P1On a recent sunny day, 13,000 chickens roam over Larry Brown’s 40 windswept acres in Shiner, Texas. Some rest in the shade of a parked car. Others drink water with the cows. This all seems random, but it’s by design, part of what the $6.1 billion U.S. egg industry bets will be its next big thing: climate-friendly eggs.

P2These eggs, which are making their debut now on shelves for as much as $8 a dozen, are still labeled organic and animal-friendly, but they’re also from birds that live on farms using regenerative agriculture—special techniques to cultivate rich soils that can trap greenhouse gases. Such eggs could be marketed as helping to fight climate change.

P3“I’m excited about our progress,” says Brown, who harvests eggs for Denver-based NestFresh Eggs and is adding more cover crops that draw worms and crickets for the chickens to eat. The birds’ waste then fertilizes fields. Such improvements “allow our hens to forage for higher-quality natural feed that will be good for the land, the hens, and the eggs that we supply to our customers.”

P4The egg industry’s push is the first major test of whether animal products from regenerative farms can become the next premium offering. In barely more than a decade, organic eggs went from being dismissed as a niche product in natural foods stores to being sold at Walmart. More recently there were similar doubts about probiotics and plant-based meats, but both have exploded into major supermarket categories. If the sustainable-egg rollout is successful, it could open the floodgates for regenerative beef, broccoli, and beyond.

P5Regenerative products could be a hard sell, because the concept is tough to define quickly, says Julie Stanton, associate professor of agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State University Brandywine. Such farming also brings minimal, if any, improvement to the food products (though some producers say their eggs have more protein).

P6The industry is betting that the same consumers paying more for premium attributes such as free-range, non-GMO, and pasture-raised eggs will embrace sustainability. Surveys show that younger generations are more concerned about climate change, and some of the success of plant-based meat can be chalked up to shoppers wanting to signal their desire to protect the environment. Young adults “really care about the planet,” says John Brunnquell, president of Egg Innovations. “They are absolutely altering the food chain beyond what I think even they understand what they’re doing.”

P1The Internet may be changing merely what we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests Columbia University psychology professor Betsy Sparrow. In 2011, Sparrow led a study in which participants were asked to record 40 factoids in a computer (“an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain,” for example). Half of the participants were told the information would be erased, while the other half were told it would be saved. Guess what? The latter group made no effort to recall the information when quizzed on it later, because they knew they could find it on their computers. In the same study, a group was asked to remember both the information and the folders it was stored in. They didn’t remember the information, but they remembered how to find the folders. In other words, human memory is not deteriorating but “adapting to new communications technology,” Sparrow says.

P2In a very practical way, the Internet is becoming an external hard drive for our memories, a process known as “cognitive offloading.” Traditionally, this role was fulfilled by data banks, libraries, and other humans. Your father may never remember birthdays because your mother does, for instance. Some worry that this is having a destructive effect on society, but Sparrow sees an upside. Perhaps, she suggests, the trend will change our approach to learning from a focus on individual facts and memorization to an emphasis on more conceptual thinking—something that is not available on the Internet. “I personally have never seen all that much intellectual value in memorizing things,” Sparrow says, adding that we haven’t lost our ability to do it.

P3Still other experts say it’s too soon to understand how the Internet affects our brains. There is no experimental evidence showing that it interferes with our ability to focus, for instance, wrote psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel J. Simons. And surfing the web exercised the brain more than reading did among computer-savvy older adults in a 2008 study involving 24 participants at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

P4“There may be costs associated with our increased reliance on the Internet, but I’d have to imagine that overall the benefits are going to outweigh those costs,” observes psychology professor Benjamin Storm. “It seems pretty clear that memory is changing, but is it changing for the better? At this point, we don’t know.”

P1When it was established, the National Health Service (NHS) was visionary: offering high-quality, timely care to meet the dominant needs of the population it served. Nearly 75 years on, with the UK facing very different health challenges, it is clear that the model is out of date.

P2From life expectancy to cancer and infant mortality rates, we are lagging behind many of our peers. With more than 6.8 million on waitlists, healthcare is becoming increasingly inaccessible for those who cannot opt to pay for private treatment; and the cost of providing healthcare is increasingly squeezing our investment in other public services. As demand for healthcare continues to grow, pressures on the workforce—which is already near breaking point—will only become more acute.

P3Many of the answers to the crisis in health and care are well rehearsed. We need to be much better at reducing and diverting demand on health services, rather than simply managing it. Much more needs to be invested in communities and primary care to reduce our reliance on hospitals. And capacity in social care needs to be greater, to support the growing number of people living with long-term conditions.

P4Yet despite two decades of strategies and a number of major health reforms, we have failed to make meaningful progress on any of these aims. That is why the Reform think tank is launching a new programme of work entitled “Reimagining health”, supported by ten former health ministers. Together, we are calling for a much more open and honest conversation about the future of health in the UK, and an “urgent rethink” of the hospital-centric model we retain.

P5This must begin with the question of how we maximise the health of the nation, rather than “fix” the NHS. It is estimated, for example, that healthcare accounts for only about 20% of health outcomes. Much more important are the places we live, work and socialise—yet there is no clear cross-government strategy for improving these social determinants of health. Worse, when policies like the national obesity strategy are scrapped, taxpayers are left with the hefty price tag of treating the illnesses, like diabetes, that result.

P6Reform wants to ask how power and resources should be distributed in our health system. What health functions should remain at the centre, and what should be given to local leaders, often responsible for services that create health, and with a much better understanding of the needs of their populations?