Carbon capture is viewed by many as a last resort. But in the race to tackle the climate crisis, intelligently taking advantage of natural processes will be key

We’re transitioning to renewables; we are using the energy we generate with extraordinary efficiency; our industries are innovating with clean, green methods; we’re recycling, reusing and reclaiming. Our greenhouse gas emissions are slowing. But perhaps it’s not enough.

There is another final – some might say ‘last resort’ – set of tools in the decarbonisation toolkit: ‘negative emissions technologies’ – technologies that store or sequester more greenhouse gas emissions than they produce. These come in two main forms: nature-based solutions such as reforestation and afforestation, and more technological solutions such as direct air carbon capture and storage, enhanced weathering, biochar, and soil carbon sequestration.

As a 2020 report from the International Energy Agency argues, carbon capture, utilisation and storage technologies are a critical part of ‘net-zero’ goals because they enable key sectors to reduce their emissions directly, but also help to balance some of the more intractable emissions.

But carbon capture is a twin challenge. First, you have to capture the carbon dioxide, either directly from the atmosphere or from emissions sources. Then you have to put it somewhere that will store it securely for as long as possible.

The good news is this is already happening naturally. Around half of the excess carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere by human activity – the combustion of fossil fuels – is ‘drawn down’ again by natural processes: half by land-based processes – mainly plants – and half by the oceans. We can’t – and shouldn’t – seek to control these natural processes. But we can take advantage of them.

Ironically, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can actually increase plant growth; a phenomenon called carbon dioxide fertilisation. There is evidence that plants are already putting out more leaves during their growing season in response to increasing carbon dioxide availability. However, plants eventually adapt to the higher concentration of carbon dioxide, so the effect is limited. And as climate change brings warmer temperatures and more rainfall to some parts of the world, that could increase the length of the growing season there. But in others, higher temperatures and decreased rainfall could have the opposite effect.

The fact remains, though, that trees are carbon guzzlers. Around half the mass of a single tree is pure carbon. Given that forests cover 31 per cent of global land area – around 4 billion hectares – that’s a lot of stored carbon.

The problem is scientists don’t know exactly how much. At the moment, forest cover is mapped from space using satellites that can tell the difference between surfaces such as forest, grasslands and desert, for example. But they don’t show whether a tree in a forest is ten metres tall or 100 metres tall, and that is a critical piece of climate information. “If we don’t know how much carbon is even stored in the Earth’s forests, let alone how it’s changing with deforestation and whatnot, that’s a massive uncertainty for those climate models,” says remote sensing scientist Laura Duncanson from the University of Maryland.

This uncertainty has significant implications for how we assess the impact of ongoing deforestation, how we plan reforestation or what’s called avoided deforestation – not chopping down existing forests – and how we calculate the emissions credits associated with that reforestation or avoided deforestation. It’s knowledge that is critical to the concept of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (also known as REDD+).

Which is where GEDI – Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation – comes in. This Nasa project uses a technology called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging: a pulsed laser shot from the International Space Station to measure the height of objects like trees. A beam, with a footprint measuring around 25 metres in diameter, is painted billions of times across the Earth’s surface, and the open-source data from those billions of samples can then be translated into a map of the Earth’s forests that will allow scientists to calculate forest carbon with far greater accuracy than ever before. “Instead of just saying, ‘Yes, we know there’s trees there,’ we actually have measurements of the physical structure of those trees that we can turn into estimates of carbon,” says Duncanson.

There are already numerous initiatives underway around the world to plant trees. For example, the Bonn Challenge aims to reforest 350 million hectares of degraded and deforested landscapes by 2030, and has already achieved 150 million hectares of reforestation in countries such as Brazil, Burkina Faso, India and Cameroon. One study has estimated that 0.9 billion more hectares of forests could be grown on existing viable land that isn’t already occupied by forests, agriculture or urban areas, and that these could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon – the equivalent of around one-quarter of the carbon dioxide currently in the Earth’s atmosphere.

But planting trees isn’t quite the straightforward solution that it appears. “It’s this great concept: you plant a tree, you save the planet from climate change and it’s actionable, it’s super-easy to integrate into economic solutions, and we all love trees,” Duncanson says. “But the reality is that it absolutely cannot solve the entire problem.”

For starters, the magnitude of that carbon draw-down is uncertain: Duncanson says some papers have based their calculations on the maximum theoretical amount rather than an average. Trees can’t be planted just anywhere, and not all those areas earmarked for possible reforestation will prove to be suitable. Regional climate or soil conditions may be unfavourable, with the result that tree planting in a particular place, far from helping the environment, will fail or will have a negative impact on local ecosystems. In practical terms, there’s the question of where the seeds and seedlings for such a massive reforestation effort will come from, whether there is enough genetic diversity, and how many of those seeds can be harvested without compromising the survival of existing forests. Finally, trees take a long time to grow and larger trees, which are also the ones storing the most carbon, can take decades to reach maturity – decades we probably don’t have.

Despite these concerns and limitations, given the incredible number of ecosystem services that trees provide to humanity – clear air, water, soil stability, oxygen, shelter, food and building materials – reforestation can only improve our environmental conundrum, not worsen it.

Traditionally, reforestation and agriculture have not sat well together, both requiring land that has sufficient nutrients, rainfall and temperatures conducive to growth. And agriculture, of course, poses its own environmental challenges, being responsible (along with forestry and other land use) for around 23 per cent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (particularly methane and nitrous oxide). But the two activities are not mutually exclusive. Agriculture can work with reforestation to play a vital role in climate change mitigation – sequestering carbon – while delivering the added benefit of more nutrient-rich soils, less fertiliser use, less water use, increased production and better food and economic security.

One farming approach that delivers climate change mitigation, food security and economic security is agroforestry. “Agroforestry is basically mixing trees together with other crops in an integrated system,” says Delphine Clara Zemp, a researcher in the Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology at the University of Göttingen in Germany. For example, timber trees can be planted alongside coffee or tea bushes, fruit trees alongside turmeric, a banana plantation intermingled with sweet potato, oil palms alongside coconut palms.

Growing trees and crops alongside each other can benefit crops by stabilising the local microclimate, providing shading, and buffering crops against extreme drought events. The trees can also enhance biodiversity by creating buffer zones around areas of natural vegetation. Some trees increase nutrient levels in the soil, for example by fixing nitrogen, which in turn increases the yields from nearby crops. Agroforestry also offers greater financial resilience for farmers who, instead of relying on one cash crop that may fail or plummet in price, have a range of crops that are harvested at different times. But while the local benefits of agroforestry are well attested, not much research has been done on the climate change mitigation impact of agroforestry – something Zemp would like to see change. “That’s why we only now start to quantify this and try to understand the potential.”

Low-carbon agricultural methods are also attracting interest because of what’s called ‘carbon farming’, whereby farmers can earn carbon credits by adopting methods that reduce emissions or sequester carbon, and then selling those carbon credits to others. Louisa Kiely, a farmer and head of Carbon Farmers of Australia, says that at least half of the farmers who contact her for advice about carbon farming are already looking at improving their soil health through regenerative farming techniques, but want to find out if there’s a way to make some money from it at the same time.

One of the most popular methods of carbon farming in Australia is “human-induced regeneration of a permanent even-aged native forest”, which essentially means allowing native trees to return. This can be achieved by keeping livestock out of areas of native forests, or by managing the timing and extent of their grazing so as to allow the native trees to regrow. It’s also about managing non-native plants, and ceasing to use any kind of chemical or physical methods of destroying native regrowth.

Another way to increase soil carbon is to change how the soil is handled. Ploughing or tilling, which cuts up and turns over the top 15–25 centimetres of soil, breaks apart and releases much of the soil’s stored carbon into the air, as well as killing many of the important soil micro- organisms. With growing awareness of the consequences of these methods both for soil fertility and for greenhouse gas emissions, many farmers are moving to low-till or no-till methods of farming, where seeds or seedlings are planted directly into the soil without disturbing it as much. In addition, these methods deliberately leave more crop waste on the soil surface, which not only returns those nutrients to the soil but also reduces both the release of carbon into the air and erosion from wind and rain. No-till agriculture also uses around one-third the fuel of conventional tilling, and improves water storage in the soil.

It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. The amount of carbon sequestration is influenced by soil type and climate, and one analysis has suggested no-till methods may store less carbon in cool, dry climates, for example. However, in the Canadian prairies, the area of agricultural land farmed with no-till methods increased from five per cent in 1991 to nearly 50 per cent in 2006, and no-till cropping is now practised across 21 per cent of all cropland in the US.

A mangrove forest at low tide is a magical place. This ever-changing buffer between land and sea is a place of strange creatures and plants that have evolved to thrive in the extremes of wet and dry. The surface is a rich ooze of fine dark mud that bubbles and crawls with life, marine snails map their journey on its canvas, and shellfish cluster on every inch of exposed rock.

This is the home of blue carbon. Mangrove forests, along with seagrass meadows and tidal salt marshes, grow on hundreds, even thousands, of years of stored carbon. In this wet, salty, low-oxygen environment, organic matter such as leaves breaks down slowly into the carbon-rich sediment. Because those sediments are water-logged or underwater most of the time, the carbon is sequestered for far longer than in a terrestrial ecosystem, where exposure to air means a much greater proportion of the carbon is returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Blue carbon is sometimes described as ‘boutique carbon’. Mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass meadows provide a host of vital ecosystem services from which humanity has benefited enormously. They limit coastal erosion, protect against extreme events such as storm surges and tsunamis, improve water quality, support tourism, and are habitat and nursery for many of the seafood species that humans eat. Preserving them brings a host of benefits beyond simple carbon sequestration.

In blue carbon environments, carbon is almost entirely stored in sediments rather than within the structure of a plant, which means the carbon storage capacity over these coastal ecosystems is almost limitless. Sediment cores taken from seagrass meadows in the Mediterranean found some sediments were more than 3,000 years old, while other studies have dated sediments in seagrass meadows at more than 6,000 years old. In contrast, the turnover of carbon in a terrestrial forest might be measured in decades, and occasionally centuries.

The idea that coastal ecosystems might be sequestering significant amounts of carbon was first floated in 1981, in a paper that suggested these carbon sinks might represent a significant and unaccounted-for element in global carbon budgets. Today, blue carbon is recognised as one of the most intense carbon sinks on the planet: around half of all the carbon sequestered in ocean sediments despite covering less than two per cent of ocean area.

The problem is that coastal ecosystems are being decimated. Mangroves are disappearing at a rate of around 2 per cent per year – their loss accounts for around ten per cent of emissions from global deforestation. The global area of tidal marsh has halved, and around 30 per cent of seagrasses have been lost. Blue carbon is under threat.

At Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, PhD student Cristian Salinas has been modelling the impact of the loss of Australia’s coastal seagrass meadows that has taken place since the 1950s. He has calculated that the destruction of around 161,150 hectares of seagrass has released the equivalent of five million cars’ worth of carbon dioxide each year, accounting for around a two per cent increase in the annual carbon dioxide emissions associated with land use change in Australia. “It’s not just that you are losing all the carbon that was buried there, it’s that’s also you are losing the capacity that these seagrasses were providing to sequester new carbon,” Salinas says.

The challenge is therefore to protect what is left, and to create new blue carbon ecosystems. Fortunately, interest in this boutique carbon has grown considerably in recent years, and it has been discussed with increasing intensity at successive UN climate change conferences since 2015. That there is now real money to be made in blue carbon suddenly makes it more attractive, says Salinas. “This is a way to protect and restore these ecosystems.”

Efforts to incorporate blue carbon into carbon inventories are under way in countries including Madagascar, Costa Rica, Australia and Indonesia. Blue carbon has even attracted the attention of technology giant Apple, which is working with Conservation International to restore a mangrove forest in Colombia that is expected to draw down around 1 million tonnes of carbon during its lifetime. That said, it’s a race against time to save and restore these precious coastal ecosystems while we can.

The term ‘synthetic forest’ might suggest some science fiction-inspired vista of metallic or translucent trees topped with mechanically waving silicon leaves, tended by an army of sterile-suited workers, the whisper and rustle of wind through foliage replaced with a mechanical hum.

It’s a futuristic aesthetic but, unfortunately for artists and dreamers, nothing like the real thing. A synthetic forest will mostly likely be row after row of long, narrow, rectangular constructions, their surfaces pocked with rows of giant fans that pull air through as fast as possible to find those 400 or so molecules of carbon dioxide in every million molecules of atmosphere.

Just as trees make use of the carbon in carbon dioxide to build their structure, so too can humans. Ever since carbon dioxide became Climate Enemy Number One, scientists have therefore been trying to work out how to make the most of the excess. When conversations started about the idea of capturing carbon from the atmosphere, the focus was on how to use that process to take care of the emissions generated by burning coal, to create so-called ‘clean coal’. “It’s a terrible phrase,” says Jennifer Wilcox, professor of chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. But now, as the coal industry staggers towards its demise, carbon capture has taken on a new meaning. “So we have this view of carbon capture being a 2.0 version, where it’s not about decarbonising coal, it’s really looking at deep decarbonisation or carbon capture and storage,” Wilcox says. It’s about not just capturing carbon from existing processes, such as steel or cement manufacture, but actively removing it from the atmosphere and either storing it or putting it to use.

The first challenge is how to capture it in such a way that we don’t create more environmental problems than we started with. Direct air capture of carbon dioxide can be done in a number of ways, but the basic principle is that the carbon dioxide is brought into contact with a solid or liquid material – potassium hydroxide, for example – that it binds to chemically. That material is then processed, usually with high levels of heat, to extract the captured carbon dioxide and purify it. This last step takes a lot of energy, which ideally is sourced from renewable sources so that few or no additional emissions are created by the process. There are already several companies that have developed direct air carbon capture technologies, such as Carbon Engineering in Canada, Climeworks in Switzerland and Global Thermostat in the United States.

Once that carbon dioxide is captured and purified, what can be done with it? It can be buried, and the best place to do that is in rocks that are very good at absorbing carbon dioxide, such as those high in magnesium. In Iceland, for example, CarbFix has developed a method for injecting carbonated water into underground seams of basalt rock, where the carbon dioxide reacts with the basalt and is literally turned to stone. Unfortunately, burying carbon isn’t necessarily profitable. One estimate is that the cost of direct air capture on a commercial scale is around $600 per tonne, although that may come down to around $200–$300 per tonne in the next few years. Another issue, if the direct air capture plant isn’t co-located with these mineral resources, is that the liquid carbon has to be transported there. “There’s plenty of storage in the Earth,” says Wilcox. “It’s just that it’s not everywhere. And so the question is, how much are you willing to pay for the transportation costs?” Burying the carbon, while it achieves the end goal of removing it permanently from circulation – at least on a geologic time frame – can’t necessarily be a profitable venture unless the carbon credits are priced highly enough to make it worthwhile.

But carbon dioxide and carbon are useful materials, and a growing number of companies are looking at how to make money from them. Carbon can be used in carbonated beverage production, for example, to create synthetic liquid fuels such as syngas or make plastics such as ethylene. It can be used to make carbon-negative concrete: for example, injecting carbon dioxide – captured from industrial processes – into wet cement as it is curing can improve its strength and sequester carbon dioxide at the same time. A form of cement manufactured from magnesium oxychloride – which is made from byproducts of magnesium mining – mixed with fly ash from coal combustion is not only stronger and more fast-setting than conventional cement, but the magnesium oxychloride also actively absorbs carbon dioxide. Even the aggregate – the sand, gravel and rock that is bound together by the cement – can be replaced by rocks made from sequestered carbon dioxide captured from industrial processes.

Carbon capture doesn’t have to involve technology or even organic processes. Enhanced weathering is the low-tech speeding-up of the natural chemical interaction between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and surface minerals, which has been sequestering carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere long before humans, or even life, emerged on the planet. That process can be accelerated by making more of those surface minerals – particularly those rich in calcium and magnesium – exposed to the atmosphere; for example, by digging them up or crushing them finely. One industry where that process happens all the time is mining.

In the early 2000s, the waste heap of an old asbestos mine in Quebec was found to be sequestering significant amounts of carbon dioxide, as the magnesium-rich minerals in the waste heap reacted chemically with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to produce magnesium carbonate. One study estimated that that single mine heap was sequestering around 600 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, roughly equivalent to the emissions from 118 passenger cars in one year.

Magnesium-rich mineral waste is a byproduct not only of asbestos mines, but also of diamond, platinum and nickel mines. Those waste heaps could therefore represent a huge, untapped carbon sequestration potential. “If we get enough of those reactions occurring, then we can sequester the amount of CO2 that’s being emitted by the mine or in some cases sequester even more potentially than the mine is emitting,” says Anna Harrison, an environmental geochemist and assistant professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. For example, one assessment of the Mount Keith nickel mine in Western Australia found the amount of carbon dioxide being sequestered by the mine tailings represented around 11 per cent of the mine’s total annual greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s taking advantage of a naturally occurring process that normally happens on geologic timescales. But in a mine waste heap, the rock is ground up into rubble, so much more surface area of the magnesium-rich rock is exposed to air, and the reaction happens much faster. And once the carbon dioxide is locked up in the carbonate minerals, it’s there for a very, very long time. It’s also possible that the reaction could be speeded up even more, because the main rate-limiting factor is the supply of carbon dioxide getting to the rock. “They’re just deposited as this big mass of fine-grain material that’s partially filled with water, and then the CO2 from the atmosphere only seems to react with maybe the upper ten to 15 centimetres of that tailings pile,” Harrison says.

Carbonated minerals can also be used in agriculture as a way of returning carbon to the soil and also helping to balance the acidity of agriculture soils. One study estimated that enhanced weathering used in this manner could sequester about the same amount of carbon as agricultural soil carbon sequestration methods.

Carbon mineralisation could deliver carbon-neutral, or even carbon-negative, mines. The diamond company DeBeers is already trialling it at some of its mine sites because kimberlite, which diamonds are often found in, is high in magnesium, making it well suited to carbonisa- tion. So well suited, in fact, that a typical diamond mine could produce enough kimberlite to offset ten times its own emissions.

“Carbon removal is an opportunity to go back,” says Jennifer Wilcox. That doesn’t mean back to pre-Industrial Revolution carbon dioxide levels, or even pre-1970 levels, because we’ve gone too far for that now. We are beyond the point where negative emissions technologies alone, without any other reductions in carbon emissions, could save us. But these technologies and practices can buy us time to get our backs off the 412-parts-per-million wall.

“We’ve got to take that back out, if we want to get back down to reasonable levels of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere,” says Wilcox, but we also have the rates at which we keep dumping today and in the future. We need to remove the carbon, and we also need to avoid putting more up there in the first place: “We’ve got to do it all.”

By BIANCA NOGRADY (https://www.wired.co.uk/)

The combination of climate change, deforestation, pollution, overfishing, and more have produced a biodiversity crisis. On a bad day, 200 species go extinct. If we project current rates, by century’s end, 50% of all large mammals and marine life will disappear. And by 2050, 90% of coral reefs—which are home to 25% of the world’s biodiversity—could be gone. But all is not lost yet, as some of today's best minds work tirelessly to halt and (in some cases) reverse these trends. This blog highlights five key developments helping to turn the tide.

DRONE REFORESTATION

On land, forests are biodiversity hotspots, which is also why deforestation is one the largest drivers of extinction. And the scale of destruction is vast.

Every year, we lose 18 million acres of forest—an area the size of Panama. Since trees are a major carbon sink, deforestation also accounts for 15 percent of total annual greenhouse gas emissions.

So how do we combat industrial-scale deforestation? With industrial-scale reforestation.

Enter Dendra Systems (formerly known as BioCarbon Engineering), a British company founded by ex-NASA employees that has developed AI-guided tree-planting drones.

These drones first map an area to identify prime planting locations, then fire seed pods tucked inside of biodegradable missiles into the ground. The pods contain a custom-designed gelatinous growth medium that acts as a shock absorber to cushion impact, then a nutrient-dispenser to speed plant growth.

A single pilot can fly six drones at once, planting a staggering 100,000 trees a day. A global army of ten thousand drones, which is what Dendra Systems intends to build, could replant a billion trees a year.

REEF RESTORATION

Coral reefs are the forests of the ocean, so if we want to restore ocean health, we have to fix our reefs.

There are around a half-dozen coral-regrowth technologies under development, but Dr. David Vaughan, a marine biologist with the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory, is pioneering some of the most exciting work.

Borrowing tissue engineering techniques, Vaughan has figured out how to regrow 100 years’ worth of coral in under two years.

And while normal coral will only spawn once it reaches maturity—something that can take 25 to 100 years—Vaughan’s corals reproduce at age two, giving us, for the first time, a way to radically replenish our reefs.

AQUACULTURE REINVENTION

Fishing is one of the severe drivers of ocean wildlife decline.

Right now, one-third of all global fisheries are stretched beyond their limits. Better fishery management is critical—but why manage when you can grow?

The same tissue engineering techniques that allow us to produce steak from stem cells also allow us to grow mahi-mahi, bluefin tuna, etc.

In fact, there are now at least six different companies pursuing exactly this goal, producing everything from cultured salmon to lab-grown shrimp, now heading for our menus.

AGRICULTURAL REINVENTION

Plants and animals need room to roam, enormous stretches of pristine, uninterrupted habitat, both terrestrial and aquatic.

Right now, 15 percent of the Earth's surface consists of protected wildlands. To stave off what’s now known as “the Sixth Great Extinction,” Harvard’s E. O. Wilson and other experts believe that half the planet might be required. This raises a critical question: Where do we find that land?

In a nutshell, by coupling reforestation and restoration with the reinvention of agriculture.

Roughly 37 percent of the globe’s landmass and 75 percent of its freshwater resources are devoted to farming: 11 percent for crops, the rest for beef and dairy.

However, these totals are shrinking. Not only are farmers abandoning their land in record numbers, but all of the new farming innovations—cultured beef, vertical farming, genetically engineered crops, etc.—allow us to harvest much more from far less.

So, here’s a simple idea: let’s give this extra land back to nature.

CLOSED-LOOP ECONOMIES

Another top-five threat we now face is pollution.

A 2017 study conducted by the medical journal The Lancet estimated that pollution kills 9 million people a year, further costing us almost US$5 trillion.

And the impact might be worse on nature. Obviously, greenhouse gas pollution is the biggest danger, but chemicals in our rivers, plastics in our ocean, and particulates in our air, are choking the life out of our planet.

So what can be done?

Shifting from a petroleum-based economy to one powered by renewables will help, but more is needed. Arguably the biggest bat is zero-to-zero manufacturing.

This process allows companies to completely remove waste rather than managing it via landfill. The list of companies now going this route is growing: Toyota, Google, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and more.

Not only is this good for the environment, it’s also good for the bottom line. GM has saved $1 billion over the past few years with the company’s 152 zero-waste facilities.

INTERCONNECTED PROBLEMS CALL FOR INTERCONNECTED SOLUTIONS

Whether we're talking about biodiversity loss, extreme weather events, or water scarcity, these are not siloed problems.

The web of life is not simply a metaphor. Everything impacts everything.

The solutions highlighted above all solve multiple problems at once. But we must be all in and right now.

Stanford researchers give us three generations to halt species die-off before ecosystem services shut down in earnest. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that we have roughly a decade to halt global warming at 1.5 degrees.

Yet we already have the technology required to meet these challenges, and thanks to convergences, it will only continue to improve. Our innovations may have caught up with our problems. Now all we need is the willpower and collective action.

If we’re going to make the shift to sustainable alternatives at the speed required, then we the people are both the obstacle and the opportunity.

By Peter Diamandis (https://www. diamandis.com)

If limbs, kidneys and lungs are instruments constituting the body’s orchestra, the brain is its conductor, the difference between cacophony and symphony. But what if technology could quietly, almost surreptitiously, influence the way our brain functions, as The Matrix predicted two decades ago? Today’s Sunday Magazine dives into the latest cutting-edge research and inventions in neurotechnology, exploring how they could make us smarter and improve our quality of life … yet also pose troubling new ethical dilemmas. Ready to pop the red pill?

1. Singing Steroids

It takes hundreds of hours of practice and sparks of creative genius to make great music. But will it in the future? Berklee College of Music is using headphones developed by Halo Neuroscience (acquired in February by Swedish firm Flow Neuroscience) that use brain stimulation to help students cut the painful part of art-making and get straight to the magic. The headphones help students, for example, master a guitar piece with fewer repetitions and practice more efficiently. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is plotting his next big move: streaming music straight into your brain.

2. Mind Games

What if your mind could act like a gaming joystick? That’s the emerging world of neurogaming. But mind-controlled games are about more than just making the experience hands-free. A group of scientists led by a professor at Finland’s Aalto University are developing video games designed specifically to treat depression. In the game, players solve challenges that are designed to come with a therapeutic benefit. They believe that neurogaming could soon reach a stage where it might help detect conditions such as Alzheimer’s, ADHD or schizophrenia. Instead of visiting a psychiatrist, you could just play a game.

3. Training the Next Top Gun

Like the naval aviators in the Tom Cruise classic, the U.S. Air Force feels the need ... the need for speed. At least when it comes to teaching. With approximately 10 percent fewer pilots than it needs, the U.S. Air Force now aims to accelerate its aviator training program by plugging hi-tech electrodes into ears. The Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio is testing earbuds designed to use the latest advances in neuroscience to help pilots concentrate more than would otherwise be possible.

4. Gut Instinct

Scientists have long known that people thought to be wiser are less likely to feel lonely. But new research shows there’s a biological component to just how wise or lonely we are: the diversity of microbes in our gut. It’s a new wrinkle to the surging gut health trend. Turns out that a greater variety of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes in our gut goes hand in hand with the ability to make smart decisions associated with wisdom and to end up less lonely.

5. Ignore Small Setbacks

It’s something we’ve all been taught growing up. Now researchers at the University of Miami have proven that holding onto a petty, negative event can influence your long-term mental wellbeing. So try to forget — even if you can’t forgive. Without the advantages of neurotech research, our elders had it right.

making our lives better

1. Speech Within Reach ... for Everyone

Throughout history, those who couldn't speak were disadvantaged, even stigmatized. Now scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, have developed technology that for the first time allows them to translate brain signals into entire sentences; before they could translate individual words but couldn’t string them together. Electrodes record brain activity, and combined with the movement of the tongue, lips, jaw and larynx, the device offers up data that a deep-learning algorithm can translate into sentences.

2. Safer Brain Surgeries

Nearly 24,000 adults in the U.S. will be diagnosed with cancerous tumors of the brain and spinal cord this year. Many of them require surgeries. New techniques known as nerve fiber-guided tractography and TumorGlow are helping surgeons target brain tumors more accurately than has been possible. The first helps avoid the brain’s language and motor areas with colorful 3D mapping, while TumorGlow spotlights tumor cells by infusing them with a fluorescent dye.

3. A Cure for Insomnia?

If you are an insomniac, you know the struggle. You might have tried meditation apps and hypnosis and gulped down melatonin or other sleep aids. Nothing seems to work. As pandemic-induced sleeplessness has soared, a growing number of companies are developing devices using electrostimulation to cure insomnia, offering an approach that allows users to avoid or minimize medication. The scientific evidence backing this approach is thin so far. But the growing demand for these devices is a reminder of the nightmare that is sleeplessness.

4. Reversing Alzheimer’s?

A growing body of research over the past decade suggests that electromagnetic waves can help reverse memory loss and other effects of conditions like Alzheimer’s. A headset bombards the brain with electromagnetic pulses that activate nerve cells, bringing cognitive decline to a halt in some patients in a small clinical trial while improving cognition in others. If the approach succeeds with larger patient samples, it could offer the most pathbreaking step yet toward conquering Alzheimer’s — a disease afflicting 6 million Americans, with the number expected to double by 2050.

5. Zombie Genes

They live after we die. New research shows some genes in the brain actually become more active in the hours after our death. That has implications for researchers exploring whether brain cells from dead bodies can be used to devise treatments for autism, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and other diseases.

6. Mini Brains

Scientists have now started developing test tube brains to use in experiments on new drugs and their efficacy against diseases. These “mini-brains” are pinhead-sized collections of brain cells grown from a sample of human hair or skin.

startups to track

1. BrainQ

When Israeli geophysicist Yaron Segal’s son was born with familial dysautonomia, a rare disorder of the autonomic nervous system, he decided it was time for a career change. Partnering with two friends, Segal’s startup, BrainQ, has developed a device that promises to revolutionize the treatment of brain disorders by identifying neural damage early and then getting an algorithm to devise a personalized treatment for traumatic brain injuries or strokes. It has also developed an electromagnetic, wave-based therapy for stroke patients that in a recent small study helped reduce disability.

2. USB for Your Brain

Doctorsand researchers trying to decode the mysteries of the mind often try to track the activity of neurons and the flow of blood in the brain. But until now, that required invasive procedures and in some cases, brain surgery. Los Angeles-based startup Kernel has devised two technologies that serve as non-invasive brain recorders — inventions that attracted $53 million in funding last year. If the technology truly works, it could fundamentally transform brain research.

3. Sleep on It

Or with it, actually. French startup Dreem started off as a dorm-room idea but is now promising one of the most talked-about innovations in sleep science. You wear their device, it tracks your sleep and emits subtle sounds at precise moments to help you sleep better. With more than $60 million in funding, investors are betting on this dream staying sweet.

By Pallabi Munsi, Reporter, and Charu Sudan Kasturi, Senior Editor  (https://www.ozy.com)

The first annual Microsoft Work Trend Index should be a wake-up call for bosses and software developers alike to improve employee experiences as offices reopen

The majority of people want flexible remote work to continue, but new research from Microsoft warns leaders that they're out of touch with exhausted employees and need to plan if hybrid work is to be successful. Otherwise, they will lose staff -- especially Gen Z workers. 

There have been plenty of smaller-scale studies showing how working habits, attitudes to remote work and plans for the future have changed during the pandemic, but the scale of Microsoft's Work Trend Index -- interviews with over 30,000 people across 31 countries, plus analysis of trillions of mails, messages, Teams meetings and other activity across Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn -- lends it more weight. 

Indeed, with the data representing "a global and cross-industry view on how work is changing", Microsoft will be using it to guide product development and even reorganise some of its own offices, Kamal Janardhan, general manager of Microsoft 365 Insights told TechRepublic.

Remote trade-offs

Obviously, remote work is a major topic. "The theme of the pandemic is that the entire world participated in this work-from-home experiment, and it became a norm essentially," Janardhan said. "For a lot of people it used to be 'can we even do that as an organisation?' and now it's the norm -- of course we can."

Although it varies by country, industry and what job you have, the interest in remote work is strong, despite the drawbacks. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of workers in the survey want the option of flexible remote work to continue, and 46% plan to move because of that flexibility.

"The flexibility and agility is something that people appreciate, and it's here to stay," Janardhan maintains. "This is going to be the new way of working [that] is actually going to [bring] better culture, more inclusion. The human need to accommodate each other is something that creates connection, and all of us should think about how we accommodate each other in this new way of working."

The good news is that 40% of workers feel they can finally bring their full selves -- complete with pets, family members and the worries they might share, along with a few tears -- to work without embarrassment, the way employees have been promising they could all along. People who have those closer interactions report higher productivity as well as better wellbeing and stronger work relationships.

That's much harder for Black and Latino workers in the US, Microsoft notes in the report: these groups find it slightly harder to build relationships with their team, feel less included and are less likely to feel they can be themselves.  

But with lines between work and home blurring, we've lost what Janardhan calls "cognitive white space" -- travelling to work or dropping children off at school might mean traffic jams, but it also provides a transition that the 'virtual commute' in Teams might not fully replicate.

Teams meetings last longer -- 45 minutes rather than 35 the year before -- and people are in more meetings, (with almost two-thirds of those not being scheduled in advance), adding up to 2.5x more time in meetings. They also send 45% more chat messages and do 42% more chats out of business hours. Despite all the pressures of the past year and the fact that remote work should allow for asynchronous work styles, people aren't stepping away from work: just like the year before, 50% of people respond within five minutes in a Teams chat. 

It's not just Teams: 66% more people are creating documents that would presumably have been conversations before, and just among Exchange Online commercial and education customers, 40.6 billion more email messages were sent in February 2021 than in February 2020.

Trying to make up for not being in the same room as people by spending so much of the time in Teams interactions may be why 54% of people feel overworked and 39% are downright exhausted. Despite options like Together mode, the combination of the urgent feeling of virtual meetings and the lack of social cues and body language creates 'digital static' that makes it harder to communicate and understand what other people mean. That leads to fatigue, anxiety and even less of a feeling of connection.  

We're spending more time with those we work closely with, but much less time with the broader network of people. Messages in Teams channels that the whole group can see are down 5%, while private and small group chats are up 87%. Some of that back channel is positive -- attempts to replicate those physical interactions, Janardhan suggests. "Previously it was rude to chat while you were in the meeting, and now it's the norm, because this is how people exchange things that were previously available only through body language. I would lean over to the person next to me and say 'really?' or I would smile. Now we do that in the chat."

Feeling included correlates with feeling productive and collaborating, coming up with new ideas and thinking strategically -- the things that contribute to creativity and innovation, which are under threat. "Innovation is defined by the things that you create together as a community. This risk to innovation is caused by the fact that when we look at how people are interacting with each other, the level, the depth of their conversations, the time they spend, the team bonds and networks are diminishing," Janardhan warns.

Close-knit groups can be supportive, but they can also be silos of groupthink with no new ideas, Microsoft researcher Nancy Baym (who studies social connections) cautions in the report. "Bumping into people in the office and grabbing lunch together may seem unrelated to the success of the organization, but they're actually important moments where people get to know one another and build social capital. They build trust, they discover common interests they didn't know they had, and they spark ideas and conversations." 

It's worst for Gen Z: 60% of 18-25s (who may be living alone or lack the space and money to create a good home workspace) say they're surviving rather than thriving, or flat-out struggling. They find it harder to balance work and life, they're more likely to feel exhausted after work, they don't feel engaged because they can't suggest new ideas or even get a chance to talk in meetings and they have fewer opportunities to make up for that and grow their career by networking because they can't connect with people casually at work. "They feel like the outlook is worse than ever on feeling engaged and excited about work, career advancement, being included in conversations and meetings, wellbeing and productivity," Janardhan notes. 

Those downsides are why 67% of people want more in-person time with their colleagues as well as working remotely.

Overoptimistic leaders 

Even though two-thirds of employers talk about converting offices into hybrid work locations, they seem to be out of touch with how much this matters. Business leaders are mostly male, information workers and either Gen X or millennials and they're thriving (61%, up over 20% from pre-pandemic), reporting better relationships with colleagues and their own bosses and taking all of their vacation days or even a few extras. "However, their employees are actually saying that they're tired -- the time spent in meetings has almost tripled, and it's still increasing." 

Women, frontline workers, those with less career progress and especially Gen Z are struggling -- and 37% of all staff say their company is asking too much of them. A fifth say their employer doesn't care about their work-life balance. 

"This dissonance between how leaders are seeing what's happening and how individuals and teams are feeling is really key," Janardhan warns.

One problem is that leaders are more isolated than before the pandemic. "What we see with leaders is that they're often focused on talking to that core group a lot. Previously they had all-hands meetings or company parties: the large gathering is exactly what the pandemic took away from us, it's something they no longer have access to so they become more siloed," Janardhan explains.

Companies advertising more roles as remote work (a 5x increase in remote job postings on LinkedIn) aren't always investing in what staff need to make that work: 42% of employees say they're missing some 'office essentials' and one in ten say their internet connection at home isn't good enough for their work. Worldwide, only 46% of staff get even a portion of remote work expenses paid. 

Oblivious leaders may get a rude awakening. Remote flexibility and a lack of support may explain why 41% of employees are now planning to leave their current job within a year. "This is a pretty significant trend increase," Janardhan notes. "When you look at Gen Z, the younger population that has been in the workforce for less time, that jumps to 54%. How leaders approach this next phase of work will impact who stays, who goes, and who joins the company, and it will significantly impact the bottom line. How do you manage your overall workforce with this churn and transition happening?" 

Although Microsoft has some suggestions about using technology to improve the situation, most of the strategies the report suggests are about improving employee experience by being flexible and supportive -- and setting the right example.

"This is a pivotal moment in history: we're on the cusp of the next workforce disruption. Across the board companies are thinking about how they can reinvent themselves," says Janardhan. "We should resist the urge to see this new way of working, hybrid work, as business-as-usual. It is an opportunity to rethink long-held assumptions, and I'm convinced that if we take the good that's emerging from this time with us, then we're going to reinvent for much better workforce [conditions]." 

The cultural norms inside companies about hybrid work need to be matched with new thinking about workspaces, Janardhan says. "If entering a certain physical space or exiting it was how you defined working, that's gone out the window. Organisations have all these cultures about 'when did you badge and when did you badge out, how long did you work?' That will have to evolve for this new type of working that is more individual, more empowered, more trusting, but also needs to have guardrails in place to be effective."

Both expectations and technology will need to change to make hybrid work successful, Janardhan suggests. "If you do back-to-back meetings because you have no need to commute from one place to another, you're going to be exhausted. It was typical, when you walk to a meeting room, to visit the restroom or get a drink of water and have a conversation. If you eliminate that, that's going to be the opposite of productive for every human being for every team. You can't write the best document or the best code if you aren't creating the right cognitive, critical space for deep work and collaboration work." 

The new Viva Insights tool can be helpful, Janardhan notes. "We're finding people are eager to set things like 'this is my focus time, this is my deep work time, this is my after-hours time'. That creates the courtesy culture you previously got from in-person interactions. I could see someone was heads-down, working at their desk, and I wouldn't interrupt. Bringing that sort of human sense into Teams standards is a huge part of this." 

But combating the exhaustion of remote work doesn't mean lecturing people about taking a break -- it has to come from the top down. "You can't have individuals saying 'we should have protected after-hours time' if you don't have leaders creating the structure by saying 'I will have certain times where I will engage and interact with the team and those will meet the guardrails and the norms of effective work/life scheduling'."

If companies introduce extra wellness days (Microsoft has added five extra days of time off for employees), leaders need to show that it's OK to use them by taking time off and encouraging staff to do the same. They should also encourage people to take time to network and connect, for fun as well as for work, because that's not an unproductive distraction. "Embrace the asynchronous collaboration, create a culture of breaks and interaction space for human interaction versus just transactional," says Janardhan. 

"We're human, we will always have to meet -- we will just do it more intentionally on our own terms, with more flexibility," she adds.   

Rebuilding the office 

The culture change includes rethinking the spaces people work in, because while many employees want both face-to-face time and the opportunity to work remotely at least some of the time, they're not positive about hybrid meetings. "Meetings where everyone's online: everyone rated those as the most inclusive. Meetings where everyone's in person are next, and the meetings with some online and some in person were the least inclusive," Janardhan tells TechRepublic. 

"Physical spaces have often been just a holding ground for people to get transactional work done. If you create rich collaboration -- for example extending the whiteboarding capabilities in Teams to a physical space -- you get a very different kind of physical space."  

Microsoft already has about 20% of its global employees back in offices and other locations in 21 countries, and plans to slowly reopen its Redmond headquarters to staff from March 29. Last year the company said that in the long run it will be standard for employees whose job doesn't need them to be in a specific location like a data centre or a hardware lab to work remotely up to 50% of the time if they want. That's already common for some groups like Azure DevOps, which has team members in several different countries, but a much bigger shift for teams like Windows, which has traditionally required employees to move to Seattle. For now, though, employees working in and near Redmond will be able to choose if they want to return to the office, carry on working remotely, or combine the two.

Previously, the campus has been at stage three of Microsoft's hybrid workplace classing, with working from home strongly encouraged. On March 29 it shifts to stage four, a soft opening. "Employees are encouraged to work remotely" a letter from executive vice president Kurt DelBene says. They "should not feel they need to return" but can "work where they feel most productive and comfortable". Precautions on campus will include "social distancing of workspaces, face coverings, extensive cleaning procedures, daily health attestations, attendance strategies and more". 

In other Microsoft locations at stage four, less than a third of employees are in the office for half of their working week and more than half are only there 25% of the time. If conditions worsen, the dial could shift back to a more restrictive level and Microsoft won't remove those measures until COVID-19 is more like a seasonal flu than a pandemic. 

The company is also building prototype hybrid meeting spaces in Redmond and its UK offices, experimenting with multiple screens, cameras and mixed reality scenarios to try and make meetings equally inclusive for remote workers and people in the room. That might look like the spacious offices Microsoft has shown in the Viva launch video, with a curved row of tables and wall-sized screens with a filmstrip view of remote attendees that puts everyone face to face, or something more like Microsoft Mesh mixed reality. Either way, offices and meeting rooms will need to be appealing spaces that are more attractive than staying home.

Software will be an important part of this, because it can help create habits and culture as well as simply enabling report work, and Janardhan is keen to see technology that better supports people. "My hope is that we and absolutely every single software company start thinking about the reinvention of employee experience. This is the rising tide that should raise all ships: we should change the way we think about software and service of that human endeavour."

By Mary Branscombe in CXO (https://www.techrepublic.com/)