3 Noticias economicas ingles

Evan Sharp says he wants to ‘grow as a designer and product builder’

Sophie Earnshaw and Roddy Snell describe Beijing’s crackdown on internet companies, which has wiped off nearly a quarter of its share price since June, as ‘remarkably sensible’.

When it comes to pregnancy and childbirth, the focus tends to be on the baby’s health. As a result, women don’t often get the support they need, as they experience radical physical and psychological changes during and after delivery. That’s partly why maternal mortality rates have been on the rise in the United States, increasing more than 15% in 2019 alone. And Black women are three times more likely than their white counterparts to die of pregnancy-related causes. Yet, nearly two-thirds of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.

Four years ago, Kate Westervelt founded a startup called Mombox to give women tools and products that would help them as they recovered from labor and delivery. Now, she’s launching a new subscription kit that gives women science-backed support as they recover in the year after childbirth. Westervelt was inspired by a growing body of academic research about the intense transformation that women experience after giving birth.

Westervelt came up with the concept of Mombox after her own pregnancy, when she noticed that the medical system, and society more broadly, tended to focus on the needs of the baby rather than those of the mother. Companies now sell products like belly bands, which help with C-section recovery, and more comfortable mesh underwear. But products like this are often hard to find and come from a range of small brands. Westervelt’s idea was to scour the market for labor and delivery products and test and curate them, in order to spare women the time and effort required to do it themselves.

But Westervelt realized that a woman’s recovery from pregnancy takes far longer than her hospital stay or even the few weeks after she’s home with her newborn. “It’s a misconception that maternal mortality refers to dying during childbirth,” she says. “When a woman dies within a year of giving birth, that is counted toward the maternal mortality rate. And yet, women get hardly any support during this first year, besides a final checkup with their OBGYN six weeks after delivering.”

[Screenshot: Mombox]With the new offering, Westervelt wants to provide tools for each month post-delivery to help with the physical recovery. For $99, customers can buy a single month’s box to focus on a problem like mood shifts or sleep. Or for $69 a month, they can sign up for the yearlong program, which will deliver boxed kits every month at the right postpartum stage. (There are also 3- and 6-month subscriptions.) Still, the subscription boxes aren’t cheap and will likely be out of reach for many lower-income women who would especially benefit from these kinds of products and resources.

Each box contains educational materials to help new mothers identify what’s considered “normal” and what might need medical attention. They also can include wellness and fitness products for help with common issues, such as the separation of abdominal muscles or weakening of the pelvic floor. Westervelt worked with a panel of researchers and practitioners to develop this content and curate products, including lactation consultants and perinatal physical therapists. And when possible, she sources products from small businesses owned by women and people of color. “Our priority is picking the best products on the market,” says Westervelt. “We’re also helping to support brands that specialize in creating these products by connecting with the women who need them.”

As she was developing these boxes, Westervelt was influenced by the research on “matrescence,” an anthropological term that refers to how a woman’s identity changes when she becomes a mother. It was coined in the 1970s by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, but never really became widely known in mainstream culture. Over the last decade, Aurélie Athan, a reproductive psychologist at Columbia University, has been working to bring it back into the public consciousness. “It’s a concept that has parallels in adolescence, which is something that is widely understood in our culture,” says Westervelt. “We accept that when a child becomes an adult, their bodies change but so does their entire relationship to the world, and it’s a process of transformation that takes years. The same is actually true when a person gives birth. And yet we don’t seem to recognize that.”

In some ways, it’s not particularly surprising that matrescence hasn’t been rigorously studied. Researchers have documented a persistent gender bias in health care, in which doctors don’t treat women’s pain as seriously as men’s, and women’s health issues aren’t researched as thoroughly as men’s—including how pregnant women would respond to the COVID-19 vaccine. But Athan says things are slowly beginning to change. “There’s been growing awareness about postpartum depression and maternal mental health screening,” she says. “Then there was the #MeToo movement, where women insisted that people take their voices seriously.”

Athan believes that simply educating women—and society—about matrescence can be an important first step toward helping new mothers through this transition. “So much of the discourse about new mothers is about how they can bounce back physically or ‘return’ to work,” she says. “The concept of matrescence is that you don’t ever go back to who you were before. But with the right tools, women can adapt to their new identities and lives.”

And that’s become Westervelt’s goal as she’s developed these monthly offerings. In addition to addressing women’s physical health, the boxes include resources to help mothers negotiate tricky things like reestablishing sexual intimacy with their partner and understanding postpartum brain shifts as they return to work. “The goal is to empower new moms with the research, so they can take control of their lives after they have a baby,” she says. “They might not be able to return to who they were before, but with support, their new lives could be even better.”

I haven’t had a reason to yell in the morning since my boys were little. Those occurrences were more of this variety: “You’re going to be late for school!” “Get in the car!” or “Where are your shoes?” So, when I heard about a class that encourages you to start your day screaming, I was curious.

The platform, called Open, is an in-person and online mindfulness studio that includes breathwork, meditation, and yoga instruction. Some of the breathwork classes include screaming. I’ll admit, the classes weren’t what I expected—which is a good thing. I envisioned jumping right into a scream. Instead, you build up to it with several minutes of active breathing, crescendoing with a guttural yell.

While there are several options, the class I took lasts 20 minutes and includes rounds of breathing exercises. You take two quick inhale breaths in through your mouth—the first to fill air near your belly, and the second to the top of your chest near your heart. Then you release the air with one exhale, also through your mouth. The exercise is done in quick succession, which after a while made me feel tingly and lightheaded.

A round lasts about five minutes. At the end, you take a deep breath in and hold it for 10 seconds. Then you exhale and hold empty lungs for another 10 seconds. After the second round, the breath-holding lasts 20 seconds, and after the third round, you hold your breath for 30 seconds.

The screaming comes in after the last round of active breathing exercises. You take a deep inhale and then let out a scream. Repeat as many times as you want.

The class I took is led by Open breathworks instructor Ally Maz. “This type of class is what we call upregulating,” says Maz. “It lifts the heart rate and works on endurance for performance and mental clarity. It’s similar to [Dutch fitness guru] Wim Hof breathing exercises.”

Active breathwork can help you release stress at the beginning of your day and connect to your body. After the third morning taking the class, I started to feel more in control of my day.

But why the screaming?

Active upregulating breathwork is energizing. Screaming can help you get out emotions you may not know you’re holding.

“When we hold the classes in person, people will scream, and then they’ll either cry or laugh because it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been holding on to that thing,'” says Maz. “There’s a transformational moment. It can be scary to hear your voice, especially as a female because we’re not always in touch with our rage or have a lot of ways to use our voice in the world. We can be hard on ourselves and may be holding onto guilt or shame. Stuff starts bubbling up, and screaming is an energy release.”

I didn’t cry or laugh, but I did feel lighter after the scream. Eventually, I increased the number of times I screamed because it felt empowering.

Other forms of breathwork

Breathing—without the screaming—can also circumvent stress. I also used the platform to do quick classes that are designed to help calm you. “Downregulated breathwork practices slow the heart rate and help you recover, rest, and sleep better, which is also helpful for anyone struggling with anxiety or panic,” says Maz. “It’s all how you manipulate the breath. Different patterns have different outcomes.”

Maz calls this type of breathing a sigh of relief. Inhale through your nose, and exhale through your mouth. “That stimulates the vagus nerve, and it sets off a neurotransmitter that essentially goes to your heart and says, ‘Hey, heart, slow down,'” she says. “The breath shifts us from the fight or flight state back into parasympathetic, which is the rest and digest part of the nervous system. It helps open the lungs and reset the body. So many of us are sitting on our computers, typing, and not focusing on our breath.”

Breathwork is one of Open’s most popular types of classes, says founder Raed Khawaja. “You can actually discover a lot when you start to pay attention to how you breathe,” he says.

The more breathwork practice you do, the more you remember to take a deeper inhale, adds Maz. “I feel more at ease being in traffic, or when the stress response comes in,” she says. “I know if I can slow my breath down, I’ll slow my heart rate down, and stimulate my vagus nerve.”

I tend to be a breath holder, either when I’m feeling stressed or in deep focus with work. I don’t realize I’m doing it until I release the breath. Getting in tune with my breathing felt very foreign at first, but it’s definitely a valuable tool I can use on demand when I start to feel tension.

So, after taking classes for a week, will I keep up the screaming? Probably not every day. Maz screams weekly and says it helps her feel calmer in her life. This seems like a cadence I’ll try.

“I would call it a safe avenue to get that emotion out of your body,” says Maz. “Then it’s not coming out in road rage or at your partner or being suppressed with alcohol or numbed out through binge watching TV. It’s a really healthy way to get some of that emotion out of your body.”

This story is part of Fast Company’s Climate Change Survival Plan package. As time runs out to prevent climate catastrophe, we’re looking at what we need to do now to safeguard our future. Click here to read the whole series.

Without much effort, you can find news every day that confirms—over and over—that we are in a climate emergency. Droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes, and heat waves are now happening with such frequency, it can be hard to remember which tragedy happened last, while the political reaction is, at best, muted—entirely incommensurate to the challenge at hand.

In the absence of a grand political solution, we are forced to nibble around the edges and hope that science and technology can make enough advances to mitigate the problem, to give more time for world governments to act on broad de-carbonization. There is no cause for techno-optimism: We will not invent a perpetual motion machine that can somehow eliminate all the carbon in a way that allows life to continue as is, all without pushing political and business leaders. At the same time, you don’t need to surrender to complete techno-pessimism because scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs are making slow but steady advances in ways to replace the vital carbon in our economy with clean alternatives.

Forty years ago, solar and wind power were considered by some to be expensive boondoggles, only for the wealthy hobbyists, that would never make a difference at scale. Now—after decades of research and development—they’re the cheapest source of power we have. This list contains just a few of the recent advances that could be the next technology that can grow into part of a future, clean economy. Some of the items on this list will turn out to be too expensive, too hard to scale, too small in impact to matter. But others could become part of the solution. No one piece of technology will save us, but together many of them can be the building blocks that undergird the political solution we need. —Morgan Clendaniel

Moving to renewable energy

• This giant wind turbine blade can be recycled. Energy companies are trying to redesign wind energy so the giant components don’t end up in landfills. Siemens Gamesa’s RecyclableBlade can be broken down into its raw materials at the end of its life.
• During a power outage, this tech keeps the electricity on in the most important places. A grid powered by renewables requires managing much more complexity than one powered by a single, always-on coal plant. Intel has designed a new platform to help.
• This startup helps build solar farms where the grid is dirtiest. Renewable installations usually get installed where it’s easiest to build, which leaves some areas without new clean power. Clearloop wants to even out the distribution.

Reducing carbon footprint

• This sleek, climate-friendly cooling unit reduces the footprint of HVAC by 75%. Heat pump technology is the future of cooling and heating, but it’s been expensive to install. Now you can get a small heat pump for your window.
• How the shipping industry can go from global polluter to carbon neutral. From hydrogen to sails to green ammonia, the shipping industry is rethinking how it moves the massive amount of goods that undergird the global economy.
• This startup ensures that forestry-based carbon offsets deliver on their promises. The market for carbon offsets could be worth $100 billion by 2030. Pachama cofounder and CEO Diego Saez Gil is keeping it transparent and accountable.
• These carbon-capturing robotic seaweed farms are like planting forests in the ocean. Phykos is trying to pioneer a new form of carbon sequestration: using automated boats to grow seaweed in the middle of the ocean, then sinking it to the ocean floor.

Redesigning how we live

• What if walking around on your wood floors powered your home? Scientists have figured out how to make pieces of wood generate a charge when you apply pressure to them, which could reshape how we make buildings more efficient.
• 100 ways to make better use of urban rooftops, from parks to tiny homes. Cities have a lot of roofs. Let’s put some stuff on them!

Improving transportation

• Every new car and truck in the U.S. can be electric by 2035. The transition to EVs can happen faster than you think.
• Austin, Texas, just voted to spend $7 billion on a transportation revolution. The Texas capital will build a 31-station rail system, rapid bus routes, and bike lanes to get more people out of cars.

Solving food shortages and waste

• Everything you need to know about the booming business of fighting food waste. A new wave of companies is figuring out how to make new products from food that used to end up in the trash, from pulp popsicles to beer bread. Here are 20 to watch.

Cleaning the planet

• These drones will plant 40,000 trees in a month. By 2028, they’ll have planted 1 billion. We need to massively reforest the planet, in a very short period of time. Flash Forest’s drones can plant trees a lot faster than humans.
• This beach-cleaning robot sifts sand for the tiny plastics that humans miss. It’s hard to pick up all the plastic trash on beaches by hand. BeBot, a solar-powered robot, speeds up the process.
• This “sustainable infrastructure company” just raised $2 billion to build more clean tech. Generate Capital makes the often-costly upfront investments in sustainable projects—from solar panels to electric vehicles to food waste digesters—and then sells the services to other companies.
• Microplastics are in everything. What if they were biodegradable? Microplastics are used everywhere from laundry detergent to agriculture. Biotech startup Calyxia is making a new version of the tiny capsules that dissolve in nature.

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