“Eggs-pedition Access: January” is a ticketed limited timed event during Pokémon Go season “Timeless Travels”.
For $4.99,it unlocks a Timed Research that will be available until Jan. 31 at 8 p.m. in your local time.
The Timed Research steps, ticket bonuses, as well as whether or not it may be worth it, is discussed below.
What are the ‘Eggs-pedition Access: January’ ticket bonuses?
As well as the Timed Research, the ticket also gives you these bonuses until the end of the January:
1 single-use Incubator for your first spin of the day
Triple XP for your first spin and catch of the day
Gift opening limit increased to 50 per day (up from 20)
Gift sending limit increased to 150 per day (up from 100)
Gift storage limit increased to 40 gifts (up from 20)
‘Eggs-pedition Access: January’ Timed Research quest steps
You have until the end of the month to complete the following Timed Research:
Step 1 of 4
Catch 30 Pokémon (2,500 XP)
Catch 15 different species of Pokémon (2,500 XP)
Transfer 20 Pokémon (2,500 XP)
Rewards: 2,500 XP
Step 2 of 4
Use 25 berries to help catch Pokémon (2,500 Stardust)
Send 5 gifts to friends (2,500 Stardust)
Hatch 3 eggs (2,500 Stardust)
Rewards: 2,500 Stardust
Step 3 of 4
Earn 25 hearts with your buddy (5,000 XP)
Open 5 gifts (5,000 XP)
Catch 20 water- or flying-type Pokémon (5,000 XP)
Rewards: 5,000 XP
Step 4 of 4
Make 30 curveball throws (5,000 Stardust)
Explore 5 km (5,000 Stardust)
Evolve 10 Pokémon (5,000 Stardust)
Rewards: 5,000 Stardust, Togetic encounter
Is the ‘Eggs-pedition Access: January’ ticket worth it?
If you love hatching eggs, then yes — the ticket is worth it for the incubators alone. If you spin a stop every day, you’ll get 31 single-use Incubators, which means you can hatch 31 eggs. 31 single-use Incubators equal about 10 regular Incubators (which are priced at 150 PokéCoins individually, meaning 1500 PokéCoins for 10 Incubators costs approximately $15) making it a good deal for $4.99. You will have to remember to spin a PokéStop every dayto make the most of this deal, though.
Meanwhile, the increases in gift storage, sending and sending is particularly useful for players who routinely trade gifts en masse. Regularly opening gifts and levelling friendship is one of the best ways to get XP in Pokémon Go, so if you want to maximize your gains, then this is well worth factoring into the price of the ticket.
Otherwise, if you are buying this for research alone, it offers just a smattering of Stardust, XP, and a single Togetic (which was found regularly in the wild over the recent December Community Day weekend), which are rewards which you will gain through regular play with little effort.
If you’re trying to improve your health, the first stop is likely to be your doctor’s office. But your own office may have nearly as much influence on well-being, according to a growing body of research that suggests your job can affect everything from mental health to risk of cardiovascular disease and how long you live.
“Health happens everywhere,” says Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, chief medical officer for prevention at the American Heart Association. Given that the average employed U.S. adult spends more of their waking hours working than doing just about anything else, that includes the workplace, he says.
Work-related stress is one culprit for health problems, since unmanaged stress can contribute to heart disease, insomnia, gastrointestinal issues, and other chronic conditions. Long hours on the job can also cut into time that would otherwise be spent sleeping, exercising, cooking, seeing loved ones, or doing other activities that can boost wellness. Such problems are most effectively fixed when employers change workplace conditions, rather than leaning on workplace wellness initiatives as a Band-Aid, says Laura Linnan, director of the University of North Carolina’s Collaborative for Research on Work and Health.
“We can provide all the coping strategies and stress-management programs possible,” she says. “But if we put employees back in an environment where the work pace is out of control, the staffing is wrong, there’s a toxic supervisor—no amount of stress management is going to save that.”
Here’s what the research says about how work affects health, and a few ways bosses and employees alike can make the workplace better for everyone.
Find control and meaning in work
Autonomy in the workplace is a powerful thing, Linnan says. Studies show that the level of control someone has over their work predicts how their job will affect their physical and mental health, sometimes more than workload alone. On the flip side, lacking autonomy is a known risk factor for burnout, a condition characterized by feeling exhausted by, disengaged from, and cynical about work.
Some workers will naturally have more say over their time and tasks than others, Linnan says. But even in a highly regimented setting, she says, bosses could ask, “What would make this job better for you?” and use that feedback to determine how shifts and breaks are scheduled, for example.
Studies also show that people who find their work meaningful may experience improved well-being, as long as they don’t work too much or become overly invested. So, if workplace culture allows, employees could consider proactively bringing ideas to their managers and asking for tasks that align with the work they’d like to be doing.
But, unfortunately, not all companies and managers are open to that kind of feedback. That, Linnan says, is where the “reawakening for unionization” in the U.S. comes in. “There are organizations that just haven’t moved the needle at all, and employees are not going to stand for it,” she says.
Acknowledge and reward good work
Fair pay is the most obvious and impactful form of workplace reward, and one with clear links to better health. But research suggests even verbal acknowledgement, such as bosses praising or thanking their direct reports for their work, can improve employee well-being.
In a recent study, men who felt they put forth a lot of effort on the job but were not adequately rewarded for it (as measured by whether they felt they were compensated fairly, had good promotion prospects, and got enough respect from peers and supervisors) had a 50% higher risk of heart disease than peers who felt fairly recognized. There was not as clear a link among women, but the study’s co-author noted in a statement that reducing stressors at work—including an imbalance between effort and reward—could have other health benefits for people of all genders, potentially including decreases in depression.
Create flexible work environments
Demanding workplaces can contribute to health problems. But some studies also show it’s not that difficult to make a meaningful shift. “You can change work, and actually in a relatively short time,” says Lisa Berkman, a social epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
For a paper published in 2023, Berkman and her colleagues studied two very different workplaces: an IT company and a long-term health care provider. In both, managers were trained on how to be more supportive of employee work-life balance, and supervisors and employees together looked for ways of streamlining work—such as by taking some meetings off the calendar, or minimizing time spent on administrative work. After these programs were put into place, workers saw measurable improvements in sleep quality, psychological wellness, and heart health, the researchers found.
Studies have also shown that four-day work weeks improve employees’ mental health, sleep, and physical activity levels, further underscoring the benefits of flexible working hours. True four-day work weeks may not be possible for every industry, but companies taking part in pilot programs have found workarounds, like assigning different departments within a company to work different days and letting employees take a couple of half days per week.
You don’t necessarily need to make close, personal friends at work. Even relatively small interactions, like chatting with coworkers after a meeting or checking in with them after a hard day, can go a long way, research suggests. It’s also up to managers to create environments in which employees feel free to build social connections, and to check in with their direct reports to see how they’re doing as whole people—not just workers.
That mentality, Linnan says, is key to workplace health more generally. She points to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Total Worker Health Program as a good model. It seeks to improve all domains of employee health, from risk of on-the-job accidents and illnesses to psychological well-being—a marked contrast from classic workplace wellness initiatives, which tend to focus on narrow goals like boosting physical activity or encouraging smoking cessation. “Overall well-being is about mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, [and financial health],” Linnan says. “They all interrelate.”
NEW YORK —Tutor.com, one of the world’s largest and most innovative online tutoring organizations, announced that it satisfies Level II requirements (Moderate Evidence) of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) for its on-demand tutoring services.
The findings come from an effectiveness study independently designed and conducted by LearnPlatform by Instructure, a third-party edtech research company. The study results show four statistically significant favorable outcomes for El Monte Union High School District students who used Tutor.com, as compared to demographically similar non-users. Highlights include:
– Students who used Tutor.com had higher GPAs. Students who used Tutor.com had higher spring-semester GPAs as compared to non-users (3.02 vs. 2.87), and the difference was statistically significant.
– Students who used Tutor.com had fewer Ds and Fs. Students who used Tutor.com had fewer spring-semester D and F grades as compared to non-users (0.72 vs. 0.91 on average per student), and the difference was statistically significant.
– Students who completed more Tutor.com sessions had fewer absences. Students who completed more than 20 sessions had fewer absences than students who completed 3–20 sessions, and fewer still than students who completed 1–2 sessions (5.14 absences for high Tutor.com usage vs. 6.42 for medium usage and 8.62 for low usage), and these differences were statistically significant.
– Students who engaged in more total minutes of Tutor.com tutoring had fewer absences. Students who completed more than 300 minutes of Tutor.com tutoring had fewer absences as compared to students who completed between 1 and 60 minutes of tutoring (5.42 absences vs. 8.30), and the difference was statistically significant.
The study showed positive outcomes from on-demand tutoring, a service Tutor.com has delivered for more than two decades. Together with High-Dosage Tutoring, an evidence-based intervention that Tutor.com and affiliate company The Princeton Review® launched earlier this year, on-demand tutoring can be utilized as an effective tool to enhance a district’s Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS).
“This study confirms what we and the millions of students we serve have long known,” said Sandi White, Chief Institutional Officer at Tutor.com and The Princeton Review. “Students consistently tell us that Tutor.com is helping them improve their grades and confidence. This independent effectiveness study measurably attests to many of the student success stories we see every day.”
The study, which examined outcomes during the 2022–2023 school year, included a matched analysis sample of 746 students (373 treatment, 373 comparison) in grades 9–12 from El Monte Union High School District. Researchers used both administrative and state summative assessment data to examine the impact of Tutor.com on student outcomes. (Additional details can be found in the study.) Given multiple positive outcome findings, the study provides results to satisfy ESSA evidence requirements for Level II. LearnPlatform by Instructure had previously completed a Tutor.com logic model that satisfies ESSA IV standards.
“Every El Monte educator is dedicated to empowering our students to be resilient, college- and career-ready, lifelong learners and contributing members of our global society,” said Dr. Edward Zuniga, Superintendent, El Monte Union High School District. “We proactively implement programs to help students realize their full potential, and we are delighted to see the positive, measurable impact that online tutoring has had on their success.”
Other case studies have shown positive outcomes with Tutor.com use. “As part of our commitment to student success, we examine impact data and continually innovate our services to support success for learners, schools, and districts,” said White. The company, which has delivered more than 25 million sessions, plans to release additional MTSS tools in the new year.
About Tutor.com
Since its incorporation in 2000, Tutor.com has delivered more than 25 million online tutoring and homework help sessions to students. The company’s more than 3,000 vetted and qualified tutors provide learning assistance that is available 24/7 in a wide variety of subjects. The company’s mission is to instill hope, advance equity, and catalyze achievement in schools and communities. Tutor.com powers tutoring and homework help programs for the U.S. Department of Defense, colleges and universities, K–12 school districts, state and local libraries, and companies offering employee benefit programs. Headquartered in New York City, Tutor.com is an affiliate of The Princeton Review, an education services company not affiliated with Princeton University. Follow Tutor.com on X (formerly Twitter) @tutordotcom, Facebook @TutorDotCom, and LinkedIn @Tutor.com.
SOURCE Tutor.com
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
TAIPEI — 2024 will be a bumper year of elections around the world, but one of the first votes on the calendar will also be one of the most hotly contested and consequential: Taiwan, where there are vital strategic interests at play for both the U.S. and China on January 13.
If the campaign started with expectations in the U.S. that the ruling, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), whose top brass are frequent and welcome guests in Washington, would stroll to victory, the final stages of the presidential and legislative race have turned into a nail-biter.
Chinese President’s Xi Jinping’s Communist Party leadership, increasingly assertive in its claim that democratic Taiwan is part of China and keen to see the ruling party in Taipei ousted, is trying to swing the election through a disinformation campaign of hoaxes and outlandish claims on social media.
And the tactics may be working. The latest polls for the first-past-the-post presidential race on the My Formosa portal have DPP leader William Lai on 35.2 percent, only just keeping his nose out in front of his main challenger from the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), Hou Yu-ih,on 30.6 percent. On Tuesday, the Beijing-leaning United Daily News put both candidates on 31 percent.
“This is not a walk in the park,” admitted Vincent Chao, a city councillor and prominent DPP personality, speaking to POLITICO’s Power Play podcast at a campaign event in New Taipei, a municipality surrounding the capital.
It could hardly be a more febrile period in terms of security fears over the Taiwan Strait, where insistent Chinese maneuvering has been matched by a high-stakes U.S.-backed boost to the island’s defenses. Only on December 15, the U.S. approved another $300 million of spending on defense kit, sparking a retort from China that the expenditure would harm “security interests and threaten peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.”
Lai’s opponents are playing hard on these security implications of the vote, and are accusing him of bringing the island closer to conflict because of his past comments in favor of the island’s independence. China has, after all, continually warned that independence “means war” and Xi has said Beijing is willing to use “all necessary measures” to secure unification. Lai has hit back that his rivals “are parroting the [Chinese Communist Party line] as propaganda to score electoral benefits.”
For the global economy, open war over Taiwan would be a disaster, perhaps even outstripping the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, due in particular to the island’s critical role in microchip supplies.
Head-to-head race
The specter of a DPP defeat has raised the temperature of the fevered last few weeks of the campaign.
Chao, the DPP councillor and a former political secretary in Taiwan’s Washington representation, admitted that the DPP ends the year in “a head-to-head race” in the final stretch. “I mean, it’s democracy and the party has been in power for eight years. Anything could change,” he said.
Wearing a jaunty white and green “Team Taiwan” tracksuit, the party’s signature colors, he talks above the backstage din of an evening event, held among the tower block estates of New Taipei. Volunteers hand out pork dumplings, the outgoing president Tsai Ing-wen gives a rousing speech about freedom and security, and there are ballads of national loyalty and singalong love songs. It feels heartfelt, but also very Taiwanese in its orderliness, the crowd sitting on stools in the evening heat, waving small flags in unison.
Chao is candid about the scale of China’s social media offensive.
The specter of a DPP defeat has raised the temperature of the fevered last few weeks of the campaign | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
“What we’re seeing is a much more sophisticated China,” Chao reflected. “They’ve grown much more confident in their abilities to influence our elections, not through military coercion or other overt means, but through disinformation, through influencing public opinion, through controlling the information that people see … through social media organizations like TikTok.”
One of the many unfounded stories that gained currency on social posts was a claim the U.S. had asked Taiwan to develop biological weapons research, a rumor aimed at raising anxiety about an arms race. Another accused the DPP of covert surveillance of its rivals.
Trade and business links are another lever. According to Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, some 300 executives from big Taiwanese businesses operating China were called to a meeting by by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Director Song Tao, a close ally of China’s President Xi, in early December and roundly encouraged to fly home to Taiwan support a pro-Beijing outcome in January.
A third concern is an international system buckling under new conflicts and crises, with less time to devote to Taiwan’s freedoms, all compounded by an uncertain outcome in the upcoming U.S. election. In the wake of Beijing’s ’s clampdown on freedoms in Hong Kong and with the backwash of the Ukraine crisis, anxieties run high among DPP supporters about Taiwan’s outlook and the need for high levels of deterrence.
“We really do not want to be the next Ukraine,” Chao added, with feeling.
Bending with Beijing
Opinion is strongly divided about the smartest tactical response toward China’s muscle flexing.
Opinion is strongly divided about the smartest tactical response toward China’s muscle flexing. | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
Across town, at one of the opposition’s bases, where campaigners wear tracksuits in the white and blue of the Kuomintang party, International Relations Director Alexander Huang said his political troops were “within touching distance” of a possible victory.
Keen to shake off a reputation of being reflexively pro-China, as opposed to merely cautious about riling its powerful neighbour, the KMT hosted cocktails for foreign journalists in a trendy, Christmas-decorated bar, bringing together Chinese news-agency writers with Western reporters covering the election.
Huang, who hails from a military intelligence background and studied Chinese military and security doctrine in Washington, argued renewed Western support and commitments of defence expenditure by the U.S. administration increased the risk of something backfiring over Taiwan’s security. “We are under a great military threat [from China],” he told Power Play. “Our position is deterrence without provocation: assurance without appeasement.”
He also reckoned the current chilly relations between the governing DPP party and Beijing were widening distrust. “Our current government has no direct communication with the other side. If you are not able to communicate your view to your adversary, how can you change that?”
It’s less clear what reassurances the KMT expects from Beijing in return for a more accommodating relationship. Huang cites a possible decrease in trade tensions, which can hit Taiwanese agriculture and fishing when Beijing turns the screws, and further action on climate change and pollution (Taiwan is downwind of China’s emissions).
Colorful cast
The race certainly does not lack for colorful personalities.
The DPP’s presidential candidate, Lai, is a doctor and parliamentarian, while his KMT rival Hou is a former policeman and mayor in New Taipei. Mindful that the mood has become cynical about political elites, both sides have chosen frontmen who can claim humble roots: Hou hails from a family that scratched a living as food market traders, while Lai, the epitome of a slick Taiwanese professional, grew up with a widowed mother after his father died in a mining accident.
Hou is a former policeman and mayor in New Taipei | Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
The “Veep” contenders are flashier than the main candidates and more media-friendly. Hsiao Bi-khim, educated in the U.S. and until recently ambassador to Washington, is a pet-lover who styles herself as an agile “cat warrior” in stark contrast to China’s pugnacious “wolf-warrior” diplomats. Her KMT opponent is Jaw Shaw-kong, a formidable, populist-tinged debater and TV personality, who channels overt pro-Beijing sentiment, recently calling for more alignment in military planning with China’s leadership.
The billionaire Foxconn founder Terry Gou, who had run as a maverick, wafting pets as incentives to couples to have more babies to combat a worryingly low birthrate, quit the race after China’s tax authorities launched punitive investigations into his company, the builder of iPhones.
Russell Hsiao of the Global Taiwan Institute, a non-partisan research organization, reckoned that even if the DPP wins, its mandate will be less compelling than in the glory days of 2020, when it surged to a record level.
The guessing game of how likely an intervention — or even invasion — by China is helps explain the nervy tenor of this race.
The KMT’s Huang thought a “full-scale, kinetic invasion” is unlikely in the immediate future. How long does he think that guarantee would hold? “I would say not for the next five years, if we get our policy right.”
Hardly the most durable time-frame.
Taipei politics being a small world, Huang is a longstanding frenemy of the DPP’s Chao, who counters that Taiwan urgently needs to retain its defiant stance and deepen its strategic alliances with the West. They just disagree widely on the means to secure its future.
“The aim of [Beijing’s] engagements is unification … by force if necessary. Democracy, freedom, they are not just words. They represent what our people sincerely believe and hope to uphold.”
Stuart Lau contributed reporting.
Anne McElvoy is host of POLITICO’s weekly Power Play interview podcast, whose latest episode comes from the Taiwan election campaign.
There seems to be bi-partisian support for medical marijuana to be an aide in treating PTSD. The VA Medicinal Cannabis Research Act was introduced during summer for Department of Veterans Affairs. In addition to pain and post-traumatic stress disorder, the legislation would require the VA to examine how the plant affects sleep, agitation, mortality and hospital readmissions. It was is critical as it healthcare professionals, veterans and counselors give the nod it is a benefit for those in need.
Science is finally backing up these opinions. A study published in the Journal of Pharmacology looked at the patient history of 24,000 Canadians using 2012 Statistics Canada data. Researchers were interested in exploring how cannabis could affects those living with PTSD, specifically with regards to suicide and depression. Living with PTSD sharply increases the risk of depression and suicide in patients unless, researchers discovered, they consume marijuana.
“We know with limited effective treatment options for PTSD, many patients take to medicating with cannabis to alleviate their symptoms,” lead author Stephanie Lake told Global News. “However, until now, there has been no population-level data to suggest cannabis might have a possible therapeutic role in the course of PTSD. These findings offer those patients seeking treatment options some promise.”
Photo by lalesh aldarwish via Pexels
In the more than 24,000 participants, researchers found 420 Canadians who’d been clinically diagnosed with PTSD. About 28% (106 individuals) of those living with PTSD reported using cannabis in the past year. Only 11% of respondents undiagnosed with PTSD reported cannabis usage. Non-users were seven times more likely to have experienced a recent major depressive episode and had a 4.7% higher chance of contemplating suicide, compared to non-cannabis users who didn’t suffer from PTSD. Among cannabis users, the study did not find a connection between PTSD and depression or suicide.
Official VA statistics reports about 10-20% of veterans live with PTSD, depending on the service era in which they participated. But the organization’s National Suicide Report paints a starker picture — suicide rates are increasing for both veterans and non-veterans. About 20 veterans commit suicide each day, according to the report.
While more research is necessary, as Lake and her team said, this study points to how cannabis might assist those living with PTSD.
For dog lovers, the prospect of a dog longevity drug sounds fantastic. Who doesn’t want their furry friends to live longer, healthier lives?
Recent developments from a San Francisco-based biotech company, Loyal, bring this dream closer to reality. They’ve announced an anti-aging drug for dogs that has cleared its first hurdle for FDA approval. This marks a pivotal moment in veterinary medicine, as it’s the first time the FDA has shown openness to endorsing longevity drugs for pets.
Dog Longevity Drug Holds Promise of Longer Lives for Man’s Best Friend
Loyal’s groundbreaking drug, LOY-001, targets a growth and metabolism hormone called IGF-1. This hormone, linked with size, appears in higher levels in larger dogs and lower in smaller ones. Studies on other species suggest inhibiting IGF-1 can increase lifespans. LOY-001 is aimed at healthy dogs over seven years old and weighing more than 40 pounds. Administered every three to six months by a vet, it holds the potential to slow down the aging process in dogs.
Parallel to this, Loyal is developing LOY-003, a daily pill form of the treatment. CEO Celine Halioua emphasizes that they’re not creating immortal dogs. The goal is to slow their rate of aging, thus maintaining a healthier state for a longer period.
As promising as these developments are, they raise significant ethical questions, particularly concerning the quality of extended life for these animals. Veterinarian Kate Creevy, involved in a similar trial for an anti-aging drug called rapamycin, stresses the importance of ensuring that any extended lifespan is accompanied by good health and quality of life.
Moreover, the human manipulation of dogs through selective breeding, which may have contributed to accelerated aging in larger breeds, underlines the ethical complexities in altering canine aging processes.
Trials and the Future of Canine Health
Loyal plans to start a large clinical trial for LOY-001 with around 1,000 large and giant dogs by either 2024 or 2025. The ultimate aim is to have a market-ready product by 2026. This trial not only represents a major step in veterinary medicine but also opens doors to understanding aging in more complex organisms like humans.
The success of Loyal’s drug could potentially revolutionize how we approach canine health and aging. It offers a glimpse into a future where our canine companions can enjoy longer, healthier lives alongside us. However, it’s crucial to balance this scientific advancement with ethical considerations to ensure the well-being of these beloved animals.
Just because death is inevitable doesn’t make it easy or natural to talk about. In a new study, researchers wondered if hospice workers—experts in end-of-life care—had lessons to teach the rest of us when it came to speaking with patients and families about death.
Daniel Menchik, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona who studies the use of language in different fields of medicine, spent eight months sitting in on team meetings at a hospice care facility that were also open to patients’ families. His goal was to study how both groups talked to each other about the impending death of the patient. His findings, which will be published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, reinforce the importance of framing death as a process rather than an outcome when caring for frightened patients and loved ones. It’s a helpful strategy that he says everyone could use when facing loss.
“People aren’t dead until they’re dead,” Menchik says. “And even then, they may not be experienced that way by the people that they are connected to, especially if they’ve had quality time with that person.”
In the study, Menchik noticed that hospice workers used three different types of verbs in meetings with family members: predictive, subjunctive, and imperative. Predictive verbs are used to assert things about the future and include words like “will” and “going to.” Imperative verbs carry a similar firmness, but include a call to action; the most common one Menchik encounters in medical settings is “should.” Subjunctive verbs convey some sort of personal stance when talking about the future. “Think,” “feel,” “want,” and many other expressive phrases fall in this category.
When a family starts hospice care, “their capabilities to engage in intense conversations [about death] are usually pretty limited,” Menchik says. But he believes that hospice workers help bridge that gap by minimizing their use of imperative verbs. In meetings he observed, imperative verbs made up just 17% of the verb phrases used by hospice professionals. That’s fairly uncommon in medicine. Menchik has also researched how surgeons speak—a field where questions about courses of treatment and illness progression demand quick and conclusive answers—and found that they use imperative verbs much more often, likely as a way of projecting that they have control over outcomes.
A higher priority in hospice is emotional management. “With the language that they’re using, they’re there as guides, not as the authorities,” says Dr. Maya Giaquinta, a pediatric resident at the Medical College of Wisconsin who worked with Menchik on the paper (and emphasized that she’s speaking in her own capacity, and not on behalf of the school). Using more predictive and subjunctive verbs allows hospice experts to orient care around current emotional needs, rather than future events.
While predictive verbs were used the most often in the meetings Menchik and Giaquinta observed, at least half of the verbs most frequently used were words that conveyed uncertainty, like “could,” “might,” and “may.” In declining to talk about future events as set in stone, the researchers found, professionals were better able to redirect conversations to the current moment and focus on anxieties and emotions.
Hospice professionals aren’t taught about care at a grammatical level in training, at least not explicitly, says Dr. Robert Gramling, a physician and the chair of palliative medicine at the University of Vermont, who was not involved with the study. Research that describes and identifies the skills experts pick up over time can be valuable for expanding the general public’s ability to think and talk about death, he says.
Gramling has studied end-of-life conversations, which he says require “thinking granularly about the words we use and how they land with other people.” When speaking to a family or a patient facing death, ask yourself: “Am I referring to this person as dying? Or am I referring to this person as living?” Gramling suggests. Such reflection grounds the conversation firmly in the present. Another question to consider about your wording: “Is that framed in the language of the person who’s experiencing it, or is it really my perspective of things?” In hospice, where patients face only one outcome, speaking with empathy and compassion along the path to it is one thing within people’s control.
Scientists may have just had their first conversation with whales while testing software that could one day help them communicate with aliens.
The team of scientists—from the SETI Institute, the University of California, Davis, and the Alaska Whale Foundation—were studying humpback whale communication off the coast of Alaska when they detected the underwater “greeting signal” from a whale called Twain.
Whales make underwater noises to communicate with each other. Although we do not know what the sounds mean exactly, scientists believe they use them to socialize with each other, as well as to navigate, find food and avoid predators
A stock photo shows a humpback whale swimming underwater. A team of researchers recently had a conversation with the species while practicing technology for possibly communicating with extraterrestrial life. Craig Lambert/Getty
The scientists played a previously recorded humpback whale contact call through an underwater speaker, which resulted in Twain approaching the boat. He circled the boat for a while before responding. The conversation lasted for 20 minutes, and during this time the whale made noises in response to each record.
The team members had been studying these whales to practice the software and develop intelligence filters that may one day be used to communicate with extraterrestrials. The SETI Institute is a nonprofit organization that has a strong focus on the search for extraterrestrial life. The team is focusing on developing the filter to decipher the meaning behind any signals received. Similarly, scientists have studied Antarctica as a way to better understand Mars.
The scientists believe this is the first exchange between humans and humpback whales, in the “humpback language,” lead author Brenda McCowan of U.C. Davis said in a press release detailing the findings.
“Humpback whales are extremely intelligent, have complex social systems, make tools—nets out of bubbles to catch fish—and communicate extensively with both songs and social calls,” said study co-author Fred Sharpe of the Alaska Whale Foundation.
Their findings following the conversation were published in the journal Peer J.
Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute, a co-author of the paper, said in a press release: “Because of current limitations on technology, an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers. This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales.”
The team of researchers, which also included such experts as Josie Hubbard, Lisa Walker, and Jodi Frediani, are looking to publish a second paper shortly.
This paper will focus on the nonaudio communicative behavior of humpback whales, the press release said. This includes indicators such as bubble rings, which the whales appear to make when near humans.
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about humpback whales? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
86% of respondents agree that river pollution greatly affects human health, but more than half (57%) have little to no knowledge about how to clean it up.
MIDLAND, Mich., December 12, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Today, Rivers are Life, a collective voice for global river ecosystems, reveals the multinational, multicultural, and cross-generational results for the “State of Rivers Around the World” survey. The global survey gathered insights from 6,645 people throughout 14 countries and four continents, including North America, South America, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
These results show that, despite regional and cultural differences, people around the world agree that climate health and rivers are inseparable and vitally important. 91% of people around the world believe that climate change needs to be acted on in 2024, and nine in ten report that rivers are important to climate change mitigation. Moreover, 80% globally agree that rivers have an impact on their lives.
Despite 81% of people considering rivers to be a vital part of the food system – and 94% agreeing that rivers are important to agriculture – the majority of people around the world would not eat a fish out of their local river.
“What’s most shocking about this data is that we found something that more than 90 percent of the world agrees on: climate change needs to be addressed, and rivers play a vital role in mitigating those issues,” said Katie Horning, BeAlive, Head of Rivers are Life Brand. “Despite that alignment, there are still gaps in knowledge about rivers, and how people can take action to make a difference.”
Greater Education Is Needed
Across findings, respondents agreed that there is a need for greater education around the environment, river systems and how they can help. 98% of people around the world would like to know more about environmental issues.
Importantly, 74% of participants believe more public awareness will improve the health of rivers, and 63% say lack of attention to the issue is a major obstacle to reducing water pollution.
“Education is a key component to addressing issues like river pollution, and we at LSU contribute both academic expertise and on-the-ground support to Rivers are Life,” said Clint Willson, Interim Dean of LSU’s College of the Coast & Environment and Director of the LSU Center for River Studies. The Center for River Studies is an academic partner to Rivers are Life. “LSU’s commitment to this research signifies the importance of educating and encouraging younger generations globally to advocate for the vitality of waterways.”
Around the world, and across generations, there are a few key differentiators about what individuals want to learn and how they take action:
People in South America and Asia (69%) are twice as likely to be interested in learning about environmental issues facing rivers than those in North America and Europe (30%).
Globally, Gen Z (56%) and Millennials (57%) are much more interested in learning about environmental issues than the Baby Boomers (33%).
Limiting pollution in rivers is a higher concern for people in South America and Asia (80%) when compared to North America and Europe (68%).
When asked to rank who was most responsible for polluting rivers, people in Asia (42%) and those in South America (36%) felt that individuals were most at fault, while those in North America (41%) and Europe (42%) were most likely to select corporations.
In terms of taking action, 75% of individuals from Asia have helped to clean their local river, compared to only 46% in South America, 27% in North America and just 18% in Europe.
And More Urgent Action Is Required
While most survey respondents agree that some action is required, the findings show differing responses when it comes to how this problem is addressed:
76% believe that human behavior is the biggest obstacle to reducing water pollution;
50% believe no one is protecting their local rivers;
With only 10% of participants strongly agreeing that their countries’ leaders care about the health of rivers;
72% of people around the world would like stricter policies or more regulation to curb river pollution;
88% believe there should be stronger legislation to prevent sewage drainage into rivers;
And 57% have little to no personal knowledge on how to clean up their local rivers
Despite these concerns, respondents shared a sense of hopefulness, and willingness to help, when it comes to cleaning these vital waterways. Fifty-nine percent of people around the world are planning to take action to help clean their rivers in 2024, they just need help getting started.
Rivers are Life is the ideal platform that can provide education and solutions for those looking to get involved in addressing the issue and protecting our rivers. It aims to inspire people to protect, preserve, and explore our world’s rivers.
Visit RiversareLife.com to subscribe to their e-newsletter, hear from River Heroes impacting community-based change around the world, and follow on social media to learn more. For full survey results, visit www.RiversareLife.com/State-of-rivers-around-the-world.
METHODOLOGY:
Conducted by SAVANTA, a market research consultancy. Dates of fielding: October 3, 2023, to October 18, 2023. This survey was conducted in: U.S., Europe (UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain), South America (Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru), and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand).
The sample populations were: U.S. (n=1,590), Europe (n=1,925), South America (n=1,487), and SE Asia (n=1,643). The survey was in an online format and was conducted in English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese (BR), Italian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian.
While having a good night’s sleep might help you to remember things you’re trying to remember, it can also help our brains make up entirely false memories.
The human brain’s memory is notoriously unreliable, often missing things that were glaringly obvious or remembering things happening that never actually did. New research in the journal Royal Society Open Science reveals that sleep might help us remember things, and also remember false memories.
These false memories often arise when people are given a list of related words to memorize, and falsely remember a word being there that would have fit the category but in fact was missing.
Stock image of a man sleeping. Sleeping has been found to make people better at remembering lists, but also more prone to false memories. ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS
“We found that participants had better memory for the lists in terms of better recall of the words in the lists. But their errors were also revealing—they made fewer random errors (intrusions), and more errors that suggest that they had learned the gist of the lists,” Gareth Gaskell, a professor of sleep psychology at the University of York in England, told Newsweek.
The researchers tested 488 participants on their ability to recall a list of words 12 hours after seeing them, with some of the participants being allowed to sleep in the 12-hour interim.
They found that those who had slept remembered more of the words on the list than those who had not, but they were also more likely to give words that weren’t on the list, but were related. The related incorrect words are known as “lure words,” while completely unrelated incorrect words are known as “intrusions.” If a list contained words like nurse, hospital and sick, the false memories may include lure words like doctor.
“The results suggest an intriguing combination of effects. The sleep and wake groups were well-matched in the number of total responses after the 12-hour delay. Despite this, the sleep participants were more accurate in their veridical (truthful) memory of the studied list words, as well as more gist-like in their incorrect responses—a greater lure-to-intrusion ratio,” the authors wrote in the paper.
This suggests that sleep has a complex role in memory, influencing not only how well memories are retained but also potentially the nature of the memory.
“Memories in some ways are more about our future than our past. What we want is knowledge about our past that can be applied in a generalized way to help us to deal with future events,” Gaskell said.
“Future events won’t be identical to the past events, so a gist-like representation might actually be more useful than a ‘perfect’ detailed representation. So what sleep might be doing is helping us to store memories in a gist-like way that can then be better applied to our future interactions.”
The researchers also found that the results varied based on the time of day that the participants were remembering the list, with both groups suggesting more incorrect and unrelated words in the evening.
“We found an unexpected time-of-day effect, such that completing free recall in the evening led to more intrusions—neither studied nor lure words,” the authors describe in the paper.
“Above and beyond this time-of-day effect, the sleep participants produced fewer intrusions than their wake counterparts. When this was statistically controlled for, the sleep participants falsely produced more critical lures. They also correctly recalled more studied words, regardless of intrusions.”
The authors do recognize several limitations of their study, namely that all participants were aged between 18 and 25, and that the tests were performed online, meaning that other distractions and environments could not be controlled.
However, they hope that their research paves the way to new discoveries regarding sleep’s role in memory.
“Our study provides a rich new body of evidence to help determine the contribution of sleep,” they wrote.
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about sleep and memory? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Roche Holding said its investigational treatment, inavolisib, showed promise in a late-stage study to treat patients with breast cancer.
The Swiss pharmaceutical company said Tuesday that the phase 3 study met its primary endpoint of progression-free survival, showing that inavolisib, in combination with palbociclib and fulvestrant, delivered a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement compared to palbociclib and fulvestrant alone.
While Roche acknowledged that overall survival data were immature at this stage, it said it had observed a clear positive trend. The inavolisib combination was well tolerated.
The group said inavolisib is an investigational, oral targeted treatment with potential to provide durable disease control.
Blue dots represent the 75 schools that were eligible for the right-to-read settlement program of training and funds. (Source: Sarah Novicoff and Thomas Dee, Figure A1 of “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms” working paper.)
In 2017, public interest lawyers sued California because they claimed that too many low- income Black and Hispanic children weren’t learning to read at school. Filed on behalf of families and teachers at three schools with pitiful reading test scores, the suit was an effort to establish a constitutional right to read. However, before the courts resolved that legal question, the litigants settled the case in 2020.
The settlement itself was noteworthy. The state initially agreed to give an extra $50 million to 75 elementary schools with the worst reading scores in the state to improve how they were teaching reading. Targeted at children who were just learning to read in kindergarten through third grade, the settlement amounted to a little more than $1,000 extra per student. Teachers were trained in evidence-based ways of teaching reading, including an emphasis on phonics and vocabulary, and encouraged to use them. (A few of the 75 original schools didn’t participate for various reasons.)
A pair of Stanford University education researchers studied whether the settlement made a difference, and their conclusion was that yes, it did. Third graders’ reading scores rose in 2022 and 2023, equivalent to an extra 25 percent of a year of learning, compared to students in schools that weren’t eligible for the settlement payments. Roughly 36 percent of the third graders in these schools reached Level 2 or higher on the California state reading tests, up from about 30 percent before the settlement. (Level 2 equates to slightly below grade-level proficiency with “standard nearly met” but is above the lowest Level 1 “standard not met.”) It’s noteworthy that reading achievement in these schools rose during the post-pandemic period even as reading achievement suffered nationwide. (State testing of all students doesn’t begin until third grade and so there was no standard measure for younger kindergarten, first and second graders.)
The test score gains might seem small. The majority of children in these schools still cannot read well. Even with these reading improvements, more than 60 percent of the students still scored at the lowest of the four levels on the state’s reading test. But these reading gains are meaningful for a real-life classroom experience, not a laboratory experiment or a small pilot program, which involved more than 7,000 third graders over two years. The researchers characterized the reading improvements as larger than those seen in 90 percent of large-scale classroom interventions, according to a 2023 study. They also conducted a cost-benefit analysis and determined that the $50 million literacy program created by the settlement was 13 times more effective than a typical dollar spent at schools.
“I wouldn’t call the results super large. I would call them cost effective,” said Jennifer Jennings, a sociologist at Princeton University who was not involved in the study, but attended a presentation of the working paper in November.
The working paper, “The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms,” was posted to the website of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University on Dec. 4, 2023. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and may still be revised.
Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education who conducted the analysis with doctoral student Sarah Novicoff, says that the reading improvements at the weakest schools in California bolster the evidence for the so-called “science of reading” approach, which has become associated with phonics instruction, but also includes pre-phonics sound awareness, reading fluency, vocabulary building and comprehension skills. Thus far, the best real-world evidence for the science of reading comes from Mississippi, where reading scores dramatically improved after schools changed how they taught reading. But there’s also been a debate over whether the state’s policy to hold weak readers back in third grade has been a bigger driver of the test score gains than the instructional changes.
The structure of the right-to-read settlement offers a possible blueprint for how to bring evidence-based teaching practices into more classrooms, says Stanford’s Dee. School administrators and teachers both received training in the science of reading approach, but then schools were given the freedom to create their own plans and spend their share of the settlement funds as they saw fit within certain guidelines. The Sacramento County Office of Education served as an outside administrator, approving plans and overseeing them.
“How to drive research to inform practice within schools and within classrooms is the central problem we face in education policy,” said Dee. “When I look at this program, it’s an interesting push and pull of how to do that. Schools were encouraged to do their own planning and tailor what they were doing to their own circumstances. But they also had oversight from a state-designated agency that made sure the money was getting where it was supposed to, that they were doing things in a well-conceived way.”
Some schools hired reading coaches to work with teachers on a regular basis. Others hired more aides to tutor children in small groups. Schools generally elected to spend most of the settlement money on salaries for new staff and extra compensation for current teachers to undergo retraining and less on new instructional materials, such as books or curriculums. By contrast, New York City’s current effort to reform reading instruction began with new curriculum requirements and teachers are complaining that they haven’t received the training to make the new curriculum work.
It’s unclear if this combination of retraining and money would be as effective in typical schools. The lowest performing schools that received the money tended to be staffed by many younger, rookie teachers who were still learning their craft. These new teachers may have been more open to adopting a new science of reading approach than veteran teachers who have years of experience teaching another way.
That teacher retraining victory may foretell a short-lived success story for the students in these schools. The reason that there were so many new teachers is because teachers quickly burn out and quit high-poverty schools. The newly trained teachers in the science of reading may soon quit too. There’s a risk that all the investment in better teaching could soon evaporate. I’ll be curious to see their reading scores a few years from now.
This story abouttheright to read settlementwas written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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In San Francisco, a safety net is under construction at the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent future tragedies.
In New York City, college officials opted for metal screens at a library where students had died. And in Missouri, fencing and steel mesh went up at a Columbia parking garage after a public outcry.
Across the nation, the installation of fencing, nets or other physical barriers at tall structures has become a recognized strategy for preventing suicides. As the Disneyland Resort reels from the third such death in a year, many advocates say that such safety barriers have been shown to save lives.
Suicide prevention and crisis counseling resources
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional and call 9-8-8. The United States’ first nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline 988 will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.
Experts say that such barriers or obstructions can help buy time for someone to intervene or for a person’s suicidal impulse to dissipate. That can be critical because such feelings can soon evaporate: Most people who survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die of suicide later, studies have found.
Since its most recent death, Disneyland has not publicly announced the installation of new fencing or other barriers, and has not answered questions from The Times about whether it was considering such a move.
“In an effort to deter this type of tragedy, we have long had multilayered security protocols in place at our parking structures, which we have substantially enhanced over time,” a Disneyland Resort spokesperson said in an email. “However, as with all of our security and safety measures, we don’t discuss specifics so as not to compromise our efforts.”
Last week, Anaheim police were called to a structure at the Disneyland Resort and found the body of a 24-year-old man. His death is being investigated as a suicide.
People died in similar incidents in February 2023 and December 2022 at the same kind of structure at the Disneyland Resort, according to the Anaheim Police Department. Three others died in the same way in the area in 2010, 2012 and 2016, bringing the reported total to six since 2010.
Installing physical barriers such as fences can help prevent deaths by stopping people from acting on a fleeting impulse, researchers say. In New Zealand, for instance, researchers found that suicides spiked after safety barriers were removed from a bridge, then stopped after barriers were reinstalled.
When someone is suicidal, “their mental state is often in a state of crisis. And so they have less flexibility in their thinking,” said Jill Harkavy-Friedman, senior vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
As a result, she said, if a physical barrier stops them from acting, “they’re not likely to shift gears and think of something else … They don’t say, ‘I can’t do that; let me do this instead.’”
If there is a risk of suicide at a site, “there’s really no reason not to put a barrier in and every reason to put a barrier in,” Harkavy-Friedman said.
Neither an Anaheim city spokesperson nor other city officials answered questions from The Times about whether the city had suggested that Disneyland install barriers following last week’s incident.
“Our thoughts go out to a family grieving the loss of a loved one and to all who were impacted,” Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken said in a statement. “We want to respect them and also an ongoing review of the incident.”
“We encourage everyone to continue raising awareness of the tragedy of suicide and the importance of mental health,” she added.
Efforts to construct barriers typically focus on tall structures where deaths have occurred. Parking garages are a particular concern for suicide prevention, because they tend to have open sides and less monitoring than other tall structures, according to the International Parking & Mobility Institute.
Bridges are also a common target of such interventions. In Pasadena, officials have erected mesh fencing at the Colorado Street Bridge and have unveiled several designs for permanent barriers to protect the public. In San Francisco, a 3.5-mile-long network of stainless steel mesh is nearly complete at the Golden Gate Bridge, where roughly 2,000 people have died by suicide since the iconic structure’s opening in 1937.
The $217-million safety netting, which extends 20 feet out from the bridge, was designed to blend in with the span’s architecture. Between 2011 and 2020, there were an average of nearly 34 deaths by suicide at the bridge every year. In 2022, when the first part of the safety barrier was installed, there were 22 such deaths, bridge spokesperson Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz said.
And fatal incidents have continued to decrease as the barrier netting has grown. As of Oct. 31, there had been 13 deaths by suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge this year, Cosulich-Schwartz said.
“Restricting easy access to lethal means reduces suicides,” said Paul Muller, president of the Bridge Rail Foundation, a nonprofit that has advocated for a safety barrier at the Golden Gate since 2006.
In a 2015 analysis of 22 peer-reviewed journal articles on suicide prevention methods, researchers found that measures that physically blocked people from accessing potentially lethal sites such as bridges or train tracks led, on average, to a 91% drop in deaths by suicide at those sites.
“Barriers work,” said study author Jane Pirkis, director of the Center for Mental Health in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne.
However, some scholars have argued that more studies are needed on their effectiveness. In 2020, researchers in the United Kingdom who reviewed existing studies said they had “methodological limitations.” More research is needed on the “potential for suicide method substitution and displacement,” they wrote.
Veronica Kelley, chief of mental health and recovery services for the Orange County Health Care Agency, said that “while there is evidence that restricting access to means of suicide is an effective approach for preventing suicides, the evidence for preventing suicide by jumping is not well-established.”
“Calling attention to suicide prevention is the most effective way to reduce suicides,” Kelley said.
The Orange County agency is “actively participating in a national campaign with the goal of achieving zero suicides,” she said, and “we can all do our part by calling attention to the fact that suicide is preventable, treatment works, and recovery happens.”
Harkavy-Friedman, who characterized the research on barriers as “quite strong,” said “there’s no reason to have an either/or — we need both. We need public education and we need barriers.”
At some sites where barriers are impractical, advocates have also pushed for signage.Harkavy-Friedman said there is not a lot of research on the effectiveness of such signs in preventing suicide.
Then in 2018, while visiting her eldest son at the Ohio State University, she saw a flier posted at a site where a student had died. It said: “Remember: You Matter,” alongside the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline phone number.
The simple language struck her. If a person in crisis couldn’t be physically blocked from a dangerous location, she thought, perhaps they could still be deterred from harming themselves.
Trujillo began writing letters to the National Park Service to encourage suicide prevention signs at the canyon. Although park officials never confirmed to her that they were taking any specific action, in 2021 she was sent a photograph of a sign with the Lifeline number inside a free park shuttle bus.
When she saw the photo, Trujillo burst into tears. It was the same shuttle service her mother had taken on her last day.
“I think of my mom sitting there. If that sign was up there, I have no idea if it could have interrupted her train of thought,” she said. But “sometimes, we all need that reminder.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional and call 988. The first nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.
Last week’s surprise deal between China and the United States may provide a boost to the climate talks in Dubai — but the two powers remain at odds on tough questions such as how quickly to shut down coal and who should provide climate aid to developing nations.
The world’s top two drivers of climate change are also divided by a thicket of disagreements on trade, security, human rights and economic competition.
The good news is that Washington and Beijing are talking to each other again and restarting some of their technical cooperation on climate issues, after a yearlong freeze. That may still not be enough to get nearly 200 nations to commit to far greater climate action at the talks that begin Nov. 30.
The two superpowers’ latest detente creates the right “mood music” for the summit, said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at climate think tank E3G. “But it still is not saying that the world’s two largest economies and two largest emitters are fully committed to the scale and pace of reductions that are needed.”
The deal, announced after a meeting this month between U.S. climate envoy John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua, produced an agreement to commit to a series of actions to limit climate pollution. Those include accelerating the shift to renewable energy and widening the variety of heat-trapping gases they will address in their next round of climate targets.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping endorsed that type of cooperation after a meeting in California on Wednesday, saying they “welcomed” positive discussions on actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions during this decade, as well as “common approaches” toward a successful climate summit. Biden said he would work with China to address climate finance in developing countries, a major source of friction for the U.S.
“Planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed,” said Xi ahead of his bilateral with Biden.
But the deal leaves some big issues unaddressed, including specific measures for ending their reliance on fossil fuels, the main contributor to global warming. Andthe two countries are a long way from the days when a surprise U.S.-Chinese agreement to cooperate on climate change had the power to land a landmark global pact.
That puts the nations in a dramatically different place than in 2014, when Xi and then-President Barack Obama made a historic pledge to jointly cut their planet-warming pollution, paving the way for the landmark Paris Agreement to land in 2015.
Even a surprise joint deal between the two nations in 2021 failed to ease friction, with China emerging at the last minute to oppose language calling for a phase-out of coal power. The summit ended with a less ambitious “phase-down.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks after receiving the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon, Taiwan’s highest civilian honour | Handout/Getty Image
The two countries’ struggles to find comity have come at the worst possible moment — at a time when rapid action is crucial to preventing climate catastrophe. A growing number of factors has threatened to widen the U.S.-Chinese wedge further, including their competition for supremacy in the market for clean energy.
Two nations at odds
While the U.S. has contributed more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than any other nation during the past 150 years, China is now the world’s largest climate polluter — though not on a per capita basis — and it will need to stop building new coal-fired power for the world to stand a chance of limiting rising temperatures.
The recent agreement hints at that possibility by stating that more renewables would enable reductions in the generation of oil, gas and coal, helping China peak its emissions ahead of its current targets.
The challenge will be bridging the countries’ diverging approaches to climate issues.
The Biden administration is urging a rapid end to coal-fired power, which is waning in the U.S., even as it permits more oil drilling and ramps up exports of natural gas — much of it destined for Asia.
At the same time, it wants the United States to claim a larger role in the clean energy manufacturing industry that China now dominates, and is seeking to loosen China’s stranglehold on supply chains for products such as solar panels, electric cars and the minerals that go into them. It’s also pressuring Beijing to contribute to U.N. climate funds, saying China’s historic status as a developing country no longer shields it from its responsibility to pay.
China sees the U.S. position as a direct challenge to its economic growth and energy security.
Beijing wants to protect the use of coal and defend developing countries’ access to fossil fuels. It has also backed emerging economies’ demands that rich countries pay more to help them deploy clean energy and adapt to the effects of a warmer world. China says it already helps developing countries through South-South cooperation and points to a clause in the 2015 Paris Agreement that says developed countries should lead on climate finance.
Hanging over the talks is also the prospect of a change of administration in the U.S., and continued efforts by Republicans to vilify Beijing and accuse the Biden administration of supporting Chinese companies through its climate policies and investments. And as China’s response to Pelosi’s trip underscored, climate cooperation remains hostage to other tensions in the two countries’ relationship, a dynamic likely to heighten in the coming year as both Taiwan and the U.S. hold presidential elections.
One challenge is that China doesn’t seem to see much to gain from offering more ambitious climate actions amid worsening relations with other countries, said Kevin Tu, a non-resident fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and an adjunct professor at the School of Environment at Beijing Normal University.
“In the past several years, China has voluntarily upgraded its climate ambitions a few times amid rising geopolitical tensions,” Tu said, pointing to its 2020 pledge to peak and then zero out its emissions. “So China does not necessarily have very strong incentive to further upgrade its climate ambition.”
The divide between the two nations has created a dilemma for some small island nations that often walk a fine line between negotiating alongside China at climate talks while pushing for more action to scale back fossil fuels.
The U.S. and China remain at odds on how quickly to shut down coal and who should provide climate aid to developing nations | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
“The U.S. is trying to drag everyone to talk about an immediate coal phase-out,” Ralph Regenvanu, climate minister for the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, said during a recent call with reporters, calling the effort a “U.S.-versus-China thing.”
“But we also need to talk about no more oil or gas as well,” he added.
Operating on its own terms
The dynamic between China and the U.S. will either drag down or bolster the ambitions of countries updating their national climate pledges, a process that begins at the close of COP28. Nations are already woefully behind cuts needed to hit the goals they laid out in Paris.
China’s new 10-year targets will be crucial for meeting those marks, given that China accounts for close to 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and that it plans to build dozens of coal-fired power plants in the coming years. The U.S., and many other countries, will be looking for greater commitments from China — whether that’s modifying what it means by phasing down coal or setting more stringent targets.
China has pledged to peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and zero them out before 2060,a decadelater than the United States has promised to reach net-zero. Beijing is unlikely to accelerate that timeline, in part because — analysts say — its philosophy is fundamentally different from that of the U.S.: underpromise and overdeliver.
Even without committing to more action, China’s massive investments in low-carbon energy installations — twice that of the United States — may inadvertently help the country achieve its peaking target early, some analysts say.
A complicated picture
If the Trump years drove China further from America, the global pandemic and resulting economic slowdown that started during his final year didn’t bring it closer. And the energy crunch stemming from Russia’s war with Ukraine cemented China’s drive for reliable energy to meet the rising needs of its 1.4 billion people. That created a coal boom.
Meanwhile, China heavily subsidized the expansion of wind, solar and electric vehicle production. Its clean energy supply chain dominance has lowered the global costs for those technologies but drawn scorn from the U.S. as it tries to rebuild its own domestic manufacturing base.
China has turned more combative in response. Rather than work with the U.S. to make joint announcements on climate action, Xi has made clear that China’s climate policy won’t be dictated by others. At G20 meetings, China has aligned with Saudi Arabia and Russia in opposing language aimed at phasing out fossil fuels.
“At the end of the day, it’s harder to make a claim that China needs the U.S. and it’s harder to make the claim that the U.S. can rely on China,” said Cory Combs, a senior analyst at policy consulting firm Trivium China.
Wealthy countries’ inability to deliver promised climate aid to vulnerable countries hasn’t helped. While China remains among the bloc of developing nations in calling for more action on climate finance, it also points to the investments it’s making in the Global South through its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative and bilateral aid.
A foreign diplomat who asked for anonymity to speak openly said China has resisted pressure to contribute money to a climate fund that would help developing countries rebuild after climate disasters and would likely push back against a focus on its continued build out of coal-fired power plants.
US climate envoy John Kerry sits next to China’s special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images
“Anything that would signal that they would need to do more is something that gets blocked,” the person said.
China did release a plan earlier this month to cut emissions of the potent greenhouse methane, delivering on a promise it had made in a joint declaration with the U.S. at climate talks in 2021. But it has still not signed onto a global methane pledge led by the U.S. and the European Union.
All that amounts to a complicated picture for the U.S.-Chinese relationship and its broader impact on global climate outcomes.
“The U.S.-China talks will help stabilize the politics when countries meet in the UAE, but critical issues such as a fossil fuel phase-out still require much [further] political efforts,” said Li Shuo, incoming director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“It’s very much about setting a floor,” and the talks in Dubai still need to build out from there, Shuo added.
He argues in a recent paper that China will subscribe to targets it sees as achievable and will continue toside with developing countries on climate finance. Chinese government officials are cautious about what they’re willing to commit to internationally, which sometimes serves as a disincentive for them to be more ambitious, he said.
The calculation is likely to be different for Biden’s team, who “want a headline that the world agrees to push China,” said David Waskow, who leads the World Resources Institute’s international climate initiative.
Not impossible
The power of engagement can’t be completely written off, and in the past it has proven to have a positive effect on the U.S.-China relationship.
“[Climate] sort of was a positive pillar in the relationship,” said Todd Stern, Obama’s former chief climate negotiator. “And it came to be a thing where when the two sides have come to get together, it was like, ‘What can we get done on climate?’”
Engagement with Chinaat the state and local level and among academics and research institutes has potential — in large part because it’s less political, said Joanna Lewis, a professor at Georgetown University who closely tracks China’s climate change approach.
There could also be opportunities to separate climate from broader bilateral tensions.
“I do feel like there’s that willingness to say, ‘We recognize our roles, we recognize our ability to have that catalytic effect on the international community’s actions,’” said Nate Hultman, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability and a former senior adviser to Kerry. “It doesn’t solve all the world’s issues going into the COP, but it gives a really strong boost to international discussions around what we know we need to do.”
Sara Schonhardt and Zack Colman reported, and Phelim Kine contributed reporting, from Washington, D.C.
This article is part of the Road to COP special report, presented by SQM.The article is produced with full editorial independence by POLITICO reporters and editors. Learn more about editorial content presented by outside advertisers.
In late October 2017, a US health official from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a glimpse of an eagerly anticipated work in progress. The WIV, a leading research institute, was putting the finishing touches on China’s first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. Operating with the highest safeguards, the lab would enable scientists to study some of the world’s most lethal pathogens.
The project had support from Western governments seeking a more robust partnership with China’s top scientists. France had helped design the facility. Canada, before long, would send virus samples. And in the US, NIAID was channeling grant dollars through an American organization called EcoHealth Alliance to help fund the WIV’s cutting-edge coronavirus research.
That funding allowed the NIAID official, who worked out of the US embassy in Beijing, to become one of the first Americans to tour the lab. Her goal was to facilitate cooperation between American and Chinese scientists. Nevertheless, says Asha M. George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, a nonprofit that advises the US government on biodefense policy, “If you want to know what’s going on in a closed country, one of the things the US has done is give them grant money.”
In emails obtained by Vanity Fair, the NIAID official told her superiors what she’d gleaned from the technician who’d served as her guide. The lab, which was not yet fully operational, was struggling to develop enough expertise among its staff—a concern in a setting that had no tolerance for errors. “According to [the technician], being the first P4 [or BSL-4] lab in the country, they have to learn everything from zero,” she wrote. “They rely on those scientists who have worked in P4 labs outside China to train the other scientists how to operate.”
She’d also learned something else “alarming” from the technician, she wrote. Researchers at the WIV intended to study Ebola, but Chinese government restrictions prevented them from importing samples. As a result, they were considering using a technique called reverse genetics to engineer Ebola in the lab. Anticipating that this information would set off alarm bells in the US, the official cautioned, “I don’t want the information particularly using reverse genetics to create viruses to get out, which would affect the ability for our future information gain,” meaning it would impair the collaboration between NIAID and the WIV.
There was good reason to fear that such a revelation could derail the fledgling partnership. One year earlier, the US Department of Energy had warned other agencies, including NIAID’s parent entity, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that advanced genetic engineering techniques could be misused for malign ends. The Energy Department had developed a classified proposal, reported on here for the first time, to ramp up safeguards against that possibility and develop tools to better detect evidence of genetic engineering. The proposal, which was not implemented in its suggested form, prompted a heated interagency battle, six people with knowledge of the debate tell Vanity Fair.
On January 10, 2018, as the NIAID official prepared her official trip report for the US embassy in Beijing, she wrote to colleagues, “I was shocked to hear what he said [about reverse engineering Ebola]. I also worry the reaction of people in Washington when they read this. The technician is only a worker, not a decision maker nor a [principal investigator]. So how much we should believe what he said?” She concluded, “I don’t feel comfortable for broader audience within the government circle. It could be very sensitive.”
Among the recipients of that email was F. Gray Handley, then NIAID’s associate director for international research affairs. Handley agreed with the official’s assessment and advised her: “As we discussed. Delete that comment.”
On January 19, the US embassy in Beijing issued a sensitive but unclassified cable that included concerning details from the NIAID official’s tour. It said that WIV scientists themselves had noted the “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate” the lab, according to an unredacted copy obtained by Vanity Fair. But the cable did not include the information that her NIAID colleagues apparently found most worrying.
In a study by the University of Arizona, researchers revealed that non-stereotypical apologies in the workplace can enhance communication. This study challenges conventional norms, emphasizing the power of breaking gender stereotypes in apologies to repair trust and foster collaboration.
Gender Stereotypes and Apologies in the Workplace
Sarah Doyle led a research team to explore the nuances of effective apologies in professional settings. Their focus? The impact of gender stereotypes on the perception of apologies. Traditional masculine language, characterized by assertiveness and confidence, and feminine language, known for its warmth and nurturing qualities, were used as benchmarks. Surprisingly, the research found that apologies that deviate from these gender norms were perceived as more effective.
Celebrity Apologies on Social Media
The research commenced with an analysis of celebrity apologies on Twitter. This platform, a hub for public statements, provided a rich dataset of 87 apology tweets from various celebrities. The response to these tweets revealed a pattern. Female celebrities who used masculine language in their apologies received higher engagement and more positive reactions.
The study extended beyond the virtual world into more relatable workplace scenarios. Researchers created situations involving accountants and nurses making mistakes and issuing apologies. Participants in these studies consistently found counter-stereotypical apologies more effective.
For women, using a counter-stereotypical apology increased the perceived effectiveness by an average of 9.7%, and for men, by 8.2%.
The Impact of Counter-Stereotypical Apologies
This research underscores the importance of moving beyond stereotypical patterns in our apologies. By adopting language and approaches that defy gender norms, individuals can enhance the impact of their apologies, leading to better outcomes in conflict resolution and trust-building.
The findings from the University of Arizona research team suggest that the way we construct apologies is as important as the frequency with which we offer them. This shift in focus from quantity to quality in apologies could pave the way for more effective communication strategies in diverse settings.
The study’s results have significant implications for professional environments, where effective communication is crucial. By encouraging individuals to break free from stereotypical language patterns in apologies, organizations can foster a more inclusive and collaborative atmosphere.
Rethinking the Construction of Apologies in the Workplace
As we move forward, this research encourages a deeper consideration of how we construct our apologies. The study highlights the potential for nuanced, thoughtful apologies to make a substantial difference in interpersonal relationships and professional settings.
The University of Arizona’s study on apology psychology offers a fresh perspective on effective communication. By challenging gender stereotypes in the language of apologies, individuals can enhance trust and collaboration in the workplace. This research not only adds a new dimension to our understanding of apologies but also opens avenues for future exploration in communication dynamics.
For centuries, sailors have whispered tales of monstrous rogue waves capable of splitting ships and damaging oil rigs. These maritime myths turned real with the documented 26-meter-high rogue wave at Draupner oil platform in 1995.
Fast forward to 2023, and researchers at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Victoria have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict these oceanic giants. They’ve developed a revolutionary formula using data from over a billion waves spanning 700 years, transforming maritime safety.
Decoding Rogue Waves: A Data-Driven Approach
The quest to understand rogue waves led researchers to explore vast ocean data. They focused on rogue waves, twice the size of surrounding waves, and even the extreme ones over 20 meters high. By analyzing data from buoys across the US and its territories, they amassed more than a billion wave records, equivalent to 700 years of ocean activity.
Using machine learning, the researchers crafted an algorithm to identify rogue wave causes. They discovered that rogue waves occur more frequently than imagined, with about one monster wave daily at random ocean locations. However, not all are the colossal 20-meter giants feared by mariners.
AI as a New-Age Oceanographer
The study stands out for its use of AI, particularly symbolic regression. Unlike traditional AI methods that offer single predictions, this approach yields an equation. It’s akin to Kepler deciphering planetary movements from Tycho Brahe’s astronomical data, but with AI analyzing waves.
The AI examined over a billion waves and formulated an equation, providing a “recipe” for rogue waves. This groundbreaking method offers a transparent algorithm, aligning with physics laws, and enhances human understanding beyond the typical AI black box.
Contrary to popular belief that rogue waves stem from energy-stealing wave combinations, this research points to “linear superposition” as the primary cause. Known since the 1700s, this phenomenon occurs when two wave systems intersect, amplifying each other momentarily.
The study’s data supports this long-standing theory, offering a new perspective on rogue wave formation.
Towards Safer Maritime Journeys
This AI-driven algorithm is a boon for the shipping industry, constantly navigating potential dangers at sea. With approximately 50,000 cargo ships sailing globally, this tool enables route planning that accounts for the risk of rogue waves. Shipping companies can now use the algorithm for risk assessment and choose safer routes accordingly.
The research, algorithm, and utilized weather and wave data are publicly accessible. This openness allows entities like weather services and public authorities to calculate rogue wave probabilities easily. The study’s transparency in intermediate calculations sets it apart from typical AI models, enhancing our understanding of these oceanic phenomena.
The University of Copenhagen’s groundbreaking research, blending AI with oceanography, marks a significant advancement in our understanding of rogue waves. By transforming a massive wave database into a clear, physics-aligned equation, this study not only demystifies a long-standing maritime mystery but also paves the way for safer sea travels. The algorithm’s potential to predict these maritime monsters will be a crucial tool for the global shipping industry, heralding a new era of informed and safer ocean navigation.
The holiday season for most people is a fun time of the year filled with turkey, celebrations, and family and friend gatherings. Media reenforces is a merry good cheer time for everyone. But some some it is a time filled with sadness, self-reflection, loneliness, and anxiety. Marijuana may help holiday anxiety and depression. During the holidays, 62% of respondents to a study described their stress level as “very or somewhat” elevated during the holidays, while only 10% reported no stress during the season.
A Washington State study utilized a data-centric approach using human test subjects to reveal marijuana’s efficacy in treating depression, anxiety, and stress found in everyday life. Published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the study concluded that “[c]annabis reduces perceived symptoms of negative affect in the short-term, but continued use may exacerbate baseline symptoms of depression over time.”
Utilizing information provided by the marijuana app Strainprint, which helps medical users tracks their cannabis doses and strains, researchers were able to examine how subjects used cannabis within the comforts of their home. As lead author on the study Carrie Cutler told Health Europa, that approach is a departure from previous research around mental illness and cannabis.
“Existing research on the effects of cannabis on depression, anxiety and stress are very rare and have almost exclusively been done with orally administered THC pills in a laboratory,” Cutler said. “What is unique about our study is that we looked at actual inhaled cannabis by medical marijuana patients who were using it in the comfort of their own homes as opposed to a laboratory.”
Photo by Joanna Kosinska via Unsplash
According to their analysis, the researchers found that marijuana low in THC and high in CBD was most effective at reducing depression symptoms, while high-THC/high-CBD cannabis “was best for reducing perceived symptoms of stress.” Interestingly, the data also showed that women responded with larger decreases in anxiety after marijuana consumption than men.
More specifically, 89,3% of all session saw significant drop-offs with depression symptoms after smoking marijuana. However, 3.2% of sessions had those symptoms exacerbated while 7.5% of session elicited no change. For session tracking anxiety and stress, more than 90% of sessions had significant reduction in those symptoms. Whether marijuana increased symptoms of anxiety and stress, or played no role at all, followed similar statistical patterns as the depression numbers.
“This is to my knowledge one of the first scientific studies to provide guidance on the strains and quantities of cannabis people should be seeking out for reducing stress, anxiety and depression,” Cutler said. “Currently, medical and recreational cannabis users rely on the advice of bud tenders whose recommendations are based off of anecdotal not scientific evidence.”
Anxiety and related disorders are among the most prevalent mental health conditions in the U.S. While antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications can be effective, they also come with significant side effects. As a result, some individuals are turning to alternative treatments, such as cannabis. But using cannabis comes with its own set of risks. “While it can be used as an alternative treatment for certain types of stress and anxiety, cannabis is not a one-size-fits-all solution and may not be suitable for everyone,” says psychiatrist Dr. Amanda Kingston.
Cannabidiol (CBD) is marketed by some suppliers as a painkiller, e.g. for osteoarthritis of the knee. Animal experiments have shown that the substance, which is extracted from the hemp plant, has an anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving effect in arthritis. As pain researchers at MedUni Vienna were now able to show for the first time in humans, CBD is not effective as pain medication, even in high doses. The results of the clinical study involving patients from the Department of Anaesthesia, Intensive Care Medicine and Pain Medicine at MedUni Vienna and University Hospital Vienna have just been published in the prestigious scientific journal “The Lancet Regional Health – Europe”.
86 men and women with an average age of around 63 years who suffered from severe pain due degeneration of the knee joint (osteoarthritis) were involved in the study. While one half of the patients received high-dose cannabidiol (CBD) by the mouth, the other group was given a placebo that was not recognizable as such, i.e. a drug without an active ingredient. The strictly controlled study period of eight weeks showed that CBD did not have a stronger pain-relieving effect than the placebo.
This means that CBD is not an alternative for pain therapy for osteoarthritis of the knee, so the search for more effective options must continue.”
Sibylle Pramhas (Division of Special Anaesthesia and Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesia, General Intensive Care Medicine and Pain Therapy at…
