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"With each interaction, Alexa is training to hear better, to interpret more precisely, to trigger actions that map to the user's commands more accurately, and to build a more complete model of their preferences, habits and desires. What is required to make this possible? Put simply: each small moment of convenience - be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song - requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data. The scale of resources required is many magnitudes greater than the energy and labor it would take a human to operate a household appliance or flick a switch. A full accounting for these costs is almost impossible, but it is increasingly important that we grasp the scale and scope if we are to understand and govern the technical infrastructures that thread through our lives. III The Salar, the world's largest flat surface, is located in southwest Bolivia at an altitude of 3,656 meters above sea level. It is a high plateau, covered by a few meters of salt crust which are exceptionally rich in lithium, containing 50% to 70% of the world's lithium reserves. 4 The Salar, alongside the neighboring Atacama regions in Chile and Argentina, are major sites for lithium extraction. This soft, silvery metal is currently used to power mobile connected devices, as a crucial material used for the production of lithium-Ion batteries. It is known as 'grey gold.' Smartphone batteries, for example, usually have less than eight grams of this material. 5 Each Tesla car needs approximately seven kilograms of lithium for its battery pack. 6 All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty. The Amazon Echo is wall-powered, and also has a mobile battery base. This also has a limited lifespan and then must be thrown away as waste. According to the Ay

Land use change-for example, the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural or urban ecosystems-is widely recognized to influence the risk and emergence of zoonotic disease in humans1,2. However, whether such changes in risk are underpinned by predictable ecological changes remains unclear. It has been suggested that habitat disturbance might cause predictable changes in the local diversity and taxonomic composition of potential reservoir hosts, owing to systematic, trait-mediated differences in species resilience to human pressures3,4. Here we analyse 6,801 ecological assemblages and 376 host species worldwide, controlling for research effort, and show that land use has global and systematic effects on local zoonotic host communities. Known wildlife hosts of human-shared pathogens and parasites overall comprise a greater proportion of local species richness (18-72% higher) and total abundance (21-144% higher) in sites under substantial human use (secondary, agricultural and urban ecosystems) compared with nearby undisturbed habitats. The magnitude of this effect varies taxonomically and is strongest for rodent, bat and passerine bird zoonotic host species, which may be one factor that underpins the global importance of these taxa as zoonotic reservoirs. We further show that mammal species that harbour more pathogens overall (either human-shared or non-human-shared) are more likely to occur in human-managed ecosystems, suggesting that these trends may be mediated by ecological or life-history traits that influence both host status and tolerance to human disturbance5,6. Our results suggest that global changes in the mode and the intensity of land use are creating expanding hazardous interfaces between people, livestock and wildlife reservoirs of zoonotic disease.

Silicon is the second-most abundant element in Earth's crust and it plays a vital role in plant life, both on land and in the sea. Silicon is used by plants in tissue building, which helps to ward off herbivorous animals. In the ocean, phytoplankton consume enormous amounts of silicon; they get a constant supply courtesy of rivers and streams. And silicon winds up in rivers and streams due to erosion of silicon-containing rocks. Land plants also use silicon. They get it from the soil. In this new effort, the researchers began by noting that the terrestrial biogeochemical cycling of silicon (how it moves from plants back to the soil and then into plants again) is poorly understood. To gain a better understanding of how it works, they ventured to a part of Western Australia that, unlike other parts of the world, has not been impacted by Pleistocene glaciations. The soil there gave the researchers a look at the silicon cycle going back 2 million years.

Deforestation has converted swaths of land in the southern Amazon region from rainforest to farmland. The uses of the deforested land are diverse, and activities can range from small-scale farming in rural settlements to large-scale commodity agriculture. Commercial farms in the Southern Amazon can reach hundreds of thousands of hectares in area, exporting millions of tons in grains and beef every year.

""'Conquering' nature has long been the western way," writes Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. "Our hubris, and often our religious ideologies, have led us to believe we are above nature and have a right to subdue and control it. We let our technical abilities get ahead of our wisdom. We're learning now that working with nature-understanding that we are part of it-is more cost-effective and efficient in the long run." In our new normal, one way to work with nature might be to let her have her coastlines back."

Of course the thing that all these policies have in common is that they would make life vastly better for nearly all of us, while making the super-rich a very little worse off. As Wu points out, this is not a picture of a "heavily polarized" nation, as the pundits would have it. These policies are wildly popular and are outside of the political mainstream because a minority have figured out how to suppress the will of the supermajority.