Weekend Reading, Watching and Listening Recommendations (July 24)
Fertility, mortality projections for 195 countries in year 2100, The Pandemic's Toll on Women, The Worrying Link Between Deforestation and Disease, Inside the Tesla Gigafactory, How to End A Pandemic.
Read: A new study in the Lancet looks at fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100. The global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9·73 billion people and decline to 8·79 billion in 2100. The reference projections for the five largest countries in 2100 were India 1·09 billion, Nigeria 791 million, China 732 million, the USA 336 million, and Pakistan 248 million.
23 countries in the reference scenario, including Japan, Thailand, and Spain, were forecasted to have population declines greater than 50% from 2017 to 2100; China's population was forecasted to decline by 48·0%. China was forecasted to become the largest economy by 2035 but in the reference scenario, the USA was forecasted to once again become the largest economy in 2098.
Read: The Pandemic’s Toll on Women. COVID-19 Is Gender-Blind, But Not Gender-Neutral. [Melinda Gates writes in Foreign Affairs]
Read: How Pandemics Wreak Havoc—and Open Minds. The plague marked the end of the Middle Ages and the start of a great cultural renewal. Could the coronavirus, for all its destruction, offer a similar opportunity for radical change? [From the New Yorker]
Listen: How To End A Pandemic: The eradication of smallpox is one of humanity's great achievements - but the battle against the virus was fought by the most unlikely of alliances. How did the breakthrough happen - and can we guarantee that the world is still safe from smallpox?
Listen: The Worrying Link Between Deforestation and Disease: Researchers link recent forest loss to 25 Ebola outbreaks that have occurred since 1976. Six out of every ten diseases in humans, and three-quarters of the world's emerging infectious diseases, are zoonotic-jumping from animals to humans.
Watch: Inside the Tesla Gigafactory: The Science Channel got a VIP tour of Tesla’s cutting-edge gigafactory in Nevada that builds the batteries for its award-winning electric vehicles
Watch: How Energy Got So Cheap (and Will It Last?). Hint: A Lot Of It Is About Natural Gas:
A tribute to Congressman John Lewis [ from the New Yorker]