The game-changing online think-tank

The opioid crisis in the United States continues to reverberate across society. While a holistic solution remains elusive, health plans and pharmacy benefit managers are evolving their use of data analytics and technology to improve prevention and treatment among their members and in their communities.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world and is located between Hawaii and California.

It is estimated that 1.15 to 2.41 million tonnes of plastic are entering the ocean each year from rivers. More than half of this plastic is less dense than the water, meaning that it will not sink once it encounters the sea.

Once these plastics enter the gyre, they are unlikely to leave the area until they degrade into smaller microplastics under the effects of sun, waves and marine life. As more and more plastics are discarded into the environment, microplastic concentration in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will only continue to increase.

When a palm oil company fells Sumatran rainforests, orangutans are displaced as the trees are burnt. Palm oil is used in approximately 50% of supermarket products.

Global demand for palm oil has increased six-fold since 1990. It’s in half of all packaged products on supermarket shelves and to avoid it completely would be incredibly tricky. Although palm oil in food can no longer be described simply as vegetable oil and must be clearly labelled (thanks to an EU directive in 2014), there is no such law for products such as soap, shampoo and other cosmetics.

This is a species that has dropped precipitously from more than 240,000 individuals in 1999 to just 100,000 today, according to research published in 2018 in Current Biology. Orangutans cannot survive in exclusively monoculture production areas; they need some natural forest to fulfill their ecological requirements.

Space junk, or space debris, is any piece of machinery or debris left by humans in space. It can refer to big objects such as dead satellites that have failed or been left in orbit at the end of their mission. It can also refer to smaller things, like bits of debris or paint flecks that have fallen off a rocket. Some human-made junk has been left on the Moon, too.

While there are about 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth at the moment, there are also 3,000 dead ones littering space. What’s more, there are around 34,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimetres in size and millions of smaller pieces that could nonetheless prove disastrous if they hit something else.

While Africa continues to experience the highest occurrence of food insecurity worldwide, the continent also contains over 60 percent of the worlds uncultivated but fertile land.

There are plenty of reasons to be worried about the future financing of healthcare. There is a consensus among economists that most of the Western European countries today run healthcare systems that cannot be financed in future. Among them, Frederick Erixon and Erik van der Marel wrote the following paper arguing for a reduction in European healthcare productivity lags in 2011. Yet the sector's performance has, if anything, worsened in the years since the article was written.

Richard Cooke, Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet, Wired Magazine, 17th February, 2020.

Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopaedia written collaboratively by the people who use it. It is designed to make collaboration and data creation easy: volunteers throughout the planet contribute to the online encyclopaedia and edit its contents, using trusted sources. This mirrors exactly what Tim-Berners-Lee had in mind when he conceived the Internet:

The author of the Wired article postulates, with the benefit of the hindsight given by twenty years of mass use of the Internet, that Wikipedia's choice to operate as a relatively horinzontal, collaborative tool has proven, on balance, incredibly benevolent. It is the model we at Policymakr have chosen to follow.

Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, New York Times Magazine, 1st August, 2018.

This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.

Arthur C. Brooks, Our Culture of Contempt, New York Times, 2nd March, 2019.

According to the author, The problem in America today is not incivility or intolerance. It’s something far worse.In this seminal article, Arthur C. Brooks defined what he called the Culture of Contempt which he believes has divided America. To understand the toxicity of the climate it has made prevalent, it is also worth reading the author's subsequent interview with Forbes Magazine.

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