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(www.publichealth.hscni, 20.01.2017.)

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    The Amazon has existed as a dense and humid rainforest full of life for at least 55 million years. But in a new paper, scientists claim that over 75% of the ecosystem has been losing resilience since the early 2000s due to climate change. This process appears to be most prominent in areas that are closer to human activity, as well as in those receiving less rainfall.

    The resilience of an ecosystem — its capacity to maintain usual processes like the regrowth of vegetation following drought — is a notoriously difficult concept for scientists to measure. In this paper, the authors analysed satellite images of remote areas of rainforest across the Amazon from 1991 to 2016. Using a measurement called vegetation optical depth, they suggested that forest biomass (the total weight of organisms in a given area) is taking longer to recover in these
places as stresses accumulate.

    This, the authors argue, suggests that longer dry seasons and drier conditions caused by climate change are undermining the rainforest’s ability to recover from successive droughts. The authors note, for example, that drought-sensitive tree species are being replaced with drought-resistant ones at a much slower rate compared with rapid changes in the regional climate. This could mean that the Amazon is approaching a tipping point which, if passed, would lead to the collapse of the rainforest into a dry grassland or savanna.

(https://theconversation.com, 07.03.2022. Adaptado.)

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Being yourself at work

    When Danielle Vinales, a 24-year-old university employee working in the US state of Virginia, transitioned to remote work in March, she noticed something striking about herself: she talked with her hands. Seeing herself on video-conferencing calls, the Miami native became aware of how her speech and actions made her stand out as distinctly Latina in contrast to her colleagues. She was suddenly self-conscious of her mannerisms and accent in a way she hadn’t been before. Whenever she would see her hands go up in her tiny Zoom window, it would be a visual reminder to tone it down. Vinales consciously decided to restrict her hand gesture.

    What Vinales did is an example of ‘code-switching’. The term, coined in the 1950s, was originally intended to describe the way bilingual individuals switched between languages and corresponding identities. It has since evolved to refer to the way people adjust and adapt their behaviour, appearance and language to avoid highlighting negative stereotypes in school and work environments. Conforming may mean putting on a persona that’s more ‘compatible’ with the environment more likable or relatable, thus more likely to succeed.

    Covid-19 has changed the way nearly everyone works, which means that code-switching is also evolving. The use of video conferencing has blurred the border between ‘private’ or ‘office’ spaces. “There are new ways of code-switching in remote work environments, like using virtual backgrounds or turning your camera off,” says professor Courtney McCluney, from Cornell University. Before the pandemic, McCluney continues, offices that were entirely virtual were more likely to emphasise employees embracing their true selves. Without physically walking into an office every day, these remote workers didn’t have to be as ‘on’ and “were code-switching less,” she says. 

     For Vinales, the switch to remote allowed her to be more candid; seeing her boss on camera — in her home, with her kids in the background — made Vinales more confident about disclosing her insecurities. She felt her boss was letting her colleagues in, and it empowered her to do the same. She feels that her need to code-switch has drastically decreased and now, while working from home, she’s making more of an effort to connect with her colleagues on a personal level. And more importantly, it’s allowed her to feel more herself.

(Chika Ekemezie. www.bbc.com, 21.01.2021. Adaptado.)

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Female historical figures who were happy with their choices

Greta Garbo

    In the 1932 film “Grand Hotel,” Garbo’s character famously proclaimed, “I want to be alone,” a quote that was affiliated with her for the rest of her life. She did have several relationships, including a long on-and-off with her frequent co-star John Gilbert. He once proposed to her, but she said no. “I was in love with him, but I froze,” she later told New York magazine. “I was afraid he would tell me what to do and boss me. I always wanted to be the boss.”

Coco Chanel

    The iconic designer had many, many love affairs and several significant relationships, but she never married. She was once quoted as saying, “I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.” Less great: the evidence that she worked as a Nazi spy during the Second World War.

Mary Cassatt

    Cassatt had a lot of familial love, as she’s maybe best known for her paintings that clearly but unsentimentally depicted the bonds between parents and children. But that love came from her relationships with her nieces and nephews, as she chose not to marry and didn’t have kids herself. The Impressionist painter enjoyed the freedoms that feminism had given women of her privileged stature by the turn of the 20th century — among them the right to an independent life. She was highly educated and well-travelled, and spoke out about the importance of female suffrage.

Louisa May Alcott

    Like Jo in her best-known book “Little Women,” Alcott was independent and concerned with advancing women’s place in the world. But unlike Jo, she never married. “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” she wrote in her journal.

(Maija Kappler. www.huffingtonpost.ca, 28.02.2020. Adaptado.)

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Electric car revolution: calculating the cost of green motoring

(Photograph: Miles Willis/Getty Images)

Adam Vaughan
July 8, 2017

    Streets will be quieter, the air will be cleaner, people will spend less time at petrol stations and car factories might even return to Britain’s shores if the country switches to electric cars in a widespread fashion. But widespread adoption of battery-powered vehicles would not be without challenges too. A large-scale switchover to electric cars could create problems for power grids, could mean roads lined with charging poles and it could also leave a big hole in public coffers as fuel duty dries up.

    With just over 90,000 fully electric and plug-in hybrid cars now on UK roads, such risks and benefits might look a way off. But this week big changes have been announced. On Wednesday Volvo said it will only launch electric or hybrid cars from 2019 and just a day later Emmanuel Macron’s new government pledged that France will ban diesel and petrol cars by 2040. Battery-powered travel could be coming far sooner than previously thought

    According to research published this week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance the proportion of fully electric new cars sold in the UK will be one in 12 by 2030 – up from one in every 200 today. The surge in electric cars will have to be accompanied by thousands of new charging points to plug them all in. Today there are around 4,000 publicly accessible locations with 13,000 plug sockets. Of the 13,000, a fifth are so-called rapid charging connections that will top up a Nissan Leaf, the UK’s best-selling pure electric car, in half an hour.

    The number of sockets is set to soar to 80,000 by 2025, predicts Zap-Map, which has mapped the ones built so far. There are 8,476 petrol filling stations across the UK, most with many pumps, but topping up takes minutes rather than hours. A lot of those will be installed in supermarkets, railway stations and car parks. But there will be also a lot of poles along residential streets, even though there are other innovative fixes such as the charging sockets a German company is building into street lamps.

(www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/08/electric-car-revolutioncalculating-the-cost-of-green-motoring. Adaptado)

Wearable tech for kids coming from LeapFrog

By Doug Gross, CNN

updated 12:57 PM EDT, Thu May 1, 2014

(CNN) – The wearable technology movement is in full effect, and exercise-based activity trackers lead the way. Now, it’s becoming child’s play.

  LeapFrog, the maker of education-oriented tablets and apps for children, has unveiled1 LeapBand, a wearable activity tracker designed with kids in mind.

  The band fits around the user’s wrist and looks a lot like a kids version of a smartwatch. By performing actions like “walk like a crab,” “spin like a helicopter” or “pop like popcorn,” kids can unlock new games and a group of Pokemon-like “digital pets” on the device.

  The band connects to a website or app that lets parents monitor their children’s activities and choose which challenges they can select, and which they can’t.

  Moving past smartphones and tablets, wearable tech has become arguably the hottest digital trend in the past year or so.

(http://tinyurl.com/noswsfc Acesso em: 20.07.2014. Adaptado)

Glossário

¹ unveil: revelar, apresentar.