Link About It: This Week’s Picks
Mount Everest’s new height, evidence of the Anthropocene, work-from-home tips and more from around the internet
Burberry + British Fashion Council Will Donate Fabric to Students
Burberry has teamed up with the British Fashion Council for a new initiative called ReBurberry that will provide students with the luxury brand’s unused fabric. Aiming to give the fabric (minus that iconic check pattern) to UK-based students who are most in need of resources, Burberry hopes that their program encourages other fashion houses to do the same. (Alexander McQueen gave several old fabrics to universities earlier this year, too.) “Providing resources for the next generation of diverse voices across the country in a sustainable way will enable them to bring their creativity to life,” the brand’s release reads. Find out more at Dazed Digital.
Image courtesy of Burberry
Mount Everest’s New Height
Officials from Nepal and China, the two nations that border Mount Everest, just announced a new official height for the mountain. Now documented as standing at 8,848.86 meters (29,031.69 feet) tall, Everest measures three feet more than the previous height, which was recorded in the 1950s. A number of facts impact Everest’s official height: earthquakes can cause it to sink somewhat, while shifting tectonic plates push it further upward. Nepal announced its mission to record the mountain’s height in 2018, and committed over $1 million to the task. Trigonometry, satellite technology, teams of human surveyors and more were employed for the immense project, but scientists agree that the resulting number is a “moving target.” Read more at The Washington Post.
Image courtesy of Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
Psychological Specifications Around Successful Work-From-Home Breaks
For everyone who’s shifted to working from home this year, and for the continued foreseeable future, taking regular—scheduled—breaks is crucial to productivity. Otherwise, your brain continues to say, “I know I need to take a break at some point. Why not now?” explains Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and The Time-Block Planner: A Daily Method for Deep Work in a Distracted World. Checking email is not a break—in fact, it creates a “cognitive disaster,” according to Newport. Read more about the author’s findings and guidance at Fast Company.
Image courtesy of Foundr
Human-Made Elements Outweigh the Natural World
Researchers believe that 2020 is the year that human-made mass (roads, buildings, machines and everything else we manufacture) will outweigh the natural world (aka biomass). As mass on the planet is finite, this means biomass is shrinking, too—through the prevalence deforestation and development. This turning point “is a reason for all of us to ponder our role, how much consumption we do and how can we try to get a better balance between the living world and humanity,” Dr Ron Milo, the study’s lead researcher, tells the BBC. And while this shift has seemed inevitable since the 1950s, when new technologies helped humans significantly increase their production capabilities, 2020 may officially mark the dawn of the Anthropocene, a threshold that stamps humanity’s impact on our planet into the sediment and rock to be seen some millions of years from now. Read more at the BBC.
Image courtesy of the BBC/Getty
2,953 Movements of the Sun in One Photograph
In 2012 Regina Valkenborough, a student in the Fine Art Master’s program at the University of Herfordshire, was exploring making photographic images without technology. One experiment included making a pinhole camera from a beer can, which she tried several times unsuccessfully in the university’s observatory, each failing due to moisture and paper-curling. Fast forward eight years when one of her beer can cameras was discovered atop a telescope, and the image captured inside shows 2,953 movements of the sun over that period. She says, “It was a stroke of luck that the picture was left untouched.” It’s believed that this long-exposure photo is the longest in existence. Read more at the University of Hertfordshire.
Image courtesy of Regina Valkenborgh
Link About It is our filtered look at the web, shared daily in Link and on social media, and rounded up every Saturday morning. Hero image courtesy of Pixabay
