Insignis Nick Zelt

I’ve been stuck in social isolation, and I imagine that many of you have as well. So here’s a little nugget about the virus that has us all worked up right now so that we all know a little bit more about what we’re dealing with.

There are only three things in the world that you can control, those are your thoughts, feeling, and opinions. So imagine if these things could actually improve your life, or at least your health. Today’s gives evidence that you may be able to do just that, having a more positive outlook and being an optimist may be protective against heart disease and all-cause mortality. Optimism could save lives, so even if you can’t bring yourself to be an optimist maybe you can at least help out those arounds you.

Bet you’d thought we already knew about all of the body’s organs. I might actually be inclined to agree, yet this paper would better characterize a previously known space within the human body so that we may just have to start calling it an organ as well. The space between cells, the interstitium, might be more than just an incidental space between poorly fitting cells. Researchers are finally seeing what’s been right in front of them all along.

What else is there to do but get things done? Apparently far too much, so how do we do a bit better at getting some work done. I give a few personal types from my own experiences of trying to concentrate, and then we review a part comparing popular office space layouts to put one more voice into the open workspace debate.

What if we just put it all in a pile, then how much of it would there be? And what if we took one thing away, how much would be left? That’s probably how most of us think of statistics, and that’s pretty much exactly what today’s paper did! Put all the living stuff on earth together to see just how much there is. Plus a quick digression to start off the episode about that might have been in the pile if almost everything on earth hadn’t died since then. . .

Reference:
Bar-On, Yinon M. et al. "The Biomass Distribution On Earth". Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, vol 115, no. 25, 2018, pp. 6506-6511. Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.1711842115.

Host: Nick Zelt

Yet again we are reminded that temperatures are rising. Nothing on our dear planet will be spared, and that include the strange little organisms we call coral. Today’s episode talks about the effects that rising ocean temperatures have on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.
Spoiler: It doesn’t help anything.

Reference:
Hughes, Terry P. et al. "Global Warming Transforms Coral Reef Assemblages". Nature, vol 556, no. 7702, 2018, pp. 492-496. Springer Nature, doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0041-2.

Host: Nick Zelt