life

Forests once deemed resilient are suffering surprising die-offs. To predict the fate of the world’s woods in the face of climate change, researchers need to understand how trees die.

Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it.

“In some sense Barbie invites more of a critique because she is a role model of mass consumption, but she isn’t given that critique,” Wright said. “She is like other female archetypes, really criticized for what she represents and how she’s presenting herself in the world. It really comes back to women’s embodiment and what that symbolizes.”

Below the Earth’s surface lies over a thousand times more water than all the rivers and lakes in the world.

This groundwater accounts for almost all the freshwater on the planet.

But in many areas of the world, groundwater is being extracted faster than the rate that it naturally recharges.

A recent study found that humans are pumping so much groundwater that it’s not only increasing sea levels, it’s actually shifting the entire planet on its axis.

Once upon a time, leisure was a sign of prestige. Today that idea has been turned on its head, and busyness is the new status symbol. Busy people are considered important and impressive, and employees are rewarded for showing how “hard” they’re working. Such thinking is misguided. It can cause organizations to overload their employees, base their incentives on the amount of time they put in, and excessively monitor their activities, all of which undermine productivity and efficiency, research shows. Meanwhile, reducing work to manageable levels can actually enhance them.

Psychologists increasingly think effortful restraint is not the key to the good life. So what is?

Obliterate toil: automate it.

Automate ruthlessly. This is where I have seen the most surprising pushback. We’re programmers. Automating processes is what we do! People will flinch about this, afraid of time spent automating things that won’t pay off. Yes, we’ve all been there. So don’t do that. Don’t automate things that are really one-offs. If there’s any chance you have to do the same thing more than five times, automate it. If it’s complex and difficult for a human to do, automate it. If the blast radius of the explosion caused by a human doing it wrong is large, automate it. If the end results need to be the same every time, automate it.

Infrastructure should be automated as far as you can push it.

The upside of automation is that the software that does the work for you can be instrumented.

The discovery raises intriguing new questions about the role wildfires may play in spurring the growth of microscopic marine algae known as phytoplankton, which absorb large quantities of climate-warming carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere through photosynthesis and are the foundation of the oceanic food web.

“Our results provide strong evidence that pyrogenic iron from wildfires can fertilize the oceans, potentially leading to a significant increase in carbon uptake by phytoplankton,” said Nicolas Cassar, professor of biogeochemistry at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

The algal blooms triggered by the Australian wildfires were so intense and extensive that the subsequent increase in photosynthesis may have temporarily offset a substantial fraction of the fires’ CO2 emissions, he said. But it’s still unclear how much of the carbon absorbed by that event, or by algal blooms triggered by other wildfires, remains safely stored away in the ocean and how much is released back into the atmosphere. Determining that is the next challenge, Cassar said.