From & To Sathish #7

First Previous

Page

Next Last

Frequent Posters

live life

@satish_2025

Rocker

+ 5

Posted: 6 days ago

#871

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0kz1wpnq5o?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_12_31&position=5&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=ed633974-d7db-4e8e-9b46-8ee808395cc8&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2Fcn0kz1wpnq5o

The surprising truth about the generations that suffer loneliness the most

Quote

live life

@satish_2025

Rocker

+ 5

Posted: 6 days ago

#872

https://atmos.earth/science-and-nature/giving-our-bodies-back-to-the-earth-the-rise-of-conservation-burial/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ten_tabs&utm_campaign=FIREFOX-EDITORIAL-TENTABS-2025_12_31&position=2&category=fascinating_stories&scheduled_corpus_item_id=99531ca8-8215-4546-b6bb-e832989c19c7&url=https%3A%2F%2Fatmos.earth%2Fscience-and-nature%2Fgiving-our-bodies-back-to-the-earth-the-rise-of-conservation-burial%2F

Giving Our Bodies Back to the Earth: The Rise of Natural Burial

Quote

Looks like you are new here. Register for free, learn and contribute.

live life

@satish_2025

Rocker

+ 5

Posted: 6 days ago

#873

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260102-how-i-changed-my-personality-in-six-weeks

How I changed my personality in six weeks

Based on emerging research showing people can shift their core personality traits, Laurie Clarke tried tweaking hers. Here's what happened.

When I noticed a recurring itch in my hand a few months ago, I immediately remembered an article I'd once read about people with mysterious itches so maddening they scratch and claw until they tear through their own flesh – sometimes disabling or even killing themselves in the process. I thought, panicked, "that's probably about to happen to me".

I experience similar episodes on a semi-regular basis. So it wasn't entirely surprising when I scored higher than 85% of people on neuroticism in a personality test I took online. I've been neurotic since my teen years, when I suffered my first panic attack. It is dimming with age, thanks, I believe, to my own piecemeal interventions: reducing self-criticism, trying not to agonise over every social interaction and the multifarious ways in which I surely humiliated myself, and so on.

Then my editor offered me an intriguing assignment: would I like to try tweaking some aspects of my personality, drawing on emerging research from the field of personality change? (Given we've never met face to face, I didn't take this personally.)

The psychological model for personality with the most scientific backing is the "Big Five", which breaks it down into five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Each is further subdivided into traits, so neuroticism, for example, includes excessive worrying, rumination and emotional instability; extraversion includes assertiveness and gregariousness.

Psychologists once assumed personality was pretty intractable. "Some of my colleagues back in the 80s argued it was fixed by the age of 30 and things like that," says Brent Roberts, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US and one of the most influential personality researchers. "A lot of research has emerged in the last three decades that has moderated that position."

I was frankly too afraid to try some of the activities. I'd need so many drinks before striking up 'a conversation with a stranger at a bar' that the deleterious health impacts would surely outweigh any lift to mental wellbeing

Psychologists have found that people tend to become less neurotic and more conscientious and agreeable over the course of a lifetime. Researchers now think these changes "result from both biological maturation and the accumulation of life experiences that encourage grown-up responsibilities", says Mirjam Stieger, a researcher in personality change at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland.

In recent years, psychologists have carried out more studies on personality change, and newer research indicates we can expedite this effect through conscious choices. A growing number of studies suggest that with targeted interventions, we can achieve the degree of personality change typically seen over a lifetime in just a few months. For my own experiment, I only had six weeks.

My first port of call was an online personality test to assess where I currently scored on the Big Five. It turns out that in addition to sky-high neuroticism, I'm also very "open", scoring in the 93rd percentile (meaning I'm more open than 93% of people). Openness indicates receptivity to new experiences and ideas, so I took this to be generally positive. My conscientiousness was also very high – little surprise since I was an inveterate striver at school and still exhibit an unfortunate tendency towards perfectionism.

My agreeableness wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. High scorers in agreeableness tend to be considerate, cooperative, trusting and well-liked. I scored in the 50th percentile. There were a few questions I wish I could've answered differently, but I wasn't quite there yet. I begrudgingly agreed that I was generally "suspicious of others' intentions'" and disagreed that I have "a forgiving nature".

My neuroticism might be the worst thing about my personality, but it's far from the only thing I'd change. Like many bookish introverts, I grew up menaced by the idealised image of the extraverted social butterfly, flapping its giant wings obnoxiously near my fragile self-esteem. At one point I thought I might eventually become one, but long ago acquiesced to the knowledge that this would never be.

Even so, a little more extraversion couldn't hurt – especially given that I recently moved to a new city where my partner and I don't know anyone and are keen to make friends.

Typically, people want to become more extraverted and conscientious, while being less neurotic. I wanted to become a little more extraverted, much less neurotic and a little less conscientious insofar as it pertains to perfectionism. I also wanted to become more agreeable, because I think a lack of trust in others is one of the things that sustains my neuroticism. Conversely, a lot of people say they want to become less agreeable because they associate the quality with being a pushover, says Roberts. (It's true that less agreeable people tend to earn more money).

At a yoga class near the end of my six weeks of experimentation, I found myself doing something almost unheard of: I spontaneously initiated small talk with the person one mat over

Studies show that socially desirable changes to our personalities could transform our lives for the better. Lower neuroticism and higher extraversion in particular are linked to higher life satisfaction. But how to go about it?

A 2019 study led by personality psychologist Nathan Hudson from Southern Methodist University in Texas looked at whether an active intervention could shift target traits over time. The researchers asked student participants to pick aspects of their personalities they'd like to change and then complete weekly challenges "that would pull their thoughts, feelings and behaviours in line with their desired traits".

At the end of 15 weeks, the results indicated the students were able to affect small but statistically significant changes in their desired traits including extraversion, conscientiousness and neuroticism, but not openness or agreeableness. Those who completed more challenges underwent the greatest transformation.

Stieger conducted a similar intervention supported by a smartphone app in 2021, which also produced desired changes in extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism and agreeableness, but not openness. The alterations persisted at a three-month check in.

From Hudson's paper, I cribbed a set of activities to encourage change in each of my target personality dimensions. Here's a sampling from all of them:

• Decreasing neuroticism: Start to meditate daily, write a regular gratitude journal, try to counter a negative thought with a positive one – or merely write the thought down and how it makes you feel.

• Increasing extraversion: Go to events to meet new people, say hello to a cashier at a shop, open up and honestly tell a friend how your life's going right now.

• Increasing agreeableness: Do a small kindness to someone close to you, when you intend to say something mean about someone say something positive instead, if someone does something irritating come up with three external factors that might explain their behaviour (e.g. "they were having a bad day") rather than internal factors (e.g. "they're a bad person").

• Increasing conscientiousness: Pay a bill as soon as you receive it, organise and clean up your desk, spend 30 minutes writing down a list of your short term and long-term goals.

• Increasing openness: Read a news story about a foreign country, go to a poetry reading, visit a museum or gallery.

The interventions rely on a mixture of adapting thought patterns and attitudes and testing out new behaviours. The overarching logic is, if you want to become somebody different, start thinking and acting like them. Put another way: fake it until you make it.

Researchers usually focus on interventions lasting a few months, so to speed things up for my six week timeframe I prioritised activities that ostensibly targeted several personality traits at once. By going to a yoga class or opening up to a friend, for example, I could improve my neuroticism, agreeableness and extraversion simultaneously.

I was frankly too afraid to try some of the activities. "Offer to get someone in line's coffee at a café" made me concerned the target would think I was clumsily flirting with them or covertly filming them for one of those insipid feel-good YouTube videos. I'd need so many drinks before striking up "a conversation with a stranger at a bar" that the deleterious health impacts would surely outweigh any lift to mental wellbeing.

And self-affirmations are always going to feel ridiculous if, like me, you hail from a long line of emotionally parsimonious Scots. I did say "I choose to be happy today" out loud, but not without a self-effacing smirk.

I tried out as many of the activities as I could. I'd dragged myself along to a few social activities in my new city in summer but was on the cusp of retreating into hibernation when I received this assignment, which encouraged me not to give up for the year. I made a renewed effort to attend local activities, as well as to see friends who live nearby and to arrange phone calls with those abroad.

Although most people profess to want to change at least one aspect of their personality, those who will put the effort in are surely far fewer

I thought attending meetups with strangers would be enormously disruptive to my hermetic home-working existence, imagining I'd need days to convalesce after attending a new book club. In fact, the opposite was true. The more events I attended, the easier it became.

I went to a life drawing class that I'd enjoyed a few months prior but hadn't returned to. Last time, during the break, I had contorted myself defensively around my phone while people milled around with glasses of wine. This time, I adopted a friendly posture and found engaging with people surprisingly natural. At a yoga class near the end of my six weeks of experimentation, I found myself doing something almost unheard of: I spontaneously initiated small talk with the person one mat over.

I also began meditating and writing a gratitude journal nearly every day. The meditation turned out to be revelatory. At first it was near impossible to silence the din of thoughts. As well as the classic intrusions about what I needed to do that day, there was also a relentless rabbity commentary on what I was experiencing moment-to-moment while attempting to meditate.

The incontinent babblerer at the steering wheel of my mind seemed to fear being asked to step out of the vehicle for a while – scared, perhaps, that it wouldn't be allowed to return. But after my partner suggested I visualise it not as leaving the vehicle but simply cutting the engine, I stopped fearing the silence. I also began to see the merit of encouraging its spread to parts of my life that were otherwise characterised by a frenzy of nervous chatter.

To improve neuroticism, "you target people's willingness to experience emotions", says Shannon Sauer-Zavala, associate professor in psychology at the University of Kentucky in the US. Shesays that neurotics chronically avoid emotions, as well as lambasting themselves for feeling the way they do.

Sauer-Zavala is working on an intriguing approach to treating mental health conditions through personality-targeted interventions. "If we target neuroticism instead of general anxiety disorder, social anxiety, panic disorder, eating disorders etc, it's just more efficient," she says. So far, results indicate the approach is effective.

Neuroticism is not the only personality dimension that can cause psychological vulnerabilities. Sauer-Zavala says high levels of conscientiousness can tip into perfectionism, something I relate to. The interventions Sauer-Zavala suggests for this make my skin crawl: "Figure out what 80% of your best job is, do that and stop there and see what happens," she says. "Or send an email with a typo, or leave work at five o'clock every day this week. It's usually the most anti-climactic thing."

I compulsively check and re-check any bit of work or correspondence before I send it off. After Sauer-Zavala's comments, I try to stop myself before doing a final-final-final check on a bit of corporate work, and just send it. I can't help opening it once more afterwards and spot what I see as a glaring error, the close repetition of a certain word. I feel a pang – see! But of course she's right, it doesn't matter in the slightest, and I quickly forget about it.

By the end of my six weeks of experimentation, I didn't feel radically different, but I did feel pretty good. The moment had come to re-take the test. Early on, I sensed that I might evince some changes. In answer to a question about whether I was "outgoing and sociable", I felt sure I would have previously disagreed. This time, I had six weeks of unignorable data in front of me. Objectively, I had socialised, often with strangers, and had a not bad time. So maybe I was sociable after all. The researchers were right that acting in a certain way can change your perception of yourself.

The spiral of suffering

For people with chronic illnesses, the relief and recognition of online communities can set up a toxic psychological trap

Quote

live life

@satish_2025

Rocker

+ 5

Posted: 4 days ago

#878

https://www.biographic.com/critical-minerals-theres-a-plant-for-that/

Critical Minerals? There’s a Plant for That

Could phytomining—using plants to pull metal out of the soil—put the green in “green transition”?

Alpine pennycress is a charming little plant. Its low-growing rosette of green leaves is topped by leggy stalks bearing clusters of pinkish-white flowers. As they develop, these flowers transform into beautiful flattened seedpods that, in the words of botanist Liz Rylott from the United Kingdom’s University of York, “resemble a British old penny.” But alpine pennycress (Noccaea caerulescens) is notable for far more than its penny disguise. The plant is one of a select group—representing just 0.21 percent of the world’s known vascular plant species—that have evolved the ability to pull impressive amounts of valuable metals out of the soil. Known to scientists as hyperaccumulators, these plants undergird a developing industry that is looking to help secure the vital metals we want without wrecking the planet in the process.

Hyperaccumulators come in all shapes and sizes. Petite alpine pennycress accumulates zinc and cadmium, while shrubby, moth-pollinated Phyllanthus rufuschaneyi—a plant so obscure and narrowly distributed that it doesn’t have a common name—targets nickel. Pycnandra acuminata, a tree native to New Caledonia, has sap so nickel-rich that it “bleeds” a vibrant blue-green and is known as sève bleue, or blue sap, in French. Meanwhile, common buckler-mustard (Biscutella laevigata) collects thallium, and the cobalt wisemany (Haumaniastrum robertii), a plant in the mint family native to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, pulls up copper and cobalt.

In all, researchers have identified plants that hyperaccumulate arsenic, cadmium, cerium, copper, cobalt, lanthanum, manganese, neodymium, nickel, selenium, thallium, and zinc. Many of these are among the so-called critical minerals that are needed to build batteries and other components for electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, and other facets of the green energy transition. They also include the metals that scientists warn could run short and derail global decarbonization efforts.

By pulling these elements out of metal-rich soils, hyperaccumulating plants can become as much as 5 percent metal by weight—a feat that would kill most species. And in the emerging field of phytomining, scientists and industrialists are learning to extract these valuable metals in a way that is much gentler on the landscape than conventional mining.

Right now, the race for critical minerals is sparking environmental destruction and human rights abuses. Cobalt mining, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been compared to modern slavery. And concerns over access to critical minerals are stoking geopolitical tensions, including contributing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As demand for these elements increases, high-grade and easily accessible deposits are getting tapped out, sending prospectors scouting for evermore extreme places to mine—like the very bottom of the ocean.

There is plenty of lower-grade ore available to be mined, as well as unprocessed mining waste and metal-polluted soils, but the traditional techniques to extract metals from these sources involve toxic chemicals and environmental destruction across wide areas. Yet harnessing the metals from lower-concentration sources, says Rylott, is exactly where phytomining shines. “Plants are really good at large, dilute problems,” says Rylott, who recently published a scientific paper reviewing how phytomining—originally an offshoot of bioremediation research—has advanced over the past several decades.

drone photo of a nickel mine

Getting the metal out of hyperaccumulating plants is simple in principle: burn the plants and separate the metal from the ash. Surprisingly, the quality of the resulting metal is often more concentrated and purer than that extracted by conventional mining. And the metal doesn’t need as much refining—it may even be in a form that manufacturers can use directly, minimizing the energy and effort required for processing. The leftover organic material can even be repurposed into fertilizer.

But putting that seemingly simple process into practice at industrial scale has proved difficult. Developing the infrastructure to extract metal from large amounts of plant biomass is “the greatest challenge for phytomining,” according to Antony van der Ent, a plant biologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands, and coauthor, along with Rylott, of the phytomining review.

And there are other challenges. Many hyperaccumulators are small, slow-growing plants, says Om Parkash Dhankher, a plant biotechnologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “Many of them are restricted to particular geoclimatic conditions” and are finicky to cultivate, he says. Or, worse, they grow too well, which is what happened when yellowtuft (Odontarrhena chalcidica, formerly known as Alyssum murale), a nickel hyperaccumulator native to the Mediterranean, escaped from an Oregon-based pilot project and turned into an invasive weed.

Even phytomining’s boosters say the technology is likely to remain relatively niche. Aside from the technological hurdles, there simply isn’t enough metal within the reach of plant roots to supply all the world’s needs. “Phytomining cannot replace conventional mining,” Dhankher says.

Despite these limitations, several phytomining startups have already begun commercial operations. Botanickel, for instance, is combining two different nickel phytomining projects—one with O. chalcidica in Greece, and another using P. rufuschaneyi in Malaysia—with the aim of producing partially plant-derived stainless steel. (Antony van der Ent serves as an advisor to the company.) GenoMines, a French firm, is using a genetically engineered plant in the daisy family and soil probiotics to farm nickel in South Africa.

To date, most phytomining work has focused on nickel, a high-value metal needed in large amounts to make batteries, stainless steel, and other materials.

Of the 721 known hyperaccumulating plant species, more than 500 take up nickel. For them, as with all complex evolved traits, it’s a matter of survival. Around the world, geological differences in the makeup of the earth mean that some soils—like those made of serpentine or ultramafic rocks—are naturally rich in nickel. For most plants, a heavy dose of nickel is deadly. But hyperaccumulators evolved the ability to absorb the metal into their tissues, turning otherwise toxic soil into an opportunity to thrive. Some scientists think hyperaccumulators’ high concentrations of bodily nickel even help protect them from pathogens and hungry insects.

In 2024, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced seven grants totaling US $9.9 million over the next several years to develop nickel phytomining technology that could unlock a domestic supply of the metal from the more than 40,000 square kilometers (15,000 square miles) of serpentine soils that pepper the landscape in California and Oregon, and along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.

One ARPA-E grant went to a team that includes Rupali Datta, a plant biologist at Michigan Technological University. She and her collaborators are investigating the role of soil chemistry and microbes in maximizing the phytomining potential of several known hyperaccumulators as well as vetiver grass (Chrysopogon zizanioides), a fast-growing species she’s previously used to clean up lead pollution. Meanwhile, Metalplant, a Delaware-based company, is collaborating with the Connecticut-based biotech firm Verinomics on a grant to genetically engineer O. chalcidica. Metalplant is already successfully using the species to mine nickel in Albania where it is native, but the company is hoping to tweak it to boost its nickel uptake and prevent it from becoming invasive when planted in North America.

Dhankher’s own phytomining efforts got a $1.3 million boost from the ARPA-E program. He aims to develop a genetically engineered version of Camelina sativa, a fast-growing member of the mustard family that is already widely grown in the United States for biofuel, so that it can become a better nickel accumulator. “The target is to create these plants that can accumulate 1 to 3 percent nickel,” Dhanker says. An advantage of C. sativa is that in some areas phytominers could grow three crops a year. If the plants accumulate at least 1 percent of their body mass as nickel, Dhanker says they could produce up to 25,000 kilograms of useful metal per square kilometer of soil each year (around 145,000 pounds per square mile). A typical electric vehicle battery contains about 30 to 50 kilograms (66 to 110 pounds) of nickel.

Nickel aside, phytomining also shows promise for collecting other minerals, especially cobalt, thallium, and selenium, Rylott and van der Ent wrote in their recent review. And the technique could even be used to target rare earth elements, a group of important metals that are common in the Earth’s crust but are mostly found at very low concentrations. For now, rare earth mining—an industry controlled almost entirely by China, with cascading effects on global trade relationships and supply chains—is expensive, energy intensive, and environmentally destructive. But if phytomining opens a new way to secure rare earth elements, says Lydia Bridges, a geochemist and senior sustainability consultant with Minviro, a company that helps mining operations measure and mitigate their environmental impact, “that would be pretty incredible.”

Though none have yet been commercially developed, scientists have identified a few natural hyperaccumulators of rare earth elements. Using plants to mine for rare earth elements would be “a huge step towards critical mineral security and, hopefully, sustainability,” Bridges says. But she adds a note of caution: “We do need to be a bit careful of environmental burden shifting.” While a welcome innovation, phytomining—of rare earth elements or anything else—is not an environmental panacea.

Growing hyperaccumulators at scale brings the same environmental woes as any other industrial crop, van der Ent points out: pesticide and fertilizer runoff, overdrawn water, and the loss of local biodiversity to a single-species operation. And while some outcrops of metal-rich soils host little life, others underpin fragile ecosystems, with, for example, metal-tolerant insects having evolved to live on hyperaccumulator plants.

But what phytomining could do is produce some metal while also remediating degraded land, sequestering carbon, and serving as the fuel for energy production or the raw material for biochar fertilizer, syngas, and other chemical creations. It could be one of many small but commercially viable enterprises that make for a more sustainable world. And along the way, it’s expanding our understanding of the endless and surprising feats that plants—even the pocket-sized alpine pennycress—are capable of.