The world’s balance-sheet is out of kilter with its economy

The deep sea may seem very far away, but it's more connected to our world than you might think. In the South China Sea, for instance, nutrient-rich waters well up from the deep, sustaining coastal fisheries that support the livelihoods of about 3.7 million people each year. Mining companies also have their eyes on the deep sea, where they can see riches in polymetallic nodules, cobalt-rich rocks, and other mineral deposits. A new paper from scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences gives a preview of how deep-sea mining can rapidly disrupt the microbes central to nutrient cycling on the South China Sea floor. The results are reported in the scientific journal Total Environment Microbiology. In 2020, samples of cobalt-rich rock were collected during a mining trial in the South China Sea, at around 1,300 meters below sea level. As is typical of deep-sea mining, the rocks were crushed into small pieces first, and then transported to the surface. "A large amount of sediment and other particulate matter were stirred up duringmining, and this process had several direct and indirect effects on the insitu microbial ecosystem," the authors note.

Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon. Open this photo in gallery:erhui1979/iStockPhoto / Getty ImagesStudies of leadership tend to ignore followership. Yet without followership, there would be no leadership. We learn to follow as youngsters, in the family and in school. Later comes organizational leaders and managers and political figures. Somewhere in there, we are taught about following the law. To follow is human nature, academic Barbara Kellerman observes: “Submission is the human condition.” We often follow because there are rewards for following as well as punishments for not following. Sometimes those are apparent, sometimes not. But she notes we can also follow out of inertia. “We follow over, and then over again, simply because not following seems more trouble than it’s worth. Notably, this applies even when we think our leaders are bad – ineffective, unethical or both,” the founding executive director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School writes in Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.

Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon. Marc Cenedella’s career has been shaped in part by his love of video games. “I played Space Invaders and Centipede and Mission Control and my first job at Yale as an undergraduate was running computers for the Yale School of Music,” says Mr. Cenedella, now 56. He says his first jobs after university all involved understanding how to take real-world information and put it into computers. “When they started to have connected gaming and we were all collaborating virtually with our squad, well that’s just remote work.” From early computer programming to remote collaboration to virtual and augmented reality and now artificial intelligence, Mr. Cenedella says games have been instrumental in familiarizing young people with the tools that will become vital to their future careers. Now, as the founder and chief executive officer of Ladders, a New York-based job platform for six-figure jobs, Mr. Cenedella is encouraging employers to take gaming skills and accolades as a serious indicator of candidate potential.

“They insist that the details will be provided after they have carried out a soft credit check.”

“Computer science isn’t the ticket to the American dream like people thought it was.”

In this week's Wealth Wise column, a 65-year-old couple was pitched $500,000 in life insurance to cover nursing home care. Financial experts weigh in on the catch.