Repurposed farmland 🚜, a heat-tolerating organism 🧫, and expanding benefits 📈

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It’s been a bit over ten years since Instagram replaced the chronological feed of your friends’ posts with one ranked by an algorithm. Six years later, it leaned even further into recommendations, becoming less a place to keep up with your friends and more a window into whatever the engine predicts you’ll find interesting. It’s hard to hold an optimistic perspective on this given the change has been fueled by profit-maximizing tech companies, but we can at least try to see where it benefits us. We’re exposed to more new content than at any other time in history and can constantly learn, discover new niches, and find a community for almost any interest.

The downside: we’re exposed to more content than at any other time in history, and our brains weren’t built for this much of it. One thing that’s stayed true through social media’s development is the nature of using it to share your highs. Whether it’s a meaningful accomplishment or just a good picture, sharing your best side is only a click away. In a feed of friends, that might have meant some social anxiety. In a feed of everyone on the internet, it can become something deeper. In a few scrolls, you can go from watching someone complete an Ironman race, to influencers on your dream vacation, to entrepreneurs raising millions for their startup, to an engagement party. And it almost feels normal. Seeing person after person celebrating their peak.

But what you don’t see is the work behind these accomplishments, the uncertainty, failure, and years it took to get there. It can certainly be overwhelming, but seeing all that success also makes it feel more attainable. It’s a window into seeing all the different paths of life that are out there for us. The beauty of it is in recognizing that the accomplishments of strangers on the internet don’t have to be a measuring stick. Rather, they can serve as blueprints for your path. It just has to start with putting in work on the margins, the stuff that doesn’t get recommended to your feed.  

On that note, this week we’re bringing you three stories where progress came from the margins. Along the lower Mississippi, flood-prone fields that were unprofitable for farmers are being planted back into forests. Syracuse researchers discovered a fire amoeba at the edge of what complex life can survive. And across the nation, the lowest-paid quarter of jobs are gaining benefits faster than the average.

With gratitude,

The 3GT Crew

Across farmland in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, floods have a habit of wiping out a season’s entire crop. Worse yet, taxpayers are left holding the bag as government-backed crop insurance programs cover the forgone income, a true lose-lose situation. Enter the Agriculture Department’s Wetland Reserve Easement program. It buys the right to farm the land from voluntary sellers, then plants the forest back and ends the payments. The program has now enrolled more than one million acres of farmland (roughly 70 Manhattans).

How’d we get here? In the 1960s and 70s, a boom in soybean prices drove farmers to the outskirts of farmable land. That meant clearing the native bottomland hardwood trees off floodplains to make room for crops. When the good years paid, the occasional flood was worth the risk. But when prices came back down, the floods didn’t, turning the land into a losing bet that the government had to keep paying for.

The easement program, started in 1990, lets the government buy a landowner’s right to farm, drain, or build on flood-prone acres. Landowners keep the land itself along with the right to fish and hunt on it. Then the trees go back in. Ducks Unlimited, a hunters’ conservation group, has been contracted for 30 years. They’ve helped plant over 250 million hardwoods in the region, improving water quality and providing year-round habitat for songbirds, deer, bears, and other wildlife. In fact, the Louisiana black bear population rebounded from 200 to as many as 1,000 as the forest came back.

One farmer owns 300-plus acres along the Boeuf River in northern Louisiana. He tried cattle, then soybeans. The river drowned both. In 2025, he sold the farming rights, and this year 183 acres of hardwoods went in, returning the land to its natural state. Louisiana alone holds more than a third of the acres, but the program runs nationwide. Last year’s budget law funded it through 2031. The trees planted this year won’t be a forest for decades. But Ducks Unlimited estimates there are still six million acres in the region where farming doesn’t pay, providing plenty of room left to plant.

In the hot streams of Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, Syracuse researchers discovered an amoeba with the highest heat tolerance of any complex organism on Earth, per a Cell report last month. Formally named Incendiamoeba cascadensis, the fire amoeba can grow and divide at 145 degrees Fahrenheit (63 degrees Celsius, or USDA’s safe temperature for steak). That beats the former record of 60 degrees Celsius for eukaryotes (organisms whose cells have nuclei and organelles). Bacteria and archaea on the other hand can already go much further, up to 122 degrees Celsius, but their simple structures mean no membrane-bound components to protect.

Behind the scenes: from 2023 to 2025, the Syracuse team collected water, biofilm, and sediment samples by holding vials in geothermal streams with barbecue tongs. Then back in the lab, they held flasks near stream temperatures, and an amoeba no one had seen before started showing up. To test how it survived in a volcanic region, they continued turning up the heat and found it lasted up to five minutes at 70 degrees Celsius by changing shape and forming a protective shell.

The researchers also determined its proteins are toughened in the same heat-loving way bacteria’s are. The team thinks those proteins could be useful in things like detergent, crops, and drugs. A hot spring microbe has paid off before: Thermus aquaticus, a bacterium from a Yellowstone hot spring in the late 1960s, makes an enzyme called Taq polymerase, the engine behind PCR (used for COVID, DNA and forensic tests).

The big picture: if the same DNA turned up in Yellowstone, thats means relatives are probably hiding in hot springs elsewhere. NASA’s astrobiology program, which hunts for signs of life beyond Earth, has already looked in ancient hot-spring deposits on Mars and the hot vents feeding the ocean under Saturn’s moon. Alison Olcott, the science lead in that program, said the fire amoeba discovery “expands the range of conditions we think life could potentially be inhabiting elsewhere.”

As open enrollment season draws near, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has published the latest numbers on Employee Benefits in the US. The biggest change came from the lowest-paid quarter of private-sector jobs. In 2012, fewer than 30% of that cohort had access to paid sick leave (either set sick days or a PTO bank that can be drawn on). Today that figure is over 60%. Retirement moved the same direction, with employer plans now offered to 48%, up from 38% in 2012.

Part of it was a tight post-pandemic job market which created an environment where employers were fighting for talent. State-level legislation and ballot measures over the last 15 years also played a key role in benefits adoption. Connecticut became the first state to require paid sick leave in 2012. Today it’s required in 20 states.

Why it matters: historically, benefits went to the best-paid jobs while lower-income professions were left out. Importantly, the bottom did not just keep pace, but grew further than the average, rising roughly 50% more over the survey period on both paid sick leave and retirement account access. Widespread access to benefits like sick leave is better for everyone. One study looked at states that required paid sick leave and found that doctor-reported flu-like illness rates fell in the year after the requirement went into effect.

Jobs in finance and insurance come with paid sick leave 98% of the time while service workers in restaurants, hotels, and entertainment see a mere 58%. No one wants to be served food by someone ill. CDC investigators found that food workers who came in sick or contagious were linked to about 40% of restaurant food-poisoning outbreaks. When a cook or cashier can stay home without fear of losing their job, the people around them are less likely to get sick too.

Stepping back: the 61% access that the bottom bucket has today is what the average had 15 years ago. With the top quarter at 95%, there’s still significant room to grow. And the state that started it isn’t done. Kicking off in 2027, Connecticut’s law will reach every employer down to a one-man show.