Monday Dose #9🚀
Chernobyl's tree frogs, week review, time management as a student, creating change counterintuitively, falling up
Hello friends, happy to be back!
🖋️Quick week recap
The Japanese yen touches a 32-year low against the US dollar
Netflix ad-supported service to launch in November. The ad-discounted tier, a first for Netflix, will roll out in Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Spain and the United States. Video ads will be from 15 seconds to 30 seconds long.
Scottish rocket startup Skyrora fails on 1st space launch attempt as it hits sea.
Harry Porter actor Robbie Coltrane dies aged 72.
Elon Musk is under a federal investigation related to his $44 billion takeover deal for Twitter.
Burkina Faso coup leader Ibrahim Traore to become interim president until elections in July 2024
🏞️Nature: How Chernobyl’s tree frogs survived radiation
In what seems like a direct example of “evolution in action” scientists in Chernobyl have discovered a change in frog’s colouring in Chernobyl.
☢️The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven—the maximum severity—on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
The nuclear disaster seems to have had lasting effect on the local tree frogs. Many of the frogs which are normally green have turned black.
After studying more than 200 male frogs whose habitats were spread across 12 different breeding ponds throughout the radioactive contamination zone, researchers found that on average, 44 percent were darker than those outside of Chernobyl.
Studies have found frogs with more skin-darkening melanin pigment were more likely to survive the 1986 nuclear accident in Ukraine than frogs with lighter skin, leading to populations today that are dominated by darker frogs.
🤔Interestingly, the frog’s colouring is thought to be a protective response to radiation.
“They actually did not "change colour", what changed was the proportion of dark versus normal/green frogs. We suppose that this happened shortly after the accident (first years), when radiation levels were much higher, and radioisotopes more diverse.”
💡Melanin is thought to reduce the impact of radioactive particles on cells by dissipating the energy of the radiation and avoiding damage.
The scientists suspect that the frogs first became darker after the accident, and the pigmentation has passed down through generations of frogs since then.
🤷It would be interesting to learn how other organisms adapted to the events.
Here is the link to the study
Youtube
⌚How to manage your time as a student by Ali Abdaal
Avoid cramming!
Learn how to study effectively- use active recall and spaced repetition.
Be experimental with self care time
Work out your ideal ordinary week
Scrap revision timetables
Do not watch TV unless it is a social activity
Nothing good ever happens after 2 am
Run your life religiously based on a calendar.
Schedule everything. Ali hates social media so much lol
Embrace welcome distractions.
Use downtime for studying. Use your semester breaks for studying.
Choose to be satisfied with how you spend time. Don’t be hard on yourself.
Article
💡The counterintuitive way to create change in your life
Each one of us has an habit that he/she would like to change. Whether it is to quit smoking or stop eating junk food or cut overspending…the list is endless.
Here is the catch. There is a part of you that doesn’t want change. As psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it, it is human nature not to prefer doing something that has less than half the chance of making us feel good. This is the path of least resistance.
⭐Leo Babauta from Zen Habits offers a counterintuitive advice. He says that we should own that part of us that doesn’t want to change.
Until you own this part of you, you’re constantly trying to ignore it, repress it, squash it. Committing violence against a part of you doesn’t make it go away — in fact, it will strengthen it. Trying to ignore it means it will keep mysteriously controlling you.
💡He proposes that we should acknowledge that there is a part of us that is creating the resistance.
Once you start to love and delight and find delicious pleasure in this part of you, it no longer needs to be in control. It is loved and honored, which is all it ever wanted. You can move beyond it to another way — though it will still be there, when it does show up, you no longer have to fight it. You love it.
👍By doing this we can embrace the expansive change that is more than this one part of us.
This is a great thread in which Takezo focuses on health, wealth, mind and relationships. Wonderful insights!
In his tweet, Sahil Bloom highlights quotes and lessons from Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University. What a speech!
✍️Quote of the week
Success is about more than simple resilience. It’s about using that downward momentum to propel ourselves in the opposite direction. It’s about capitalizing on setbacks and adversity to become even happier, even more motivated, and even more successful. It’s not falling down, it’s falling up.
From ‘The Happiness Advantage’ by Shawn Achor
That is it for today. Have a great week, won’t you?
Dennis