No business would welcome being compared to Big Tobacco or gambling. 【C1】_____that is what is happening to makers of video games. For years parents have casually【C2】__that their offspring are “addicted” to their PlayStations and smartphones. Today,【C3】__, ever more doctors are using the term【C4】_____.

On January 1st “gaming disorder”—in which games are played compulsively, despite causing harm—gains【C5】_____from the World Health Organization (WHO), as the newest edition of its diagnostic manual【C6】__. A few months ago China, the world’s biggest gaming market,【C7】__new rules limiting children to just a single hour of play a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and none the【C8】__of the week. Western politicians【C9】__publicly about some games’【C10】__to gambling. Clinics are sprouting【C11】_____the world, promising to cure patients of their habit in the same way they might cure them of an addiction to alcohol or cocaine.

Are games really addictive? Psychologists are【C12】_____. The case for the defense is that this is just another moral【C13】_____. Some people in the past issued similarly serious

【C14】_____about television, rock ’n’ roll, jazz, comic books, novels and even crossword puzzles. As the newest form of mass media, gaming is merely enduring its own time in the stocks【C15】__it eventually ceases to be controversial.【C16】__, defenders argue, the criteria used to【C17】__gaming addiction are too loose. Obsessive gaming, they suggest, is as likely to be a【C18】__(of depression, say) as a disorder【C19】__its own right. The prosecution responds that, unlike rock bands or novelists, games developers have both the motive and the means to【C20】_____their products to make them irresistible.

Nothing’s worked. More diplomatically put: nothing has yet worked at anything like the pace required. Is it any wonder that desperation is growing?

The closest anything came to working was Extinction Rebellion in April 2019. The radical flank of the environmental movement punched a hole through complacency and denial and raised climate consciousness permanently. But it didn’t succeed in its ultimate aim of provoking meaningful climate action from the UK government.

Governments over the world are simply not taking the findings of climate science seriously. In parallel, the same governments resist the blunt and terrible truth that the world can no longer stay below the 1.5℃ “safe” heating limit. This year’s United Nations climate summit, starting in a week in Egypt, is extremely unlikely to admit this failure. Yet deep down, everyone who pays any attention to the climate debate knows.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing therefore if academics, environmental and business leaders— even committed politicians, not to mention activists—were to admit that nothing yet has really worked? The public is waiting for those brave enough to speak these truths and to invite a broad and popular response. But it won’t happen anything like quickly enough if the public continues not to be trusted with the full reality of our situation.

This is the tragedy of the moment. Because it is frustrating the full emergence of so much energy and endeavour that will become a new moderate flank—one that is all about you: all about where you work or the communities where you live, acting collectively in the day to day to turn around the legacy of failure outlined above.

By way of example: lawyers can express their professional agency by choosing what clients and what business they take. The same goes for insurers who can disclose what they know about the rising threat we face. For academics and teachers, it’s about transforming what your teaching and research is about. And for those with access to land, it’s about building resilience and inviting the community at large, including those who you may not agree with politically, to join in.

It’s about fully facing and sharing the reality of the situation and acting on it. This is the opposite of a recipe for doomism. In lieu of anything even remotely resembling adequate plans from our “leaders”, we need to embody an exit strategy from fossil fuels or else we’ll eventually go to an end.

So it’s clear the next big step forward in climate action must bring the public with us. We need together to step beyond the lures of polarisation, roll up our sleeves and get down to business by identifying the underlying reasons for past failures.

The transformation unleashed by increased funding for science during the 20th century is nothing short of remarkable. In the early 1900s research was a cottage industry mostly funded by private firms and charities. Thomas Edison electrified the world from his industrial lab at Menlo Park. Advances in science during the second world war led governments and companies to scale things up. By the mid-1960s America’s federal government was spending 0.6% of GDP on research funding and the share of overall investment in research and development rose to nearly 3%.

That dynamism is fizzling out. A growing body of work shows that even as the world spends more on research, the benefit-cost ratio has fallen. One explanation for this is that the way science is funded is out of date. Researchers must now contend with amounts of bureaucracy. The rate at which grant applications are accepted has fallen, meaning more of them must be made. Two-fifths of a top scientist’s time is spent on things other than research, such as looking for money. The current system is also monolithic. Western scientific systems are dominated by handouts of project grants and peer review. Most money flows to universities, and the academic career ladder is such that researchers face incentives to pursue incremental advances, in order to boost citations and gain tenure, rather than breakthrough work. It is time for another shake-up.

A growing number of scientists, policymakers and philanthropists hopes to revamp science funding. In 2022 America’s CHIPS Act reformed the National Science Foundation (NSF) to focus it more on technology. America’s famed Advanced Research Projects Agency (today called DARPA) has inspired copycats in Britain and Germany. Tech billionaires’ plans to fund pet projects come thick and fast. On November 1st Eric Schmidt, a former boss of Google, announced he was funding a Moonshot to build an “artificial-intelligence scientist” to speed up biology.

What’s the best ways to fund science? The first step is to try new things. More money could fund promising people rather than specific projects, encouraging researchers to take risks. Funders could move faster and bypass peer review entirely, for example by using lotteries. More important still is to find ways to measure what is working and what is not, and then adapt accordingly. Governments might consider appointing “meta-scientists” or “chief economists” to do the number-crunching across their various scientific agencies.

None of this will be easy. More cash for DARPA-like bodies means less for other approaches. Scientific funders say they want to experiment, but they also face pressure to support research that can be easily explained to keep politicians happy. In some cases more money may be the only solution. Still, the economic returns to research are so large that fixing the system is well worth the effort.

Cosmetic procedures used to be the preserve of middle-aged women and often involved surgery. Today they are increasingly sought by girls who want the faces of their favorite social-media influencer, and by a growing number of men wishing for fewer wrinkles, fuller lips and sharper jawlines. Globally, more than 14m nonsurgical procedures were conducted last year, up from fewer than 13m two years earlier.

Research and Markets, a firm of analysts, reckons that the global sales of noninvasive aesthetic treatments, currently around $60bn, could more than triple by 2030. A large part of that growth will come from injectables. These include Botox and other substances that freeze facial muscles, as well as dermal fillers which plump softer tissue. Demand has been fueled by the proliferation of selfies and high-resolution video-calls. Snapchat and Instagram filters give users a glimpse of what they could look like with a filler-generated “liquid facelift”. The contrast with what they see on unadorned Zoom can be stark.

In America 2.4m injectable procedures were carried out last year, roughly one for every 100 American adults. About 700,000 such treatments were performed on Germans, not renowned for an obsession with looks. Brazilians, who are famously beauty-obsessed but much poorer, subjected themselves to around 500,000. Demand for “prejuvenation” work is especially strong in Asia, where younger patients want to pre-empt a craggy face before any lines actually appear. Since injectables have to be topped up every few months, they guarantee producers of the substances and clinics that administer them a source of recurring revenue. The younger the customer starts, the better for business.

Some modern dermal fillers are formulated with ingredients such as hyaluronic acid that are typically found in mild skincare products. That is more attractive to potential customers than Botox, which is derived from a toxin that occurs naturally in spoilt sausages. Other new treatments are stopping using foreign substances entirely. Certain cosmetic clinics offer to inject stem cells from a patient’s own fat into their face, or platelets from their blood to rejuvenate the skin.

However, the injectables craze, especially among youngsters, worries regulators. Botox is a prescription drug in most places but many dermal fillers are not. “Treatments are often trivialised on social media and people don’t understand the full consequences of what can go wrong,” says Tijion Esho, a cosmetic surgeon in Britain. Misplaced injections can lead to abscesses or, in some cases, necrosis. An outcry from doctors and victims of the procedures forced the British government to require a licence for people administering nonsurgical treatments. England has already banned them for under-18s.

The world’s climate depends on a global aquatic “conveyor belt” system that snakes around the oceans, taking heat from some places and redistributing it elsewhere. It is this system that keeps Europe relatively warm despite its northern latitudes, underpins major fisheries and drives key weather patterns across continents. Global warming may be endangering this crucial circulation.

Scientists are accumulating evidence that climate change is disrupting a major section of the conveyor belt, running from the tropics up to the North Atlantic and back south, slowing this piece of the system to its weakest pace in more than 1,000 years, according to a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience. A group of scientists from Britain, Germany and Ireland studying the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation—that is, the circulation pattern that warms the North Atlantic—have sought to compare how it is behaving now with its recent past. Some clues present a consistent picture: The circulation has been weakened in a way that is unprecedented in the past 1,000 years, said Niamh Cahill, a statistician from Ireland’s Maynooth University.

The scientists believe the ultimate cause is global warming. The circulation occurs because warm tropical water cools and becomes saltier as it travels north, which makes it denser. This dense water eventually sinks to the bottom of the ocean, then travels south, where it is once again heated in another part of the cycle. Higher rainfall, lower amounts of sea ice and ice melting on the Greenland ice sheet are adding far more fresh water than usual to the system, making the water up north less salty and, thus, less dense and less prone to sink, undermining the circulation. This may account for a giant stretch of unusually cold water that has stubbornly persisted near Greenland and for unusually high water temperatures on the U.S. East Coast. The study’s authors warn that climate change may further destabilize the Atlantic circulation over coming decades. The consequences are hard to predict with precision, in part because warming air might offset some of the cooling associated with slower circulation.

Climate change is not some isolated change in the air temperature. It encompasses sea-level rise, heavy storms, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, acidifying oceans and disruptions in the sensitive planetary rhythms on which human society developed. Scientists know some things for sure—the planet will warm because of greenhouse gas emissions, with a variety of negative results. But they have not catalogued all the consequences—the longer we humans fail to adjust our behavior, the worse the consequences are likely to be.

[A] Take actions to overcome failure

[B] Not one, but all

[C] Remember soil is not dead matter

[D] Soil generates food

[E] Solving soil problem helps cope with other problems

[F] Pay attention to other environmental issues

[G] Insufficient nutrient value

Can soil ever turn extinct? Yes, it can. If you remove organic content (in the form of plant litter and animal waste) from soil, it turns into sand. This is called desertification. Conversely, if you add organic content to sand, it becomes soil. Soil extinction may be a relatively new term, but the process it describes has been unfolding over the past 100 to 150 years because of unsustainable agricultural practices. An acre of soil in the world is turning into desert every second. This is a statistic with grave consequences for all life on this planet.

【G1】__________________________

The problem is that we treat soil as a mere resource, an inert substance into which we can pump chemicals. This is an unfortunate consequence of the fragmentation of human consciousness. We forget that soil is the largest living system we know. A teaspoon of fertile soil can contain, in some cases, more than 9 billion organisms. Nearly 60% of our body is microorganisms; less than half is from our parental genetics.

【G2】_____________________________

Ninety-five percent of our food comes from soil. But studies show a tragic decline in the nutrient value of vegetables worldwide. Americans are potassium-deficient, 88% are deficient in vitamin E, 67% in vitamin K, 52% in magnesium, 43% in vitamin A, and 39% in vitamin C, according to a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Acute soil degradation contributes to lower crop yields—and even if you eat enough, your food may be short of nourishment. Research shows that some of the foods we grow are less nutrient-dense than they once were. How much longer before we awaken to the urgency of the problem?

【G3】_____________________________

People often ask, “But what about other environmental issues?” They are certainly important, but soil conditions are plummeting so rapidly that the problem could spiral out of control. Addressing soil could alleviate many other ecological issues, helping to reverse climate change and water scarcity. If the ozone-layer problem has been addressed with some success, it is because it was pursued with a single-point agenda. The same needs to happen with soil.

【G4】_____________________________

I have embarked on a crazy motorcycle journey across 27 countries, covering 30,000 km in 100 days, to meet with government leaders, influencers, and the general public; raise awareness; and recommend policy changes that ensure a minimum of 3% to 6% organic content in soil. Individual efforts are commendable, but collective action is clearly the need of the hour.

【G5】_____________________________.

We have not lost the fight yet. But we’re standing on the brink. If we act now, we can initiate the necessary policy changes and make a vital turnaround in soil health in the next decade. This is a real challenge. Let’s be the generation that acted responsibly, that rescued the planet from its wanton and tragic project of self-destruction.

All writing has to be ’what you know’; it can reasonably be argued that you can’t write what you don’t know.【T1】Whatever we invent is based on something known to us—our own experience, to which we apply our imagination. And in those cases where we have to increase the stock of what we know—through research—our writing reflects our newly acquired knowledge.

We are already applying imagination to memory when we recall an event from the past.【T2】If you were to set yourself the ten-minute task of writing down a memory from your childhood and were then asked whether, in order to fill in any gaps in your memory, you had made anything up, you would be very likely to say that you had. In fact, you had been obliged to, because otherwise the narrative would have had distracting gaps or uncertainties in it. However, you would probably maintain that the account was essentially true.

The truth of an event may not, in any case, be easy to establish. You will probably recognise this experience: you are among old friends or family members when one of them starts to recall an event at which others were present.【T3】Members of the group will disagree on the detail—perhaps even on bigger issues—because the fact is that each individual has their own version of what happened. This is partly because they were experiencing it from their own unique perspective and partly because memory doesn’t unfold as a continuous spool of events and experiences.【T4】We don’t preserve a frame-by-frame record of the past; what we retain is more like snaps in an album, and we have not all taken the same snaps; we have remembered what seemed to affect us as individuals most deeply at the time. We can’t recall every incident which happened between the snaps, so we imaginatively reconstruct what must have happened between them. It is natural for humans to make connections in this way, to create narratives that suggest causes and effects.【T5】This is why dreams are at once so fascinating and so frustrating—they seem to be no respecters of cause and effect or of flawless narrative: we can step out of a restaurant and be on a ship, or get out of a corridor and be in a forest. It’s not a frame-by-frame narrative; connections seem to be missing. And our desire for connections—our desire to make sense—drives our automatic habit of filling in the gaps. When we remember, we are to a large extent reconstructing the past.