TED Talks - آموزش زبان

🔴Possible futures from the intersection of nature, tech and society #Biology #Science #Innovation #Future #Technology #Design #Collaboration 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

And that model is completely replicable. In São Paulo, a church sermon encourages parishioners to not just bring offering on Sunday, but the recycling, too. We then match the church with the poor. Or, I believe more powerfully, we could match a mosque in London with an impoverished church in Cairo. Or like in Vancouver, with our bottle-deposit program: now any individual or any group can now return their deposit-refundable recyclables, and instead of taking back the cash, they have the opportunity to deposit that value into the account of the poor around the world. We can now use our recycling to support and create recyclers. One bottle deposited at home could help extract hundreds around the world. Or, like Shell, the energy company, who's invested in our plastic-neutral program. Plastic neutrality is like carbon-neutral. But plastic neutrality invests in recycling infrastructure where it doesn't exist. And it provides an incentive for the poor by providing a price increase. Or -- like in the slums of Manila, where the smallest market with a simple scale and a phone can now accept social plastic as a new form of payment by weight, allowing them to serve more people and have their own greater social impact. And what's common here is that social plastic is money. Social plastic is money, a globally recognizable and tradable currency that, when used, alleviates poverty and cleans the environment at the same time. It's not just plastic. It's not recycled plastic, it's social plastic, a material whose value is transferred through the lives of the people who encounter it, rich and poor. Humans have produced over eight trillion kilograms of plastic, most of it still here as waste. Eight trillion kilograms. Worth roughly 50 cents a kilo, we're potentially unleashing a four-trillion-dollar value. See, I see social plastic as the Bitcoin for the earth -- and available for everyone. Now the entire ecosystem is managed and supported through an online banking platform that provides for the safe, authentic transfer of value globally. You can now deposit your recyclables in Vancouver or Berlin, and a family could withdraw building bricks or cell phone minutes in the slums of Manila. Or Lise -- she could deposit recycling at a center in Port-au-Prince, and her mother could withdraw cooking fuel or cash across the city. And the app adds rewards, incentives, group prizes, user rating. We've gamified recycling. We add fun and formality into an informal industry. We're operating in Haiti and the Philippines. We've selected staff and partners for Brazil. And this year, we're committing to India and Ethiopia. We're collecting hundreds and hundreds of tons of material. We continue to add partners and customers, and we increase our collection volumes every day. Now as a result of our program with Henkel, they've committed to use over 100 million kilograms of material every year. That alone will put hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of the poor in the emerging economies. And so now, we can all be a part of the solution and not the pollution. And so, OK, maybe cleaning the ocean is futile. It might be. But preventing ocean plastic could be humanity's richest opportunity. Thank you. #Plastic #Pollution #Poverty #Business #Innovation #Ocean 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

🔴The surprising solution to ocean plastic We've had it all wrong. Everybody. We've had it all wrong. The very last thing we need to do is clean the ocean. Very last. Yeah, there is a garbage truck of plastic entering the ocean every minute of every hour of every day. And countless birds and animals are dying just from encountering plastic. We are experiencing the fastest rate of extinction ever, and plastic is in the food chain. And I'm still here, standing in front of you, telling you the very last thing we need to do is clean the ocean. Very last. If you were to walk into a kitchen, sink overflowing, water spilling all over the floor, soaking into the walls, you had to think fast, you're going to panic; you've got a bucket, a mop or a plunger. What do you do first? Why don't we turn off the tap? It would be pointless to mop or plunge or scoop up the water if we don't turn off the tap first. Why aren't we doing the same for the ocean? Even if the Ocean Cleanup project, beach plastic recycling programs or any well-meaning ocean plastic company was a hundred percent successful, it would still be too little, too late. We're trending to produce over 300 million ton of plastic this year. Roughly eight million ton are racing to flow into the ocean to join the estimated 150 million ton already there. Reportedly, 80 percent of ocean plastic is coming from those countries that have extreme poverty. And if you live in the grips of poverty concerned, always, about food or shelter or a sense of security, recycling -- it's beyond your realm of imagination. And that is exactly why I created the Plastic Bank. We are the world's largest chain of stores for the ultra-poor, where everything in the store is available to be purchased using plastic garbage. Everything. School tuition. Medical insurance. Wi-Fi, cell phone minutes, power. Sustainable cooking fuel, high-efficiency stoves. And we keep wanting to add everything else that the world may need and can't afford. Our chain of stores in Haiti are more like community centers, where one of our collectors, Lise Nasis, has the opportunity to earn a living by collecting material from door to door, from the streets, from business to business. And at the end of her day, she gets to bring the material back to us, where we weigh it, we check it for quality, and we transfer the value into her account. Lise now has a steady, reliable source of income. And that value we transfer into an online account for her. And because it's a savings account, it becomes an asset that she can borrow against. And because it's online, she has security against robbery, and I think more importantly, she has a new sense of worth. And even the plastic has a new sense of value. Hm. And that plastic we collect, and we add value to, we sort it, we remove labels, we remove caps. We either shred it or we pack it into bales and get it ready for export. Now, it's no different than walking over acres of diamonds. If Lise was to walk over acres of diamonds but there was no store, no bank, no way to use the diamonds, no way to exchange them, they'd be worthless, too. And Lise was widowed after the 2010 Haitian earthquake, left homeless without an income. And as a result of the program, Lise can afford her two daughters' school tuition and uniforms. Now, that plastic we sell. We sell it to suppliers of great brands like Marks and Spencer, who have commissioned the use of social plastic in their products. Or like Henkel, the German consumer-goods company, who are using social plastic directly into their manufacturing. We've closed the loop in the circular economy. Now buy shampoo or laundry detergent that has social plastic packaging, and you are indirectly contributing to the extraction of plastic from ocean-bound waterways and alleviating poverty at the same time.

🔴The surprising solution to ocean plastic #Plastic #Pollution #Poverty #Business #Innovation #Ocean 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

When we play, we learn. A recent study published by Stanford University about the science of what makes people care reconfirms what we have been hearing for years: opinions are changed not from more information but through empathy-inducing experiences. So learning from science and art, we saw that we can talk about global armed conflict through light bulbs, or address racial inequality in the US through postcards, or tackle the lack of even one single monument of a woman in Sofia by flooding the city with them, and, with all these works, to trigger dialogue, understanding and direct action. Sometimes, when I talk about taking risks and trying and failing in the context of human rights, I meet raised eyebrows, eyebrows that say, "How irresponsible," or, "How insensitive." People often mistake play for negligence. It is not. Play doesn't just grow our armies stronger or spark better ideas. In times of painful injustice, play brings the levity we need to be able to breathe. When we play, we live. I grew up in a time when all play was forbidden. My family's lives were crushed by a communist dictatorship. For my aunt, my grandfather, my father, we always held two funerals: one for their bodies, but, years before that, one for their dreams. Some of my biggest dreams are nightmares. I have a nightmare that one day all the past will be forgotten and new clothes will be dripping the blood of past mistakes. I have a nightmare that one day the lighthouses of our humanity will crumble, corroded by acid waves of hate. But way more than that, I have hope. In our fights for justice and freedom, I hope that we play, and that we see the joy and beauty of us playing together. That's how we win. Thank you. #Communication #TED_Residency #Activism #Social_Change #Society #TED_Fellows #Art #Creativity 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

🔴How to recover from activism burnout? In the summer of 2017, a woman was murdered by her partner in Sofia. The woman, let's call her "V," was beaten for over 50 minutes before she died. The morning after, her neighbors told the press that they heard her screams, but they didn't intervene. You see, in Bulgaria and many other societies, domestic violence is typically seen as a private matter. Neighbors, however, are quick to react to any other kind of noise. We wanted to expose and affect the absurdity of this. So we designed an experiment. We rented the apartment just below V's for one night. And at 10pm, Maksim, the artist in our group, sat on the drum set we had assembled in the living room and started beating it. Ten seconds. Thirty seconds. Fifty seconds. A minute. A light came on in the hallway. One minute and 20 seconds. A man was standing at the door, hesitant to press the bell. One minute and 52 seconds. The doorbell rang, a ring that could have saved a life. "Beat." is our project exploring the ominous silence surrounding domestic violence. We filmed the experiment, and it became instantly viral. Our campaign amplified the voices of survivors who shared similar stories online. It equipped neighbors with specific advice, and many committed to taking action. In a country where every other week, the ground quietly embraces the body of a woman murdered by a partner or a relative, we were loud, and we were heard. I am an activist, passionate about human rights innovation. I lead a global organization for socially engaged creative solutions. In my work, I think about how to make people care and act. I am here to tell you that creative actions can save the world, creative actions and play. I know it is weird to talk about play and human rights in the same sentence, but here is why it's important. More and more, we fear that we can't win this. Campaigns feel dull, messages drown, people break. Numerous studies, including a recent one published by Columbia University, show that burnout and depression are widespread amongst activists. Years ago, I myself was burned out. In a world of endless ways forward, I felt at my final stop. So what melts fear or dullness or gloom? Play. From this very stage, psychiatrist and play researcher Dr. Stuart Brown said that nothing lights up the brain like play, and that the opposite of play is not work, it's depression. So to pull out of my own burnout, I decided to turn my activism into what I call today "play-tivism." When we play, others want to join. Today, my playground is filled with artists, techies and scientists. We fuse disciplines in radical collaboration. Together, we seek new ways to empower activism. Our outcomes are not meant to be playful, but our process is. To us, play is an act of resistance. For example, "Beat.," the project I talked about earlier, is a concept developed by a drummer and a software engineer who didn't know each other two days before they pitched the idea. "Beat." is the first winner in our lab series where we pair artists and technologists to work on human rights issues. Other winning concepts include a pop-up bakery that teaches about fake news through beautiful but horrible-tasting cupcakes -- or a board game that puts you in the shoes of a dictator so you get to really grasp the range of tools and tactics of oppression. We did our first lab just to test the idea, to see where it cracks and if we can make it better. Today, we are so in love with the format that we put it all online for anyone to implement. I cannot overstate the value of experimentation in activism. We can only win if we are not afraid to lose.

🔴How to recover from activism burnout? #Communication #TED_Residency #Activism #Social_Change #Society #TED_Fellows #Art #Creativity 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

Miguel was happier than he had been in years. But the night before their first anniversary, Sharon left him. She had decided to move to the West Coast to be closer to her children, and she didn't want a long-distance relationship. Miguel was totally blindsided and utterly devastated. He barely functioned at work for many, many months, and he almost lost his job as a result. Another consequence of heartbreak is that feeling alone and in pain can significantly impair our intellectual functioning, especially when performing complex tasks involving logic and reasoning. It temporarily lowers our IQ. But it wasn't just the intensity of Miguel's grief that confused his employers; it was the duration. Miguel was confused by this as well and really quite embarrassed by it. "What's wrong with me?" he asked me in our session. "What adult spends almost a year getting over a one-year relationship?" Actually, many do. Heartbreak shares all the hallmarks of traditional loss and grief: insomnia, intrusive thoughts, immune system dysfunction. Forty percent of people experience clinically measurable depression. Heartbreak is a complex psychological injury. It impacts us in a multitude of ways. For example, Sharon was both very social and very active. She had dinners at the house every week. She and Miguel went on camping trips with other couples. Although Miguel was not religious, he accompanied Sharon to church every Sunday, where he was welcomed into the congregation. Miguel didn't just lose his girlfriend; he lost his entire social life, the supportive community of Sharon's church. He lost his identity as a couple. Now, Miguel recognized the breakup had left this huge void in his life, but what he failed to recognize is that it left far more than just one. And that is crucial, not just because it explains why heartbreak could be so devastating, but because it tells us how to heal. To fix your broken heart, you have to identify these voids in your life and fill them, and I mean all of them. The voids in your identity: you have to reestablish who you are and what your life is about. The voids in your social life, the missing activities, even the empty spaces on the wall where pictures used to hang. But none of that will do any good unless you prevent the mistakes that can set you back, the unnecessary searches for explanations, idealizing your ex instead of focusing on how they were wrong for you, indulging thoughts and behaviors that still give them a starring role in this next chapter of your life when they shouldn't be an extra. Getting over heartbreak is hard, but if you refuse to be misled by your mind and you take steps to heal, you can significantly minimize your suffering. And it won't just be you who benefit from that. You'll be more present with your friends, more engaged with your family, not to mention the billions of dollars of compromised productivity in the workplace that could be avoided. So if you know someone who is heartbroken, have compassion, because social support has been found to be important for their recovery. And have patience, because it's going to take them longer to move on than you think it should. And if you're hurting, know this: it's difficult, it is a battle within your own mind, and you have to be diligent to win. But you do have weapons. You can fight. And you will heal. Thank you. #Addiction #Compassion #Humanity #Depression #Identity #Love #Personal_Growth #Social_Change 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

Heartbreak is far more insidious than we realize. There is a reason we keep going down one rabbit hole after another, even when we know it's going to make us feel worse. Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opioids. Kathy was going through withdrawal. And since she could not have the heroin of actually being with Rich, her unconscious mind chose the methadone of her memories with him. Her instincts told her she was trying to solve a mystery, but what she was actually doing was getting her fix. This is what makes heartbreak so difficult to heal. Addicts know they're addicted. They know when they're shooting up. But heartbroken people do not. But you do now. And if your heart is broken, you cannot ignore that. You have to recognize that, as compelling as the urge is, with every trip down memory lane, every text you send, every second you spend stalking your ex on social media, you are just feeding your addiction, deepening your emotional pain and complicating your recovery. Getting over heartbreak is not a journey. It's a fight, and your reason is your strongest weapon. There is no breakup explanation that's going to feel satisfying. No rationale can take away the pain you feel. So don't search for one, don't wait for one, just accept the one you were offered or make up one yourself and then put the question to rest, because you need that closure to resist the addiction. And you need something else as well: you have to be willing to let go, to accept that it's over. Otherwise, your mind will feed on your hope and set you back. Hope can be incredibly destructive when your heart is broken. Heartbreak is a master manipulator. The ease with which it gets our mind to do the absolute opposite of what we need in order to recover is remarkable. One of the most common tendencies we have when our heart is broken is to idealize the person who broke it. We spend hours remembering their smile, how great they made us feel, that time we hiked up the mountain and made love under the stars. All that does is make our loss feel more painful. We know that. Yet we still allow our mind to cycle through one greatest hit after another, like we were being held hostage by our own passive-aggressive Spotify playlist. Heartbreak will make those thoughts pop into your mind. And so to avoid idealizing, you have to balance them out by remembering their frown, not just their smile, how bad they made you feel, the fact that after the lovemaking, you got lost coming down the mountain, argued like crazy and didn't speak for two days. What I tell my patients is to compile an exhaustive list of all the ways the person was wrong for you, all the bad qualities, all the pet peeves, and then keep it on your phone. And once you have your list, you have to use it. When I hear even a hint of idealizing or the faintest whiff of nostalgia in a session, I go, "Phone, please." Your mind will try to tell you they were perfect. But they were not, and neither was the relationship. And if you want to get over them, you have to remind yourself of that, frequently. None of us is immune to heartbreak. My patient Miguel was a 56-year-old senior executive in a software company. Five years after his wife died, he finally felt ready to start dating again. He soon met Sharon, and a whirlwind romance ensued. They introduced each other to their adult children after one month, and they moved in together after two. When middle-aged people date, they don't mess around. It's like "Love, Actually" meets "The Fast and the Furious."

🔴How To Fix A Broken Heart? At some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken. My patient Kathy planned her wedding when she was in middle school. She would meet her future husband by age 27, get engaged a year later and get married a year after that. But when Kathy turned 27, she didn't find a husband. She found a lump in her breast. She went through many months of harsh chemotherapy and painful surgeries, and then just as she was ready to jump back into the dating world, she found a lump in her other breast and had to do it all over again. Kathy recovered, though, and she was eager to resume her search for a husband as soon as her eyebrows grew back in. When you're going on first dates in New York City, you need to be able to express a wide range of emotions. Soon afterwards, she met Rich and fell in love. The relationship was everything she hoped it would be. Six months later, after a lovely weekend in New England, Rich made reservations at their favorite romantic restaurant. Kathy knew he was going to propose, and she could barely contain her excitement. But Rich did not propose to Kathy that night. He broke up with her. As deeply as he cared for Kathy -- and he did -- he simply wasn't in love. Kathy was shattered. Her heart was truly broken, and she now faced yet another recovery. But five months after the breakup, Kathy still couldn't stop thinking about Rich. Her heart was still very much broken. The question is: Why? Why was this incredibly strong and determined woman unable to marshal the same emotional resources that got her through four years of cancer treatments? Why do so many of us flounder when we're trying to recover from heartbreak? Why do the same coping mechanisms that get us through all kinds of life challenges fail us so miserably when our heart gets broken? In over 20 years of private practice, I have seen people of every age and background face every manner of heartbreak, and what I've learned is this: when your heart is broken, the same instincts you ordinarily rely on will time and again lead you down the wrong path. You simply cannot trust what your mind is telling you. For example, we know from studies of heartbroken people that having a clear understanding of why the relationship ended is really important for our ability to move on. Yet time and again, when we are offered a simple and honest explanation like the one Rich offered Kathy, we reject it. Heartbreak creates such dramatic emotional pain, our mind tells us the cause must be equally dramatic. And that gut instinct is so powerful, it can make even the most reasonable and measured of us come up with mysteries and conspiracy theories where none exist. Kathy became convinced something must have happened during her romantic getaway with Rich that soured him on the relationship, and she became obsessed with figuring out what that was. And so she spent countless hours going through every minute of that weekend in her mind, searching her memory for clues that were not there. Kathy's mind tricked her into initiating this wild goose chase. But what compelled her to commit to it for so many months?

🔴How To Fix A Broken Heart? #Addiction #Compassion #Humanity #Depression #Identity #Love #Personal_Growth #Social_Change 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

My work harnesses the power of the built environment to focus on issues that communities and local governments have failed to address themselves, by creating projects so custom fit that the community naturally makes it their own. When people from all walks of life have a shared experience in these spaces, it can lead to a paradigm shift in how we see our home, our community and the world. For me, public space is political and becomes powerful when it sparks people's imagination to envision a new future. And although every place I've worked is unique, it all boils down to one thing: if people can sit together, they can dream together. Thank you. #Architecture #Design #Community #Society #TED_Fellows #Public_Space 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

🔴Playful, wondrous public spaces built for community and possibility For me, public space is political. I work with communities around the world, and as we know, every community has problems. Some of these problems are solved through the ballot box or city hall meetings or community efforts, like bike lanes and potholes and school budgets. But some problems are beyond the reach of these structures, like food deserts, community well-being and the loss of cultural identity. These problems cannot be solved with the existing tool sets. I believe that public space is the most potent place to discuss these issues, because it contains the richest diversity of perspectives. And that's what makes it so powerful. The existing parks, town squares and sidewalks are not enough, though, which is why I'm interested in creating a new type of public space, one that's built by the community and designed specifically for their needs. I start by listening and by setting up actual outdoor living rooms, complete with couches, tables, chairs, rugs and lamps, as a way of holding meetings to learn about the issues directly from the community. I use this technique to capture the voices and ideas of people that might not have time or feel comfortable in more formal meetings. So why get someone to sit in a love seat in the middle of the street? In York, Alabama, the residents bear witness to the abandoned houses that cover the town, which are a constant reminder of the white flight that took place after segregation ended, when white homeowners left the area and let their houses fall into disrepair. Teaming up with the people of York, we transformed an iconic, pink-sided, blighted property in the middle of town into a new house, called "Open House." However, this house has a secret. It physically transforms into a 100-seat open-air theater for plays, movies, music or whatever the community would like to experience. And when it folds back up into the shape of a house, the image of the reclaimed pink siding reminds people of the past. After its opening, the mayor saw the potential in Open House and held the next town hall meeting there. The excitement of this unique gathering space brought new energy and gave a fresh viewpoint to collectively discuss the future of the town. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, to highlight the issues of energy, waste and climate change, we replaced a garbage can in a park with an anaerobic digester to transform dog waste into usable methane gas. Burning this methane lights the park and reduces greenhouse gases. By slightly changing an everyday experience in public space, the Park Spark Project provokes neighbors to have conversations about the natural and built systems around them and their connection to the environment. In Lyons, Nebraska, residents spoke about the loss of social life as downtown storefronts began to shutter their doors, a result of the slow violence of disinvestment, which has left many rural downtowns empty. To address this loss of human connection, we used an abandoned storefront to turn Main Street into a movie theater. The storefront wall is modified with hydraulics so that the awning and false front fold down over the sidewalk with the push of a button, providing seating for 100. As the community came together to build a storefront theater, an eccentric postman who makes sci-fi movies starring his cat proposed to make a documentary for the debut. And so that summer, we turned downtown into a movie set and the townspeople into actors to create the movie "Decades," a history of Lyons downtown from its founding to the present moment. On opening night, the main street, which is usually empty after dark, filled with people to watch the story of their town, leaving locals to question: How will we write the next chapter of Lyons? Well, the next chapter started with a series of movie screenings, public events and international musicians, as well as a low-budget film community that has blossomed in Lyons, bringing in people from all over the world and a permanent art gallery that has opened next door.

🔴Playful, wondrous public spaces built for community and possibility #Architecture #Design #Community #Society #TED_Fellows #Public_Space 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

I'd love to be able to tell you right now how much the food you had for breakfast, the food you're going to have for lunch, has shifted from what your grandparents ate in terms of its nutritional quality. But I can't. We don't have the research on that. I'd love to tell you how much current food insecurity is affected by these changes. But I can't. We don't have the research on that, either. There's a lot that needs to be known in this area, including what the possible solutions could be. We don't know exactly what those solutions are, but we've got a range of options. We've got advancements in technologies. We've got plant breeding. We've got biofortification. Soils could make a difference. And, of course, it will be very helpful to know how these changes could affect our future health and the health of our children and the health of our grandchildren. And these investments take time. It will take time to sort all of these issues out. There is no national entity or business group that is funding this research. We need these investments critically so that we do know where we're going. In the meantime, what we can do is ensure that all people have access to a complete diet, not just those in the wealthy parts of the world but everywhere in the world. We also individually and collectively need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the challenges that will come later in the century. It's been said that if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Let's not. Let's invest in ourselves, in our children and in our planet. Thank you. #Climate_Change #Food #Future #Sustainability #Agriculture #Science #Anthropocene #Environment #Plants #Biology #Nature 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

And it's not just us. Cattle are already being affected because the quality of their forage is declining. In fact, this affects every consumer of plants. And give a thought to, for example, our pet cats and dogs. If you look on the label of most of the pet and dog food, there's a significant amount of grain in those foods. So this affects everyone. How do we know that this is a problem? We know from field studies and we know from experimental studies in laboratories. In the field studies -- and I'll focus primarily on wheat and on rice -- there's fields, for example, of rice that are divided into different plots. And the plots are all the same: the soil's the same, the precipitation's the same -- everything's the same. Except carbon dioxide is blown over some of the plots. And so you can compare what it looks like under today's conditions and under carbon dioxide conditions later in the century. I was part of one of the few studies that have done this. We looked at 18 rice lines in China and in Japan and grew them under conditions that you would expect later in the century. And when you look at the results, the white bar is today's conditions, the red bar is conditions later in the century. So protein declines about 10 percent, iron about eight percent, zinc about five percent. These don't sound like really big changes, but when you start thinking about the poor in every country who primarily eat starch, that this will put people who are on the edge over the edge into frank deficiencies, creating all kinds of health problems. The situation is more significant for the B vitamins. When you look at vitamin B1 and vitamin B2, there's about a 17 percent decline. Pantothenic acid, vitamin B5, is about a 13 percent decline. Folate is about a 30 percent decline. And these are averages over the various experiments that were done. Folate is critical for child development. Pregnant women who don't get enough folate are at much higher risk of having babies with birth defects. So these are very serious potential consequences for our health as CO2 continues to rise. In another example, this is modeling work that was done by Chris Weyant and his colleagues, taking a look at this chain from higher CO2 to lower iron and zinc -- and they only looked at iron and zinc -- to various health outcomes. They looked at malaria, diarrheal disease, pneumonia, iron deficiency anemia, and looked at what the consequences could be in 2050. And the darker the color in this, the larger the consequences. So you can see the major impacts in Asia and in Africa, but also note that in countries such as the United States and countries in Europe, the populations also could be affected. They estimated about 125 million people could be affected. They also modeled what would be the most effective interventions, and their conclusion was reducing our greenhouse gases: getting our greenhouse gas emissions down by mid-century so we don't have to worry so much about these consequences later in the century. These experiments, these modeling studies did not take climate change itself into account. They just focused on the carbon dioxide component. So when you put the two together, it's expected the impact is much larger than what I've told you.

🔴 How climate change could make our food less nutritious? Yogi Berra, a US baseball player and philosopher, said, "If we don't know where we're going, we might not get there." Accumulating scientific knowledge is giving us greater insights, greater clarity, into what our future might look like in a changing climate and what that could mean for our health. I'm here to talk about a related aspect, on how our emissions of greenhouse gases from burning of fossil fuels is reducing the nutritional quality of our food. We'll start with the food pyramid. You all know the food pyramid. We all need to eat a balanced diet. We need to get proteins, we need to get micronutrients, we need to get vitamins. And so, this is a way for us to think about how to make sure we get what we need every day so we can grow and thrive. But we eat not just because we need to, we also eat for enjoyment. Bread, pasta, pizza -- there's a whole range of foods that are culturally important. We enjoy eating these. And so they're important for our diet, but they're also important for our cultures. Carbon dioxide has been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution, increasing from about 280 parts per million to over 410 today, and it continues to increase. The carbon that plants need to grow comes from this carbon dioxide. They bring it into the plant, they break it apart into the carbon itself, and they use that to grow. They also need nutrients from the soil. And so yes, carbon dioxide is plant food. And this should be good news, of rising carbon dioxide concentrations, for food security around the world, making sure that people get enough to eat every day. About 820 million people in the world don't get enough to eat every day. So there's a fair amount written about how higher CO2 is going to help with our food security problem. We need to accelerate our progress in agricultural productivity to feed the nine to 10 billion people who will be alive in 2050 and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly the Goal Number 2, that is on reducing food insecurity, increasing nutrition, increasing access to the foods that we need for everyone. We know that climate change is affecting agricultural productivity. The earth has warmed about one degree centigrade since preindustrial times. That is changing local temperature and precipitation patterns, and that has consequences for the agricultural productivity in many parts of the world. And it's not just local changes in temperature and precipitation, it's the extremes. Extremes in terms of heat waves, floods and droughts are significantly affecting productivity. And that carbon dioxide, besides making plants grow, has other consequences as well, that plants, when they have higher carbon dioxide, increase the synthesis of carbohydrates, sugars and starches, and they decrease the concentrations of protein and critical nutrients. And this is very important for how we think about food security going forward. A couple of nights ago in the table talks on climate change, someone said that they're a five-sevenths optimist: that they're an optimist five days of the week, and this is a topic for the other two days. When we think about micronutrients, almost all of them are affected by higher CO2 concentrations. Two in particular are iron and zinc. When you don't have enough iron, you can develop iron deficiency anemia. It's associated with fatigue, shortness of breath and some fairly serious consequences as well. When you don't have enough zinc, you can have a loss of appetite. It is a significant problem around the world. There's about one billion people who are zinc deficient. It's very important for maternal and child health. It affects development. The B vitamins are critical for a whole range of reasons. They help convert our food into energy. They're important for the functions of many of the physiologic activities in our bodies. And when you have higher carbon in a plant, you have less nitrogen, and you have less B vitamins.

🔴How climate change could make our food less nutritious? #Climate_Change #Food #Future #Sustainability #Agriculture #Science #Anthropocene #Environment #Plants #Biology #Nature 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

Clearly, having a healthy liver is extremely important. The best things you can do: don't smoke, eat a balanced diet, exercise regularly and get lots of sleep, but there are some more liver specific things to do. Don't consume too much alcohol, as it can cause a variety of problems over time, from fatty liver disease to cirrhosis of the liver, to liver cancer. Read the warning labels on medications as some can damage your liver when you don't take them as directed. You've probably heard about hepatitis, which can be caused by a viral infection of the liver that can be very serious. Get the vaccine for hepatitis B, if you haven't already. And if you're an adult who hasn't been screened for hepatitis C, consider talking to your doctor about testing options, as too many people don't realize they have it. Finally, be careful with supplements and herbs, particularly anything marketed as bodybuilding or a weight loss supplement, as these are not nearly as well-regulated as you would think. 20 percent of liver injury due to medication in the United States is actually caused by these kinds of supplements. So talk to your doctor before you start them. So many things are sold to us as self-care, and cleanses are no exception, but I believe the best self-care is just learning more about our bodies. That way, we can tune out all the noise and make informed decisions on what we really need. #Health #Human_Body #Biology #Food #Health_Care 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜ 🎙Join ➣ @TEDTalksLearning ☜

🔴A cleanse won't detox your body but here's what will "Should I do a cleanse?" I hear people asking this question a lot. If you're hoping it will remove toxins from your body, that's just not going to happen. Detoxes and cleanses are very popular. They come in many forms, from charcoal-infused lemonades to detox teas, and they often have a hefty price tag. The idea of cleansing isn't anything new -- it's been around for thousands of years. For centuries, medicine and religion were deeply intertwined, and there was a lot of focus on ridding the body of impurities and sickness related to bad or imbalanced humors. Bloodletting, purging, fasting -- they were all well-regarded treatments. Today, the wellness industry has picked up on our desire to rid ourselves of things. They've taken the word "detox," the medical treatment for people with drug and alcohol addictions, and used it to apply to market cleanses. They make it sound like pouring liquid cleaner down plumbing, getting rid of all the dirty stuff. But the reason that sounds right to us is it's a rooted in a lack of understanding of how our liver works. The liver is located in our upper right abdomen. It's somewhere around half the size of a football -- an American football -- and weighs three pounds. It does many, many jobs that keep our bodies running, from assisting the immune system, to creating proteins for blood clotting, to sending out the cholesterol we need to produce hormones. The liver is also a key organ for dealing with harmful substances. You can think of it almost like a factory. It takes nutrients from substances that we consume, food, drinks, medicines, breaks them down so they can either be packaged in a way that's usable -- like cholesterol and protein, for instance -- or removed as waste in the bile or via the kidneys, usually in the form of urine. Let's look at what happens when the liver encounters some specific substances. What about alcohol? That’s a substance that’s fine in smaller, moderate amounts but becomes poisonous in excess. When we drink, alcohol passes through our liver, and the liver breaks it down in three steps. First, enzymes convert the alcohol to acetaldehyde, a substance that can damage cells over time. But acetaldehyde is quickly converted into acetate, a much more stable intermediate, before it breaks down into carbon dioxide and water. These are components our body can handle. Now let's look at a popular cleanse -- cayenne, pepper, lemon juice drink, to help your liver flush toxins. You drink it, it gets digested, nutrients get absorbed in the blood and arrive at the liver. The liver processes these nutrients the same way it processes everything else. It packages whatever's useful that came from the lemon and the pepper and disseminates it throughout the body. Whatever it can't use becomes waste. There's nothing particularly magical about mixing cayenne and lemon. Doing a cleanse doesn't "clean the pipes," and it doesn't make your liver work any better or faster. At best, you might lose a few pounds on a cleanse, because you aren't eating much. At worst, you could go into starvation mode. You could throw off your electrolyte balance, not to mention disrupt your intestinal flora and bowel function.