Global Water Crisis

More than half the world’s food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in a landmark review.

Half the world’s population already faces water scarcity, and that number is set to rise as the climate crisis worsens, according to a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water published on Thursday.


Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world’s water systems are being put under “unprecedented stress”, the report found.      READ MORE...

Publishing House Replaces Jobs with AI

Bild, the German tabloid owned and operated by major European publishing house Axel Springer, is expected to replace over a hundred human editorial jobs with artificial intelligence, a leaked email first obtained by the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ) has revealed.

The tabloid will "unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by AI and/or automated processes," the email reads, as reported by FAZ and translated by The Guardian.

According to the report, the email detailed that those who will be replaced by AI include "editors, print production staff, subeditors, proofreaders and photo editors," and that these time-honored human careers "will no longer exist as they do today."

The decision appears to be part of broader cost-cutting efforts across Axel Springer brands, including Insider, which also cut a large chunk of employees amid its own AI pivot earlier this year.

Though several publications across the media industry have experimented with incorporating AI into their workflows, the choice to fully automate hundreds of essential editorial roles with AI feels like a significant escalation. Bild might be a messy, politicized tabloid, but Axel Springer is the biggest publisher in Europe and others could be following suit soon.  READ MORE...

Wealthy To Pay More

California will soon become the first state to determine residents’ electricity fees based on their income as part of a new effort to spur households toward full electrification and bring down the state’s soaring electricity costs for low-income Californians.

Electricity bills are made up of fixed costs as well as fees that vary based on the amount of electricity residents use. Last year, the state passed a law giving the California public utilities commission a 1 July 2024 deadline to determine a fixed charge for household electric bills based on people’s income.

The new income-based electricity bills could hit residents’ mailboxes as soon as 2025. Based on proposals currently under consideration, residents who make more than $180,000 a year could pay about $500 more annually on their electricity bills, while Californians who make less than $28,000 annually could save up to $300 a year. The law is part of the state’s answer of how to equitably transition away from carbon as an energy source.

But state officials are already facing backlash from higher-income residents who don’t want to see their bills increase. The proposals have so far received more than 250 public with large number opposing the law.  READ MORE...

Chinese Hackers Target USA

A state-sponsored Chinese hacking group has been spying on a wide ange of US critical infrastructure organizations and similar activities could be occurring globally, western intelligence agencies and Microsoft have warned.

“The United States and international cybersecurity authorities are issuing this joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) to highlight a recently discovered cluster of activity of interest associated with a People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored cyber actor, also known as Volt Typhoon,” said a statement released by authorities in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK – countries that make up the Five Eyes intelligence network.


In a separate statement, Microsoft said Volt Typhoon had been active since mid-2021 and had targeted critical infrastructure in Guam, a crucial US military outpost in the Pacific Ocean. “Mitigating this attack could be challenging,” Microsoft said.   READ MORE...

Russian Elites & Putin

Friends, rivals and enemies took their seats in the Grand Kremlin Palace as Vladimir Putin gathered the country’s elite to formalise Russia’s illegal annexation of four occupied regions in Ukraine.

The ceremony was meant to portray strength and unity, but within 24 hours had been overshadowed by Russia’s failures on the battlefield. These losses, which continued into this week on the southern and eastern fronts in Ukraine, have led to a major, unprecedented rupture within the ruling class as the Kremlin seeks scapegoats for a series of military embarrassments.

The following account is based on 15 interviews with former government and defence officials, members of the military, political observers, journalists, opposition members, and an inmate at a prison where Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin recruited soldiers to join his mercenary group in Ukraine.                READ MORE...

Slave Traders Cheated

Copper manilla bracelets from a late 17th-century Royal African Company trader in the Western Approaches. Photograph: Seascape Artifact Exhibits Inc.

Early English enslavers sourced copper from Cornwall to create manilla bracelets, the grim currency of the transatlantic slavery trade, and used an impure mix to maximise their profits, according to a study.

Dr Tobias Skowronek, a German scientist, has conducted a scientific analysis of horseshoe-shaped bracelets that were exchanged over hundreds of years for enslaved people from Africa who were transported to Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean.

His study revealed that copper had been sourced from Cornwall decades earlier than previously thought, overturning assumptions that it had come primarily from Sweden and Flanders until the 1720s.  READ MORE...

Will Pelosi Go To Taiwan?

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has confirmed a visit to Asia this week but questions remain over whether it will include a stop in Taiwan.

In a press release on Sunday, Pelosi said a delegation would travel to the Indo-Pacific “to reaffirm America’s strong and unshakeable commitment to our allies and friends in the region”.

The delegation left Hawaii on Sunday and there will be stops in Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. Pelosi said they would hold “high-level meetings” in those countries to discuss the advancement of “shared interests and values” including peace and security. The press release did not mention Taiwan.

Pelosi was supposed to visit Taiwan in April but the trip was postponed after she contracted Covid-19. Recent reports suggesting Pelosi intended to visit in August have angered Beijing and prompted threats of military countermeasures. Some analysts have said it is one of the most dangerous moments in cross-strait relations in decades.

China considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province destined for reunification, and strongly objects to all acts that appear to support Taiwan as an independent sovereign state. In a phone call lasting more than two hours, China’s president, Xi Jinping, warned Joe Biden over what he considers China’s “territorial integrity”. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Xi said.  READ MORE...

Leonardo da Vinci's Anatomy Drawings

The veins and muscles of the arm drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. 

Photograph: Royal Collection Trust

Leonardo da Vinci’s notes on human anatomy remained largely forgotten until the mid-18th century when the Scottish anatomist William Hunter learned of them in the royal collection. A new exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, called Anatomy: A Matter of Death and Life, brings some of these drawings together with a variety of objects and artwork from the Scottish Enlightenment to illuminate the frequently tense relationship between the furthering of anatomical knowledge, and the need of early anatomists to procure dead bodies.

Leonardo got around the problem by working with elite patrons and by assisting an academic professor of anatomy; later Dutch and Scottish anatomists often had to pull bodies from gibbets and graveyards. Modern medicine, the art of postponing death, is built on a foundation of this grave robbery, but had its origins in a more collaborative, consensual attitude typified by Leonardo.

It’s an approach that has now returned: the exhibition closes with a moving series of videos from Edinburgh’s current professor of anatomy, a medical student and a member of the public, each explaining the vital role of bequests by people who leave their body to medical science.

Some of this history is unavoidably grisly: the exhibition resurrects the story of Burke and Hare, two Irishmen of Edinburgh who obtained bodies for the anatomist Robert Knox through the simple expedient of murdering them.

Burke’s fate was to be anatomised: on my way to tutorials in Edinburgh’s medical school I used to pass his skeleton, and it was a surprise to see it across the road in the museum. Burke’s signed confession has been loaned from the New York Academy of Medicine, and some detective work has unearthed details of the lives of his victims.

There is Johan Zoffany’s painting of William Hunter lecturing, and from Amsterdam, Cornelis Troost’s three-metre The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Willem Röell – more ghoulish (and more accurate) than Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, painted almost 100 years earlier.

One particularly striking exhibit is an early 19th-century petition, signed by 248 medical students, asking for bodies to be made available to them through legal means.  READ MORE...

Unfinished da Vinci Work

When the Italian polymath and Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci swore allegiance to the French king in 1516 and accepted François I’s invitation to make his home in France, he brought with him three of his most famous works. Saint John the Baptist, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and his most celebrated painting, Mona Lisa – all now hang in the Louvre in Paris.

Some Leonardo experts, however, suggest he may have arrived in France with another painting – one that remained unfinished – a work that he returned to and improved but never completed, despite keeping it near him for more than 30 years.

The mysterious Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, which Leonardo started some time in the 1480s, rarely leaves its permanent home in the Vatican Museums. Today, however, as the result of an exceptional loan agreement it is on display at the manor house at Clos Lucé – near the former royal château at Amboise on the Loire in western France – where Leonardo lived for just over two years until his death in 1519.

“Five hundred years after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, we will have the painting here for 100 days,” François Saint Bris, whose family owns the Clos Lucé, told the Observer.

“It’s extremely moving for us to have this work loaned to us. This is a singular canvas, a work in progress that comes more alive the more we look at it. In it we see the workings of Da Vinci’s brain, his techniques, his intelligence, his drawing. We hope visitors will come here to contemplate it.”

Fewer than 20 paintings by Leonardo are thought to have survived until now. Saint Jerome in the Wilderness is not the best nor, indeed, the brightest: the gloomy and largely colourless painting depicts the gaunt and penitent fourth-century saint – considered the father of the Christian church – beating his chest with a stone. At the bottom of the canvas the outline of the lion from whose paw Jerome has famously extracted a thorn lies sketched uncharacteristically ferocious, a change from its usual docile representation.  READ MORE...

Microplastics in Lungs

Microplastic pollution has been discovered lodged deep in the lungs of living people for the first time. The particles were found in almost all the samples analysed.

The scientists said microplastic pollution was now ubiquitous across the planet, making human exposure unavoidable and meaning “there is an increasing concern regarding the hazards” to health.

Samples were taken from tissue removed from 13 patients undergoing surgery and microplastics were found in 11 cases. The most common particles were polypropylene, used in plastic packaging and pipes, and PET, used in bottles. Two previous studies had found microplastics at similarly high rates in lung tissue taken during autopsies.

People were already known to breathe in the tiny particles, as well as consuming them via food and water. Workers exposed to high levels of microplastics are also known to have developed disease.

Microplastics were detected in human blood for the first time in March, showing the particles can travel around the body and may lodge in organs. The impact on health is as yet unknown. But researchers are concerned as microplastics cause damage to human cells in the laboratory and air pollution particles are already known to enter the body and cause millions of early deaths a year.

“We did not expect to find the highest number of particles in the lower regions of the lungs, or particles of the sizes we found,” said Laura Sadofsky at Hull York medical school in the UK,a senior author of the study. “It is surprising as the airways are smaller in the lower parts of the lungs and we would have expected particles of these sizes to be filtered out or trapped before getting this deep.”  READ MORE...

Greenwashing Scam

A Chevron drilling site near Midland, Texas. It’s unlikely PR firms will be able to serve the fossil-fuel industry as they have in the past. Photograph: Jessica Lutz/Reuters


This week a peer-reviewed study confirmed what many have suspected for years: major oil companies are not fully backing up their clean energy talk with action. Now the PR and advertising firms that have been creating the industry’s greenwashing strategies for decades face a reckoning over whether they will continue serving big oil.

The study compared the rhetoric and actions on climate and clean energy from 2009 to 2020 from the world’s four largest oil companies – ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP. Writing in the journal Plos One, researchers from Tohoku University and Kyoto University in Japan conclude that the companies are not, in fact, transitioning their business models to clean energy.

“The magnitude of investments and actions does not match discourse,” they write. “Until actions and investment behavior are brought into alignment with discourse, accusations of greenwashing appear well-founded.”

Although this isn’t the first time that oil companies have been accused of overstating their climate bona fides, it has never been set out quite so comprehensively, according to environmental sociologist Dr Robert Brulle at Brown University. “This is the first robust, empirical, peer-reviewed analysis of the activities–of the speech, business plans, and the actual investment patterns of the major oil companies regarding their support or opposition to the transition to a sustainable society,” he says.

Brulle says PR firms and advertising agencies that have created campaigns around the oil firms’ net-zero claims are now on notice. “There’s no plausible deniability that they are unaware of the activities of these companies after this paper has been published,” he says. “This paper clearly shows that these companies aren’t walking the talk.”  READ MORE...

Americans For Prosperity

The cries of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” rang throughout the marbled walls of the Wisconsin state assembly chamber. Disgusted Democratic politicians, some of whom had been up for over 60 hours by this point, punctuated their chants by throwing papers – and even drinks – at their Republican counterparts. Police officers had to be summoned to physically restrain one Democratic representative yelling “Cowards!” across the aisle.

The source of this confrontation, in the early hours of February 2011, was an unprecedented push by Wisconsin Republicans, led by the state’s newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, to slash the union rights held by most public workers. 

Walker argued that budget woes in the state necessitated the shift, and barrelled forward to eliminate the rights of virtually all public-sector workers to collectively bargain with government and to allow government employees to opt out of paying dues to their unions.

At first blush this might seem like a years-old local issue in a US state that rarely lights up the international headlines. Yet events in Wisconsin are crucial to understanding how a little-known, billionaire-funded organization, called Americans for Prosperity (AFP), has tilted American politics to the right. It is intertwined with, and rivals in size, the Republican party itself.

Where did Walker’s ultra-conservative labor agenda come from? As a candidate, Walker barely mentioned collective bargaining or union busting. And we know this plan did not come from voters. Before the legislation popped up on the agenda, Wisconsinites generally supported collective bargaining. Nationally, only about 40% of American adults favor curbs to public sector bargaining rights, and in Wisconsin, this minority level of support was about the same.

Instead, to understand what happened in Wisconsin – and what is happening in states across the country – we need to look to the underappreciated organization that is at the center of the political network created and directed by the billionaire conservative industrialists, Charles and David Koch.  READ MORE...

America's Billionaires Control Americans

A new study reveals how the wealthy engage in ‘stealth politics’: quietly advancing unpopular, inequality-exacerbating, highly conservative policies

If we judge US billionaires by their most prominent fellows, they may seem to be a rather attractive bunch: ideologically diverse (perhaps even tending center-left), frank in speaking out about their political views, and generous in philanthropic giving for the common good – not to mention useful for the goods and jobs they have helped produce.

The very top titans – Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates – have all taken left-of-center stands on various issues, and Buffett and Gates are paragons of philanthropy. The former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is known for his advocacy of gun control, gay rights, and environmental protection. George Soros (protector of human rights around the world) and Tom Steyer (focused on young people and environmental issues) have been major donors to the Democrats. 

In recent years, investigative journalists have also brought to public attention Charles and David Koch, mega-donors to ultra-conservative causes. But given the great prominence of several left-of-center billionaires, this may merely seem to right the balance, filling out a picture of a sort of Madisonian pluralism among billionaires.

Unfortunately, this picture is misleading. Our new, systematic study of the 100 wealthiest Americans indicates that Buffett, Gates, Bloomberg et al are not at all typical. Most of the wealthiest US billionaires – who are much less visible and less reported on – more closely resemble Charles Koch. 

They are extremely conservative on economic issues. Obsessed with cutting taxes, especially estate taxes – which apply only to the wealthiest Americans. Opposed to government regulation of the environment or big banks. Unenthusiastic about government programs to help with jobs, incomes, healthcare, or retirement pensions – programs supported by large majorities of Americans. Tempted to cut deficits and shrink government by cutting or privatizing guaranteed social security benefits.

How can this be so? If it is true, why aren’t voters aware and angry about it?  READ MORE...

Next Decade Predictions

At the beginning of every year, trend forecasters the world over put together expensive reports predicting what the future will bring. As a trend forecaster myself, I’ve read literally hundreds of predictions in the past few weeks made by the likes of McKinsey, WGSN and countless others so that you don’t have to. So, what do these professional speculators of the future think the next few years hold?

Many of the themes are predictable: automation, artificial intelligence, climate crisis and climate-related migration, virtual reality and augmented reality, China’s rising power, cryptocurrencies, Zoom, remote work and people agitating for their rights.

Like all predictions, these should be taken with a grain (or boulder) of salt. For example, the firm Mintel “predicts” that by 2030 “corporations will shape transnational politics”, something they have clearly already been doing for decades, or that by 2025 “more subtle gender labels will emerge”, something that’s also already here. Barclay’s 150 trends for investors to watch in the 2020s report, meanwhile, puts smartdust (microscopic sensor systems) in the same “unlikely to happen” quadrant as cryptocurrencies, which are booming. Needless to say, operating in the realm of the speculative and pandering to potential clients is an unsteady combination, though not without its jewels.

Still, here is a sampling of the big and compelling trends that forecasters seem convinced will come to pass, if not in 2021 then over the next five to 10 years:

1 Universal work from home policies
Remote work due to Covid-19 has exposed the inadequacies of compulsory office attendance; now that people are working from home, it will never go back to the way it used to be; geographical requirements around talent acquisitions will loosen or expand beyond urban centers.

2 End of the open-plan office
Besides being notoriously difficult for concentration and privacy, an airborne pandemic has lessened the appeal of cramming big groups of people shoulder to shoulder in a single room.

3 Digital commutes and forced mindfulness
Microsoft is reportedly introducing a “virtual commute” feature intended “to create mental bookends for the remote workday”. It is also partnering with the meditation app Headspace to add a new “emotional check-in feature”.

4 Carbon labelling for consumer goods
Like nutrition facts on food, listing carbon expenditures related to various products on their packaging or in marketing materials will become a norm. This could be used to justify higher prices for certain more “carbon-responsible” items.  READ MORE...

Islamophobia

Our analysis shows that almost two-thirds of articles paint Muslims in a negative light.

Miqdaad Versi is the founder of the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring

‘Muslims have been compelled to take libel action against newspapers and have won.’ Photograph: Terry Harris/Alamy

Last week, the Labour MP Naz Shah observed that “Islamophobia has now passed the ‘mainstream media test’”. The report published this week by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring shows that she’s right.

Consider some of the most egregious cases cited in the report. There was the Times, Telegraph, MailOnline and Express libelling a Scout group leader, Ahammed Hussain, in 2019, using a laundry list of anti-Muslim tropes; these included “allegations about using the Scout group to promote extremism, segregation of children, extensive links to antisemitic groups, and inviting banned preachers to the Mosque”. 

Or take the Mail on Sunday, which called council worker Waj Iqbal “a fixer” for paedophile taxi drivers in Rochdale. As he put it, his whole world crumbled, he lost his job, his “marriage ended and [he] couldn’t see [his] kids”. The impact of this kind of reporting cannot be overstated. While nothing can repair the harm caused, in both cases, the publishers had to pay very substantial libel damages and print apologies.

Many other similar examples published in the report show how Muslims have been compelled to take libel action against newspapers, and have won. If one considers the hundreds of thousands of pounds paid to settle these claims, what does this tell us about the price they are willing to pay to misrepresent Muslims?  READ MORE...

Mushroom Leather Gamechanger

Vegan leather alternative isn’t just the hot fashion must-have – it could teach us about consumption and waste

Grown in trays, mycelium is engineered to look and feel like calfskin or sheepskin Photograph: carla tramullas

Vegan alternatives to leather could save more than just animals. The scientists behind fashion’s new latest must-have – the “mushroom leather” handbag – believe that mycelium, a material grown from fungi which can be engineered to look and feel like calfskin or sheepskin, could help save the planet.

Speaking to the Guardian before a talk at the Business of Fashion Voices conference in Oxfordshire, Dr Matt Scullin, CEO of biomaterials company MycoWorks, forecast that mushroom leather could be a sustainability gamechanger, “unlocking a future of design which begins with the material, not with the object”.

Fine Mycelium, a patented material which can be grown from fungi in trays in a matter of weeks, replicates the appearance and feel of leather while outperforming it in strength and durability. The material recently made its high fashion debut as an exclusive Hermès handbag.  READ MORE...

China Warns US Businesses

Vice-foreign minister Xie Feng tells industry figures to push US government toward a ‘rational’ China policy and end ‘ideological’ conflicts

Comments to American businesses with interests in China come amid simmering tensions between the world’s two largest economies. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

Beijing has urged US business groups with interests in China to “speak out” and lobby the US government in its defence, warning that as bilateral relations deteriorate they cannot make money “in silence”.

The vice-foreign minister Xie Feng, in charge of managing China’s relationship with the US, also urged against political boycotts of the upcoming Beijing Winter Olympics, saying it harms the interests of athletes and was “unpopular”.

Key business groups including the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai and the US-China Business Council, met Xie at a virtual forum on Tuesday, according to a transcript of his address.

In his address, published by the ministry of foreign affairs, Xie urged the US business representatives to “speak up and speak out, and push the US government to pursue a rational and pragmatic policy towards China, stop conducting wars in trade, industry and technology, and stop creating … ideological and geopolitical confrontations and conflicts”.

The meeting’s warning added to letters sent by China’s embassy in Washington directly to US businesses last month, making similar threats and urging them to lobby against US bills that would affect Chinese interests.

Xie praised the recent meeting between the US president, Joe Biden, and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in seeking to restore the relationship, and said that when bilateral relations were good, economic and trade cooperation was smoother.  READ MORE...

Fossil Fuels

24 November 2021
Fossil Fuels: Stranded Assets and Fire Sales
By Gwynne Dyer


An article with the innocuous title ‘Reframing Incentives for Climate Policy Action’ slipped out in the scientific journal ‘Nature Energy’ three weeks ago and got very little attention, presumably because of the hopeless title. But it’s not innocuous at all. It’s explosive.


It explains why about half of the world’s oil and gas industry will die in the next 15 years, while the other half enjoys one last frenzied round of growth. Listen carefully, and you can already hear the smart money starting to move.


As the lead author of the article, Jean-François Mercure of Exeter University, told The Guardian: “People will keep investing in fossil fuels until suddenly the demand they expected does not materialise and they realise what they own is worthless.” Stranded assets, in other words. But that won’t happen everywhere in fifteen years’ time; just in some places.


The authors of the article took the national pledges of ‘Net Zero by 2050’ that have proliferated across the planet recently, worked out what that implies in terms of declining demand for oil and gas, and identified which oil- and gas-exporting countries will still be in the game by the mid-2030s.


Not all the Net Zero pledges will be kept in full, of course, but there will be still enough cuts in fossil fuel use, soon enough, to create a nightmare of falling global demand for all the fossil-fuel producers of the world. Anybody can see that. It takes a little more work to calculate who goes under and who doesn’t – or at least not right away.


What they foresee is that the lowest-cost producers, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, will go for broke. Nobody can compete with them on price (they can make a profit even when oil costs only $20 a barrel), so they will flood the world market with cheap oil.


They haven’t done that in the past because they could make much more per barrel if the supply stayed tight. But that’s a long-term perspective, and there is no long term for fossil fuels any more.


If it is clear that a lot of oil and gas assets are going to stay in the ground forever, then it is your patriotic duty to make sure that the stranded assets belong to other countries, not to yours.


So drop your price to $20 a barrel, drive all the higher cost competitors out of the market, and sell as much you can before demand collapses entirely.


The authors of the paper calculate that Saudi Arabia, for example, could earn $1.7 trillion before demand completely dries up if it goes the ‘fire sale’ route, compared to only $1.3 trillion if it cooperates with all the non-Arab members of OPEC and tries to hold oil and gas prices up. $400 billion is a big difference, so which way do you think they’ll jump?


Who goes to the wall first in this scenario? High-cost producers working in tar sands, oil shales, deep water and Arctic areas, so Canada, the United States, Latin America (mostly Mexico and Brazil), and Russia. But even the lowest-cost producers go broke by 2050, if all those ‘Net Zero by 2050' pledges come true.


Maybe all these changes can happen without grave impacts on other parts of the global economy, but history suggests otherwise. If too many players realise their assets are stranded at the same time, we could get the mother of all market crashes out of this.


Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘The Shortest History of War’.

Consciousness Understood by Dreaming

The ability to control our dreams is a skill that more of us are seeking to acquire for sheer pleasure. But if taken seriously, scientists believe it could unlock new secrets of the mind.

Michelle Carr is frequently plagued by tidal waves in her dreams. What should be a terrifying nightmare, however, can quickly turn into a whimsical adventure – thanks to her ability to control her dreams. She can transform herself into a dolphin and swim into the water. Once, she transformed the wave itself, turning it into a giant snail with a huge shell. “It came right up to me – it was a really beautiful moment.”

There’s a thriving online community of people who are now trying to learn how to lucid dream. (A single subreddit devoted to the phenomenon has more than 400,000 members.) Many are simply looking for entertainment. “It’s just so exciting and unbelievable to be in a lucid dream and to witness your mind creating this completely vivid simulation,” says Carr, who is a sleep researcher at the University of Rochester in New York state. Others hope that exercising skills in their dreams will increase their real-life abilities. “A lot of elite athletes use lucid dreams to practise their sport.”

Sleep researcher Michelle Carr says she can tranform herself into a dolphin during her lucid dreams. 

“It’s just so exciting and unbelievable,” she says. Photograph: TEDX/YouTube

And there are more profound reasons to exploit this sleep state, besides personal improvement. By identifying the brain activity that gives rise to the heightened awareness and sense of agency in lucid dreams, neuroscientists and psychologists hope to answer fundamental questions about the nature of human consciousness, including our apparently unique capacity for self-awareness. “More and more researchers, from many different fields, have started to incorporate lucid dreams in their research,” says Carr.

This interest in lucid dreaming has been growing in fits and starts for more than a century. Despite his fascination with the interaction between the conscious and subconscious minds, Sigmund Freud barely mentioned lucid dreams in his writings. Instead, it was an English aristocrat and writer, Mary Arnold-Forster, who provided one of the earliest and most detailed descriptions in the English language in her book Studies in Dreams.  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS, CLICK HERE...

Meyers Briggs Takeover

The MBTI’s different permutations amount to 16 types of personality, each with innate strengths and blind spots. Illustration: Ricardo Cavolo/The Guardian


Deemed ‘astrology for businessmen’ for some, lauded as life-saving by others, the personality tests are a ‘springboard’ for people to think about who they are

Iam a born executive. I am obsessed with efficiency and detached from my emotions. I share similarities with Margaret Thatcher and Harrison Ford. I am among 2% of the general population, and 1% of women.

People like us are highly motivated by personal growth, and occasionally ruthless in the pursuit. We make difficult partners and parents, but good landscape architects. We are ENTJs: extroverted, intuitive, thinking, judging – also known as the executive type or, sometimes, “the Commander”.

This, over a decade ago, was my auspicious entry into the world of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Based on psychiatrist Carl Jung’s theories of personality, the assessment maintains that we are all born with a preference for extroversion or introversion, intuition or sensing, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving.

The different permutations amount to 16 types of personality, each with innate strengths and “blind spots”. By understanding which one we are, so the theory goes, we might apply ourselves more effectively in our personal and professional lives.
As an insecure teenager, finding out my type online was like being handed an instruction manual

The business of “typing” people generates the Myers-Briggs Company a reported $20m annually from public and private institutions, militaries and universities, charities and sports teams who make use of it – not to mention 88 of the Fortune 100 companies. Away from the corporate world, the Myers-Briggs theory of personality has been embraced by enthusiasts as a hobby – even a way of life.

As an insecure teenager, finding out my type online was like being handed an instruction manual; ENTJ became as much part of my identity as my astrological sign. Even a decade later, I will still catch myself reaching for Myers-Briggs terms – talking about “thinkers versus feelers”, or having mostly “intuitive” friends.

About 50 million people have taken the MBTI since the 1960s; 2 million continue to do so every year. Why is the idea of there being just 16 types still so seductive?  READ MORE