Hello lovely email friends. Hope all is well. If you go down to the woods today, as the song goes, you’re sure of a big surprise. Bears optional.

💩 How to deal with a conspiracy theorist: In amongst the widespread but low-level bullshittery of the internet, a few bullshitters-in-chief have risen to damaging prominence. You can see it a mile off, but sometimes it’s too intellectually expensive to refute. Fortunately there’s a playbook of bullshit, and science writer David Robson offers five ways to spot the holes in their logic. See also: How do you write simple explanations without sounding condescending?

📖 After 70 years, Ikea is getting rid of its catalogue, one of the most popular books in the world: The company’s decision to scrap its iconic catalogue and shift focus towards its online store came after collecting extensive customer feedback. Last year its online retail sales grew 45% worldwide. See also: How tech for show business can automate IKEA warehouses.

📺 TV hijacking happens surprisingly infrequently, when you think about it. Here’s a noteworthy example.

🏔 The Geology of the Billboard: The Billboard Landscape series is a collection of colour photographs taken by Richard Baird, presenting the billboard and its layering of adverts as an interrelated topology. Only in their degradation, persistent weathering and a lack of human intervention does a dialogue through time emerge between disparate marketing.

🥱 Second lockdown left women feeling worn out, while men complained of boredom: New research by King’s College London and Ipsos MORI unpacks the UK’s response to lockdown conditions. See also: How to help a friend through a tough time, according to a psychologist.

🚐 The Digital Nomads Did Not Prepare for This: They moved to exotic locales to work through the pandemic in style. But now tax trouble, breakups and Covid guilt are setting in. Hint hint.

🔮 Chinese photonic quantum computer demonstrates quantum supremacy: A team of Chinese researchers has built and tested a photonic quantum computer that demonstrates quantum supremacy. Their paper describes their computer, and that it took approximately 200 seconds to provide an answer to a calculation that would’ve taken the world’s fastest supercomputer approximately 2.5 billion years.

Can trees socialise?

Thanks to subterranean networks of mycorrhizal fungi, the trees in forests appear to communicate and even cooperate with one another. Trees growing under conditions of high resource availability such as with plenty of light or nitrogen are able to use the network to transfer carbon or nutrients to trees located in less favourable conditions.

The leading ecologist, Professor Suzanne Simard, presents over thirty years of field research in a TED talk. To us intelligent, social creatures, this idea is simultaneously mindblowing and deeply appealing.

But the science is also prone either to extrapolation or distortion by humans’ love of anthropomorphism. This distortion is present in The Hidden Life of Trees by German forester Peter Wohlleben but, even so, laypeople can’t help but find the idea of socialising forests intoxicating.

That trees absorb carbon is commonly understood. But that the majority is then stored in forest soil, more even than in the atmosphere, is yet to be widely appreciated. So if we were to try and plant our way back to carbon neutrality, we’d need to nurture networked forests, not just lone trees.