James' World 2

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Electric delivery vehicles are big business. These “last-mile” solutions from companies like UPS and Amazon are a way around restrictions on freight vehicle emissions in cities and provide green credentials at the point where customers interact with a service.

In Europe, electric van sales went up 74 percent over the first five months of 2023, with EV powertrains becoming the second-favorite propulsion behind diesel, leapfrogging gasoline. Delivery EV production is massively accelerating as companies head toward 2025 commitments for fleet transformation and Ford and Stellantis bring more vehicles to market. Nissan has even been using Nikola battery-electric heavy-duty car transports to deliver Ariyas to customers in California.

But these electric delivery vehicles not especially new. In fact, a very significant proportion of electric road vehicles for most of the 20th century were working in suburbs, small towns, and villages in the UK as “milk floats.”

Low-powered, slow, and silent, the British milk float was the most common electric road vehicle for most of the 20th century, until the demise of morning milk deliveries. Some other utility EVs, like electric forklifts (invented in 1923) or golf carts, have outnumbered them worldwide, but they were never intended to be driven alongside cars.

You bring me milk each morning?

Anyone old enough to remember milk floats in Britain will know them as trundling vehicles that were the bane of morning commutes, impossible to pass thanks to the flatbeds that made them just long enough to be a moving obstacle. But they were also an institution. According to a 2017 Independent article, there were 1,200 being made a year. Most milk floats on the roads must have been pushing 10 years old, so that tells you how in-demand they were.

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Milk float in Earlsfield in London, England, United Kingdom. In Britain, a milk float is a vehicle specifically designed for the delivery of fresh milk.

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Meshuggah concert. (Credit: Andreas Lawen, Fotandi / Wikipedia)

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Martha Crawford started having climate change dreams about 11 or 12 years ago. Unlike many of her previously remembered dreams, these were not fragmented or nonsensical—they were “very explicit,” she recalls. “They didn’t require a lot of interpretation.” In one, she’s reading a textbook about climate change and then throws it behind the back of her couch, pretending it doesn’t exist. In another, she’s sitting in a lecture given by a climate scientist. But the professor starts yelling at her for not paying attention, and she fails the course. The meaning was pretty clear, says Crawford, a licensed clinical social worker: “You’re not paying attention, and you need to pay attention.”

The dreams eventually inspired her to start the Climate Dreams Project in 2019, and since, she’s been facilitating a space where people can share climate dream anecdotes, mostly anonymously.

One dream submitted to the collection was of people digging holes in the desert so that the rising seas would have somewhere to go. In another contribution, a Flood Football game was underway, and in the second half, players were floating on inner-tubes. Another person, who shared four climate dreams, recounted one in which billions of people were funneling into a giant room that looked like a video-game sports arena, but large enough to hold the world’s population. “At the end of the dream, the entire face of the earth was different,” they wrote. “It was completely icy and the only habitable part was a giant plateau with a city on it.”

It would seem that climate change has woven itself into the “fabric of dreaming” as Crawford puts it.

Studying dreams can be slippery. We don’t always remember them, and interpreting them is highly subjective. But, according to a survey of 1,009 people conducted by The Harris Poll in June on behalf of TIME, over a third of people in the U.S. have dreamed about climate change at least once in their lives.

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Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver, who rose to become one of New Jersey’s most prominent Black leaders and passionately advocated for revitalizing cities and against gun violence, died Tuesday after a sudden illness. She was 71.

No cause of death was given, according to a statement from her family issued by Gov. Phil Murphy ’s office. Oliver was serving as acting governor while Murphy and his family are on vacation in Italy. His office said she had been hospitalized on Monday.

Murphy said he and his family are distraught at the news. Naming Oliver as his lieutenant governor was, he said, “the best decision I ever made.”

She was the first Black woman to hold statewide elected office in New Jersey, winning the vote alongside Murphy in 2017 and again in 2021. She was a well-known figure in state government and made history in 2010 by becoming the first Black woman to lead the state Assembly.

In contrast to her predecessor, who rarely appeared alongside Gov. Chris Christie, Oliver regularly stood at Murphy’s side and signed several bills into law while serving as acting governor.

She was a compelling public speaker and frequent attendee at Murphy’s bill signings and other events, where he typically introduced her as his “rocking” lieutenant governor.

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Lt. Gov. Sheila Oliver

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There are all kinds of ways to speed up your WiFi at home: You can pay for a faster broadband package, upgrade your network’s hardware, or move your router into another room.

But you can also get faster downloads and uploads on your home WiFi by identifying which apps are hogging all of your bandwidth and using them more sparingly. It’s easy to do, and you can go about it on your phone, tablet, or laptop.

Checking WiFi hogging apps on Android

To find out how much bandwidth your apps are using on Android phones and tablets, open up Settings, choose Apps, and then See all. You can’t sort apps based on how much WiFi they’re using, but you’ll be able to check up on them individually. Tap on a specific program and then go to Cellular data and Wi-Fi to see how much data they’ve accessed over both types of connection.

By default, you’ll only see the last month of usage, but at the top of the screen, you’ll be able to change the time range to see statistics from a specific moment up to four months before the current date.

Android allows a number of third-party apps to dig into data usage in more detail. One of the best we’ve come across is GlassWire Data Usage Monitor, which will alert you about tools using a lot of bandwidth, and show you charts with the source and the amount of data your apps have accessed in the last 24 hours. GlassWire is free to use, but you can pay $5 a year to see more stats from further back in time.

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Michelle Carr had vivid nightmares as a kid. It wasn’t until she was in college that she learned about lucid dreaming, a fairly rare phenomenon in which the dreamer can consciously shape the dream. She found that she could use lucid dreams to rewrite her own nightmares and conquer her fear of them.

The experience inspired her to pursue dream research. In 2011, a few years after her first encounter with lucid dreaming, Carr began a Ph.D. under Tore Nielsen, a well-known nightmare expert, at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory in Montreal. Today she calls herself a dream engineer: She helps people rescript their dreams as a researcher and therapist at the University of Rochester Sleep and Neurophysiology Laboratory in New York.

Two to 6 percent of people have nightmares at least weekly.

Carr works with people who suffer particularly frequent nightmares—around 2 to 6 percent of people have them at least weekly. For these individuals, sleep becomes something to fear. It can upend their mental health, leading to clinically significant anxiety and depression, and in the most extreme cases, suicide risk. Normally, dreams make novel associations between elements of your memory and experience. In nightmares, strong emotions seem to interrupt this process, leading to a repetitive script, says Carr. But researchers have identified some effective therapies that can break the cycle. 

I recently talked with Carr about nightmare interventions.

Are there any established clinical interventions for nightmares?

Yes, the most well-known is called imagery rehearsal therapy. It’s very standardized. It’s a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, and it’s evidence-based. If somebody has a recurring bad dream, they can try to rewrite it, come up with a new ending for it, and practice visualizing this new ending while awake. There are many different variations of this therapy. 

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Defeat Nightmares

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https://nautil.us/

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