But what about Internet users who want to slow down, but their jobs won’t let them? People whose profession revolves around deadlines and time-sensitive material — journalists, bankers and many others — would be up in arms if the Internet slowed down even a split second, admits Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow. “We’re up against the Web industrial complex,” he says, in which even the most well-intentioned businesses are driven by more content, more clicks, more swipes and ultimately getting more people addicted to their product. The Slow Web movement stands at odds with these realities. “That’s the big challenge,” Honoré says, “a kind of detoxification, a relearning of how to use the Web.”
Bill Fulkerson on 14 Jan 21If you want to understand an ecosystem, look at what the species within it eat. In studying food webs-how animals and plants in a community are connected through their dietary preferences-ecologists can piece together how energy flows through an ecosystem and how stable it is to climate change and other disturbances. Studying ancient food webs can help scientists reconstruct communities of species, many long extinct, and even use those insights to figure out how modern-day communities might change in the future. There's just one problem: only some species left enough of a trace for scientists to find eons later, leaving large gaps in the fossil record-and researchers' ability to piece together the food webs from the past.
