Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his vision for the future of his company, now called Meta. He appeared very optimistic about his ideas despite Facebook’s popularity crashing to abysmal levels in recent years. 

In his rose-colored plans, he extols the benefits of his new Metaverse, a hybrid virtual-augmented reality world in which he envisions the general population spending their daily lives. This technology uses sophisticated machinery that includes an Oculus-style headset owned by Meta and a series of complex biosensors that track your body’s movements. This gives users a personalized experience as their avatars navigate the Metaverse.

Zuckerberg eagerly walked the viewer through a tour of all the seemingly exciting opportunities the Metaverse has to offer—like working in cyberspace offices, hanging out with friends in three-dimensional Zoom calls and attending business meetings. 

Vocal critics of the Metaverse have quickly aligned its premise with similar concepts from science fiction works, such as Snow Crash and The Matrix. The fear is that eventually all of us will have to plug our conscious minds into the matrix forever. However, few people have mentioned that the Metaverse really isn’t as dystopian as warned by the media. 

The core idea of the Metaverse is already ingrained into our everyday lives and its prominence has slowly bloomed for decades. Since the inception of the internet, forums and chat rooms have occupied the majority of a person’s typical internet usage. Humans are social by nature and will always manifest new ways to connect with others to share ideas and information. The old AOL chat rooms planted the roots of current social media sites, such as Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. 

In discussions about the quickly-blurring line between reality and virtual reality, video games are often omitted from the conversation. Typically, social media sites catch the majority of the blame for distorting teenagers’ perception of reality and virtual life when video games embody the essence of what the Metaverse is desperately attempting to be—an immersive virtual reality experience that is designed to entice you into spending most of your time within its coded walls. 

Zuckerberg neglected to account for the ‘secret ingredient’ that makes video games far more enriching of an experience than what his sterilized digital version of Earth has to offer. The sole purpose of building the alternate-reality experiences of video games has always been to transcend the limitations of the real world. But given unfathomable amounts of money and resources to design the Metaverse—the virtual universe that he proclaims will replace our physical spaces—he recreated the exact universe we already know. 

It then calls into question what role the Metaverse fills when, essentially, its aspirations already define various aspects of our daily existence and achieve the Metaverse’s goals with far better results. Right now, the video game industry is thriving. Each new release offers rich worldbuilding and hundreds of hours of content between campaigns, seasonal events and multiplayer adventures. In the time it takes for the Metaverse to become accessible, which could potentially not be until next decade, video games will continue to advance mind-boggling capabilities for users. The biometric technology required to access the virtual offices of the Metaverse will likely be emulated by other non-Oculus companies as part of the game experience first. 

Above all, it’s painfully evident what Zuckerberg is trying to achieve. Facebook has never been more reviled than it is now in 2021, after years of failing to adequately address its systematic problem as a fertile ground for terrorism and cyber warfare. By changing the company’s name to Meta and unveiling the Metaverse, he is hoping to bury the venom associated with the Facebook brand and attempting to force his project’s relevancy deeper into daily life now that users are retreating en masse. 

Ultimately, the Metaverse will likely fail to ignite on the launchpad. Its current iteration as Facebook is far more dystopian.

In March 2020, as campuses and businesses were shutting down to shelter in place due to COVID-19, many people were afraid as they watched their livelihoods be derailed by the sudden onslaught of the global pandemic. The forceful shift to conducting our everyday business online felt like we were going into it blind. 

Although online classes existed before the pandemic, they were mostly seen as an ‘alternative’ educational path or only for making up classes during break terms. However, they soon became the default throughout the 2020 and 2021 semesters. For the first year of the pandemic, students and professors both worked tirelessly to transition to virtual learning while eagerly waiting for the announcement of the return to physical spaces. 

The commonly accepted narrative of the pandemic is that online classes were universally a terrible, ineffective experience and that in-person classes are always preferable. Many said their quality of education plummeted and that now, as we start to return to in-person activities, they feel like they didn’t retain anything they should’ve learned. 

While this experience is entirely true and haunts many “Zoom University” alumni, the pushback against virtual education overshadows the enumerable benefits. Classes operating online actually provide an incredible inventory of tools that students can use to their advantage. 

Before the pandemic, disruptions to your life that could cause you to miss classes were risky. Unexpected travel plans, needing to pick up extra shifts at work to make rent or even just taking a day off to care for your mental health could potentially affect your grade. 

But once online classes began, it felt as if the entire system softened and everyone became more forgiving. In the synchronous format, the classroom is immediately accessible from anywhere with an Internet connection, which allows students to travel and work as needed and still be able to keep up with their classes. Asynchronous classes removed the specific time obligation, giving students control over when to complete the lectures and course work. 

Many professors also chose to elongate the amount of time given to take tests, some by several hours, and many classes also switched to completely open-note exams to fit the virtual format. A common story from pre-pandemic education shared by numerous students focused on how they did well on homework and projects and felt confident in the material, but never being successful in their exams. Some students battled severe test anxiety, some felt as if they couldn’t properly memorize the material and some needed much longer than the allotted time to process and work through the questions. 

Having these test-taking accommodations be normalized is hugely beneficial to students who previously struggled. Instead of a one-shot, time-crunched chance to score a high grade that weighs heavily into your final grade, the long take-home exams allow for more time to work through each problem at a thorough pace. 

Now that we’re returning to in-person classes, the benefits of virtual learning should be maintained. Recorded lectures, more adaptability with test accommodations and the overall increased level of empathy towards struggling students will move mountains to improve higher education as a whole in our new normalcy. 

In recent years, local governments have enacted laws regulating consumer products in an effort to reduce our dependence on petroleum products. The movement began by targeting small items that could have easy replacements, such as plastic straws and grocery bags. The plastic straw ban coincided with the rise of reusable metal and bamboo straws, which help reduce daily plastic waste. In Maine, the plastic bag ban in July 2021 implemented the use of reusable bags constructed from brown paper, cloth and insulating material.

Despite the controversy of these laws, the largest benefit of them is the push for awareness about how plastic pollution affects local ecological systems. By far, the most vulnerable ecosystem to plastic contamination are marine environments, with coastal ecosystems less than 50 kilometers from shore the most at risk. A study conducted by the American Chemical Society cites that nearly 700 marine species are directly impacted in some way by plastic contamination in their environment, either by eating plastic bits after confusing them for food, or becoming entangled in loose-flowing plastics that can cause serious injury. 

A recently passed California law took an even bolder step by banning small gasoline engines, which power small equipment like lawn mowers and ATVs. Again, this regulation places the burden of blame on the backs of average consumers when in reality the foundation of this law should target gas companies. 

For one, the average consumer will generate significantly less emissions over the course of a year from occasionally mowing their lawn or riding around on an ATV than they will by driving a gasoline-powered car. Even in terms of emission generation, cars are vastly overshadowed by the pollution that is created by a small handful of industries and companies. 

These kinds of regulations, despite their eco-forward attitude on paper, only serve to pin most of the blame on the average consumer and their daily activities for contributing to environmental harm. In reality, the greatest threat looms from large industries, but this truth is often kept hidden away in the shadows of public discourse. 

In the end, these measures are only targeting the surface of the problem, attempting to mitigate the symptoms of climate change without treating the root of the issue. One aspect of meaningful, impactful change will come from within industries, from upcoming generations of innovators who will be able to redefine various industrial processes to reduce excessive or harmful byproducts. For consumers, education will be the most effective tool for environmental protection, as it’s important to learn about where emissions are generated, how plastics degrade and other potential ecological harms. Far more change will come from these routes rather than imposing regulations not entirely based in reality.

In the time of a global pandemic, energy crisis and supply shortages, the idea of allocating money toward leaving Earth to continue space exploration and research seems appalling to many. At first glance, it would make far more sense to redirect those funds toward solving these crises, which could theoretically provide more money for vaccine production or alternative energy sources to keep the lights on as oil and natural gas supplies are throttled. Although it seems counterintuitive, current circumstances are providing more fertile ground for harvesting knowledge from space research and technology. The objective isn’t necessarily finding ways to leave Earth, and instead the benefits of these research projects can directly uplift our everyday lives in ways most take for granted. 

These benefits don’t necessarily unfold overnight. In fact, it often takes decades for these scientific feats to tangibly affect most people. Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched into space 64 years ago. Within the six decades since, technologies emerged from this launch like GPS navigation and cell phones, marking just a handful of the most groundbreaking technological advancements in human history. Nearly every college student carries a small powerhouse of technology in their pocket. With cell phones, we are able to call our friends and family anywhere else on the planet, which has become our lifeblood for communication during an unprecedented pandemic. Navigation apps for smartphones, which are often free or cost only pennies, allow us to instantaneously cue up directions to get anywhere in the country. 

Many technological advancements from aerospace research have significant potential to provide solutions for current environmental challenges as well. In 2005, NASA developed a new type of solar cell that would go on to become widely used as a source of solar power—outperforming conventional solar cells in durability and power. These new solar cells weren’t developed specifically with the intent of being an alternative energy source for everyday use. Rather, they were created to be a lightweight power source for an unmanned craft that would fly at high altitudes for several days. The new technology proved so successful that these types of solar cells are now widely available and at a low cost, a technology to help transition to non-petroleum based fuels. 

Another breakthrough tech developed by NASA, microencapsulation, has found use in a beeswax-based product used to clean up oil spills and other sources of pollution in water. The beeswax forms thousands of tiny ‘capsules’ with hollow centers, which are then deposited into the polluted area. Water can’t get through the beeswax exterior, but since beeswax is actually made of the same basic chemicals as crude oil and petroleum products these pollutants are absorbed into the beeswax spheres. Once the beeswax fully absorbs the polluting oils, it acts as a natural food source for local bacteria and other organisms in the water that then help biodegrade the oils and keep the water clarified. This technology is widely used for cleaning oil spills, groundwater tables and small bodies of water. 

Although these are only a handful of examples of current technologies developed from aerospace research, future knowledge garnered from upcoming projects may yield even more revolutionary ideas. It’s entirely possible that experimenting with humans living long-term elsewhere, such as the ISS, the moon or even Mars could foster technological advancements that help us improve our quality of life here on Earth. In an era of unprecedented humanitarian crises, our planet needs all the innovation it can get—even if said innovations are born elsewhere in the solar system. 

In recent years, you may have seen terms such as “clean,” “green” and “nothing bad inside” proudly brandished across labels in every aisle, from makeup to shower products, to dish soap and sunscreen. But what do these words even mean?

Buying specific products based on the moral compass of environmental consciousness is nothing new, and this mindset has been skyrocketing as consumers work toward reducing their participation in ecologically harmful activities. 

In the fight toward conscientious consumerism, new revelations have brought more questions that are left unanswered to the average consumer. Since the late 20th century, numerous scientific papers have been published examining the biological effects of potentially harmful chemicals, leading to the restriction or outright ban of many. A famous example is asbestos, a fibrous crystal which causes asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma from long-term exposure. 

While many chemicals, such as asbestos, are definitively known to be harmful to humans, many other chemicals are swimming in uncertainty about their true safety. Scientific publications are notoriously difficult reads, written in a complex language that is indecipherable to the average consumer. They’re not as accessible and widespread as the labels and marketing provided by companies. It’s not surprising that many consumers are not aware of the scientific literature surrounding products.  

These concerns aren’t limited to everyday consumers, either. Hawaii recently banned the sale of sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate, citing concerns from scientific publications that detailed the harmful effects of these chemicals on marine life, notably coral bleaching. With one of the richest marine ecosystems on the planet, Hawaii works tirelessly to preserve its vitality. Doing so means adopting a better safe than sorry mindset — a highly protective approach. However, that allows for bans that might not have strong scientific evidence, like the recent sunscreen ban, to still impact the legal system.

Scientific publications about oxybenzone safety frequently end on a teetering conclusion, in which they say lab settings may show a correlation, but more research is needed. These lab settings often don’t reflect real life exposure or usage, but for both consumers and companies in the ‘clean’ movement, that ‘maybe’ translates to a strong definitive answer. 

This article from Reef Repair (which coincidentally sells its own “reef safe” branded sunscreen) uses frightening words and imagery to paint oxybenzone as “dangerous” and that humans should avoid exposure at all costs. They link numerous studies and journal publications, which appears to bolster their credibility, but reading through these links reveals gross misinterpretations of the actual data.  

For example, they state that oxybenzone is linked to ‘organ toxicity,’ implying that this is a risk you face when you have oxybenzone in your sunscreen. The associated link is a short explanation of oxybenzone from the American Chemical Society, which displays the traditional chemical hazard list for oxybenzone. Although the hazard list includes organ toxicity among other hazards, this describes completely pure, 100% lab-grade oxybenzone if you ingest it, get it in your eyes or inhale vapors in a laboratory setting. Nobody is casually eating their sunscreen, hopefully. The concentration of oxybenzone in typical sunscreens is also incredibly low compared to pure, lab-grade products. 

In Reef Repair’s article, they cleverly sprinkle in ads for their own ‘reef safe’ products in between horror stories about oxybenzone. This is just one example out of dozens of companies that weaponize misinterpretation and misinformation to sell their alternative products as better, cleaner, and greener because they don’t use those “bad chemicals.” 

These kinds of buzzword terms aren’t rooted in any scientific or chemical definition, and only contribute to misinformation and fear instead of educating consumers on what’s inside their cabinets. Ultimately it’s up to companies to provide better ingredient transparency, including explaining what the chemicals in their products actually do in order to help others be less afraid of chemicals they don’t recognize or can’t pronounce.

Many young girls are charging headlong into stressful academic environments without knowing they have a learning or behavioral disorder such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This lack of critical awareness of their mind’s wiring leaves many girls trudging through their academic careers convinced they’re lazy, irresponsible or too incompetent for their field.

Only a small percentage of women with ADHD get a diagnosis, and this often occurs much later in their life than men, who often are diagnosed in elementary school. Classroom settings favor children who are quiet, compliant and get along well with their peers. Young boys with the disorder often present the hyperactive subtype, which often causes friction against academic and social norms. Teachers communicate these behaviors to parents, who corroborate the teacher’s concerns with behavior they see at home. They take their child for a psychological evaluation, which results in the ADHD diagnosis.

Girls tend to present the inattentive subtype, which is not as readily noticeable to teachers and parents. A young girl daydreaming and drawing in her notebook, although unfocused, isn’t disrupting the classroom. She often presents a bubbly, sociable disposition. Most parents and teachers only look for hyperactive, disruptive behavior modeled after the stereotypical ‘male’ symptoms. They fail to recognize that when young girls struggle to complete work, focus during class or have difficulty understanding concepts, it may stem from ADHD.

Without knowing the true root of the obstacles they face, girls in this position heavily internalize their perceived faults and can become self-critical. Young women seeking medical and psychological help will often see their ADHD symptoms dismissed as ‘normal’ behaviors of ‘flighty’ girls or receive a misdiagnosis. These misdiagnoses commonly cite the existing ADHD symptoms as a mood disorder or something else that is targeted with medication, often antidepressants, long before the root cause is addressed.

Ultimately, the medical community and many adults view ADHD as not affecting women, and it’s time to challenge these outdated, harmful stereotypes. Teachers and parents should understand how the inattentive subtype manifests in young girls and not dismiss such behavioral patterns as ‘flighty’ or ‘ditzy.’ Ensuring girls receive a proper diagnosis at an early age will allow for the development of self-management strategies that will help them throughout their academic career, as well help them gain a sense of self-worth.