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Organic farming matters – just not in the way you think

Posted on August 15, 2020 October 8, 2020 by Emma Jansen

Is organic agriculture the solution to our global food system challenges? That’s been the premise and promise of the organic movement since its origins in the 1920s: farming that’s healthy, ecological, and socially just.

Many people – from consumers and farmers to scientists and international organisations – believe that organic agriculture can produce enough nutritious food to feed the world without destroying the environment, while being more resilient to climate change and improving the livelihoods of farmers.

But as with many important issues of our time, there are more passionate opinions about organic agriculture than there is scientific evidence to support them. And there’s nothing black or white about organic agriculture.

Not just nice to have: nature in the workplace makes employees happier and healthier

Posted on August 14, 2020 April 8, 2021 by Emma Jansen

Bringing nature into the workplace can help reduce stress and increase creativity and focus, research shows.

Some researchers suggest humans have an innate need to be connected with nature. This is called biophilia. But as housing density, commute times, and office hours increase, we are spending less and less time in natural environments.

Workplace stress costs American businesses up to US$190 billion every year in healthcare costs alone. This is why bringing nature into the office can have such a big impact on employee wellbeing.

Bike-share companies are transforming US cities – and they’re just getting started

Posted on August 13, 2020 October 8, 2020 by Emma Jansen

Residents of major U.S. cities are becoming used to seeing docks for bike sharing programs nestled into parking spaces or next to subway station entrances. Adorned with stylish branding and corporate sponsors’ logos, these facilities are transforming transportation in cities across the country.

The modern concept of bike sharing – offering bikes for short-term public rental from multiple stations in cities – was launched in Copenhagen in 1995, but U.S. cities only started piloting their own systems in the past decade. Washington D.C. led the way, launching SmartBike DC in 2008 and an expanded network called Capital Bikeshare in 2010. This program now boasts over 480 stations and a daily ridership of 5,700.

Within a few years, bike-share systems launched in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and dozens of other cities. In 2016 there were 55 systems across the country with a total of over 40,000 bikes.

How a year of trying to buy nothing made me a smarter shopper and a better teacher

Posted on August 12, 2020 April 8, 2021 by Emma Jansen

It started as a New Year’s resolution driven by guilt and a touch of sibling rivalry – but by the end of the year, it taught me valuable lessons as a teacher, including about the benefits of failure.

At Christmas dinner 2018, my sister declared she would buy nothing for a year. After living in Bangladesh for two years, she had seen how the world’s fashion industry was wreaking havoc on the country’s people and environment.

I decided to follow her lead. As an Australian living in Finland, I still can’t imagine going a year without a flight home to see family. So buying nothing (apart from groceries) would do something to offset all those carbon-costly air miles.

Leonardo da Vinci designed an ideal city that was centuries ahead of its time

Posted on August 11, 2020 October 8, 2020 by Emma Jansen

The word “genius” is universally associated with the name of Leonardo da Vinci – a true Renaissance man, he embodied scientific spirit, artistic talent and humanist sensibilities. Exactly 500 years have passed since Leonardo died in his home at Château du Clos Lucé, outside Tours, France. Yet far from fading to insignificance, his thinking has carried down the centuries – and still surprises today.

The Renaissance marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, after the spread of the plague caused a global crisis resulting in some 200m deaths across Europe and Asia. Today, the world is on the cusp of a climate crisis, which is predicted to cause widespread displacement, extinctions and death, if left unaddressed. Then, as now, radical solutions were called for to revolutionise the way people live and safeguard humanity against catastrophe.

Organic agriculture is going mainstream, but not the way you think it is

Posted on August 10, 2020 October 8, 2020 by Emma Jansen

One of the biggest knocks against the organics movement is that it has begun to ape conventional agriculture, adopting the latter’s monocultures, reliance on purchased inputs and industrial processes.

“Big Organics” is often derided by advocates of sustainable agriculture. The American food authors Michael Pollan and Julie Guthman, for example, argue that as organic agriculture has scaled up and gone mainstream it has lost its commitment to building an alternative system for providing food, instead “replicating what it set out to oppose.”

New research, however, suggests that the relationship between organic and conventional farming is more complex. The flow of influence is starting to reverse course.

Running a mile a day can make children healthier – here’s how schools can make it more fun

Posted on August 9, 2020 October 8, 2020 by Emma Jansen

Children today spend more time sitting than ever before. And research shows that as they grow up, children tend to become more sedentary and less active.

This is where The Daily Mile, a teacher-led running programme for primary school children, aims to make a difference. Designed by a headteacher in Scotland in 2012 in a bid to get children more active, the concept involves children running laps of the playground or school playing fields for 15 minutes everyday. Its simple design combined with political, public health and celebrity endorsement has seen it expand to over 10,000 schools in 78 countries worldwide.

When cities were Nature’s haven: a tale from Bangalore

Posted on August 8, 2020 October 8, 2020 by Emma Jansen

We tend to think that nature and cities are polar opposites. Yet this is not true. As my research on Bangalore or Bengaluru – India’s IT hub – shows, for centuries, the population of this region grew because of nature, not despite it.

In my book Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future, I take a deep dive into the ecological history of an Indian city, going way back in the past to the 6th century CE.

This Is How Your Brain Responds to Social Influence

Posted on August 7, 2020 October 8, 2020 by Emma Jansen

I’m a doormat when it comes to peer pressure. Jump off a 32-foot (10 meter) diving board without any experience? Sure! Propel off a cliff my first time outdoor climbing? I’ll try!

Those were obviously terrible decisions for someone afraid of heights, and each ended with “I really should’ve known better.” But it illustrates a point: it’s obvious that our decisions don’t solely come from our own experiences. From what career you choose to what sandwich you want for lunch, we care about what our friends, families, and complete strangers think—otherwise, Yelp wouldn’t exist.

In academic speak, observing and learning from other people is called “social influence,” a term that’s obviously crossed into pop culture lexicon. Yet neuroscientists have struggled to understand why this happens. How do our brains process others’ decisions? And how does it weigh those decisions against our (potentially saner) judgment?

Couch Potato No More: How the Benefits of Exercise Transfer to the Brain

Posted on August 6, 2020 October 7, 2020 by Emma Jansen

Brain aging is reversible. How? Why? And how much can we rejuvenate an already aged brain?

Those were the one conviction and three questions that guided me throughout my post-doctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).

Yes, this isn’t like my usual articles. For the first time, I’m covering my own work—a multi-year passion project that spans diverse ways to reverse brain aging, probes the intersection between body and mind, and hopefully one day can help battle the seemingly inevitable memory and cognitive decline we all face as we age.

Uber Wants to Go All-Electric by 2030. It Won’t Be Easy

Posted on August 5, 2020 October 7, 2020 by Emma Jansen

The coronavirus pandemic has been an all-around nightmare, but there are a few silver linings. One of these is a renewed focus on the environment. Emissions plummeted worldwide when countries went into lockdown in the spring, and cities have since been implementing new measures to keep pollution down and get people to be more active and environmentally conscious.

In keeping with the trend, ridesharing market leader Uber announced on Tuesday that it will transition to a 100 percent electric car fleet by 2030. Lyft, its main competitor, made a similar announcement in June. Are the ride-hailing companies’ commitments to greening linked to the pandemic? It’s unclear; they likely would have implemented this switch at some point in the near future anyway, and the pandemic may simply have accelerated it (as it did for other technologies and trends, like automation and remote work).

How a Memory Quirk of the Human Brain Can Galvanize AI

Posted on August 4, 2020 October 5, 2020 by Emma Jansen

Even as toddlers we’re good at inferences. Take a two-year-old that first learns to recognize a dog and a cat at home, then a horse and a sheep in a petting zoo. The kid will then also be able to tell apart a dog and a sheep, even if he can’t yet articulate their differences.

This ability comes so naturally to us it belies the complexity of the brain’s data-crunching processes under the hood. To make the logical leap, the child first needs to remember distinctions between his family pets. When confronted with new categories—farm animals—his neural circuits call upon those past remembrances, and seamlessly incorporate those memories with new learnings to update his mental model of the world.