【推荐1】Bringing in and engaging diverse people in your organization requires awareness and preparation. When employees don't feel included, they're less engaged and productive.     1     That's why some leaders are concluding that what they've been doing isn't working. This is a result of bringing people in but not supporting them as full participants in the organization. This is where inclusion comes in.

    2     When a workplace is truly inclusive, everyone feels like they are valued and their needs are being considered. There's a place, for example, to be a working mother without feeling like you have to apologize or explain that you need to balance work and parenting.

Companies that are good for working moms are also good for humans.     3     They want to be part of companies that readily acknowledge people have priorities outside of work and recognize this does not mean they're any less productive or less committed.

Although companies have talked for decades about trying to develop a sense of inclusion for working moms, very little has changed.     4     They have to handle questions about limitations such as a lack of time, commitment, and focus.

Working moms are valuable employees who we should actively guide and promote. They bring a lot to the table. In fact, a productivity study of highly skilled workers in 2014 found that parents were more productive than those who were not parents.     5    

Professional cultures that make employees feel included are places where employees can do their best work, individually and on teams. These cultures experience higher engagement because people are well-positioned to stay for the long term.

【推荐3】Generally speaking, convenience and safety affect how we choose to pay for things. Environmental concerns do, too.

Each time you pull out a credit, use a phone’s wallet app or hand over cash, you take part in a system. Some parts of that system make things, like coins, bills or cards. Other parts move money between buyers, sellers, banks and others. Used cash, cards and equipment will be eventually dealt with, as well. Each part of this system uses materials and energy. And all parts produce waste.

Now researchers are looking more closely at how “green” these payment systems are. They’re finding buyers can help cut some of the environmental costs, no matter how they pay.

To understand the full “cost” to society of money or any other system, researchers can perform what’s called a life-cycle assessment. It looks at all the environmental impacts of a product or process. It starts with mining, growing or making the raw materials. It includes what happens while something is in use. And it considers the final disposal or reuse of things.

Even though raw materials are the first step, in fact there are raw materials added in at every single step along the journey. For money, raw materials go into each step of something that is “made”. Fuels are the raw materials for energy to make products and transport them. More energy goes into using products. Recycling or disposal also requires energy, plus water, soil or other materials.

People don’t realize most of those steps, so they can’t judge if one form of payment is dirtier or more costly. And that’s a problem, researchers say. It’s also what has got some of them to show more about the costs of how we pay for our lifestyles.

A life-cycle assessment doesn’t tell you what to do. However, it gives you an informed basis for making a decision.

【推荐1】Imagine a warm spring day 66 million years ago. Fish would have been swimming in the rivers in an area that’s now North Dakota in the US. Seconds later, the peace was ended by destruction.

These could have been the very last moments of the dinosaur era when a city-sized asteroid (小行星) struck Earth, killing off three quarters of all species on the planet. According to a study published in Nature on Feb 23, the asteroid hit in springtime, which saw the death of an over-160-million-year-old dynasty and changed the course of evolution of life on Earth.

Scientists have long been confused over the time of year the asteroid hit, and how some animals managed to survive while dinosaurs didn’t.

Researchers in 2019 discovered the fishes fossils in North Dakota that died shortly after the asteroid hit Earth. They examined the fossils with a particle accelerator and found out there was seasonal growth on the bones. All fish bone cell densities (密度) and volumes can indicate the season. Because the accelerator also could capture the size, researchers were able to determine when in the year the asteroid hit.

The timing of the big hit, at least for the Northern Hemisphere (北半球), came at a particularly sensitive stage. “I think spring puts a large group of the late Cretaceous biota (白垩纪生物) in a very difficult situation because they were out and about looking for food, tending to their babies and trying to build up resources after the terrible winter,” an author of the study said.

In the Southern Hemisphere, it was in autumn, a season when many creatures prepared for winter. Therefore, life in the Southern Hemisphere was a lot more prepared for this event.

It is unclear whether small animals in the Northern Hemisphere actually did worse than those in the south. There is evidence that Northern Hemisphere turtles were extinguished in the asteroid strike, after which their habitats were later repopulated by turtles from the south, the author said.