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Sterile, isolating, and stressful: Todays hospitals can kindle deep discomfort. Because they must be designed adequately for everyone, theyre designed perfectly for no one. So, what would our healthcare experience look like if physical hospitals were to disappear altogether?
Artificial intelligence that is generative, predictive, and integrated, combined with the power of edge computing in every background device, will transform our very notion of hospitals. Healthcare will become a lifestyle so seamlessly woven into our daily experience that it will be invisible.
Why is this the future of healthcare? The trends are already apparent:
Evolving economics: As baby boomers transition to Medicare, millennials, Gen X and Gen Z are emerging as the primary healthcare consumers. These groups place an emphasis on convenience and personalization, and this social shift is influencing how we access care.
Modern living: Biometric data collection is being increasingly integrated into our homes and daily routines, and predictive AI is streamlining diagnostics and preventing diseases.
Converging technologies: Healthcare delivery has traditionally required specialized devices for every test and procedure, but the limitations of cost and size are fading. Advances in computation will converge functionalities, revolutionizing the patient experience in the process.
Strategies for success
In light of these trends, my firm has recently explored strategies for success in a changing healthcare landscape. They reflect our belief in a gradual transition toward decentralized healthcare and the integration of AI technology, celebrating our gradual societal progression towards an improved future, rather than a utopia that appears overnight. Here are some of these strategies.
Lean into wearable technology. Soon, health data will be paired with pattern-recognition AI to identify and predict all risk factors for disease. This is a future inflection point where almost all healthcare becomes preventative medicine. For example, instead of learning about our heart disease after a cardiac event, AI will accurately warn us of our impending heart attack decades before it happens.
Treat mental health as a community endeavor. The human body emits numerous indicators of psychological stress: elevated heart rate, tense muscles, and insomniawhich can be read by advanced biometric devices like an open book to our minds. Combined with large language model and diffusion model AI, a radical change in behavioral health could be at our fingertips. With AI-driven behavioral medicine available anywhere, anytime, communities could invest in public infrastructurelike augmenting parks to combine mental health with public green spaceto increase accessibility and fight social stigma.
Repurpose obsolete infrastructure: By 2051, gas stations may be obsolete, and diagnostic equipment that is expensive today will be cheaper, smaller, and more powerful. Repurposing existing gas stationsand other outdated infrastructureinto neighborhood health stations could efficiently disperse essential health services throughout communities.
Create personalized care environments: Unbound by location, cost and data availability, we can enjoy more personalized healthcare. For example, combining a labor and delivery room with augmented reality will make birth more comfortable by bridging the personal environment of a home birth with the medical sophistication of a specialty clinic. Floor-to-ceiling digital screens that respond to cortisol levels to create a calming atmosphere while displaying critical health information would have positive health impacts and improve patient satisfaction.
Integrate diagnostic screening into the home: Households will become data collection centers and bathrooms can become labs of the future by integrating AI into existing buildings. For example, imagine household appliances that track the type of food you keep on hand as a marker of your overall health or screen your biowaste for signs of sickness in real time. Your own digital health avatar will be updated every time you cook a meal or brush your teeth.
Today, a visit to the hospital entails finding a place to park in a busy lot, picking the right door to enter, and winding your way through confusing corridors past services you dont need, and ride elevators with people who cough without covering their mouths. Designers and architects have an opportunity to design a better way of doing things.
Its a safe bet the future of healthcare will be a messy evolution of technology, culture, and economy. Markets are demanding more personalized on-demand service, technology is getting smaller and cheaper every day, and AI continues to advance. As designers, we believe this leaves us free to envision healthcare first and foremost as experiences rather than buildings or places. By embracing solutions that are opportunistic and incremental, we can create a future where healthcare is invisible and omnipresent. As we move into a future where technology will diminish the constraining power of location, cost and data, designers must resolve to increase our commitment to human flourishing. We must work together to deliver healthcare that delights.
Mike Sewell is director of innovation at Gresham Smith.
Which came first: the up-for-grabs blame over inflation or the meme about it?
Either way, both have lately caused a stir on social media, where news about rising economic anxiety is now often yoked to three cheeky little words: Trump take egg.
One of the first major political memes to emerge on Bluesky in the Trump 2.0 era, Trump take egg, is a pithy, grammatically fraught way to assign ownership over a leading economic hardship. It can be found accompanying photos of empty store shelves, astronomically high prices, and signage about egg rationingthe kind of photos that haunted Bidens entire inflation-ravaged presidency.
Egg-ception
The idea for the meme hatched with Daytime Emmy-winning editor for TV and film Michael Tae Sweeney, who made the first recorded Trump take egg post on February 4. Sweeney got the inspiration for it not online but out in the wild, where he witnessed firsthand the sweeping panic over rising egg prices. During a weekday morning trip to a Costco in Southeast San Diego, he noticed the vibes were off as soon as he walked through the door.
Every single cart besides mine already had two cartons of 60 eggs in it, the most you were allowed to buy in one trip, he recalls. I bee-lined to the dairy section and was lucky to get some of the last eggs available that day. Other guys were pulling out their phones to take pictures of the empty egg case. It felt like it was all anyone wanted to talk aboutthe cashiers, the other grocery shoppers, my neighbors, the security guards at my kids’ daycare. That was weeks ago, and it’s only gotten worse since then.
Indeed, egg prices have soared over the past few weeks, as farmers have had to kill more and more of their chickens in an effort to contain an ongoing outbreak of avian flu. The average wholesale price for a dozen large white eggs broke the $8 threshold on Thursday, a new record, up from $6.55 on January 24.
Although it may scan as goofy, Trump take egg is an organic, free-range rallying cry, holding the presidents feet to the fire for his lapsed pledge to bring down food prices on Day Oneas he attempts to shift blame for it again and again. The message is starting to spread too. Not only has Trump take egg taken over Bluesky, where theres a dedicated account reposting some of its usage, its migrated to X and has also begun to hit TikTok.
A meme takes flight
Though the bird flu outbreak may have preceded Trumps term, some official acts on his watchin particular, the Department of Government Efficiency accidentally firing the USDA workers tasked with curbing bird flulikely did not help matters. Because the meme caught fire during a series of weeks in which egg prices soared, social media users now had a shared vocabulary to call out Trump for firing those workers in real time.
And though Sweeney has played ringleader to his own creation, posting it alongside egg news as often as possible, Trump take egg quickly took on a life of its own. Within days, random Bluesky users began tagging him in replies to their posts about eggs (and who took them). Some even started using the same cadence to assign blame for other consequences of Trumps presidency, posting comments such as Trump cause traffic after the president sought to end New York Citys congestion pricing program earlier this week.
The message seems to be resonating because it applies a refreshing light touch to a serious issue. So far, a lot of political and financial news in 2025 has had a bleak aura for many Americans, and tends to hit social media with doomsday gravity. Slapping Trump take egg on an entire segment of current events, though, has the disarming effect of wearing Groucho glasses with a doctors smock. It also helps keep attention and ownership on a pressing issue during a chaotic time.
Americans are angry and confused by the high price of eggs, understand it’s wrong, and understand that, on some level, Trump and the incompetent people running the country are responsible for it, Sweeney says. Being able to express all that real emotion in a tight three-word slogan just makes it easy for people, even if the slogan’s broken grammar is a little silly.
Although for now, the message is mainly restricted to left-leaning Bluesky, the sentiment behind it seems to be taking hold all over. A new poll from the Washington Post and Ipsos released on Thursday shows 53% of Americans disapprove of Trumps handling of the economy, his worst economic numbers since 2017. Another poll released the same day, by CNN and SRSS, reveals 62% of respondents say the president has not gone far enough in trying to reduce prices.
Despite Trumps efforts to deflect blame, it may now be harder than ever to wipe the egg off his face.
Siri Chilazi is a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Iris Bohnet is a professor of business and government at Harvard Kennedy School and co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program.
Whats the big idea?
Fairness is not merely a choice; it is a way of moving through the world. For life and work to exhibit more fairness, people need to embed fair behavior into everyday choices, routines, and systems. Everyone can show up in ways that allow for a diversity of people to be seen, heard, and valued at the table.
Below, co-authors Siri and Iris share five key insights from their new book, Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results. Listen to the audio versionread by Siri and Irisin the Next Big Idea App.
1. Fairness must be embedded in our systems.
At some hotels, room key cards both unlock doors and control the lights. This little bit of technology makes it more likely that the lights are off when leaving the room. This is our vision for fairness as well. We want to embed it into everything we do.
Fairness is not a program, it is a way of doing things, but it does not happen automatically. Only a few years ago, Swedish engineer Astrid Linder and her team developed the first crash test dummy built in the form of a womans body. And during COVID-19, personal protective equipment (PPE) was not made for everyone: not for those with small hands or large feet, and not for cultural dress codes that did not correspond with standard overalls. Unfairness can creep in anywhere: cars, protective gear, artificial intelligence, data for decision-making, and workplace procedures.
A few years ago, we were approached by one of the largest employers in Australia. People had applied to positions of leadership at this organization and they sent those who were not chosen an email inviting them to reapply. They found that men were about twice as likely to reapply than women. Why was this and what could they do to not lose that talent? We asked the organization, who exactly are you writing to? They responded that they only asked the top 20 percent of applicants to reapply. This was our opener.
Given that women have been found to be less self-confident, we suggested that we run a randomized control trial. Some applicants still got the email that was normally sent, but for others, we added one sentence sharing that they were among the top 20 percent of applicants. This edit completely closed the gender gap in reapplication rates. We fixed the system and equalized the playing field for all.
2. Make fairness count.
Ros Atkins, a TV presenter at the BBC, made fairness count when he realized he had no data to know if he featured women and men with equal frequency as experts on his nightly primetime news show. Atkins and his team decided to generate that data. They began spending two minutes at the end of each nights show counting how many women and men had appeared on screen during their one hour on air. This counting exercise illuminated that women made up only 39 percent of experts on aira much lower share than they had anticipated. They set themselves a target of reaching 50:50 gender representation and became more thoughtful about featuring a diversity of experts on air. Within four months, they hit their target and maintained it for years.
They also inspired hundreds of other BBC content-creating teams to join them in what has globally become 50:50 The Equality Project. Even though it wasnt an organizational mandate, Ros Atkins and his team made fairness count in their work. They simply knew that for journalism to be of the highest quality, it needed to represent the world they reported on. They tweaked their everyday ways of working to better deliver on that goal.
Even though it wasnt an organizational mandate, Ros Atkins and his team made fairness count in their work.
Another great example is Google, which discovered a few years ago that women were leaving the company at higher rates than men. A deeper dive into the data revealed that new mothers drove this pattern. Google tested a solution: increasing the length of leave available to all new parents from 12 to 18 weeks. Google continued to monitor the data and discovered that this solution worked to close the gender gap.
To make fairness count, we need to use the same tools we rely on to manage our daily work on incentives and accountability. Accountability, in particular, is critical because research shows that its one of the most powerful influences on behavior. For the 50:50 project, this meant that all participating teams could see each others data. When humans know that our actions are being watched, were more likely to be on our best behavior.
3. Make fairness stick.
For fairness to stick, we must build changes into existing practices and procedures.
Consider the resume: perhaps a benign document describing our educational and work experience, but whoever decided what a resume should look like? Two of our collaborators, Ariella Kristal and Oliver Hauser, took this to heart and tested the impact of a redesigned resume. They were interested in one specific issue: how we describe work experience.
They explored the impact that different ways of framing work experience on resumes have on the likelihood that an applicant will be invited to an interview. They responded to job postings by more than 9,000 employers in the United Kingdom and presented job history either by displaying a single number indicating how many years a job was held or (as it is commonly done) by indicating the dates during which the applicants worked in a given job.
The change in framing made the applicants acquired expertise salient while obfuscating employment gaps. When prior work experience was shown by the number of years worked, without any dates, it increased the likelihood that a candidate would be invited to an interview by 15 percent. This finding held for women and men. While this reframing is gender-neutral, it will disproportionately benefit those more likely to have had career breaks: women.
4. Make fairness normal.
Before the pandemic, flexible work was typically a special accommodation available only by request and not always granted. For decades, research has shown that providing flexible work options for everyone improves retention, employee satisfaction, and productivity. Studies in the U.K. and Switzerland even showed that job postings advertised as flexible received up to 30 percent more applications, especially from women. It took COVID-19 for most organizations to accept flexible work as a default option for all their workers.
Closing perception gaps shifts what people view as normal and, therefore, what they end up doing.
Employees and job seekers pay attention to company signals about their norms and culture. Drivers do the same. In Montana, 85 percent of drivers reported using seat belts, but they estimated that only 60 percent of other drivers would do so. In Saudi Arabia, married men similarly underestimated the share of other husbands who support their wives working outside the home. Eighty-seven percent of Saudi men said they were supportive, but they believed only 63 percent of their peers would be.
Closng perception gaps shifts what people view as normal and, therefore, what they end up doing. Like in meetings, if your workplace has a culture of rampant interruptions, it can be hard to get the full benefit of everyones ideas. One simple way to shift this norm is to interrupt the interrupter like this: I look forward to hearing what you have to say, but please let Nicole finish her point first. Soon, interruptions will likely become less common because they are no longer tolerated or viewed as normal.
5. Make fairness personal.
In the film Hidden Figures, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan were three brilliant mathematicians who worked for NASA during the space race in the 1960s. Jackson became the first female African American engineer at NASA, Vaughan was the space agencys first African American supervisor, and Johnson conducted crucial research on flight trajectories for various space shuttle missions. Role models matter. Seeing is believing.
A few years ago, India amended its constitution with the provision that a third village head position had to be held by women. Seeing women in leadership changed what women in these villages thought was possible for themselves. They became politically active, spoke up in town hall meetings, and were likelier to run for political office. The role models inspired parents who reported that one of the core career aspirations for their daughters was to become a politician. You can be one of these role models. You can also change the portraits on your office walls to ensure they represent everyone. You can inspire others to dare.
The crux of making work fair is that it must be part of every single persons job. No matter your role, seniority, or activities, there is something that you personally can do to make work more fair. We liken this to communications. Most companies have a dedicated corporate communications department that handles high-profile press releases and CEO speeches. But simultaneously, every employee writes emails, speaks in meetings, and creates slide decks daily.
Make small changes in the way you work and share them with others. Shift what people see as normal or what people expect as the way to do things. Together, we can get further faster and see real results unlike ever before.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Who wouldnt want a DOGE dividend? Such an idea is evidently being floated at the highest levels of government.
DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, is currently slashing through the federal budget in what it says is an effort to weed out waste and fraud, lower the budget deficit, and claw back money for the taxpayers. As part of that, one idea that made its way to Elon Muskwho is (or perhaps is not) leading DOGEwas that some of the savings that DOGE is finding could be returned to taxpayers in the form of $5,000 checks, or DOGE dividends or “stimulus,” as some are calling them.
On X this week, Musk said that he would “check with the president” about doing it, and President Trump himself has since said hes open to the idea.
While most Americans would no doubt love to have an extra $5,000, how realistic is the idea? Not very, say experts.
Could DOGE even send out checks?
While the infrastructure exists to send checks to taxpayers, the executive branch can’t do so on its own. Congress would need to step up first, says Zachary Liscow, a professor of law at Yale Law School who served as chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) at the White House in 2022 and 2023.
In terms of technical feasibility, can the government send out a bunch of $5,00 checks? The answer is yes, Liscow says.
But there are major challenges with doing so, he adds, first and foremost being that this would need to be a statute passed by Congress. Its not in the ability of the executive branch to send out checks without authorization from Congress.
Additionally, Liscow says that the money, or savings that DOGE is finding, simply isnt there. Its wildly unfeasible, it is impossible, for Musk to save $2 trillion in a year and a half, which Musk said, at one point, was DOGEs goal.
The federal government spent $6.75 trillion during fiscal year 2024, which ended in September, and most of that was mandatory spending. DOGE would be looking to cut discretionary spending, which would include National Parks, defense spending, border security, and much more.
Even with wide-ranging cuts or proposed cuts, DOGE still wouldnt even come close to shaving off $2 trillion, Liscow says. You add it all up, and theyre going to be orders of magnitude off. It strikes me as a stunt. Its fake math, he says.
Fast Company has reached out to DOGE for comment.
What is DOGE actually up to?
If DOGE is unable to deliver on its promises of saving trillions, then the question becomes: What exactly is it doing? So far, it seems like the answer is clear: Trollololol.
Thats according to Martha Gimbel, executive director and cofounder of the Budget Lab at Yale, a nonpartisan policy research center that analyzes federal policy proposals and their potential effects on the economy.
In effect, even as DOGE has caused a lot of waves in recent weeks, it hasnt really done anything to further its goals. It is incredibly unclear how much spending DOGE has actually cut, and how much spending they have legally cutand those are two separate questions. The best data we have about how much the government is spending, you cant see any impact at all. So theyve accomplished basically nothing, except the degradation of government services.
By Gimbels calculation, even if you assume DOGE has cut $8.5 billionwhich is what it claims to have cut so fartaking that and sending out a check to each taxpayer would net them around $50, nowhere near $5,000. Not only that, but it would run counter to DOGEs stated goal of decreasing federal spending.
Technically, they keep saying the point of DOGE is to cut the deficit, which is quite large. If you were going to plow any savings back to the taxpayer, then youre still left with the deficit problem. Youre not doing anything at all, Gimbel says.
This is all to say that, no, you should not expect to receive a DOGE dividend check anytime soon, and certainly not a $5,000 one, despite what youre hearing from those in and around the White House.
We really are in a situation where theres a lot that is being promised to Americans, but none of its being delivered, Gimbel says. There are ways you could do this in a way that makes the government function better, be more efficient, and get better outcomes for the taxpayer. Instead, theyre slashing and burning.
Information on the internet might seem like its there forever, but its only as permanent as people choose to make it.
Thats apparent as the second Trump administration floods the zone with efforts to dismantle science agencies and the data and websites they use to communicate with the public. The targets range from public health and demographics to climate science.
We are a research librarian and policy scholar who belong to a network called the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of nonprofits, archivists and researchers who rely on federal data in our analysis, advocacy and litigation and are working to ensure that data remains available to the public.
In just the first three weeks of Trumps term, we saw agencies remove access to at least a dozen climate and environmental justice analysis tools. The new administration also scrubbed the phrase climate change from government websites, as well as terms like resilience.
Heres why and how Public Environmental Data Partners and others are making sure that the climate science the public depends on is available forever.
Why government websites and data matter
The internet and the availability of data are necessary for innovation, research and daily life.
Climate scientists analyze NASA satellite observations and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather records to understand changes underway in the Earth system, whats causing them and how to protect the climates that economies were built on. Other researchers use these sources alongside Census Bureau data to understand who is most affected by climate change. And every day, people around the world log onto the Environmental Protection Agencys website to learn how to protect themselves from hazards and to find out what the government is or isnt doing to help.
If the data and tools used to understand complex data are abruptly taken off the internet, the work of scientists, civil society organizations and government officials themselves can grind to a halt. The generation of scientific data and analysis by government scientists is also crucial. Many state governments run environmental protection and public health programs that depend on science and data collected by federal agencies.
Removing information from government websites also makes it harder for the public to effectively participate in key processes of democracy, including changes to regulations. When an agency proposes to repeal a rule, for example, it is required to solicit comments from the public, who often depend on government websites to find information relevant to the rule.
And when web resources are altered or taken offline, it breeds mistrust in both government and science. Government agencies have collected climate data, conducted complex analyses, provided funding and hosted data in a publicly accessible manner for years. People around the word understand climate change in large part because of U.S. federal data. Removing it deprives everyone of important information about their world.
Bye-bye data?
The first Trump administration removed discussions of climate change and climate policies widely across government websites. However, in our research with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative over those first four years, we didnt find evidence that datasets had been permanently deleted.
The second Trump administration seems different, with more rapid and pervasive removal of information.
In response, groups involved in Public Environmental Data Partners have been archiving climate datasets our community has prioritized, uploading copies to public repositories and cataloging where and how to find them if they go missing from government websites.
As of Feb. 13, 2025, we hadnt seen the destruction of climate science records. Many of these data collection programs, such as those at NOAA or EPAs Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, are required by Congress. However, the administration had limited or eliminated access to a lot of data.
Maintaining tools for understanding climate change
Weve seen a targeted effort to systematically remove tools like dashboards that summarize and visualize the social dimensions of climate change. For instance, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool mapped low-income and other marginalized communities that are expected to experience severe climate changes, such as crop losses and wildfires. The mapping tool was taken offline shortly after Trumps first set of executive orders.
Most of the original data behind the mapping tool, like the wildfire risk predictions, is still available, but is now harder to find and access. But because the mapping tool was developed as an open-source project, we were able o recreate it.
Preserving websites for the future
In some cases, entire webpages are offline. For instance, the page for the 25-year-old Climate Change Center at the Department of Transportation doesnt exist anymore. The link just sends visitors back to the departments homepage.
Other pages have limited access. For instance, EPA hasnt yet removed its climate change pages, but it has removed climate change from its navigation menu, making it harder to find those pages.
Fortunately, our partners at the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archives Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008.
If youre looking at a webpage and you think it should include a discussion of climate change, use the changes tool in the Wayback Machine to check if the language has been altered over time, or navigate to the sites snapshots of the page before Trumps inauguration.
What you can do
You can also find archived climate and environmental justice datasets and tools on the Public Environmental Data Partners website. Other groups are archiving datasets linked in the Data.gov data portal and making them findable in other locations.
Individual researchers are also uploading datasets in searchable repositories like OSF, run by the Center for Open Science.
If you are worried that certain data currently still available might disappear, consult this checklist from MIT Libraries. It provides steps for how you can help safeguard federal data.
Narrowing the knowledge sphere
Whats unclear is how far the administration will push its attempts to remove, block or hide climate data and science, and how successful it will be.
Already, a federal district court judge has ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions removal of access to public health resources that doctors rely on was harmful and arbitrary. These were put back online thanks to that ruling.
We worry that more data and information removals will narrow public understanding of climate change, leaving people, communities and economies unprepared and at greater risk. While data archiving efforts can stem the tide of removals to some extent, there is no replacement for the government research infrastructures that produce and share climate data.
Eric Nost is an associate professor of geography at the University of Guelph.
Alejandro Paz is an energy and environment librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Since Donald Trump regained the presidency, he has coveted Greenland. Trump has insisted that the U.S. will control the island, currently an autonomous territory of Denmark, and if his overtures are rejected, perhaps seize Greenland by force.
During a recent congressional hearing, senators and expert witnesses focused on Greenlands strategic value and its natural resources: critical minerals, fossil fuels and hydropower. No one mentioned the hazards, many of them exacerbated by human-induced climate change, that those longing to possess and develop the island will inevitably encounter.
Thats imprudent, because the Arctics climate is changing more rapidly than anywhere on Earth. Such rapid warming further increases the already substantial economic and personal risk for those living, working and extracting resources on Greenland, and for the rest of the planet.
I am a geoscientist who studies the environmental history of Greenland and its ice sheet, including natural hazards and climate change. That knowledge is essential for understanding the risks that military and extractive efforts face on Greenland today and in the future.
Greenland: Land of extremes
Greenland is unlike where most people live. The climate is frigid. For much of the year, sea ice clings to the coast, making it inaccessible.
An ice sheet, up to 2 miles thick, covers more than 80% of the island. The population, about 56,000 people, lives along the islands steep, rocky coastline.
While researching my book When the Ice is Gone, I discovered how Greenlands harsh climate and vast wilderness stymied past colonial endeavors. During World War II, dozens of U.S. military pilots, disoriented by thick fog and running out of fuel, crashed onto the ice sheet. An iceberg from Greenland sunk the Titanic in 1912, and 46 years later, another sunk a Danish vessel specifically designed to fend off ice, killing all 95 aboard.
Now amplified by climate change, natural hazards make resource extraction and military endeavors in Greenland uncertain, expensive and potentially deadly.
Rock on the move
Greenlands coastal landscape is prone to rockslides. The hazard arises because the coast is where people live and where rock isnt hidden under the ice sheet. In some places, that rock contains critical minerals, such as gold, as well as other rare metals used for technology, including for circuit boards and electrical vehicle batteries.
The unstable slopes reflect how the ice sheet eroded the deep fjords when it was larger. Now that the ice has melted, nothing buttresses the near-vertical valley walls, and so, they collapse.
A massive rockslide, triggered by permafrost melt, tumbled down the fjord wall and into the water at Assapaat, West Greenland. [Photo: Kristian Svennevig/GEUS]
In 2017, a northwestern Greenland mountainside fell 3,000 feet into the deep waters of the fjord below. Mments later, the wave that rockfall generated (a tsunami) washed over the nearby villages of Nuugaatsiaq and Illorsuit. The water, laden with icebergs and sea ice, ripped homes from their foundations as people and sled dogs ran for their lives. By the time it was over, four people were dead and both villages lay in ruin.
Steep fjord walls around the island are littered with the scars of past rockslides. The evidence shows that at one point in the last 10,000 years, one of those slides dropped rock sufficient to fill 3.2 million Olympic swimming pools into the water below. In 2023, another rockslide triggered a tsunami that sloshed back and forth for nine days in a Greenland fjord.
Theres no network of paved roads across Greenland. The only feasible way to move heavy equipment, minerals and fossil fuels would be by sea. Docks, mines and buildings within tens of feet of sea level would be vulnerable to rockslide-induced tsunamis.
Melting ice will be deadly and expensive
Human-induced global warming, driven by fossil fuel combustion, speeds the melting of Greenlands ice. That melting is threatening the islands infrastructure and the lifestyles of native people, who over millennia have adapted their transportation and food systems to the presence of snow and ice. Record floods, fed by warmth-induced melting of the ice sheet, have recently swept away bridges that stood for half a century.
As the climate warms, permafrost frozen rock and soil which underlies the island, thaws. This destabilizes the landscape, weakening steep slopes and damaging critical infrastructure.
Permafrost melt is already threatening the U.S. military base on Greenland. As the ice melts and the ground settles under runways, cracks and craters form a hazard for airplanes. Buildings tilt as their foundations settle into the softening soil, including critical radar installations that have scanned the skies for missiles and bombers since the 1950s.
Greenlands icebergs can threaten oil rigs. As the warming climate speeds the flow of Greenlands glaciers, they calve more icebergs in the ocean. The problem is worse close to Greenland, but some icebergs drift toward Canada, endangering oil rigs there. Ships stand guard, ready to tow threatening icebergs away.
Greenlands government banned drilling for fossil fuels in 2021 out of concern for the environment. Yet, Trump and his allies remain eager to see exploration resume off the island, despite exceptionally high costs, less than stellar results from initial drilling, and the ever-present risk of icebergs.
As Greenlands ice melts and water flows into the ocean, sea level changes, but in ways that might not be intuitive. Away from the island, sea level is rising about an inch each six years. But close to the ice sheet, its the land thats rising. Gradually freed of the weight of its ice, the rock beneath Greenland, long depressed by the massive ice sheet, rebounds. That rise is rapid more than 6 feet per century. Soon, many harbors in Greenland may become too shallow for ship traffic.
Greenlands challenging past and future
History clearly shows that many past military and colonial endeavors failed in Greenland because they showed little consideration of the islands harsh climate and dynamic ice sheet.
Changing climate drove Norse settlers out of Greenland 700 years ago. Explorers trying to cross the ice sheet lost their lives to the cold. American bases built inside the ice sheet, such as Camp Century, were quickly crushed as the encasing snow deformed.
In the past, the American focus in Greenland was on short-term gains with little regard for the future. Abandoned U.S. military bases from World War II, scattered around the island and in need of cleanup, are one example. Forced relocation of reenlandic Inuit communities during the Cold War is another. I believe that Trumps demands today for American control of the island to exploit its resources are similarly shortsighted.
However, when it comes to the planets livability, Ive argued that the greatest strategic and economic value of Greenland to the world is not its location or its natural resources, but its ice. That white snow and ice reflect sunlight, keeping Earth cool. And the ice sheet, perched on land, keeps water out of the ocean. As it melts, Greenlands ice sheet will raise global sea level, up to about 23 feet when all the ice is gone.
Climate-driven sea level rise is already flooding coastal regions around the world, including major economic centers. As that continues, estimates suggest that the damage will total trillions of dollars. Unless Greenlands ice remains frozen, coastal inundation will force the largest migration that humanity has ever witnessed. Such changes are predicted to destabilize the global economic and strategic world order.
These examples show that disregarding the risks of natural hazards and climate change in Greenland courts disaster, both locally and globally.
Paul Bierman is a fellow of the Gund Institute for Environment and a professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Vermont.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The official White House social media account is under fire for posts that resemble something typically found on the internet forum 4chan.
A post shared on February 14, styled like a Valentines card, read, “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally and well deport you.” It has since been viewed 36.6 million times. While many of President Donald Trumps supporters praised the message, others condemned it as callous. I thought this was a parody account at first. Absolutely disgusting! one X user commented. Classless, another simply put.
Happy Valentine's Day pic.twitter.com/6d7qmo7gtz— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 14, 2025
On February 18, another post tapped into the ASMR trendshort for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” a term for the tingling sensation some people experience in response to certain sounds or visuals. The video featured audio of a plane, chains clinking against the ground, handcuffs being fastened, and footsteps ascending a metal staircase. It was titled, ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.
ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight pic.twitter.com/O6L1iYt9b4— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 18, 2025
X owner and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief Elon Musk reposted the video writing, Haha, wow, accompanied by Frankenstein and gold medal emojis. Many commenters, however, were alarmed by the apparent trivialization of a serious humanitarian issue. And youre telling me this isnt a fascist dictatorship? Making ‘ASMR’ about a human being being deported is beyond cruel. Thats some cartoon type evil, one wrote.
Another commented: As a European watching this reality show called ‘American Politics’ unfold, I didn’t think they could go any lower at this point.
The White House posts signal a shift in tone and strategy from the norm for official accounts of those governing the country. Rather than maintaining a neutral, bureaucratic voice, the White Houses official X account now resembles that of a social media troll. In response to the backlash, White House spokesman Harrison Fields told The New York Times, President Trump is committed to using every direct line of communication to the American people.
While the 2024 electionand the interminable discourse surrounding Kamala HQ and Brat summerproved there is room within politics for internet lingo, the question remains: Where should the line be drawn for an official government account?
A glance at the days headlines reveals a universal truth: Leadership matters.
Whether uplifting and ethical or toxic and abusive, leaders profoundly shape our lives. And this is especially true on the job. Research consistently shows that leadership influences employees attitudes, behaviors and emotions, driving key organizational outcomes such as creativity, employee engagement, well-being and financial performance.
Unfortunately, research also shows that supervisors abuse their employees far too often and then try to manage impressions to compensate for their bad behavior. But what happens when a leader tries to make up for past abuse by suddenly acting ethically? And do employees have to experience the abuse firsthand for it to hurt them?
As professors who study management and whove heard horror stories of employees working under mercurial bosses we wanted to find answers. So we conducted a study, which was recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Our research includes multiple samples of full-time employees in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. To begin, we surveyed 222 employees and 66 supervisors to gather insights into workplace leadership and work experiences. We focused on two contrasting leadership behaviors: ethical leadership and abusive supervision. We also conducted experiments with 400 people, presenting them with stories about managers who alternately display both ethical leadership and abusive supervision and asking them how they would respond.
Across these studies, we found that employees who experience such oscillating leadership often end up worse off in terms of their emotional well-being and job performance than if they were consistently being abused. By going back and forth between abusive and ethical behaviors, leaders create greater confusion, leaving their employees emotionally exhausted.
Instead of providing relief, acts of ethical leadership ironically serve to amplify the damage done by prior abusive behavior.
Jekyll and Hyde leadership in practice
As an example, consider Steve Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple for more than a decade until his death in 2011. While Jobs was an icon to many people, he reportedly swung between toxic and positive leadership behavior while dealing with subordinates.
For example, when Jobs exacting standards werent met, he would reportedly storm into meetings and profanely berate the team responsible for not living up to his lofty expectations. Yet, despite these outbursts, he was also described as a leader who believed in his employees potential, expressing unwavering confidence in their abilities and empowering them to exceed their own expectations.
This kind of unpredictable leadership can leave workers emotionally exhausted, wondering: Which version of my boss will show up today? Will this kindness last, or is it just a setup for another blow? Unsurprisingly, this isnt good for productivity.
Employees value stability and predictability in their leaders. A supervisor who bounces between harsh criticism and warm praise creates an emotional roller coaster for the team. When employees see a supervisor as unpredictable, they experience more stress and emotional exhaustion, which hurts their job performance and willingness to share ideas.
Interestingly, we found that workers dont even need to be directly targeted by an abusive supervisor to be affected; employees whose immediate supervisors get the Jekyll-and-Hyde treatment from their higher-ups suffer similar consequences.
These negative reactions occur, in part, because employees begin to doubt that their immediate supervisors are able to effectively influence higher-level leaders. In other words, the psychological toll of Jekyll-and-Hyde leaders isnt limited to direct encounters but can also be experienced vicariously.
How companies can banish Mr. Hyde
The good news is that organizations can break this cycle and workers are likely to be less stressed and more productive when they do. Here are three steps every organization can take:
Train leaders to manage stress without lashing out. High-pressure environments are prevalent these days, but abusive leader behavior doesnt have to be. Providing leaders with tools like emotional intelligence training and conflict resolution skills can help leaders navigate both personal and professional challenges more constructively.
Address the abusive behavior directly. When abusive actions occur, ignoring them or asking the leader to be nicer next time isnt enough. Structured interventions like one-on-one coaching, counseling or formal sanctions are essential for generating real change. Employees need to see that the organization is living up to its stated values and ideals.
Foster a culture of trust and accountability. Tools like 360-degree feedback reports which involve feedback from supervisors, peers and subordinates can help leaders gain deeper insight into their behaviors. These can be used not just for development, but also for heightened accountability. Creating a climate of psychological safety in which employees can report concerns without fear of retaliation is key to rebuilding trust. So is ensuring clear, consistent responses to reports of abusive supervision.
Great leaders understand the power of trust and setting an example. Employees want leaders they can rely on, not ones who keep them guessing. So leaders should be wary about employing ethical leadership as a quick fix for past mistakes. Rather, its about showing up consistently, authentically, and with integrity every single day.
For leaders at all levels, the takeaway is simple: Consistency fosters success. Organizations that prioritize stable, ethical leadership create workplaces where employees feel valued, supported and empowered to do their best work.
John Sumanth is a James Farr Fellow & associate professor of management at Wake Forest University.
Haoying Xu is an assistan professor of business at Stevens Institute of Technology.
Sean Hannah is chair of business ethics and a professor of management at Wake Forest University School of Business at Wake Forest University.
Sherry Moss is associate dean of MBA Programs at Wake Forest University School of Business at Wake Forest University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
An iconic eyewear brand has a new creative icon at its helm.
Ray-Ban announced today that rapper and fashion trendsetter A$AP Rocky will be its first-ever creative director.
In his new role, Rocky will lead Ray-Ban Studios, a sub label of Ray-Ban that it calls a creative hub celebrating self-expression. More broadly, hes tasked with reinventing and contemporizing the brand by overseeing creative projects including a new Blacked Out Collection, which will release in April. The collection redesigns iconic frames (think the Wayfarer and Clubmaster) with a brand-new black-out lens and gold-plated details.
Today, we are welcoming A$AP Rocky into our family; hes a visionary artist and creator, Ray-Ban president Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio says in a statement. His ability to push the boundaries of the diverse worlds he explores aligns with the Ray-Ban DNA. We are reinforcing the brands values of innovation, pioneering spirit, and courage.
Rocky has a history of wearing Ray-Bans. Most recently, in what is now seemingly a tell of the collaboration to come, Rocky wore Ray-Bans to his trial for two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, which ended last week with a not guilty verdict.
He also wore Ray-Bans to his first-ever fashion show American Sabotage last summer. The announcement follows the release of Rockys fourth album Dont be Dumb earlier this year. This isnt his first foray into fashion collaborations, either. The rapper, 36, has previously collaborated with JW Anderson, Guess, Puma, and Moncler.
Rockys onboarding comes at a moment of growth for the eyewear brands parent company, EssilorLuxottica. The holding company acquired Supreme last July, and announced a long-term partnership with Meta last September. Time will tell if A$AP Rocky’s affiliation with Ray-Ban will have a positive knock-on effect for the Meta partnership.
That depends on whether he can counter public perception of Mark Zuckerberg, who has a Midas touch of uncool and makes everything in his arm’s reach turn cringe, including the Ray-Ban wayfarers that are the center of the EssilorLuxottica-Meta smartglasses partnership. EssilorLuxottica saw group revenue up 9.4% in Q4, and has sold two million smartglasses since launch, according to its most recent quarterly report.
Rockys creative leadership at Ray-Ban will extend beyond glasses design. Hell also have a hand in the brands creative campaigns and redesign its retail stores, signaling a pivot point and an overhaul of the brand and its public perception at large. The company wrote that Rocky joins in a critical time in the evolution of Ray-Ban, in its announcement. EssilorLuxottica did not respond to a request for additional comment by time of publication.
Ive always admired Ray-Bans ability to stay true to its roots while constantly evolving, Rocky said in a statement. Im excited to be part of the strong heritage and develop the next chapter for an iconic brand like Ray-Ban.
You’ve probably heard AI is coming for many of our jobs. But how would you feel about getting a medical diagnosis from an AI doctor? Would you trust a verdict delivered by an AI judge?
A new study of 10,000 people in 20 countries, including the United States, India, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and China, found when it comes to artificial intelligence replacing human jobs, people are most concerned about AI replacing doctors and judges, and least concerned about AI replacing journalists.
The findings, published in American Psychologist by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, focused on the study participants’ attitudes to AI taking over six occupations: doctors, judges, managers, caregivers, religious leaders, and journalists.
Researchers looked at eight psychological traitswarmth, sincerity, tolerance, fairness, competence, determination, intelligence, and imaginationand assessed AIs potential to replicate these traits. The study’s findings suggest that when AI is introduced into a new job, people instinctively compare the human traits necessary for that job with AI’s ability to imitate them. The level of fear that study participants felt about AI taking certain jobs appeared to be directly linked to a “perceived mismatch between these human traits and AI’s capabilities.”
For example, the prospect of AI-driven doctors and care workers elicited strong fears in some countries due to concerns about AIs lack of empathy and emotional understanding.
But when researchers looked at widespread concerns about AI replacing human workers, they found people’s attitudes also varied widely among nations.
For example, people in the U.S., India, and Saudi Arabia reported being most afraid of AI’s role in jobs, particularly of judges and doctors, reflecting concerns about fairness, transparency, and moral judgment. (AI-driven journalists were the least feared, likely because people feel that they retain autonomy over how they engage with the information provided by journalists.)
However, people in China, Japan, and Turkey were least afraid of artificial intelligence overall. And other studies have found that people in China place less importance on controlling AI and more on connecting with AI compared to European Americans. They’ve also found that 47% of North Americans are worried about harmful AI, while only 25% of Southeast Asians and 11% of East Asians have similar feelings.
That is due, at least in part, to different countries having different traditions of depicting AI as benevolent or malicious, as well as different historical interactions with intelligent machines. It’s also affected by people in countries having been exposed to different governmental policies about AI.
