Greenland's misleading name is the result of a marketing campaign by Erik, a tenth century explorer who wished to attract settlers to its icy landscape. Little did he know that the island had been covered by lush forests many millennia before he was born. Nor could he have fathomed that, a millennium after his death, the vast ice sheet that gave the lie to his inviting description would be in rapid retreat.

That sheet holds enough water to raise the world's sea level by more than seven meters, should it all melt and run off into the oceans. For this reason, climate scientists monitor the sheet's seasonal trends closely. The latest data show that the area of melting ice is unusually high this year. On June 12th 712,000 square kilometers of the sheet (more than 40% of it) was melting.

Several things are to blame. First, a natural cycle known as the North Atlantic Oscillation is encouraging ice melting. Then there is long-term warming driven by rising greenhouse gas emissions. Third, climate change has also weakened the jet stream, permitting a warm and humid weather system to settle over north-eastern Greenland. As a result of all this, the seasonal ice melting began two weeks earlier. Greenland is currently losing 3bn tons of ice a day. That is roughly three times the average for mid-June in the period from 1981 to 2010.

When we’re facing a complex problem, we often gather a group to brainstorm. We’re looking to get the best ideas as quickly as possible. We love seeing it happen — except for one problem. Group brainstorming usually backfires.

Extensive evidence shows that when we generate ideas together, we fail to maximize collective intelligence. Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more ideas — and better ideas —if we all work alone. As the humorist Dave Barry quipped (打趣道),“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: ‘meetings’.” But the problem isn’t meetings themselves — it’s how we run them.

To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’d better turn to a process called “brain writing”. The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously (匿名地) among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine (完善) the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and stating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.

An example of great brain writing was in 2010 when 33 miners were trapped underground in Chile. With time of the essence, the rescue team didn’t hold long brainstorming sessions. They established a global brain writing system to crowd source independent ideas. A tiny plastic telephone ended up becoming the only means of communicating with the miners. And the specialized drill that ultimately made it possible to save the miners was suggested by a 24-year-old engineer.

Organizational behavior scholar Anita Woolley helps to explain why this method works. They find that a key to collective intelligence is balanced participation. In brainstorming meetings, it’s easy for participants to become in favor of the most powerful people. The brain writing process makes sure that all ideas are brought to the table. The goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the room — it’s to make the room smarter.

A well-known study in 1979 found that people who socialize with others live longer than people who keep to themselves. A new study shows that socializing online may have health benefits as well.

To test the theory, researchers from Harvard, Yale, Northeastern and the University of California at San Diego looked at the Facebook profiles of 12 million people. Then they compared the profiles with the California Department of Public Health records over a two-year period from 2011 to 2013. The researchers found that people with more friends online were less likely to die than similar people who were not so connected. The researchers published their findings in an article titled "Online social integration (整合) is associated with reduced mortality (死亡) risk" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Of all the kinds of Facebook usage, it was getting friend requests rather than sending friend requests that related to reduced mortality. Similarly, posting photos and being tagged in photos was connected with living longer, but sending messages on Facebook was not. People who were tagged in many photos had the lowest mortality rates in the study.

Some diseases had a significant reduction of mortality with Facebook users. Deaths from infections, diabetes, mental illness or dementia, heart disease, strokes, other cardiovascular diseases, liver disease, and homicide were all significantly lower for Facebook users than for non-users. Other causes of death did not show a relation to Facebook usage, including several types of cancer, unintentional injuries, drug overdoses, and suicides.

The study did not examine any other social media sites to see if using them lengthened life. Also, two of the researchers worked at Facebook while the study was being conducted. William Hobbes, one of the researchers who was a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University, and co-author of the study, worked at Facebook as a research intern (实习生) in 2013. He said that Facebook agreed not to interfere with the research, no matter what the result was. But, he added, researchers "were pretty confident that we were going to find this result".

The researchers were careful to say that their results showed an associative relationship between using Facebook and living longer, not a causal one. In other words, researchers did not prove that using Facebook makes someone live longer. The study simply showed a connection between a longer life and some activities users do on Facebook. The researchers say the findings may be able to help show how online social networks can help improve people’s health on a global scale.