“A great ass-covering way to say no is to say, ‘Well, this person said something irresponsible on television,'” de Grey explains. “Whether or not the thing they said on television actually was irresponsible, if it could be characterized as irresponsible, like over-promising and under-delivering or getting the public’s hopes up or whatever, then that’s good enough.”

The post Why Scientists Don’t Make Predictions: The Funding Politics of Aging Research appeared first on Green Prophet.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey: people can live for 1000 years.

In the prestigious halls of biogerontology—where scientists untangle the mysteries of human aging—a curious silence persists when it comes to discussing timeframes. Ask most aging researchers when we might defeat aging, and they’ll quickly pivot to discussing incremental progress or the complexity of their work. This isn’t mere scientific caution; it’s a carefully calculated strategy shaped by the brutal realities of research funding.

“I actually wrote a paper on this called “The duty of biogerontologists to discuss time frames publicly”, and I wrote it in 2004,” says Dr. Aubrey de Grey, founder and Chief Science Officer of LEV Foundation. “So it’s been a real problem.”

While remarkable progress continues in labs worldwide, the culture of avoiding predictions has created what de Grey considers a dangerous disconnect between scientific potential and public awareness. This strategic silence might be protecting individual careers, but at what cost to humanity’s battle against its oldest enemy?

The Politics of Prediction in Scientific Funding

The land between the Tigris and Euphrates was once a wellspring of invention. Thousands of years before modern irrigation, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians carved canals, engineered flood basins, and developed qanat systems—ingenious underground channels that carried water from mountain springs to distant farms.

The post Iraq’s Ancient Water Wisdom Faces a Modern Reckoning appeared first on Green Prophet.

An ancient Qanat system in Persia. Spread throughout the arid Middle East, these systems predated Roman aqueducts but the historical narrative isn’t told

As tensions over water intensify across Iraq and the wider Middle East, the 5th Baghdad International Water Conference has cast a timely spotlight on the country’s fragile water future—and its ancient hydrological past.

Held in the heart of Mesopotamia—where early civilizations once mastered the art of water management—the conference drew regional experts and leaders to Baghdad to confront a crisis that’s becoming more urgent by the year: water scarcity. With rivers running dry and modern agricultural systems straining under the pressure, Iraq finds itself at a crossroads between its hydraulic heritage and an increasingly parched present.

They Call Her Madam Torti. She Might Be the Only One Who Can Save Seychelles Turtles

Published May 29, 2025 | By wizardsreview.com

Sea turtle expert Dr. Jeanne Mortimer warns that unchecked development on Assomption Island threatens Seychelles’ most critical nesting beach. With over four decades of research, Mortimer advocates for science-based, turtle-friendly development to protect endangered species. Her quiet, persistent work underscores the urgent need for conservation-led planning in fragile island ecosystems.

The post They Call Her Madam Torti. She Might Be the Only One Who Can Save Seychelles Turtles appeared first on Green Prophet.

Jeanne Mortimer, the Dianne Fossey of sea turtles. She changed everything in the Seychelles.

Assomption Island is the back door to one of the last unspoiled corners of Seychelles, the Aldabra Atoll. The Seychelles is a nation of people that control 115 islands scattered across the Indian Ocean. With just over 100,000 people and a heroin crisis afflicting nearly 10% of its population, this small country faces vast and complex challenges. But perhaps none are more pressing—or more invisible to the wider world—than the fate of its sea turtles.

At the center of this story is Dr. Jeanne A Mortimer, an American-Seychellois biologist who has been studying sea turtles since 1973 and working in Seychelles since 1981. Known affectionately as “Madam Torti” among locals, Jeanne is not an activist. She’s not leading protests or lobbying parliament. She is, as always, knee-deep in research—methodically documenting, measuring, walking the beaches at dawn, and then later at night when the turtles nest, and publishing what she finds.

And what she finds is urgent.

Assomption Beach Too Valuable to Lose

Are you like me, reading about people fading away as they burn out, and feeling unable to relate? Do you feel like your feelings are invisible to the world because you’re experiencing burnout differently? When burnout starts to push down on us, our core comes through more. Beautiful, peaceful souls get quieter and fade into that distant and distracted burnout we’ve all read about. But some of us, those with fires always burning on the edges of our core, get hotter. In my heart I am fire. When I face burnout I double down, triple down, burning hotter and hotter to try to best the challenge. I don’t fade—I am engulfed in a zealous burnout. 

So what on earth is a zealous burnout?

Imagine a woman determined to do it all. She has two amazing children whom she, along with her husband who is also working remotely, is homeschooling during a pandemic. She has a demanding client load at work—all of whom she loves. She gets up early to get some movement in (or often catch up on work), does dinner prep as the kids are eating breakfast, and gets to work while positioning herself near “fourth grade” to listen in as she juggles clients, tasks, and budgets. Sound like a lot? Even with a supportive team both at home and at work, it is. 

Sounds like this woman has too much on her plate and needs self-care. But no, she doesn’t have time for that. In fact, she starts to feel like she’s dropping balls. Not accomplishing enough. There’s not enough of her to be here and there; she is trying to divide her mind in two all the time, all day, every day. She starts to doubt herself. And as those feelings creep in more and more, her internal narrative becomes more and more critical.

Suddenly she KNOWS what she needs to do! She should DO MORE. 

This is a hard and dangerous cycle. Know why? Because once she doesn’t finish that new goal, that narrative will get worse. Suddenly she’s failing. She isn’t doing enough. SHE is not enough. She might fail, she might fail her family…so she’ll find more she should do. She doesn’t sleep as much, move as much, all i

Feedback, in whichever form it takes, and whatever it may be called, is one of the most effective soft skills that we have at our disposal to collaboratively get our designs to a better place while growing our own skills and perspectives.

Feedback is also one of the most underestimated tools, and often by assuming that we’re already good at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Poor feedback can create confusion in projects, bring down morale, and affect trust and team collaboration over the long term. Quality feedback can be a transformative force. 

Practicing our skills is surely a good way to improve, but the learning gets even faster when it’s paired with a good foundation that channels and focuses the practice. What are some foundational aspects of giving good feedback? And how can feedback be adjusted for remote and distributed work environments? 

On the web, we can identify a long tradition of asynchronous feedback: from the early days of open source, code was shared and discussed on mailing lists. Today, developers engage on pull requests, designers comment in their favorite design tools, project managers and scrum masters exchange ideas on tickets, and so on.

Design critique is often the name used for a type of feedback that’s provided to make our work better, collaboratively. So it shares a lot of the principles with feedback in general, but it also has some differences.

The content

The foundation of every good critique is the feedback’s content, so that’s where we need to start. There are many models that you can use to shape your content. The one that I personally like best—because it’s clear and actionable—is this one from Lara Hogan.

“Any comment?” is probably one of the worst ways to ask for feedback. It’s vague and open ended, and it doesn’t provide any indication of what we’re looking for. Getting good feedback starts earlier than we might expect: it starts with the request. 

It might seem counterintuitive to start the process of receiving feedback with a question, but that makes sense if we realize that getting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions.

Design critique is not a one-shot process. Sure, any good feedback workflow continues until the project is finished, but this is particularly true for design because design work continues iteration after iteration, from a high level to the finest details. Each level needs its own set of questions.

And finally, as with any good research, we need to review what we got back, get to the core of its insights, and take action. Question, iteration, and review. Let’s look at each of those.

The question

Being open to feedback is essential, but we need to be precise about what we’re looking for. Just saying “Any comment?”, “What do you think?”, or “I’d love to get your opinion” at the end of a presentation—whether it’s in person, over video, or through a written post—is likely to get a number of varied opinions or, even worse, get everyone to follow the direction of the first person who speaks up. And then… we get frustrated because vague questions like those can turn a high-level flows review into people instead commenting on the borders of buttons. Which might be a hearty topic, so it might be hard at that point to redirect the team to the subject that you had wanted to focus on.

But how do we get into this situation? It’s a mix of factors. One is that we don’t usually consider asking as a pa

I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine? Or design products that work on devices yet to be invented?

Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design

When I first started designing websites, my go-to software was Photoshop. I created a 960px canvas and set about creating a layout that I would later drop content in. The development phase was about attaining pixel-perfect accuracy using fixed widths, fixed heights, and absolute positioning.

Ethan Marcotte’s talk at An Event Apart and subsequent article “Responsive Web Design” in A List Apart in 2010 changed all this. I was sold on responsive design as soon as I heard about it, but I was also terrified. The pixel-perfect designs full of magic numbers that I had previously prided myself on producing were no longer good enough.

The fear wasn’t helped by my first experience with responsive design. My first project was to take an existing fixed-width website and make it responsive. What I learned the hard way was that you can’t just add responsiveness at the end of a project. To create fluid layouts, you need to plan throughout the design phase.

A new way to design

Designing responsive or fluid sites has always been about removing limitations, producing content that can be viewed on any device. It relies on the use of percentage-based layouts, which I initially achieved with native CSS and utility classes:

.column-span-6 {
  width: 49%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}


.column-span-4 {
  width: 32%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}

.column-span-3 {
  width: 24%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: 0.5%;
  margin-left: 0.5%;
}

Then with Sass so I could take advantage of @includes to re-use repeated blocks of code and move back to more sem

We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations. Only in the last few millennia have we begun to commit our conversations to writing, and only in the last few decades have we begun to outsource them to the computer, a machine that shows much more affinity for written correspondence than for the slangy vagaries of spoken language.

Computers have trouble because between spoken and written language, speech is more primordial. To have successful conversations with us, machines must grapple with the messiness of human speech: the disfluencies and pauses, the gestures and body language, and the variations in word choice and spoken dialect that can stymie even the most carefully crafted human-computer interaction. In the human-to-human scenario, spoken language also has the privilege of face-to-face contact, where we can readily interpret nonverbal social cues.

In contrast, written language immediately concretizes as we commit it to record and retains usages long after they become obsolete in spoken communication (the salutation “To whom it may concern,” for example), generating its own fossil record of outdated terms and phrases. Because it tends to be more consistent, polished, and formal, written text is fundamentally much easier for machines to parse and understand.

Spoken language has no such luxury. Besides the nonverbal cues that decorate conversations with emphasis and emotional context, there are also verbal cues and vocal behaviors that modulate conversation in nuanced ways: how something is said, not what. Whether rapid-fire, low-pitched, or high-decibel, whether sarcastic, stilted, or sighing, our spoken language conveys much more than the written word could ever muster. So when it comes to voice interfaces—the machines we conduct spoken conversations with—we face exciting challenges as designers and content strategists.

Voice Interac