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Why go green? Going green has numerous benefits. Green living helps make the planet sustainable and habitable. Let's get into some of the most important advantages of going green.

Green Coast was created for us all to learn how to position the world for the future of energy. Going green is an excellent decision. This is no longer a thing of the past. It is the way of life in the present. There are many ways of going green.

There are plenty of renewable energy technologies out there to consider such as biomass energy.

However, before we discuss the various advantages of going green, let's first understand the concept of going green.

What does going green mean?

Going green means embracing a way of life that helps preserve the environment by reducing, reusing, and recycling items.

Going green concept is learning and practicing an environmentally-mindful lifestyle that contributes towards protecting the environment and preservation and conservation of the natural resources, habitats, and biodiversity.

The aim of going green is to:

Reduce pollution. Here is how pollution affects the body and mind.

Reduce resources consumption and eliminate wastes.

Conserve natural resources and forests.

Maintain the natural ecological balance on earth so that all living things can survive and thrive in their natural habitat.

So, why is going green important?

Going green has numerous benefits at homes, in the workplace and to the economy at large. Different people across the planet are trying to come up with ways of going green by eliminating the use of plastics to growing organic foods. It's no doubt that if we make the planet eco-friendly, we could significantly achieve multiple benefits.

Some of the environment-friendly practices that we can embrace include:

Reduce energy costs and consumption through the use of renewable energy alternatives like wind, solar, hydroelectric, and geothermal energy among others

Buy and use energy star and saving appliances and plumbing systems

Purchase eco-friendly items and cars

Recycle biodegradable products and create DIY items

Eat green and organic foods

Choose a green mode of transportation like carpooling and telecommuting

Use green cleaning and skin products

Reduce paper consumption in offices and so much more

Join the Green Coast community to engage in a number of different discussion topics on how we can make the world a better place.

See Related: Inspirational Quotes on Climate Change

Three Advantages to Going Green

The advantages of going green can fall into three major categories: Economic, Health and Environmental Benefits.

Let's dive into these major categories and how you can do your part in going green.

A significant economic benefit of going green is that it helps lower costs and save money. Use of renewable energy helps reduce energy consumption which in turn helps save money used on electricity bills.

An apparent benefit of going green at home is that it helps reduce water and power bills significantly. It is possible when we reduce water consumption for example if we run the washing machines full loads or add water-saving appliances in shower and washrooms.

Another way to potentially save a hundred dollars is through the purchase of energy star appliances and water-saving plumbing systems.

Recycling is another way to go green. Recyclable products last longer than other products which can save on money used for repair and maintenance. When we recycle products as well as create Do-it-Yourself (DIY) items, we not only reduce wastage, but we also become more creative which helps create new products consistently and thus reduce the cost of buying new products.

Buying recycled products is also much cheaper and helps save on production costs since it would have been costly to create new products from fresh and virgin raw materials. Waste reduction also helps save the cost of waste disposal.

Another advantage of going green is that one can receive discounts and incentives for green living, for instance, some states offer incentives to those that opt to live in green homes. Green homes create ways to consume less energy which helps reduce utility and maintenance costs.

Going green by reducing or eliminating air pollutants makes the air we breathe in clean which means good health and less expenditure on hospital bills and insurance products.

Just like an adage goes, "prevention is better than cure," reducing pollutants is cheaper than trying to clear pollution from the environment if we allow it to spread.

Going green also reduces dependency on fossil fuels and other depleting resources. Organic farming boosts the economy and means that we can eat local, organic and seasonal produce which are affordable.

Another economic benefit of going green is that it helps strengthen and stimulate the economy through the creation of employment opportunities.

There are more jobs in both renewable energy operations and maintenance.

Use of green and renewable energy also helps reduce the emission of carbon dioxide to the environment which helps reduce carbon footprints.

The second category of the advantages of going green is the health benefits it offers. Going green reduces air pollutants. You can agree with me that breathing clean air makes one a healthier person.

According to a report by the World Health Organisation (WHO), air pollution causes around 2 million premature deaths every year globally. It's is indeed sad.

It's therefore essential to strive for green living. A healthy person is also a productive person at work and home. One way to go green is through the purchase of eco-friendly household and cosmetic products. It reduces chemicals and toxins in the air we breathe in.

Going green reduces air pollution and environmental toxins that could affect our body's immune system that fights infections, and that could expose us to diseases and fatal illnesses.

Another advantage of going green is that it helps decrease the number of pollutants released to the environment. If we opt for a green mode of transportation or purchase eco-friendly vehicles, it could significantly decrease the number of pollutants released to the environment.

It makes the air we breathe in clean and free of pollutants. Breathing clean air means better health.

Another advantage of going green is that it helps save rainforests which act as air purifiers. Food organically grown are also healthier and do not contain harmful chemicals, pesticides among other contaminants.

The health of our environment dramatically affects the quality of our food and ultimately our body's health.

If we consume polluted water or food contaminated with chemicals for example if vegetables we consume get exposed to acid rain or eat fish with heavy metal contamination, then it can cause terminal diseases and illnesses.

See Related: Best Books on Renewable Energy

An obvious advantage of going green is the environmental benefits, but going green has numerous environmental benefits. Going green through organic farming means responsible farming practices and land use. Organic farming reduces greenhouse gases emission and thus lowers air pollution.

Going green can help save the rainforests and thus preserve the animal habitat and ecosystem. The destruction of the ecosystem that offers nature goods and services for all living things means that we may lose on the many natures powerful products including those that could offer humankind health benefits.

An ideal advantage of going green at work is that it helps conserve the environment if we embrace paperless practices in the office through opting to go digital. It helps conserve the trees that would have otherwise been cut and used as raw materials to produce papers.

A benefit of going green at home is that it helps reduce wastage. When we reuse or give our unwanted items for recycling, it helps reduce waste products that could have otherwise ended up in the incinerators and landfills.

Valuable free land initially intended for landfills and incinerator plants can now be used for alternative purposes.

See Related: What is Sustainability?

Conclusion on the Advantages of Going Green

By going green, we build a healthier environment for all living creatures, both current and future generations.

It is essential to practice green living because if we don't, our lives would be in danger when there is no clean air, food, drinking water, or even get exposed to harsh climate changes and temperatures that can lead to global warming and life-threatening illnesses.

When we strive for green living, then we would significantly reduce the impact of extreme temperature and climate changes that could be brought about by global warming.

With a greener planet, you and I can look forward to a cleaner environment and a brighter future. With better quality of air, surroundings, and food, we are more likely to be healthier, to be around for longer to fulfill our life aspirations and enjoy our relationship with our loved ones.

What are your favorite advantages of going green? Please let us know in the comments below. We'd love to hear from you.

Let's all go green and live in a better world. Can you save money with sheep's wool insulation?

Related Resources

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Advantages of Going Green: Help the Environment

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Why go green? Going green has numerous benefits. Green living helps make the planet sustainable and habitable. Let's get into some of the most important advantages of going green. Green Coast was created for us all to learn how to position the world for the future of energy.

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Why I live a zero waste life | Lauren Singer | TEDxTeen

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Monarchy 2/2

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In the 21st century, monarchies remain pivotal parts of several democratic countries across Europe, including the UK. In a new book, edited by Unit founder Robert Hazell and Bob Morris, contributors from across Europe consider the constitutional and political role of monarchy, its powers and functions, how it is defined and regulated, the laws of succession and royal finances, relations with the media, its popularity, and why it endures.
Monarchy has a long history in Europe, being the predominant form of government from the Middle Ages until the First World War. At the turn of the twentieth century every country in Europe was a monarchy with just three exceptions: France, Switzerland and San Marino. But by the start of the twenty-first century, most European countries had ceased to be monarchies, and three quarters of the member states of the European Union are now republics. That has led to a teleological assumption that in time most advanced democracies will become republics, as the highest form of democratic government.

But there is a stubborn group of countries in Western Europe which defy that assumption, and they include some of the most advanced democracies in the world. In the most recent Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, six out of the top ten democracies - and nine of the top 15 - in the world were monarchies. They include six European monarchies: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the UK.

This paradox of an ancient hereditary institution surviving as a central part of modern democracies prompted the comparative study which led to our latest book, The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy: European Monarchies Compared. Our study, written by 20 academic experts, includes the six countries listed above, plus Belgium and Spain.

These monarchies have survived partly for geopolitical reasons, most of the other European monarchies having disappeared at the end of the First or Second World Wars. Their continuance has been accompanied by a steady diminution in their political power, which has shrunk almost to zero, and developing roles that support liberal democracy. What modern monarchies offer is non-partisan state headship set apart from the daily political struggle of executive government; the continuity of a family whose different generations attract the interest of all age groups; and disinterested support for civil society that is beyond the reach of partisan politics.

These roles have evolved because monarchy depends ultimately on the support of the public, and is more accountable than people might think: a point we return to at the end. So what is the secret of the success of these remaining European monarchies?

One: remain politically neutral. Monarchs who are too interventionist will encounter resistance and lose their reputation for neutrality. One example is the Easter crisis of 1920 in Denmark, when King Christian X dismissed his Prime Minister and the rest of the government over a difference of policy. The dismissal caused demonstrations threatening the future of the monarchy, and the King was forced to back down. Another was evident in Belgium after the Second World War, when King Leopold III's performance as Commander in Chief and refusal to follow his government caused him to spend five years in exile. A third was the refusal by Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg in 2008 to sign a euthanasia bill into law: the consequence was that he was stripped of his legislative role. Constitutional monarchs must accept that they have little or no discretion when it comes to matters of state; little choice but to approve every action or decision of the government in the hundreds of documents they are required to sign every week.

Two: avoid scandals, or any hint of corruption. The most serious recent scandals have been in Spain, where in 2011 King Juan Carlos helped the Spanish government to win a €7 billion high speed rail contract in Saudi Arabia. The accusation that he received US$100m from the Saudis has been very damaging to the monarchy, and was part of the reason for his decision to abdicate in 2014. It is now the subject of investigations in Switzerland and in Spain. Similar difficulties have arisen with other monarchies. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands was forced to resign from his role as Inspector General of the Dutch armed forces over the Lockheed arms scandal. Prince Laurent, known in Belgium as the 'Clown Prince', got involved with Colonel Gaddafi of Libya in a reforestation project which failed. And in the UK, Prince Andrew got into trouble over his role as trade envoy, in particular over his close links with the rulers of Kazakhstan, and with the financier David Rowland. It was his friendship with the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein which led him to withdraw from public life in 2019.

Three: keep the team small. The greater the size of the royal family, the greater the risk that one of its members may get into trouble and cause reputational damage; and the greater the risk of criticism about excessive cost, and too many hangers-on. So in Norway the royal family consists of just four people: the King and Queen, Crown Prince and Princess. And in Sweden last year the King, under political and parliamentary pressure, removed five of his grandchildren from the royal family. But the size of the royal family will vary depending on the size of the country concerned. The UK, with a population more than ten times that of Norway, needs a larger royal family to fulfil all the demands for royal patronage and visits. Prince Charles has been reported as wishing to slim down the royal family; but too small a team could reduce the monarchy's reach and public profile. In Spain, one reason for the monarchy's low popularity is its limited visibility: the royal family consists just of the King and Queen - a royal family smaller than that in Norway is serving a population ten times the size.

Four: Understand better the plight of the minor royals, allow them a means of escape and equip them to enter careers commensurate with their abilities. They lead lives of great privilege, but lack fundamental freedoms: the right to privacy and family life which ordinary citizens take for granted, free choice of careers, freedom to marry whom they like. The strict rules on marriage have caused grief to younger Princes in Sweden, to Princess Margaret in the UK, and led to Dutch Princes and Princesses being removed from the line of succession. Their privacy is frequently invaded by paparazzi, gossip magazines and the tabloid press. Their choice of careers is limited: if they seek to earn a living in business or the professions they risk being accused of exploiting their title for commercial gain. The most high profile recent case of people opting out in order to gain more of a private life is that of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex. In January they announced that they would withdraw from royal duties, drop their royal titles, receive no more public funding, and seek to become financially self-sufficient. How feasible this will prove in practice we don't yet know. It is not easy to 'leave' the family one is born into; their celebrity status derives from Harry being one of the royals; the media and the public might still consider Harry and Meghan to be a royal couple, despite their protestations to the contrary.

Five: although hereditary, the monarchy is accountable, just like any other public institution. The most high profile example is King Juan Carlos of Spain, now in exile and the subject of prosecutorial investigations. But he is not alone: other monarchs who stepped out of line have also lost their thrones. The Grand Duchess Marie -Adélaïde of Luxembourg and, as mentioned, King Leopold III of Belgium had to abdicate because of their conduct during the First and Second World Wars. In the UK, King Edward VIII was forced by his government to abdicate because of his wish to marry a twice divorced woman, Wallis Simpson. When King Juan Carlos abdicated in 2014, he was not required by the Spanish government to do so; but opinion polls showed that two thirds of Spaniards felt he should leave the throne.

Modern monarchies are continuously held to account, in a range of different ways. They are all regulated by law: as we have seen in the UK, in the Sovereign Grant Act 2011, and the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 (the latter making the rules of succession gender neutral, a change already made in all the other European monarchies except Spain). They are subject to public funding, which can go down as well as up: the Spanish monarchy is the least well funded, in part because it is the least popular of all the European monarchies; and Prince Laurent of Belgium has had his allowance cut by the Belgian government. They are subject to scrutiny in the media: alongside all the fawning coverage and glossy pictures, there is more serious investigative journalism which keeps all the monarchies on their toes, scrutinising their expenditure, their hunting trips, their choice of friends. The media also commission regular opinion polls in all the European monarchies, asking if people are satisfied with the monarch's performance, is the royal family paid too much, should the monarch abdicate, should the country become a republic. Support for the monarchy remains high in all countries, with polls regularly showing that between 60 and 80% of the people wish to retain the monarchy - ratings which politicians would die for.

This final lesson, about the accountability of the monarchy, is the most important. Individual monarchs can be forced to abdicate; and support for the institution as a whole can be tested in a referendum. During the twentieth century there were 18 referendums held on the monarchy in nine European countries. It was through referendums that the monarchy came to an end in Italy and Greece, and was restored in Spain; and through referendums that the future of the monarchy was endorsed in Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg and Norway. The monarchy may seem the very antithesis of a democratic or accountable institution; but ultimately continuation of the monarchy depends on the continuing support of the people for the roles it is seen to undertake.
The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy: European Monarchies Compared (edited by Robert Hazell and Bob Morris) was published by Hart Publishing in September. Constitution Unit Blog readers can buy the book with the benefit of an exclusive discount. Order now at www.hartpublishing.co.uk and use the code UG6 at the checkout to get 20% off the hardback edition. The e-book is also currently 20% off. To mark the 25th anniversary of the Constitution Unit we have launched a special fundraising initiative, encouraging supporters to make donations incorporating the figures 2 and 5. If you value our work, and would like to contribute to its future continuation, please consider making a one-off or regular donation. Contributions are essential to supporting our public-facing work. Find out more on our donations page. Sign up to our mailing lists, for news of events and publications, or to our blog, here. About the authors
Bob Morris is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Constitution Unit, and has for some time led its work on Monarchy, and Church and State. He is the co-editor of The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy.
was the founder and first Director of the Constitution Unit. He is the co-editor of The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy.

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The role of monarchy in modern democracy

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In the 21st century, monarchies remain pivotal parts of several democratic countries across Europe, including the UK. In a new book, edited by Unit founder Robert Hazell and Bob Morris, contributors from across Europe consider the constitutional and political role of monarchy, its powers and functions, how it is defined and regulated, the laws of...

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Reading 2/2

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Charlotte Brontë | Wilder Publications, 2009 | Book

Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre was my role model of an independent woman when I was growing up. 'Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!'

Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey | Martino Fine Books, 2013 | Book

Cheaper by the Dozen

Since reading this book as a kid, I have been obsessed with efficiency. Read it at your own risk :)

Pearl S. Buck | Washington Square Press, 2004 | Book

The Good Earth

Pearl S. Buck's house in Nanjing where she lived during the 1930s later became the office of the Chinese Department of Nanjing University, where I received my BA. But her books were banned in China when I was in college, so I finally read this book in the US. After Beijing lifted the ban on her books a few years ago, her house has been converted to a museum.

Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster, 2004 | Book

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Read this and John Adams by David McCullough together. Both men were great yet very different. They had many disagreements but the American Revolution needed them both.

Katharine Graham | Vintage, 1998 | Book

Personal History

Read this along with The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. The first one is the autobiography of Katharine Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post. She was an inspiration for me when I was struggling with insecurities. She and Warren Buffett are great friends and business partners. I really like Buffett's approach to life, business and wealth: 'Life is like a snowball — all you need is wet snow and a really long hill.'

Christopher Moore | William Morrow Paperbacks, 2004 | Book

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

This book is both hilarious and profound. The teenage Jesus took a road trip with Biff to look for the three wise men and encountered Buddhism and Hinduism (and lattes) along the way. I'm amazed by the author's understanding of all three religions.

Mystic Fire Video, 2001 | Watch

Jospeh Campbell and the Power of Myth

This six-hour conversation between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers changed my life. I re-watch it whenever I'm stuck in writing or life, and it never fails to inspire me. It's also one of my favorite gifts to give to friends.

Thomas Merton | New Directions, 2010 | Book

The Way of Chuang Tzu

Read this and Tao: The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts together. Instead of loss in translation, I find there's much to gain from Thomas Merton's interpretation of Chuang Tzu's writing. Maybe because without cultural preconception, a Westerner can read Chuang Tzu's ancient text with fresh eyes, thus see its original meaning more readily. I'm also amazed by Alan Watts' understanding of Eastern philosophies. He has a talent to articulate complicated ideas in an easy to understand manner.

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What happens when a dream you've held since childhood ... doesn't come true? As Lisa Bu adjusted to a new life in the United States, she turned to books to expand her mind and create a new path for herself. She shares her unique approach to reading in this lovely, personal talk about the magic of books.

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Reading 1/2

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Rita Carter: Why reading matters | Rita Carter | TEDxCluj | TED Talk

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Speaking is already in our genes. But reading is not. Until about 100 years ago most people didn’t do it all. When we read fiction especially, we create new pathways in our brain. Reading 30 pages of fiction every night gets the pathways thicker and thicker. Our brain needs a workout just like our b…

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Holidays 2/2

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The science of vacation: Ian Cole at TEDxOrlando

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Holidays 1/2

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The term staycation, originally from the United States, is a neologism deriving from the contraction of "stay" and "vacation". According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it means vacations that you take at home or near your home rather than traveling to another place.
Staycation isn't, nonetheless, a vacation model for students or low-budget travelers (though it may be a concept a large share of these audiences decides to adopt).

Rather, a staycation is an ecological way of spending your vacation close to your home. It is synonymous with less pollution, saving money and not contributing to the overwhelming chaos that takes place in some of the world's most touristic areas. Let's take a closer look.

Staycation, A Movement Born From The Economic Crisis And Ecological Awareness

The concept of staycation was born at the time of the 2008 market crisis in the United States. Because of it, many households were forced to restrict their expenses and consequently limit their vacation budget. The shortage of money to travel abroad is at the origin of why many ​​people started to (re) discover their most immediate surroundings.

At the same time, awareness of the environmental impacts of tourism, especially on what concerns the impacts of transportation, started to increase too. And so has the perception that some of the main cities (abroad) are increasingly overloaded with people - with places such as Barcelona, Venice, or the Seychelles planning on introducing a tourist cap.

Staycation appears like a great solution for the challenges above mentioned. It is a great way of spending joyful vacations while helping one's pocket and the environment. In fact, staying close to home eliminates the budget for accommodation (15% of the budget of average households on vacation) and transport.

Apart from the financial savings gained by leaving behind expensive plane tickets or by not booking hotel rooms that aren't cheap, staycation also has the benefit of keeping harmful GHG emissions in the ground. Cars, boats, and planes are not (or are less) used and other means of transport such as public transport, bicycles, electric scooters or just walking are favored instead. This allows people's carbon footprints not to increase as much as they would if long distances had been traveled.

Staycation: A Slow And Sustainable Touristic Movement With Many Benefits

A staycation is a form of alternative tourism that is fully in line with the slow tourism trend. Slow tourism invites you to live in the present moment. It encourages you to take your time, discover nearby landscapes, reconnect and spend more time outdoors in nature with the people you enjoy.

There are no fully-booked days, you do what you feel like doing (with proactivity and without constantly falling into temptations such as Netflix) and there is no rush to go from one activity to another just to stay busy all the time.

Hence, provided you stimulate your curious mind and push yourself to find out new tracks and new things to do, here are some of the benefits of a staycation:

Staycation limits the stress related with organizing a trip: from finding accommodation to preparing multiple suitcases filled with clothes that many times aren't even used;

It allows carrying out activities that you never do because of a busy schedule during the year - such as visiting the permanent collections of museums, taking advantage of the good weather to (finally) practice some sports in the nearby parks;

Staycation also promotes the local economy. You can take advantage of vacations to take a tour on the local markets, go to the farm to pick fruits and vegetables, take part in the seasonal sports or artistic courses; or even to spend a night in an interesting hotel nearby;

Discovering or rediscovering the beauty of your city or region, which we often forget to notice due to stress and the power of habit is another potential benefit of staycation;

Last but not least: staycation allows you to learn how to take advantage of the present moment.

Given the multiple advantages of local tourism, you no longer have a reason to be embarrassed at the coffee machine at work when you are asked where you are going on vacation this year.

On the contrary, not going to the other corner of the world like everyone else to "visit" instagramable beaches, but instead to discover your region is an eco-friendly and economical choice you should be proud of.
Note: Some paragraphs from the first half of this article are an adaptation from Emma Henrich's piece, available at youmatter.fr
10 Ideas For What To Do During A Staycation: Different Plans And Activities

We will leave you with some nice tips that you can use to make the best out of your staycation:

Number 1: Turn off your phone notifications, skip your emails and the news and focus on yourself and your loved ones;

Number 2: Take advantage of your staycation to have a good time outdoors in nature: be it in a nearby beach, lake or reservoir;

Number 3: During your staycation find the time to practice sports you haven't been able to play: be it surfing, snowboarding, hiking or a short bicycle trip;

Number 4: If it's not too cold outside, grab a tent and a sleeping bag and go camping;

Number 5: Go to a theatre, music or comedy show and if you find someone you know let them know about your staycation project and inspire them to try it out too;

Number 6: Use a mat or a carpet, find some online videos and start your regular practice of yoga at home;

Number 7: Find the time during your staycation to learn about things you've been wanting to learn for some time but never really had the time to read about them;

Number 8: You are no longer under the work routine - it's staycation time. Forget about cooking your own meals: order takeaway food or go eat out at a nice restaurant;

Number 9: Relax when you're at home and create a different atmosphere. Choose different soundtracks, candlelight at night to create a more relaxed environment and use refreshing essential oils for the air to smell differently;

Number 10: One of those nice things when you are sleeping out is having a perfectly made bed with clean sheets and a room perfectly tidy. Hiring someone to do these home services for you can be a warming idea.

[Image credits to hiking on Shutterstock]

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Don't Travel Too Far: Staycation Is The Latest Trend In Sustainable Tourism

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The term staycation, originally from the United States, is a neologism deriving from the contraction of "stay" and "vacation". According to the Cambridge Dictionary , it means vacations that you take at home or near your home rather than traveling to another place.

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Misinformation 2/2

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Olga Yurkova: Dentro la lotta contro l'impero russo delle fake news

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Quando i fatti sono falsi, le decisioni sono sbagliate, dice l'editor e TED Fellow Olga Yurkova. Per fermare la diffusione delle fake news, insieme a un gruppo di giornalisti ha lanciato StopFake.org che riporta notizie faziose o inaccurate al fine di ristabilire la fiducia che abbiamo perso nei giornalisti, nei leader e nelle istituzioni.

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Is this the era of distrust?

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In an era of fake news, where even a president of the United States is accused of spreading misinformation, could it be that we are living through a crisis in trust? Neil and Rob discuss the meaning of trust and teach you the honest truth about topical vocabulary.

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The benefits of a good sleep 2/3

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Matt Walker: How sleep can improve your immunity

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One of the best things that you can do to boost your immune system is head to bed, says sleep scientist Matt Walker. It can even make your flu shot more effective!

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The benefits of a good sleep 3/3

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Get the Rest You Need

Sometimes, the pace of modern life barely gives you time to stop and rest. It can make getting a good night's sleep on a regular basis seem like a dream.

But sleep is as important for good health as diet and exercise. Good sleep improves your brain performance, mood, and health.

Not getting enough quality sleep regularly raises the risk of many diseases and disorders. These range from heart disease and stroke to obesity and dementia.

There's more to good sleep than just the hours spent in bed, says Dr. Marishka Brown, a sleep expert at NIH. "Healthy sleep encompasses three major things," she explains. "One is how much sleep you get. Another is sleep quality-that you get uninterrupted and refreshing sleep. The last is a consistent sleep schedule."

People who work the night shift or irregular schedules may find getting quality sleep extra challenging. And times of great stress-like the current pandemic-can disrupt our normal sleep routines. But there are many things you can do to improve your sleep.

Sleep for Repair

Why do we need to sleep? People often think that sleep is just "down time," when a tired brain gets to rest, says Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, who studies sleep at the University of Rochester.

"But that's wrong," she says. While you sleep, your brain is working. For example, sleep helps prepare your brain to learn, remember, and create.

Nedergaard and her colleagues discovered that the brain has a drainage system that removes toxins during sleep.

"When we sleep, the brain totally changes function," she explains. "It becomes almost like a kidney, removing waste from the system."

Her team found in mice that the drainage system removes some of the proteins linked with Alzheimer's disease. These toxins were removed twice as fast from the brain during sleep.

Everything from blood vessels to the immune system The system that protects your body from invading viruses, bacteria, and other microscopic threats. uses sleep as a time for repair, says Dr. Kenneth Wright, Jr., a sleep researcher at the University of Colorado.

"There are certain repair processes that occur in the body mostly, or most effectively, during sleep," he explains. "If you don't get enough sleep, those processes are going to be disturbed."

Sleep Myths and Truths

How much sleep you need changes with age. Experts recommend school-age children get at least nine hours a night and teens get between eight and 10. Most adults need at least seven hours or more of sleep each night.

There are many misunderstandings about sleep. One is that adults need less sleep as they get older. This isn't true. Older adults still need the same amount. But sleep quality can get worse as you age. Older adults are also more likely to take medications that interfere with sleep.

Another sleep myth is that you can "catch up" on your days off. Researchers are finding that this largely isn't the case.

"If you have one bad night's sleep and take a nap, or sleep longer the next night, that can benefit you," says Wright. "But if you have a week's worth of getting too little sleep, the weekend isn't sufficient for you to catch up. That's not a healthy behavior."

In a recent study, Wright and his team looked at people with consistently deficient sleep. They compared them to sleep-deprived people who got to sleep in on the weekend.

Both groups of people gained weight with lack of sleep. Their bodies' ability to control blood sugar levels also got worse. The weekend catch-up sleep didn't help.

On the flip side, more sleep isn't always better, says Brown. For adults, "if you're sleeping more than nine hours a night and you still don't feel refreshed, there may be some underlying medical issue," she explains.

Sleep Disorders

Some people have conditions that prevent them from getting enough quality sleep, no matter how hard they try. These problems are called sleep disorders.

The most common sleep disorder is insomnia. "Insomnia is when you have repeated difficulty getting to sleep and/or staying asleep," says Brown. This happens despite having the time to sleep and a proper sleep environment. It can make you feel tired or unrested during the day.

Insomnia can be short-term, where people struggle to sleep for a few weeks or months. "Quite a few more people have been experiencing this during the pandemic," Brown says. Long-term insomnia lasts for three months or longer.

Sleep apnea is another common sleep disorder. In sleep apnea, the upper airway becomes blocked during sleep. This reduces or stops airflow, which wakes people up during the night. The condition can be dangerous. If untreated, it may lead to other health problems.

If you regularly have problems sleeping, talk with your health care provider. They may have you keep a sleep diary to track your sleep for several weeks. They can also run tests, including sleep studies. These look for sleep disorders.

Getting Better Sleep

If you're having trouble sleeping, hearing how important it is may be frustrating. But simple things can improve your odds of a good night's sleep. See the Wise Choices box for tips to sleep better every day.

Treatments are available for many common sleep disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help many people with insomnia get better sleep. Medications can also help some people.

Many people with sleep apnea benefit from using a device called a CPAP machine. These machines keep the airway open so that you can breathe. Other treatments can include special mouthguards and lifestyle changes.

For everyone, "as best you can, try to make sleep a priority," Brown says. "Sleep is not a throwaway thing-it's a biological necessity."

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Does getting a good night's sleep seem like a dream? Find tips for getting a better night's sleep.

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The benefits of a good sleep 1/3

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Want to not only fall asleep quickly but also stay asleep longer? Sleep scientist Matt Walker explains how your room temperature, lighting and other easy-to-fix factors can set the stage for a better night's rest.

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Nature in our life 2/2

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Nature is everywhere -- we just need to learn to see it

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How do you define “nature?” If we define it as that which is untouched by humans, then we won’t have any left, says environmental writer Emma Marris. She urges us to consider a new definition of nature -- one that includes not only pristine wilderness but also the untended patches of plants growing…

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Nature in our life 1/2

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Being in the green open space can certainly help us relax and de-stress. So much so that the beneficial contact with the outdoors is inspiring a particular kind of therapy. Neil and Georgina discuss ecotherapy and teach you related vocabulary.

This week's question

How high is the world's tallest tree thought to be? Is it...

a) 65.8 metres

b) 115.8 metres

c) 185.8 metres

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

tonic
something that makes you feel happier and healthier

horticulture
the study or activity of growing garden plants

panacea
something that is believed to solve everything

therapeutic
makes you feel better or healthier

biophilia
a passion for or empathy with the natural world and living things

innate
a quality that you're born with

Transcript

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript

Neil Hello, this is 6 Minute English. I'm Neil.

Georgina
And I'm Georgina.

Neil
Georgina, what do you do to cheer yourself up?

Georgina
Having a walk usually helps - especially if it's in the countryside.

Neil
Me too. But connecting with the natural world is particularly beneficial to people with mental health issues such as clinical depression. And it's something that's being called 'ecotherapy'. More on that in a moment but here's a question for you to answer, Georgina.

Georgina
OK, Neil. Fire away.

Well, seeing or even hugging trees is a form of therapy, but how high is the world's tallest tree thought to be? Is it...
a) 65.8 metres,
b) 115.8 metres, or
c) 185.8 metres
Georgina, any ideas?

Georgina Not a clue - but let's go for the highest figure of 185.8 metres.

Neil
Are you sure? Well, we'll have to wait until the end of the programme to find out. Now, the mental health charity, Mind, describes ecotherapy as a formal type of treatment which involves doing outdoor activities in nature. However, there's not one simple definition, it just relates to doing activities outdoors.

Neil
It's something Patricia Hasbach knows a lot about. She's a clinical psychotherapist and told the BBC Radio programme Health Check how ecotherapy can help. Does she say it can help everyone?

Neil So it's interesting that she describes ecotherapy as a tool - something that can be used to achieve something else. Here is can be used to help improve someone's mental health.

Georgina
Well, I think that's clear, but what is it about the outdoors that affects us?

Neil
A good question, Georgina. It seems from research that our busy brains are always on guard, but when we get into nature it gets a break, there's not so much to be on the lookout for and we can relax.

NeilNaturally. OK. Well, Georgina, maybe getting today's quiz question right will give you positive emotions. Earlier I asked you how high the world's tallest tree is thought to be. Is it...
a) 65.8 metres,
b) 115.8 metres, or
c) 185.8 metres
What did you say?

Georgina
I said c) 185.8 metres.

Neil
Oh dear, I'm afraid that's far too high! The correct answer is 115.8 metres. Never mind. The tree, named Hyperion, is a type of redwood and was found in California in 2006.

Georgina
Well, that's still very tall, and would be great to see.

Horticulture is the study or activity of growing garden plants - in other words, gardening.

NeilA panacea is something believed to solve everything.

Georgina Bye!

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / The calming power of nature

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Being in the green open space can certainly help us relax and de-stress. So much so that the beneficial contact with the outdoors is inspiring a particular kind of therapy. Neil and Georgina discuss ecotherapy and teach you related vocabulary. How high is the world's tallest tree thought to be?

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Earth day 3/3

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How can I help the environment? What can I do to be more environmentally friendly? What can we do to make a difference? Sam and Neil discuss the small practical changes you can make to help the environment and teach you 6 items of useful English vocabulary in this 6 Minute English.

This week's question

Plastic has many natural variations but where was the first artificial plastic developed? Was it:

a) England
b) Germany or
c) Switzerland?

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

a pet peeve
something someone finds particularly annoying or frustrating

(buying) in bulk
buying many or a large quantity of something

decant
to transfer from an original container to a different one

to pass on
to give something to someone

a hand-me-down
a possession or item of clothing that is not new but has come from someone who no longer needs it or has outgrown it

in good nick
in good condition

Transcript

Note: This is not a word for word transcript

Neil
Hello. This is 6 Minute English. I'm Neil.

Sam
And I'm Sam.

Neil
Now, tell me about your teeth-cleaning routine.

Sam
OK. Well, it's pretty good, I think. I brush twice a day and change my brush every couple of months.

Neil
And what kind of brush do you use?

Sam
Nothing fancy, just a regular, cheap plastic one.

Neil
Oh dear!

Sam
What do you mean?

Neil
Well, imagine all the toothbrushes you've used in your life, from your first brush as a child, to the one you currently have. You do realise that probably they all still exist in the environment somewhere. We use them for a couple of months yet they will last for hundreds of years.

Sam
Oh dear, and I thought I was actually quite environmentally aware. But that's quite shocking. I hadn't thought of that.

Neil
Well it's just one of the problems we are facing with our use of plastics. A marvellous invention that has given us so much. But we are beginning to realise it's causing many long-lasting environmental problems. More on this topic shortly, but first, a question: Plastic has many natural variations but where was the first artificial plastic developed? Was it:

a) England
b) Germany or
c) Switzerland?

What do you think, Sam?

Sam
I'm going to have a guess at Switzerland.

Neil
OK, we'll find out if you're right at the end of the programme. Environmental issues are, of course, a big story at the moment. The topic was featured on the BBC Woman's Hour radio programme recently. Madeleine Murray is from an Irish organisation that gives advice to businesses and communities on how to operate in an environmentally responsible way. She was asked about what she does in her daily life that other people could do too. What food items does she mention?

Madeleine Murray
My personal, like, pet peeve is multipacks and minipacks. I buy in bulk now. I buy the biggest yoghurt I can buy. I buy big cereal boxes. I buy big shampoo bottles. We can decant stuff into lunch boxes and we can, you know, refill our pasta and our rice.

Neil So, what food does she mention, Sam?

Sam
She talked about yoghurt, cereal, pasta and rice.

Neil
And what was she saying about those foods?

Sam
She was saying that she buys the biggest containers for those that she can - and not just food - things like shampoo as well.

Neil
And what's the benefit of that?

Well, she says that her pet peeve is small packs of things. A pet peeve is something that you find particularly annoying. She doesn't like small packs because they use a lot of packaging for a small amount of product.

So she buys in bulk. Buying in bulk means 'buying a lot of something'. And if you have a lot of something like rice or pasta, you can always transfer it to different smaller reusable containers. She uses the word decant for this. So that's one area where we can all be a bit more environmentally friendly. Another area is reusing things that are perfectly good but which we don't need any more. Dr Tara Shine is a colleague of Madeleine Murray and she talked about how new parents often buy a lot of new things for their babies, which they then throw away when the child gets too big or too old. She suggests that it's better to pass these things on -to give them to other people.

Dr Tara Shine
Pass things on. The hand-me-down, pass-thing-on culture is really, really important in the world of kids and there are lots of things that can be passed down, whether it's toys or the equipment, or the high chair, whatever it is, all of that can be passed on and that's really important. It's saving someone else money. Most of these things are in good nick when we need to pass them on.

She used another expression for passing things on, didn't she?

Yes, she talked about the hand-me-down culture. When I was growing up, I had a lot of hand-me-downs. These were toys and clothes from my older cousins, which saved us a lot of money and they were then passed on to someone else.

Neil
And the thing is children grow up quickly so often everything is in good condition.

Dr Shine used an interesting expression for that, didn't she? She said most of these things are in good nick. That expression means 'in good condition'.

Neil Now, before we recycle today's vocabulary ...

Sam
Oh, very good, I see what you did there!

Neil
It's time for the answer to today's question. Where was the first artificial plastic developed? Was it:

a) England
b) Germany or
c) Switzerland?

What did you think, Sam?

Sam
I guessed Switzerland.

Neil
Well, I'm afraid, you are wrong. The correct answer is actually, England. Well done if you got that right. Extra bonus points if you knew that in 1856 Alexander Parkes patented Parkesine, the first artificial plastic. Now, let's recap today's words and expressions.

Yes, a pet peeve is something that someone finds particularly annoying.

Buying in bulk means 'buying many of the same things or a large quantity of something'. Buying in bulk is usually cheaper and can be better environmentally.

And if you have a lot of something, you can decant it to smaller containers, that is, you can transfer it to those other containers to make it easier to use. For example: I buy huge bottles of liquid soap and decant it into smaller dispensers for the kitchen and bathrooms.

You can pass on clothes, toys and other kids' stuff to family and friends. This means 'giving them to other people to use'. And those things can be described as hand-me-downs.

But of course you'd only want to pass on things in good nick, that is, 'in good condition'.

Neil
Right, that's all we have time for. We hope you will join us again soon, though. And you can always find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, online and on our app. We are BBC Learning English. See you soon. Good-bye!

Sam Bye!

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Earth day 2/3

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Earth Day was founded in 1970 as a day of education about environmental issues, and Earth Day 2023 will occur on Saturday, April 22. The holiday is now a

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What happens if you cut down all of a city’s trees? - Stefan Al

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By 2050, it’s estimated that over 65% of the world will be living in cities. We may think of nature as being unconnected to our urban spaces, but trees have always been an essential part of successful cities. Humanity has been uncovering these arboreal benefits since the creation of our first cities…

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Inequity and inequality 3/3

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SEATTLE - The difference between an inequality and an inequity is not one of semantics. The future of social progress necessitates conceding that many of the world's greatest challenges - be it poverty, corruption, or hunger - are tied to preventable social conditions.
Inequality
At the core, inequalities simply refer to unbalanced conditions, although they are often used to describe unfair circumstances. For example, describing "gender inequality" in technical terms moves to illustrate that not all genders are treated equally in society.
Inequity
On the other hand, inequity refers to the state of being unfair or unjust. This would mean that gender inequality is the result of a social inequity, or societal condition which creates unfairness in gender norms.

Grammarists explain the difference through another simple scenario: "one might say that income inequality results from inequity in society." In other words, the difference in incomes spread among a population is the result of social conditions that leave some groups with lower socioeconomic status than others.

These grammatical nuances help explain that inequities have an unhealthy relationship with social conditions. The World Health Organization explains that, in terms of health, "there is ample evidence that social factors, including education, employment status, income level, gender and ethnicity, have a marked influence on how healthy a person is." These differences in health can not simply be described as inequalities, as they are tied to unjust societal nuances.
The Difference Between the Two
This reveals the crucial difference between an inequality and an inequity: inequities are preventable. The World Health Organization includes this as part of its "Key Concepts" page, noting that inequities are avoidable. The same source explains that no matter the location, people of the lowest socioeconomic status experience the worse health, lending to a universal inequity.
Relevancy
But what does this look like in the real world? A prevalent example of a health inequity stands with child mortality rates: the rate of children dying under the age of five is 11 times greater in low income countries than high income countries. Inequities are also responsible for the fact that 99 percent of global maternal deaths take place in developing countries.

Inequities are worldwide, but they also exist within smaller-scale levels of society. For example, the United States is considered a developed country, yet there are significant levels of health inequities that disproportionately impact marginalized groups. Although there is no genetic marker for it, African Americans experience nearly half of national HIV infections. However, they only represent 13 percent of the American population, suggesting they are disproportionately affected by a preventable inequity.

Life expectancy helps paint another telltale inequity. Indigenous groups in Australia have a life expectancy of 59.4 years for men and 64.8 for women; these numbers jump to 76.6 and 82 for non-indigenous Australians. Around the world, there is a 34 year gap in life expectancy among different countries.

Health inequities are not only costly to individuals' well-beings, but also to economies. According to the World Bank, health inequities generate an average of 1.4 percent loss in GDP every year within the European Union. This is largely caused by preventable losses in taxes, welfare, healthcare and productivity.

Better understanding that these and other social conditions cause unfair levels of wellbeing in society marks a stop in the path to sustainable development. Ultimately, the silver lining lies in knowing that understanding the difference between an inequality and an inequity can advocate for change.

The World Health Organization explains that "health inequities are unfair and could be reduced by the right mix of governmental policies," alongside better acknowledgment of the factors that perpetuate inequities. This begs the question: should health and wellbeing be determined by factors like race, income or gender?

- Cleo Krejci

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The Crucial Difference Between Inequality and Inequity

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SEATTLE - The difference between an inequality and an inequity is not one of semantics. The future of social progress necessitates conceding that many of the world's greatest challenges - be it poverty, corruption, or hunger - are tied to preventable social conditions.

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What is inequality and social justice? - BBC Bitesize Key Stage 3 Learning for Life and Work

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Cucumber or grapes? What happens when two monkeys do the same task but get 'paid' in different ways? Watch this funny video to find out how monkeys react to inequality.

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It is never too late 3/3

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It's never too late | Dilys Price OBE | TEDxCardiff

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If you ever fear that you are already too old to learn a new skill, remember Priscilla Sitienei, a midwife from Ndalat in rural Kenya. Having grown up without free primary school education, she had never learnt to read or write. As she approached her twilight years, however, she wanted to note down her experiences and knowledge to pass down to the next generation. And so, she started to attend lessons at the local school - along with six of her great-great-grandchildren. She was 90 at the time.

We are often told that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" - that the grizzled adult brain simply can't absorb as much information as an impressionable young child's. Many people would assume that you simply couldn't pick up a complex skill like reading or writing, at the age of 90, after a lifetime of being illiterate.

The latest studies from psychology and neuroscience show that these extraordinary achievements need not be the exception. Although you may face some extra difficulties at 30, 50 - or 90 - your brain still has an astonishing ability to learn and master many new skills, whatever your age. And the effort to master a new discipline may be more than repaid in maintaining and enhancing your overall cognitive health.
Wax tablets
But there hasn't always been such an optimistic view of learning brand new skills from scratch as a grown adult.

The prevailing, pessimistic, view of the ageing mind can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks. In his treatise De Memoria et Reminiscentia, Aristotle compared human memory to a wax tablet. At birth, the wax is hot and pliable, but as it cools it becomes too tough and brittle to form distinct impressions - and our memory suffers as a result.

Millennia later, scientists' understanding of the brain appeared to echo this view. Neuroscientists even use a word to describe the brain's adaptability - neuroplasticity - that directly recalls the malleable wax of Aristotle's " tabula rasa ", and as we age, we were thought to lose much of that plasticity.

Childhood, in particular, was thought to be the "critical period" to make those impressions. By the end of the critical period, the brain's circuits begin to settle, making it far harder to learn many complex new skills.

Compelling evidence for this theory appeared to come from people learning a second language. Young children brought to a new country seemed to find it far easier to reach fluency than their older siblings or parents, for instance.

Yet a closer look at the data paints a somewhat rosier picture. Analysing the census records of immigrants, Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto showed that the immigrants fluency appeared to decline very gradually with the age at arrival, rather than a drop off a cliff predicted by a critical period. And that may have been partly due to the fact that the children simply had more opportunities to master the language, with the support of schools and their classmates. Or perhaps children are simply less inhibited and aren't so scared about making mistakes.

Just consider the case of Aleksander Hemon. Originally from Sarajevo in then-Yugoslavia, he found himself stranded in the US on the outbreak of the Bosnian war in 1992 - despite having little command of English. "I had this horrible, pressing need to write because things were happening. I needed to do it the same way I needed to eat, but I just had no language to write in," he later told the New York Times. And so he set about embracing the language on the streets around him. Within three years, he had published his first piece in an American journal, a path that eventually led to three critically acclaimed novels, two short story collections, a book of autobiographical essays, and a MacArthur Genius Award.

Hemon's profound mastery of expression should have been near impossible if language acquisition had to fall within a critical period for us to achieve true fluency. But his sheer determination and the urgency of the situation fuelled his power to learn.

Admittedly, children may still find it easier to master certain skills, particularly those that revolve around the fine-tuning of our perception. A linguist may struggle to exactly match a native's accent, while a new musician may never be able to acquire the refined perception of "absolute pitch" shown by stars like Ella Fitzgerald or Jimi Hendrix. But as Hemon shows, you can still be an award-winning novelist without sounding like a native, and many accomplished musicians do not have perfect pitch. Amazing progress is still possible in many different fields, and adults may find that they can make up for some of the deficits with their greater capacity for analysis, self-reflection - and discipline.

The scientific literature is now dotted with case studies of older adults performing amazing mnemonic feats, including a septuagenarian who learnt to recite all 10,565 lines of John Milton's Paradise Lost for public performance. Such extended neuroplasticity also seems to be reflected in more recent studies of the brain's anatomy, revealing that the adult brain is far more fertile than expected, and more than capable of sprouting the connections necessary for profound learning.

Keeping in shape seems to be particularly important for maintaining that plasticity, as exercise helps to release a flood of neurotransmitters and hormones that are known to promote the growth of new brain cells and synapses.

Adults are often reluctant to learn new skills - but the ability to learn new skills, from languages to art, is still well within reach (Credit: Getty)

A simple lack of confidence may present the biggest barrier - particularly for older learners, past retirement, who may have already started to fear a more general cognitive decline.

Through a string of recent experiments, Dayna Touron at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has shown that older adults (60 and over) frequently underestimate the power of their own memories, leading to some bad habits that fail to make the best use of their minds.

In one (deliberately tedious) study, Touron's participants had to compare a reference table of word pairings (like 'dog' and 'table') with a second list, and then identify which words had not appeared in the original table. The word pairings were not difficult to learn, and by the end most people - of all ages - would have been able recite them. But the older adults - aged 60 and over - were more reluctant to rely on their memory, preferring instead to laboriously cross-reference the two tables, even though it took significantly more time. For some reason, they weren't confident that they had learnt the pairs accurately - and so took the more cautious, but time-consuming, strategy.

In another experiment, the participants had to work through a list of calculations, with many of the sums appearing repeatedly through the list. The younger participants soon started to recall their previous answers, while the older subjects instead decided to perform the calculations from scratch each time. Again, this did not seem to reflect an actual hole in their memory - many could remember their answers, if they had to, but had simply chosen not to. "We do see some adults who come into the lab and who never shift to using their memory," says Touron. "They say they know the information, they just prefer not to rely on it."

By asking her participants to keep detailed diaries of their routine, Touron has shown this habit of "memory avoidance" may limit their cognitive performance in many everyday activities. Older people may be more likely to rely on GPS when driving, for instance - even if they remember the route - or they may follow a recipe line by line, rather than attempting to recall the steps.

Eventually, that lack of confidence may become a self-fulfilling prophecy - as your memory skills slowly decline through lack of use. On the plus side, she has found that simply giving the older adults feedback on their performance - and underlining the accuracy of their memory - can encourage them to rely more on their recall. "I think it does offer an optimistic picture," she says.

Sometimes life circumstances force adult learners over mental hurdles, like the immigrants at this ESL migrant centre in Connecticut. (Credit: Getty)

Break through those psychological barriers to learning, and you may soon see some widespread and profound benefits, including a sharper mind overall. As evidence, Touron points to research by Denise Park at the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Park first divided her 200 participants into groups and assigned them to a programme of different activities for 15 hours a week for three months. Some were offered the opportunity to learn new skills - quilting, digital photography, or both - that would challenge their long-term memory and attention as they followed complex instructions. Others were given more passive tasks, such as listening to classical music or completing crossword puzzles, or social activities - such as field trips to local sites of interest. At the beginning and the end of the three months, Parks also gave the participants a memory test.

Of all the participants, only the subjects learning the quilting or the photography enjoyed a significant improvement - with 76% of the photographers showing a higher score at the second memory test, for instance. A later brain scan found that this seemed to be reflected in lasting changes to circuits in the medial frontal, lateral temporal, and parietal cortex - areas associated with attention and concentration. Overall, the more active pastime of learning a new skill led to the more efficient brain activity you might observe in a younger brain, while the passive activities like listening to music brought no changes. Crucially, these benefits were long-lasting, lingering for more than a year after the participants had completed their course.

Park emphasises that she still needs to replicate the study with other groups of participants. But if the results are consistent with her earlier findings, then the brain boost of taking up a new hobby may trump so-called "brain training" computer games and apps, with study after study finding that these programs fail to bring about meaningful benefits in real life.

Although the specific activities that Park chose - photography or quilting - may not appeal to everyone, she suspects the same benefits could emerge from many other hobbies. The essential point is to choose something that is unfamiliar, and which requires prolonged and active mental engagement as you cultivate a new set of behaviours. "it's important that the task is novel and that it challenges you personally," Park says. If you are a pianist, you might find greater benefits from learning a language say, than attempting to pick up the organ; if you are a painter, you might take up a sport like tennis.

You may be surprised by how much you enjoy the challenge itself. "The participants got more confidence in themselves," Park says. One man went on to take photographs for his local newspaper; another woman had at first reluctantly attended the quilting class, despite having no real interest in the skill. She still wasn't convinced by the end, but her successes had nevertheless inspired her to take up a new hobby - painting - instead. "I didn't like quilting, but I had learnt how to learn," she told Park.

So why not give it a go yourself and attempt to stretch your mind beyond its comfort zone? As Priscilla Sitienei - the 90-year-old Kenyan great-great-grandmother - put it: "Education has no age limit."

---

David Robson is a freelance writer. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
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If you ever fear that you are already too old to learn a new skill, remember Priscilla Sitienei, a midwife from Ndalat in rural Kenya. Having grown up without free primary school education, she had never learnt to read or write.

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Work and life 3/3

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The way you spend your time is the way you spend your life. On average, working Americans spend 36% of our weekdays sleeping and 37% of our days at work. So, two-thirds of our weekdays are spent either asleep or at work. If you want to live a meaningful life, you have to find a way to bring meaning…

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Work and life 2/3

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Chris, a US-based IT professional, says he's experienced terrible working conditions in his recent roles. He says two separate employers, one offering no sick pay and the other only a week's worth of paid time off, forced him back to work despite illness. At other labour-intensive jobs, he says he's ended up having to treat his own wounds.

But it was a role in customer support that pushed him too far. His job, which paid less than $13 (£9.40) an hour, involved verifying whether peoples' dependents qualified for health-care insurance. He says he would have been fired if he had given callers certain helpful information he was not authorised to disclose, like how much time they had to submit their paperwork.

"There were people literally begging for their lives on the phone, and I couldn't do anything about it," he says. "That broke me to a point where I realised that absolutely nothing in this system is working... It's the lack of empathy and human kindness. I'm not sure how that went missing."

Two years into the pandemic, employees across the globe are tired. Poor mental health and burnout are common, particularly among low-wage and essential workers. This prolonged period of uncertainty has made many re-examine the role their employers play in making matters worse; record numbers of workers are leaving jobs in search of better options.

But some people are going further, wondering aloud if there's purpose to their work - or the economic system itself. These people are part of the 'anti-work' movement, which seeks to do away with the economic order that underpins the modern workplace. Anti-work, which has roots in anarchist and socialist economic critique, argues that the bulk of today's jobs aren't necessary; instead, they enforce wage slavery and deprive workers of the full value of their output.

That doesn't mean there would be no work, however. Supporters of the anti-work movement believe people should self-organise and labour only as much as needed, rather than working longer hours to create excess capital or goods.

A few years ago, anti-work was a radical, fringe idea, but the pandemic incarnation of this movement has grown faster and become more well known outside these political circles. It's centred on the r/antiwork subreddit, a community still rooted in direct action, but whose focus has both softened and broadened into a wider dialogue on working conditions as its popularity has grown. Today, it contains a mix of personal narratives about quitting, creating change in hostile workplaces, advocacy for ongoing labour strikes, labour organising and ways people can try to advocate for themselves.

The community has grown rapidly. At a time when worker dissatisfaction and labour rights are under intense scrutiny, how significant is the growing interest in this movement - and could it help play a part in effecting change?
'Visceral rejection of work'?
Chris helps moderate the r/antiwork subreddit, which currently has 1.7 million subscribers as of this writing (up from 100,000 before March 2020). "We have a steady growing membership of between 20,000 and 60,000 followers a week. We have a ton of growth and a tonne of engaged members. We get hundreds of posts and thousands of comments every single day," adds Doreen Ford, another moderator.

The subreddit's name and philosophy draw from multiple sources. Ford says one is Bob Black, an anarchist philosopher, whose 1985 essay The Abolition of Work built upon preceding thoughts on labour - a history Black asserts goes back to ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Xenophon. "Many workers are fed up with work ... There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work," writes Black, suggesting people do only necessary work and devote the rest of their time to family and personal passions.

Believers in anti-work are not necessarily against all forms of labour. Rather, the overarching sentiment is hostility towards "jobs as they are structured under capitalism and the state", according to the subreddit's FAQ. "The point of r/antiwork is to start a conversation, to problematise work as we know it today," it continues.

Some r/antiwork users share ideas on how to support strike efforts, including late last year during the Kellogg's labour dispute (Credit: Getty Images)

Today, while these ideals remain central to the movement, the subreddit's focus has widened to encompass more general labour rights. Users share stories of employer abuse, ask for advice on how to negotiate better pay, contribute memes or post news updates about ongoing labour strikes. Participants also offer tips on how users can support strike efforts. In December 2021, members of the subreddit helped efforts to flood Kellogg's job application portal when the company broke off negotiations with striking unionised workers and said it would hire new, non-union workers. Although it's unclear how much r/antiwork's members directly influenced the company's actions, later that month, Kellogg's and the union reached a deal.

The community also provides links to literature and podcasts about the anti-work movement beyond Reddit. The majority of posts come from US workers across all genders and occupations, although there is a global presence as well.
'An interruption of work as we knew it'
Although the anti-work movement itself isn't novel, it has garnered newfound attention.

"With Covid there was an interruption of work as we knew it," says Tom Juravitch, a professor of labour studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, US. "In moments like this, people have time to reflect. Working has been degraded for so many people. The authority structures that we're in have gotten more draconian and more controlling than ever. People really felt that in a new way."

For blue-collar workers, Covid-19 brutally exposed deep inequalities; low wages, a lack of paid sick leave, requirements to be in customer-facing environments with inadequate workplace safety measures that left people vulnerable to contracting Covid on the job. Workers at all income levels, meanwhile, have struggled to juggle work pressures with family responsibilities caused by shuttered schools, leading to increased burnout, mental health issues - and, for some, existential questioning.

Yet Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labour education research and a senior lecturer at Cornell University, US, notes that while Covid-19 has been a major propellant, the current anti-work movement has deeper roots that predate the last two years. "Workers have had an amazing threshold for tolerating the abuse that employers have put on them," says Bronfenbrenner. "But when that abuse went so far as to risk their lives, that crossed the line; in the context of Covid, where employers were asking them to work harder than ever and employers were making huge profits."

Of course, not every disillusioned worker will embrace anti-work. It's clear swaths of workers are seeking out new roles aimed at securing better conditions. Others are quitting or choosing to work for themselves. But some are trying to advocate for change. "People aren't all quitting," says Bronfenbrenner. "Some are saying they're going to fix it by organising, striking or standing up."

'It feels like a big moment for us'
It's still too early to tell whether this online community might have measurable impacts on labour rights, whether through louder, more impassioned conversations or other disruptions.

Fundamentally changing work overnight is unlikely, but we are experiencing an unprecedented shake-up in terms of how workers do their jobs and the kinds of conditions they are expecting from employers in return. It's clear many workers are at their breaking points - and there are already signs that employers who fear widescale employee attrition are starting to respond with incremental improvements. If anti-work and its ideological cousins continue to gain numbers, this may give employers - and perhaps even politicians - further pause for thought.

At the same time, it's important to look at how the anti-work movement has played out in the past. One parallel is the " long seventies", a period of inflation and economic recession in the US, which compelled many labour leaders - and in many cases, wildcat strikers - to walk off the job and ask for more than just pay rises from employers. Their demands also included better working conditions from bosses as well as changes in union leadership.

However, this movement didn't gain widespread traction. An energy shortage and worsening unemployment took the steam out of efforts to radically alter the state of work, particularly as employers asked unions for deeper concessions to contend with lost profits amid a dramatic recession. The power of labour petered out as "the fear of loss of security at work" undermined the movement of the time, says Leon Fink, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Fink adds economic shifts and the decline of the boom economy ultimately eroded the increased leverage workers had to sustain longer-lasting change. Similarly, future economic conditions as well as how power evolves in the workplace will affect the direction of today's anti-work movement.

Still, past labour movements suggest moments of opportunity can lead to some change, even if that change may be short-lived or incremental. "I think that there's a real possibility for some traction" with the current anti-work movement, says Juravitch. He points towards the implications of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which "continue to reverberate through all other kinds of grassroots movements".

Ford is optimistic. "It's starting a lot of conversations. It feels like a big moment for us."

Chris looks at the anti-work movement as a small part of what he hopes will be a bigger effort to dismantle the state of work entirely - even if he doesn't see this happening in his lifetime. "Hopefully I can make it easier for the people who come after me."
Ed note: Shortly after the publication of this story on 26 Jan 2022, the r/antiwork subbredit went private in response to comments made on Reddit. Writing and reporting was completed prior to this.

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Chris, a US-based IT professional, says he's experienced terrible working conditions in his recent roles. He says two separate employers, one offering no sick pay and the other only a week's worth of paid time off, forced him back to work despite illness.

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Work and life 1/3

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The coronavirus pandemic might have changed our attitude to work and people are more comfortable with working from home than ever before. However, this trend started much earlier with new rules that allowed people some flexibility. In this programme, Neil and Georgina discuss if the 9-to-5 shift in the office will soon be a thing of the past and teach you vocabulary along the way.

This week's question

According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), workers from which country work the longest hours?

a) South Korea
b) Germany
c) Mexico

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

routine
the usual, fixed way of doing things

common sense
our judgement to make sensible decisions

match
work equally on both sides

inflexible
unwilling to change

bias
unfairness; treating one group of people more favourably than another

active
involved with (something)

Transcript

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript

Georgina
Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Georgina.

Neil
And I'm Neil.

Georgina
In this programme we're going to be talking about the world of work.

Neil
Ah yes, travelling to an office five days a week, sitting at a desk all day, and then going home.

Neil
That's true. During the pandemic, we've all had to have a more flexible approach to work.

Georgina
Yes, we have. And it has, perhaps, changed our attitude to working flexibly. But even before coronavirus, there was an opportunity to work flexibly, and we'll be discussing that soon.

Neil
But there's one thing that can't be changed and that's you setting a quiz question for me!

Ah yes, I hadn't forgotten. So, Neil, I know you work very hard. But according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - the OECD - workers from which country work the longest hours? Is it...
a) South Korea
b) Germany, or
c) Mexico?

Neil
Well, as I'm not on the list, let's go for c) Mexico.

Georgina
OK, Neil, we'll find out if that's right at the end of the programme. But let's talk more about flexible working now. Different countries have different laws about working flexibly - but here in the UK, for last 14 years, employees - workers - have had the right to request flexible working.

Neil
But what does it mean to work flexibly? Sarah Jackson is a workplace consultant and visiting professor at Cranfield University School of Management. She spoke to BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour programme about what it means exactly ...

Sarah Jackson, workplace consultant
Because of the pandemic, now everybody thinks flexible working means working from home - it doesn't, it's about common sense, what does the job need in terms of when where, how long, and what do you need and what does your family need - and how do the two match? So, flexibility really means having choice and control over when, where and how long you work, and agreeing that with your manager.

Neil
But of course, in the UK at least, an employee has a right to request flexible working, and this must be considered by the employer. This law initially was just for parents with a child younger than 6 years old - or a disabled child less than 18.

Georgina
But since 2014, everyone has the right to request flexible working. And that includes men.

Neil
Which is an important point, as Sarah Jackson explains. Fewer men seem to have their requests for flexible working accepted - let's find out why...

Sarah Jackson, workplace consultant
Men, when they do ask, are more likely to be turned down, so there's a real bias there in the system and the most important thing that needs to happen here, I think, is for employers to really actively say to their men, 'we know you want to be active fathers' - because there's a whole generation of young men who do want to be active fathers - 'please use the right to request flexible working, work flexibly if you can' because until men are enabled to be active fathers, we won't get equality at home and we certainly won't get equality in the workplace either.

Neil
And I said Mexico.

Georgina
Which is correct, well done! According to the OECD, the average Mexican spends 2,255 hours at work per year - the equivalent of around 43 hours per week. Germans, on the other hand, clock up the fewest hours.

And when someone is inflexible, they are unwilling to change - sometimes we say they won't budge!

Georgina
Well, there's no flexibility in our 6 minutes so we're out of time. We have plenty more 6 Minute English programmes to enjoy on our website at bbclearningenglish.com. And check us out on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Neil
Don't forget that we have an app too, which you can download for free from the app stores. We help you learn English on the move! Grammar, vocabulary, and interesting topics - we have them all!

Georgina
Bye for now.

Neil
Goodbye.

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Flexible working

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The coronavirus pandemic might have changed our attitude to work and people are more comfortable with working from home than ever before. However, this trend started much earlier with new rules that allowed people some flexibility.

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The power of music 3/3

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Esha Alwani: What it's like to have Tourette's -- and how music gives me back control

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Esha Alwani began writing songs when she was six years old, shortly after being diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. And she noticed something amazing: whenever she played music, her involuntary tics suddenly went away. Listen along as Alwani explores the power of music and delights the audience with an ethereal performance of her piano ballad "I'm Not Loving You (My Mask)."

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The power of music 2/3

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Life without music

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How does music make you feel? Research shows that it actually influences us more than we realise - whether we’re at the movies, the supermarket, or down the pub

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The power of music 1/3

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Music: How it affects your brain, changes your mood and helps you focus

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The music we choose to listen to can have a profound effect on our emotions and behaviour, but how and why?

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The dark Web 2/2

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Jamie Bartlett: How the mysterious dark net is going mainstream

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There's a parallel Internet you may not have run across yet -- accessed by a special browser and home to a freewheeling collection of sites for everything from anonymous activism to illicit activities. Jamie Bartlett reports from the dark net.

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The dark Web 1/2

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"Onion services take load off scarce exit nodes, preserve end-to-end encryption [and] the self-authenticating domain name resists spoofing," explained Prof Steven Murdoch, a cyber-security expert from University College London.

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"Onion services take load off scarce exit nodes, preserve end-to-end encryption [and] the self-authenticating domain name resists spoofing," explained Prof Steven Murdoch, a cyber-security expert from University College London.

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Wintering 2/2

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BBC Radio 4 - Wintering by Katherine May

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A thought-provoking, generous celebration of life's dark seasons and fallow times.

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Wintering 1/2

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f therapy is a talking cure, this beautiful book - Wintering - is a reading cure. Not that it sets out in a know-it-all way to enlighten. It is too internalised for that. It is a personal, original and wayward examination of the idea that, as humans, we have - and need to have - our fallow seasons, that we must learn to revel in days when the light is low (one of her convincing thoughts is that we live in an overlit age). This is a winter's tale of hard-won celebration, but - in keeping with other memoirs - it begins with what we are braced to predict will be a catastrophe.

Just before Katherine May's 40th birthday, her husband - referred to as H - is stricken with appendicitis on Folkestone beach. He is rushed to hospital, where his appendix bursts. May persecutes the nurses on his behalf ("I'm usually too embarrassed to order my own takeaway, but this was different"). His life hangs in the balance, but after making a wonderful and, to us, unexpected recovery, he practically disappears from May's narrative. It is a rum start because he is so abruptly dropped, his story giving way to hers. May becomes ill and takes leave (before departing altogether) from her job as a creative writing director at Canterbury Christ Church University. Desolation, stomach pain and a gnawing fear of being perceived to be malingering collide. In passing, she mentions that, in adulthood, she was diagnosed as autistic.

"There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them to somewhere else," she writes. She researches the somewhere-elseness of winter - not as a journalist might, but more like a poet with an angled take on things, an instinctive sense of beauty, a helpless appreciation of comedy. "We must learn to invite the winter in. That is what this book is about: learning to recognise the process, engage with it mindfully, even to cherish it. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how."

Her descriptions of swimming in a winter sea are fantastic: the assault of cold water, its steely embrace, the highs it produces

She cooks her way ahead before winter overwhelms: "I feel I am cooking autumn into my house," but she does not let the romance of the kitchen falsify her struggles. Amusing paragraphs are dedicated to her failed bagels. In the small hours, unable to sleep, she lights candles and reads. She seems always to have access to the perfect image: "Now that I'm upright, my thoughts settle like a snow globe." And she stirs our appetite for the quiet described. Her book has the quality of a meditation, a peaceful rebuff to life in fast-forward.

After an engrossing account of bathing with her son in the Blue Lagoon in Reykjavik, she determines to import Iceland to Kent (she lives in Whitstable) and become a sauna devotee. But she has a gift for unleashing unexpected comedy, especially when her intentions are most earnest. Inconveniently given her subject, the sauna has a disastrous effect. She fetches up on the floor of a swimming pool cubicle, calling out for water.

There is an entertaining account of a visit to Stonehenge for the winter solstice, where she finds herself in mixed company. The first crowd, at the heritage cafe, is in late middle age with clothes by M&S (one or two wear cloaks) and forgoing the nettle wine on offer. The second is a ragged new age group like the "bitter end of a rock festival". Here, as elsewhere, she is embarrassed by having no familiarity with ritual. And yet she often finds the sublime when least expected. Later, she considers Carol Ann Duffy 's moving line: "Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself", and buttresses it with her own experience: "For my own part, they [prayers] open up a space in which to host thoughts that I would otherwise find silly or ridiculous: that voiceless awe at the passing of time. The way everything changes. The way everything stays the same. The way those things are bigger than I am, and more than I can hold."

There is so much to treasure here - most of all, her fantastic descriptions of swimming in a winter sea: the assault of cold water, its steely embrace, the highs it produces - masochism mixed with salvation. "We have crossed a glorious, brave unspoken line," she declares, as if swimming were a form of transgression. Her winter is customised. It is open season for all her ideas. I love the surprises of this book. Most of all, it is about the comforts of language. Reading is like slipping into a fur coat. May could protectively convince us of anything - the pleasures of cold weather, slow days, dusty libraries. They all start to seem like prizes and her sensual connoisseurship a joy.

Wintering: How I Learned to Flourish When Life Became Frozen by Katherine May is published by Rider (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15

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Wintering review - learning to love the cold

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f therapy is a talking cure, this beautiful book - Wintering - is a reading cure. Not that it sets out in a know-it-all way to enlighten. It is too internalised for that.

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Are you a risk taker 3/3

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Tina Seelig: The little risks you can take to increase your luck

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Luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic -- it's much more like the wind, blowing constantly. Catching more of it is easy but not obvious. In this insightful talk, Stanford engineering school professor Tina Seelig shares three unexpected ways to increase your luck -- and your ability to see and seize opportunities.

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Are you a risk taker 2/3

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In this programme we discuss risk and how different people react to different levels of risk in different ways. We hear from an expert who describes the different types of risk takers and how knowing your risk type can help people such as financial advisors, make decisions for you.

This week's question:

When was the first driverless car demonstrated on a public road? Was it:

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

risk-averse
describes people who don't like risk

risk-tolerant
describes people who don't mind risk

risk seekers
describes people who like risk and want risk

to assess
to make a judgement or a decision based on information

to put money away
to save money

retirement
time of life when you are too old to work anymore
or you have enough money that you don't need to work anymore

Transcript
Note: This is not a word for word transcript
Neil
Hello, and welcome to 6 Minute English, I'm Neil and joining me today is Rob.

Rob
Hello.

Neil
So Rob, what's the most dangerous thing you've ever chosen to do?

Rob
Mmm. Tricky question. I've done many risky things, but probably the most risky thing is bungee jumping in New Zealand.

Neil
Oh wow, bungee jumping. You'd never catch me doing that. Did you enjoy it?

Rob
Not really, no. I won't do it again!

Neil
OK, well today our topic is risk and how different people react to different levels of risk in different ways. For example, would you be happy to be in a driverless car?

Rob
Absolutely not! No, I don't trust anybody's driving - even a computer. So no, I wouldn't go in a driverless car.

Neil
OK, I won't offer you a lift! Driverless cars are the topic of today's quiz. The question is: When was the first driverless car demonstrated on a public road? Was it:

a) 1970s

b) 1950s

c) 1920s

Rob
I think they are quite modern, so I'm going to say 1970s.

Neil
OK, well we'll find out if you're right at the end of the programme. Joe Kable is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In a recent BBC science programme, All in the Mind, he talked about the psychology of risk and whether there was anything physically in our brains that could predict how much risk we are prepared to accept. Here he is, first talking about a number of different ways people see risk. How many different types does he describe?

Joe Kable, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Some people are quite risk-averse and really don't want to take any decisions where there's risk involved at all, whereas others are fairly risk-tolerant and in some cases even risk-seeking so they seek out decisions that have an aspect of risk to them.

Neil
How many different types of people did he mention, when it comes to attitudes to risk?

Well, there were three. The first group was those who are risk-averse. If you are averse something, you are against it, you don't like it. So risk-averse people don't like to take risks.

The second group are those who are risk-tolerant.If you are tolerant of something, you accept it, you don't mind it, it's not a problem for you. So someone who is risk-tolerant is not worried by an element of risk in what they choose to do.

The third group he mentioned are those who are risk-seeking. If you seek something, you actively look for it, you try to find it. So risk seekers are those who enjoy risk and want to take risks in their life.

Associate Professor Kable carried out research on risk-taking and discovered that there were differences in brain structure and the way parts of the brain worked together between those who are risk-averse and those who are risk-tolerant or risk seekers.

Rob
So it seems as if this is something that could be measured. You could put someone in a brain scanner and tell if they like risk or not. I wonder how useful that would be though - is there any practical application for this knowledge?

Neil
Good question and one that was put to Kable. What area does he say this could be applied to?

Definitely something that I can see coming out of this is using these associations to help develop better assessments of who's likely to take risks versus not. This is exactly the thing that financial advisors want to assess when you come to them and say 'I want to put my money away for retirement'. Exactly the aspect of your personality that they want to know is what's your tolerance for taking risk?

Neil
In which area does he say knowledge of someone's attitude to risk might be useful?

For example if you are planning for your retirement. Retirement is the time when are able to or you have to stop working.

Neil
Mmm, not sure that's true but anyway, what is true is the answer to this week's quiz question. I asked you when the first driverless car was demonstrated on a public road. The options were a) the 1970s, b) the1950s and c) the 1920s. What did you say Rob?

Rob
I said the 1970s.

Neil
And you were wrong, I'm afraid. Apparently it was the 1920s, so a long time ago. Well done if you got that right. Now before we drive off into the sunset, let's recap today's vocabulary.

And finally we had retirement. That time of life when you are too old to work anymore or you have enough money that you don't need to work anymore. Are you looking forward to your retirement Rob?

Rob
Cheeky. I'm neither old enough nor rich enough to even think about that Neil.

Neil
Same here. Well that's all from us today, and you don't have to be a risk seeker to find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and of course on our website bbclearningenglish.com! Thank you for joining us and goodbye.

Rob
Bye!

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Taking risks

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In this programme we discuss risk and how different people react to different levels of risk in different ways. We hear from an expert who describes the different types of risk takers and how knowing your risk type can help people such as financial advisors, make decisions for you.

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Are you a risk taker 1/3

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It took Binta Niambi Brown several years to walk away in 2013 from the comfortable life she had built for herself as a corporate lawyer. She was going to start her own business, in a tough market that was already flooded.

By 2015, she had launched Fermata Entertainment, a production and artist management company based in Brooklyn, New York. Her boutique record label, Big Mouth Records, followed shortly after.

"I could have gone and worked for a record label as an executive and there were certainly opportunities to do that," Brown says. "But there was a particular problem that I wanted to solve and I believed that I had a solution to it. I felt compelled to try that and see if I could build something and be successful at it."

This past year, Brown's record label won its first Grammy and produced a song that's been streamed tens of millions of times. Her story can serve as inspiration for others who dream of taking a similar leap from an easy and secure way of life into the unknown.

In a world where a guaranteed job for life is now a rare gem, the conventional career path no longer exists in most developed economies. So does this mean we have to take risks to get ahead? Bill Aulet, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, believes so. He insists that doing things the way they've always been done at a time of such uncertainty is the "most risky thing you can probably do."

This attitude is perhaps reflected in the way we view risk-takers. For better or worse, those who are brave enough to take the plunge are often celebrated. After all, playing it safe just doesn't make for a great story. Would Elon Musk be idolised by entrepreneurs around the world in the way he is today if he hadn't taken a gamble that saw his companies rocket from near bankruptcy in 2008 into the multibillion-dollar enterprises Tesla and SpaceX?

So perhaps we should not be surprised to see risk-taking becoming a modern, global phenomenon. The "go big or go home" start-up culture has cultivated a mentality that says only those willing to take big risks can reap great rewards. Those who do not take chances are on the path to "guaranteed failure ", according to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

But what does it take to be a risk-taker? And is it possible to turn yourself into one?
What makes a risk-taker?
Our ability to take a chance and be comfortable with an unknown outcome is affected by our own psychological make-up, the physiological functions in our bodies, the culture in which we grew up and wider societal acceptance of risky behaviour.

Research has found, for example, that our individual testosterone levels can directly correlate with our appetite for risk. Since men tend to have higher testosterone levels than women, they can often be more willing to act impulsively, on partial information - even though both genders have similar appetites for risk.

"When you're gearing up for a fight or you've taken a risk and it's paid off well, your testosterone levels increase and you become more confident," says Dr Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and leadership coach based in London, England. On the other hand, when your risky venture leads to failure, your testosterone levels drop.

"Your brain will actually prevent you [from taking more risks] by giving you more memories of times when things went wrong," Swart adds.

Our own experiences and our individual emotional histories will also affect how risky we'll be. Your parents may have been particularly risk-averse during your upbringing, or you may have taken a risk in the past that didn't pay off, making you cautious when you face your next "should-I-shouldn't-I?" moment.

And then there are cultural factors. You might come from a society or social group that values steady and safe successes in a person's professional, financial or personal life, over the chance involved in trial and error. In some environments, such as California's Silicon Valley, taking risks is seen as being fundamental for success in the start-up culture that flourishes there.
How to become a risk-taker
For those who are not natural risk takers, there are a few ways to make yourself more comfortable with taking a chance. To a limited extent, you can alter the physiological responses that might keep you from taking risks by mastering some of the psychological issues too.

Swart recommends a practice she refers to as "silencing the mind." These techniques are designed to reduce "brain chatter" by training the brain on being in the present. Whether you're walking, eating, or breathing, focusing on the sights, sounds, and physical sensations of that particular moment can help drown out our habit of replaying mistakes and worries, says Swart.

Such mindful practices, along with living a healthy lifestyle, have been proven to control levels of adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone that's released when you're under the kind of pressure that's associated with taking a risk. In other words, mindfulness can keep your cortisol and adrenaline levels down, so that you can be clear-headed enough to make intelligent decisions - even taking some risks necessary for success in today's ambiguous business world.

Taking risks also means overcoming some of your natural responses to uncertainty and anxiety. Srini Pillay, author of Think Less, Learn More: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, says biology plays a very small part in your risk-taking abilities compared to environmental factors. He believes one of the most effective ways we can build resilience against the anxiety risk-taking can cause is to tap into the power of our unfocused mind.

Our conscious brain trains us to focus and use lessons from past experiences to make better decisions. But according to Pillay, most experts including Michael S. Gazzaniga, one of the world's foremost cognitive neuroscientists, think that between 90% and 98% of mental activity is unconscious. In order to be a better risk-taker, it is vital to let your subconscious take over sometimes, helping your brain to pick up long-lost memories and connect ideas, says Pillay.

Some of the practical steps he gives to engaging our unconscious minds include resting, napping, and even adopting a persona - a study from 2016 found that people are more successful at solving problems and inevitably, practicing intelligent risk-taking, when they behave like an eccentric poet rather than a rigid librarian.

"The brain is optimally designed to take both risk and certainty, focus and unfocus and for every human being learning how to balance the equation is crucial," says Pillay.
Recalibrating your thinking
When it comes to overcoming our personal histories and bad experiences with previous risks, there's an inevitable challenge. It's also sometimes impossible to influence the views of our friends, family and colleagues when it comes to taking risks. But what we can change is the way we think about those elements and our reactions to them.

Deena Goodman, a psychotherapist and executive coach, helps senior-level professionals change their "catastrophic thinking" patterns and become more at ease with taking risks. A classic example of uncertainty that gives many of us anxiety is public speaking. If you are asked to give a keynote speech at a major industry event, for example, you might know it could advance your career but you may also fear it could all go horribly wrong. By recalibrating your thinking, you can learn how to be comfortable with this uncertainty and attach less importance to the judgement of others.

"Most catastrophic thinking comes from being out of control," says Goodman. "When we're out of control, we try to latch on to control by predicting the worst possible outcomes."

This fear of "what's coming next" tends to drive the irrational thoughts that we have about ourselves, about how we're going to be perceived and what's going to happen to us. In instances where some risk is involved, Goodman advises her clients to write down their irrational thoughts, then for each of their worst-case scenarios, think: so what? In the case of the keynote speech, for example, you might forget what you're saying midway through, but then what happens?

Going through each one of these feared 'bad' outcomes can help "a person get in control over what feels almost impossible to control," she says. She also suggests thinking of the many possible positive outcomes that can arise from taking a risk. What she finds is that along the way, people realise that they'll survive most decisions that involve some risk and they come up with alternative plans in case anything does go awry.
Taking a chance on yourself
Perhaps ultimately you will need to be willing to take a chance on yourself, to accept that you can make the right choices and cope with the bad ones should things go awry. But it's worth reminding yourself that risks are almost always necessary for innovation and for progress, says Aulet. It's not about taking every risk that comes along, but training your brain to capable of taking intelligent and educated risks while also allowing yourself to think about what would happen if things don't go as planned.

For Brown, it is something she reminds herself of daily.

"It's certainly a very different life for me," she says. "I was making a very good living as a corporate lawyer, so going from that to being an entrepreneur and learning how to live differently and make choices in a different kind of way has been one of the most extraordinary rides of my life."

"It's funny because I never thought I could be happier with more risk and less security and with less certainty."
To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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You can teach yourself to be a risk-taker

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It took Binta Niambi Brown several years to walk away in 2013 from the comfortable life she had built for herself as a corporate lawyer. She was going to start her own business, in a tough market that was already flooded. By 2015, she had launched Fermata Entertainment, a production and artist management company based in Brooklyn, New York.

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Time and free time 4/4

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Leisure is the prize, right? We work hard, so we want to play hard; we look forward to our time off, believing that the more leisure time we have, the better life will be. Enjoying that time - or savouring that coveted end goal - should come naturally.

However, research shows that both having and deciding how to spend leisure time can be very stressful. Some people feel enormous pressure to maximise their downtime with the best choices: researching more, anticipating and spending more money. But, as data prove, this pressure to maximise our fun might get in the way of our enjoyment of leisure itself.

Additionally, some people struggle to view leisure as worthwhile at all. These individuals - often in high-stress, high-paying jobs - prioritise productivity to the extent that they can't enjoy time off, often to the detriment of their mental health.

However different their problems with leisure, both groups struggle with enjoying time off for the same reason: the way we perceive and value leisure has changed, problematically. Understanding this evolution, and finding ways to change our attitudes, could be beneficial for everyone - and help people to start enjoying themselves again.
The changing concept of leisure
"Leisure has dramatically evolved over the centuries and across cultures," says Brad Aeon, assistant professor at the School of Management Sciences at the University of Québec in Montréal. "One thing that's consistent about leisure, however, is that it has always been contrasted with work."

Two-thousand years ago, concepts of work and leisure were associated with servitude and freedom, respectively. In Ancient Greece, explains Aeon, most of the labour was outsourced to slaves, while wealthier parts of society pursued other activities. "Leisure was an active state of mind. Good leisure meant playing sports, learning music theory, debating qualified peers and doing philosophy. Leisure was not easy, but it was supposed to be gratifying."

Aeon believes that a shift occurred when the Romans started viewing leisure as a way of recuperating in preparation for more work, a transition that accelerated significantly during the Industrial Revolution. By the 1800s, the kind of leisure that signified status had shifted, too; the wealthy led overtly idle lives. A popular example is philosopher Walter Benjamin's description of the fashion, around 1893, to walk through arcades with a turtle on a leash.

Anat Keinan, associate professor of marketing at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, has conducted extensive research on the symbolic value of time. She explains today we're seeing yet another transition: a lack of leisure time now operates as a powerful status symbol. "On Twitter, celebrities 'humblebrag' about 'having no life' and 'being in desperate need of a vacation'," she points out. In the workplace, being part of the long-hours working culture is still seen by many as a badge of honour.

In fact, those with the most money to spend on leisure are most likely also putting in the longest hours. "Highly educated people (think surgeons, lawyers, CEOs) often go for well-paid jobs that require highly productive candidates willing to work long hours," explains Aeon. "This means that those who complain the most about not having enough free time are wealthy and educated." That fuels the idea that we must maximise leisure's 'hedonic utility', or enjoyment value, when we actually do get some time off - and make every hour count.
The leisure maximisers
Economists call the idea that we must maximise our time off the intensification of the value of our leisure time. In his book, Spending time: The Most Valuable Resource, US economist Daniel Hamermesh explains that "our ability to purchase and enjoy goods and services has risen much more rapidly than the amount of time available for us to enjoy them". This pressure manifests in our decisions. "We feel like we want to have the best bang for our buck and minutes," explains Aeon, "So we invest more money in leisure. Better hotels, better movie experiences - like IMAX or Netflix in 4K - better everything."

For some people, leisure has come to represent collectible experiences that convey status, often on social media (Credit: Getty)

All this can lead to hours poring over reviews diligently planning leisure activities. That might not necessarily be a bad thing, researchers have found, as pre-trip anticipation greatly accounts for vacationers' happiness. But too much anticipation might set us up for a seemingly zero-duration holiday. New research shows that we judge future positive events as both farther away and shorter than negative or neutral ones, leading us to feel like a holiday is over as soon as it begins.

Equally, the way we chase top-notch leisure experiences has made recreation more stressful than ever. High expectations may clash with our experienced reality, making it feel anti-climactic, while trying to concoct the best vacation or leisure experience ever can fuel performativity.

In her 2011 research paper, Keinan first posited that some consumers work to acquire collectable experiences that are unusual, novel or extreme because it helps us reframe our leisure as being productive. By working through our experiential checklist instead of seeking simply to enjoy the moment, she writes, we build our "experiential CV".

And just like a traditional resume, where we show off our best selves, this experiential CV can become a breeding ground for competition. Keinan believes social media exacerbates our focus on productive leisure. Referencing a 2021 research paper, she suggests people are pivoting to signal their status and accomplishments in alternative domains - in this case, the use of their free time.

"Users post carefully curated slide shows of themselves crossing marathon finish lines and climbing Machu Picchu. Conspicuous consumption used to be a wayfor people to display their money through scarce luxury goods. Now, they flaunt how they spend their valuable time only on activities that are truly meaningful, productive or spectacular," she says.

The people who hate leisure

Some struggle to enjoy leisure at all. Some try to 'hack' leisure by applying productivity techniques, says Aeon, like listening to a podcast while jogging or watching Netflix shows at twice the regular speed. Others may not truly take time off at all. For example, only 14% of Americans take two weeks' vacation in a row, a finding in keeping with the overwork culture. The same study reports that as of 2017, 54% of American workers didn't use up their vacation time, leaving 662 million days reserved for leisure unused.

Part of the problem, new research shows, is how comprehensively we internalise the message that leisure is wasteful. Selin A Malkoc, associate professor of marketing at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University and co-author of the study, says certain people perceive leisure as lacking value, even when it doesn't interfere with their pursuit of goals. These negative beliefs about leisure are associated with lower reported happiness and greater reported depression, anxiety and stress.

Malkoc describes two types of leisure: 'terminal leisure', where the activity and the goal are 'fused' together, like attending a Halloween party just for fun, is immediately rewarding and an end goal in itself; and 'instrumental leisure', like taking a child trick-or-treating and thereby 'checking off' parental duties, which is a means to an end and feeds a long-term goal. The ability to enjoy terminal leisure is a stronger predictor of wellbeing than enjoyment of instrumental leisure, the study showed.

In one of the study's experiments, Malkoc and her co-authors wanted to see if they could manipulate participants' beliefs about leisure and get them to enjoy it more. Each group was presented with a different version of an article that framed their understanding of leisure, either as wasteful in terms of goal-achievement, unproductive or as a productive way of managing stress. Participants were then asked to evaluate how well-written the article was.

But researchers were more interested in what came afterwards. They offered participants a break and gave them a funny cat video to watch to see how much they enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, priming our beliefs about leisure only works in one direction, the researchers found - the wrong one. Those who read the articles framing leisure as wasteful enjoyed the experience 11% to 14% less than the baseline (the control group, who read about coffee makers), while those cued to believe it is productive did not experience bolstered enjoyment levels. In other words, trying to prime participants' receptivity towards enjoying leisure more was about as effective as having them read about coffee, suggesting that our attitudes are deeply entrenched.

It's a sobering finding. "We had this group of undergraduate students in the lab doing a series of mostly mind-numbingly boring studies - there's nothing enjoyable about it," says Malkoc, "And then, we offer them a mental break to watch a fun video. The fact that even though they couldn't use those brief moments for something better, they still couldn't enjoy themselves... attests to the strength of their belief."

The view that leisure is wasteful can be deeply entrenched - meaning some people really struggle to enjoy time off (Credit: Getty)

Malkoc also compared samples from different nations. Participants from India and America, both nations with overwork cultures, endorsed the belief that leisure is wasteful more strongly than participants from France, which has social norms, "less restrictive of enjoying life and having fun". In fact, while Malkoc estimates about 30% of the population endorses the 'leisure is wasteful' belief on average, this varies greatly across cultures, going as high as 55% in the Indian subsample and as low as 15% in the French sample, she explains.

Hope for leisure intensifiers and avoiders

Fortunately, there are ways to help both groups. The first, regardless of which end of the spectrum you fall on, is to relax the productivity mindset. Keinan says a way to do this is by "assuming a broader perspective on life and anticipating your long-term regrets, as it allows people to enjoy the present more".

For those seeking to intensify leisure, Aeon recommends using the peak-end rule, a cognitive bias that influences the way we remember events. For example, he says, at the dentist's office, we remember the peak (when the pain was at its worst) and the end (the candy we'd get as we left); the average sum of these experiences adjusts the emotional intensity. So, for holidays, he recommends doing one thing that's "completely insane" in the middle, such as bungee jumping, and one equally grandiose thing at the end (for instance, a spa day or indulgent meal) to elevate the entire experience and maximise hedonic utility overall.

He recommends using mindfulness to help savour leisure experiences. "It expands your subjective perception of time (i.e., you feel like you have more of it) and enhances memory formation, which means you'll not only feel like your vacations lasted longer, but you'll remember them a lot better." And in keeping with research on anticipation, having multiple smaller vacations to look forward to rather than one massive one could also maximise our enjoyment value.

For those who find it hard to take time off to begin with, Keinan suggests using a functional alibi - a practical excuse for enjoying themselves. "Having a 'functional alibi' that articulates a purpose for an activity (such as the health and productivity benefits of taking a much-needed vacation) allows many consumers to relax without feeling guilty," she says.

Combating the 'leisure is wasteful' mindset might also mean emphasising the value of an activity by aligning it with another utilitarian goal, instead of trying to reframe leisure as a concept. "Vacations are meant to be 'terminal', but we can have different goals embedded within them," says Malkoc. A trip to Disneyland, for example, might have terminal value for the children, and offer instrumental leisure for the parents. "Making them understand... that this is a way to get productive or fuel another purpose might help them let their guard down and enjoy it a little bit more."

Enjoying leisure might even be a learned response, similar to the way we build up stamina gradually at the gym. Smaller vacations - a 30-hour getaway at a hotel - might be just short enough for such individuals to leave responsibilities behind. For longer trips, Malkoc suggests allowing driven individuals to work for a short window once a day might actually be less stressful than asking them to unplug completely.

For both groups - and even those somewhere in the middle - the persistent fear that we are not using our time 'right', whether by having an extravagantly 'collectable' experience or just being uber productive, can derail the very purpose of leisure. Because the only 'right' way to do leisure is to relax, let your guard down, make good memories and trust the pieces will fall into place.

"If you approach a vacation with a 'should' mindset, you might be messing it up," warns Malkoc. "Don't let your belief that you 'need to get the best out of this' get the best of you."

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The way we view free time is making us less happy

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Some people try to make every hour of leisure perfect, while others hate taking time off altogether. Have we forgotten how to enjoy free time?

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Time and free time 3/4

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Guy Winch: How to turn off work thoughts during your free time

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Feeling burned out? You may be spending too much time ruminating about your job, says psychologist Guy Winch. Learn how to stop worrying about tomorrow's tasks or stewing over office tensions with three simple techniques aimed at helping you truly relax and recharge after work.

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Time and free time 2/4

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There are 168 hours in each week. How do we find time for what matters most? Time management expert Laura Vanderkam studies how busy people spend their lives, and she’s discovered that many of us drastically overestimate our commitments each week, while underestimating the time we have to ourselves.…

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Time and free time 1/4

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Pay bills, clean the house... these are boring tasks we all have to do regularly even if we don't feel like it. They're part of what we call 'life admin'. Neil and Rob discuss what could make life admin tasks more interesting and teach you related vocabulary.

This week's question

The website Hotels.com commissioned some research about how much time young adults - that's millennials - spend doing life admin. Do you know what proportion of their free time they spend doing life admin tasks? Is it...

a) a quarter of a day

b) a third of a day

c) half a day?

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

a chore
a boring, ordinary task you do regularly

admin
short for 'administration' - the activities and tasks you have to do to make a business, organisation or just your life, run smoothly

aka
also known as

utility company
a company that supplies something such as electricity, gas, or water to the public

procrastinate
delay doing things until later, probably because you don't want to do them

super-doers
an informal term to describe people who get satisfaction out of doing life admin and do lots of it

Transcript
Note: This is not a word for word transcript
Rob
I'd like to think so.

Neil
What's the best way to organise everything?

Rob
You need a 'to-do' list - a list of all the jobs you need to do that you can work your way through.

That's a good idea and something we can include in today's discussion about life admin. Admin is short for administration - that describes the activities and tasks you have to do to make a business or organisation run smoothly - but life admin is administration you have to do to make your day-to-day life run smoothly - like doing housework, or paying a bill. And the first thing on my 'to-do' list is to ask you and the listeners, a question.

Rob
Yes, you wouldn't want to forget that.

Neil
So, the website Hotels.com commissioned some research about how much time young adults - that's millennials - spend doing life admin. Do you know what proportion of their free time they spend doing life admin tasks? Is it...

a) a quarter of a day

b) a third of a day

c) half a day?

Rob
Based on my personal experience, I would say about a quarter of a day.

NeilWell, we'll see if you're the same as other people at the end of the programme. But as we all know, life admin is necessary but it can be a bit of a chore - a boring, ordinary task you do regularly.

Neil
She's been speaking to the BBC Radio 4 programme, Woman's Hour, and described what she thought life admin is...

Rob
She calls life admin the invisible layer of work - so it's work, tasks or chores we carry out that people don't notice we're doing - or don't realise we have to do them it's extra work in our life.

Neil
And we don't get paid for it - unless we're at work when it is the role of someone to do it - such as secretaries or aka admins - aka is short for 'also known as' - so secretaries might also be known as admins - that is short for people who do administration.

Rob
You are what Elizabeth classifies as an 'admin avoider'. So this is where my to-do list comes in handy Neil. You have a written record of tasks that can be quite satisfying to cross off as you do them. But this is something Elizabeth Emens has found to work, at least for some people. Let's hear from her again. What type of people did she find get most satisfaction from completing a to-do list?

Elizabeth Emens, Professor of Law at Columbia University
If you've ever made a list and put things on it you've already done, just to cross them out, then you know the kind of 'done it' pleasure that goes with that. But actually I interviewed people, especially the super-doers that I interviewed, actually can find real pleasure in the actual doing of it - so trying to understand how we can get to that when we have to do it - how we can make it so that there is some meaning in it and some texture and there're ways of doing it that please us.

Neil
How we find pleasure from doing life admin is different for different people - so personally, I think I'll stick with being an 'admin avoider' - but that might explain why I just got charged extra for not paying my credit card bill on time!

Rob
Well, please don't avoid giving us the answer to the quiz question you asked us earlier.

a) quarter of a day

b) a third of a day

c) half a day?

RobUnlike this programme Neil, which is not a chore - one of the words we discussed today.

NeilYes, our vocabulary today included chore - a boring, ordinary task you do regularly.

RobWe also mentioned admin, short for administration - the activities and tasks you have to do make a business, organisation or just your life, run smoothly.

NeilWe heard aka - meaning 'also known as' - so for example, Rob aka The master of 6 Minute English!

RobThanks very much Neil. Next we heard utility company. That's a company that supplies something such as electricity, gas, or water to the public. And we also heard how Neil likes to procrastinate - that's delay doing things until later, probably because he doesn't want to do them.

NeilFinally, we mentioned super-doers - an informal term to describe people who get satisfaction out of doing life admin and do lots of it.

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / What's on your to-do list?

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Pay bills, clean the house... these are boring tasks we all have to do regularly even if we don't feel like it. They're part of what we call 'life admin'. Neil and Rob discuss what could make life admin tasks more interesting and teach you related vocabulary.

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Addictions 3/3

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ddiction was once viewed as an unsavoury fringe disease, tethered to substances with killer withdrawal symptoms, such as alcohol and opium. But now the scope of what humans can be addicted to seems to have snowballed, from sugar to shopping to social media. The UK's first NHS internet-addiction clinic is opening this year; the World Health Organization (WHO) has included gaming disorder in its official addictions diagnosis guidelines.

The first glimmer of this shift was in 1992, when tabloids reported that Michael Douglas - Hollywood royalty, fresh from starring in the erotic thriller Basic Instinct - was holed up in an Arizonan rehab facility with sex addiction. No matter that, to this day, Douglas stringently denies ever suffering from the condition - the way we perceive addiction had begun to unfurl.

Back then, the broadening of the term was often viewed in medical circles as lazy appropriation; however, neuroscience has now largely accepted that it is the same brain chemical, dopamine, driving these irrepressible cravings. What's more, our 21st-century world is so heavily baited with cues and stimuli - from stealthy marketing to junk food, not to mention the nagging lure of online life - that it appears to be rigging our dopamine systems to become "hypersensitised".

"The range of what people are getting addicted to has increased," confirms Michael Lynskey, a professor of addiction at King's College London. "For my parents' generation, the only options were tobacco and alcohol. Now there are more drugs, including synthetics, along with commercialisation and ways - especially online - of encouraging prolonged use of different things."

Many of these emerging conditions are seen as behavioural rather than physical, substance-related addictions - but the consequences can be as grave. Gambling is the longest established behavioural addiction, having been medically recognised since 2013. Suicide rates, along with the likelihood of substance addiction, are higher among compulsive gamblers. "I see gambling students who drop out of university because they can't stop," says Henrietta Bowden-Jones, the consultant psychiatrist behind the forthcoming NHS internet-addiction clinic. "I see people with shopping compulsions who are in so much debt because they couldn't stop themselves from buying three dresses in different sizes, that in the end their businesses and families suffer."

Sometimes, she says, compulsions flit between different vices - for example, a young man seeking refuge from family problems might toggle between gaming and porn. "I saw [a gaming disorder patient] yesterday," she adds, "who then went on to spending money on objects and clothes. You can somehow shift the behaviour but it's an illness we don't yet know enough about."

It is hard to overlook, however, the fact that many of these thrills are available at the touch of a screen. When the addiction charity Addaction commissioned a YouGov survey in October 2018, it found that parents are twice as worried about their teenage children being addicted to social media as they are about drugs, and a similar ratio when comparing worries about gaming and drugs. Also in October, the EU announced it would fund the European Problematic Use of the Internet Research Network to investigate the public health implications.

Not everyone agrees with defining these new disorders as addictions - after all, you can't overdose on them. Gambling and gaming are the only ones to have made it on to the WHO list of addictions. However, a paradigm shift in understanding addiction is in motion.

Take sex addiction. Seeking treatment for this controversial condition has, in cases such as that of the golfer Tiger Woods, been criticised as a cynical shortcut to redemption for philanderers. On the other hand, neuroscientists who have been able to study the brains of people with debilitatingly compulsive obsessions with sex witness similar responses to those they have observed in drug addiction cases.

Most of the standard criteria for addiction diagnosis do apply to these disorders, says Lynskey: "Tolerance, neglect of responsibilities, inability to stop, withdrawal." Withdrawal is the obvious sticking point, although sugar withdrawal symptoms have been induced in lab rats - sweats, shakes, changes in body temperature, anxiety, the whole kaboodle. "If a teenager becomes irritable when a gaming session is cut short, there's some discussion as to whether that's a sort of mild withdrawal," says Lynskey.

Terry Robinson, an esteemed professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan - together with his colleague, Kent Berridge - identified dopamine as the neurochemical responsible for craving. He thinks debating the semantics of addiction is unhelpful. "Whether it's drugs, sex, gambling or whatever, you're looking at impulse-control disorders where people have difficulty refraining from maladaptive use. There are certainly similarities in terms of the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms involved."

Once Robinson and Berridge had identified dopamine as "wanting" and pleasurable brain opiates as "liking" - two distinct phenomena - they discovered that you don't have to like something in order to want it: a key finding about addiction. In addicts' brains, the craving is unbearable even when they no longer like the object of their desire. Berridge once told me that the "massive", "robust" wanting systems in the brain can be turned on with or without pleasure, whereas pleasure "has a much smaller and more fragile brain basis ... That's why life's intense pleasures are less frequent and less sustained than life's intense desires". It also explains, perhaps, why humans are so easily herded into wanting new stuff and instant gratification, even when these things don't make us happy.

"What's happening in these addictions," says Robinson, "is that the dopamine system is becoming hypersensitised, leading to these pathological motivational states." He has identified three factors that could help explain why "there seems to be a wider variety of problematic things [to get addicted to]". (He does caution, however, that "getting into social factors is very difficult in terms of proving cause and effect".)

The first factor is that our modern environment is stuffed with craving-inducing stimuli. "People don't appreciate the power of cues that have been associated with rewards, be it a drug or sex or food, in generating motivational states." In fact, addicts can start liking the cues more than the end goal, such as the rigmarole of scoring drugs and so on. "The amount of cues associated with highly palatable foods are everywhere now," he says. "Drugs, sex and gambling as well, and that has changed quite a bit over the years and could be leading to more problematic use."

Lynskey agrees, adding "some of the marketing and design of gambling machines is a step ahead of all of us academics in devising ways to attract users and boost dopamine and retain them". The "like" button, quantifying approval and igniting a compulsion to check social media, is a similar example. Introducing a report into the effects of social media on young people in early 2018, the UK's children's commissioner Anne Longfield wrote that "some children are becoming almost addicted to 'likes' as a form of social validation".

Robinson's second consideration is dosage. Our liking of sweet tastes suited us when we were hunter-gatherers, helping us choose ripe energy sources. Now, we have high-fructose corn syrup, which blows our minds with unnatural levels of glucose. Similarly with drugs, he points out: "Chewing coca leaves in the Andes is not the same as smoking crack cocaine. The pharmacology is different and this can also increase propensity to addiction."

His final factor is simply access. "Food, sex, gambling and drugs - availability these days is much greater than it was in the past." (Sex addiction can include consuming porn, sexting, compulsive masturbation, exhibitionism and chemsex.)

All these factors, Robinson continues, "combine in complex ways - and I'm sure we don't understand them all - to increase the probability of problematic use in a variety of things". Does this mean that more people are at risk in this era of throbbing dopamine excitation? Major risk factors for addiction, such as deprivation and childhood trauma, are still important predictors for how easily your dopamine system can be hijacked, says Robinson - "but you have laden on top of that ubiquitous cues, more potent formulations and increased availability".

Another theory about what is driving the diversification of addictive behaviours stems from a series of experiments conducted in Canada in the late 1970s known as Rat Park. The psychologist Bruce Alexander found that lab rats, while isolated in empty cages with the option of drinking either plain or drugged water, easily became addicted to heroin; if you put rats in a vast, toy-filled enclosure with other male and female rats for company, the heroin couldn't compete. The context was driving addiction, rather than the drug itself. The resulting study made minimal waves when it was published - yet today, Alexander is being flown all over the world to share his take on addiction, which he calls the dislocation theory.

"The modern world breaks down all kinds of community, all kinds of tradition and religions and stuff that has made life integral and full for people in the past," he says. "You can't just say: 'OK, now I'm going to give you back what modernity took away.' We have to reinvent society, as we perpetually do, with an eye on making sure there are enough connections for human beings with each other in a traditional way, so that people can grow up and be content enough so they don't need to find substitutes in addiction for life."

Organisations such as Addaction in the UK, he says, "are finding ways to get [addicts] together into groups and planting these groups in communities and getting the community to support people in these groups, not to give up their addictions but to have a meaningful life". Steve Moffatt, policy manager at Addaction, says that like all such services, "we're just starting to try to understand the level of issues that are out there. For this generation coming through, social media is a big thing and online activities generally, but we still don't know the extent."

Despite the increase in the range of addictions, says Lynskey, there are still probably fewer addicted people than there were 30 years ago because the level of nicotine dependency - the most deadly one - has dropped from 50% to less than 20% in the UK. However, updates to diagnosis guidelines mean that people who sit lower on the addictive spectrum can now be seen as having problematic dependencies. The influential American Psychiatric Association, he says, "used to distinguish between 'abuse' and 'dependence', whereas now they are in a single category of drug-use disorders. Perhaps as many as one in four males would meet the criteria for alcohol dependency, and a lower, but still substantial, number of females." And yet these people are at no risk of seizures or death if they go into withdrawal. "There is a spectrum," he says, "whether it's alcohol or drug dependence or shopping addiction and people have become a bit happier with placing the point at which behaviour becomes problematic at a lower level of use."

Bowden-Jones says the best evidence for treating behavioural addictions is using cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help avoid cues (for example, taking a different route home so you don't pass the bookmaker), rewarding good behaviour and reaffirming what people have to lose with constant reminders, such as on wristbands.

Assistance can also come in the form of stimulus-control tools. "There are fantastic blocks to put in place that can stop you from watching porn, gambling and indeed anything to do with the behaviour you have an issue with, except for gaming," says Bowden-Jones. "We need to get to a position where, in the cold reality of your day, you can say: 'I don't need to spend more than two hours a day doing this, so I will block myself after two hours [of play].'" This responsibility, she says, lies with the gaming industry.

Mindfulness meditation has also helped to reduce substance abuse. In fact, it was found to be more effective than the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step programme and CBT in 2014 research led by Sarah Bowden, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Pacific University in Portland, Oregon; the previous year, Bowden, Berridge and other neuroscientific luminaries met to discuss addiction with the Dalai Lama. After all, Buddhists caught on to this craving problem thousands of years ago, using meditation to overcome the very urges that they identified as the linchpin of human suffering, long before these dopamine-fuelled times.

A modern challenge is the ubiquity, and the necessity: gone are the days when recovering behavioural addicts can be told to avoid the ever-necessary internet, for example. "Younger generations will be socially cut off," says Bowden-Jones, "and what our patients say is when they feel they're missing out, it pushes them more toward the virtual life that they already have a problem with rather than engaging properly in their face-to-face lives." As Moffat says, "that's where they get their validation".

Many of us would plot our internet habits on the lower end of this spectrum: slaves to our phones, wasting hours that we will never get back stuck down internet rabbit holes, compulsively checking for likes. "There's a great distinction," says Bowden-Jones "between functional use and use that is not necessary. It's like eating too much cake, which makes you feel bad. People who are on social media too much, it's not a positive experience, although it may have started off as such." There goes the dopamine without the pleasure, again.

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Constant cravings: is addiction on the rise?

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ddiction was once viewed as an unsavoury fringe disease, tethered to substances with killer withdrawal symptoms, such as alcohol and opium. But now the scope of what humans can be addicted to seems to have snowballed, from sugar to shopping to social media.

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Addictions 2/3

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Michael Botticelli: Addiction is a disease. We should treat it like one

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Only one in nine people in the United States gets the care and treatment they need for addiction and substance abuse. A former Director of National Drug Control Policy, Michael Botticelli is working to end this epidemic and treat people with addictions with kindness, compassion and fairness.

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Addictions 1/3

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Are you a phubber? Do you suffer from FOMO? These are words associated with smartphone addiction. 6 Minute English describes these words and discusses how you can kick the habit.

This week's question:

In what year did the term 'smartphone' first appear in print? Was it:

a) 1995
b) 2000
c) 2005

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

FOMO
(acronym) Fear of Missing Out

phubber
person who ignores the real people around them because they are concentrating on their phones

addicted (to something)
having a physical or mental need to keep on doing something

compulsively
unable to stop doing something again and again

keep in touch with
stay in contact with

in person
actually meeting someone face-to-face

Transcript

Note: This is not a word for word transcript

Rob
Hello, welcome to 6 Minute English. I'm Rob.

Catherine
And I'm Catherine.

Rob
So, Catherine, how long do you spend on your smartphone?

Catherine
My smartphone? Not that long really, only about 18 or 19 hours.

Rob
No, sorry, I meant in a day, not in a week.

Catherine
Er, that's what I meant too, Rob - a day.

Rob
Oh wow, so you've even got it right here...

So we could call you a phubber... Hello... I said, so you're a phubber? Someone who ignores other people because you'd rather look at your phone.

Catherine
Oh, yeah, that's right.

Catherine
Sorry, Rob, yes, well I think if I went more than a minute, I'd probably get sort of sweaty palms and I think I'd start feeling a bit panicky.

Rob
Oh dear! Well, if I can distract you for a few minutes, can we look at this topic in more detail please? Let's start with a quiz question first though. In what year did the term 'smartphone' first appear in print? Was it:

a) 1995
b) 2000
c) 2005

What do you think?

Catherine
OK, you've got my full attention now, Rob, and I think it's 2000, but actually can I just have a quick look on my phone to check the answer?

Rob
No, no, that would be cheating - for you - maybe not for the listeners.

Catherine
Spoilsport.

Rob
Right, Jean Twenge is a psychologist who has written about the damage she feels smartphones are doing to society. She has written that smartphones have probably led to an increase in mental health problems for teenagers. We're going to hear from her now, speaking to the BBC. What does she say is one of the dangers of using our phones?

Rob
So what danger does she mention?

Catherine
Well, she said that we can get so involved in our phones that we don't notice the time passing and when we finally look up, we realise that maybe an hour has gone. And I must say, I find that to be true for me, especially when I'm watching videos online. They pull you in with more and more videos and I've spent ages just getting lost in video after video.

Rob
Well that's not a problem if you're looking at our YouTube site, of course - there's lots to see there.

Catherine
Yes, BBC Learning English, no problem. You can watch as many as you like.

Rob
So, does she think it's a good idea?

Catherine
Well, she doesn't say so directly, but we can guess from her answer that she does, because she says these timers will make people spend more time in face-to-face interaction, which a lot of people think would be a good thing.

Catherine
I think I said 2005, without looking it up on my phone, Rob!

Rob
That's good to know, but maybe looking at your phone would have helped because the answer was 1995. But well done to anybody who did know that.

Catherine
Or well done to anyone who looked it up on their phone and got the right answer.

Rob
Mmm, right, before logging off let's review today's vocabulary.

Catherine
Bye!

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Smartphone addiction

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Are you a phubber? Do you suffer from FOMO? These are words associated with smartphone addiction. 6 Minute English describes these words and discusses how you can kick the habit. In what year did the term 'smartphone' first appear in print? Was it: a) 1995b) 2000c) 2005 Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

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Metaverse 3/3

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Alex Kipman: A futuristic vision of the age of holograms

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Explore a speculative digital world without screens in this fanciful demo, a mix of near reality and far-future possibility. Wearing the HoloLens headset, Alex Kipman demos his vision for bringing 3D holograms into the real world, enhancing our perceptions so that we can touch and feel digital content.

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Metaverse 2/3

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Can virtual reality change your mind? | Thong Nguyen | TEDxMinneapolis

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In this talk, Thong shares insights on how VR experiences are impacting training and development, health care, and even our own self perception. Virtual reality even has the capacity to create empathy and strengthen how we understand ourselves - and each other.

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Metaverse 1/3

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Apparently, it’s the next big thing. What is the metaverse?

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What does it mean, and what have Facebook and Fortnite got to do with it?

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Personality 3/3

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“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” Dan Gilbert shares recent research on a phenomenon he calls the “end of history illusion,” where we somehow imagine that the person we are right now is the person we’ll be for the rest of time. Hint: that’s not the case.

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Personality 2/3

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Watch where you're watching! Apparently, where your eyes look can be used to predict things about your personality. Could this be the personality test of the future? Neil and Rob discuss how your eyes predict your personality and teach you related vocabulary.

This week's question

The letters 'AI' stand for Artificial Intelligence but what are the letters 'AI'? Are they

A) an abbreviation

B) an acronym, or

C) an initialism?

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

extrovert
someone who has a very outgoing personality, confident and socially comfortable.

introvert
someone who is shy and not comfortable in social situations and doesn't like being the centre of attention.

findings
the results and conclusions of research

unconstrained
without control or restriction

gaze
the way that someone looks at someone

figured out
understood something after studying it

Transcript
Note: This is not a word for word transcript
Neil
Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I'm Neil.

Rob
And I'm Rob.

Neil
Now, Rob, would you say that you are an introvert or an extrovert?

Neil
But you do all of this on the radio and videos for Learning English, don't you? Some would say you have to be an extrovert to do what we do.

Neil
Well, it might not be so easy to hide in the future because researchers have developed a computer program that can tell your personality from looking at where you look, by tracking your eye movements.

Rob
Wow! That sounds pretty hi-tech, and scary.

Neil
Well, we'll learn more shortly, but first a question on the topic of clever computers. The letters 'AI' stand for Artificial Intelligence but what are the letters 'AI'? Are they

A) an abbreviation

B) an acronym, or

C) an initialism?

Rob
OK, I thought that was going to be easy, but I think it's an abbreviation, isn't it?

Neil
Well, you'll have to wait to the end of the programme to find out! Sabrina Hoppe is a researcher at the University of Stuttgart. She was interviewed on the BBC Radio programme All In The Mind. She spoke about an experiment in which they tracked the eye movements of people in real situations. This is what she said about the research. Was she confident the experiment would work in the real world?

Neil So, was she confident this would work?

The result of the experiment - or the finding, as she called it - was that by following eye movements, a computer programme was able to work out the personality of the subjects. Let's listen again.

Sabrina Hoppe
We still don't really know in detail what makes the difference. We can only tell that there are differences and that we know computer programs that can pick up those differences. Maybe extrovert people look up a lot because they want to look at people's faces, whereas some super introvert person maybe just stares at their own shoes, if you want to take the extreme examples. So, probably it somehow changes gaze. But we only know that this information is there and somehow our program figured out how to extract it.

Neil
So how does it work?

Well, that's the strange thing. She said that she didn't really know, at least not in detail. She did say that our personality somehow changes gaze. Gaze is another word for looking at something. So maybe we gaze in different ways depending on our personality. Extroverts may look up more and introverts, like me, may look down more.

A) an abbreviation

B) an acronym

C) an initialism

Rob, what did you say?

Rob
I said A) an abbreviation.

Neil
Well sorry, no, AI is C), so to speak. It's an initialism. It's the first letters of the words 'artificial intelligence', but it's not pronounced like a new word, just the initial letters. Right, time now to review today's vocabulary.

By contrast, an introvert is someone who is shy and not comfortable in social situations and doesn't like being the centre of attention.

Our next word was gaze. This is a word that means 'our way of looking at something'.

And this was something the computer was able to figure out. To figure out means 'to study something and reach an answer to a particular question or problem'.

Right! Well, you know what I've just figured out?

Rob
Do tell!

Neil
It's time to bring this edition of 6 Minute English to an end. We hope you can join us again, but until then we are bbclearningenglish.com and you can find us on social media, online and on our app. Bye for now.

Rob Bye-bye!

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / How your eyes predict your personality

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Watch where you're watching! Apparently, where your eyes look can be used to predict things about your personality. Could this be the personality test of the future? Neil and Rob discuss how your eyes predict your personality and teach you related vocabulary. The letters 'AI' stand for Artificial Intelligence but what are the letters 'AI'?

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Personality 1/3

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"Mr President, I want to raise an issue that I think has been lurking out there for two or three weeks and cast it specifically in national security terms..." said the journalist Henry Trewhitt, as he locked President Ronald Reagan with a steady, serious gaze.

It was October 1984 and Reagan was on the debating circuit, battling to remain in office for a second term. He had already performed poorly against his main rival a few weeks earlier. Now there were whispers that, at 73 years old, he was simply too old for the job.

After all, at the time, Reagan was already the oldest US President in history. His predecessor had gone for days without sleep during the Cuban missile crisis. Trewhitt wanted to know: did Regan have any doubts that he could function in such circumstances?
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"Not at all, Mr Trehwitt," replied Reagan, holding back a smile. "And I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign - I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience." His response was met with raucous laughter and applause - and preceded a landslide victory in the election.

Reagan's quip, however, held more truth than he knew. He didn't just have experience on his side, he would also have had a "mature personality".

We're all familiar with the physical transformation that ageing brings: the skin loses its elasticity, the gums recede, our noses grow, hairs sprout up in peculiar places - while also disappearing entirely from others - and those precious inches of height to which we cling start to slink away.

Now, after decades of research into the effects of ageing, scientists are uncovering another, more mysterious change.

"The conclusion is exactly this: that we are not the same person for the whole of our life," says René Mõttus, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh.

Most of us would like to think of our personalities as relatively stable throughout our lives. But research suggests this is not the case. Our traits are ever shifting, and by the time we're in our 70s and 80s, we've undergone a significant transformation. And while we're used to couching ageing in terms of deterioration and decline, the gradual modification of our personalities has some surprising upsides.

We become more conscientious and agreeable, and less neurotic. The levels of the "Dark Triad" personality traits, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy also tend to go down - and with them, our risk of antisocial behaviours such as crime and substance abuse.

Research has shown that we develop into more altruistic and trusting individuals. Our willpower increases and we develop a better sense of humour. Finally, the elderly have more control over their emotions. It's arguably a winning combination - and one which suggests that the stereotype of older people as grumpy and curmudgeonly needs some revision.

Far from being fixed in childhood, or around the age of 30 - as experts thought for years - it seems that our personalities are fluid and malleable. "People become nicer and more socially adapted," says Mõttus. "They're increasingly able to balance their own expectations of life with societal demands."

Psychologists call the process of change that occurs as we age "personality maturation". It's a gradual, imperceptible change that begins in our teenage years and continues into at least our eighth decade on the planet. Intriguingly, it seems to be universal: the trend is seen across all human cultures, from Guatemala to India.

"Generally it's controversial to put value judgments on these personality changes," says Rodica Damian, a social psychologist at the University of Houston. "But at the same time we do have evidence that they're beneficial." For example, low emotional stability has been linked to mental health problems, higher mortality rates, and divorce. Meanwhile, she explains that the partner of someone with high conscientiousness will probably be happier, because they're more likely to do dishes on time, and less likely to cheat on their partner.

It would be reasonable to think that this continual process of change would make the concept of personality fairly meaningless. But that's not entirely true. That's because there are two aspects to personality change: average changes, and relative changes. It turns out that, while our personalities shift in a certain direction as we age, what we're like relative to other people in the same age group tends to remain fairly stable.

For example, a person's level of neuroticism is likely to go down overall, but the most neurotic 11-year-olds are generally still the most neurotic 81-year-olds. These rankings are our most enduring characteristics, and distinguish us from everyone else.

"There is a core of who we are in the sense that we do maintain our rankings relative to other people to some extent," says Damian. "But relative to ourselves, our personalities are not set in stone - we can change."

How do these personality changes develop? "This is the big debate in the field," says Mõttus.

Because personality maturation is universal, some scientists think that far from being an accidental side-effect of having had longer to learn the rules, the ways our personalities change might be genetically programmed - perhaps even shaped by evolutionary forces.

On the other hand, some think that our personalities are partly forged by genetic factors, then sculpted by social pressures over the course of our lives. For example, research by Wiebke Bleidorn, a personality psychologist at the University of California, Davis, found that, in cultures where people were expected to grow up more quickly - get married, start working, have adult responsibilities - their personalities tend to mature at a younger age.

"People are just kind of forced to change their behaviour and, over time, to become more responsible. Our personalities change to help us cope with life's challenges," says Damian.

But what happens when we reach very old age?

There are two possible ways to study how we change over our lifespan. The first is to take a large group of people of lots of different ages, and then look to see how their personalities are different. One problem with this strategy is that it is easy to accidentally mistake generational traits that have been sculpted by the culture of a particular time period - such as prudishness or an inexplicable adoration of custard creams and sherry - for changes that occur as you age.

The alternative is to take the same group of people and follow them as they grow up.

This is exactly what happened with the Lothian Birth Cohort - a group of people who had their personality traits and intelligence examined in June 1932 or June 1947, when they were still at school. At the time, they were around 11 years old. Together with colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, Mõttus tracked down hundreds of the same people when they were in their 70s or 80s, and gave them two more identical tests, several years apart.

"Because we had two different cohorts of people, and both of them were measured at two occasions, we were able to use both strategies at once," says Mõttus. This was lucky, because the results were remarkably different for the two generations.

While the younger group's personalities remained more or less the same overall, the older group's personality traits begin to shift, so that on average, they became less open and extraverted, as well as less agreeable and conscientious. The beneficial changes that had been occurring throughout their lives started to reverse.

"I think this makes sense, because in old age things start happening to people at a faster pace," says Mõttus, who points out that these people's health might have been in decline, and they're likely to have started losing friends and relatives. "This has some impact on their active engagement with the world."

No one has yet looked at whether this trend would continue into our 100s. Research into Japanese centenarians has found that they tend to score highly for conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness, but they may have had more of these characteristics to begin with - perhaps this even contributed to their longevity.

In fact, our personalities are intrinsically linked to our wellbeing as we age. For example, those with higher self-control are more likely to be healthy in later life, women with higher levels of neuroticism are more likely to experience symptoms during the menopause, and a degree of narcissism has been associated with lower rates of loneliness, which itself is a risk factor for an earlier death.

In the future, understanding how certain traits are linked to our health - and how we can expect our personalities to evolve throughout our lifespan - might help to predict who is most at risk of certain health problems, and intervene.

But there's another benefit to the research. "I was just giving a talk in a prison yesterday," says Mõttus. "There was one question they were really interested in: do people change at all? Well the big-picture finding is that yes, they do." This means that, as far as he is concerned, there isn't any strong evidence to suggest that people can use their personality as an excuse for their behaviour.

The knowledge that our personalities change throughout our lives, whether we want them to or not, is useful evidence of how malleable they are. "It's important that we know this," says Damian. "For a long time, people thought they didn't. Now we're seeing that our personalities can adapt, and this helps us to cope with the challenges that life throws at us."

If nothing else, it gives us all something to look forward to as we get older, and find out who we will become.
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"Mr President, I want to raise an issue that I think has been lurking out there for two or three weeks and cast it specifically in national security terms..." said the journalist Henry Trewhitt, as he locked President Ronald Reagan with a steady, serious gaze.

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Incontri del 22 settembre e 6 ottobre 2021

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Incontri del 22 settembre e 6 ottobre 2021

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How To Hack Your Health 3/3

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One is a town surrounded by tropical forest and beaches popular with surfers, two are craggy islands in the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean, the fourth is at the tail of the Japanese archipelago, while the last is a small city in California whose name means "beautiful hill".

At first glance, there might not seem much to link these five locations - Nicoya in Costa Rica, Sardinia in Italy, Ikaria in Greece, Okinawa in Japan and Loma Linda in California. They are scattered in different corners of the world and could not look more different.

But for anyone wanting to live a long and healthy life, these are perhaps the five best places to have been born. These are the so-called Blue Zones, where people's chances of living to 100 years old is ten times higher than the US average.
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The term Blue Zone first originated with the Italian epidemiologist Gianni Pes and the Belgian demographer Michel Poulain, who were investigating rates of mortality in Sardinia. Marking regions of high longevity in blue in the early 2000s, they found a cluster of particularly high life expectancies in the province of Nuoro on the island. Working with the American journalist Dan Buettner, they since identified a handful of other regions across the world - work that spawned a best-selling book on the subject in 2008.

Getting plenty of daily exercise may be one of the keys to the long life enjoyed by centenarians in Blue Zones around the world (Credit Alamy)

In the subsequent 12 years, many scientists have continued their research into the Blue Zones, with many intriguing hypotheses about what might explain the longevity in these regions.
The lifespan lottery
Let's first explore the general patterns. As Buettner explored in his original book, the lifestyles of people across the Blue Zones share certain characteristics.

The first is diet. Particularly in the past, many people in the Blue Zones tended to eat in moderation. In Okinawa, for example, the elderly people follow the ancient rule of " Hara hachi bu" - eating only until the stomach is 80% full. (According to scientific studies, that translates to around 10% fewer calories than the current recommendations for the average adult.)

And this seems to slow ageing.

Long-term animal studies by Rozalyn Anderson, who researches metabolism and ageing at the University of Wisconsin, have shown that macaques following similar "calorie restricted" diets and have a markedly lower risk of age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. They even look younger - the macaques' fur took longer to turn grey, for example.

We don't yet understand the full mechanisms behind these effects, though calorie restriction seems to reduce the build-up of the toxic free radicals that are normally the result of our metabolism, and which can damage our cells. Some scientists have argued that the body also experiences the reduced calorie consumption as a very mild stress, which shifts its signalling to focus on the maintenance of cells (rather than, say, building new tissue).

According to Diddahally Govindaraju, a geneticist at Harvard University, in Boston, Massachusetts, this decreases the risk of forming damaging mutations in our DNA, which could lead to diseases like cancer. "Calorie restriction appears to reduce DNA damage and improve DNA repair," he says. "And genome integrity appears to be a feature among centenarians." Besides being fairly frugal, the diets in the Blue Zones are mostly plant-based, which can contribute to greater heart health.
Spiritual connection
In addition to their eating habits, of equal importance are the social lives these centenarians enjoy: the people in the Blue Zones tend to live in highly integrated communities. It is now well accepted that a sense of social connection helps to reduce the effects of stress, while the responsibility of maintaining those friendships encourages greater overall mental and physical activity. In one meta-analysis, Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, found that the quality of our relationships are as important to our health as exercise or diet.
Watch BBC Reel's series of three films exploring the lives of Sardinia's centenarians and the unique benefits of their genetic and cultural isolation.
Religion offers one important source of social connection in the Blue Zones. The people of Loma Linda are mostly Seventh-Day Adventists, for instance, while the Nicoyans and Sardinians are Catholics, the Ikarians are Greek Orthodox, and in Okinawa, the locals practice the Ryukyuan religion. Writing a paper for the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, Buettner described how all but five of the 263 Blue Zone centenarians he had interviewed were part of some kind of spiritual community. ( Read more about how the Nicoyan way of life contributes to their longevity.)

Social interaction and spirituality were both found to be common among 100 year olds in places like Okinawa (Credit: Alamy)

In addition to the social connection they can provide, religious practices also offer a sense of purpose to life, and offer solace during upset, which together are thought to add between one and five years to believers' life expectancy. That's bad news for atheists, of course, but there may be other ways that people without faith can enjoy the same benefits. Some cities already have secular assemblies that offer time for contemplation, meditation and social support from like-minded individuals, which should, in theory, have many of the same life-enhancing effects without the belief of divine intervention. The awe we experience in nature may also have similar benefits.
Time for a brew?
Beyond these broad similarities between the Blue Zones, some of their more unique quirks can also give us some hints at the secrets of exceptional longevity.

When it comes to the specific elements of the diet, for instance, it's interesting to note that on the Greek island of Ikaria, the population is known to drink a few cups of tea and coffee a day, and this seems to be associated with reduced cardiovascular disease in the region. The finding would seem to fit with longitudinal studies from elsewhere showing that drinking a few cups of these hot drinks a day can reduce the risk of problems like cardiovascular disease. This may be due to the fact they contain many micronutrients, such as magnesium, potassium, niacin and vitamin E, that act as antioxidants, mopping up toxic free radicals that may be behind many diseases.

Greek coffee - made by boiling a fine grind in a tall narrow pot - is thought to be especially good for the body since it releases polyphenols, known as chlorogenic acids, which reduce inflammation throughout the body. Inflammation contributes to many age-related diseases, such as promoting the growth of plaques in your arteries that lead to heart attacks and strokes, so the regular consumption of an anti-inflammatory polyphenols like the chlorogenic acids could reduce that damage.

These drinks are also associated with a lower risk of type II diabetes. Through various pathways, compounds that have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties - such as chlorogenic acids - appear to stabilise our blood sugar levels, by regulating our cells' energy uptake and preventing them from developing insulin resistance - a precursor to diabetes. "It promotes the beneficial metabolism of glucose," says Christina Chrysohoou at the University of Athens, Greece, who was a lead author on the study of cardiovascular disease in Ikaria.

Caffeinated drinks certainly aren't a guaranteed elixir of life. But combined with a moderate, low-calorie diet, they may contribute to a longer and healthier existence. Like the food in Okinawa and Sardinia, the diet in Ikaria is notably low in meat and high in fresh fruit and vegetables. "They don't even eat as much fish as you might expect for people living on an island," says Chrysohoou.
Bitter-sweet solutions
Along similar lines, the exceptional longevity of Okinawa's residents has generated lots of interest in two of its most common ingredients: the sweet potato and the bitter melon - that may have life-extending properties.

While rice is the staple carbohydrate for most of Japan, the sweet potato has long been the most common carb on Okinawa since it was first introduced in the 1600s. Unlike foods such as white bread, it has a low glycaemic index, meaning that its energy is released slowly into the bloodstream. It is also dense with nutrients like vitamins A, C and E: antioxidants that can mop up damaging free radicals, and which also reduce inflammation.

The sweet potatoes' potassium content helps to reduce blood pressure. The tuber is also high in fibre (which is essential for a healthy gut microbiome) and low in cholesterol and saturated fat, all of which should reduce the risk of chronic disease. ( Read more about how a high-carb diet may explain why Okinawans live so long.)

Greek coffee is thought to be particularly good for human health due to the anti-inflammatory compounds it contains (Credit: Alamy)

The bitter melon, meanwhile, looks a bit like a knobbly cucumber, with a taste a little like black tea. It is used in a variety of dishes - from salads and tempura to juice drinks. Like the Greek coffee drunk in Ikaria, it contains compounds that may stabilise glucose uptake and metabolism, reducing the risk of insulin resistance and type II diabetes.

There may be many more examples in years to come. Nutrient-dense marine organisms like seaweed, algae and kelp - all of which are consumed in Okinawa - are also attracting increasing interest for their potential to stave off age-related diseases, for instance.
A lifegiving landscape
Less researched, but equally tantalising, is the possibility that the very place where these people live may hold some clues to their exceptional longevity.

The Sardinian Blue Zone, for example, lies in incredibly mountainous, and breath-takingly beautiful, regions of the island - often called the "Selvaggio Blu" (Blue Wild) to describe the rugged terrain sweeping straight from the coast. Most of the centenarians living in Sardinia were farm workers, leading Pes and Poulain to speculate that the steep slopes increased the physical activity of their already demanding day-to-day lives. They were athletes thanks to the natural landscape and a traditional way of life.

The village with the key to long life

Across the Aegean, Chrysohoou has been intrigued by the presence of low but significant levels of radioactivity on the Blue Zone in Ikaria. The island is essentially divided into two geologically distinct zones: the east, formed of sedimentary metamorphic rock, and the west, which lies on a bed of granite that leaks radioactive radon into its famous springs.

Amazingly, the longevity of the population appears to be highest in those slightly radioactive regions, while the people in the east have slightly lower lifespans. (Those springs in the west of the island are even said to produce "immortal water" by locals.) This could be a mere coincidence but Chrysohoou points to research in the US, which have also found this puzzling correlation between low levels of environmental radiation and longevity.

"The Rocky Mountain States, for example, have a lower prevalence of cancer death compared to the Gulf States," says Chrysohoou - yet the background radiation in Idaho, Colorado and New Mexico is around three times as high as the natural background radiation in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. A few animal studies have also found that a very low dose of radiation can induce an anti-inflammatory response and DNA repair - possibly in the same way that the small but beneficial stress of caloric restriction can trigger protective mechanisms within cells.

For the time being, the finding remains a curiosity. Many more studies would have to confirm that these patterns cannot be explained by other factors and their potential mechanisms; Chrysohoou certainly isn't suggesting that radioactive drinks might be the elusive elixir of youth. "It is rather dangerous to expect that radioactivity is good for your health," she admits.
The moderation principle
Clearly, exceptional longevity of the Blue Zones can't be restricted to a single magic ingredient, but is the combination of many factors - some of which are shared between the regions, and some of which are unique to each individual place. While that may not be as enticing as the discovery of a miraculous anti-ageing elixir or superfood, there are nevertheless many ways we could learn from these discoveries.

Eating moderately with plenty of fruit and vegetables, exercising plenty, drinking coffee and tea, and finding space for spiritual solace (whether that's church or a long mountain walk) - these are things that we can all build into our daily lives.

--
* David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap Join one million Future fans by liking us on If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. , which examines why smart people act foolishly and the ways we can all make wiser decisions. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
--

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A handful of small towns have remarkable longevity. What is it about their lifestyle that can increase your chances of living to 100?

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Incontri del 22 settembre e 6 ottobre 2021

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Incontri del 22 settembre e 6 ottobre 2021

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How To Hack Your Health 2/3

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Can science reverse the ageing process? - BBC Reel

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The idea of slowing down the ageing process and living healthier, more productive lives is hugely appealing. It's led to a growing trend for people looking to take control of their own biology, optimising their bodies and minds through 'biohacking'. But how safe and ethical is this pursuit of longevity?

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Incontri del 22 settembre e 6 ottobre 2021

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Incontri del 22 settembre e 6 ottobre 2021

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How To Hack Your Health 1/3

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In this programme, Neil and Sam will be discussing whether the revolution in artificial intelligence, often shortened to 'AI', could replace human doctors and nurses. Can you imagine a future without doctors?

Listen to the conversation and learn vocabulary along the way.

This week's question

It's a well-known fact that skin is the human body's largest organ - but how much skin does the average adult have?

a) 2 square metres

b) 3 square metres

c) 4 square metres

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

bedside manner
the kind and caring behaviour shown by doctors and nurses to people who are ill

freckle
small brown or ginger spot on someone's skin, especially a person with pale skin

cancerous
involving cancer

diagnosis
a doctor's judgement about what someone's particular sickness or disease is, made after examining them

rule of thumb
a useful and practical but approximate way of doing or measuring something

where, how, what, why on earth...?
an emphatic way of forming a statement or question to show frustration, anger, surprise or disbelief

Transcript
Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript
Neil
Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I'm Neil.

Sam
And I'm Sam.

Neil
Are you feeling well, Sam? No headache or sore throat?

Sam
No, I feel fine thanks, Neil. Why do you ask?

Neil
Well, I've been reading some inspirational stories about the doctors and nurses fighting Covid. When I was a boy, I always dreamed of becoming a doctor.

Sam
Ah, I see. Have you ever been in hospital?

Neil
In this programme, we'll be discussing whether the revolution in artificial intelligence, often shortened to 'AI', could replace human doctors and nurses. We'll be asking: can you imagine a future without doctors?

Sam
In fact, machines are already doing some of the jobs traditionally done by doctors - scanning people's bodies to detect skin cancer, for example.

Yes, that's true, Sam, and it links to my quiz question which is about human skin. It's a well-known fact that skin is the human body's largest organ - but how much skin does the average adult have? Is it:
a) 2 square metres?,
b) 3 square metres? or,
c) 4 square metres?

Sam
Of course our skin gets loose as we age but I can't believe there's 3 square metres of it! I'll say the answer is a) 2 square metres.

Neil
OK, we'll find out if that's correct later. Every year in the UK over 5 million people are treated for skin cancer. Catch it early and your chances of survival are increased.

Sam
Usually a skin specialist, or dermatologist, will examine your skin using a handheld microscope. But in 2017, a team of researchers at Stanford Medical School made an exciting announcement.

Neil
Here's Oxford University researcher Daniel Susskind, telling BBC World Service programme, The Big Idea, what the medics at Stanford had invented:

Daniel Susskind
A team of researchers at Stamford last yearannounced the development of a system that, if you give it a photo of a freckle it can tell you as accurately as twenty-one leading dermatologists whether or not that freckle is cancerous.

Sam
So, it seems that artificial intelligence is already replacing humans when it comes to detecting cancer - and doing a better job of it.

Neil
But Daniel Susskind isn't convinced. One reason is that AI systems still need humans to programme them - and as it turns out, knowing exactly how doctors detect illness remains something of a mystery.

Sam
Here's Daniel Susskind again in conversation with BBC World Service programme, The Big Idea:

Daniel Susskind
If you ask a doctor how it is they make a diagnosis, they might be able to point you to particularly revealing parts of a reference book or give you a few rules of thumb, but ultimately they'd struggle... they'd say again it requires things like creativity and judgment, and these things are very difficult to articulate - and so traditionally it's been thought very hard to automate - if a human being can't explain how they do these special things, where on earth do we begin in writing instructions for a machine to follow?

Diagnosing someone's illness is complicated but there are some rules of thumb. A rule of thumb is a practical but approximate way of doing something.

Neil
For example, when cooking, a good rule of thumb is two portions of water to one portion of rice.

Exactly. And because identifying sickness is so difficult, Daniel says " where on earth do we begin writing instructions for a machine?" We use phrases like where, how or what on earth to show feelings like anger, surprise or disbelief.

I might show surprise by asking Sam, ' how on earth did you know the answer to that?'

Sam
Ha ha! I guess you're talking about your quiz question, Neil? And you needn't be so surprised - I'm naturally brainy!

Neil
Of course you are. In my quiz question I asked Sam how much skin there is on an adult human body.

Sam
And I said it was a) 2 square metres.

Neil
That's all for this programme but join us for the next edition of 6 Minute English when we'll discuss another trending topic and the related vocabulary.

Sam
Why on earth would you miss it? Goodbye for now!

Neil
Goodbye!

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / A future without doctors?

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In this programme, Neil and Sam will be discussing whether the revolution in artificial intelligence, often shortened to 'AI', could replace human doctors and nurses. Can you imagine a future without doctors? Listen to the conversation and learn vocabulary along the way.

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BOREDOM

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The unexpected benefits of being bored - BBC Reel

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Many people believe there is no benefit to boredom, but it is a very important emotion, as psychologist Sandi Mann explains.

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BOREDOM

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

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Manoush Zomorodi: How boredom can lead to your most brilliant ideas

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Do you sometimes have your most creative ideas while folding laundry, washing dishes or doing nothing in particular? It's because when your body goes on autopilot, your brain gets busy forming new neural connections that connect ideas and solve problems. Learn to love being bored as Manoush Zomorodi explains the connection between spacing out and creativity.

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BOREDOM

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While mind-numbing tedium is never the goal, it can often be the source of great art, writes Clare Thorp.

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BIAS AND PREJUDICE

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Starbucks and Google have been doing it. So have Sephora and Papa John's. The UK's Civil Service will no longer be taking part, while the Labour Party has been criticised for doing it in 20-minute chunks.

What these organisations have in common is that they've all introduced some form of unconscious-bias training, which educates people about the knee-jerk preconceptions they hold and how these beliefs may affect their actions.

But while well-intentioned, there's mixed evidence that unconscious-bias training works. If they're not carefully designed, training sessions may become eye-roll-inducing obligations, and some high-profile organisations have controversially dropped the programmes. But before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, it's important to ask: What, if anything, should replace unconscious-bias training?
What is unconscious bias training?
Unconscious bias refers to the deep-seated prejudices we all absorb due to living in deeply unequal societies. Unconscious or implicit bias can lead to instinctive assumptions that a nurse must be a woman or an engineer must be a man, that an Asian woman won't make a good leader, or that a black man will be an aggressive competitor. (In contrast, explicit bias leads someone to deliberately and wilfully discriminate against others.) Unconscious bias can be present even in people who genuinely believe they're committed to equality; it's harder to spot and root out than obvious discrimination.

But that doesn't mean unconscious bias is insignificant. This under-the-surface form of bias can affect health and life in dramatic ways. For example, many medical professionals in the US believe that black patients are less susceptible to pain, and less likely to comply with medical advice than white patients. The quick-fire judgements of police officers are also very fraught; some research suggests that US police instinctively see darker faces as being more criminal. There are also lots of examples of unconscious bias at the recruitment stage. Hiring managers may gravitate to candidates who are similar to them, assume that male candidates are more competent, or see a 'black-sounding' name on an application, and instinctively associate that person with aggression.

Unconscious bias can have significant implications in the medical arena, research has shown (Credit: Alamy)

As the Black Lives Matter movement has driven demand for reforms, many organisations have considered adopting unconscious-bias training to address their roles in perpetuating racism and inequality. This kind of training seeks to make participants aware of their biases, in a blame-free manner.

The training can take many forms, in-person or online. You might take some form of implicit-association test, in which you're presented with a quickfire series of images, and have to make rapid judgements of them, e.g. 'black', 'white', 'good', 'bad'. You might attend a presentation about how biases affect people from stigmatised groups, and the ubiquity of such biases. You might roleplay as a hiring manager, to consider how differently you evaluate mock candidates from different groups. And you might participate in workshops that suggest strategies for overcoming bias, for instance through repeated exposure to counter-stereotypes.

Together with other forms of diversity training, unconscious bias training has become a massive industry. McKinsey estimated in 2017 that each year about $8bn (£5.8bn) was spent on diversity training just in the US.

Why are some organisations rejecting it?

According to Fatima Tresh, a social and organisational psychologist who works for the UK diversity consultancy Delta Alpha Psi, there's been a rapid rise and fall of such training. In 2020, even as organisations have grappled with their anti-racism responsibilities, there was a distinct trend of workplaces moving away from unconscious bias training.

The UK's Civil Service scrapped this training late in 2020, and urged other public-sector organisations to do the same. The parliamentary statement drew on damning research from the Nudge Unit (a behavioural research company that advises the UK government and other organisations) arguing that implicit bias training had little impact on behaviours or long-term attitudes. For instance, such training had had little effect on the representation of women in management.

KPMG's Bill Michael had to resign after his comments on unconscious bias sparked a staff backlash (Credit: Alamy)

Private companies have also experienced conflict over this issue. KPMG is one of many large firms providing unconscious bias training to its employees, which it's been rolling out since 2014. In an online meeting made public in February, KPMG's UK chair, Bill Michael, called the concept of unconscious bias "complete and utter crap", adding: "Because after every single unconscious bias training that has ever been done, nothing's ever improved." His comments (on Covid-19 as well as bias training) led to an outcry from staff and others, after which Michael apologised and resigned.

Tresh believes that the backlash against unconscious bias training stems from the attitude that "it's a tick-box exercise: if everybody in the organisation just attends this e-learning module or quick training session, that will fix all of our problems or will show that we're not a biased or discriminatory organisation". Employees may sleepwalk their way through a training session that seems like just an item on a checklist to boost a company's image. And a one-and-done approach to training can create the harmful impression that prejudice can be swiftly and neatly dispatched before returning to business as usual.

Moreover, although this kind of training may be well-intended, a significant body of research suggests that it has limited effects on changing beliefs in the long term, or improving representation of minority groups in the workplace. In the worst cases, the training can backfire - making participants feel that they don't need to worry about bias anymore because they've done the training, or teaching them that such bias can never be eradicated.

Yet Katerina Bezrukova, who researches management and organisational behaviour at the University at Buffalo, believes that the backlash isn't a product of organisations tracking outcomes (all too often, they don't). She believes it's partly because such training makes people uncomfortable - something that's needed if it is going to succeed. "It works only when you're the most uncomfortable," she says. Confronting social differences and ingrained ways of thinking is challenging, even frightening. Bezrukova points out that "human nature is to take the easy way" - and the easy way here is to defensively reject challenging new information.

What's the way forward?

The British government has been criticised for getting rid of a diversity programme without an alternative in place; the Civil Service says its new strategy, focusing on behavioural change rather than bias training, is not yet ready. Those formulating a new strategy should consider a number of factors that are associated with more effective inclusion programmes.

One is the importance of being clear and specific about the objectives of an inclusion programme. If unconscious bias training is designed solely to kick-start awareness raising, then it can do some good; indeed, awareness raising is the most common achievement.

But achieving behavioural change is harder. If a company wants to increase representation of minorities in senior management, then relying on bias training alone is likely to fail - and to give employees a sour experience of diversity initiatives. For concrete change, this training has to be part of an integrated process, and organisations need to be willing to invest in that longer-term process rather than the short fix of a one-off training session. A 30- or 60-minute training session can't begin to compete with a lifetime of absorbed prejudice and structural inequalities, after all. A perfunctory session also sends a message to employees that an organisation isn't taking bias seriously.

But longer training sessions aren't enough. What's key is continuity and embedding these within larger structural change. According to Chester Spell, who researches management at Rutgers University, this doesn't have to be a costly proposition. "I don't think it's so much a matter of you have to spend massive amounts of dollars into this, instead of be something that's ongoing... something that's part of the company's way of doing business."

To change practices holding back minority groups, more concrete steps are needed. These could include reforming recruitment processes (for instance, rethinking language on job adverts that evokes stereotypically male traits, or removing photos, names and mentions of age from job applications). Mentoring is particularly useful for underrepresented groups. "Certain elements of unconscious bias training are worth retaining if they are contributing to a longer-term, sustainable programme," says Tresh.

And although it may seem thuddingly obvious, diversity breeds more diversity. Talking to varied groups of people reduces bias, for police officers and office workers alike. In the short term, the pandemic has limited opportunities for varied social interaction. But organisations that genuinely care about diversity need to think longer term, for instance assessing whether they're supporting policies to desegregate the regions where they operate.

Ultimately, the politicised furore over unconscious bias training may be allowing for some convenient scapegoating of this particular approach, rather than more careful scrutiny of broad challenges.

"I think unconscious bias training is comparable to all types of diversity and inclusion training," reflects Tresh. "The deeper you go, the more thoughtful you are in your design, the more impact it will have. And, so, I think the move away from unconscious bias training is helpful if we're moving toward deeper learning and behaviour change. I think a move away from it is unhelpful if we're just looking for other tick-box solutions to diversity and inclusion challenges."

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The complicated battle over unconscious-bias training

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Starbucks and Google have been doing it. So have Sephora and Papa John's. The UK's Civil Service will no longer be taking part, while the Labour Party has been criticised for doing it in 20-minute chunks.

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BIAS AND PREJUDICE
(remember to activate english subtitles)

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How to Outsmart Your Own Unconscious Bias

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The human brain is a remarkable achievement in evolution. Unfortunately, the brain activity that kept the human species alive for millions of years is the same brain activity that keeps us from achieving equality today. Author, speaker and CEO, Valerie Alexander, explains how the human brain instinctively reacts when encountering the unexpected, like saber-toothed tigers or female tech execs, and proposes that if we have the courage to examine our own behavior when faced with the unfamiliar, we can take control of our expectations, and by doing so, change the world.

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BIAS AND PREJUDICE

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The internet contains a wealth of . This information can be used to learn about new things or to verify facts.

However, much of the information on the internet is either in some way or incorrect.

Information that is biased or incorrect loses its value. When information has no value, it is of no use to us. We need to be able to distinguish between information that is valuable (of use to us) and that which is not.

What is bias?
Biased information is information that is written from a particular perspective or point of view.
When we write, we often - either purposefully or accidentally - introduce bias. Information that contains bias may be:

personal opinion

a statement that has no factual basis

in favour of or against a person, product, situation or idea

Look at the following examples of information about a film:

"I think this film is the best animated film of all time." This statement is clearly personal opinion, and as such should be treated with caution. Someone else might say the film is poor.

"In twenty years' time, people will say this film is the best animated film ever." There is no factual basis to this statement. How can the person who wrote it know what people will think in the future?

"Like all animated films, this one is great!" This information contains prejudice - the writer clearly has a passion for animation. Someone who does not like animation may say all animated films are poor.

In each case, bias has distorted the information about the film.

What is reliability?
Incorrect information is information that is wrong, out of date or inaccurate.
Websites may contain information that is incorrect for any of these reasons:

the facts stated are incorrect

out of date - the facts may have been correct when the website was produced, but are no longer correct

inaccurate - the facts may be largely correct, but may contain some errors

When information is correct, it is 'reliable' . Reliable information has value. The less reliable the information, the less valuable it is .

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Bias and reliability - Bias and reliability - KS3 Computer Science Revision - BBC Bitesize

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The internet contains a wealth of . This information can be used to learn about new things or to verify facts. However, much of the information on the internet is either in some way or incorrect. Information that is biased or incorrect loses its value.

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FRIENDSHIP

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A friendship written in 50,000 letters - BBC News

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FRIENDSHIP

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The Power of Relationships | Andrew Mills | TEDxEdenHighSchool

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FRIENDSHIP

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Why is it harder to make friends as an adult?

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Dr Carter believes one of the issues with social media is recognising what level of friendship you might have with someone. "I think social media has affected the complexity of our friendship because people aren't sure how to portray themselves and often they're over-identifying with people, telling them too much, and they may come to regret that later," she says.

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FOOD

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Insects are a nutrition-dense source of protein embraced by much of the world. Why are some of us so squeamish about eating them?

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FOOD

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Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal

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Western countries throw out nearly half of their food, not because it's inedible -- but because it doesn't look appealing. Tristram Stuart delves into the shocking data of wasted food, calling for a more responsible use of global resources.

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FOOD

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THE BENEFITS OF LEARNING LANGUAGES

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The number of teenagers learning foreign languages in UK secondary schools has dropped by 45% since the turn of the millennium, BBC analysis has found.

The reaction to the research was mixed. Why learn a foreign language when English is spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, some people wondered.

Others questioned the need for a second language when translation technology is advancing so quickly.

But many speakers of foreign languages extolled the benefits. Four native English speakers tell the BBC how making the effort to learn a second language is important - and how it changed their life.

'It gave me the confidence to interview footballers'

When Alex Chaffer moved to Germany four years ago, he could only say "hello" and "thank you" in German.

He had not learnt the language at school, but was starting off a career in sports journalism and had the opportunity to go to Germany.

When he first arrived, he discovered his accommodation had fallen through.

"I had been scammed," he said. "I couldn't speak to anyone because I didn't have the language, I was lost."

"The first year I was here I didn't learn a lot. I then had a German girlfriend that helped massively, having someone force me to do it and hearing it around all the time. She would speak in English and I would speak in German."

The 23-year-old is now fluent and works on the website of Germany's top football league, Bundesliga.

He said that in his job, he was "embarrassed to not know the language" and learning German has given him "so much confidence".

"I would be worried about going to the shops and restaurants," he said.

"Even professionally, I didn't interview footballers for three years because I didn't have the confidence in my language but now I can go up to any player. It's totally changed my way of living.

"It's opened me up as a person professionally and personally."

School language learning at 18-year low

Critical window for learning a language

Should all kids learn sign language?

Five tips to learn a new language

'I gave my children the gift of a second language'

James Westgarth's first introduction to a foreign language was at school, a comprehensive in west London where he learnt French.

"My parents had no language skills but they encouraged me so I could order food etc when we went on holidays," he said.

"The result is a 23-year international career. I spent 13 years at Airbus in Toulouse and the US and am now a sourcing director at a subsidiary of Lufthansa in Frankfurt."

The 44-year-old puts his successful career down to his language skills and the cultural awareness they bring.

"Speaking a language helps to break the ice," he said. "Even if it's not perfect, it's a good introduction and brings people on-side when you're negotiating

"My own two children, who attend an international school in Toulouse, are of course bilingual in French and English.

"Now they have a lot of international friends and they're discovering the world through two sets of eyes. The gift of a second language is the best thing I can give to them."

From his experience of working in Europe over the past 20 years, he said he believes the UK has become "more and more insular" and that "a language barrier plays a part".

"Things could be made a lot easier with language skills," he said. "I'm still learning German, and when I'm with my work colleagues in Frankfurt, it helps to show that I'm making an effort."

He added: "If you see the language as living, if you experience it in daily life, it makes it more real. They really do help people later in life."

'Why do we see languages as nice but not important?'

Being introduced to languages at a young age is something that teacher Ellie Baker believes strongly in. She founded BilinguaSing - which runs musical French and Spanish classes for children.

"Since 2013, I've been teaching babies and upwards," Ms Baker said. "My business is about empowering families.

"We cannot afford for children not to learn languages. We should be equipping them [for] whatever Brexit is going to bring."

Among the benefits of learning a second language is the potential to "boost brain power", Ms Baker's company has said.

Studies have suggested that learning a second language can slow brain ageing, and can lead to higher mental function in the brain.

She said schools are still overly focused on qualifications rather than skills for life, like languages.

"Why do we look at learning a language as nice to have but not important? Why are we more worried about a child having a lower GCSE grade than average?

"The future of our kids will not hinge on academic abilities as much as it has done," she said.

"We're still really focused on academic grades. I'm not saying qualifications are not important, but it's not everything. We have to think about what the kids need for their future."

'Foreign languages did wonders for my English'

Cassandra Scott, from Edinburgh, studied three languages in her final year at school: Advanced Higher French and German as well as beginners level Russian, which her French teacher taught "just for fun".

She is now a freelance translator in Edinburgh, and said: "Learning languages at school really set the course for my career."

"I went to Fortrose Academy in the Highlands, where we had brilliant language teachers. It's a state school, but they offered us so many amazing opportunities.

"Learning two foreign languages also did wonders for my English. It gave me a new perspective on my own language and also gave me extra practice in identifying parts of speech, and later on, analysing literature."

Since studying interpreting and translation, she has worked as an in-house translator and an assistant language teacher (for English) in Osaka, Japan.

"I now work as a freelance medical and marketing translator," she said. "Most of my work - about 80% - is in German.

"I love my job and I'll always be thankful to my language teachers at school who taught me how to learn."

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'Learning a second language changed my life'

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The number of teenagers learning foreign languages in UK secondary schools has dropped by 45% since the turn of the millennium, BBC analysis has found. The reaction to the research was mixed. Why learn a foreign language when English is spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, some people wondered.

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THE BENEFITS OF LEARNING LANGUAGES

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THE BENEFITS OF LEARNING LANGUAGES

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Do we think differently in different languages? - BBC Ideas

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How much of an impact does the language you speak have on how you actually think?

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Incontro del 17 marzo rinviato al 31 marzo 2021

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Incontro del 17 marzo rinviato al 31 marzo 2021

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WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS
This is a Playlist: choose only one or two videos among those that interest you most and explain them to the group during the meeting!

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"Feminism: The fight for equality" Playlist - BBC Ideas

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A playlist that features some of the ideas, the women and the stories of the feminist movement.

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Incontro del 17 marzo 2021 rinviato al 31 marzo 2021

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Incontro del 17 marzo 2021 rinviato al 31 marzo 2021

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WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

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In Zimbabwe, 96% of people expressed a bias against women's physical integrity - a measure covering support for violence against women and opposition to reproductive rights. In the Philippines, 91% of people held views that were detrimental to women's physical integrity.

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Gender study finds 90% of people are biased against women

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The UN Development Programme analysed biases against gender in 75 countries around the world.

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Incontro del 17 marzo rinviato al 31 marzo 2021

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Incontro del 17 marzo rinviato al 31 marzo 2021

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WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

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Thousands of women have signed up with 50:50 Parliament to register their interest in standing as an MP (Member of Parliament) in the UK. What's inspiring them to get involved? Sam and Georgina discuss the engagement of women in politics and teach you related vocabulary.

This week's question

Which country has the highest percentage of women in its parliament? Is it:

a) Rwanda

b) Sweden

c) New Zealand

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

to stand
to be a candidate in an election

to tailor (what you say)
to change (how you speak) to make it suitable for a particular group

Transcript

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript

SamWomen in politics is our topic today. Before we get into it, today's question. Which country has the highest percentage of women in its parliament? Is it:
a) Rwanda
b) Sweden
c) New Zealand
What do you think, Georgina?

SamOK. We'll see if you're correct at the end of the programme. There are a number of projects in the UK at the moment trying to get more women interested in standing for parliament. One of these is the campaign 'sign-up-to-stand' from an organisation called 50:50 Parliament. Lucrece Grehoua is someone who has taken up that challenge and is hoping to stand in upcoming elections. She was a guest on the BBC Radio programme Woman's Hour. She wasn't always interested in politics, though. How does she describe it?

Lucrece Grehoua
I didn't really see myself in the Houses of Parliament. When we see it on TV it looks extremely boring, politics looks boring, especially as a young person and so when I saw that 50:50 Parliament were including women and including young women, including a diverse range of young women, I thought 'wow, this is really for me and it can be for me'. So I decided to #signuptostand. Ever since I've just been excited at the prospect of me standing for parliament.

Sam
What was her original feeling about politics?

SamShe says that she is now excited at the prospect of standing. What does she mean by that?

Sam
So, what was it that made her change her mind and think that politics wasn't so boring after all? Here's Lucrece Grehoua again.

Lucrece Grehoua
I think everybody has a politician within them because we all get anger about something but unfortunately when we see it, it's all jargon, it's not very... words that we can understand. Even just as a working class person who hasn't, you know, been to a private school and who's come from a disadvantaged background and so I realised politics is for absolutely everybody, it's just the way that you speak about it has to be tailored to everyone.

SamOne of the things she didn't like about politics was the jargon.

Well, no one likes jargon, do they? Jargon is the very specific language and vocabulary relating to a particular profession. Inside the profession people know what it means, but from outside it can seem very complicated and confusing.

GeorginaBut even though, or maybe because, she came from a disadvantaged background she has become interested in politics and thinks that it can be something for everyone, but rather than use jargon you have to tailor the way you speak for everyone. To tailor something is to make it fit - in the same way that a tailor makes clothes fit, you can tailor your language to make it easy for everyone to understand. And one way to do that is to cut out the jargon!

SamThat's just about all we have time for today. But before we review the vocabulary, it's time to get the answer to today's quiz question. Which country has the highest percentage of women in its parliament? Is it:
a) Rwanda
b) Sweden
c) New Zealand
Georgina, what did you say?

Georgina
I made an educated guess of Rwanda.

Of course. To stand is the verb we use when someone is a candidate in an election - when someone stands for election you can vote for them.

The prospect of something, is the possibility of something, so for example, the prospect of becoming an MP is something that excites Lucrece.

Georgina Bye!

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Women in politics

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Thousands of women have signed up with 50:50 Parliament to register their interest in standing as an MP (Member of Parliament) in the UK. What's inspiring them to get involved? Sam and Georgina discuss the engagement of women in politics and teach you related vocabulary.

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EPIGENETICS - NATURE VS NURTURE

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Each creature inherits genes from its parents. These provide blueprints for how its cells will grow and act. Those blueprints usually say how those cells will act from conception until death. But sometimes the environment we live in can tweak those blueprints. It doesn't change the genes themselves - so the change is not genetic. Instead, the environment changes certain molecules that act a bit like light switches. They don't illuminate or darken a room. These switches instead turn a gene on or off.

Such changes are described as epigenetic. The term means "above the genes."

The switches are often molecules called methyl groups. (This refers to a carbon atom stuck tightly to three hydrogen atoms. Their formula is written CH 3.)

Around the time a mammal is born, those switches attach to its DNA. They glom onto the DNA next to certain genes. A child's epigenome, or full set of switches, tends to match that of his or her parents when they had been born.

But those switches can change throughout life. Certain factors in the environment, such as pollutants or diet, can damage a methyl group or strip it off of the DNA. In some cases, this will alter how a gene performs. The change may stop a gene from working. Or it might make it stay switched on for too long, or not long enough. Depending on when this improper switching occurs and which gene it affects, the change may have little impact on an animal's health - or a lot.

The classic example came out of a 2003 experiment by Randy Jirtle and Dana Dolinoy. Both scientists were working at Duke University in Durham, N.C., at the time. They fed some pregnant mice a diet that affected a gene called agouti in their developing pups. This gene controls fur color. Switching it off turned the normally brown mouse pups a golden hue. More importantly, it made them uncontrollably hungry. So they ate and ate and ate. And that made them fatter and fatter and fatter.

The young mice looked and acted different because their mothers' diets had caused epigenomic (EP-ee-jeh-NO-mik) changes to their DNA. Those changes happened while the babies were growing in the womb. But these fat, golden animals would not pass on those changes to their own young. That's because a fetus has a way to erase epigenetic changes from the DNA it inherits. It starts with a clean slate, then puts on some methyl groups, but only where its normal genetic inheritance says they belong.

Or so scientists had thought.

Seven years after the Duke study, Margaret Morris and her team showed that environmental changes to the epigenome also could be inherited. Morris worked at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The researchers took healthy male baby mice and raised half on a normal diet. The rest ate high-fat food. They downed an unhealthy number of calories, grew fat, and eventually developed diabetes. It's the same pattern seen in many people.

When these now-fat males mated with slim females, the resulting babies grew into tubby mice. But when the slim males mated with slim females, the babies grew into normal-size mice. This was evidence that the overweight, diabetic dads had epigenetic changes to their DNA, and could pass down those changes to their children.

A few years later, Michael Skinner and his colleagues at Washington State University in Pullman did a similar study with pollutants instead of diet. They showed that when dads were exposed to certain pollutants, they could pass on epigenetic changes - even to their grandchildren.

A pollutant's epigenetic effects shouldn't show up in subsequent generations, John McCarrey told Science News at the time. He's an epigeneticist who worked at the University of Texas at San Antonio and was not involved in the study. But in the Skinner study, these changes did show up in later generations. And that, he said, "is pretty heavy in terms of their potential significance."

Since then, a host of other studies also have shown that some epigenetic changes may be passed down from a parent to its offspring - and beyond.

Power Words
More About Power Words

(for more about Power Words, click here)

atom The basic unit of a chemical element. Atoms are made up of a dense nucleus that contains positively charged protons and neutrally charged neutrons. The nucleus is orbited by a cloud of negatively charged electrons.

conception The moment when an egg and sperm cell fuse, starting in motion the development of a new individual.

diabetes A disease where the body either makes too little of the hormone insulin (known as type 1 disease) or ignores the presence of too much insulin when it is present (known as type 2 diabetes).

epigenetic changes Molecular switches that can turn a gene on or off. Methyl groups - chemical clusters each made of one carbon and three hydrogen atoms - latch onto DNA near a gene. It's these methyl groups that can alter the programmed activity of a gene. Individuals can acquire an epigenetic change at any time during their lives.

epigenome The full complement of epigenetic switches present in an individual.

gene (adj. genetic) A segment of DNA that codes, or holds instructions, for producing a protein. Offspring inherit genes from their parents. Genes influence how an organism looks and behaves.

methyl group (in chemistry) Three hydrogen atoms bonded, chemically, to a carbon atom. This amazingly common quartet of atoms is then attached - through the carbon - to some other molecule. (in genetics) When attached to a gene, the methyl group can act like a new switch to turn the gene's activity on or off, up or down.

molecule An electrically neutral group of atoms that represents the smallest possible amount of a chemical compound. Molecules can be made of single types of atoms or of different types. For example, the oxygen in the air is made of two oxygen atoms (O 2), but water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H 2 O).

pollutant A substance that taints something - such as the air, water, our bodies or products. Some pollutants are chemicals, such as pesticides. Others may be radiation, including excess heat or light. Even weeds and other invasive species can be considered a type of biological pollution.

womb Another name for the uterus, the organ in mammals in which a fetus grows and matures in preparation for birth.

Janet Raloff is the editor of Science News for Students. Prior to this, she was an environmental reporter for Science News, specializing in toxicology. To her never-ending surprise, her daughter became a toxicologist.

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Each creature inherits genes from its parents. These provide blueprints for how its cells will grow and act. Those blueprints usually say how those cells will act from conception until death. But sometimes the environment we live in can tweak those blueprints. It doesn't change the genes themselves - so the change is not genetic.

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EPIGENETICS - NATURE VS NURTURE

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Three simple ways to deactivate your bad genes - BBC Reel

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Epigenetics, the study of the code that controls our DNA, tells us that our lifestyle choices can have a significant impact on our gene expression and our lives. Video by Izabela Cardoso & Fernando Teixeira

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EPIGENETICS - NATURE VS NURTURE

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Det medisinske fakultet - Universitetet i Oslo

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CARBON FOOTPRINT
Ti consigliamo di ascoltare questo per primo!

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Feifei loves to travel, but she's concerned about the size of her 'carbon footprint'. What does this phrase mean, and how is it related to the environment? And what can Feifei do about it? We explain all, in the programme.

Transcript

Neil
Welcome back, Feifei! Good holiday?

Feifei
The best, Neil! We flew to Mexico, then up to California, and then drove all the way across the States from LA to New York.

Neil
Incredible. All in one week?

Feifei
Yes. It's just that...

Feifei
I can't help thinking... all that travelling can't be great for the environment.

Neil
I know. You must have a pretty big carbon footprint right now.

Enormous.
Let's take a moment to explain this phrase 'carbon footprint'. Then plan what to do about it.

Feifei
Carbon dioxide is a gas that contributes to climate change.

Neil
And your 'carbon footprint' is the amount of carbon dioxide you produce through your activities - things like how much electricity you use...

Feifei
How much oil and gas you use...

Neil
What you eat is another factor. And of course your trips by car, plane and so on...

Feifei
If you take a lot of flights, then you have a large carbon footprint! Like me.

Neil
And me. And the people in these examples.

Examples
I used the air conditioning non-stop all summer. My carbon footprint must be huge.

Martina has the highest carbon footprint of all her colleagues. She drives everywhere, flies every weekend, and eats nothing but red meat.

I downloaded an app to calculate my carbon footprint. The results are pretty shocking.

Feifei
You're listening to The English We Speak from BBC Learning English. The expression we're looking at in this programme is 'carbon footprint'. OK, we've heard the examples. And Neil, I have a plan. It's time to reduce my footprint.

Neil
Great. That's the verb we normally use: reduce. We talk about reducing our carbon footprint, by changing the way we live. So, what's the plan?

Feifei
I'm going to cycle to work, use less heating in winter, and... I've got these new shoes.

Neil
Great. But, shoes?

Feifei
They're made of recycled plastic. Fantastic, aren't they?

Neil
Well, that's one way to reduce your footprint!

Feifei
I even brought you a pair - a little present from my trip LA.

Neil
You're so kind. I can wear them when I'm in Tokyo this weekend. And Paris next week. Oh, and Iceland tomorrow. Only kidding!

Feifei
Yes, I want to hear your plan to reduce your carbon footprint, Neil!

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BBC Learning English - The English We Speak / Carbon footprint

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Feifei loves to travel, but she's concerned about the size of her 'carbon footprint'. What does this phrase mean, and how is it related to the environment? And what can Feifei do about it? We explain all, in the programme. Neil Welcome back, Feifei! Good holiday? Feifei The best, Neil!

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CARBON FOOTPRINT
Hi to everyone, I would like to suggest a couple of interesting links related to this evening discussion.
Claudia T.

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MS. SELLERS: Good morning and welcome to Washington Post Live. I'm Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer at The Washington Post. My first guest this morning is the co-founded and CEO of a plastics recycling company, BioCellection. Miranda Wang, welcome to Washington Post Live.

MS. WANG: Thank you, Frances.

MS. SELLERS: Well, we're delighted to have you. From what I've read, this all started with an 11th grade trip to a refuse center. But tell me what prompted you to start BioCellection and what the company actually is.

MS. WANG: Sure. So, when I was a teenager, I had the opportunity to visit a waste transfer station while I was growing up in Vancouver, Canada. And it just dawned on both me and my co-founder, who is my high school best friend, that, you know, we have this huge problem. Few people know what happens to their plastic, to their trash in general and their recycling after they leave it out at the curbside. But actually, globally, only 9 percent of plastics that we produce every year is getting recycled. And of that 9 percent, very little of it, even less of it is actually getting effectively recycled. And so, while most of us might think that recycling starts and ends with putting things in a recycling bin, that's actually not true.

And the problem is that when we talk about plastics, we make it sound like it's just one material. But in reality, it's a class of multiple types of materials. It's actually, you know, a whole world of lots of different mixed materials. And right now, you know, for a lot of plastics that we most ubiquitously use, such as low-density polyethylene, which is, you know, what we would use for a plastic bag, for example, materials like that are very hard to recycle. Just due to the chemical nature of that material is part of why it's so cheap to produce that material at scale, because of its chemical structure. But it's also because--but also because of this chemical structure, it's really difficult to recycle it.

And so, what my company does is we are creating a circular economy solution for these types of plastics that are very hard to recycle. And we do it by using an innovative technology we've invented to chemically break down this plastic, and not into fuels, but into chemical building blocks that can then be used to--whether to be turned into performance materials that can be reintroduced back into the economy, into products like shoes and cars and apparel, but also into a variety of other kinds of products through technologies like biotechnology. And so, we're creating, you know, a chemical solution for a relatively complex real-world problem.

MS. SELLERS: So, you're really talking about taking the plastic bags I throw out every day and turning them into useful objects: shoes, apparel and other things. Tell me why this--you've said this is a really dire and urgent problem at the moment. What's the biggest message you would like to get over to the general public, and how are you doing it?

MS. WANG: Yeah, I think--I think as an everyday person, you know, the technologies are in development. And it's not just our company. There are other companies doing this too in different ways. You know, the solutions are in incubation. They're being scaled up. But our solutions are not yet at a level that can handle all the problems, the scale of the plastic problem we have available around the world. And so, as an everyday person, what you can do to, you know, ease the pain here is to really be conscious about the plastics you're using. You know, every day it seems impossible to be getting any goods that comes into your home without packaging, you know, plastic packaging around it. But for us to make the conscious choice and to give the feedback to the merchants and the retailers that this is, you know, constantly push back that this is not something, you know, we can continue consuming at--in this type of volume. We have to work on reducing our footprint and not treating the use of plastics and the discarding of plastics as if it's something that is free, that is unlimited. Because, you know, the solutions are not yet at the scales that are needed. And we're quickly scaling them up, but, you know, in times like COVID, for all manufacturing type technologies, you know, there is a setback. There is--there are challenges to scaling up these types of technologies. And society needs to be aware of, you know, how there is a mismatch between the volumes out there and the amount that technology can handle still.

MS. SELLERS: Miranda, take that point a little bit further. How has the pandemic made this more of a challenge?

MS. WANG: So, the pandemic has really taken a lot of energy out at a time when obviously the world economy is the least prepared for it. But in a way, you know, we came off after, especially United States, a decade of positive economic growth. So, you can kind of argue either way.

And of course, this is, you know, something that took out a lot of financial resources, a lot of time, you know, caused a lot of exhaustion. But it's created new opportunity and has forced us to look at how do we move into this new decade, you know, doing the right things that we have to do.

We have a lot of kind of backlogged work that we need to do for our society. We can't accelerate the society and our technology development asymmetrically, focusing only on things that, you know, are--you know, for, you know, first-world problems or for making life make comfortable and enjoyable. We have to catch up on things that would make, you know, our environment something that we can actually have in the future, that we can pass onto future generations. We have all sorts of critical issues right now that, you know, we don't have enough young people working in these fields, which is--which is people, scientists, inventors, business people, working on them in general. You know, we need to field those voids, and we need the financial resources to be there, the policies to be there to accelerate those solutions.

MS. SELLERS: But tell me what role you think government should be playing? Some governments have banned single-use plastics. What would you like to see here? You talked about your Canadian background. You now live in the U.S. What should the U.S. government be doing?

MS. WANG: It's a challenging one for the governments because the technology solutions are emerging but they're not fully at scale yet. And so, for policy, you know, it's easy to say let's just stick with bans. I mean, I think from a policy standpoint, there are not that many tools right now in their tool chest, as they will have in a decade from now. And so, I think policy--it's important for policy to continuously keep up with what the technologies are, with understanding and assessing how these new technologies should be implemented, and constantly updating every single year to make sure that we're implementing the best plan that we can, you know, as things change.

And also, understanding the complexity of this plastic problem, right? It's not a black or white problem. It's not that we're either pro-plastics or against plastics. Plastics are a human-made material that is the best invention really of the last century, of this century. It's the material that's really enabled a lot of people to be able to get clean food, to get, you know, the quality of life that we have.

And so, it's not a fight against plastics. It's more about how do we--how do we ensure that we're all able to live well in this modern age and sustain this kind of--you know, the kind of lifestyle we have without destroying our planet. How do we use this material, plastics, and redesign it? How do we--how do we create this material while thinking about what happens to it after it's used? I think we're definitely capable of doing this. It's just that, you know, for anything like--for anything like these problems, it takes some time for the solutions to be invented and to be scaled up. And we just have to not lose hope. And we need to continue focusing on solving these problems until they're solved.

MS. SELLERS: Miranda, we've been hearing from our audience, and I'd like to read you one of the questions that's come in this morning. This is from Leila Hawkins who lives in California, and she asks, "Do you think colleagues should be training students for careers in climate solutions?"

MS. WANG: Absolutely. I mean, 2020 is a decade for humans really to reflect on, you know, what does our future look like, where to do we stand and what does our future look like. And I think we're forced to have to do that. And I think it's--you know, once you think on that problem, it's inevitable you come to, you know, these huge issues that have been kind of swept under the rug. And climate change has become this, you know, politicized, huge complex issue.

But really when you start chipping away at it, there are definitely concrete issues, concrete problems that we can start knocking out to simplify the problem and to make it, you know, significantly better. And what we need, first of all, are people who will work on these problems. And education is, you know, the key to opening that up. So absolutely. I think in this--in this era, if you want to learn something that, you know, will be relevant to society, will make your skills valuable in a workforce, you know, that is a must-have. You have to know how to join this fight.

MS. SELLERS: So, you've been talking to me about the plastics that I throw out in my recycle--put into my recycling bin and I hope don't get thrown out. What about the plastic that's already broken down in the sea, for example and polluting in very small particles our oceans?

MS. WANG: Yeah, so what happens when plastics get out into the oceans is that they actually pass through an oxidation pathway. That's been well studied for decades. Usually what you read about in, you know, sources like National Geographic or other kinds of news sources is that, you know, we get this huge amount of micro plastics in the ocean. And that's the problem, is that, you know, plastics start to really fray and decay and become little bits and bits. But eventually after hundreds of years, you know, these micro plastics, they do end up breaking down into biodegradable chemicals and from there being ingested by bacteria and organizations that are in the ecosystem. It's just that that period is extremely prolonged. And so, you have these partially broken-down plastics in the environment getting contaminated, you know, getting--contaminating into our food streams, and that's what's causing all of these problems and that's why it's dangerous.

The thing is that, you know, animals in the environment, organisms, they don't live for hundreds of years. They can't tolerate that. So, we really have to keep plastics out of the environment, and we have to figure out how do we responsibly use this material that we've invented and doesn't break down, you know, very readily in the environment? And since this has already produced a huge scale, how do we close the loop? I think that's--from an industry perspective, that's the first thing we have to do. And then we need to go in and assess, you know, have we overengineered this material? Have we created too many types of plastics that don't need to be here? Have we for example always prioritized things like color and surface finishings and making the plastics fancy and nice to touch over the practicality of it being recycled at the end of use, right? We have to choose a society. You can't have it all. You can't have the beautiful products that are on the shelves and having 50 different kinds of it at any given time and having amazing recyclability and sustainability. We just have to pick. A lot of the things I think people that wouldn't even know that that kind of luxury that we have is at a huge expense of sustainability.

MS. SELLERS: Miranda, I think I have time for one last question, and it's a kind of big one, but you've been working on plastics recycling. Do you see that for the--being the quest for the rest of your life, or is there another environmental challenge that you will be working on in the future?

MS. WANG: You know, I think it's hard to find a problem as big as working on, you know, the plastic pollution problem, which is so--it's not just on the surface, you know, materials in the environment creating pollution but it's tied into the carbon problem directly with climate. It's tied in with social justice, you know, because people who are living near and affected by plastic pollution are usually the most poor in the world. And so, it's a very meaningful problem to be working on. And I think I will be working on it for a very long time.

MS. SELLERS: Miranda Wang, thank you very much for joining me.

MS. WANG: Thank you for having me.

MS. SELLERS: Well, we were delighted. I'll be back soon after a short video to talk about two other young leaders in this world of environmental challenges: Sarah Evans and Karan Jerath. I look forward to seeing you again after the video.

[Video plays]

MS. SELLERS: Welcome back to Washington Post Live. If you're just joining us, I'm Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer at The Washington Post. I'm delighted now to introduce two young leaders in the environmental world, Sarah Evans, the founder--co-founder of WellAware; and Karan Jerath, who is an inventor, entrepreneur, and more. Welcome to you both.

MR. JERATH: Thank you for having us.

MS. SELLERS: And just checking we can hear you, Sarah, too.

MS. EVANS: Yes, thank you for having me.

MS. SELLERS: Delighted to have you both here. So, Sarah, let's talk to you about what is [audio distortion] tell me a little bit about how you founded the company and also about the complementary company WellBeyond that you've worked with, which is a consulting company?

MS. EVANS: Certainly, yes. I founded WellAware about 12 years ago. It was not my background. I went to law school and have a legal background. But I was asked to join a project in Kenya to fund the replacement of some livestock in this village because of the drought. But the more I researched the issue and dug into the problem and started to get some--to know some of the community members, I realized that the core issue was a lack of clean water there.

So, we switched the project to raise money for a water well instead. And the first project was exciting, exhilarating, and I knew nothing about what I was doing. We got really lucky and the water well was successful and high-yielding, is still benefiting that community. So, I really feel in love with the work and I fell in love with the region. But I also saw that there were really big issues with the way that water system infrastructure was being put into not just rural places in Kenya but developing regions all over the world. Most of the water wells that are put in Africa actually don't work about a year after they're installed, and that's a big issue. And there are so many resources being put into solving the global water issues. But they're not really being directed toward effective solutions.

So, we built WellAware around studying the failure and understanding how things go wrong. And really the biggest two issues are the lack of technical expertise and the lack of true community partnership and understanding communities before you go in and offer a solution, because they're the ones who know the solution and we only plug in the resources that they lack. And that's typically the expertise and some funding.

So WellAware began to grow and build capacity. And we knew we could continue to scale, but I started to feel like I could probably tackle this bigger issue of all the resources being put into the water sector that really were not--not only not benefiting the community, but actually a big disservice to communities because they changed their lifestyles and they put in their resources around a new clean source of water and then it goes away and it's further devastating for these regions.

And that's the inspiration for the formation of the new company WellBeyond, which began consulting for other NGOs around their clean water infrastructure implementation and now we're developing technology to leverage the technology that's already rapidly evolving in these regions to further support these communities and put the power and the knowledge and the education in their hands to manage their own water.

MS. SELLERS: Sarah, thank you. Karan, Sarah was inspired by a trip overseas. But the disaster that came to your attention was right on your doorstep. Tell us about what prompted you to get involved in this environmental work.

MR. JERATH: Absolutely. So, this was the Deepwater Horizon spill, which happened in 2010. And my family and I moved from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia in 2008, and essentially just seeing the devastation in our backyard, the Gulf of Mexico, because we live around 30 minutes from there, really sparked my interest in trying to solve solutions that could have a global impact. At that time, I was in high school. I didn't have a college degree, and so what my limiting factors were, were just not having resources. And so, what I decided to do was to use a science fair as a way to be able to engage in these types of solutions.

And freshman year of high school, I got involved with the science fair, talked to one of my teachers who happened to have contacts within the oil and gas industry, and that ultimately then allowed me to use software and simulations to develop this solution. But what really sparked my interest in this was just seeing this devastation over the course of three months not come to a standstill. As you can imagine, the news headlines were all over, not only within our local community but around the world. And after seeing all the solutions that were developed, that really sparked my interest in thinking if I could do something regardless of the scale, and regardless if it even worked, me actually contributing and making an attempt would be--would be something that I would--that I would want to do.

And so, over the course of two years, within the science fair program, I developed this device for cleaning up oil spills. When I saw the Deepwater Horizon solutions being were all centered around stopping the spill, which ultimately had then--you need to think of those permanent solutions. But in my mind the solution was what if temporarily stopped the spill. The spill would still be leaking, but there would be some sort of capping mechanism that would allow for more time and more research to be placed to then ultimately think of a permanent solution. And so, my solution ultimately was a capping device that used temperature sensor and density sensors to ultimately monitor the oil and gas coming in and separate them into homogenous spaces to then be recycled.

MS. SELLERS: Sarah, you chose to start a nonprofit and then this consulting branch. But can you talk to me a little bit more about the roles nonprofits can play and how they can scale up and deal with this enormous problems?

MS. EVANS: Well, the nonprofit sector has a big role to play in conjunction with the private sector and governments. What I--one of the other things I realized being--having been in the nonprofit international development world for about a decade is that the NGO industry alone will not solve these issues. However, I think once we start working together a little bit more and sharing information and data, we can reduce some of the redundancy that you--we are seeing in the sector.

A lot of times we go into the field to implement a new system or actually rehabilitate a system, and we're finding that there have been several NGOs in and out without knowledge of each other and with no way for these communities to get back in touch with the NGOs. That's one of the inspirations for developing this new technology, a smartphone app to connect beneficiaries with their funders and regional offices so that we don't just go in and put something in and leave and never be heard from again.

So, I really do think that nonprofits can support each other in helping to maintain that contact and to help each other measure results over time and not just consider a project complete after it's been implemented. So, it's a long-term monitoring, sharing of information and collaboration within nonprofits that I think will really have an impact on tackling the global water crisis.

MS. SELLERS: Thank you.

And, Karan, you've mentioned earlier on the importance of the science fair for you. But can you talk a little bit more about education and where science fairs fit in training young people to be able to take on these sorts of challenges?

MR. JERATH: Yeah, absolutely. I think the power of the science fairs is that it allows youth to come together and essentially solve any problem that they feel are ones that they need to solve, specifically solve problems in their backyards. And so, the importance of science fairs is ultimately that outlet to allow for creativity to be, you know, tackled--or creative solutions to then be tackled. And ultimately, I think that the power of youth in participating in science fairs, where it comes in is that we don't have limitations in how we solve problems, because we're not burdened with these barriers that industry individuals place on themselves with how problems are solved, and we ultimately have, I believe, this massive creative outlet that science fairs allow for solving these problems.

MS. SELLERS: So, I'd like to ask--we've had some--been hearing from the audience. Sarah, I have a question for you, which I'm going to read out now. It is from Chris in California, who says, "What indicators for climate change have not had enough attention, and which ones are being overemphasized?"

MS. EVANS: That's a very, very good question. As it specifically relates to water, I'm so in the weeds in this sector, I'm not really sure what's being overlooked by the masses. But I think it's pretty common knowledge that we're looking at aquifer recharge issues. That has a lot to do with climate change and a lack of snow cover and local geography. That is an issue for groundwater. It's also an issue for surface water. Of course, as Miranda expressed, these issues always affect the most impoverished most, as well as women. In these rural developing regions, once there's conflict over water, it is the women who are not prioritized for access and who use the water for their own commerce and needs, unfortunately.

Another issue, though, that we're seeing in these regions that is not talked about much is the drastic change and fluctuations between droughts and floods, which we have not seen in recent years. So, the groundwater is changing based on these variable climates, which are often already variable in these regions. So, the dramatic change between a drought and the flood will actually affect the groundwater. So, we're seeing more turbid water underneath the surface, especially in the deeper aquifers, and that's problematic not just for water quality but also for the equipment that's downhole if you're pumping water out of the ground. It's compromising that equipment. It's making it more costly to have to--be able to rehab and install these systems. So, if it gets much worse, it's going to be incredibly problematic. So, I'm hopeful that these amazing young people are going to help us address these issues and the awareness of these issues.

MS. SELLERS: And a quick follow-up on that, because many of the problems you describe we have documented as well in the United States and your focuses overseas. Do you see yourself bringing these technologies back to work in areas like the Texas border, the Navajo Nation, other areas where there's very poor water quality or lack of access to clean water?

MS. EVANS: We get that question a lot. And we have actually done a little bit of disaster response work in Texas after hurricanes. The problem in the U.S., of course, is politics and policy. It--we have this really niche expertise in groundwater and cultural understanding in the United States, that's a lot trickier, there's a lot more--a lot more red tape to get through. However, I think with the new innovations we're working on right now, it can be translated anywhere in the world. So, we are actually hopeful that we can start working on the border or on the reservations and provide solutions at home, as well as overseas.

MS. SELLERS: Thank you.

Karan, Amnesty International recently had a survey that suggested that Generation Z has been more affected and is more upset about climate change than prior generations. Why, Karan, are these issues resonating so much with young people now?

MR. JERATH: Because this is our problem. This is ultimately a problem that we have inherited, that we, I think youth especially in this day and age, are realizing that our leaders, if they're not going to solve it for us, we have to be the ones to take this initiative and solve it ourselves. Quite frankly, in today's day and age, climate change is the biggest threat to national security. But the thing is, it doesn't just go--it's not just national security for the United States, but it's international security. And I think the United States needs to take a multilateral approach and can't approach this in isolation, and that's what youth are kind of seeing right now, is that because climate change does not affect who we--who--because climate change does not choose who it affects, it affects everyone. And unless we are the generation that brings this to light, it's not going to be--it's not going to be solved. And I think, ultimately, youth are--we're seeing especially in today's day and age youth organizing events and speaking up for what we believe in, because we're trying to show that our voices matters in this stage. And we're being creative, resilient and showing that we care, because we ultimately are trying to have a seat at this decision-making table that affects our future and the generations to come.

MS. SELLERS: So, Karan, how exactly is it a threat to national security? Where does the national security impact come in?

MR. JERATH: I think a lot of that comes in with institutions. We're seeing the wildfires in California impacting infrastructure and power and ultimately impacting the community there. We're seeing storms and hurricanes in the Gulf Coast impacting the local economy and infrastructure. And ultimately, this is--this is truly where I think that national security angle comes in, in that if we're not addressing this problem early on and being proactive rather than reactive, we're going to see the way in which we live be affected. And I think that's something that, as more--you know, as more devastation occurs, we're going to [unclear]. We don't want it to, you know, impact us then and only then realize what we've done and what we could have solved. But, yeah, I think that's where that infrastructure angle comes in.

MS. SELLERS: So just one more follow-up for you. What advice would you have for young people who want to get involved--and actually both of you could probably take this. What advice would you have for young people who want to get involved in this environmental movement? Karan, why don't you go first, and then Sarah. Oh, Sarah, go ahead.

MS. EVANS: Well, before we wrap up, I just want to say I'm so inspired by Karan. I watched a lot of your stuff before this interview. And it's young people like you that give me hope in making a change. I have a Gen Z daughter, and it breaks my heart to see what she's inherited, but then I'm hopeful. And the whole Greta movement has been very inspiring. The Fridays for Future is just an incredible movement, these young people that get out there every week. There's a young women in Uganda. Every Friday she goes and she speaks her mind. And it's incredible to see. So, I would just say if these young people could keep it up and stay motivated and don't give up or get discouraged, because the future really does rely on you. And I hate to say that, and I'm sorry that it does, and it rests on your shoulders. As a Gen Xer, we're here to help, and we're here to step aside where you come in with greater knowledge and greater energy. So, I'm just so proud of you, Karan, and everybody else involved in these movements right now.

MS. SELLERS: So, Karan, how do you inspire younger people, and what do you think--how do you think they can step up?

MR. JERATH: I would think--I would say right now we need to use what we have, what we know best, and that is social media, and using social media as that medium to build the conversation but also share accurate information and limit disinformation. I think we're at this stage where there's so much disinformation circulating that we first need to address sort of the facts. And that's something that youth have been very proactive about. And it's great to see, you know, peers from all over the world do that. But I think that second stage is the hardest, and this is what truly differentiates youth being able to--being the ones to solve a solution. And that is actually going out into your local communities and finding ways in which you can make impact. So, it's shifting away from couch activism, just sharing your views and not doing anything about it, but more so then find even the smallest thing that you can do in your local community and start there.

And then it doesn't only end there, but also, you know, comes in your home environment and making sure that while you can, you know, educate your younger siblings about what's going on in the world, but it's also sharing that information with your parents and changing mindsets and, you know, within your own family trying to have more sustainable habits that sort of shift the mindset and contribute to a more sustainable path.

MS. SELLERS: Karan, you tackled the oil spill, which was a memorable and enormous disaster in this country. You've looked at transportation uses in Africa. You've created a documentary. What is the next challenge you have your sights on?

MR. JERATH: I think the next step for me is to just--so the work that I'm currently doing, Africa, is one that I'm very passionate about, and I think that is going to be a stepping stone for contributing--continuing to work in that region. Specifically, we're starting off in Zambia and trying to disrupt the transportation sector and taking a sustainable angle towards it. But then I know there's a lot of other angles that we can take, such as financial literacy for the local community and helping build more sustainable energy solutions. And so, using that as a stepping stone. But, yeah, we're going to see where it goes from there.

MS. SELLERS: So, I want to finish with a question for each of you. What problem do you think we are overlooking right now that's going to be a problem for a generation ahead? Where are you seeing the need to reinvest interests and young people's energy? And, Sarah, maybe you can start with that.

MS. EVANS: I will. This might be a little bit more broad than what you're getting at, but I'm discouraged by the lack of focus on corporate accountability and the portion of climate issues that actually come from industry and agriculture. As consumers, we're told that it's up to us to limit our showers, limit our plastics and recycle and compost, but we're only about 10 percent where water is concerned of the consumers of the fresh water on the planet. So, I'm hopeful that along with this next generation we can force that awareness of corporate responsibility and hopefully force some change.

MS. SELLERS: Thank you. Karan, take it on yourself.

MR. JERATH: Yeah, I could not agree more with what Sarah just mentioned, and that while we have the public sector that ultimately is the one to enforce, it's really what we see through the private sector and what corporations do that ultimately shape our opinions and show that progress is being made. That was the whole purpose of the Bancolombia documentary where it was me connecting with an executive within a mining and ceramics company and sort of showing my perspective on what I believed him and his company needed to change to sort of have that youth time and that belief that corporations are changing, because while government does do a lot, we really firsthand see what corporations do in our local communities. And so, I would really hit on that point. It's where corporations and the messaging that they now pursue that are ultimately going to be the ones that reenergize youth.

MS. SELLERS: I can't resist asking you, are you optimistic, looking ahead?

MR. JERATH: Absolutely. I don't think you can take a pessimistic approach. I think even with everything that's going on right now, you need to--you know, the optimism is what carries you in your creativity and your continuous efforts in solving these solutions that don't have a definite solution and that are, you know, larger than you. And so, I think that mindset always has to remain within youth, because that's the only way that progress will then be made.

MS. SELLERS: And, Sarah, you, are you optimistic?

MS. EVANS: I will echo that. Yes, we're devoting our lives to tackling these issues, so we must remain optimistic. So, and it's not forced optimism. We really are, especially getting to see this next generation and the stand that they're taking. I have concerns, but overall, I am optimistic.

MS. SELLERS: Sarah Evans and Karan Jerath, thank you both very much for joining me this morning on Washington Post Live.

MR. JERATH: Thank you.

MS. EVANS: Thank you.

MS. SELLERS: We were delighted to have you. That was a fascinating conversation. Thank you.

If you'd like to watch highlights from this morning's video, please go to WashigntonPostLive.com, where you can also find a calendar of upcoming events.

I'm Frances Stead Sellers and thank you very much for joining us.

[End recorded session.]

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Transcript: Climate Solutions: Next Generation

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MS. SELLERS: Good morning and welcome to Washington Post Live. I'm Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer at The Washington Post. My first guest this morning is the co-founded and CEO of a plastics recycling company, BioCellection. Miranda Wang, welcome to Washington Post Live. MS. WANG: Thank you, Frances.

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TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

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TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

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For some, it's the laziest form of activism. On social media, "slacktivists" express their support for a cause by changing a profile image, retweeting a sentiment, or deploying a trending hashtag. The Urban Dictionary defines slacktivism as "the self-deluded idea that by liking, sharing, or retweeting something you are helping out".

But is such slacktivism - or "clicktivism", as it's also known less pejoratively - really so useless? Accumulating evidence suggests that online activism is more effective than many people might assume. And recent research suggests it is deployed by the political right and left in different, often hidden, ways to spread beliefs and ideas.
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Clicktivism has a bad reputation. As one commentator put it a decade ago: "clicktivism is to activism as McDonalds is to a slow-cooked meal. It may look like food, but the life-giving nutrients are long gone." And last year, former US president Barack Obama suggested that social media activism - particularly "woke" culture - was no substitute for community organising or protest in the physical world. "There is this sense," he said, that the way to provoke change "is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that's enough. That's not activism. That's not bringing about change. If all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get that far."

Perhaps. But as Deen Freelon and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, write in a new paper in the journal Science, many criticisms of clicktivism rest on two mistaken assumptions. "One of the biggest misconceptions is that it doesn't do anything," says Freelon. "The second is that it somehow displaces or replaces offline activism. We know that both of these are not true."

It's a misconception that online activism displaces protest and other political activities (Credit: Getty Images)

Evidence collected over the last decade suggests that clicktivism, in the aggregate, can be very effective in spreading little-known ideas and publicising non-mainstream notions. While one tweet or post won't change the world, thousands of them can disseminate beliefs that will. "Clicktivism has a major effect in terms of offering movements an alternative pathway to the public," says Freelon.

In the US and internationally, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, far-right anti-immigration advocates, and the men's rights movement have all furthered their aims through clicktivism, according to research in recent years. Meanwhile, studies suggest that people who engage strongly with politics online also do so in their offline lives. Sharing and tweeting politics on social media correlates with attending political meetings, donating to campaigns and other forms of civic engagement.

"Most truly effective activist movements in the 21st Century are multi-pronged," says Freelon.

Clicktivism has also propagated new vocabulary, both good and bad (a subject of particular interest to the Wise Words series you are reading). For example, a decade ago the term "globalist" - an anti-semitic dog-whistle - was restricted to far-right corners of the internet. But as researchers have found through textual analysis, the online efforts of right-wing activists gradually introduced it to websites such as Breitbart, before it was eventually picked up by Fox News and even in the speeches of the current US president.

So-called hyperpartisan news sites such as Breitbart, the German Compact magazine and Swedish Nyheter Idag can act as "bridges" for once-extreme views into mainstream right-wing outlets, researchers have found. (And as BBC Future explored recently, the origin of minority ideas is often forgotten, an effect called " social cryptomnesia ".)

Hashtag activism is more often a feature of left-wing causes, suggests the research to date (Credit: Getty Images)

Intriguingly, the science suggests the right and left deploy different tactics in their clicktivism, at least in the US. While it risks some over-simplification, research to date suggests that a predominant way that left-wing activists aim to spread ideas is via hashtag activism, such as #TakeAKnee, #TimesUp, or other hashtags publicising an action or cause. Meanwhile, activists on the right - particularly the far right, which Freelon argues has grown on US social media in recent years - aim for subtler routes. It's known as "trading up the chain" and goes like this: plant a story, opinion or idea in a small or obscure news site, or on social media, encourage followers to share it too, then hope a bigger outlet with a bigger audience picks it up, and another, all the way up to major publishers or TV networks.

Disinformation follows a similar path, according to Claire Wardle of First Draft News, a non-profit organisation set up to fight fake news. A false assertion starts on private channels like WhatsApp, before moving into online conspiracy content on Reddit or Youtube, then more open social media such as Twitter or Facebook, and then all it takes is for a credulous journalist for a major outlet to pick it up, and it reaches thousands or even millions of people.

Even if the mainstream media is only shooting down the false story, the goal is achieved. For many campaigners, "a debunk is better than nothing. It provides oxygen," writes Wardle. After all, if more people are searching for the story that means more people discovering the campaigners' ideas, narratives or beliefs. The researcher Whitney Phillips of Syracuse University has called this " the oxygen of amplification ".

Images of swans supposedly "returning" to Venice canals spread during the early months of the pandemic, and some activists attached their ideologies to them (Credit: Getty Images)

Some activists deploy their messages hidden within viral content, easy to miss for even the most sophisticated internet user. For example, last month Marcia Allison of the University of Southern California published a paper describing how fascist campaigners have been using shareable faked animal pictures to spread their ideas. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, many false images appeared online of animals supposedly returning to uninhabited places, from Welsh sheep playing in a children's park to dolphins swimming through the canals of Venice.

One particular group of far-right activists, called ecofascists, who hold a white supremacist, pro-environmental ideology, latched on to these images, as a way to attach their racist ideology to potentially viral content.

It was a tactic they'd used before: in their social media posts, ecofascists use apparently benign emojis such as a pine tree, an Earth and a mountain accompanied by subtle far-right dog-whistle symbols such as Norse runes and ideological hashtags. This makes it easier for milder environmentalists to inadvertently share fascist accounts and hashtags, as well as allowing disparate ecofascists to find each other. (I am not unaware that by debunking this content I risk amplifying it, but would argue that the hidden agenda justifies doing so.)

So, those who dismiss online activism as the work of slacktivists fail to understand the subtlety and power of how messages and beliefs move through the modern digital ecosystem. And there is still much unknown about how clicktivism spreads ideas through society, says Freelon. There are whole areas of discourse that researchers cannot study because they are closed off and private, such as Whatsapp groups.

But what we do know is that clicktivism can and does work - and it's often far more sophisticated and hidden than many people realise.

--

Richard Fisher is a senior journalist for BBC Future. Twitter: @rifish
Welcome to Want to expand your vocabulary even more? Discover more: Join one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. Wise Words, a BBC Future series that aims to boost the vocabulary we use to describe a rapidly evolving world. We'll uncover lesser-known words and phrases that label previously hidden phenomena, guided by the belief that novel language can unlock novel understanding.

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The subtle ways that 'clicktivism' shapes the world

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Often derided, online activism is far more effective than it first appears - but there are big differences between how the political left and right deploy it to spread ideas.

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TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

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Incontro del 3 febbraio 2021 il titolo del libro sulla Mindfulness consigliato da Gabriella è:

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Incontro del 3 febbraio 2021 il titolo del libro sulla Mindfulness consigliato da Gabriella è:

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LA PACE E' OGNI PASSO
Autore: Thich Nhat Hanh

Casa editrice Astrolabio - 1993

titolo originale:
Peace is every step

The path of mindfuless in every day life

Bantam Books

1991

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Articolo consigliato da Antonella su "Mindfulness"

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The long read: It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism, but with its inward focus, mindful meditation may be the enemy of activism

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MINDFULNESS

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30 seconds to mindfulness | Phil Boissiere | TEDxNaperville

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Can you go from feeling stressed to calm in under 30 seconds? Phil Boissiere shares his simple technique to bring mindfulness into your busy life, any time, anywhere. Phil Boissiere is an adult ADHD and couples counseling specialist based in the San Francisco Bay area.

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MINDFULNESS

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From the US army to Oxford University, the concept of mindfulness is being embraced in some surprising places. Nikki Allen discovers the growing popularity of a simple approach to helping people change how they experience life

As 2012 drew to a close, Labour MP Chris Ruane kicked off a debate in parliament about mindfulness and its potential impact on unemployment. The ensuing discussion gave a clear signal to the public that this powerful mind-body practice is firmly on the agenda of our country's leaders.

"Mindfulness can both prevent people from becoming unemployed, limit the effects of unemployment, and help people to get back to work," said Ruane. Plus, he pointed out, mindfulness has proven to be beneficial in the workplace, with participants more engaged in their work. "With a greater ability to concentrate, workers become more compassionate, both with themselves and their co-workers," Ruane said. "And when used in prisons, prisoners become less aggressive and hostile, and have fewer mood disturbances."

The signs of a widespread mindfulness movement don't stop there - the practice is being taken ever more seriously within a host of corporate businesses. Its popularity in the workplace makes sense; its focus on stilling and de-cluttering the mind has been shown in many studies to improve attention span and concentration.

"Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally"

For example, Transport for London recently carried out a mindfulness programme that led to some impressive results. Among the participants, days off sick due to stress, anxiety and depression fell by 70% and absences for all health conditions fell by 50% in the three years following.

Google, meanwhile, is offering its California workers a free course titled Search Inside Yourself, which is designed to teach 'practical real-world meditation you take with you wherever you go'. The program describes itself as a business-friendly mindfulness course in three parts: train your attention, develop self-knowledge and self-mastery, and create useful mental habits.

Employees at General Mills - the food company behind brands such as Häagen-Dazs and Green Giant sweetcorn - have been practising meditation and yoga in the workplace too. "It's about training our minds to be more focused, to see with clarity, to have spaciousness for creativity and to feel connected," explains Janice Marturano, General Mills' deputy general counsel, who founded the programme. "That compassion to ourselves, to everyone around us - our colleagues, customers - that's what the training of mindfulness is really about."

So what exactly is mindfulness, and what does the practice mean to us in our daily lives? Mindfulness teacher and the founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Jon Kabat-Zinn, offers a clear definition: "Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally."

Essentially, mindfulness helps us to stay focused on the present experience and observe our thoughts as simply thoughts, neither right nor wrong, just existing. By using simple exercises, mindfulness training helps us pay attention to things as they actually are rather than the way we want them to be, and to be aware of ourselves experiencing and being, rather than getting continually caught up in doing.

This kind of freedom from the constant commentary of our thoughts can help us recognise unhelpful habits of mind and behaviour and even change these to more beneficial patterns of thinking.
Benefits to mind and body
The approach offers a huge range of psychological and physical benefits, studies say. According to the US National Library of Medicine National, in one recent piece of research the concentration of grey matter in important regions of the brain was measured in a group of people about to start an eight-week MBSR course. When they measured the same areas again after the course, they found that the grey matter had grown denser, showing more connections and more activity, in regions involved in learning and memory and the capacity to regulate emotion.

The study also found an increase in the activity in the left side of their brains: a pattern associated with positive feelings and responses, as well as a significant boost to the immune system among the group.

"Mindfulness can both prevent people from becoming unemployed, limit the effects of unemployment, and help people to get back to work" - Labour MP Chris Ruane

And when it comes to regular meditation - one of the most important practices suggested for living more mindfully - the benefits are seemingly endless. A host of psychological studies have shown that people who regularly meditate are happier and more contented than average. Depression, anxiety and irritability all decrease with regular sessions of meditation, while memory improves, reaction times become faster and mental and physical stamina increase.

All of these mental and psychological health improvements have a knock-on effect on the body. Studies worldwide have found that meditation reduces the key indicators of chronic stress, including high blood pressure, that it's effective in reducing the impact of serious conditions such as chronic pain and cancer, and that it can help relieve drug and alcohol dependence.

According to Annee Griffiths, mindfulness teacher, trainer and supervisor at the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice based at Bangor University, regular meditation and mindfulness practice can bring us greater ease physically, psychologically and emotionally.

"From my own experience as a mindfulness teacher, I am always amazed by how people are happier and less stressed after practising for only eight weeks," she says. "One of its great benefits is that it can soften judgemental attitudes both towards oneself and to others. This generates more kindness and compassion, which I believe is key to happier individuals and a happier society."

Some people think meditation is a selfish 'navel gazing' activity, points out Griffiths, but it's a practice in developing awareness which is, instead, remarkably practical and useful. "More awareness of self and others can help communication enormously," she adds. "Many people find that it totally transforms their lives."

Sholto Radford, founder of Wilderness Minds, which runs mindfulness courses in the outdoors, agrees this shift in mode of mind can hugely change our conscious experience.

"It is easy to get caught up in wanting things to be a certain way and thinking if we can only do, then things will be better," he says. "The practice of mindfulness invites us to let go of goals and expectations and see what emerges in the space left when the striving mind quietens for a moment.

"I found that by introducing mindfulness into lessons, it had a profound effect on the students' anxiety levels, their confidence and their concentration" - Claire Kelly, teacher and mindfulness practitioner

"One of the first things people notice when they begin mindfulness practice is how much of the time the mind is on automatic pilot, getting caught up in planning, remembering things, worrying, judging and so on, but through mindfulness practice, people tend to find that they can become more aware of this automatic mode and begin to purposefully bring awareness to the direct experience of the senses in the present moment," he explains.

And it's not just adults that can benefit hugely from a mindful approach, as Chris Ruane pointed out in his parliamentary debate: "Mindfulness is not just for those who suffer with mental health issues, or who work in high-stress occupations - its applications go far beyond that. In primary schools in my constituency, mindfulness is used to train five-year-olds to be more mindful, to live in the present moment and to concentrate."

In March, the International Mindfulness in Schools Conference 2013 is set to take place in London, with education secretary Michael Gove expected to attend.

Claire Kelly, a teacher and mindfulness practitioner who is now involved with the Mindfulness in Schools Project, says: "I think mindfulness training should be made available to every child."

"I found that by introducing mindfulness into lessons, it had a profound effect on the students' anxiety levels, their confidence and their concentration. Teaching mindfulness to young people gives them crucial tools to deal with the pressures of life. It's empowering, and once they know how to do it, they can draw on it whenever they need to. Once you've seen the tangible effect it has on behaviour and performance, it makes complete sense to incorporate it into school life and beyond."
The practice of mindfulness
How best, then, to start reaping the many benefits of mindfulness in your day-to-day life? As Sholto Radford points out, mindfulness practice is called so for a reason - it does take practice.

"Ideally mindfulness in daily life is a combination of formal practice, which involves setting aside time to engage with mindfulness practices such as sitting meditation, 'body scanning' and mindful movement, as well as informal practice, which is bringing mindfulness into everyday activities," he explains. The formal practice, he says, helps support the informal practice.

But it's important not to be hard on yourself if you find it challenging, he adds. "There is a real focus within mindfulness programmes around being gentle to yourself and not judging or struggling with the mind," he says. "It's very natural that the mind wanders, and bringing it back to the present moment takes practice and intention but also patience and kindness. Developing a real sense of curiosity towards what is unfolding in experience moment by moment is an attitude which underpins the practice."

Radford adds that it's important to remember that mindfulness meditation isn't about trying to achieve a particular experience: "Quite often you hear people saying they have tried meditation but can't do it. I think this is because people tend to believe that mediation is about emptying the mind or going into some kind of trance, and when this doesn't happen they think they have failed," says Radford. "Mindfulness is not about emptying the mind or even about trying to achieve a particular state of mind. It is about beginning to notice what is happening in the mind and body moment by moment and developing an attitude of curiosity and acceptance to this."

Interested? There are an increasing number of mindfulness courses available throughout the UK, as well as many helpful books and CDs on the topic.
8 ways to live mindfully every day:
1. Be aware of your surroundings. While you're walking, standing or sitting, be aware of the nature, people and architecture that surrounds you.

2. Meditate. Set aside a time each day to sit still and focus on your breathing. When thoughts arise, try to simply view thoughts as thoughts, rather than judging them as positive or negative.

3. Practice listening to others. Mindfulness can help us really listen more fully to what others are saying, by being present and attentive to their words.

4. Express kindness. Make a point of expressing gratitude and appreciation of others; this will help to keep you in the present experience.

5. Be still and dedicate some time to doing nothing and just 'being'. As more and more of our time is filled with emails, texts, social media and entertainment, periods of silence and time alone brings respite.

6. Slow down. Try to do just one task at a time, and eat slowly, taking time to appreciate the food you are feeding your body.

7. Don't sweat the small stuff. When we hold on to anxiety, it makes it more difficult to live within the moment. Allow yourself to feel your feelings, then let them go.

8. Make everyday tasks and chores a meditation. Cooking and cleaning are often seen as drudgery, but actually they are good ways to practice mindfulness and can make great daily rituals.

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The benefit of being present - Positive News

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From the US army to Oxford University, the concept of mindfulness is being embraced in some surprising places. Nikki Allen discovers the growing popularity of a simple approach to helping people change how they experience life As 2012 drew to a close, Labour MP Chris Ruane kicked off a debate in parliament about mindfulness and its potential impact on unemployment.

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MINDFULNESS

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THE NORDIC WAY

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31 July 2019|Work

The Nordic Way

Worklife goes beyond the headlines to see how the Nordic countires are getting their work-life balance correct.

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Burnout in the land of work-life balance - BBC Reel

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Sweden is famous for championing a balanced lifestyle, but the number of young people being signed off work with severe stress is mushrooming. Video by Maddy Savage and Benoit Derrier

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THE NORDIC WAY

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26 February 2020|Age

The Nordic Way

BBC Reel goes beyond the headlines to see how the Nordic countires are getting their work-life balance correct.

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How the Swedes are tackling loneliness - BBC Reel

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You can only live in this block of flats if you are under 25 or a pensioner - and you have to socialise. It's all part of a plan to help tackle loneliness in Sweden, a country where over half of all homes only have one occupant.

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THE NORDIC WAY

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13 October 2020|Culture

The Nordic Way

BBC Reel goes beyond the headlines to see how the Nordic countires are getting their work-life balance correct.

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How the Swedes survive without small talk - BBC Reel

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In most cultures, small talk acts as a social lubricant. It connects people across demographic lines and creates a sense of belonging and companionship. But in Sweden, small talk doesn't come naturally to people. Video by Björn Nilsson

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THE NORDIC WAY

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06 January 2021|Economy

The Nordic Way

BBC Reel goes beyond the headlines to see how the Nordic countires are getting their work-life balance correct.

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Why the Swedes love doing something that Americans hate - BBC Reel

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Sweden is infamous for having some of the highest taxes in the world, and yet the country's tax agency is still one of Sweden's most trusted institutions. The Swedish attitude towards tax contrasts sharply with many countries where taxes can be a deeply divisive issue.

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Articolo di Umberto Eco  sul diritto alla felicità consigliato da Mariella

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Articolo di Umberto Eco  sul diritto alla felicità consigliato da Mariella

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HAPPINESS

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Stati Uniti, una parata per il 4 luglio

Talora mi viene il sospetto che molti dei problemi che ci affliggono - dico la crisi dei valori, la resa alle seduzioni pubblicitarie, il bisogno di farsi vedere in tv, la perdita della memoria storica e individuale, insomma tutte le cose di cui sovente ci si lamenta in rubriche come questa - siano dovuti alla infelice formulazione della Dichiarazione d'indipendenza americana del 4 luglio1776, in cui, con massonica fiducia nelle magnifiche sorti e progressive, i costituenti avevano stabilito che "a tutti gli uomini è riconosciuto il diritto alla vita, alla libertà, e al perseguimento della felicità".

Sovente si è detto che si trattava della prima affermazione, nella storia delle leggi fondatrici di uno Stato, del diritto alla felicità invece che del dovere dell'obbedienza o altre severe imposizioni del genere, e a prima vista si trattava effettivamente di una dichiarazione rivoluzionaria. Ma ha prodotto degli equivoci per ragioni, oserei dire, semiotiche.

La letteratura sulla felicità è immensa, a iniziare da Epicuro e forse prima, ma a lume di buon senso mi pare che nessuno di noi sappia dire che cos'è la felicità. Se si intende uno stato permanente, l'idea di una persona che è felice tutta la vita, senza dubbi, dolori, crisi, questa vita sembra corrispondere a quella di un idiota - o al massimo a quella di un personaggio che viva isolato dal mondo senza aspirazioni che vadano al di là di una esistenza senza scosse, e vengono in mente Filemone e Bauci. Ma anche loro, poesia a parte, qualche momento di turbamento dovrebbero averlo avuto, se non altro un'influenza o un mal di denti.

La questione è che la felicità, come pienezza assoluta, vorrei dire ebbrezza, il toccare il cielo con un dito, è situazione molto transitoria, episodica e di breve durata: è la gioia per la nascita di un figlio, per l'amato o l'amata che ci rivela di corrispondere al nostro sentimento, magari l'esaltazione per una vincita al lotto, il raggiungimento di un traguardo (l'Oscar, la coppa, il campionato), persino un momento nel corso di una gita in campagna, ma sono tutti istanti appunto transitori, dopo i quali sopravvengono i momenti di timore e tremore, dolore, angoscia o almeno preoccupazione.

Inoltre l'idea di felicità ci fa pensare sempre alla nostra felicità personale, raramente a quella del genere umano, e anzi siamo indotti sovente a preoccuparci pochissimo della felicità degli altri per perseguire la nostra. Persino la felicità amorosa spesso coincide con l'infelicità di un altro respinto, di cui ci preoccupiamo pochissimo, appagandoci della nostra conquista.

Questa idea di felicità pervade il mondo della pubblicità e dei consumi, dove ogni proposta appare come un appello a una vita felice, la crema per rassodare il viso, il detersivo che finalmente toglie tutte le macchie, il divano a metà prezzo, l'amaro da bere dopo la tempesta, la carne in scatola intorno a cui si riunisce la famigliola felice, l'auto bella ed economica e un assorbente che vi permetterà di entrare in ascensore senza preoccuparvi del naso degli altri.

Raramente pensiamo alla felicità quando votiamo o mandiamo un figlio a scuola, ma solo quando comperiamo cose inutili, e pensiamo in tal modo di aver soddisfatto il nostro diritto al perseguimento della felicità.

Quando è al contrario che, siccome non siamo delle bestie senza cuore, ci preoccupiamo della felicità degli altri? Quando i mezzi di massa ci presentano l'infelicità altrui, negretti che muoiono di fame divorati dalle mosche, ammalati di mali incurabili, popolazioni distrutte dagli tsunami. Allora siamo persino disposti a versare un obolo e, nei casi migliori, a impegnare il cinque per mille.

È che la dichiarazione d'indipendenza avrebbe dovuto dire che a tutti gli uomini è riconosciuto il diritto-dovere di ridurre la quota d'infelicità nel mondo, compresa naturalmente la nostra, e così tanti americani avrebbero capito che non devono opporsi alle cure mediche gratuite - e invece vi si oppongono perché questa idea bizzarra pare ledere il loro personale diritto alla loro personale felicità fiscale.

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Talora mi viene il sospetto che molti dei problemi che ci affliggono - dico la crisi dei valori, la resa alle seduzioni pubblicitarie, il bisogno di farsi vedere in tv, la perdita della memoria storica e individuale, insomma tutte le cose di cui sovente ci si lamenta in rubriche come questa - siano dovuti alla infelice formulazione della Dichiarazione d'indipendenza americana del 4 luglio1776, in cui, con massonica fiducia nelle magnifiche sorti e progressive, i costituenti avevano stabilito che "a tutti gli uomini è riconosciuto il diritto alla vita, alla libertà, e al perseguimento della felicità".

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HAPPINESS

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Research has suggested that while personal feelings of pleasure are the accepted definition of happiness in Western cultures, East Asian cultures tend to see happiness as social harmony and in some parts of Africa and India it's more about shared experiences and family. Neil and Rob discuss what makes people happy and ... are happy to teach you new vocabulary.

This week's question

The World Happiness Report measures "subjective well-being" - how happy the people are, and why. But do you know, according to a United Nations agency report in 2017, which is the happiest country on Earth? Is it...

a) Norway

b) Japan

c) New Zealand

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

down in the dumps
(informal) feeling of unhappiness, sometimes with no hope

imperfection
fault or weakness

gild
cover something in a thin layer of gold

jolly
cheerful and happy

coping mechanism
something someone does to deal with a difficult situation

Transcript
Note: This is not a word for word transcript
Rob
Hello, Neil.

Neil
Now Rob, you seem like a happy chappy.

Rob
What's the point of being miserable?

Rob
Oh many things like being healthy, having good friends, presenting programmes like this with you, Neil!

Neil
Of course - but we all have different ideas about what makes us happy - and that can vary from country to country and culture to culture. It's what we're talking about today - concepts of happiness.

Rob
Now Neil, you could make us even happier if you gave us a really good question to answer.

Here it is. Happiness is an emotion that actually gets measured. The World Happiness Report measures "subjective well-being" - how happy the people are, and why. But do you know, according to a United Nations agency report in 2017, which is the happiest country on Earth? Is it...
a) Norway
b) Japan, or
c) New Zealand?

Neil
OK, we'll see. I'll reveal the answer later on. But now back to our discussion about happiness around the world.

Rob
Happiness can be hard to define. Research has suggested that while personal feelings of pleasure are the accepted definition of happiness in Western cultures, East Asian cultures tend to see happiness as social harmony and in some parts of Africa and India it's more about shared experiences and family.

Neil
It's something author and journalist Helen Russell has been looking at - she's even created an 'Atlas of Happiness'. Her research focused on the positive characteristics of a country's population - and guess which country she found to be one of the happiest?

Rob
New Zealand?

Neil
Actually no. It was Japan. Here she is speaking on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour programme. What concept - or belief - is it that promotes happiness?

Helen Russell, author and journalist
Millennials and perhaps older people are better at remembering wabi-sabi - this traditional Japanese concept around celebrating imperfection, which I think is something so helpful these days, especially for women - it's this idea that there is a beauty in ageing, it's to be celebrated rather than trying to disguise it, or trying to cover up the scars instead you gild them with kintsugi - if you break a pot instead of chucking it away, you mend it with gold lacquer so the scars, rather than being hidden, are highlighted in pure gold... We all have laughter lines and rather than being ashamed of them, they're something to be celebrated.

So in Japan, there is a belief that people should celebrate imperfection. Imperfection is a fault or weakness. So rather than hiding something that's not perfect, we should celebrate it.

Rob
Getting old, for example, is not something to be ashamed of - don't hide your wrinkles or laughter lines - these are the creases you get as you skin ages or even you get from smiling too much!

Neil
Rather than spending time being ashamed of our faults, we should accept what and who we are. This concept is something that Helen feels is particularly being celebrated by Millennials and older people.

Neil
This concept is something that maybe English people should embrace more because according to Helen Russell's research, they are not a very happy population. Here she is speaking on the BBC's Woman's Hour programme again - what word does she use to describe people like me and you?

Helen Russell, author and journalist
In England what we have is ' jolly', which many of us now associate with this kind of 'jolly hockey sticks' or maybe an upper-class thing but actually it's something that really plays through a lot of British culture in a way that we may not think of so much. So there's this sense that in a lot of our comedy, in a lot of our approach to life you just sort of... you get out there, you go for a dog walk, you have a boiled egg and soldiers ['soldiers' in this case are small slices of toast that you can dip into your egg and eat], and we do sort of get on with things - it's a coping mechanism, it's not perfect but it's worked for many Brits for a while.

But Helen now thinks ' jolly' describes an attitude that is used as a coping mechanism - that's something someone does to deal with a difficult situation. We smile, do everyday things - like walking the dog - and just get on with life.

Rob
I guess she means carry on without complaining.

Well, here's something to make you happy, Rob - the answer to the question I asked you earlier, which was: according to a United Nations agency report in 2017, which is the happiest country on Earth? Is it...
a) Norway
b) Japan, or
c) New Zealand?

Rob
And I said c) New Zealand.

The answer is a) Norway. The report has been published for the past five years, during which the Nordic countries have consistently dominated the top spots.
OK, now it's time to remind ourselves of some of the vocabulary we've mentioned today.

We mentioned the phrase down in the dumps - which is an informal way of describing the feeling of unhappiness, sometimes with no hope.

Glad to hear it. Maybe we should gild this script - to gild something is to cover it in a thin layer of gold. We also heard about the word jolly which means 'cheerful and happy'.

Rob
Well, there's no need to do that in this programme. Now there's just time to remind you that we have a website with lots more learning English content. The address is bbclearningenglish.com.

Neil
Thanks for joining us and goodbye.

Rob
Goodbye!

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Concepts of happiness

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Research has suggested that while personal feelings of pleasure are the accepted definition of happiness in Western cultures, East Asian cultures tend to see happiness as social harmony and in some parts of Africa and India it's more about shared experiences and family. Neil and Rob discuss what makes people happy and ...

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HAPPINESS

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Robert Waldinger: Come vivere una vita serena? Lezioni dal più lungo studio sulla felicità

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Che cosa ci mantiene felici e in salute per tutta la vita? Se pensate che siano fama e fortuna, non siete i soli ma, secondo lo psichiatra Robert Waldinger, vi sbagliate. In qualità di direttore di una ricerca che dura da 75 anni sullo sviluppo in età adulta, Waldinger ha un accesso senza precedenti ad una serie di dati sulla vera felicità e soddisfazione.

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HAPPINESS

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TOLSTOY - The Three Questions by Leo Tolstoy - Short story audiobook - FAB

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Incontro del 9 dicembre 2020 - Per ricordarci dell'ambiente anche quando mangiamo!

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Incontro del 9 dicembre 2020 - Per ricordarci dell'ambiente anche quando mangiamo!

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CARBON FOOTPRINT
L'autore ha lasciato sul retro la sua mail e sarebbe felice di ricevere suggerimenti o commenti costruttivi.

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...e al corto tratto da The Landlady (always with English subtitles)

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Qui il link all'audiolibro The Landlady - By Roald Dahl (don't forget English subtitles!)...

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Roald Dahl, The Land lady, free audiobook short story read by Nick Martin

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CARBON FOOTPRINT
...e secondo Ted Talk
(English subt. + transcript)

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Ursula von der Leyen: Europe's plan to become the first carbon-neutral continent

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With the ambitious goal of becoming the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050, the European Union has committed to creating a greener world for future generations. In this bold talk, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, details the challenges and opportunities that come with transitioning an entire continent to clean energy -- and shows why fixing climate change calls for everyone to take action.

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CARBON FOOTPRINT
Primo Ted Talk...
(English subt. + transcript)

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Angel Hsu: Cities are driving climate change. Here's how they can fix it

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Cities pump out 70 percent of all global carbon emissions -- which means they also have the greatest opportunity to lower CO2 levels and energy consumption. Climate and data scientist Angel Hsu shares how cities around the world are leading the response to climate change by innovating new, low-carbon ways of living.

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