James' World 2

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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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Fireballs could light up the night as shooting stars streak through the sky this weekend in an event that will act as a warmup for stargazers ahead of an even more impressive light show in mid-August.

A flurry of meteors will soon dash across the heavens, a celestial light show that will be followed up by an even more impressive astronomical event in the coming weeks.

The Southern Delta Aquarids and Alpha Capricornids will peak simultaneously centered around the night of Sunday, July 30, into the early morning of Monday, July 31. However, it will not be a one-night-only event.

Both meteor showers have plateaulike peaks that last for about a week centered around the night of July 30, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS), meaning any night at the end of July or the start of August will offer views of shooting stars. This is much different than many other meteor showers that peak over the course of just one or two nights.

The two long-running meteor showers will combine for 15 to 20 meteors per hour, including the chance to spot a few incredibly bright meteors known as fireballs.

However, there will be some competition in the night sky at the end of July.

A nearly full moon will rise Sunday night, emitting moonlight that will wash out many of the dimmer meteors. For the best chance at spotting shooting stars, experts recommend viewing the Southern Delta Aquarids and Alpha Capricornids after 3 a.m.,

local time, when the moon sets.

Meteors may still appear in the sky before the moon sets, but will be best seen in darker areas of the sky where the moon is out of sight.

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A man watches the Perseid meteor shower on Dahong mountain on August 13, 2021, in Xilingol League, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. (Photo by Liu Shuangxi/VCG via Getty Images)

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It’s been more than 50 years since humans last walked on the lunar surface, but starting this year, an array of missions from private companies and national space agencies plan to take us back, sending everything from small robotic probes to full-fledged human landers.

The ultimate goal? Getting humans living and working on the moon, and then using it as a way station for possible later missions into deep space.

Here’s what’s next for the moon.

Robotic missions are leading the charge

More than a dozen robotic vehicles are scheduled to land on the moon in the 2020s.

On July 14, India launched its Chandrayaan-3 mission, a second attempt from the country to land on the surface of the moon after Chandrayaan-2 crashed there in 2019. That landing attempt will come in August. 

Hot on its heels are two private companies in the US, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, both partly funded by NASA to begin moon landings this year. Astrobotic’s Peregrine One lander is scheduled to carry a suite of instruments (some from NASA) to the moon’s northern hemisphere later this year to study the surface, including a sensor to hunt for water ice and a small rover to explore. And Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander will attempt a lunar first.

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NASA

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