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Everybody makes mistakes. Professional baseball players make hits less than half the time at bat. Experienced lawyers make decisions that lead to them losing cases all the time. But what if there was a way to make fewer missteps? In his new book, Leonard L. Riskin, law professor and senior fellow at the Center on Negotiation, Mediation, and Restorative Justice at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law says the key to succeeding in high-pressure situations is mindfulness.

On Monday, Riskin, alongside a panel of his colleagues, shared insights from his book “Managing Conflict Mindfully: Don’t Believe Everything You Think” in a discussion hosted by Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. Riskin, a pioneer in mindfulness practice in law, believes being aware of emotions and unhelpful thoughts and feelings help in decision-making critical to not only law, but many other professions.

“I have noticed that even people who are very well-trained in negotiation and have read everything and have a lot of experience will from time to time, really mess up a particular negotiation or mediation,” Riskin said. “And the same thing applies in almost any field … we’re also talking about any kind of a difficult situation.”

Riskin described five obstacles to mindfulness:

• Automatic or habitual ways of thinking, feeling, or behaving;
• Excessively self-centered perspectives;
• Poor management of emotions;
• Insufficient social skills;
• Inadequate management of focus or awareness.

The five obstacles, Riskin said, often interact with each other in difficult situations. To illustrate, he shared a story of a negotiation during which he started disliking one party and favoring the other. At the same time, he was worrying about what others thought of him, and whether they believed he was a capable mediator.

“So I have these voices running around in my head. Meanwhile, I’m listening to them and feeling awful about myself. And I’m not listening to the actual conversation that’s going on in the room,” Riskin said.

Riskin combines his five-obstacle theory with a psychological framework known as “Internal Family Systems” that has influenced his law practice and teaching for the last decade.

“It’s a theory of the mind and an approach to psychotherapy which is based on these ideas that in our minds there are two kinds of entities. There’s a self and then there a whole bunch of things called parts, which are the same thing as what psychologists have called ‘sub personalities.’”

The parts, Riskin said, represent our battling interests like a family. One part of your psyche may be childlike and lack forethought, while one may be parental and protective. For Riskin, his parental subpart interrupts his mindfulness to tell him to chat up important scholars, even when he has nothing to say to them.

“I was able to resist,” Riskin said. “You can achieve some freedom from these inner voices if you’re aware of them.”

To conclude the talk, Riskin shared starting places for those interested in implementing some mindfulness into their own practices. For one, he says the RAIN exercise, written about by psychologist Tara Brach, helps slow down busy minds and take stock of decision-making processes. Riskin also suggests reading Judson Brewer’s book “Unwinding Anxiety” about learning to pause while in the throes of anxiety.

“The more you practice it, the more diligent you are, the better able you are to manage these kinds of distractions and feel better,” Riskin said.

Electronic devices run on the fundamental property that electrons’ charge helps them to move and generate current. Now imagine another property — this one in the quantum realm — that can help electrons behave more energy-efficiently. Spintronics makes use of the spin of an electron, a fundamental property dependent on its intrinsic angular momentum.

“People want to talk to spins as the information bit for quite a while now, as the quantum-mechanical property of a spin doesn’t cost as much energy to switch on or to sustain as electrical current. But it is harder than it looks,” said Sascha Feldmann, research group leader at the Rowland Institute.  “You usually have to apply strong magnetic fields to talk to the tiny magnetic moment a spin has.”

An electron can have two spin states — up or down — and these can be used to store and process information. But manipulating them can be tricky, requiring the use of magnetic fields on very perfectly ordered materials at extremely low temperatures to work. Feldmann and his team of researchers, both here and at the University of Cambridge, were able to generate electron spin domains with none of these factors at hand. They simply shined circularly-polarized light at room temperature on halide perovskite films, a very easy-to-make, but highly disordered semiconducting material. Lo and behold, within a few picoseconds (trillionths of a second), the electrons developed different spin states and formed local spin domains. The results were published in a paper in Nature Materials.

“With light we can now optically address spins, which so far one could only learn about using magnetic measurements,” said Feldmann, a corresponding author of the paper. “With just the polarization of our light, we are able to talk to the spins of the electrons, non-invasively.”

To study this, the researchers developed a special microscopy technique based on the information encoded in the spiraling handedness of the light. Left or right-handed circularly-polarized light was used to generate the spin-up or spin-down state, and using that information, they were able to see the spins of the material in detail.

At this scale in each domain, spins survived for much longer than expected. Because they were using microscopy, they were also able to see spin transport. “Like how charges flow in a wire, we can see how the spins move,” said Feldmann.

The researchers observed a phenomenon called spin-momentum locking. This means, for an electron, the spin state determines the direction of its movement. Being able to not only observe, but also manipulate the movement of the spins opens possibilities for the clever design of materials with electron spins to be optically manipulated. Once a material is magnetized, even optically, it remains that way and does not need external power to maintain its state. This allows spintronics to be very useful, a common use being the more stable and efficient storage of data in computer storage systems. It also has uses in quantum computing, as the quantum property of spins opens new ways of easily performing certain computing tasks, tasks that would take a traditional computer thousands of years to complete.

“A semiconductor is what interacts with light and a ferromagnet is what is magnetic and does stuff with spins. Here we have found something that combines the best of both worlds. It is amazing, because it brings the spintronics people to a place where one can optically control magnetism, and by using spins, it adds another degree of freedom to traditional optical semiconductor devices,” said Feldmann. “It is quite exciting, the interfacing of photonics, electronics, and spintronics, potentially all in one material.”

Feldmann had been using the extremely versatile halide perovskite materials as a semiconductor for its solar photovoltaic or LED applications, as a means for sustainable energy production. The Rowland Fellow is amazed at how this messy material behaves so beautifully upon its interaction with light and wants to study this further.

“The simplicity of the material and making these films and still being able to see spin transport physics is absolutely fantastic for us.”

“Arjun Ashoka, the Ph.D. student who led this work, really did a fantastic job in making this challenging experiment work,” added Feldmann.

Wildfire smoke is a threat to air quality, public health, and ecosystems throughout the U.S. Notwithstanding the impact of this year’s Canadian wildfires, the West typically sees much higher exposure to wildfire smoke than other regions of the country. New research from Harvard University, the U.S. Forest Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that controlled burns — particularly in coastal areas of northern California and the Pacific Northwest — could dramatically reduce the overall amount of wildfire smoke exposure in vulnerable rural communities and dense population centers across the West. The findings are published online in Earth’s Future.

“Since the early 1900s, a legacy of fire suppression in the West in combination with a warming climate have contributed to severe wildfires. Until now, there hasn’t been much research into how land management methods might influence smoke exposure,” says Makoto Kelp, the paper’s lead author, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard as a member of the Atmospheric Chemistry Modeling Group.

“Smoke consists of a mix of gases and tiny particles. The particles are bad to breathe because they can get deep into your lungs and trigger a slew of acute and chronic diseases,” says modeling group co-leader Loretta Mickley, senior author of the paper and a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Drier and warmer conditions, together with accumulated underbrush, have made the West more vulnerable to large, severe wildfires. Implementing smaller, prescribed fires could make it more difficult for out-of-control wildfires to spread. These controlled fires still emit smoke, but the net benefit is less smoke pollution overall.”

Analyzing wildfire data from 2018 and 2020 and using a computer model to simulate how prescribed fires would behave, the team found that controlled burns in key zones in northern California, western Oregon, and eastern Washington could have an outsized effect on reducing wildfire smoke exposure throughout the entire western U.S. This is due in part to prevailing winds carrying smoke across the continent and to the abundant, dense vegetation that fuels smokey fires.

Satellite observations and government records reveal that only a handful of such prescribed fires were set for land management purposes in the West between 2015 and 2020. Using fire to clear agricultural lands and manage habitats is a more common practice in the East and Southeast U.S. While Indigenous communities in the West have historically set controlled fires, land managers over the last century have tried to quickly suppress wildland fires for fear of their destructive spread, thus contributing to a “fire deficit.”

With more research indicating the benefits of prescribed fires, however, that practice may be poised to change. In August 2022, the Biden Administration designated nearly $2 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce hazardous wildfire fuels through prescribed burns and land management measures.

“Our modeling reveals that controlled burns should be targeted to dense vegetation areas, especially west of the Sierras and the Cascades, upwind of populated areas,” Kelp says.

The team’s computer modeling integrates environmental, meteorological, chemical, and physical parameters to predict how wildfire smoke spreads and impacts communities. “With all these levels of data baked into the model, we’ve improved our understanding of how and where to reduce wildfire smoke exposure,” Kelp says. “Although prescribed fires come with their own risks, we know that prescribed fires can be better controlled over smaller pieces of land, achieving more efficient combustion that generates less pollution over the course of a few hours or days. In contrast, wildfires are unpredictable and can rapidly spread across vast areas, blanketing populated regions with harmful smoke.”

“Anyone who has spent time in wildfire-prone areas can attest that smoke from wildfires can travel great distances and have significant impact on air quality,” says Matthew Carroll, a program specialist at the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station. Carroll co-authored the paper and discussed the teams’ findings. “What was surprising was our ability to use highly predictive models of physical phenomena to understand impacts to social landscapes. Fire managers can use this research about how smoke from wildfires and prescribed fires can affect communities and population centers differently to help prioritize where and when to conduct fuel treatments to be more effective and equitable.”

Prior research indicates wildfire smoke can have a disproportionate impact on communities predominantly inhabited by people of color or a high proportion of people living below the poverty line. While monitoring of wildfire smoke and its public health impacts has increased in urban population centers, researchers say the smoke effects on these rural communities have likely been overlooked.

For their study, the team looked at smoke exposure across three major environmental justice communities in the West: agricultural communities in California’s Central Valley and central/eastern Washington and Navajo Nation in the Southwest. They found that prescribed burns in key areas of northern California and the Pacific Northwest would reduce the transport of smoke to these vulnerable regions.

“Confronting the wildfire crisis is enormously complex. My hope is that this research helps the public understand all the physical and social factors that we consider when planning and implementing prescribed burns to deal with the myriad of complexities that exist in tackling wildfire and smoke,” Carroll says. “The power of this research is in bringing together multiple disciplines of science to conduct modeling that looks at data in new ways, analyzing physical phenomena like smoke across a social landscape of cities and communities and using that information to help support real-world decisions and actions.”

Additional authors include Tianjia Liu from the University of California Irvine, Robert Yantosca from Harvard SEAS, and Heath Hockenberry from NOAA.

Funding for the research was provided by NOAA.

Kids these days. Where did all the good guys go? We never used to lock the doors! For years, Adam M. Mastroianni bristled at pronouncements of declining human decency.

“One of my earliest Facebook statuses was: I get so annoyed when people make sweeping claims about history without actual knowledge of it,” said Mastroianni, who earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard in 2021. “I was apparently very mad about people having this sense that today is somehow different from the past.”

In a paper published this month in Nature, Mastroianni, now a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School, channels that frustration into a rebuff. The experimental psychologist not only provides evidence that kindness, honesty, and civility are stable or have perhaps even increased in recent decades, he also marries two well-established concepts to explain why the illusion of moral decline persists.

First, Mastroianni needed to prove the prevalence of “good old days” nostalgia. He partnered with Daniel T. Gilbert, Harvard’s Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, to scour databases for surveys that asked people worldwide about perceived morality past and present. Hundreds of relevant surveys were identified, dating as far back as 1949. For example, in 1987 Gallup asked: “Compared to 10 years ago, are people more honest, less honest, or about the same today?”

The researchers also conducted their own surveys online, with questions tailored more precisely to their inquiry. This approach yielded similar findings. “People say it just gets worse and worse — that moral decline has been happening their whole lives and it’s still happening today,” summarized Mastroianni, who also authors the “Experimental History” newsletter on Substack.

Interestingly, these perceptions varied little along demographic lines. “If you ask people about decline over their entire lives, older people do report more, but they’ve been alive longer,” Mastroianni said. “Older and younger people perceive the same rate of decline.”

In the study’s second phase, the researchers asked whether everybody is right about everybody else. Is pro-social behavior really plummeting? An obvious retort comes from Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, whose work has shown steadily declining rates of war, genocide, child abuse, and other forms violence over the past 2,000 years. “However, that isn’t what we found people mean when they say morality is declining,” Mastroianni noted. “What they really mean is things like respect and kindness.”

Again, the researchers turned to surveys. They found more than 100, administered between 1965 and 2020, that asked people about moral behavior. One survey gauged current rates of volunteerism; another asked whether the respondent had helped a stranger over the past month. “We find that, on none of these items, is there a meaningful change over time,” Mastroianni said.

Also cited is a 2022 meta-analysis of 511 lab experiments, conducted between 1961 and 2017, that specifically measured levels of cooperation. The analysts fully expected to find cooperation falling over the past several decades. “They found the opposite!” Mastroianni said. “Cooperation rates went up by 10 percent.”

Having found that moral decline is an illusion, the researchers closed their paper with an explanation based on two psychological tendencies. The first, known as biased exposure, relates to how negative information disproportionately captures human attention and is more likely to be broadcast to others. “Every day you look out on the world, and what you see is people being bad to one another,” Mastroianni said.

The other phenomenon, biased memory, pertains to the way recollections fade over time. “Say you got turned down for prom,” Mastroianni said. “That was probably a pretty terrible experience at the time, but looking back, maybe it’s funny. If you had a great prom, that memory is probably still pretty good. Both bad and good fade, but bad fades faster.”

If both phenomena play out at once, Mastroianni realized, a person could be left with the impression that things are changing for the worse. “We call this mechanism BEAM (Biased Exposure and Memory), and it fits with some of our more surprising results,” he wrote in a recent Substack post. “BEAM predicts that both older and younger people should perceive moral decline, and they do. It predicts that people should perceive more decline over longer intervals, and they do. Both biased attention and biased memory have been observed cross-culturally, so it also makes sense that you would find the perception of moral decline all over the world.”

As Mastroianni came to see it, the upshot is worse than mere annoyance. The research project, which was also his dissertation, underscores the political danger of romanticizing the past. Aspiring despots can and do prey upon declinist nostalgia, and the citizenry appears ready to squander precious resources on it. The new paper cites a 2015 Pew Research Center poll in which 76 percent of Americans agreed that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be a high priority for government policy and spending.

“There are many real problems facing society today,” Mastroianni concluded. “Fortunately, moral breakdown is a fake problem, and we don’t need to spend any resources on it.”

The dense smoke that has led to air quality alerts across the U.S. Northeast the past week provides a view of a climate-changed future where Quebec’s wildfires burn twice as much land and the wind carries the toxic effects south, scientists say. But there are steps we can take to mitigate the harm.

In research published in 2015, Loretta Mickley, a wildfire expert and senior research fellow at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, worked with colleagues to project the spread of Canadian wildfires in a warming world. They found that forest burn in Quebec — directly north of New York and New England — will likely double by 2050.

That’s troubling, Mickley said, because what is so unusual about the current Quebec fire season is not the number of fires — some 400 were burning when the densest smoke headed south — but the area of forest. Ten times the acreage has burned across Canada compared with the same time a year ago, Mickley said. That’s 11 times the 10-year average.

“I am surprised,” Mickley said of recent scenes from New York and other cities, “but this is within my expectations of what fires will be like in a warming climate.”

The mechanism for fire danger is straightforward, with higher temperatures drying out forests until a spark sets them ablaze. This year, eastern Canada saw an early season heat wave that increased wildfire fuel. Once the forests were burning, all it took was the right weather pattern to push the smoke south.

“There have been times in the past where fire activity was more or less frequent, depending on hemispheric climate at that time, but we are pushing the envelope on the past and moving into a new regime,” Mickley said.

Imagine the possibility of life forms on other planets that don’t resemble any on Earth. What might they look like, and why would they be so different?

Juan Pérez-Mercader says it may be possible and the answer may be that they developed from a different type of chemistry. For more than 10 years, the senior research fellow in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard has studied how to produce synthetic living systems — without relying on biochemistry, or the chemistry that has enabled life on Earth.

“We have been trying to build a non-biochemical system, which unaided is capable of executing the essential properties common to all natural living systems,” Pérez-Mercader explained.

The Pérez-Mercader lab’s latest study, published last month in Cell Reports Physical Science, even finds such a system engaged in what Charles Darwin called “the struggle for life.” The paper features Pérez-Mercader with co-authors Sai Krishna Katla and Chenyu Lin describing how they created two synthetic models (or “species”) and observed the ensuing competition between them.

Long before this study, the lab figured out how to create non-biochemical but carbon-chemistry-based systems called protocells. These are made up of self-assembling polymer vesicles that emerge from a homogenous blend of smaller synthetic chemicals with no relation to living organisms. “These systems act like biochemical cells,” Pérez-Mercader noted. “They are born, metabolize what they need, grow, move, reproduce, and perhaps even evolve.”

Now the researchers wanted to see whether these systems would operate according to the evolutionary principle of competitive exclusion. As we know from Darwin’s work, this involves the struggle for survival — with the species with the greatest competitive advantage edging out the other when vying for resources.

That’s why Pérez-Mercader and his team created two new species of protocells for this particular study — one with the advantage of light sensitivity, the other without. When the researchers watched how these systems behaved as they shared food in an illuminated environment, they saw that the light-sensitive “species” endured while the other did not. “It’s the struggle for existence where the best-suited structure survived in its environment,” Pérez-Mercader said.

With these results, Pérez-Mercader is willing to go as far as to suggest that biochemicals are not essential to the struggle for life. “This shows that non-biochemical carbon chemistry can lead to the extinction of the less ‘fit’ protocell species,” he said.

His team’s findings beg the question: Could there be chemistries beyond Earth capable of implementing the fundamental properties of life?

“It’s possible there are materials, which once on a planetary surface somewhere with appropriate conditions, could react chemically, self-organize, and perhaps do the things that this experiment shows,” Pérez-Mercader said.

Under the right circumstances, these materials may evolve from very simple chemistry into more complicated structures, he said. “I believe we should be very open about other forms of life elsewhere in the universe, and that they may not resemble life as we recognize it now.”