James' World 2

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If you think a colleague is struggling with their mental health, it’s important to approach the issue sensitively and compassionately. Here, a psychologist shares her advice on how to do this.

If you count yourself among the quarter of the UK population who report having a mental health problem, or have supported someone through a period of poor mental health, you’ll know that working can quickly become overwhelming. In fact, your job can even be the cause of mental health issues, with research finding that over 17 million working days each year are lost to work-related stress, anxiety, and depression.

If you’re worried about a colleague, it can be hard to know how to approach this, or to know what warning signs to look out for. After all, you want to deal with the situation sensitively, while also looking out for their well-being. 

Sometimes, it isn’t always obvious when a colleague is struggling. “In today’s fast-paced work environments, mental health challenges often go unnoticed until they become severe, so it’s crucial to understand that distress can manifest in subtle ways,” explains psychologist Dr Ravi Gill.

To ensure that you can best support your colleagues’ mental health, Dr Gill recommends being aware of the following three signs that could mean someone you work with is struggling with their wellbeing. While you should be cautious about making assumptions about another person’s mental health, these signs can be used as indicators to assess the situation.

Observe how they communicate

If a colleague’s communication style changes, this could be a sign of a change in their mental health. “Your colleague’s tone might shift, becoming more curt, emotionally flat or unusually snappy,” explains Dr Gill. “Emails may lack their usual clarity or contain more errors, and they might disengage from collaborative conversations or seem distracted during meetings.

“Some workers may become overly apologetic or anxious in their interactions, seeking constant reassurance despite usually being confident.” 

Look out for changes to behaviour

Everyone acts differently at work – no two colleagues will be the same – but look out for any changes to a colleague’s regular behaviour. “You might notice they become more withdrawn, avoid meetings, team lunches, or casual conversations,” says Dr Gill. 

Watch out for workload

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Hmmmm….Man’s inhumanity to man, where are the silos? Thank goodness for our 3 tier power structure!

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We are living in a scary time. After a terrorist attack that killed at least 26  people, mostly Indian tourists, in Kashmir in April, India blamed the attack on Pakistan, threatened to cut off that nation’s water supplies, and followed up in May with airstrikes. Pakistan has promised a “measured but forceful response,” threatening a wider war endangering everyone.

India and Pakistan each have about 170 nuclear weapons. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas. That smoke would rise into the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above the troposphere where we live, which has no rain to wash out the smoke. Our research has found that the smoke would block out the sun, making it cold, dark, and dry at Earth’s surface, choking agriculture for five years or more around the world. The result would be global famine.

Like it or not, humanity still has a nuclear dagger pointed at its throat. But there is another choice that starts with the U.S. If we take our land-based missiles off their hair-trigger alerts and negotiate with Russia to reduce our nuclear arsenal, we could set an example for the rest of the world. If we eventually sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the U.S. could provide an example to Iran and other nations with an interest in building their own nuclear arsenal.

The alternatives are terrifying. One of us (Robock) published an article in Scientific American 15 years ago describing how a war in South Asia, like the one now possible between India and Pakistan, could produce global climate change and threaten the world’s food supply, but we did not know how large that threat would be. In the years since then, we have calculated, for a range of smoke amounts released from nuclear war, the specific effects on agriculture in each nation. From there, we estimated how the people would fare under the assumption that their stored food was gone, trade was halted, and they kept the same agricultural activity. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could kill one to two billion people through starvation in the two years after the war.

The U.S. and Russia have more than 8,000 nuclear weapons. A nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia could kill more than six billion people around the world in the following two years. The direct impacts of blast, radiation, and fire on those attacked by nuclear weapons would be horrific, as we know from what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, but 10 to 20 times more people would die from famine.

Many people assume that there will never be another nuclear war, since it has now been 80 years and several generations since the last one. They also have been told that nuclear deterrence must be maintained to keep us safe. Yet threats to use nuclear weapons from Russia and North Korea, and even from the U.S. president, have worried many. The New START treaty, the only remaining arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia, expires next year. China is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal.

President Trump just proposed a budget for the next fiscal year with a 13 percent increase for the Defense Department. This is exactly the wrong  direction for the U.S. A substantial part of the defense budget is for a “modernization” of our nuclear arsenal. Our nuclear “triad” is composed of land-based missiles, submarine missiles and nuclear bombs that could be dropped from airplanes. We already have all of these, and they cannot be used without the risk of killing almost all the people on the planet. They need to be removed, not modernized.

Deterrence is a myth. The theory is that we will not be attacked because we will attack an enemy if they attack us, thus deterring them. But in order for it to work, they have to believe that we will act as a suicide bomber. That is, that we will attack an enemy, producing so much smoke that we will be unable to grow any crops for more than five years, and thus all starve to death. This is not mutual assured destruction (the so-called “MAD” theory). It is self-assured destruction (SAD).

The upcoming Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, a report from the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine due out this summer, the first such report since 1985, will make this danger more plain.

The rest of the world well understands the risk we all face. In 2017, after three international conferences on the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, including the indirect effects on food supply based on our work, the United Nations passed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which prohibits possession, manufacture, development and testing of nuclear weapons, stationing and installment of nuclear weapons or assistance in such activities, by its parties. The treaty came into force on January 22, 2021. There are currently 94 signatories and 73 states parties, but the nine countries, notably including the U.S., with nuclear weapons have not signed it and are trying to ignore the will of the rest of world.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which led the effort to get this treaty, was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”

For deterrence to succeed, there must be no use of nuclear weapons by accident, terrorists, computer malfunctions, hackers or unstable leaders. We have come close many times. As Beatrice Fihn, executive director of ICAN, said in her Nobel Peace Prize Lecture on December 10, 2017, “If only a small fraction of today’s nuclear weapons were used, soot and smoke from the firestorms would loft high into the atmosphere—cooling, darkening and drying the Earth’s surface for more than a decade. It would obliterate food crops, putting billions at risk of starvation. Yet we continue to live in denial of this existential threat.… The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending, and it is up to us what that ending will be. Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us? One of these things will happen. The only rational course of action is to cease living under the conditions where our mutual destruction is only one impulsive tantrum away.”

When Carl Sagan, a leader in early nuclear-winter research, was asked if he didn’t want to keep our nuclear weapons as a deterrent, he said: “For myself, I would far rather have a world in which the climatic catastrophe cannot happen, independent of the vicissitudes of leaders, institutions, and machines. This seems to me elementary planetary hygiene, as well as elementary patriotism.” We agree.

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On November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre opened in Chicago to rave reviews. “Few theaters in America can rival its architectural perfections,” applauded one commentator. The venue was “absolutely fireproof,” its playbills boasted.

Five weeks later, during a December 30 holiday matinee performance with 1,800 people in the audience, the Iroquois was engulfed in flames. Until the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, it was the worst building disaster in the U.S.

Underwriters Laboratories, founded in 1894 to promote safety, joined the investigation into what went wrong at the Iroquois. The building didn’t have a single fire alarm. Crucial escape routes were barred with locked doors. And the one safety tool that could have stopped the fire at its initial spark, when an ​​electric light ignited a curtain backstage, didn’t work: the fire extinguisher.

“A man put 10 cents’ worth of baking soda in a 5-cent tin tube. He sold it for $3 as a fire extinguisher,” fumed UL founder William Henry Merrill, Jr., likening the contraption to a phony magic wand. “Unfortunately, there was nothing ‘make-believe’ about the fire, and the result was very real to the families and the friends of over 600 women and children, whose lives were sacrificed that a man might make a profit of $2.”

Determined to prevent such pointless tragedies in the future, Merrill created a certification operation to assure the public that products with its distinctive mark had been scientifically tested and could be used safely. More than a century later, UL is still at the forefront of fire prevention.

“What made us relevant in the late 1800s is the same thing that has us relevant today, if not more,” says Steve Kerber, vice president and executive director of the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), a part of UL Research Institutes (ULRI). “We’re trying to understand these new products or behaviors or technologies when they’re a concept … to understand the impact they have before people die.”

Danger at the Edge of Town

FSRI and its partners among ULRI’s other research institutes are focused on two main issues, both born of new technological and societal developments: fires caused by lithium-ion batteries and fires that ignite where wildland and urban development meet.

Wildland-urban interface fires, as they’re called, are especially hazardous. Not only do they threaten homes and businesses but “the fuel that can burn includes many things of human origin: plastics, fuels, energy-storage systems, solar panels and more,” says Christopher J. Cramer, ULRI’s interim president and chief research officer. “The gases and particulates that are produced under these circumstances are likely to be much more dangerous.”

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With graduation season just a few days away, it’s almost the time to throw up those caps and gowns, but unfortunately, that’s not the only thing being thrown around. So are the anxieties of a younger generation that is graduating into what might be the harshest economy in more than ten years. 

Not only did these kids start college during a pandemic, but now they’re finishing with inflation through the roof, a housing market that seems unattainable, and a job market that’s arguably even worse than 2008 (and for the millennials, if you know, you know). Throw in student loans, and you’ve got a perfect storm of financial stress.

Intuit released their Prosperity Index for 2025 graduates, and the findings are… well, they’re pretty much what you’d expect given everything we’ve been seeing discussed surrounding the economy as of late. But the numbers put some real perspective on what we’re seeing.

About 42% of new grads say they’re “cautiously optimistic” about their financial future as they tiptoe into adulthood. And the way these young adults define success looks nothing like what their parents were chasing at the same age. Almost 60% say having a decent savings account equals success in 2025. And 43% just want to make rent without having a panic attack every month. That’s not exactly “corner office and vacation home” territory, is it?

What’s really telling is that most of these young people are avoiding long-term goals altogether. The economy’s so unpredictable that three-quarters of gen-z graduates argue what’s the point of planning? Nearly half say they’re even more hesitant to plan long-term than they were last year.

What’s keeping them up at night? Cost of living tops the list for practically everyone (97%). Job security isn’t far behind at 87%. Then there’s saving money (47%), paying bills (31%), debt (31%), budgeting (29%), building credit (28%), and housing costs (25%). Basically, everything about money is stressing them out.

But there’s something weird happening with all this stress. Instead of doubling down on the traditional get-a-good-job path, the Class of 2025 is going in a completely different direction. They’re becoming entrepreneurs by necessity.

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Young adults in graduation gowns joyfully tossing caps into the sky, celebrating achievement and new beginnings against a clear backdrop

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CLIMATEWIRE | When EPA announced its intent to roll back more than two dozen regulations last month, Administrator Lee Zeldin said it was necessary because pollution limits were “suffocating” the nation’s economy.

But 12 of the 31 rules on the chopping block protect Americans’ ability to breathe by curtailing air pollutants like fine particulate matter and ozone. According to one review of EPA’s analyses, those rules would collectively prevent more than 100 million asthma attacks through 2050.

The regulatory rollback isn’t the Trump administration’s only move that will affect American lungs. Just this month, the Department of Health and Human Services completely eliminated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s asthma office, which provides funding and advice to state and local health officials on how to prevent the the inflammatory lung condition.

“I don’t say this lightly, but these are programs that were keeping people alive,” said Laura Kate Bender of the American Lung Association. “And now we have this double whammy where on the one hand, we are seeing the threat of a slew of air pollution rollbacks and lax enforcement at EPA, and on the other hand, they are cutting programs that were helping people manage their lung disease.”

The rollbacks and cuts contradict the Trump administration’s stated goals of reducing childhood chronic diseases, including asthma. Asthma was mentioned twice in President Donald Trump’s February executive order that directed federal agencies to act “urgently” to end chronic childhood diseases through “fresh thinking” on “environmental impacts” to health, among other things.

Asked how EPA reconciles its directive to tackle asthma with rolling back regulations that prevent the disease, EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said only that “the Trump Administration is taking steps in the right direction to ensure EPA adheres to the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment and powering the great American comeback.”

The costs of a regulatory rollback

Elizabeth Hauptman remembers the joy she felt two years ago when EPA finalized a carbon rule meant to reduce pollution from fossil fuels.

Now a field consultant for Moms Clean Air Force, Hauptman started paying attention to air pollution regulations when her then-toddler son, Oscar, started having difficulty breathing. In the years since he was diagnosed with asthma, Oscar, now 15, has been to the intensive care unit twice and had to sit out sports practices more times than Hauptman can count on poor air quality days.

She had been hoping the carbon rule would save more kids like Oscar from struggling to breathe. But now the rule is one of 12 air pollution limits EPA announced it would reconsider in March on its “biggest deregulation action in U.S. History.”

Hauptman worries EPA’s actions will only make asthma attacks more common — for her son and others.

“My son is growing up in a world where he has to check the air quality index like some kids check their favorite sports scores, and that should not be normal,” she said. “This is not just about policy — it’s about playgrounds and bedtime stories without wheezing.”

In 2035 alone, EPA estimated, the rule would prevent 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 1,900 new asthma diagnoses and 360,000 asthma attacks severe enough to require an inhaler.

Those calculations are part of the cost-benefit analysis EPA is required by law to conduct whenever it issues new regulations. They often measure the benefits of reducing air pollution in terms of avoided asthma symptoms,

emergency room visits and hospitalizations.

“My son is growing up in a world where he has to check the air quality index like some kids check their favorite sports scores, and that should not be normal. This is not just about policy — it’s about playgrounds and bedtime stories without wheezing.” —Elizabeth Hauptman, field consultant

For example, EPA estimated that another regulation targeted in Zeldin’s rollback — the “good neighbor” rule — would prevent 179,000 asthma attacks and 5,000 new diagnoses of the disease in 2026. The rule limits smokestack emissions from power plants that create ozone pollution and smog in downwind, neighboring states.

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What is a job that is going to teach you something where you will learn, you will grow, and it feels like the kind of environment that you can personally thrive in?

Christine Cruzvergara, Chief Education Strategy Officer, Handshake

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More tornadoes than usual have already struck the U.S. in 2025, and many of them have been touching down farther east than they had in the past

By last Saturday, the National Weather Service reported that 552 tornadoes had occurred in the U.S. this year, well above the average total of 337 for the period of January through April in 1991–2020. Then an outbreak struck Texas and Oklahoma on Saturday night, killing at least three people. Parts of those two states were at the center of the twister-prone “tornado alley” for most of the 1900s, but this well-known corridor has been shifting steadily eastward in the past three and a half decades. This year, many of the touchdowns that caused deaths occurred in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, all east of the old alley.

Why does the U.S. have so many tornadoes?

Far more tornadoes strike the U.S. than any other country, and this is because of its geography. Wet, westerly winds from the Pacific Ocean become dry as they pass over the the Rocky Mountains, then become high and cool as they blow farther east. Meanwhile, warm, humid air streams northward from the Gulf of Mexico, moving at a lower elevation. Flat terrain along these paths allows the two streams to run into each other. The angles at which they collide tend to create unstable air and wind shear, two big factors that favor tornado formation.

Where has tornado alley moved?

For decades, most of the largest outbreaks occurred across northeastern Texas, eastern Oklahoma, and western Arkansas and Missouri. But between 1989 and 2019, the focus shifted eastward by 400 to 500 miles, covering western Kentucky and Tennessee, plus northern Mississippi and Alabama.

Why is tornado Alley sliding eastward?

Most tornadoes are created by a supercell—a strong thunderstorm with a rotating updraft of air. Supercells tend to form when warm, humid, low-level air interacts with cool, dry, higher air. And climate change is now generating more of that warmer, moister air. Tornadoes also are more likely to develop when the local atmosphere is unstable, and warming increases instability. Climate change is warming the Gulf of Mexico as well, and this can send generous amounts of water vapor into the southeastern U.S., farther east than it tended to travel decades ago. In addition, climate change has moved the rough north-south boundary between dry western U.S. air and moist, eastern U.S. air about 140 miles to the east.

Why does the shift matter?

Tornado shelters are common in Texas and Oklahoma but less so in other U.S. regions. The Southeast is more densely populated, and mobile homes (which often fare poorly in windstorms) are prevalent. Tornadoes in the Southeast also occur at night more often than those that strike farther west do, in part because winds can bring ample moisture from the Gulf after dark. And nighttime makes it much harder to see a storm coming.

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Smart rings are in the middle of a resurgence. That means a lot of experimental ideas and newcomer tech brands you’ve probably never heard of. Enough competitors have cropped up that I spent the better part of last summer rocking six rings like a high-tech mafia don. While these aren’t necessarily bad products (some are pretty good), many aren’t as polished as what you’d see in more mature categories like smartwatches, headphones, and smartphones.

Speaking of which, there are a few things to know about the category. Currently, these devices are primarily health trackers. Their benefit is they’re more discreet and are better suited to sleep tracking than a smartwatch. However, the vast majority don’t include smart alarms or push notifications. This makes them best suited to casual athletes or more wellness-minded people. Hardcore athletes would be better served in most cases by a smartwatch or fitness tracker, with a smart ring as a supplementary source of data. (But that’s quite an expensive endeavor.) Smart rings are also ill-suited for weightlifters, as they can easily scratch against equipment.

With that in mind, here’s the best smart ring for most people in 2025 — and a handful of runners-up worth highlighting for the more tech-adventurous.

I can already hear some of you shouting, “But what about the subscription!” And I agree. Even Oura’s relatively affordable $6 monthly fee can feel more like $100 when you consider the sheer number of apps, gadgets, and services asking for a chunk of your monthly paycheck. However, Oura is still the best in terms of hardware, size range, features offered, app, dedication to research, and experience in the field. Many of the smart rings available today follow the example Oura set this past decade.

The upgrades from the Oura Ring Gen 3 to the Oura Ring 4 were mostly software-based, with minor hardware refinements. You can read more in my review, but the gist is a more accurate heart rate and blood oxygen algorithm, improved automatic activity detection, and an expanded range that spans size 4 to 15. The app has been redesigned to be less cluttered, and in the last few weeks, Oura also officially launched an AI chatbot. (Of the AI chatbots in health trackers I’ve tested, this one is among the more polished implementations, though it often feels like Captain Obvious-level insights.)

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Every week, millions of Americans toss their recyclables into a single bin, trusting that their plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard boxes will be given a new life.

But what really happens after the truck picks them up?

Single-stream recycling makes participating in recycling easy, but behind the scenes, complex sorting systems and contamination mean a large percentage of that material never gets a second life. Reports in recent years have found 15% to 25% of all the materials picked up from recycle bins ends up in landfills instead.

Plastics are among the biggest challenges. Only about 9% of the plastic generated in the U.S. actually gets recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Some plastic is incinerated to produce energy, but most of the rest ends up in landfills instead.

So, what makes plastic recycling so difficult? As an engineer whose work focuses on reprocessing plastics, I have been exploring potential solutions.

How does single-stream recycling work?

In cities that use single-stream recycling, consumers put all of their recyclable materials − paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, and metal − into a single bin. Once collected, the mixed recyclables are taken to a materials recovery facility, where they are sorted.

First, the mixed recyclables are shredded and crushed into smaller fragments, enabling more effective separation. The mixed fragments pass over rotating screens that remove cardboard and paper, allowing heavier materials, including plastics, metal,s and glass, to continue along the sorting line.

Magnets are used to pick out ferrous metals, such as steel. A magnetic field that produces an electrical current with eddies sends nonferrous metals, such as aluminum, into a separate stream, leaving behind plastics and glass.

The glass fragments are removed from the remaining mix using gravity or vibrating screens.

That leaves plastics as the primary remaining material.

While single-stream recycling is convenient, it has downsides. Contamination, such as food residue, plastic bags and items that can’t be recycled, can degrade the quality of the remaining material, making it more difficult to reuse. That lowers its value.

Having to remove that contamination raises processing costs and can force recovery centers to reject entire batches.

Which plastics typically can’t be recycled?

Each recycling program has rules for which items it will and won’t take. You can check which items can and cannot be recycled for your specific program on your municipal page. Often, that means checking the recycling code stamped on the plastic next to the recycling icon.

These are the toughest plastics to recycle and most likely to be excluded in your local recycling program:

• Symbol 3 – Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, found in pipes, shower curtains, and some food packaging. It may contain harmful additives such as phthalates and heavy metals. PVC also degrades easily, and melting can release toxic fumes during recycling, contaminating other materials and making it unsafe to process in standard recycling facilities.
• Symbol 4 – Low-density polyethylene, or LDPE, is often used in plastic bags and shrink-wrap. Because it’s flexible and lightweight, it’s prone to getting tangled in sorting machinery at recycling plants.
• Symbol 6 – Polystyrene, often used in foam cups, takeout containers, and packing peanuts. Because it’s lightweight and brittle, it’s difficult to collect and process and easily contaminates recycling streams.

Which plastics to include

That leaves three plastics that can be recycled in many facilities:

• Symbol 1 – Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, widely used in soda bottles.
• Symbol 2 – High-density polyethylene, or HDPE, commonly used in milk jugs and laundry detergent bottles.
• Symbol 5 – Polypropylene, PP, used in products such as pill bottles, yogurt cups and plastic utensils.

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