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There is nothing conventional about 17-year-old Michael Fuller’s relationship with music. As someone with high-functioning autism who sees the world through sound, creating melodies from the bustle of the high street or trains on the tracks feels more natural than any social interaction. This hardwired connection to sound has been with him for as long as he can remember.

By the age of 11, Michael could play Mozart by ear, having taught himself to play the piano through a mobile phone app. The app highlighted notes on a keyboard as classical music played. He describes his unusual musical talent as “downloading” music into his head. His mother, Nadine, remembers that as a child Michael would “suddenly pop up and say: ‘I’ve got a symphony’”. Michael took to the piano and found he could quickly perform complex pieces from memory.

“I liked what I was hearing, sought more music and began studying through Google and YouTube,” he remembers. “It was very organic. I would listen in great depth and the music would be implanted in my mind. I could then just play it on the piano – all without being taught.”

Growing up in a family that listened to reggae over classical music, Michael feels “very much aware” of how different his approach is to music – symbolised by the way he taught himself piano as a child. This, his mother says, came as a “surprise to the family and myself – I’d never listened to classical music in my life”.

It was not long after learning to play the piano that Michael started composing his own works. Describing this process as “making music with my mind”, Michael says composing classical symphonies “helps me to express myself through music – it makes me calm”. Michael wants to nurture his song writing to achieve his ambition of becoming a modern mainstream classical artist. He wants to control the creative process, unlike typical modern-day composers, who he says “write blobs on a page, hand it over to the musicians – then say bye-bye and stay in the background and get no recognition”. Instead, Michael is determined to take centre stage.

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Does a lipstick threaten the future of one of our closest living relatives?

Pizza, biscuits, and beauty treatments are some of the thousands of products that contain palm oil, which threaten iconic species through deforestation. And a new study says that planting alternative oils could pose an even bigger danger to living things.
Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet and is believed to be in about 50% of products found in supermarkets and shops. It is important for lipstick for example because it holds colour well, has no taste and doesn’t melt at high temperatures. It’s found in shampoos, soaps, ice cream and instant noodles amongst thousands of others.
Over the past 20 years, growing demand has seen thousands of hectares of old, tropical forests chopped down to make way for the oily palm tree plantations. But these forests are home to some of the most threatened species in the world, including the orangutan. “Orangutans are a lowland species on Bornean Sumatra and that’s where palm oil is grown. The two often clash, palm oil displaces orangutans, they are pushed into gardens where they generate conflicts with locals and that’s where you get the killings. They are incredibly versatile, but what an orangutan can’t deal with is killing. Because they are such slow breeding species, the killing has a really big impact”, the report’s lead author Erik Meijaard, told BBC News.
Palm makes up 35% of the world’s vegetable oil supply but only takes up 10% of the world’s land allocated to producing the greasy stuff. To replace it with rapeseed, soy or sunflower seed oil would take far larger amounts of land, in fact up to nine times the amount needed for palm. It’s likely that such a move would see a displacement of diversity loss, with many more species in different places under threat. “If palm oil didn’t exist you would still have the same global demand for vegetable oil,” said Erik Meijaard.

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Lego wants to replace plastic blocks with sustainable materials

The Lego Group wants to replace the plastic in their products with a “sustainable material” by 2030, the company announced.

The world’s largest toy company will invest $1 billion in their new LEGO Sustainable Materials Centre in Denmark, which ________________(1) devoted to finding and implementing new sustainable alternatives for their current building materials. Lego plans on hiring 100 specialists for the center. There is no official definition of a sustainable material.

Legos ________________(2) made with a strong plastic known as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene since 1963. The company uses more than 6,000 tons of plastic annually to manufacture its products, according to NBC News.

Changing the raw material could have a large effect on Lego’s carbon footprint, especially considering that only 10% of the carbon emissions from Lego products come from its factories. The other 90% is produced from the extraction and refinement of raw materials, as well as distribution from factories to toy stores.

The company ________________(3) already taken steps to lower its carbon footprint, including a reduction of packaging size and an investment in an offshore wind farm.

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Prison without guards or weapons in Brazil

Tatiane Correia de Lima is a 26-year-old mother of two who is serving a 12-year sentence in Brazil. The South American country has the world’s fourth largest prison population and its jails regularly come under the spotlight for their poor conditions, with chronic overcrowding and gang violence provoking deadly riots.

Lima had just been moved from a prison in the mainstream penitential system to a facility run ___________(1) the Association for the Protection and Assistance to Convicts (APAC) in the town of Itaúna, in Minas Gerais state. Unlike in the mainstream system, “which steals your femininity”, as Lima puts it, at the APAC jail she is allowed to wear her own clothes and have a mirror, make-up and hair dye. But the difference between the regimes is far more than skin-deep.

The APAC system has been gaining growing recognition as a safer, cheaper and more humane answer to the country’s prison crisis. All APAC prisoners must have passed through the mainstream system and must show remorse and be willing to follow the strict regime of work and study which is part of the system’s philosophy. There are no guards or weapons and visitors are greeted by an inmate who unlocks the main door to the small women’s jail.

Inmates are known as recuperandos (recovering people), reflecting the APAC focus ___________(2) restorative justice and rehabilitation. They must study and work, sometimes in collaboration with the local community. If they do not - or if they try to abscond - they risk being returned to the mainstream system. There have been physical fights but never a murder at an APAC jail.

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Is it time you went on a social media detox?

In today's world, social media is central to our lives. It helps us to stay in touch with our friends, promote our work, and follow the latest news. How do these networks impact our mental and physical health?

A number of studies have linked social media use with increased levels of depression, anxiety, and isolation.

Social media lovers have twice the risk of depression, compared with their less enthusiastic peers.

Research has revealed that younger and older users alike are in danger of breaking under the pressure of unachievable standards of beauty and success.

Among young adult users, social media notably increases the incidence of anxiety and depression, according to the results of a sizeable study conducted in 2016.

In fact, the researchers saw that users who frequently checked their accounts had a more than twice as high a risk of depression than their less social media-oriented peers.

This may partly be due to the fact that social networks create an artificial need to be available 24/7, to respond to messages and emoji reactions instantly. But this attitude creates an unnecessary amount of low-key stress that takes its toll on our emotional well-being.

And, despite the fact that such platforms are supposed to enhance our sense of connectedness with other people, research has found that they actually have the opposite effect: they render dedicated users lonelier and more isolated.

However, this shouldn't really surprise us. The hyperconnectedness takes place at a superficial level, eliminating all of the extra elements that make communication more valuable and psychologically constructive.

Such elements include eye contact, body language, the possibility of listening for changes in our interlocutor's tone of voice, or the possibility of physical touch.

An over-active social media presence can leave its mark not just on our mental health, but also on our physical health — particularly by altering our sleep patterns.

Lastly, researchers have proven that our commitment to social media platforms can negatively affect our commitment to our own creative and professional lives in complex ways.

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