They'll also have to encourage people to drive less.

In a nation built around the automobile, that's not easy.

"It's a tough shift for us," said Shoshana Lew, executive director of Colorado's Department of Transportation. "Colorado is very different from a place like New York City that already has lots of transit. But if we want to clean up our transportation system as quickly as possible, we need to try everything we can."

Road work in Denver in July, part of a project to expand Interstate 70. Credit... Hyoung Chang/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post, via Getty Images

Over the coming decade, the decisions that Colorado and other states make about how many new roads to build could have major consequences for America's ability to tackle climate change. Transportation is the nation's largest source of greenhouse gases, producing 29 percent of emissions, and has been stubbornly difficult to clean up.

The new $1 trillion infrastructure law invests billions in climate-friendly programs like electric car chargers and public transit. But it also gives states $273 billion for highways over five years, with few strings attached. One analysis from the Georgetown Climate Center found that this money could significantly increase emissions if states keep adding highway lanes.

Already, there are signs that even states with ambitious climate goals like Washington, Illinois and Nevada hope to use federal funds to expand roadways, such as adding lanes to a congested section of the Eisenhower Freeway near Chicago. In 2019, states spent one-third of their highway dollars on new road capacity, roughly $19.3 billion, with the rest spent on repairs.

"This is a major blind spot for politicians who say they care about climate change," said Kevin DeGood, director of infrastructure policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. "Everyone gets that oil pipelines are carbon infrastructure. But new highways are carbon infrastructure, too. Both lock in place 40 to 50 years of emissions."

The core problem, environmentalists say, is a phenomenon known as " induced traffic demand." When states build new roads or add lanes to congested highways, instead of reducing traffic, more cars show up to fill the available space.

Induced demand explains why, when Texas widened the Katy Freeway in Houston to more than 20 lanes in 2011, at a cost of $2.8 billion, congestion returned to previous levels within a few years.

"It's not always intuitive to people, but the economic logic is pretty simple: If you make driving easier, people will do more of it," said Susan Handy, a transportation expert at the University of California, Davis, who helped develop a calculator showing how highway expansions can increase emissions in different cities.

Denver has added several light-rail lines and express bus routes in recent years. Credit... Hyoung Chang/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post, via Getty Images

Some Colorado communities are wary of any shift away from traditional road building. North of Denver sits Weld County, a largely rural region dotted with cattle ranches and oil wells where home building has exploded in recent years, along with traffic. Local officials want new roads, including a $300 million proposal to add two lanes to a busy stretch of Interstate 25 linking Weld County's swelling exurbs with Denver.

"We need more road capacity," said Scott James, a Weld County commissioner. "And my fear is this rule will either hobble funding for new roads or force us to spend millions on a bunch of buses or transit that just won't work for us in rural Colorado. People move here from Denver or Boulder because they're looking for a certain type of lifestyle. Are we going to punish them for that?"

Under the new rule, part of a $5.4 billion transportation package passed by the state legislature, local governments will have to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions expected from future road projects, factoring in induced traffic. Those plans will have to adhere to an overall emissions budget: If localities want to expand highways, they need to offset the extra emissions with cleaner projects, such as public transit, bicycle trails, electric-vehicle chargers, car-pooling or land-use changes that help limit suburban sprawl.

Enforcement is strict: If local governments exceed their emissions budgets, the state can withhold funding for roads. Colorado officials estimate the rule could shift $6.7 billion away from highways by 2050 and reduce driving miles by 7 to 12 percent, compared with business as usual.

Environmental groups hope the rule will force drastic revisions to long-planned highway expansions, like a proposal to widen a congested section of Interstate 25 near low-income neighborhoods in downtown Denver.

"There's a real opportunity to step back and rethink what we're doing," said Danny Katz, executive director of the environmental advocacy group CoPIRG. "If we need to make safety improvements to existing highways, we absolutely should. But let's resist the temptation to keep widening roads and lock in a car-only approach."

But business groups say Colorado has underinvested in highways for years, while adding 800,000 residents since 2010, and roads designed for an earlier era need to grow.

"We do think it's likely that emissions will come down naturally as vehicle technology gets cleaner," said Mike Kopp, president of Colorado Concern, a business coalition. "But in the meantime, people are stuck in traffic, it's a truly immiserating experience, and we need to alleviate that."

State officials are trying to thread the needle. Ms. Lew, who heads the Transportation Department, said in the short term she expected several key highway expansion projects to go forward albeit with modifications. For instance, a $700 million plan to ease a bottleneck on Interstate 70 near Floyd Hill, where mountain-bound skiers jam the roads on weekends, will include a new "micro-transit" shuttle service offering an alternative to cars.

"There's not a world where refusing to build another lane there would stop people from trying to go skiing," Ms. Lew said. "But if we can put in a system of small buses that give people more choices, we can mitigate the impacts."

The state faces major challenges: While Denver's transit agency has added several new light-rail lines and express bus routes in recent years, ridership was declining even before the coronavirus pandemic scared people off buses and trains. And the regional organizations that propose transportation projects have limited control over local zoning rules that determine how densely cities develop, and whether homes are built near jobs and transit stops. Those decisions can profoundly influence driving habits.

"We've been building communities oriented around cars and single-family homes pretty much since World War II," said Andrew Gunning, executive director of the Pikes Peak Area Council of Governments, which oversees the rapidly growing region around Colorado Springs. "Trying to retrofit and change how we build those communities is going to be a monumental undertaking."

Traffic heading toward ski resorts west of Denver in 2018. Credit... Thomas Peipert/Associated Press

While few states have copied Colorado's approach, the pushback against highway expansions is slowly growing.

In Oregon, youth activists are protesting a $1.2 billion plan to widen I-5 through Portland, warning that the expansion will undercut the state's climate goals. In Wisconsin, officials agreed to review a proposal to add two lanes to I-94 bordering a mostly Black neighborhood in Milwaukee after criticism from civil rights and environmental groups.

In Virginia, transportation planners had long agonized over traffic jams on I-95 between Fredericksburg and Washington. But after extensive study, they found that adding two extra lanes would cost $12.5 billion and do little to solve congestion. So, last year, Ralph Northam, a Democrat who was governor at the time, announced a $3.7 billion deal to expand commuter rail service instead.

California has begun revamping its highway policies in an effort to curb car travel. Despite leading the nation in electric vehicle sales, the state is struggling to cut emissions because Californians keep driving more miles.

The state will now measure induced traffic during environmental reviews of new highways and plans to prioritize funding toward fixing existing roads rather than building new ones. Last year, officials halted a plan to widen the 710 freeway, which carries truck traffic from the port of Long Beach, over concerns that it would displace residents in low-income neighborhoods and worsen air pollution.

"The rhetoric we sometimes hear is that we're trying to take away people's cars or restrict their mobility," said Darwin Moosavi, deputy secretary for environmental policy at the California State Transportation Agency. "But what we're really talking about is giving people better and more convenient options so that they don't necessarily have to drive everywhere."

The Biden administration is also weighing in. In December, the Federal Highway Administration issued a memo urging states "to repair and maintain existing transportation infrastructure before making new investments in highway expansions."

Yet the administration has limited authority to enforce this guidance, and state transportation officials have pushed back against restrictions on highway spending.

"Each individual state has unique challenges they need to address, and there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution," said Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.

An early version of the infrastructure bill written by House Democrats would have curtailed states' ability to fund highway expansions. But those provisions were removed in the Senate.

The law does include $90 billion for public transportation and $66 billion for rail. It also gives the federal Department of Transportation $114 billion in discretionary grants that could influence state plans. But ultimately, states have the final say.

"There's lots of money for transit, but if new transit lines are surrounded by hundreds of newly expanded highways, how do we think that will work out for the climate?" said Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America, a transit advocacy group. "The status quo is going to win unless everything aligns to change it."

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How Billions in Infrastructure Funding Could Worsen Global Warming

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Highway expansions tend to bring more greenhouse gas emissions. A few states are trying to change that dynamic, but it won't be easy. The highways in Colorado, one of the nation's fastest-growing states, are frequently clogged with suburban workers driving into Denver, skiers heading high into the Rocky Mountains and trucks rumbling across the Interstates.

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There's no silver bullet to the climate crisis, but nuclear fusion may be the closest thing to it. In the quest for a near-limitless, zero-carbon source of reliable power, scientists have generated fusion energy before, but they have struggled for decades to sustain it for very long.

On Wednesday, however, scientists working in the United Kingdom announced that they more than doubled the previous record for generating and sustaining nuclear fusion, which is the same process that allows the sun and stars to shine so brightly.

Nuclear fusion is, as its name suggests, the fusing of two or more atoms into one larger one, a process that unleashes a tremendous amount of energy as heat.

Nuclear power used today is created by a different process, called fission, which relies on splitting, rather than fusing, atoms. But that process creates waste that can remain radioactive for tens of thousands of years. It's also potentially hazardous in the event of an accident, such as Japan's 2011 Fukushima disaster, triggered by an earthquake and tsunami.

Fusion, on the other hand, is much safer, can produce little waste and requires only small amounts of abundant, naturally-sourced fuel, including elements extracted from seawater. This makes it an attractive option as the world transitions away from the fossil fuels driving climate change.

In a giant donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak, scientists working in the English village of Culham, near Oxford, were able to generate a record-breaking 59 megajoules of sustained fusion energy over five seconds on December 21 last year. Five seconds is the limit the machine can sustain the power before its magnets overheat.

A magnetic field is required to contain the high temperatures needed to carry out the fusion process, which can be as high as 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the center of the sun.

"Our experiment showed for the first time that it's possible to have a sustained fusion process using exactly the same fuel mix planned for future fusion power plants," Tony Donné, CEO of EUROfusion, said at a press conference.

EUROfusion, a consortium that includes 4,800 experts, students and staff from across Europe, carried out the project in partnership with the UK Atomic Energy Authority. The European Commission also contributed funding.

The potential for fusion energy is enormous. The experiment used the elements deuterium and tritium - which are isotopes of hydrogen - to fuel the fusion. Those elements are likely to be used in commercial-scale fusion,and can be found in seawater.

"The energy you can get out of the fuel deuterium and tritium is massive. For example, powering the whole of current UK electrical demand for a day would require 0.5 tonnes of deuterium, which could be extracted from seawater - where its concentration is low but plentiful," Tony Roulstone from the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering told CNN.

He said the fusion generated by the tokamak - called the Joint European Torus (JET) - was around the same as a wind turbine, and could power one house's energy for a day.

"But if generated repeatedly, it could power thousands of houses."

Experts say the results prove that nuclear fusion is possible, and no longer a pipedream solution for the climate crisis.

"These landmark results have taken us a huge step closer to conquering one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all," said Ian Chapman, CEO of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Mark Wenman, a nuclear materials researcher at Imperial College London, said in a statement that the experiment's results are "exciting," and that they show "fusion energy really is no longer just a dream of the far future - the engineering to make it a useful, clean power source is achievable and happening now."

JET has been subject to such extreme heat and pressure that this experiment is likely the last it will cope with.

But its results are seen as a huge boon for ITER, a fusion megaproject in the south of France supported by the US, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea and Russia. The ITER project is 80% built and aims to begin nuclear fusion sometime in 2025-26.

While JET's goal was to prove that nuclear fusion could be generated and sustained, ITER's aim is to produce a tenfold return on energy, or 500 MW of fusion power from 50 MW of energy put in.

The results are promising, but mastering nuclear fusion as an everyday energy sourceis still likely a long way off.

"The JET results are impressive and probably will get better as they proceed through their experiments. They are producing high power 12 MW, but right now just for five seconds. Much longer fusion burn is what is required," Roulstone said.

The most recent report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the latest science shows that the world must nearly halve its greenhouse gas emissions this decade and reach zero net emissions by 2050 to keep global warming in check. That means making a rapid transition away from fossil fuels, like coal, oil and gas.

Those actions are required to have any hope of containing warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, seen as a threshold to substantially worsening climate impacts, according to the IPCC.

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A giant donut-shaped machine just proved a near-limitless clean power source is possible | CNN

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There's no silver bullet to the climate crisis, but nuclear fusion may be the closest thing to it. In the quest for a near-limitless, zero-carbon source of reliable power, scientists have generated fusion energy before, but they have struggled for decades to sustain it for very long.

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Feeding the planet's 8 billion people is challenge enough and our current industrialized commercial practices are causing such ecological damage that we may soon find ourselves hard-pressed to feed any more. For decades, scientists have sought out higher yields and faster growth at the expense of genetic diversity and disease - just look at what we've done to the humble banana. Now, finally, researchers are working to revitalize landrace and heirloom crop varieties, using their unique, and largely forgotten, genetic diversity to reimagine global agriculture.

In his new book, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them, BBC food journalist Dan Saladino scours the planet in search of animals, vegetables and legumes most at-risk of extinction, documenting their origins and declines, as well as the efforts being made to preserve and restore them. In the excerpt below, Saladino takes a look at all-important rice, the cereal that serves as a staple crop for more than 3.5 billion people around the world.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux publishing

Excerpted from Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2021 by Dan Saladino. All rights reserved.
Whereas the global Green Revolution was largely steered by American science and finance, China's push for greater food production was more self-contained. Both efforts happened more or less in parallel. Mao's attempt at rapid industrialization, the 'Great Leap Forward' in the late 1950s, forced farmers off their land, leading to famine and the death of millions. Soon after, an agricultural researcher, Yuan Longping, was given the task of helping China's recovery by increasing the supply of rice. Based in a lab in Hunan, Yuan, like Borlaug in Mexico, spent years working with landraces and crossing varieties in meticulous experiments. By the early 1970s, he had developed Nan-you No. 2, a hybrid rice so productive it had the potential to increase food supply by nearly a third. Farmers were told to replace the old varieties with the new, and by the start of the 1980s, more than 50 per cent of China's rice came from this single variety. But, as with Borlaug's wheat, Yuan's rice depended on huge amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and lots and lots of water.

In the 1960s, in another part of Asia, a team of scientists were also breeding new rice varieties. What became known as the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines was funded by the American Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. The IRRI's plant breeders also made a breakthrough drawing on the genetics of a dwarf plant. This new pest-resistant, high-yielding rice, called IR8, was released across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1966. Using the Green Revolution package of irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides, IR8 tripled yields and became known as 'miracle rice'. As it rapidly spread across Asia (with the necessary agrichemicals subsidized by Western foundations and governments), farmers were encouraged to abandon their landrace varieties and help share the new seeds with neighbors and relatives in other villages. Social occasions, including weddings, were treated by Western strategists as opportunities to distribute IR8. A decade later, rice scientist Gurdev Khush, the son of an Indian rice farmer, improved on the 'miracle rice' (IR8 wasn't the tastiest rice to eat and had a chalky texture). A later iteration, IR64, was so productive that it became the most widely cultivated rice variety in the world. But while most of the world was applauding the increase in calories created by the new rice varieties, some people were sounding a note of caution about what was also being lost.

In July 1972, with the Green Revolution in full flow, the botanist Jack Harlan published an article entitled 'The Genetics of Disaster'. As the world's population was increasing faster than at any time in history, Harlan said, crop diversity was being eroded at an equally unprecedented rate. 'These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine,' he argued. 'In a very real sense, the future of the human race rides on these materials.' Bad things can happen at the hands of nature, Harlan reminded his readers, citing the Irish potato famine. 'We can survive if a forest or shade tree is destroyed, but who would survive if wheat, rice, or maize were to be destroyed? We are taking risks we need not and should not take.' The solutions being developed in the Green Revolution would be as good as they could be until they failed - and when they did, the human race would be left facing disaster, he warned. 'Few will criticize Dr. Borlaug for doing his job too well. The enormous increase in . . . yields is a welcome relief and his achievements are deservedly recognized, but if we fail to salvage at least what is left of the landrace populations of Asia before they are replaced, we can justifiably be condemned by future generations for squandering our heritage and theirs.' We were moving from genetic erosion, he said, to genetic wipe-out. 'The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner, and the public is unaware and unconcerned. Must we wait for disaster to be real before we are heard? Will people listen only after it is too late?' It may be nearly too late, but, fifty years on, people are listening to Harlan.

One of them is Susan McCouch, Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University and an expert on rice genetics. Her research includes the less familiar aus rice which evolved in the Bangladeshi delta. 'It has the most stress-tolerant genes of all the rice we know,' says McCouch. 'It grows on poor soils, survives drought and is the fastest species to go from seed to grain.' And yet aus is endangered. Most farmers in Bangladesh have abandoned it and switched to more commercial varieties. Only the poorest people have saved the rice, farmers who couldn't afford to buy fertilizers and build irrigation systems. Its genetics are so rare because, unlike japonica and indica which travelled far and wide, aus stayed put. 'The people who domesticated it never left the river delta,' says McCouch. 'They weren't empire builders, didn't have armies and never enslaved populations.' But by bequeathing the world aus, they have left their mark.

In 2018, McCouch, along with researchers from USDA, released a new rice called Scarlett. It was, the team said, a rice with nutty rich flavors but also 'packed with high levels of antioxidants and flavonoids along with vitamin E'. To create it, McCouch had crossed an American long-grain rice called Jefferson and a rice that was discovered in Malaysia. The reason the new rice was packed with nutrients and called Scarlett was because the Malaysian plant was a red-colored wild species. One person who would have been unsurprised at the special qualities of these colored grains was Sun Wenxiang, the farmer I had visited in Sichuan.

Inside a room on his farm, Sun was packing up small parcels of his special red rice to send to customers in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Hangzhou. They order his red mouth rice on WeChat, the Chinese social media app used by more than a billion people across Asia that is part Twitter and part PayPal (and so much more). Some have told him they buy it for its taste or intriguing color, but most buy it for its health properties.

For farmers such as Sun working to save China's endangered foods, help is at hand at the Centre for Rural Reconstruction, a modern day iteration of a movement founded a century ago to empower peasants and revitalize villages. In the 1920s a group of intellectuals and smallholders set up the original Rural Reconstruction Movement to develop farms, improve crops, establish co-operatives and sell more produce in China's towns and cities. After the revolution, and during Mao's rule, it disappeared, but in the 1990s was resurrected. A former government economist named Professor Wen Tiejun believed rural communities across China faced serious decline as manufacturing boomed and millions of people migrated from thousands of villages. By 2010, the country had experienced the largest and most rapid rural-to-urban migration ever witnessed in human history. Professor Wen began to ask what this meant for the future of China's small-scale farmers and the food they produced and, as a result, he launched the New Rural Reconstruction Movement.

The garden surrounding the two-story training center 50 miles north of Beijing is a statement of intent: its raised beds are fertilized with night soil, the nutrients processed from a row of eco-toilets (an ancient technique, as Chinese farmers enriched their fields using human and animal waste for thousands of years). The idea came from a book written a century ago, not by a Chinese agricultural expert, but an American one. Farmers of Forty Centuries by Franklin Hiram King has become essential reading matter for some students at China's Centre for Rural Reconstruction.

In the early 1900s, King, an agronomist from Wisconsin, worked at the United States Department of Agriculture, but he was regarded as a maverick, more interested in indigenous farming systems than the agricultural expansion the department had been set up to deliver. Convinced that he could learn more from peasant farmers than the scientists in Washington, King left the United States in 1909 and set out on an eight-month expedition through Asia. 'I had long desired to stand face to face with Chinese and Japanese farmers,' he wrote in the book's introduction, 'to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress and experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt.' King died in 1911 before he had completed his book and the work was pretty much forgotten until 1927, when a London publisher, Jonathan Cape, discovered the manuscript and published it, ensuring it remained in print for the next twenty years. It went on to influence the founding figures in Britain's organic movement, Albert Howard and Eve Balfour. The farmers who visit the Centre for Rural Reconstruction and come across King's book, will read an account of how food was produced in China's villages a century ago. Crops grown then, now endangered, are also being resurrected.

Inside a storeroom at the center, now a bank of some of China's rarest foods, I was shown boxes full of seeds and jars and packets of ingredients all produced by farming projects in villages supported by the New Rural Reconstruction Movement. All were distinctive products that were helping to increase farmers' incomes. There was dark green soy from Yunnan in the south; red-colored ears of wheat from the north; wild tea harvested from ancient forests; and bottles of honey-colored rice wine. And among other varieties of landrace rice was Sun Wenxiang's red mouth glutinous grains.

'When we lose a traditional food, a variety of rice or a fruit, we store up problems for the future,' Professor Wen told me. 'There's no question China needs large-scale farms, but we also need diversity.' With 20 per cent of the world's population, China encapsulates the biggest food dilemmas of our times. Should it intensify farming to produce more calories, or diversify to help save the planet? In the long run, there is no option but to change the system. China suffers from wide-scale soil erosion, health-harming levels of pollution and water shortages. As a consequence, land has become contaminated, there are algae blooms around its coastline and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

There are signs of change. In September 2016 China ratified the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Among the specific targets it set was zero growth in fertilizer and pesticide use. To conserve more of its genetic resources and crop diversity, China is one of the few countries investing heavily in new botanic gardens to protect and study endangered species. The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has also built a collection of half a million samples of landrace crops, varieties now being researched for future use. This is what Jack Harlan might have called the genetics of salvation. It's a long way from King's Farmers of Forty Centuries, but there is clear recognition that China's current food system can't go on as before.

'We need to modernize and develop, but that doesn't mean letting go of our past,' said Wen. 'The entire world should not be chasing one way of living, we can't all eat the same kind of food, that is a crazy ideology.' And then he shared the famous quote attributed to Napoleon: 'Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.' 'Well,' said Wen, 'we have woken up and we've started to eat more like the rest of the world. We need to find better ways of living and farming. Maybe some answers can be found in our traditions.'

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Hitting the Books: 'Miracle Rice' fed China's revolution but endangered its crop diversity | Engadget

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In his new book, Eating to Extinction, BBC food journalist Dan Saladino scours the planet in search of animals, vegetables and legumes most at-risk of extinction, documenting their origins and declines, as well as the efforts being made to restore them..

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In the story of our lives, we might be the main character, but work is the dominating theme, our constant motivation. It's the central thing we do as adults, the primary focus of our mental function for most hours of the day, most days of the week. The types of jobs we have influence who we know, where we live, how much society respects us. Being jobless, then, isn't only difficult because of the financial instability - it's also a kind of social death. As such, the fate of the jobless - the attendant derision or pity is often used as a cautionary tale. And the warning works: Most of us are terrified of losing our livelihoods.

The so-called Great Resignation has been making headline after headline for months now, as people have been quitting their jobs in droves. There were predictions that when federal pandemic benefits expired just after Labor Day, industries facing a labor shortage would find an influx of job seekers. And yet, snatching away benefits hasn't worked that way. So far, there hasn't been a dramatic increase in applicants. It's not just a perplexing economic problem. People rejecting available jobs runs counter to what we've been taught since childhood - that work isn't just how we live our lives, it's why we live our lives.

It's a sign of the times - and of how fed up people are with the conditions of work - that people are now rejecting this worldview, and doing so to such a degree that it's become a movement. If the movement has a motto, it would be the word that's been on everyone's lips over the past 18 months: burnout. According to an Insider survey of over 1,000 American workers, 61% said they were currently "at least somewhat burned out." An Indeed report from March found that the majority of respondents said their burnout had worsened during the pandemic, with 52% overall saying they were currently burned out. You've probably heard - or said yourself - the following things repeated ad nauseum: "I'm so tired. I'm so exhausted. I can't believe we have to keep going."

"I sobbed," she recalls. "And I was like, I haven't cried like this since I was dumped by my abusive ex." It was as painful as any romantic betrayal, she says: " I felt empty." Only, unlike a breakup, Alice still is connected to her employers, "because I'm financially dependent on them."

There's a lot of debate about what exactly burnout is: A medical condition? A philosophical matter? Is it just the cost of doing business? Of being alive? According to the World Health Organization, it's an "occupational phenomenon." But that seems to be an anodyne way of saying that the exact nature, cause, and solution to burnout aren't entirely clear.

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is a test developed by psychologists to measure this "phenomenon" on three scales: exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy. An online test on MindTools asks you to rate yourself on statements like, "I am harder and less sympathetic with people than perhaps they deserve," and "I feel that I have no one to talk to." It also includes a statement on perceived workload, but it doesn't include a numeric scale of the average number of hours worked. Overwork in sheer hours seems to be too simple a metric to diagnose burnout.

For a long time, "burnout" was a word most commonly used in the medical industry. In 2014, Dr. Richard Gunderman wrote an article for The Atlantic in which he argued that the reason medical students seem to suffer higher rates of burnout compared to other college students isn't because the work is intrinsically more difficult, but rather because the way they were being taught was often soul-crushing. It was an educational environment, he claimed, that did little to nurture compassion - ironic, considering these were training to care about the wellbeing of others. Gunderman contends that burnout is not, then, necessarily caused by stress and overwork, but "the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice."

This is why burnout hits when work fails to live up to our expectations of it. Many of us were raised on the mantra: "It's not work if you love what you do," and so we want to believe that our jobs can not only provide financial stability, but also emotional and spiritual nourishment. Not all work is a calling, but the journey toward finding the right job can be likened to a pilgrimage. In a time of increasing secularism, work remains our steadfast religion.

In Peggy Lee's 1969 anthem Is That All There Is, she sings about the end of a great romance. But she's not despairing over the extreme pain that came with losing love - rather, she's disappointed that the end of her relationship wasn't more ruinous. "I thought I'd die," she sings, "But I didn't. And when I didn't, I said to myself: Is that all there is to love?"

And yet, in the depths of disillusionment and burnout, there can also sometimes be a strange sense of freedom in recognizing that work might never provide the purpose and emotional sustenance you once believed it would. And that's okay. You'll survive. Collectively, we will simply need to come up with a new way of thinking about work. It turns out, work - like any relationship - isn't the be-all, end-all we'd thought it could be.

Journalist Anne Helen Petersen, who wrote a viral Buzzfeed article on burnout that garnered millions of views, agrees, and believes purpose-driven passion is a particular trap for burnout. In her book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, she observes, "The desire for the cool job that you're passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon - and, as we'll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the 'honor' of performing it." Studies have also shown that "obsessive passion" can increase work conflict, which in turn increases the chance of burnout.

In order to survive without a passion for labor, work itself has to be less necessary for survival. But that's hard to imagine - a world where work doesn't take center stage, where you don't mention your job within minutes of meeting someone new. The concept of a post-work world has existed for a while now, but the idea that people should care less about their jobs, let alone work less, often causes deep moral outrage. This isn't all that surprising, considering how much of our identities are defined by work. It's as if, without work anchoring all of our lives, society itself will disintegrate.

She also reveals that while she's gotten some pushback from older generations on the idea that work doesn't need to be the great, overwhelming passion of your life, not everyone feels that way: "I think some [boomers] have gotten to this point in their life where they have a midlife crisis and are radicalized, like, 'I shouldn't do this. I look back on my life, and what do I have to show? What is a career? Who did I serve with my career?'"

"We're talking about really reorganizing the way work finds its place in your life," says Petersen. "We have to think about, What if work wasn't the center of our lives? How do we reorganize our entire life, our entire society, so that even if we are spending the most time doing it, that it is not the number one priority. It is not the way that we define whether we are successes and failures. It is not the primary access of our identity."

However much it feels like "everyone" is quitting their jobs, we should be wary of thinking that all, or even most people have the ability to do so. It's also unclear yet that we're seeing a major shift in power between workers and employers. The Great Resignation has likely been bolstered by stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits. But most of us need jobs as a matter of financial necessity, and quitting on the spot remains only a pleasant fantasy for many, rather than a plausible reality.

Still, though, what it represents is a hopeful blip, and a reminder to employers that their futures are also precarious if they don't take care of their workers. Perhaps it could be an inspiration toward implementing a long-term bulwark against burnout. Instead of encouraging vacations, discrete periods of rest, it's time to enact labor protections that guarantee higher wages, that end at-will employment, that boost unemployment benefits permanently, that disentangle healthcare access from employment status. In other words, creating a world where workers who aren't being treated well, who aren't satisfied with their jobs, can simply quit without a backwards glance. Until that happens, burnout will continue to be endemic in our society, and individuals will continue to find their own solutions for how to cope.

Alice, though, is still at her burnout job, finishing up a long-term project that could take anywhere from six months to a year. "I dream of working 30 hours max a week," she says. "I would love to take a year off. But I don't have the money."

When psychologist Herbert Freudenberger coined the term "burnout" in the 1970s, it was a very personal endeavor, a result of his attempt to describe what he was feeling in his own line of work. "I don't know how to have fun," he observed in a voice recording describing his symptoms. "I don't know how to be readily joyful."

He didn't explicitly ask, "Is that all there is?" But he might as well have. After all, part of the recovery from burnout is making a promise to prioritize being joyful, in whatever ways we can. If the old career adage promised that as long as you do what you love, you'd never work a day in your life, the new one is simply: Work is just work. And life is too short and important to be wholly dedicated to it. As Peggy Lee sings: If that's all there is, then let's keep dancing.

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Is That All There Is? The Burnout Generation Wants Some Answers

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In the story of our lives, we might be the main character, but work is the dominating theme, our constant motivation. It's the central thing we do as adults, the primary focus of our mental function for most hours of the day, most days of the week.

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‘History of the World Part II’ Variety Series Ordered at Hulu, Mel Brooks to Write and Executive Produce (EXCLUSIVE)

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“History of the World, Part I” is finally getting a Part II, with Hulu ordering a variety series followup to the classic Mel Brooks comedy film, Variety has learned exclusively. “…

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To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses.

Now scientists have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction - and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.

The same team that built the first living robots ( "Xenobots," assembled from frog cells - reported in 2020) has discovered that these computer-designed and hand-assembled organisms can swim out into their tiny dish, find single cells, gather hundreds of them together, and assemble "baby" Xenobots inside their Pac-Man-shaped "mouth" - that, a few days later, become new Xenobots that look and move just like themselves.

And then these new Xenobots can go out, find cells, and build copies of themselves. Again and again.

"With the right design - they will spontaneously self-replicate," says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research.

The results of the new research were published November 29, 2021, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Into the Unknown

In a Xenopus laevis frog, these embryonic cells would develop into skin. "They would be sitting on the outside of a tadpole, keeping out pathogens and redistributing mucus," says Michael Levin, a professor of biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and co-leader of the new research. "But we're putting them into a novel context. We're giving them a chance to reimagine their multicellularity."

And what they imagine is something far different than skin. "People have thought for quite a long time that we've worked out all the ways that life can reproduce or replicate. But this is something that's never been observed before," says co-author Douglas Blackiston, the senior scientist at Tufts University who assembled the Xenobot "parents" and developed the biological portion of the new study.

"We've discovered that there is this previously unknown space within organisms, or living systems, and it's a vast space." - Josh Bongard

"This is profound," says Levin. "These cells have the genome of a frog, but, freed from becoming tadpoles, they use their collective intelligence, a plasticity, to do something astounding." In earlier experiments, the scientists were amazed that Xenobots could be designed to achieve simple tasks. Now they are stunned that these biological objects-a computer-designed collection of cells - will spontaneously replicate. "We have the full, unaltered frog genome," says Levin, "but it gave no hint that these cells can work together on this new task," of gathering and then compressing separated cells into working self-copies.

"These are frog cells replicating in a way that is very different from how frogs do it. No animal or plant known to science replicates in this way," says Sam Kriegman, the lead author on the new study, who completed his PhD in Bongard's lab at UVM and is now a post-doctoral researcher at Tuft's Allen Center and Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

On its own, the Xenobot parent, made of some 3,000 cells, forms a sphere. "These can make children but then the system normally dies out after that. It's very hard, actually, to get the system to keep reproducing," says Kriegman. But with an artificial intelligence program working on the Deep Green supercomputer cluster at UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Core, an evolutionary algorithm was able to test billions of body shapes in simulation - triangles, squares, pyramids, starfish - to find ones that allowed the cells to be more effective at the motion-based "kinematic" replication reported in the new research.

"We asked the supercomputer at UVM to figure out how to adjust the shape of the initial parents, and the AI came up with some strange designs after months of chugging away, including one that resembled Pac-Man," says Kriegman. "It's very non-intuitive. It looks very simple, but it's not something a human engineer would come up with. Why one tiny mouth? Why not five? We sent the results to Doug and he built these Pac-Man-shaped parent Xenobots. Then those parents built children, who built grandchildren, who built great-grandchildren, who built great-great-grandchildren." In other words, the right design greatly extended the number of generations.

Kinematic replication is well-known at the level of molecules - but it has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms.

"We've discovered that there is this previously unknown space within organisms, or living systems, and it's a vast space," says Bongard, a professor in UVM's College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. "How do we then go about exploring that space? We found Xenobots that walk. We found Xenobots that swim. And now, in this study, we've found Xenobots that kinematically replicate. What else is out there?"

Or, as the scientists write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study: "life harbors surprising behaviors just below the surface, waiting to be uncovered."

Responding to Risk

Some people may find this exhilarating. Others may react with concern, or even terror, to the notion of a self-replicating biotechnology. For the team of scientists, the goal is deeper understanding.

"We are working to understand this property: replication. The world and technologies are rapidly changing. It's important, for society as a whole, that we study and understand how this works," says Bongard. These millimeter-sized living machines, entirely contained in a laboratory, easily extinguished, and vetted by federal, state and institutional ethics experts, "are not what keep me awake at night. What presents risk is the next pandemic; accelerating ecosystem damage from pollution; intensifying threats from climate change," says UVM's Bongard. "This is an ideal system in which to study self-replicating systems. We have a moral imperative to understand the conditions under which we can control it, direct it, douse it, exaggerate it."

Bongard points to the COVID epidemic and the hunt for a vaccine. "The speed at which we can produce solutions matters deeply. If we can develop technologies, learning from Xenobots, where we can quickly tell the AI,: 'We need a biological tool that does X and Y and suppresses Z,' -that could be very beneficial. Today, that takes an exceedingly long time." The team aims to accelerate how quickly people can go from identifying a problem to generating solutions-"like deploying living machines to pull microplastics out of waterways or build new medicines," Bongard says.

"We need to create technological solutions that grow at the same rate as the challenges we face," Bongard says.

And the team sees promise in the research for advancements toward regenerative medicine. "If we knew how to tell collections of cells to do what we wanted them to do, ultimately, that's regenerative medicine-that's the solution to traumatic injury, birth defects, cancer, and aging," says Levin. "All of these different problems are here because we don't know how to predict and control what groups of cells are going to build. Xenobots are a new platform for teaching us."

Reference: "Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms" by Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, and Josh Bongard, 29 November 2021, .
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2112672118

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Xenobots: Scientists Build the First-Ever Living Robots That Can Reproduce

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To persist, life must reproduce. Over billions of years, organisms have evolved many ways of replicating, from budding plants to sexual animals to invading viruses. Now scientists have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction - and applied their discovery to create the first-ever, self-replicating living robots.

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Despite water covering two-thirds of the earth's surface, water scarcity remains a persistent issue among developed and developing countries alike. Fortunately, Adam Wood and Philip LeDuc have been working on a new solution.

It began with LeDuc's international travel and thinking about water scarcity as one of the world's future major challenges. "I've been collaborating with people in Portugal for over a decade, and they used to have these giant salt mounds near the ocean," said LeDuc, a professor of mechanical engineering. "This made me think about biology near the salt and how that could help desalinate seawater for people. I used to say, 'I bet you there's bacteria in there that has probably learned to break down salt.'" This bacteria, he theorized, could be used as a natural filter. However, he explained, no student would take on this direction of research for 10 years, until Ph.D. student Adam Wood came along. Wood took these ideas and theorized using mangroves instead of bacteria. Mangroves, trees with large groupings of exposed roots that live along the edges of the water, have evolved over time to transform salt water into fresh water.

We're trying to take something that already exists in the world and usually goes to waste and use it to produce freshwater from salty water.
Adam Wood, Ph.D. student, Mechanical Engineering

They developed the mangrove system, but Wood discovered an even more clever idea shortly after: hooking up a $5 solar panel with a bonfire could create a self-sustainable system, using wasted bread as a filtration system, similar to the mangroves. "The big idea behind this is that typically, desalination systems are quite expensive. We're trying to take something that already exists in the world and usually goes to waste and use it to produce freshwater from salty water; hence the discarded bread," Wood said.

Source: College of Engineering

How will this wasted bread be acquired? Wood suggested collaborating with bread suppliers using their takeback agreements, wherein supplies not sold in grocery stores or restaurants are returned to be disposed of.

While there are multiple systems of water desalination, LeDuc and Wood's process uses capacitive deionization, requiring only a set of carbon electrodes and a low voltage power supply. It also requires a low-resistance pathway for oxygen diffusion and water transport, for which the bread was a surprisingly perfect candidate. "It's very high in carbon content. It has an inherently porous architecture, and the microstructure is repeatable. In general, it's really easy to work with, and it's one of the most wasted foods in the world," said Wood. Their approach is meant to address one of the biggest problems in the world, water scarcity, while also developing a solution that is more cost-effective and sustainable than current technologies.

Source: College of Engineering

"One of the big takeaways from this," explained LeDuc, "is that our electrodes are extremely low in cost, relative to current electrodes that people have been researching. They are also competitive in terms of their performance." LeDuc emphasized the beauty of using something as simple as bread to desalinate water, excited to share that it met a World Health Organization standard for salinity of drinking water.

Moving forward, LeDuc and Wood plan to examine scaling their system, the manufacturing process, and what actual operation will look like. For now, LeDuc is excited to see where nature and its incredible abilities to evolve will take him next in their research.

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When biology influences technology: using bread to desalinate water

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Despite water covering two-thirds of the earth's surface, water scarcity remains a persistent issue among developed and developing countries alike. Fortunately, Adam Wood and Philip LeDuc have been working on a new solution. It began with LeDuc's international travel and thinking about water scarcity as one of the world's future major challenges.

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During Webb's launch, deployment and commissioning, this page tracked Webb's current state in detail on its journey from Earth to entry into its L2 halo orbit through all steps of its deployment, during its cooldown to operational temperatures, through its instrument commissioning and finally to the delivery of its first science images. What you see is the final state of Webb at the time of the delivery of its first images.

While Webb is in flight to L2, its journey is tracked numerically at the top of the page showing its progress in distance, speed, percentage of trip complete to L2. Below those numbers, is a timeline switchable between DAYS/DISTANCE since launch, a thumbnail of Webb's MOST RECENTLY COMPLETED deployment step marking its place in TIME or DISTANCE on its 30 day journey to L2 followed by details of the current deployment step shown with a larger image, info and links.

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On the you can Deployment Explorer page you can explore all past and upcoming deployments on the way to L2. The Deployment Explorer opens to the MOST RECENTLY COMPLETED deployment step, all deployment steps to the "left" (on the top thumbnail nav) are COMPLETED, ll deployment steps to the "right" (on the top thumbnail nav) are FUTURE.

View All First Images Explore All Deployments

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During Webb's launch, deployment and commissioning, 'WhereIsWebb' tracked Webb's 'flight' to L2 orbit, its state and progress during its deployment and commissioning process, and finally the release of its first images. This process is now complete. During this process, the page constantly updated in near realtime as Webb traveled, deployed, cooled to operating temperature and as instruments were turned on, tested and verified.