Health

Some companies claim remote work hurts wellbeing. Research shows the opposite.

OPINION ESSAY Tech
Some companies claim remote work hurts wellbeing. Research shows the opposite.

Leaders at Google and other companies are trying to get workers to return to the office, saying remote and hybrid work disrupt work-life boundaries and well-being. These arguments conflict with research on remote work and wellness.

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Many leaders at top companies are trying to get workers to return to the office. They say remote and hybrid work are bad for their employees’ mental well-being and lead to a sense of social isolation, meaninglessness, and lack of work-life boundaries, so we should just all go back to office-centric work.

One example is Google, where the company’s leadership is defending its requirement of mostly in-office work for all staff as necessary to protect social capital, meaning people’s connections to and trust in one another. That’s despite a survey of over 1,000 Google employees showing that two-thirds feel unhappy about being forced to work in the office three days per week. In internal meetings and public letters, many have threatened to leave, and some are already quitting to go to other companies with more flexible options.

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Gleb Tsipursky
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally recognized thought leader on a mission to protect leaders from dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases by developing the most effective decision-making strategies. A best-selling author, he wrote Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic and Pro Truth: A Practical Plan for Putting Truth Back Into Politics. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training as the CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and over 15 years in academia as a behavioral economist and cognitive neuroscientist. He co-founded the Pro-Truth Pledge project.
tech

A startup aims to make medicines in space

Health Environment & Space
A startup aims to make medicines in space

A company is looking to improve medicines by making them in the nearly weightless environment of space.

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Story by Big Think

On June 12, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket deployed 72 small satellites for customers — including the world’s first space factory.

The challenge: In 2019, pharma giant Merck revealed that an experiment on the International Space Station had shown how to make its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda more stable. That meant it could now be administered via a shot rather than through an IV infusion.

The key to the discovery was the fact that particles behave differently when freed from the force of gravity — seeing how its drug crystalized in microgravity helped Merck figure out how to tweak its manufacturing process on Earth to produce the more stable version.

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Kristin Houser
Kristin Houser is a staff writer at Freethink, where she covers science and tech. Her written work has appeared in Business Insider, NBC News, and the World Economic Forum’s Agenda, among other publications, and Stephen Colbert once talked about a piece on The Late Show, to her delight. Formerly, Kristin was a staff writer for Futurism and wrote several animated and live action web series.
genetics

Genes that protect health with Dr. Nir Barzilai

Podcast In The Lab
Genes that protect health with Dr. Nir Barzilai

Centenarians essentially won the genetic lottery, says Nir Barzilai of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is studying their genes to see how the rest of us can benefit from understanding how they work.

In today’s podcast episode, I talk with Nir Barzilai, a geroscientist, which means he studies the biology of aging. Barzilai directs the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

My first question for Dr. Barzilai was: why do we age? And is there anything to be done about it? His answers were encouraging. We can’t live forever, but we have some control over the process, as he argues in his book, Age Later.

Dr. Barzilai told me that centenarians differ from the rest of us because they have unique gene mutations that help them stay healthy longer. For most of us, the words “gene mutations” spell trouble - we associate these words with cancer or neurodegenerative diseases, but apparently not all mutations are bad.

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Lina Zeldovich

Lina Zeldovich has written about science, medicine and technology for Popular Science, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, the New York Times and other major national and international publications. A Columbia J-School alumna, she has won several awards for her stories, including the ASJA Crisis Coverage Award for Covid reporting, and has been a contributing editor at Nautilus Magazine. In 2021, Zeldovich released her first book, The Other Dark Matter, published by the University of Chicago Press, about the science and business of turning waste into wealth and health. You can find her on http://linazeldovich.com/ and @linazeldovich.