If you work at home or in an office, you might spend a lot of your day sitting down and staring at a computer screen. That can have lots of negative effects – but it's hard to carve out significant time in the day to counteract that.
Our friends at NPR's TED Radio Hour wanted to know if small, frequent movement breaks might do the trick instead. Along with Columbia University Medical Center, they conducted a study of over 20,000 listeners and asked them to incorporate these movement breaks into their day. Today on the show, TED Radio Hour's Manoush Zomorodi digs into the surprising preliminary results with Columbia University researcher Keith Diaz.
Ideas to get moving? We want to hear them!Get in touch at shortwave@npr.org.
How many adverts does the average person see in a day? If you search for this question online, the surprising answer is that we might see thousands ? up to 10,000.
However, the idea that we see thousands of adverts is a strange and confusing one, without any good research behind it. We investigate the long history of these odd numbers, with the help of Sam Anderson from The Drum and J Walker Smith from Kantar.
Presenter: Tim Harford
Series producer: Tom Colls
Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown
Sound Mix: James Beard
Editor: Richard Vadon
All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.
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We kick off with a critical look at reporting on the peaks and valleys, upswings and downturns in venture capital and start-up exits—and ask the $800 billion question: has all this unfathomable investment and “value creation” by the tech sector resulted in a better world? Did your life in 2023 feel better? Did society seem $800 billion better? Or has it actually just felt worse? If so, then what’s the point of this innovation system and its strategies, metrics, and benchmarks? We then end by chatting about the mass sympathy strikes against Tesla in Scandinavia.
••• US venture capital fundraising hits a 6-year low https://www.ft.com/content/cfb186c8-22f4-4a82-b262-f4380a5d82b8
••• From Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/technology/tech-startups-collapse.html
••• Musk's woes deepen as Tesla strike spreads across Scandinavia https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20231215-musk-s-woes-deepen-as-tesla-strike-spreads-across-scandinavia
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Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)
Midwest winter blast; snow in the countries mid-section. President Biden comments on a series of strikes in Yemen. Federal prosecutors says they will seek the death penalty in federal hate crimes against a white supremacist.
When you think of a potato, one state probably comes to mind: Idaho. But for much of American history, Maine was home to the nation's largest potato crop.
That status had changed by the 1970s, with the West growing more and more of the nation's potatoes. But Maine still had one distinct advantage: A privileged position in the commodities market. The New York Mercantile Exchange, one of the largest such marketplaces in the country, exclusively dealt in Maine potatoes. And two deep-pocketed Western potato kingpins weren't happy about it.
So the Westerners waged what's now called the Maine Potato War of 1976. Their battlefield was the futures market: A special type of marketplace, made up of hordes of screaming traders, where potatoes can be bought and sold before they're even planted.
The Westerners did something so bold – and so unexpected – that it brought not only the potato market, but the entire New York commodities exchange, to its knees.
Today on the show, how a war waged through futures contracts influenced the kind of potatoes we eat.
This episode was hosted by Dylan Sloan and Nick Fountain. This episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler with help from Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Molly Messick, engineered by Valentina Rodríguez Sánchez, and fact checked by Sierra Juarez. Our executive producer is Alex Goldmark.
It's Indicators of the Week, that time each Friday when we look at three of the most fascinating numbers from the news. Today we explain why Hertz is trying to sell off part of its EV inventory, why office vacancy rates are still climbing and what Apple's class-action payout yielded one of our hosts.
Related Episodes: What could break next? (Apple / Spotify) How the South is trying to win the EV race (Apple / Spotify)
For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
The Houthis are monstrous militants, which would be reason enough to dispatch them via military might. But also, think of the carbon savings! Plus, Israel defends itself from genocide charges. And we're joined once more by Donald G. McNeil Jr. to discuss his new book The Wisdom of Plagues, a zoonotic origin of Covid, if Anthony Fauci answers about gain-of-function research were accurate, and public health cowardice in the face of m(onkey) pox.