James' World 2

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Thinking of spring-cleaning? Whether you’re finally cleaning up the junk drawer or upgrading your tech, don’t condemn your old device to your in-home gadget graveyard — or worse, the garbage. We all hang onto outdated tech for our own reasons, but there are also multiple ways to repurpose old devices for your smart home, using them as security cameras and more.

Whatever the tech, when it’s finally time to say goodbye, there’s a right way to dispose of your old gadgets — and there are a lot of wrong ways. We’ll show you which is which.

What to do before you get rid of a device

When you’re finished with a gadget, make sure it’s also finished with you. Make sure to back up anything you want off the device — photos, videos, songs — and then perform a factory reset. Here are a few CNET articles to help clarify the finer points of wiping a device:

How to recycle smartphones 

Smartphone Recycling lets you print a free FedEx shipping label or request a recycling kit. Ship your old smartphone, and you might even get paid, depending on the device’s condition and age. Smartphone Recycling accepts devices in bulk, so you have to ship a minimum of 10. Depending on how long you’ve been hoarding phones, you might meet this quota on your own. If not, check with friends and family and make it a group effort.

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What do you do with your phone when it’s served its purpose? We’ll give you some options.  Sarah Tew/CNET

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TSUKUBA, Japan—Outside the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine, the heavy fragrance of sweet Osmanthus trees fills the air, and big golden spiders string their webs among the bushes. Two men in hard hats next to the main doors mutter quietly as they measure a space and apply adhesive to the slate-colored wall. The building is so new that they are still putting up the signs.

The institute is five years old, its building still younger, but already it has attracted some 120 researchers from fields as diverse as pulmonology and chemistry and countries ranging from Switzerland to China. An hour north of Tokyo at the University of Tsukuba, with funding from the Japanese government and other sources, the institute’s director, Masashi Yanagisawa, has created a place to study the basic biology of sleep, rather than, as is more common, the causes and treatment of sleep problems in people. Full of rooms of gleaming equipment, quiet chambers where mice slumber, and a series of airy work spaces united by a spiraling staircase, it’s a place where tremendous resources are focused on the question of why, exactly, living things sleep.

Ask researchers this question, and listen as, like clockwork, a sense of awe and frustration creeps into their voices. In a way, it’s startling how universal sleep is: In the midst of the hurried scramble for survival, across eons of bloodshed and death and flight, uncountable millions of living things have laid themselves down for a nice, long bout of unconsciousness. This hardly seems conducive to living to fight another day. “It’s crazy, but there you are,” says Tarja Porkka-Heiskanen of the University of Helsinki, a leading sleep biologist. That such a risky habit is so common and so persistent, suggests that whatever is happening is of the utmost importance. Whatever sleep gives to the sleeper is worth tempting death over and over again, for a lifetime.

The precise benefits of sleep are still mysterious, and for many biologists, the unknowns are transfixing. One rainy evening in Tsukuba, a group of institute scientists gathered at an izakaya bar manage to hold off only half an hour before sleep is once again the focus of their conversation. Even simple jellyfish have to rest longer after being forced to stay up, one researcher marvels, referring to a new paper where the little creatures were nudged repeatedly with jets of water to keep them from drifting off. And the work on pigeons—have you read the work on pigeons? another asks. There is something fascinating going on there, the researchers agree. On the table, dishes of vegetable and seafood tempura sit cooling, forgotten in the face of these enigmas.

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Natalie Andrewson

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During residency, I worked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

No matter what happened to my body, I never felt like it was dangerous for me to keep working. I knew I was irritable and sometimes terse, and I didn’t smell the best, but I didn’t think anything I did was unsafe. Sleep experts often liken sleep-deprived people to drunk drivers: They don’t get behind the wheel thinking they’re probably going to kill someone. But as with drunkenness, one of the first things we lose in sleep deprivation is self-awareness.

It’s this way of thinking—that you can power through, that sleep is the easiest corner to cut—that makes sleep disturbance among the most common sources of health problems in many countries. Insufficient sleep causes many chronic and acute medical conditions that have an enormous impact on quality of life, not to mention the economy. While no one knows why we sleep, it is a universal biological imperative; no animal with a brain can survive without it. Dolphins are said to sleep with only half their brain at a time, keeping partially alert for predators. Many of us spend much of our lives in a similar state.

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Mauricio Alejo

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With each passing year, the climate crisis comes into ever sharper focus. And no matter how small they may seem in the face of the herculean challenges we as a society face, our individual choices do matter. In that spirit, one pillar to consider is your beauty routine. More specifically, what you buy, how often you buy it, and whether it ends up in a landfill at the end of your use. This is because the beauty industry is among the world’s largest polluters. According to Euromonitor International, 152.1 billion units of beauty and personal-care packaging were sold globally in 2018 alone, much of which will never be recycled.

“I am grateful that sustainability has become a major focus for consumer products recently,” says Mia Davis, vice president of sustainability and impact at Credo Beauty. “Sustainability in beauty means that the work we do now–the resources we extract, the stuff we make–will not compromise people’s ability to do the same in the future.”

While change can be daunting, rest assured that being an environmentally conscious consumer and being passionate about your beauty routine aren’t mutually exclusive. “As someone who has always loved beauty, I didn’t want to give that up as I started to transition to a more sustainable lifestyle,” explains sustainability expert and low-waste living content creator Jhánneu. “Many people think they have to give up their lifestyles to be sustainable, but it really comes down to just finding better alternatives.” As a former self-proclaimed Sephora junkie, Ashlee Piper, an eco-lifestyle expert and author of Give a Sh*t: Do Good. Live Better. Save the Planet, knows firsthand it can–and needs–to be done.

“While I love a good haul and discovering new, niche beauty companies [to support], when it comes to creating excess that’s detrimental for the planet and our wallets, beauty, and grooming items are right up there,” explains Piper, citing that as of 2018, the beauty and personal care industry has created almost 8 billion rigid plastic packaging units per year in the U.S. alone. “I began evangelizing about paring down and being more mindful about our beauty-product consumption because it’s the unsung area of personal sustainability.”

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Photographed by Mikael Jansson, Vogue, November 2019

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Carmen Winant

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Neuroscientist Amishi Jha opens her book, Peak Mind, with this vignette to illustrate an important truth: You’re not alone. Most people can’t go three minutes at work without being interrupted by a chatty colleague, and students cite the allure of social media and other digital distractions as a major disruptor to their studies.

“I’ve seen certain universal patterns in the way all of our brains function — both how powerfully they can focus, and how extraordinarily vulnerable they are to distraction — no matter who you are or what you do,” Jha writes.

At the heart of this predicament, Jha argues, is attention — specifically, the many ways we can disconnect from it. Depleted attention creates a mental fog. Hijacked attention manifests as anxiety and worry. Fragmented attention shatters our ability to focus. Disconnected attention keeps us detached from others. Each attentional affliction causes you to grow out of sync with what’s happening around you, affecting what you think, how you feel, what you learn, how you react, and your relationships with others.

In short, attention isn’t just a matter of where your focus happens to be. It’s the internal force that shapes how you encounter and experience your life in its entirety.

Attention: A cognitive currency

In her book, Jha compares attention to a currency. You can pay it to others, and they can give theirs to you. You can request it in the spirit of charity — “Will you give me your attention, please?” And as any parent whose child is within earshot of an ice cream truck can attest, attention can be stolen outright.

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But it’s getting easier to clean your clothes while staying green. “You do have to wash your clothes, but you can do a very good job of minimizing the impact,” says Jonathan Gilligan, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University who has studied the effects of individual actions on greenhouse gas emissions. Although one consumer’s decision to switch to a more efficient washer isn’t going to counter the cumulative effects of major industries on its own, he says “it can have an effect.” Individual actions add up.

Here are expert-backed strategies to tweak laundry day to be greener — and less of a chore.

Choose efficient machines

The machines you use have a significant effect on the amount of energy and water you save — or waste — experts say. Older appliances can rack up high utility bills, while newer, high-efficiency washers use less water and energy with lower temperatures and higher spin speeds.

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I have observed that most religious groups stay away from the Book of Revelations, but what I heard in the attached video (starting @ 56:45) explains the book in modern-day terms. When you observe what is happening in the world around us, carefully, it begins to make sense. He doesn’t name any specific countries or organizations.

I’m including this person because I can’t get away from him in the news, which seem to be what he is trying to accomplish.

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I’m just saying, that what is depicted above is only what’s happening in America. This type of rhetoric is happening worldwide.

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‘A sense of special significance began to invest everything in the room; objects which I would normally accept as just being there began to assume some strange importance.’

‘I became interested in a wide assortment of people, events, places, and ideas which normally would make no impression on me. Not knowing that I was ill, I made no attempt to understand what was happening, but felt that there was some overwhelming significance in all this …’

The first of these quotations is from an individual describing a psychedelic trip they took after taking peyote. The second is a person describing an experience of psychosis. While rarely looked at together today, experiences of psychedelics and psychosis share a lot of subjective territory. In the past, some scientists considered them to be different versions of the same experience. However, today, experiences of psychosis and psychedelics are seen as radically different. Examining the journey from that past approach to the current perspective reveals a great deal about our assumptions and values, and the limits and biases of the current day.

In the mid-20th century, researchers thought of psychosis and psychedelics as deeply entangled, and scientific comparisons between the two experiences were common; entire academic papers were spent contrasting detailed descriptions of experiences of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and experiences of research participants who had taken psychedelic drugs. As a result of the close resemblance between these descriptions, many researchers believed that psychedelics induced a short-term psychosis, providing a perfect scientific model for those who wanted to learn more about schizophrenia. By inducing a ‘temporary psychosis’, researchers could observe biological changes in research participants who had taken a psychedelic, and compare these with measurements of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the hunt for the mysterious ‘substance-M’ that could explain what was underlying both experiences, various candidates were considered, including adrenaline, norepinephrine, and serotonin. While the hunt for a common biological factor was unsuccessful, for decades many believed that these experiences were different versions of the same thing.

There was widespread scientific belief in the similarity between psychosis and psychedelics in the mid-20th century. But the years since have led to a remarkable divide between our understandings of these phenomena. In the 1960s, moral panic related to psychedelic drugs set in. At the same time, requirements for evidence in medicine were becoming more rigorous, and creating barriers for psychedelic research. Funding, access and permissions for research related to psychedelic drugs slowly dried up, and research into these fascinating substances was largely forgotten by psychiatry.

In the intervening decades, research related to psychosis has continued unfettered and changed shape radically. Gone is much mainstream interest in detailed descriptions of the experience of psychosis that psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists often sought out in the past. Instead, psychosis research today shares with the rest of psychiatry an often singular focus on neurobiological and genetic research. Investigations related to childhood, trauma, and social forces are given much less consideration and, importantly, much less funding. Psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor, in part because of the difficulty it had fitting into novel models of evidence being adopted across medicine (it’s difficult to conduct randomized control trials on the talking cure), and in part because psychiatry needed to prove it was consistent and replicable (these are challenging features to demonstrate in an approach as complicated and variable as psychoanalysis). In its place, a neurobiological model of psychiatry has been taken up, seeking explanations and treatments for mental disorders largely at the level of genes and neurotransmitters.

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Photo by Kristina Strasunske/Getty

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