Households could save more than £400 a year on energy bills if clocks are not put back at the end of October,【C1】_____an expert, who said it would help people with the cost of living crisis and reduce【C2】_____on the National Grid this winter.

Evening energy demand【C3】_____between 5 pm and 7 pm during winter, when the sun has already set after daylight savings time ST). If clocks didn’t go back, it would【C4】_____ light for at least part of this time,【C5】_____carbon emissions and energy demand. Prof Aoife Foley, a clean energy expert at Queen’s University Belfast, said, “By simply【C6】__the winter DST in October, we save energy because we can reduce commercial and residential electrical demand as people leave work earlier, and go home earlier, meaning less lighting and heating is【C7】_____.”

This would help the governments【C8】_____the “energy war” in Europe, she said. “Dependent on weather conditions this winter it is very【C9】__we may need to start rationing energy very【C10】_____to avoid bigger energy issues in December and January,” she said.

There has long been【C11】_____over whether to scrap DST, which was introduced in 1916 to reduce energy demand. It still benefits some farmers,【C12】__is less popular among people who would prefer more light later in the day in winter, and is thought to cause sleep 【C13】__. It was【C14】_____proposed in 1907 by William Willett, a builder and the great, great grandfather of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who is well known for the song Clocks.

Foley did not【C15】_____gas savings or electricity and gas in the commercial or industrial sectors in her calculations, but she said these would offer “even more【C16】_____energy, cost and emissions reductions”, flattening the evening peak on energy demand by up to 10％.

Some critics of scrapping daylight savings are【C17】_____about road traffic collisions, but Foley’s research【C18】__most road deaths occur in good【C19】__during the day and outside built-up areas, and usually on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, with speed, tiredness and alcohol the main【C20】_____.

Scientific research is a social process that occurs over time with many minds contributing. But the public has been taught that scientific insight occurs when old guys with facial hair get hit on the head with an apple or go running out of bathtubs shouting “Eureka!” That’s not how it works, and it never has been. Rather, scientists work in teams, and those teams share findings with other scientists who often disagree, and then make more refinements. Then those findings are placed in the scientific record for even more scientists to examine and produce further adjustments. Eventually, theories become knowledge. All along the way, these scientists are conspicuously and magnificently human—with all the assets and flaws that humans possess.

It has somehow become a controversial idea to acknowledge that scientists are actual people. For some, the notion that scientists are subject to human error and frailty weakens science in the public eye. But scientists shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge their humanity. Individual scientists are always going to make a mistake eventually, and the objective truth that they claim to be espousing is always going to be revised. When this happens, the public understandably loses trust. The solution to this problem is doing the hard work of explaining how scientific consensus is reached—and that this process corrects for the human errors in the long run.

A raging debate has set in over whether the backgrounds and identities of scientists change the outcomes of research. One view is that objective truth is absolute and therefore not subject to human influences. But the history and philosophy of science argue strongly to the contrary. For example, Charles Darwin made major contributions to the most important idea in biology, but his book The Descent of Man contained many incorrect assertions about race and gender that reflected his adherence to prevalent social ideas of his time. Thankfully, evolution didn’t become knowledge the day Darwin proposed it, and it was refined over the decades by many points of view.

Amonolithicgroup of scientists will bring many of the same preconceived notions to their work. But a group of many backgrounds will bring different points of view that decrease the chance that one prevailing set of views will bias the outcome. This means that scientific consensus can be reached faster and with greater reliability. It also means that the applications and implications will be more just for all. Unfortunately, we’re nowhere close to achieving these goals. Science has had enormous trouble building a workforce that reflects the public it serves. And now, numerous state governments are trying to make it more difficult at the public universities in their states, and even within the scientific community.

In September 1983, President Reagan took a bold step and ordered the US military to make the then-new Global Positioning System (GPS) available to everyone. The change in policy wasn’t costless. Building the satellites, sending them to space and maintaining them ran into the billions. But Reagan believed having everyone use GPS would be worth it. He was right. GPS led to breakthrough innovation from fleet management to smartphones, created new global markets, and enabled societal progress at scale.

It may be time to apply the lesson from GPS to digital platforms.

In our data age, access to data is increasingly crucial—whether for economic success, innovation, or human survival. But data is unevenly distributed. A very small number of very large platforms companies collect and control huge amounts of data. Nobody else can access these potential wells of insights. Without sufficient data, we understand less and choose badly, individually and as a society.

Data access could help make mobility more efficient and sustainable. Today, Tesla cars collect mountains of data from sensors and send it to the mothership. That data is only used to advance Tesla’s self-driving capabilities. But the data could be far more useful. With it we could identify perilous road sections and city streets in need of a pedestrian crossing. Improved road safety could save lives and reduce the million plus annual deaths worldwide caused by traffic accidents.

Or take Alzheimer’s: the illness is likely caused by a combination of factors. To develop a cure requires a joint analysis of genetic and environmental data at scale. But that’s impossible because large industry players keep the relevant data to themselves. This isn’t just a problem for treating Alzheimer’s; it applies to most illnesses that affect humanity.

The solution is obvious and powerful. Like with other common goods such as security, justice, basic education and infrastructure, government action is needed. When it comes to access to data, government action is neither untested nor radical. We have made data accessible before when it was held by a powerful corporation. For instance, in the 1950s, the US government forced American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) to settle an antitrust lawsuit by mandating that all patents of its famous Bell Labs be opened to US businesses, including key transistor patents. Within years, this kickstarted what we now call Silicon Valley.

We face substantial challenges around the world—pandemics threatening our health, climate change and so on. Limiting access utterly fails to solve the big issues we face. The successes of markets tell us that the free flow of information is crucial—that to know more about the world leads to better informed decisions.

State and local authorities from New Hampshire to San Francisco have begun banning the use of facial recognition technology because the algorithms make lots of mistakes. Even if the tech gets more accurate, facial recognition could still unleash an invasion of privacy that could make anonymity impossible. Unfortunately, bans on its use by local governments have done little to curb adoption by businesses from start-ups to large corporations.

Automated facial recognition programs do have advantages, such as their ability to turn a person’s unique appearance into a biometric ID that can let phone users unlock their devices with a glance and allow airport security to quickly confirm travelers’ identities. To train such systems, researchers feed a variety of photographs to a machine-learning algorithm, which learns the features that are most salient to matching an image with an identity. The more data they amass, the more reliable these programs become.

Too often, though, the algorithms are deployed prematurely. In London, for example, police have begun using artificial-intelligence systems to scan surveillance footage in an attempt to pick out wanted criminals as they walk by—despite an independent review that found this system labeled suspects accurately only 19 percent of the time. An inaccurate system could falsely accuse innocent citizens of being miscreants, earmarking law-abiding people for tracking and harassment.

Some companies are attempting to improve their systems by feeding them more faces— but they are not always doing it in ethical ways. Google contractors in Atlanta, for example, have been accused of exploiting homeless people in the company’s quest for faces, buying their images for a few dollars, and start-up Clearview AI broke social media networks’ protocols to harvest users’ images without their consent. Such stories suggest that some companies are tackling this problem as an afterthought instead of addressing it responsibly.

Thus, federal regulations are clearly needed. They should require the hundreds of existing facial-recognition programs, many created by private companies, to undergo independent review by a government task force. The tech must meet a high standard of accuracy, and even if it meets this criterion, humans, not algorithms, should check a program’s output before taking action on its recommendations.

A clean energy transition will create jobs, promote energy independence, improve public health, and, ultimately, mitigate climate change. But getting to this new future will require more than just phasing out fossil fuels. The production of a wide range of energy-relevant materials must be scaled up substantially. Studies project that producing the materials to enable a clean energy transition will be a massive undertaking. The International Energy Agency forecasts that keeping the world on a path compatible with the goals of the Paris Climate Accord will require expanding production of energy-relevant materials sixfold between 2020 and 2040, to 43 million tons per year. At first glance, that may seem to pale in comparison to the fossil fuel industries, which produced roughly 15 billion tons of coal, oil, and natural gas globally in 2020 alone and added 32 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when burned.

But the transition will be even tougher than it first appears. For example, nickel, cobalt, and copper and many other energy-relevant materials occur in low-grade ores, which entail far more mining, processing, and waste than fossil fuels. Securing the millions of tons of finished materials needed will require mining hundreds or thousands of times more raw ore. Although this transition will ultimately lower greenhouse gas emissions, especially as more renewable energy powers mining processes, it will require processing metal ores at a scale that rivals the material throughput of today’s fossil fuel industries.

The potential harms of such a transition are considerable. Large scale mining affects ecosystems, threatens water supplies, and is sometimes linked to poor working conditions, corruption, and human rights abuses. But scaling up mining to support a clean energy transition also offers the opportunity to reform materials production in ways that are both socially and environmentally just. Wealthier countries, which have often outsourced mineral extraction abroad, need to help shoulder these burdens and model responsible approaches to development.

To meet the global clean energy challenge, government policies supporting public and private sector investments are needed at every stage of extraction and processing. This means support for exploration, research into new mining and processing technologies, streamlined permitting processes, support for expanding processing capacity, and trade agreements that ensure supplies from international markets. These policies must be paired with initiatives to ensure that materials are sourced sustainably and transparently. Over the past decade, third-party certification programs have proliferated in the mining sector. One of the most promising approaches is a standard championed by the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance. It offers an independent certification system that can be used to assess mining activities relative to best practices for worker health and safety, human rights, community engagement, corruption, pollution control, and land reclamation through mandatory third-party audits and publicly available scorecards.

How We Lost Our Sensory Connection with Food—and How to Restore It

The opposable thumbs are a trait that humans share with our primate cousins such as chimpanzees. But it has only recently been discovered that our thumbs might have first evolved as a device for measuring whether or not fruit was ripe. In 2016, biologist Nathaniel Dominy studied the way chimpanzees pick figs. Dominy found that chimpanzees use their dexterous hands to give figs a quick squeeze to determine whether they are ripe or not—a technique that works four times quicker on average than the method used by monkeys (plucking figs at random, biting them to check for ripeness and spitting out the unripe ones). Humans also have these incredible hands capable of identifying the ripest fruit from touch alone. But most of us don’t use them that way any more.

If you want ripe fruit, you no longer need to rely on your own sense of touch. You can go into the nearest supermarket and buy a plastic tub of pre-peeled, pre-sliced mango or melon labelled “ripe and ready” or “ripe and sweet” and eat it with a fork. Our noses can distinguish fresh milk from sour milk, and yet we prefer to look at the use-by date rather than sniffing. Senses, wrote the late anthropologist Jack Goody, are “our windows on the world”—the main tools through which humans acquire information about our environments. Senses are instruments of survival as well as pleasure.

But today, we have relinquished many of the functions of our own senses to the modern food industry—which suits that industry just fine. A sense of smell has long been regarded as something trivial and even inessential to humans (as opposed to other animals, such as dogs, who live by their noses). Charles Darwin was among the scientists and philosophers to argue that a sense of smell was of “extremely slight service” to humans (compared with the senses of vision and hearing).

In reality, it is not easy to live without a sense of smell. We know from survey data produced by the charity Fifth Sense that anosmia lessens enjoyment of food and drink for almost everyone, as well as increasing feelings of loneliness and depression and in some cases leading to the breakdown of relationships.

The Fifth Sense survey of nearly 500 anosmia sufferers found that 92％ reported enjoying food and drink less than they had when they still had a functioning sense of smell. More than half of the respondents said that they went to restaurants less often than before, and they also reported that cooking had become a source of stress and anxiety because they could no longer experience the joy of trying new recipes, and could not easily tell when something was burned. Amy Kincai, a member of Fifth Sense, reported that they missed both the “dangers and delight” of being able to discern the various odours of food.

A 2020 paper analysing the self-reported experiences of long Covid sufferers on a Facebook group gave a sense of how the joy gets sucked out of food for those who can’t smell. Some said that they lost their appetite while others had the opposite reaction, desperately eating more in an attempt to compensate for the loss of pleasure. Roger Samans, an online friend, noted that “food satisfaction is lacking and I see myself eating more just to try to get that satisfied feeling…I am gaining weight due to a constant urge to satisfy what can never be satisfied”.

[A] believes that dogs’ sense of smell is keener than humans’.

[B] thinks they have lost their sense of smell, can’t enjoy the flavor of food, and can’t smell the burnt food.

[C] reckons chimpanzees judge fruit maturity by hand four times faster than monkeys by mouth.

[D] considers smell is a very basic sense but humans have lost much of the facility to use it properly.

[E] supposes that some patients with olfactory loss fill their missing satisfaction by eating a lot.

[F] deems the effect of smell on humans is far less than that of vision and hearing.

[G] regards senses as tools for obtaining environmental information.