André Brocatus was here...

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

Desalination is the process of generating freshwater from brackish or saltwater, usually through the process of reverse osmosis. While this can be a very useful tool in water shortages, it also has some pretty huge drawbacks--reverse osmosis requires a lot of energy, requires chemical treatment of the water, and produces concentrated brine as a waste product which can be harmful to aquatic ecosystems.

TIL Muji launched a limited edition car, the Muji Car 1000, in 2001. It was a stripped down, debadged Nissan March, and was sold only online, in an edition of 1,000. Except the seller of this example, in Kanagawa, says Muji actually only sold 170. Rare? Fail? Or both?

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The old men were by far the most diverse bunch. Old billionaires wear whatever the fuck they want. One man wore a maroon, velvet, three-piece suit and a paisley cravat, and he must have been sweating in it, but I couldn’t tell because he had doused himself in a cologne that I’m going to call “A Million, Billion Different Kinds Of Fruit, by Calvin Klein.” There were two shaven-headed men of Caucasian descent, wearing black hakama robes and some kind of pendants. They had white socks and sandals, and from the way people were bowing to them, I’m guessing they were some kind of religious officials, but I can’t be quite sure. Whatever faith they practiced, it wasn’t Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Baha’i, Taoism, Shinto, Confucianism, Voodoo, Wicca or the Dreamtime Faith of the Aboriginal Shamans. If I had to guess, I would say they were either members of the Illuminati, or we are living in the Matrix and they are priests from the remaining human city in the real, outer world.

I don’t know what religion they were from. Do we get why that’s scary? Aside from the fact that a vast chunk of my education centered on world religions and mythology, religions really want you to know about them. That’s their whole business model. They tell you why things are the way they are and then you give them money. So the fact that there’s a religion that I’m too poor to know about is deeply troubling.

These rich old billionaires were the kindest, sweetest old gents. In conversations I overheard more than once, a man worth more than my entire extended family (which is Irish and therefore vast and mighty) talked about another man at the party as “just being the sweetest soul,” or referred to a cupcake at a certain café as “sinfully seductive.” And I realized, these men may have been cutthroat sharks before, or they may have inherited their fortunes, but none of that matters now. They won. They won life. They are lions that, having killed enough gladiators, are now left gloriously alive to become old and toothless. The host of the party had an entire wall covered in plaques and trophies. I read most of them, and still couldn’t tell you what he did for a living. Because whatever he had done, he certainly didn’t need to do it anymore. His accomplishments referenced his humanitarianism, his civic heroism and his contributions to culture and civilization. So whether or not this man had worked at Bain Capital gutting companies in the American Heartland didn’t matter, because he had rescued a bunch of Tibetan art and now he was kissing other billionaires on both cheeks and saying, “Tom, I’m in love with you!” because who gives a fuck, I’m rich!

I watched these crazy old holiday wizards and their jeweled scarab wives, their Oxford sons and Cambridge daughters, and thought to myself, “This is the most fun I’ve ever seen anyone have. Louis the XVI would've shit a brick if he'd ever thrown a party this good. This is… so great. This is… completely fucked.”

I began to notice that people were looking at me funny. For a moment I became scared that they realized I was poor. Perhaps I had used the wrong fork, or a moth had flown in lazy spirals out of my wallet, or my toes had popped out of the holes in my shoes. But then I realized it was my expression that was drawing looks. I looked flabbergasted and astounded. And they didn’t.

That’s when I realized it. These motherfuckers weren’t going to the best party of their lives. They weren’t even necessarily going to the best party of their week. Who knows? Maybe one of these plutocrats was sneering at the lack of a third fortuneteller. “No augur divining mysteries from the movement of birds? No oracle breathing poison and screaming prophesies? You call this a Christmas Party!”

Well fuck that!

My latest books cartoon for The Guardian's books pages.