From kickoff to the final whistle, game day is all about spending time with friends and family while rooting for your favorite team. When it’s your turn to host, you can bring all the fun of a tailgate party to the comfort of your couch with the proper plan for hosting.
Show Your Team Spirit
Make your guests feel excited from the moment they walk through the door – or as soon as they pull in the driveway – by decking out your space in team colors and memorabilia. Use football- or team-themed banners, flags, balloons, coasters and tablecloths to set the mood.
Wear your favorite jersey and create a stadium-like atmosphere with fun props like foam fingers or pom-poms for guests to use and cheer on their team.
Prep Ahead of Time to Score Big
Avoid a rush before kickoff by making a checklist of everything you’ll need. Ensure your TV and sound systems are working correctly and that you have access to the right channel or streaming platform.
Make a store run at least a day in advance to grab everything you’ll need for your watch party: dishes, snacks, drinks, tablecloths, trash bags and some household essentials like Finish Ultimate Dishwasher Detergent. Finish Ultimate tackles dish cleanup in the kitchen like a pro, so hosts can enjoy all the fun parts of game day without the worry.
If possible, pack your coolers the night before – just as you would for tailgating at the stadium – and prep and cook any dishes you can ahead of time, so you can enjoy the action with minimal interruptions.
Feed the Fans
Football fans are often foodies, too. A buffet-style food setup allows guests to help themselves to their favorite snacks and dishes throughout all four quarters.
Review your game plan ahead of kickoff to make sure your game day menu offers a variety of finger foods, such as wings, sliders and nachos. Then, take your menu to the next level with unique eats like this new saucy, cheesy creation – the TRUFF Hot Honey Bacon Cheddar Dip with Pretzel Bites – to add a spicy twist.
To complete the roster of game day eats, include a veggie tray or charcuterie board and a variety of beverages, including water, soda and juice. To stay on theme, consider serving cake or brownies in the shape of a football for dessert or topping cupcakes with icing in the team’s colors.
Tackle Cleanup
All those delicious snacks your guests are enjoying are sure to make a mess. For hosts tackling cleanup during the game, don’t miss out on all the on-screen action–turn to the star player to make cleanup a breeze: Finish Ultimate Dishwasher Detergent.
Finish Ultimate tackles tough game day messes, even without pre-rinsing, leaving hosts more time to cheer on their team and less time in the kitchen cleaning up.
Create the Perfect Viewing Environment
Ensure everyone has an unobstructed view by arranging your seating strategically. Use a combination of couches, chairs and floor cushions to accommodate your guests. Scatter small tables throughout the area within easy reach for guests to place their drinks and snacks while the action is live.
To ensure fans never miss a moment of the action, turn the TVs in other rooms to the game as well; just ensure the sound is down in case the main screen is ahead or behind of the secondary viewing options.
Consider Downtime Entertainment to Keep the Energy High
While the main event is watching the action, you can keep the excitement going during halftime and commercial breaks with fun activities like cornhole, football trivia, bingo, mascot matching or an old-fashioned game of catch. Also have some board games, card games or video games on hand for those who might want to take a break from watching or children who aren’t as engaged in the on-screen action.
Starting the morning on the right foot can set the tone for a productive day. Even when crunched for time before work or school, eating a filling breakfast before heading out the door is an important part of setting yourself up for success.
Between work, kids and making it to that early morning workout session, finding time to prepare a quick and tasty meal can be a real challenge. For a flavorful and easy breakfast that can be on the table in just 8 minutes when you’re in a rush, try this Quick Breakfast Skillet. With crispy bacon, scrambled eggs and rich cheddar cheese, it’s a perfect way to fuel your morning.
The secret, convenient ingredient: fluffy Minute Butter & Sea Salt Jasmine Rice Cups. Ready in just 60 seconds to fit into the day with no hassle, this versatile and flavorful ingredient is perfectly portioned in a BPA-free cup and features a delicious blend of familiar flavors to liven up breakfast.
Or try something new and delicious with this One-Pot Rice Shakshuka. A dish with origins in the Middle East and Northern Africa, shakshuka is traditionally made with a base of tomatoes, vegetables and seasonings, such as cumin and paprika. Then eggs are cracked on top and cooked in the sauce.
This version takes it a step further with the addition of Minute Instant White Rice, which provides a heartier texture to keep you feeling satisfied longer. Simply precooked and dried – nothing added but convenience – you can enjoy its light, fluffy texture after just 5 minutes in the microwave or on the stove. Plus, it works for those with dietary restrictions, including gluten-free, vegan or vegetarian.
Find more breakfast inspiration to keep you energized and ready to conquer the day at minuterice.com.
In high-sided, ovenproof skillet over medium heat, heat oil. Add onion, bell pepper, cumin and smoked paprika; saute 8-10 minutes until vegetables are tender.
Add tomatoes and water to skillet. Bring to boil. Stir in rice and reduce heat to low. Cover and cook 3-5 minutes, or until most water is absorbed.
Using spoon, create six small wells in rice mixture. Crack one egg into each well. Transfer skillet to oven; cook 12-15 minutes, or until rice is tender, egg whites are set and yolks are runny, or until cooked as desired.
Garnish shakshuka with parsley before serving.
Tip: For spicy eggs, stir 1 tablespoon harissa paste into rice mixture before adding eggs. Or serve shakshuka with hot sauce.
Approaching your regular day with a new mindset can send you in an interesting direction.
d3sign/Moment via Getty ImagesLorraine Besser, Middlebury
Imagine it’s Monday morning, too cold and too dark, but once that alarm goes off, you know you’ve got to rally. The kids have to get to school. You’ve got to get to work. And, of course, your ever-growing to-do list hangs over your head like a dark cloud, somehow both too threatening to ignore and too threatening to start its tasks.
On days like this, you may be grateful simply to make it through. But then it begins, all over again.
While you can’t escape the grind, you can transform it. The latest psychological research on the good life points the way: By shifting your mindset, you can make your day-to-day more interesting and create psychological richness within your life. Psychological richness describes a robust form of cognitive engagement. It’s distinct from happiness and meaning, but just as important to the good life.
In collaboration with Shigehiro Oishi and his research lab, I’ve investigated whether the field of positive psychology has largely overlooked an important dimension of the good life. As the philosopher on our team, I had two directives. First, I helped to define the concept of psychological richness and understand what distinguishes it from happiness and meaning. Second, I set out to explore why psychological richness is valuable.
Our initial studies found that people value experiences that stimulate their minds, challenge them and generate a range of emotions. Many would choose a life full of these experiences, which we describe as psychologically rich, over a happy life or a meaningful life.
This insight points to the important role psychological richness can play within the good life, but it stops short of explaining why it’s good and why people ought to make space for psychological richness within their lives. These are value-laden questions that can’t be answered through empirical research. Their answers are found instead through philosophical analysis.
One of the easiest ways to do this is by embracing a mindset characterized by curiosity, creativity and what I call “mindfulness 2.0.” When you bring these three perspectives to your day-to-day, you transform the grind into endless opportunities to experience the world as interesting. You develop the capacity to enhance your own life.
Mindfulness 2.0: Noticing without judging
What I call “mindfulness 2.0” means bringing nonevaluative awareness to the world around you – paying attention without judging.
Familiar from mindfulness practices, it’s a form of noticing that brings forth details you typically overlook: the texture of a houseplant’s leaves, the faces of the strangers you pass on the sidewalk, the differing heights of the cans on a store shelf. By bringing these details into your awareness, you stimulate your mind, allowing you to engage mentally with your surroundings in an active manner. Noticing things through mindfulness 2.0 is the first step toward having an interesting experience.
A good place to practice mindfulness 2.0 is during your morning commute. Because it’s routine, you probably don’t feel the need to engage much with the details of what you are doing. Instead you’ll find other ways to pass the time, such as listening to the news or your favorite podcast. These activities distract you from the otherwise boring commute by disengaging you from it.
Noticing an intriguing pattern as birds gather overhead can engage your mind as you move through the world.Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images
But you can also get through the commute by engaging with it to make it less boring. Here’s where the power of mindfulness 2.0 kicks in. Through actively noticing things around you – be it the people clustered at the bus stop, or the traffic patterns created by a stoplight, or a flock of birds swooping overhead – you engage your mind and set yourself up to experience the interesting.
Curiosity: Exploring through questions
Curiosity isn’t just for kids. No matter how much you know, there’s always something to be curious about – especially if you’ve learned to notice the details through mindfulness 2.0.
Say you’ve noticed, during your commute, the group of people gathered around the bus stop. Now let your curiosity take off: Was that bus stop always there? How long has that exceptionally weird real estate advertisement been stuck on the seatback? So many people lined up this cold morning. You might wonder if you’d feel a little more connected if you were with them. But then you notice that no one is talking. Do they ride the same bus together, every day, without acknowledging each other?
Through asking questions, you ask your mind to consider something it hadn’t before. You create new thoughts, and if you let your mind keep going, you’ll have an interesting experience, all the while making that same commute. Even better, you’ll have created that interesting experience on your own. You’ve harnessed an ability to enhance your life, an ability that’s completely within your control.
Creativity: Trying something new
While people often think of creativity as a talent, native only to artists or inventors, everyone has the ability to be creative. Creativity is a skill that involves forming new connections with your mind. You’re creative whenever you do something new or different. Whether it is painting a brilliant landscape or wearing a new color combination, developing a new dish or simply tweaking a recipe, it all falls under the umbrella of creativity.
When you are creative, in big or small ways, you generate novelty within your life, and this puts you on the path toward experiencing psychological richness. Novelty all but forces the mind to think and feel in new ways, stimulating that robust form of cognitive engagement that brings the interesting.
Even just a little bit of creativity will bring novelty to your day-to-day routine. Wear something you don’t normally wear. Add a little flair to your handwriting or choose a different colored pen to write with. Change the patterns on your screen saver. Notice the impact these little tweaks have on your day. Little by little, they’ll add up to make your day just a little more interesting.
Everyone’s experience of what’s interesting is unique. There’s no one interesting experience for all of us, because the interesting depends entirely on how our minds engage, react and respond. Through developing mindfulness 2.0, and bringing curiosity and creativity to your experiences, you train your mind to engage, react and respond in ways that will transform any experience into an interesting one.
This is the power a mindset can bring. It’s a capacity to enhance our lives that anyone can develop.
Lorraine Besser, Professor of Philosophy, Middlebury
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
It can take a lot of effort to understand the many different Medicare choices.
Halfpoint Images/Moment via Getty ImagesGrace McCormack, University of Southern California and Melissa Garrido, Boston University
The 67 million Americans eligible for Medicare make an important decision every October: Should they make changes in their Medicare health insurance plans for the next calendar year?
The decision is complicated. Medicare has an enormous variety of coverage options, with large and varying implications for people’s health and finances, both as beneficiaries and taxpayers. And the decision is consequential – some choices lock beneficiaries out of traditional Medicare.
Beneficiaries choose an insurance plan when they turn 65 or become eligible based on qualifying chronic conditions or disabilities. After the initial sign-up, most beneficiaries can make changes only during the open enrollment period each fall.
The 2024 open enrollment period, which runs from Oct. 15 to Dec. 7, marks an opportunity to reassess options. Given the complicated nature of Medicare and the scarcity of unbiased advisers, however, finding reliable information and understanding the options available can be challenging.
We are health carepolicy experts who study Medicare, and even we find it complicated. One of us recently helped a relative enroll in Medicare for the first time. She’s healthy, has access to health insurance through her employer and doesn’t regularly take prescription drugs. Even in this straightforward scenario, the number of choices were overwhelming.
The stakes of these choices are even higher for people managing multiple chronic conditions. There is help available for beneficiaries, but we have found that there is considerable room for improvement – especially in making help available for everyone who needs it.
The choice is complex, especially when you are signing up for the first time and if you are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. Insurers often engage in aggressive and sometimes deceptive advertising and outreach through brokers and agents. Choose unbiased resources to guide you through the process, like www.shiphelp.org. Make sure to start before your 65th birthday for initial sign-up, look out for yearly plan changes, and start well before the Dec. 7 deadline for any plan changes.
2 paths with many decisions
Within Medicare, beneficiaries have a choice between two very different programs. They can enroll in either traditional Medicare, which is administered by the government, or one of the Medicare Advantage plans offered by private insurance companies.
Within each program are dozens of further choices.
Traditional Medicare is a nationally uniform cost-sharing plan for medical services that allows people to choose their providers for most types of medical care, usually without prior authorization. Deductibles for 2024 are US$1,632 for hospital costs and $240 for outpatient and medical costs. Patients also have to chip in starting on Day 61 for a hospital stay and Day 21 for a skilled nursing facility stay. This percentage is known as coinsurance. After the yearly deductible, Medicare pays 80% of outpatient and medical costs, leaving the person with a 20% copayment. Traditional Medicare’s basic plan, known as Part A and Part B, also has no out-of-pocket maximum.
People enrolled in traditional Medicare can also purchase supplemental coverage from a private insurance company, known as Part D, for drugs. And they can purchase supplemental coverage, known as Medigap, to lower or eliminate their deductibles, coinsurance and copayments, cap costs for Parts A and B, and add an emergency foreign travel benefit.
The Medicare Advantage program allows private insurers to bundle everything together and offers many enrollment options. Compared with traditional Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans typically offer lower out-of-pocket costs. They often bundle supplemental coverage for hearing, vision and dental, which is not part of traditional Medicare.
Understanding the tradeoffs between premiums, health care access and out-of-pocket health care costs can be overwhelming.
Turning 65 begins the process of taking one of two major paths, which each have a thicket of health care choices.Rika Kanaoka/USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics
Different Medicare Advantage plans have varying and large impacts on enrollee health, including dramatic differences in mortality rates. Researchers found a 16% difference per year between the best and worst Medicare Advantage plans, meaning that for every 100 people in the worst plans who die within a year, they would expect only 84 people to die within that year if all had been enrolled in the best plans instead. They also found plans that cost more had lower mortality rates, but plans that had higher federal quality ratings – known as “star ratings” – did not necessarily have lower mortality rates.
While many Medicare Advantage plans boast about their supplemental benefits , such as vision and dental coverage, it’s often difficult to understand how generous this supplemental coverage is. For instance, while most Medicare Advantage plans offer supplemental dental benefits, cost-sharing and coverage can vary. Some plans don’t cover services such as extractions and endodontics, which includes root canals. Most plans that cover these more extensive dental services require some combination of coinsurance, copayments and annual limits.
Even when information is fully available, mistakes are likely.
At 65, when most beneficiaries first enroll in Medicare, federal regulations guarantee that anyone can get Medigap coverage. During this initial sign-up, beneficiaries can’t be charged a higher premium based on their health.
Older Americans who enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan but then want to switch back to traditional Medicare after more than a year has passed lose that guarantee. This can effectively lock them out of enrolling in supplemental Medigap insurance, making the initial decision a one-way street.
For the initial sign-up, Medigap plans are “guaranteed issue,” meaning the plan must cover preexisting health conditions without a waiting period and must allow anyone to enroll, regardless of health. They also must be “community rated,” meaning that the cost of a plan can’t rise because of age or illness, although it can go up due to other factors such as inflation.
People who enroll in traditional Medicare and a supplemental Medigap plan at 65 can expect to continue paying community-rated premiums as long as they remain enrolled, regardless of what happens to their health.
In most states, however, people who switch from Medicare Advantage to traditional Medicare don’t have as many protections. Most state regulations permit plans to deny coverage, impose waiting periods or charge higher Medigap premiums based on their expected health costs. Only Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and New York guarantee that people can get Medigap plans after the initial sign-up period.
Deceptive advertising
Information about Medicare coverage and assistance choosing a plan is available but varies in quality and completeness. Older Americans are bombarded with ads for Medicare Advantage plans that they may not be eligible for and that include misleading statements about benefits.
A November 2022 report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance found deceptive and aggressive sales and marketing tactics, including mailed brochures that implied government endorsement, telemarketers who called up to 20 times a day, and salespeople who approached older adults in the grocery store to ask about their insurance coverage.
The Department of Health and Human Services tightened rules for 2024, requiring third-party marketers to include federal resources about Medicare, including the website and toll-free phone number, and limiting the number of contacts from marketers.
Although the government has the authority to review marketing materials, enforcement is partially dependent on whether complaints are filed. Complaints can be filed with the federal government’s Senior Medicare Patrol, a federally funded program that prevents and addresses unethical Medicare activities.
Nearly one-third of Medicare beneficiaries seek information from an insurance broker. Brokers sell health insurance plans from multiple companies. However, because they receive payment from plans in exchange for sales, and because they are unlikely to sell every option, a plan recommended by a broker may not meet a person’s needs.
Help is out there − but falls short
An alternative source of information is the federal government. It offers three sources of information to assist people with choosing one of these plans: 1-800-Medicare, medicare.gov and the State Health Insurance Assistance Program, also known as SHIP.
Telephone SHIP services are available nationally, but one of us and our colleagues have found that in-person SHIP services are not available in some areas. We tabulated areas by ZIP code in 27 states and found that although more than half of the locations had a SHIP site within the county, areas without a SHIP site included a larger proportion of people with low incomes.
Virtual services are an option that’s particularly useful in rural areas and for people with limited mobility or little access to transportation, but they require online access. Virtual and in-person services, where both a beneficiary and a counselor can look at the same computer screen, are especially useful for looking through complex coverage options.
As one SHIP coordinator noted, many people are not aware of all their coverage options. For instance, one beneficiary told a coordinator, “I’ve been on Medicaid and I’m aging out of Medicaid. And I don’t have a lot of money. And now I have to pay for my insurance?” As it turned out, the beneficiary was eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare because of their income, and so had to pay less than they thought.
The interviews made clear that many people are not aware that Medicare Advantage ads and insurance brokers may be biased. One counselor said, “There’s a lot of backing (beneficiaries) off the ledge, if you will, thanks to those TV commercials.”
Many SHIP staff counselors said they would benefit from additional training on coverage options, including for people who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. The SHIP program relies heavily on volunteers, and there is often greater demand for services than the available volunteers can offer. Additional counselors would help meet needs for complex coverage decisions.
The key to making a good Medicare coverage decision is to use the help available and weigh your costs, access to health providers, current health and medication needs, and also consider how your health and medication needs might change as time goes on.
This article is part of an occasional series examining the U.S. Medicare system.
This story has been updated to remove a graphic that contained incorrect information about SHIP locations, and to correct the date of the open enrollment period.
Grace McCormack, Postdoctoral researcher of Health Policy and Economics, University of Southern California and Melissa Garrido, Research Professor, Health Law, Policy & Management, Boston University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
There are many professional development opportunities in higher education, but one that is not often considered is the chance to serve on a search committee. This work is overlooked because the goal of the search is to find the best talent for an open position instead of improving the evaluators themselves. The candidates are the ones who stand to benefit from a potential job offer, or at least by improving their interviewing skills and "getting their name out there."
Search committee members have less self-interest. They are volunteers doing what needs to be done for the good of the institution. Someone has to do it. If they are faculty, they might get credit for service work. Staff might benefit from helping ensure the quality of their next colleague or supervisor. But the work of the search committee is rarely considered career-enhancing to anyone except who they hire.
This perception should change.
Search committee members have a lot to gain, according to Christopher D. Lee, managing director with Storbeck Search. In his 13 years as the chief human resources officer for the Virginia Community College System, Lee served on more than 30 search committees to hire presidents at 23 institutions.
"I've earned a master's degree in leadership from having watched more than 300 people interview to be a community college president," said Lee, who has authored books and trained HR professionals related to the search process. "I've listened to experienced leaders talk about their abilities and what they would do in situations, and I've taken notes. I could write a book about leadership, so I know you can benefit by serving on a search committee."
You don't have to serve on a presidential search committee to benefit or even limit your professional development to hearing executives pontificate about leadership. Here are six areas of professional development that arise from serving on any type of search committee at your institution:
Choosing candidates. Developing an eye for talent is a valuable skill in higher education. According to Daniel Grassian, author of "An Insider's Guide to University Administration," one of the most important decisions (if not the most important decision) administrators make is who to hire. Serving on a search committee trains you to make good hiring decisions and helps administrators at your institution make their choices. When they look good, you look good -- that goes for candidates you recommend and the people who rely on you to help them make their critical decisions.
Project management. There are a lot of moving pieces when it comes to a search, from scheduling interviews to organizing the evaluation tools and rubrics. Being a part of this process will sharpen your skills that can be applied to other content areas or give you ideas and background knowledge for future searches that you might be asked to lead.
Idea generation. Lee has always considered the interview process as receiving free consulting from multiple experts. Asking candidates questions about how they would solve real problems or improve an organization will provide you fresh ideas and perspectives from different vantage points that will help you do your job better. This doesn't mean stealing proprietary information but rather taking the combination of ideas from candidates to advance your thinking.
Domain knowledge. If you serve on a committee from another academic department or functional area, you can learn a lot about how organizations operate from conducting a search. You learn about the issues facing administrators from other institutions or industries, or what academics in different disciplines value when it comes to things like tenure requirements or teaching methods. This can help you stay relevant in your career by understanding what's important to other professionals and potential collaborators. If anything, seeing how others work and think will inform your practice and recognize the distinctive qualities of your own discipline.
Networking. Serving on a search committee will give you more access and help you engage with professionals who you would not otherwise interact with, whether that's fellow committee members from within your institution or outside candidates and their references. When you work together on a common goal to hire someone, that creates a special bond and builds relationships, even with the successful candidate once they become your co-worker. Sharing your thoughts or exhibiting your skills during the process also enhances your influence with colleagues as someone they can trust.
Improve your candidacy. After serving on a search committee, you will be better prepared for the next time you apply or interview for a job. You will be exposed to conversations, reasonings, and what committees consider most when evaluating candidates. By reviewing and comparing dozens of applications, you'll have a better understanding of what makes a resume or CV effective and what doesn't (and what little time is spent reading each application during the initial screening). You'll be better prepared to answer interview questions and articulate a point from having sat on the other side of the table.
Once you appreciate the benefits of serving on a search committee, you can position yourself to be selected for one. This might be easy. Volunteers for this type of service are likely in greater demand than spots available. The further up the organizational chart, the more competitive it will become.
Having previous experience on search committees will help your chances, but don't let your lack of knowledge about the role that your institution is attempting to fill prevent you from contributing to the search.
"To have a good search committee, you need to have a novice, someone who's not a member of the key area," Lee said. "That person usually asks the basic question of 'Why?' People who are in that domain have made a whole bunch of assumptions, paradigms, and expected ways of seeing the world. The novice disrupts that."
According to Lee, if there are five members from the same department, they will be prone to make poorer decisions and perpetuate biases and preferences for the same type of candidates. Having a novice ask questions prevents groupthink, introduces diverse viewpoints, and provides clarity of purpose.
"It's always value-added because people will say, 'Oh, I've never thought about it that way,'" Lee said.
There is a caveat when it comes to faculty searches. Especially in a unionized environment, academic departments might prevent or not prefer outsiders from serving on their search committees. While the autonomy to hire their own faculty can be considered a healthy application of academic freedom, this protection can be taken too far if it diminishes a core principle of critical thinking and considering other views. But generally speaking, higher education is an industry that embraces diversity of thought, especially in its hiring practices, and you're more likely to be welcomed on a committee than not.
Ask your supervisor or contact your human resources to express your intentions to serve on search committees and note your previous experience or novice status so that you will be on the short list of possible search committee selections. Explain to your supervisor the benefits for the institutions to have thoroughly staffed searches and to have representation from your department, as well as your own professional development. Mention the benefits listed above, minus the "improve your candidacy" claim, of course.
You will find that by helping your employer conduct a search, you will be better positioned to be the one who is sought after for career advancement.
This article is republished from HigherEdJobs® under a Creative Commons license.
Wood engineered for strength and safety offers architects an alternative to carbon-intensive steel and concrete
By Kurt Kleiner
At the University of Toronto, just across the street from the football stadium, workers are putting up a 14-story building with space for classrooms and faculty offices. What’s unusual is how they’re building it — by bolting together giant beams, columns and panels made of manufactured slabs of wood.
As each wood element is delivered by flatbed, a tall crane lifts it into place and holds it in position while workers attach it with metal connectors. In its half-finished state, the building resembles flat-pack furniture in the process of being assembled.
The tower uses a new technology called mass timber. In this kind of construction, massive, manufactured wood elements that can extend more than half the length of a football field replace steel beams and concrete. Though still relatively uncommon, it is growing in popularity and beginning to pop up in skylines around the world.
Today, the tallest mass timber building is the 25-story Ascent skyscraper in Milwaukee, completed in 2022. As of that year, there were 84 mass timber buildings eight stories or higher either built or under construction worldwide, with another 55 proposed. Seventy percent of the existing and future buildings were in Europe, about 20 percent in North America and the rest in Australia and Asia, according to a report from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When you include smaller buildings, at least 1,700 mass timber buildings had been constructed in the United States alone as of 2023.
Mass timber is an appealing alternative to energy-intensive concrete and steel, which together account for almost 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Though experts are still debating mass timber’s role in fighting climate change, many are betting it’s better for the environment than current approaches to construction. It relies on wood, after all, a renewable resource.
Mass timber also offers a different aesthetic that can make a building feel special. “People get sick and tired of steel and concrete,” says Ted Kesik, a building scientist at the University of Toronto’s Mass Timber Institute, which promotes mass timber research and development. With its warm, soothing appearance and natural variations, timber can be more visually pleasing. “People actually enjoy looking at wood.”
Same wood, stronger structure
Using wood for big buildings isn’t new, of course. Industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries led to a demand for large factories and warehouses, which were often “brick and beam” construction — a frame of heavy wooden beams supporting exterior brick walls.
As buildings became ever taller, though, builders turned to concrete and steel for support. Wood construction became mostly limited to houses and other small buildings made from the standard-sized “dimensional” lumber you see stacked at Home Depot.
But about 30 years ago, builders in Germany and Austria began experimenting with techniques for making massive wood elements out of this readily available lumber. They used nails, dowels and glue to combine smaller pieces of wood into big, strong and solid masses that don’t require cutting down large old-growth trees.
Engineers including Julius Natterer, a German engineer based in Switzerland, pioneered new methods for building with the materials. And architects including Austria’s Hermann Kaufmann began gaining attention for mass timber projects, including the Ölzbündt apartments in Austria, completed in 1997, and Brock Commons, an 18-story student residence at the University of British Columbia, completed in 2017.
In principle, mass timber is like plywood but on a much larger scale: The smaller pieces are layered and glued together under pressure in large specialized presses. Today, beams up to 50 meters long, usually made of what’s called glue-laminated timber, or glulam, can replace steel elements. Panels up to 50 centimeters thick, typically cross-laminated timber, or CLT, replace concrete for walls and floors.
These wood composites can be surprisingly strong — stronger than steel by weight. But a mass timber element must be bulkier to achieve that same strength. As a building gets higher, the wooden supports must get thicker; at some point, they simply take up too much space. So for taller mass timber buildings, including the Ascent skyscraper, architects often turn to a combination of wood, steel and concrete.
Historically, one of the most obvious concerns with using mass timber for tall buildings was fire safety. Until recently, many building codes limited wood construction to low-rise buildings.
Though they don’t have to be completely fireproof, buildings need to resist collapse long enough to give firefighters a chance to bring the flames under control, and for occupants to get out. Materials used in conventional skyscrapers, for instance, are required to maintain their integrity in a fire for three hours or more.
To demonstrate mass timber’s fire resistance, engineers put the wood elements in gas-fired chambers and monitor their integrity. Other tests set fire to mock-ups of mass timber buildings and record the results.
These tests have gradually convinced regulators and customers that mass timber can resist burning long enough to be fire safe. That’s partly because a layer of char tends to form early on the outside of the timber, insulating the interior from much of the fire’s heat.
Mass timber got a major stamp of approval in 2021, when the International Code Council changed the International Building Code, which serves as a model for jurisdictions around the world, to allow mass timber construction up to 18 stories tall. With this change, more and more localities are expected to update their codes to routinely allow tall mass timber buildings, rather than requiring them to get special approvals.
There are other challenges, though. “Moisture is the real problem, not fire,” says Steffen Lehmann, an architect and scholar of urban sustainability at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
All buildings must control moisture, but it’s absolutely crucial for mass timber. Wet wood is vulnerable to deterioration from fungus and insects like termites. Builders are careful to prevent the wood from getting wet during transportation and construction, and they deploy a comprehensive moisture management plan, including designing heat and ventilation systems to keep moisture from accumulating. For extra protection from insects, wood can be treated with chemical pesticides or surrounded by mesh or other physical barriers where it meets the ground.
Another problem is acoustics, since wood transmits sound so well. Designers use sound insulation materials, leave space between walls and install raised floors, among other methods.
Potential upsides of mass timber
Combating global warming means reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector, which is responsible for 39 percent of emissions globally. Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, an environmental scientist at the Central European University in Vienna, says mass timber and other bio-based materials could be an important part of that effort.
In a 2020 paper in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, she and colleagues cite an estimate from the lumber industry that the 18-story Brock Commons, in British Columbia, avoided the equivalent of 2,432 metric tons of CO2 emissions compared with a similar building of concrete and steel. Of those savings, 679 tons came from the fact that less greenhouse gas emissions are generated in the manufacture of wood versus concrete and steel. Another 1,753 metric tons of CO2 equivalent were locked away in the building’s wood.
“If you use bio-based material, we have a double win,” Ürge-Vorsatz says.
But a lot of the current enthusiasm over mass timber’s climate benefits is based on some big assumptions. The accounting often assumes, for instance, that any wood used in a mass timber building will be replaced by the growth of new trees, and that those new trees will take the same amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere across time. But if old-growth trees are replaced with new tree plantations, the new trees may never reach the same size as the original trees, some environmental groups argue. There are also concerns that increasing demand for wood could lead to more deforestation and less land for food production.
Studies also tend to assume that once the wood is in a building, the carbon is locked up for good. But not all the wood from a felled tree ends up in the finished product. Branches, roots and lumber mill waste may decompose or get burned. And when the building is torn down, if the wood ends up in a landfill, the carbon can find its way out in the form of methane and other emissions.
“A lot of architects are scratching their heads,” says Stephanie Carlisle, an architect and environmental researcher at the nonprofit Carbon Leadership Forum, wondering whether mass timber always has a net benefit. “Is that real?” She believes climate benefits do exist. But she says understanding the extent of those benefits will require more research.
In the meantime, mass timber is at the forefront of a whole different model of construction called integrated design. In traditional construction, an architect designs a building first and then multiple firms are hired to handle different parts of the construction, from laying the foundation, to building the frame, to installing the ventilation system and so on.
In integrated design, says Kesik, the design phase is much more detailed and involves the various firms from the beginning. The way different components will fit and work together is figured out in advance. Exact sizes and shapes of elements are predetermined, and holes can even be pre-drilled for attachment points. That means many of the components can be manufactured off-site, often with advanced computer-controlled machinery.
A lot of architects like this because it gives them more control over the building elements. And because so much of the work is done in advance, the buildings tend to go up faster on-site — up to 40 percent faster than other buildings, Lehmann says.
Mass timber buildings tend to be manufactured more like automobiles, Kesik says, with all the separate pieces shipped to a final location for assembly. “When the mass timber building shows up on-site, it’s really just like an oversized piece of Ikea furniture,” he says. “Everything sort of goes together.”
A fusion experiment ran so hot that the wall materials facing the plasma retained defects.
Christophe Roux/CEA IRFM, CC BYSophie Blondel, University of Tennessee
Fusion energy has the potential to be an effective clean energy source, as its reactions generate incredibly large amounts of energy. Fusion reactors aim to reproduce on Earth what happens in the core of the Sun, where very light elements merge and release energy in the process. Engineers can harness this energy to heat water and generate electricity through a steam turbine, but the path to fusion isn’t completely straightforward.
Controlled nuclear fusion has several advantages over other power sources for generating electricity. For one, the fusion reaction itself doesn’t produce any carbon dioxide. There is no risk of meltdown, and the reaction doesn’t generate any long-lived radioactive waste.
I’m a nuclear engineer who studies materials that scientists could use in fusion reactors. Fusion takes place at incredibly high temperatures. So to one day make fusion a feasible energy source, reactors will need to be built with materials that can survive the heat and irradiation generated by fusion reactions.
Fusion material challenges
Several types of elements can merge during a fusion reaction. The one most scientists prefer is deuterium plus tritium. These two elements have the highest likelihood of fusing at temperatures that a reactor can maintain. This reaction generates a helium atom and a neutron, which carries most of the energy from the reaction.
Humans have successfully generated fusion reactions on Earth since 1952 – some even in their garage. But the trick now is to make it worth it. You need to get more energy out of the process than you put in to initiate the reaction.
Fusion reactions happen in a very hot plasma, which is a state of matter similar to gas but made of charged particles. The plasma needs to stay extremely hot – over 100 million degrees Celsius – and condensed for the duration of the reaction.
To keep the plasma hot and condensed and create a reaction that can keep going, you need special materials making up the reactor walls. You also need a cheap and reliable source of fuel.
While deuterium is very common and obtained from water, tritium is very rare. A 1-gigawatt fusion reactor is expected to burn 56 kilograms of tritium annually. But the world has only about 25 kilograms of tritium commercially available.
Researchers need to find alternative sources for tritium before fusion energy can get off the ground. One option is to have each reactor generating its own tritium through a system called the breeding blanket.
The breeding blanket makes up the first layer of the plasma chamber walls and contains lithium that reacts with the neutrons generated in the fusion reaction to produce tritium. The blanket also converts the energy carried by these neutrons to heat.
The fusion reaction chamber at ITER will electrify the plasma.
Fusion devices also need a divertor, which extracts the heat and ash produced in the reaction. The divertor helps keep the reactions going for longer.
These materials will be exposed to unprecedented levels of heat and particle bombardment. And there aren’t currently any experimental facilities to reproduce these conditions and test materials in a real-world scenario. So, the focus of my research is to bridge this gap using models and computer simulations.
From the atom to full device
My colleagues and I work on producing tools that can predict how the materials in a fusion reactor erode, and how their properties change when they are exposed to extreme heat and lots of particle radiation.
As they get irradiated, defects can form and grow in these materials, which affect how well they react to heat and stress. In the future, we hope that government agencies and private companies can use these tools to design fusion power plants.
Our approach, called multiscale modeling, consists of looking at the physics in these materials over different time and length scales with a range of computational models.
We first study the phenomena happening in these materials at the atomic scale through accurate but expensive simulations. For instance, one simulation might examine how hydrogen moves within a material during irradiation.
From these simulations, we look at properties such as diffusivity, which tells us how much the hydrogen can spread throughout the material.
We can integrate the information from these atomic level simulations into less expensive simulations, which look at how the materials react at a larger scale. These larger-scale simulations are less expensive because they model the materials as a continuum instead of considering every single atom.
The atomic-scale simulations could take weeks to run on a supercomputer, while the continuum one will take only a few hours.
All this modeling work happening on computers is then compared with experimental results obtained in laboratories.
For example, if one side of the material has hydrogen gas, we want to know how much hydrogen leaks to the other side of the material. If the model and the experimental results match, we can have confidence in the model and use it to predict the behavior of the same material under the conditions we would expect in a fusion device.
If they don’t match, we go back to the atomic-scale simulations to investigate what we missed.
Additionally, we can couple the larger-scale material model to plasma models. These models can tell us which parts of a fusion reactor will be the hottest or have the most particle bombardment. From there, we can evaluate more scenarios.
For instance, if too much hydrogen leaks through the material during the operation of the fusion reactor, we could recommend making the material thicker in certain places, or adding something to trap the hydrogen.
Designing new materials
As the quest for commercial fusion energy continues, scientists will need to engineer more resilient materials. The field of possibilities is daunting – engineers can manufacture multiple elements together in many ways.
You could combine two elements to create a new material, but how do you know what the right proportion is of each element? And what if you want to try mixing five or more elements together? It would take way too long to try to run our simulations for all of these possibilities.
Thankfully, artificial intelligence is here to assist. By combining experimental and simulation results, analytical AI can recommend combinations that are most likely to have the properties we’re looking for, such as heat and stress resistance.
The aim is to reduce the number of materials that an engineer would have to produce and test experimentally to save time and money.
Sophie Blondel, Research Assistant Professor of Nuclear Engineering, University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Previously holding political office is an obvious advantage for candidates seeking votes.
SDI Productions/E+/Getty ImagesCharlie Hunt, Boise State University
Ever since he was chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate back in July, U.S. Sen. JD Vance, a Republican from Ohio, has come under a level of scrutiny typical for a vice presidential candidate, including for some of his eyebrow-raising public statements made in the past or during the campaign.
One line of critique has persisted through the news cycles: that his lack of political experience may make Vance less qualified than others, including his opponent, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, to be vice president.
Do more politically experienced politicians have advantages in elections? And if they enjoyed such advantages in the past, do they still in such a polarized political moment?
The answers are complicated, but political science offers some clues.
Why experience should matter
Previously holding political office, and for a longer period of time, is in some ways an obvious advantage for candidates making the case to potential voters. If you were applying for a job as an attorney, previous legal experience would be favorably looked upon by an employer. The same is true in elections: If you want to run for office, experience as an officeholder could help you perform better at the job you’re asking for.
This approach has been taken by a number of high-profile politicians over the years. For example, in Hillary Clinton’s first campaign for president in 2008, the U.S. senator from New York and future secretary of state made “strength and experience” the centerpiece of her argument to the voters.
Experience also might matter for the same reasons as incumbency – that is, when a candidate is currently holding the office they are seeking in an election. Incumbents typically have much higher name recognition than their challenger opponents, distinct fundraising advantages and, at least in theory, a record of policy achievement on which to base their campaigns. Even for nonincumbents, these advantages are more prevalent for previous officeholders rather than someone who is a newcomer to politics.
Barack Obama and his family on Nov. 4, 2008, the day he won the presidential election, showing that a lack of political experience can be used as a benefit.Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
Inexperienced, or an ‘outsider’?
But Hillary Clinton was, of course, unsuccessful in her first bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. She was beaten by a relatively inexperienced candidate named Barack Obama; like Vance, Obama had served less than a full term in the Senate before running for higher office.
Obama’s 2008 win shows that a lack of political experience can be leveraged as a benefit.
The “outsider” label isn’t always a ticket to victory.
In 2020, for example, voters were frustrated with the chaos of having a political outsider in the White House and turned to Joe Biden – possibly the most experienced presidential candidate in modern history at that point, with eight years as vice president and several decades in the Senate under his belt. Voters were hungry for political normalcy in the White House and made that choice for Biden.
Does U.S. Sen. JD Vance’s lack of political experience make him less qualified than his opponent, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, to be vice president?Scott Olson/Getty Images
Political science has other important lessons about when experience matters and when it doesn’t. In Congress, electoral challengers – those running against incumbents – enjoy more of a boost from prior experience in places such as the state legislature. In fact, the typical indicator for challenger “quality” used in political science research is a simple marker of whether the challenger has prior political experience.
But even this finding is more complicated than it seems: Political scientists such as Jeffrey Lazarus have found that high-quality – that is, politically experienced – challengers do better in part because they are more strategic in waiting for better opportunities to run in winnable races.
Experience matters only sometimes – and maybe less than ever
The usefulness of a lengthy political resume also depends on which stage of the election candidates are in.
Research has found, for example, that a candidate’s experience matters much more in settings such as party primaries, where differences between the candidates on policy issues are typically much narrower. That leaves nonpolicy differences such as experience to play a bigger role.
In the general election, voters supportive of one party are unlikely to factor candidate experience in that heavily, even, or especially, when the candidate they support lacks it.
The political science phenomenon known as negative partisanship means that, more and more, voters are motivated not by positive attributes of their own party’s candidates but rather by the fear of losing to the other side. This has only been exacerbated as the two parties have polarized further.
Voters are therefore more willing than ever to lower the standards they might have for their favored candidates’ resumes if it means beating the other side. Even if a Democrat is clearly more qualified than a Republican in terms of political experience, that advantage is unlikely to sway many Republican voters, and vice versa.
What about 2024?
In 2024, the experience factor is complicated. Trump, of course, has been president before – the ultimate prior experience for someone running for exactly that office.
But he has continued to run as an outsider from the political establishment, casting Kamala Harris – who, as vice president, has little actual institutional power – as an incumbent who is responsible for the current state of the country. Since polls show consistently that a majority of Americans believe the country is not headed in the right direction, we can see why Trump might try to frame the race in this way.
Whether Trump’s strategy ends up working will be more apparent after the election is over. For now, Trump and Harris can rest assured that most of their supporters don’t appear to care how much – or how little – experience they have.
Charlie Hunt, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Boise State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
