[CNN10で英語学習！]週4日間労働に関する動向 他 [10分動画]

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Hello and welcome to the show! I'm Koi Wire, and this is CNN 10, where I tell you the what, letting you decide what to think. Hope you had an awesome weekend. Happy belated Mother's Day to all the mamas out there! Today is Monday, the first day of the school week and the first day of the work week for most folks. But does it have to be that way?

Whether you're tightening screws on an assembly line or crunching numbers at a computer, people have been working 5 days a week for a long time. Henry Ford standardized the practice about a hundred years ago when he required employees at his Ford Motor Company factories to work 40-hour weeks, or eight hours a day for five days. A century later, though, some companies are reconsidering whether that schedule still makes sense. CNN's Claire Duffy has more.

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"We went from desktops to laptops to mobiles. We're working, working, working, and there was no discussion around, 'Wait, this has gotten out of control.' Preventing employee burnout has become such an important priority that nearly one-third of large US companies are exploring shorter work weeks. One of them is Exos, a performance wellness company. CEO Sarah Robb O'Hagan saw the burnout and wanted to fix it.

'It was a huge issue going on across all of our clients, and so we were like, well hey, we could be a company that could help to figure out how to solve this,' Robb O'Hagan explained.

Her answer was something she calls 'You Do You Fridays.' So tell us about 'You Do You Fridays,' what does that mean?

'It means you do you. You may choose to say, this Friday I'm exhausted, I need to go spend time out hiking. Other people may say, Friday is my day to just do quiet work and not be disturbed. But what we put in place was you cannot email, text, or write to any of your colleagues. You can't set meetings. It is You Do You Friday. And what goes hand in hand with You Do You Friday is how we constructed the other days of the week. We structured this because we know actually from training high-performance athletes that you put a lot of load on them and then follow it with really intentional recovery to get more out of how the athlete is performing. So think about us in the workplace: if we're working 80-hour weeks, 70-hour weeks, which some people are, it's like, how on Earth is your body ever recovering? Of course you're going to get burned out. So the more we can help to introduce this concept that recovery isn't weak, it's actually part of preparing you for higher performance, I think the better for all of us.'

Robb O'Hagan partnered with the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School to study how a 4-day work week impacted employee performance.

'We were trying to figure out can we prove that with a 4-day work week that employees will perform at the same level or better and feel better, and the answer was yes.'

During the 6 months of the study, Exos also reported that employee burnout dropped from 70% to 30%.

'It sounds like this works in part because Exos' culture is already structured in this way where you have employees who are probably already having a lot of sort of freedom over their hours. Do you think this is something that can work anywhere?'

'Yeah, it's funny, we get asked that question a lot and I actually do. I think it requires leadership really being innovative in how they think about what work really is. Every industry can really think about is there a way to stagger shifts? Are there ways, even if you can't do the 4-day work week, to really think about what we call a recovery first culture.'"

Pop Quiz, Hot Shots! Which one of these contains the world's largest collection of coral reefs? The Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon Reef, Apo Reef, or Christmas Reef?

Okay, that last one's a bad dad joke, but if you said the Great Barrier Reef, you are "corally" correct! The remarkable site, located on the northeast coast of Australia, contains 2,500 individual reefs, 400 species of coral, and more than 900 islands. Next, we're taking a trip to one of those islands, Lady Elliot Island, located at the southernmost tip of the Great Barrier Reef. The island is lush with greenery, regrowing after decades of topsoil mining. But now there's a new threat to this delicate ecosystem: mass coral bleaching. CNN's Ivan Watson has more.

An hour off the coast of Brisbane, Australia, lies a tiny paradise island only accessible by light aircraft.

"We're looking at the beautiful Lady Elliot Island, the first island of the Great Barrier Reef," said one traveler.

But it didn't always look like this. It has been through an incredible transformation led by one man. Landing here is tricky; you have to deal with a short runway with crosswind, and it's quite bumpy. My pilot is Peter Gash. He basically owns the island, leasing it from the Australian government and running an eco-resort here with his family.

"My wife and I came here 40 years ago, went underwater, and absolutely fell in love with the place. We made it our life's work," said Gash.

Because humans have not bothered the animals for a long time since it's been made a protected zone, the wildlife is completely comfortable with us. Above the surface, the island teems with seabirds.

"At its peak, it's in excess of 200,000 birds on this tiny island," said Gash.

"What are these tanks for?" I asked.

"That's our water storage. We desalinate the water and store it there. We keep about between 10 and 12 days of water," Gash explained.

"How much of the energy being used by the resort comes from solar power?"

"100% of it," Gash responded.

In the 19th century, settlers mined the island for bird guano, leaving the place mostly barren.

"You can almost count the trees that were here in 1974. There was almost nothing," Gash said. "Everything you see here, we planted."

"I couldn't walk here 15 or 20 years ago because it was so rough. Now we've got natural soil," he added.

"Is this from your compost?" I asked.

"No, it's from the trees, from the bird poop, dead birds, and mulch. This is naturally forming. This is the island regrowing again," he explained. "The island grows about 3 millimeters a year. Human input caused the problem. Nature, with a bit of help from humans, is now recovering. It's rewarding, and what it tells me is if we can recover this small place, we can recover this big place, this whole planet that we live on. It's not hopeless. Every single one of us can make a difference."

Peter's message of hope is inspiring, but it's tempered by something we see underwater. Amid the reef sharks and sea turtles, there's coral bleached white enough to worry this island's greatest enthusiast.

"What we do see is more and more bleaching, more and more stress on the corals. The hot water, the water warming, the environment changing and bringing up the water temperature, to me, that's a big risk," Gash noted.

The damaged coral here is part of the mass bleaching event caused by the marine heatwave along the Great Barrier Reef, a phenomenon that could threaten the entire ecosystem.

If you're a dinosaur fan, you might want to go ahead and come with me to the Field Museum in Chicago. It has a fossil on display that some scientists call the most important fossil of all time because it establishes a link between birds and dinosaurs.

"Archaeopteryx is the one fossil that tells us that the birds outside our window are living dinosaurs, and I think that is so cool. It's also the oldest fossil bird that's ever been found, the only Jurassic bird," said a museum expert.

Research suggests that birds were the only group of dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction roughly 66 million years ago. Only 12 Archaeopteryx specimens have been found, and most are on display in Europe.

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In honor of Mother's Day yesterday, our 10 out of 10 is a shoutout to some new moms and babies. The Nashville Zoo is welcoming the birth of four Red River Hog piglets. It's the first litter of that species ever born there. Red River Hogs aren't endangered, but the population is decreasing in the wild. They are native to the rainforests of Africa. The Nashville Zoo is also celebrating the birth of a male red ruffed lemur named Helios. The species is native to Madagascar and is considered critically endangered due to habitat loss.

Alright, you animals, it's shoutout time! Mrs. Kelly's class and all the marvelous Maroons at Perry High School in Perry, Oklahoma, thank you for being you! And this shoutout goes to Mrs. Kilcup's class at Liberty Middle School in Spanaway, Washington. The lightning light up our day!

Rise up, make it a great Monday! I'll see you right back here tomorrow. I'm Koi, and we are CNN 10.

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