🔎 Fact of the week: A sapphire can be any colour except red, because at that point it’s considered a ruby. This is because rubies and sapphires are the same mineral (corundum) and the only difference between them is the contaminants which determine their colour.

Our new whitepaper is here!

The team have come back all guns blazing this year and put a tremendous amount of work into researching, designing, and scribing our first big release of 2024. Introducing our new whitepaper - Building a sustainable future: The transition to a regenerative built environment.

This publication is an exciting collaborative piece we worked on with Perspectus Global, giving an in-depth insight into the current state of our built environment, positive transformation strategies, and why adopting better building practices just makes sense.

Because we love you all so much, we’re letting you know about it early before we plaster it all over LinkedIn tomorrow!

AI prompts 🤝 an actual artist

New York graphic designer Pablo Delcan has found himself with a backlog of requests after creating what he calls a ‘non-AI generative art model’. Pablo receives user-submitted prompts like you’d get with AI tools, and instead puts his own artistic spin on it with drawings that take just 1 minute to create.

Cereal brand SURREAL has ditched its expensive suite of tools and instead opted for Microsoft Office 2007 in its new campaign embracing all the techniques we see as a ‘no-’no’ in graphic design. You gotta love the use of Clip Art here.

In what sounds like the beginning to the next Resident Evil, Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip has just been implanted into the first human patient. Using a brain-computer interface called ‘Telepathy’, the implant allows users to control a phone or computer with their mind. We think we’ll give this one a pass.

Something that can also scan your body but is a lot less scary and a lot more useful are the new period pads that can screen you for deadly diseases. Created by Qvin, the Q-pad can test users for a number of diseases like diabetes, thyroid health, and even cervical cancer from the comfort of their own home.

A silver lining for the northern white rhino

Scientists have recently carried out the first ever southern white rhino IVF pregnancy which could serve as the gateway to saving the related and much more endangered northern white rhino from extinction. With only two northern white rhinos left in the world (both of which are female), this last ditch effort to continue the survival of the species has done the impossible.

Can you guess how many house plants Taylor Swift would need to offset her carbon emissions? If we started planting one every second, we’d probably be able to do it in only 951 years. Yep, that’s 30 billion house plants. This short writeup takes a look at emissions from numerous celebrities and calculates how many house plants it’d take to mitigate the damage.

Some new research at the Knepp estate has changed the game; finding that rewilding offers a carbon capture alternative to tree plantations with a wealth of biodiversity benefits. According to the research, herbivores browsing rewilded landscapes massively helps carbon storage by altering the growth patterns of trees and shrubs.

A new study has found that a shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10tn (£7.9tn) of benefits a year, improve human health, and ease the climate crisis. Because of hidden environmental and medical costs, existing food systems destroy more value than they create, in effect, borrowing from the future to take profits today.

EU parliament gives greenwash the boot

EU Parliament has recently signed off new anti-greenwash legislation which will ban businesses from making misleading or convoluted green claims that are aimed at consumers. This is also on top of the EU forcing cosmetic companies to pay to reduce microplastic pollution.

If you manage others as part of your role, it’s very likely that you have your own style of doing things. Whether you prefer being heavy on the guidance or like to take a back seat and let them crack on, there are some styles of management that can inadvertently contribute to office conflict. Here’s how you can handle the situation when things go south.

Tight budgets and an economy that’s moving at a snail’s pace means we need to start getting our priorities in check when making a marketing plan. The advice coming from Helen Edwards is to make this the year you innovate so you don’t end up with conflicting priorities that’ll make things harder for you further down the line.

Each issue of nineteen eighty four, we feature a different Certified B Corporation, to celebrate the brands which are working hard to create a better business world. To learn more about B Corps, click here.

Our featured B Corp this week is…

Big Potato Games

Big Potato Games is a new B Corp that makes everything from quiz games to party games, kids games to toys without negatively impacting the environment.

A standout is the company’s patented MOOP technology, which turns reclaimed ocean plastic into game cards.

(They also have a potato CEO called Spudley)