TED Talks - آموزش زبان
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📙درس سیزدهم کتاب 504 لغت ضروری بر روی وب سایت ما قابل دسترسی می باشد.
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🔴How I made friends with reality?

I'm going to first tell you something that in my grandmother would've elicited a five-oy alarm: "Oy-oy-oy-oy-oy." And here it is ... are you ready? OK. I have stage IV lung cancer. Oh, I know, "poor me." I don't feel that way. I'm so OK with it. And granted, I have certain advantages -- not everybody can take so cavalier an attitude. I don't have young children. I have a grown daughter who's brilliant and happy and wonderful. I don't have huge financial stress. My cancer isn't that aggressive. It's kind of like the Democratic leadership --
not convinced it can win. It's basically just sitting there, waiting for Goldman Sachs to give it some money.
Oh, and the best thing of all -- I have a major accomplishment under my belt. Yes. I didn't even know it until someone tweeted me a year ago. And here's what they said: "You are responsible for the pussification of the American male."
Not that I can take all the credit, but ...
But what if you don't have my advantages? The only advice I can give you is to do what I did: make friends with reality. You couldn't have a worse relationship with reality than I did. From the get-go, I wasn't even attracted to reality. If they'd had Tinder when I met reality, I would have swiped left and the whole thing would have been over.
And reality and I -- we don't share the same values, the same goals --
To be honest, I don't have goals; I have fantasies. They're exactly like goals but without the hard work.
I'm not a big fan of hard work, but you know reality -- it's either push, push, push, push, push through its agent, the executive brain function -- one of the "yays" of dying: my executive brain function won't have me to kick around anymore.
But something happened that made me realize that reality may not be reality. So what happened was, because I basically wanted reality to leave me alone -- but I wanted to be left alone in a nice house with a Wolf range and Sub-Zero refrigerator ... private yoga lessons -- I ended up with a development deal at Disney. And one day I found myself in my new office on Two Dopey Drive --
And I'm staring at the present they sent me to celebrate my arrival -- not the Lalique vase or the grand piano I've heard of other people getting, but a three-foot-tall, stuffed Mickey Mouse
with a catalog, in case I wanted to order some more stuff that didn't jibe with my aesthetic.
And when I looked up in the catalog to see how much this three-foot-high mouse cost, here's how it was described ... "Life-sized."
And that's when I knew. Reality wasn't "reality." Reality was an imposter.
So I dived into quantum physics and chaos theory to try to find actual reality, and I've just finished a movie -- yes, finally finished -- about all that, so I won't go into it here, and anyway, it wasn't until after we shot the movie, when I broke my leg and then it didn't heal, so then they had to do another surgery a year later, and then that took a year -- two years in a wheelchair, and that's when I came into contact with actual reality: limits.
Those very limits I'd spent my whole life denying and pushing past and ignoring were real, and I had to deal with them, and they took imagination, creativity and my entire skill set. It turned out I was great at actual reality. I didn't just come to terms with it, I fell in love. And I should've known, given my equally shaky relationship with the zeitgeist ... I'll just say, if anyone is in the market for a Betamax
I should have known that the moment I fell in love with reality, the rest of the country would decide to go in the opposite direction.
But I'm not here to talk about Trump or the alt-right or climate-change deniers or even the makers of this thing, which I would have called a box, except that right here, it says, "This is not a box."
They're gaslighting me.
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But what I do want to talk about is a personal challenge to reality that I take personally, and I want to preface it by saying that I absolutely love science. I have this -- not a scientist myself -- but an uncanny ability to understand everything about science, except the actual science --
which is math. But the most outlandish concepts make sense to me. The string theory; the idea that all of reality emanates from the vibrations of these teeny -- I call it "The Big Twang."
Wave-particle duality: the idea that one thing can manifest as two things ... you know? That a photon can manifest as a wave and a particle coincided with my deepest intuitions that people are good and bad, ideas are right and wrong. Freud was right about penis envy and he was wrong about who has it.
And then there's this slight variation on that, which is reality looks like two things, but it turns out to be the interaction of those two things, like space -- time, mass -- energy and life and death. So I don't understand -- I simply just don't understand the mindset of people who are out to "defeat death" and "overcome death." How do you do that? How do you defeat death without killing off life? It doesn't make sense to me.
I also have to say, I find it incredibly ungrateful. I mean, you're given this extraordinary gift -- life -- but it's as if you had asked Santa for a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and you had gotten a salad spinner instead. You know, it's the beef -- the beef with it is that it comes with an expiration date. Death is the deal breaker. I don't get that. I don't understand -- to me, it's disrespectful. It's disrespectful to nature. The idea that we're going to dominate nature, we're going to master nature, nature is too weak to withstand our intellect -- no, I don't think so. I think if you've actually read quantum physics as I have -- well, I read an email from someone who'd read it, but --
You have to understand that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anymore. We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything. Nature is like a self-driving car. The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke -- I don't know if you've heard it. An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the mother goes right through a red light. And the daughter doesn't want to say anything that makes it sound like, "You're too old to drive," so she didn't say anything. And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?" And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?"
So ... and now, I'm going to take a mental leap, which is easy for me because I'm the Evel Knievel of mental leaps; my license plate says, "Cogito, ergo zoom." I hope you're willing to come with me on this, but my real problem with the mindset that is so out to defeat death is if you're anti-death, which to me translates as anti-life, which to me translates as anti-nature, it also translates to me as anti-woman, because women have long been identified with nature. And my source on this is Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who wrote a book called "The Human Condition." And in it, she says that classically, work is associated with men. Work is what comes out of the head; it's what we invent, it's what we create, it's how we leave our mark upon the world. Whereas labor is associated with the body. It's associated with the people who perform labor or undergo labor. So to me, the mindset that denies that, that denies that we're in sync with the biorhythms, the cyclical rhythms of the universe, does not create a hospitable environment for women or for people associated with labor, which is to say, people that we associate as descendants of slaves, or people who perform manual labor.
So here's how it looks from a banana-peel-universe point of view, from my mindset, which I call "Emily's universe." First of all, I am incredibly grateful for life, but I don't want to be immortal. I have no interest in having my name live on after me. In fact, I don't want it to, because it's been my observation that no matter how nice and how brilliant or how talented you are, 50 years after you die, they turn on you.
And I have actual proof of that. A headline from the Los Angeles Times: "Anne Frank: Not so nice after all."
Plus, I love being in sync with the cyclical rhythms of the universe. That's what's so extraordinary about life: it's a cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration. "I" am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern. To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process.
You know, I look at death now from the point of view of a German biologist, Andreas Weber, who looks at it as part of the gift economy. You're given this enormous gift, life, you enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back. And, you know, Auntie Mame said, "Life is a banquet" -- well, I've eaten my fill. I have had an enormous appetite for life, I've consumed life, but in death, I'm going to be consumed. I'm going into the ground just the way I am, and there, I invite every microbe and detritus-er and decomposer to have their fill. I think they'll find me delicious.
So the best thing about my attitude, I think, is that it's real. You can see it. You can observe it. It actually happens. Well, maybe not my enriching the gift, I don't know about that -- but my life has certainly been enriched by other people. By TED, which introduced me to a whole network of people who have enriched my life, including Tricia McGillis, my website designer, who's working with my wonderful daughter to take my website and turn it into something where all I have to do is write a blog. I don't have to use the executive brain function ... Ha, ha, ha, I win!
And I am so grateful to you. I don't want to say "the audience," because I don't really see it as we're two separate things. I think of it in terms of quantum physics, again. And, you know, quantum physicists are not exactly sure what happens when the wave becomes a particle. There are different theories -- the collapse of the wave function, decoherence -- but they're all agreed on one thing: that reality comes into being through an interaction. (Voice breaking) So do you. And every audience I've ever had, past and present. Thank you so much for making my life real.

#Aging #Cancer #Comedy #Death #Creativity #Happiness #Humanity #Humor #Illness

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📙درس چهاردهم کتاب 504 لغت ضروری بر روی وب سایت ما قابل دسترسی می باشد.
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🔴The transformative power of video games

Hello. My name is Herman, and I've always been struck by how the most important, impactful, tsunami-like changes to our culture and our society always come from those things that we least think are going to have that impact.
I mean, as a computer scientist, I remember when Facebook was just image-sharing in dorm rooms, and depending upon who you ask, it's now involved in toppling elections. I remember when cryptocurrency or automated trading were sort of ideas by a few renegades in the financial institutions in the world for automated trading, or online, for cryptocurrency, and they're now coming to quickly shape the way that we operate. And I think each of you can recall that moment where one of these ideas felt like some ignorable, derisive thing, and suddenly, oh, crap, the price of Bitcoin is what it is. Or, oh, crap, guess who's been elected.
The reality is that, you know, from my perspective, I think that we're about to encounter that again. And I think one of the biggest, most impactful changes in the way we live our lives, to the ways we're educated, probably even to how we end up making an income, is about to come not from AI, not from space travel or biotech -- these are all very important future inventions -- but in the next five years, I think it's going to come from video games.
So that's a bold claim, OK. I see some skeptical faces in the audience. But if we take a moment to try to look at what video games are already becoming in our lives today, and what just a little bit of technological advancement is about to create, it starts to become more of an inevitability. And I think the possibilities are quite electrifying. So let's just take a moment to think about scale.
I mean, there's already 2.6 billion people who play games. And the reality is that's a billion more than five years ago. A billion more people in that time. No religion, no media, nothing has spread like that. And there's likely to be a billion more when Africa and India gain the infrastructure to sort of fully realize the possibilities of gaming. But what I find really special is -- and this often shocks a lot of people -- is that the average age of a gamer, like, have a guess, think about it. It's not six, it's not 18, it's not 12. It's 34. [Average age of an American gamer] It's older than me. And that tells us something, that this isn't entertainment for children anymore. This is already a medium like literature or anything else that's becoming a fundamental part of our lives.
One stat I like is that people who generally picked up gaming in the last sort of 15, 20 years generally don't stop. Something changed in the way that this medium is organized. And more than that, it's not just play anymore, right? You've heard some examples today, but people are earning an income playing games. And not in the obvious ways. Yes, there's e-sports, there's prizes, there's the opportunity to make money in a competitive way. But there's also people earning incomes modding games, building content in them, doing art in them. I mean, there's something at a scale akin to the Florentine Renaissance, happening on your kid's iPhone in your living room. And it's being ignored.
Now, what's even more exciting for me is what's about to happen. And when you think about gaming, you're probably already imagining that it features these massive, infinite worlds, but the truth is, games have been deeply limited for a very long time in a way that kind of we in the industry have tried very hard to cover up with as much trickery as possible. The metaphor I like to use, if you'd let me geek out for a moment, is the notion of a theater. For the last 10 years, games have massively advanced the visual effects, the physical immersion, the front end of games. But behind the scenes, the actual experiential reality of a game world has remained woefully limited. I'll put that in perspective for a moment. I could leave this theater right now, I could do some graffiti, get in a fight, fall in love. I might actually do all of those things after this, but the point is that all of that would have consequence. It would ripple through reality -- all of you could interact with that at the same time. It would be persistent. And those are very important qualities to what makes the real world real.
Now, behind the scenes in games, we've had a limit for a very long time. And the limit is, behind the visuals, the actual information being exchanged between players or entities in a single game world has been deeply bounded by the fact that games mostly take place on a single server or a single machine. Even The World of Warcraft is actually thousands of smaller worlds. When you hear about concerts in Fortnite, you're actually hearing about thousands of small concerts. You know, individual, as was said earlier today, campfires or couches. There isn't really this possibility to bring it all together. Let's take a moment to just really understand what that means. When you look at a game, you might see this, beautiful visuals, all of these things happening in front of you.
But behind the scenes in an online game, this is what it looks like. To a computer scientist, all you see is just a little bit of information being exchanged by a tiny handful of meaningful entities or objects. You might be thinking, "I've played in an infinite world." Well it's more that you've played on a treadmill. As you've been walking through that world, we've been cleverly causing the parts of it that you're not in to vanish, and the parts of it in front of you to appear. A good trick, but not the basis for the revolution that I promised you in the beginning of this talk.
But the reality is, for those of you that are passionate gamers and might be excited about this, and for those of you that are afraid and may not be, all of that is about to change. Because finally, the technology is in place to go well beyond the limits that we've previously seen. I've dedicated my career to this, there are many others working on the problem -- I'd hardly take credit for it myself, but we're at the point now where we can finally do this impossible hard thing of weaving together thousands of disparate machines into single simulations that are convenient enough to not be one-offs, but to be buildable by anybody. And to be at the point where we can start to experience those things that we can't yet fathom.
Let's just take a moment to visualize that. I'm talking about not individual little simulations but a massive possibility of huge networks of interaction. Massive global events that can happen inside that. Things that even in the real world become challenging to produce at that kind of scale. And I know some of you are gamers, so I'm going to show you some footage of some things that I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to do, from some of our partners. TED and me had a back-and-forth on this. These are a few things that not many people have seen before, some new experiences powered by this type of technology. I'll just [take] a moment to show you some of this stuff.
This is a single game world with thousands of simultaneous people participating in a conflict. It also has its own ecosystem, its own sense of predator and prey. Every single object you see here is simulated in some way. This is a game being built by one of the biggest companies in the world, NetEase, a huge Chinese company. And they've made an assistant creative simulation where groups of players can cocreate together, across multiple devices, in a world that doesn't vanish when you're done. It's a place to tell stories and have adventures. Even the weather is simulated. And that's kind of awesome.
And this is my personal favorite. This is a group of people, pioneers in Berlin, a group called Klang Games, and they're completely insane, and they'll love me for saying that. And they found a way to model, basically, an entire planet. They're going to have a simulation with millions of non-player characters and players engaging. They actually grabbed Lawrence Lessig to help understand the political ramifications of the world they're creating.
This is the sort of astounding set of experiences, well beyond what we might have imagined, that are now going to be possible. And that's just the first step in this technology.
So if we step beyond that, what happens? Well, computer science tends to be all exponential, once we crack the really hard problems. And I'm pretty sure that very soon, we're going to be in a place where we can make this type of computational power look like nothing. And when that happens, the opportunities ...
It's worth taking a moment to try to imagine what I'm talking about here. Hundreds of thousands or millions of people being able to coinhabit the same space. The last time any of us as a species had the opportunity to build or do something together with that may people was in antiquity. And the circumstances were less than optimal, shall we say. Mostly conflicts or building pyramids. Not necessarily the best thing for us to be spending our time doing. But if you bring together that many people, the kind of shared experience that can create ... I think it exercises a social muscle in us that we've lost and forgotten.
Going even beyond that, I want to take a moment to think about what it means for relationships, for identity. If we can give each other worlds, experiences at scale where we can spend a meaningful amount of our time, we can change what it means to be an individual. We can go beyond a single identity to a diverse set of personal identities. The gender, the race, the personality traits you were born with might be something you want to experiment differently with. You might be someone that wants to be more than one person. We all are, inside, multiple people. We rarely get the opportunity to flex that.
It's also about empathy. I have a grandmother who I have literally nothing in common with. I love her to bits, but every story she has begins in 1940 and ends sometime in 1950. And every story I have is like 50 years later. But if we could coinhabit, co-experience things together, that undiminished by physical frailty or by lack of context, create opportunities together, that changes things, that bonds people in different ways. I'm struck by how social media has amplified our many differences, and really made us more who we are in the presence of other people. I think games could really start to create an opportunity for us to empathize again. To have shared adversity, shared opportunity.
I mean, statistically, at this moment in time, there are people who are on the opposite sides of a conflict, who have been matchmade together into a game and don't even know it. That's an incredible opportunity to change the way we look at things.
Finally, for those of you who perhaps are more cynical about all of this, who maybe don't think that virtual worlds and games are your cup of tea. There's a reality you have to accept, and that is that the economic impact of what I'm talking about will be profound. Right now, thousands of people have full-time jobs in gaming. Soon, it will be millions of people. Wherever there's a mobile phone, there will be a job. An opportunity for something that is creative and rich and gives you an income, no matter what country you're in, no matter what skills or opportunities you might think you have. Probably the first dollar most kids born today make might be in a game. That will be the new paper route, that will be the new opportunity for an income at the earliest time in your life.
So I kind of want to end with almost a plea, really, more than thoughts. A sense of, I think, how we need to face this new opportunity a little differently to some we have in the past. It's so hypocritical for yet another technologist to stand up on stage and say, "The future will be great, technology will fix it." And the reality is, this is going to have downsides. But those downsides will only be amplified if we approach, once again, with cynicism and derision, the opportunities that this presents. The worst thing that we could possibly do is let the same four or five companies end up dominating yet another adjacent space.
Because they're not just going to define how and who makes money from this. The reality is, we're now talking about defining how we think, what the rules are around identity and collaboration, the rules of the world we live in. This has got to be something we all own, we all cocreate.
So, my final plea is really to those engineers, those scientists, those artists in the audience today. Maybe some of you dreamed of working on space travel. The reality is, there are worlds you can build right here, right now, that can transform people's lives. There are still huge technological frontiers that need to be overcome here, akin to those we faced when building the early internet. All the technology behind virtual worlds is different. So, my plea to you is this. Let's engage, let's all engage, let's actually try to make this something that we shape in a positive way, rather than once again have be done to us.
Thank you.

#Gaming #Entertainment #Technology #Culture #Community #Society #Social_Change #Internet #Communication

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🔴Want to be an activist? Start with your toys

#Activism #Youth #Toys

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🔴Want to be an activist? Start with your toys

I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products.
So allow me to tell you about it. So I have a brother, Gavin. When this whole shebang happened, he was four. He loved to cook. He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. He wanted to be a chef really badly. And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? I mean, we all had those when we were little. And he wanted one so badly.
But then he started to realize something. In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. And this discouraged my brother a lot. He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending.
And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change org Change org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors.
So this petition started to take off -- humongously fast, you have no idea. I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition.
Thank you.
So, needless to say, it was crazy. Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. It was literally one of the best moments of my life. It was like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." That thing was amazing.
What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? So, let's see. From user name Liquidsore29 -- interesting user names we have here— "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. How about from Whiteboy77AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention."
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So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future?
But then I started to realize something. Haters gonna hate. Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. And you can make that change. You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire.
Thank you.

#Activism #Youth #Toys

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📙درس پانزدهم کتاب 504 لغت ضروری بر روی وب سایت ما قابل دسترسی می باشد.
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🔴 How climate change could make our food less nutritious?

Yogi Berra, a US baseball player and philosopher, said, "If we don't know where we're going, we might not get there." Accumulating scientific knowledge is giving us greater insights, greater clarity, into what our future might look like in a changing climate and what that could mean for our health. I'm here to talk about a related aspect, on how our emissions of greenhouse gases from burning of fossil fuels is reducing the nutritional quality of our food.
We'll start with the food pyramid. You all know the food pyramid. We all need to eat a balanced diet. We need to get proteins, we need to get micronutrients, we need to get vitamins. And so, this is a way for us to think about how to make sure we get what we need every day so we can grow and thrive.
But we eat not just because we need to, we also eat for enjoyment. Bread, pasta, pizza -- there's a whole range of foods that are culturally important. We enjoy eating these. And so they're important for our diet, but they're also important for our cultures.
Carbon dioxide has been increasing since the start of the Industrial Revolution, increasing from about 280 parts per million to over 410 today, and it continues to increase. The carbon that plants need to grow comes from this carbon dioxide. They bring it into the plant, they break it apart into the carbon itself, and they use that to grow. They also need nutrients from the soil. And so yes, carbon dioxide is plant food.
And this should be good news, of rising carbon dioxide concentrations, for food security around the world, making sure that people get enough to eat every day. About 820 million people in the world don't get enough to eat every day. So there's a fair amount written about how higher CO2 is going to help with our food security problem. We need to accelerate our progress in agricultural productivity to feed the nine to 10 billion people who will be alive in 2050 and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly the Goal Number 2, that is on reducing food insecurity, increasing nutrition, increasing access to the foods that we need for everyone. We know that climate change is affecting agricultural productivity. The earth has warmed about one degree centigrade since preindustrial times. That is changing local temperature and precipitation patterns, and that has consequences for the agricultural productivity in many parts of the world. And it's not just local changes in temperature and precipitation, it's the extremes. Extremes in terms of heat waves, floods and droughts are significantly affecting productivity.
And that carbon dioxide, besides making plants grow, has other consequences as well, that plants, when they have higher carbon dioxide, increase the synthesis of carbohydrates, sugars and starches, and they decrease the concentrations of protein and critical nutrients. And this is very important for how we think about food security going forward.
A couple of nights ago in the table talks on climate change, someone said that they're a five-sevenths optimist: that they're an optimist five days of the week, and this is a topic for the other two days.
When we think about micronutrients, almost all of them are affected by higher CO2 concentrations. Two in particular are iron and zinc. When you don't have enough iron, you can develop iron deficiency anemia. It's associated with fatigue, shortness of breath and some fairly serious consequences as well. When you don't have enough zinc, you can have a loss of appetite. It is a significant problem around the world. There's about one billion people who are zinc deficient. It's very important for maternal and child health. It affects development. The B vitamins are critical for a whole range of reasons. They help convert our food into energy. They're important for the functions of many of the physiologic activities in our bodies. And when you have higher carbon in a plant, you have less nitrogen, and you have less B vitamins.