You 2.0: Our Better Nature

You 2.0: Our Better Nature

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A Secret Source of Connection

We all have moments in our lives when we see someone who could use a helping hand. It could be a friend who recently went through a breakup, or an older person trying to load groceries into their car. We tell ourselves we should help, but then something stops us. This week, psych ...  Show more

Who Are You, Really?

You’re not the same person with your friends as you are with your co-workers or your kids. So who are you, really? This week, political scientist Eric Oliver explores why we often feel divided within ourselves, and how we can learn to live more peacefully with those contradiction ...  Show more

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TED Climate: A vision of sustainable housing for all of humanity | Vishaan Chakrabarti
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By 2100, the UN estimates that the world's population will grow to just over 11 billion people. Architect Vishaan Chakrabarti wants us to start thinking about how we'll house all these people -- and how new construction can fight climate change rather than make it worse. In this ...  Show more

Jeremy DeSilva, "First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human" (Harper, 2021)
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Blending history, science, and culture, a stunning and highly engaging evolutionary story exploring how walking on two legs allowed humans to become the planet’s dominant species. Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four legs—a locomotion known as bipedalism. ...  Show more

Death in the rainforest
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Tree mortality in tropical moist forests in Australia has been increasing since the mid 1980s. The death rate of trees appears to have doubled over that time period. According to an international team of researchers, the primary cause is drier air in these forests, the consequenc ...  Show more

Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani, "Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from Our Ancestors" (PublicAffairs, 2021)
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Human-made climate change may have begun in the last two hundred years, but our species has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have not always been pretty. From Ancient Egypt to Rome to the Maya, some of history's mightiest civilizations have been felled by p ...  Show more